#FASuccess Ep 412: 3X’ing The Business With No More Than 50 Great Clients By Hyperfocusing On Who You Can Add The Most Value For, With Anjali Jariwala

Nerd's Eye View | Kitces.com

Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 412th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Anjali Jariwala. Anjali is the Founder of FIT Advisors, an RIA based in Torrance, California (but works virtually with clients nationwide) and oversees $65 million in assets under management for 45 client households.

What's unique about Anjali, though, is how she has tripled her annual revenue from $250,000 to $750,000 during the past 6 years, while only adding a net of 10 client households (going from 35 to 45 clients in total), by hyperfocusing into her niches of physicians with complex tax needs and small business owners with $5M–$20M of revenue, offering a combination of advanced financial planning and CFO planning services while raising her fees along the way (to match the additional value she's now able to provide them).

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Anjali shifted her marketing approach over time from paid advertisements, an area that was very successful for her but had become increasingly competitive for her target clients, to instead building a blog and podcast targeted at her 2 niches, how Anjali was able to attract high-quality prospects by simply centering the content on her blog and podcast on the issues her top 10 existing clients were facing (including both technical planning topics and the emotional aspects of money, to demonstrate both her technical acumen and her ability to relate to their personal experiences with money), and why Anjali then decided to stop blogging and podcasting during the early days of the COVID pandemic, as she not only had to support clients going through a period of financial and emotional strain but also had to deal with stress in her personal life given that her husband worked as a physician navigating COVID exposure with his own patients, and yet Anjali still receives a sufficient flow of prospects today based on the prior blog and podcast content she created that continues to live on… plus client referrals from her now-established client base.

We also talk about how Anjali grew her revenue primarily by not increasing her client headcount (which only rose from 35 to 45 clients over the past 6 years) and instead focused on raising her minimum annual retainer fee from $10,000 to $18,000 per client, why Anjali's current clients and prospects are largely willing to pay this fee given the tailored services she offers clients (from her ability as a CPA to offer advanced tax and CFO-style business planning specifically related to her two niches, to even providing feedback about how best to negotiate their employment agreements for her physician clients), and how Anjali's decision to decide on the number of clients she wanted to work with and a target revenue upfront, rather than pursuing unbounded growth, is what allowed her to effectively value her time and allowed her to focus on the clients for whom she can provide the most value.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Anjali shares why she wishes she had invested more hard dollars in marketing sooner (particularly given the time it can take for tactics like podcasting and blogging to bear fruit in the form of new clients), how Anjali freed up time by not using a TAMP but instead an outsourced Chief Investment Officer to conduct investment research and cue up trades for her to execute, while allowing her to continue to better implement the trades herself to facilitate her customized, tax-efficient client portfolios, and how Anjali is approaching the idea of success, now that she has built a financially thriving practice, in part focusing on being able to pursue her passions and maintain flexibility to meet her professional, personal, and family needs.

So, whether you're interested in learning about building a profitable hyperfocused practice, implementing a marketing approach that reaches a firm's ideal target client, or adding value for clients by offering advanced tax planning, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, with Anjali Jariwala.

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