Ep 068: Becoming A Non-Revenue-Producing Partner In A Multi-Niche Financial "Design" Firm with Heather Fortner

Financial Advisor Success

Michael Kitces

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News

4.8 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2018

⏱️ 120 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s guest has had quite an unusual career path in the industry. After starting out as a Client Care Associate for SignatureFD—an independent RIA that currently serves more than $3 billion of AUM for nearly 1,000 clients—Heather Fortner is now a partner, Chief Operations Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer for the firm. It’s an impressive feat by any standard, but especially in a world where it’s still relatively rare for non-revenue-producing members of a firm to have an opportunity to become a partner (not to mention how rare this is for women).

In this episode, Heather shares how SignatureFD’s unique business model works with their series of various niches under the firm’s umbrella, as well as how their holistic financial design process aims to help clients with all types of wealth, including money, time, and relationships. Listen in to hear what skills she believes are most important for everyone—especially women—to develop in order to climb the career track in an independent advisory firm, how advisors can identify the right firm to stick with in the long run, and what she says are the most understated issues limiting the career growth of women in the industry today.

For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/68

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
0:13.0	advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight
0:18.7	from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the
0:22.0	next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis.
0:27.4	Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 68th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.
0:32.8	My guest on today's podcast is Heather Fortner. Heather is a partner and the chief operating
0:37.1	officer of
0:37.7	Signature FD, an independent RAA that calls itself a financial design firm and now serves
0:42.8	more than $3 billion of assets under management for nearly 1,000 clients. What's unique about
0:48.3	Heather's firm, though, is not just the nature of its holistic financial design process that
0:52.9	aims to help clients with all their types of
0:55.5	wealth, both money and financial, as well as time and relationships, but serves its clients
1:00.5	by organizing the firm and its advisory teams into what it calls communities, or what are essentially
1:05.5	a series of various niches all under the signature FD umbrella, including signature law,
1:10.6	signature health, signature entrepreneur, and more. In this episode, we talk in the niches all under the Signature FD umbrella, including Signature Law, Signature Health, Signature
1:11.7	Entrepreneur, and more. In this episode, we talk in depth about why and how Signature FDs
1:17.3	transition from a broad-based generalist firm into a series of niche communities. The way it's
1:22.2	adopted Angie Herbers' diamond team structure to grow and develop their advisor talent,
1:26.8	the entrepreneurial operating
1:28.0	system it uses, built from Gino Wickman's book, Traction to help ensure that every employee
1:32.9	understands how they connect to their department's one-year goals, the firm's one-year
	...

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