Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner, speaker and consultant Michael Kitsas, to hear stories of how leading financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 127th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest in today's podcast is

Gianna Stout. Giania is the co-founder of fiduciary plan advisors at

Hightower, an advisory firm focused on 401K plan consulting that's responsible for nearly

four billion of plan assets across almost 120 businesses. What's unique about Jania, though,

is the way that she's been able to rapidly grow her 401k practice to $4 billion entirely from scratch

over the past five years by leveraging nearly 20 years of immersing herself into the 401k community

to build her own personal brand and reputation as a trustworthy fiduciary. In this episode, we talk in

depth about the 401k plan consulting model. The way Janusz business operates

is either a 321 or 338 fiduciary on a flat fee structure for 401K plans, but tiered to

asset levels because plans still benchmark their fees to AUN competitors. What it takes to service

and support mid to large size 401K plans with tens or even hundreds

of millions of dollars for a fee that itself may be tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The tools that fiduciary plan advisors use this to support its fiduciary governance

consulting with 401K plans.

And the unique stewardship report that Janja built and automated in her CRM to show all of her

clients, all the behind-the-scenes work that the firm does on their behalf every year as a means

to justify why her client should stick with her and even accept an increase in their fees going

forward. We also talk about Jania's own path in growing the 401K business, from getting involved

with Sherm, the Society for Human

Resource Management, and doing CE education classes for members of their association, to being active

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