Ep 012: Delivering Profitable Financial Planning to Millennials For A Monthly Retainer Fee with Sophia Bera
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.8 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2017
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today I’m chatting with Sophia Bera, the founder of Gen Y Planning. Sophia was the subject of a post on Nerd’s Eye View back in 2013 when she was starting her firm. Four years on, she’s bringing home more than $100,000 in revenue and serving about 50 clients on a monthly retainer model.
Sophia’s firm is another example of just how powerful a niche can be. Although peers told her that millennials would be a challenging and non-lucrative group to serve, she quickly found that advisors were lacking, not millennial clients.
In this episode, Sophia breaks down her fee structure and service model. Sophia’s experience with traditional firms, financial startups, and running her own business make her uniquely suited to consulting clients and other financial planners alike on their various options for financial management.
Get the full show notes and transcript for this episode at: https://www.kitces.com/12
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with |
| 0:07.2 | financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial |
| 0:13.1 | advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get |
| 0:18.2 | insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the |
| 0:22.1 | next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone. |
| 0:29.2 | Welcome to the 12th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is |
| 0:35.1 | Sophia Barra. Sophia runs a very unique advisory firm, focused specifically on serving millennials in their |
| 0:40.9 | 20s and 30s, and charging them an ongoing monthly retainer fee from $149 to $299 per month |
| 0:47.9 | to access her ongoing financial planning services. |
| 0:51.2 | In this episode, Sophia details exactly what it is she does to provide |
| 0:55.5 | meaningful financial planning advice for millennial clients, how she still manages to generate an |
| 1:00.5 | average revenue per client that's comparable to most other solo advisory firms, despite |
| 1:05.2 | having little focus on managing assets, and the career path that led her to launch this |
| 1:10.2 | innovative kind of advisory firm |
| 1:12.0 | business model from scratch after being an employee for many years. Sophia also talks about the |
| 1:17.6 | exact trajectory that her advisory firm went through in the early years, from how much it took for her |
| 1:22.8 | to get started to exactly how much she earned in each of those early years, and how her focus on a niche |
| 1:28.9 | financial planning for millennials, allowed her to reach $100,000 of net take-home profits |
| 1:34.4 | from her advisory firm by just her third year in business, all while serving the kind of |
| 1:39.1 | millennial clients that the industry as long said could never be served profitably at all. |
| 1:43.4 | And be certain to listen to the |
| 1:44.4 | end as well as Sophia talks about how she runs her business entirely virtually, allowing her to |
... |
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