Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with

financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis 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 130th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's

podcast is Ashley Michiquet. Ashley is a partner in the CEO of True North

Retirement Advisors, an independent RAA near Portland, Oregon that oversees nearly $200 million

of assets in her management for nearly 300 clients and small business retirement plans.

What's unique about Ashley, though, is the way that she's managed to grow her practice

and her credibility, despite the challenge of starting out as a 22-year-old, and the way that she's

been able to both grow a family practice jointly with her father, and also grow her own family

and take two maternity leaves along the way, in a world where so many financial advisors still

struggle to find time to grow and sustain a practice

while also starting a family. In this episode, we talk in depth about how Ashley built her

career in the early years, the way she started out cold calling for two years with a traditional

regional brokerage firm and then ironically found it more successful to start cold knocking

small business owners for their retirement plan business instead.

The way she took advantage of an opportunity to get published in her local business journal,

not to get new prospects directly, but to use reprints of the article to get credibility with her current prospecting efforts.

And the successful way she figured out how to open the conversation with small

business owners to quickly get their interest for a follow-up meeting. We also talk about how

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