Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 429th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Ali Nasser. Ali is the Founder of the Wealth Integration System for Entrepreneurs, an education and coaching company based in Houston, Texas, that works with entrepreneurs facing a liquidity event and trying to figure out what’s next… and financial advisors who serve them.
What’s unique about Ali, though, is the path of how he built an advisory business by helping (high-net-worth) business owners achieve their financial goals while being true to their entrepreneurial mindset and drive (which can sometimes conflict with ‘standard’ financial planning advice), which was so successful that he eventually sold his advisory firm so he could focus in even more deeply with non-advisory coaching and consulting services to entrepreneurs.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Ali attracted high-net-worth business-owner clients to his advisory firm by identifying planning gaps created by the client’s current investment, tax, and estate advisors who might not have been coordinating their advice on the full breadth of the business owner’s tax situation (on issues such as making charitable donations in the most tax-efficient way possible), how doing so helped Ali convince busy business owner prospects to go through a multi-meeting pre-engagement process to further demonstrate the value he provided (and helped both sides understand whether they would be a good client-advisor fit), and Ali’s financial planning process itself (which could include eight meetings over the course of six to nine months) for mapping a path to what he calls “independent wealth” for his entrepreneur clients (as a way to facilitate them finding a better balance between their work and personal lives).
We also talk about how Ali approaches the delicate issue of concentration risk when working with entrepreneurs (who often have a deep emotional attachment to their business and might be hesitant to pull money out of it, despite it making up a very disproportionately large percentage of their net worth), how Ali helps business-owner clients overcome the “paradigm gap” of reluctance to invest in the broader stock market (preferring to continue reinvesting in their business instead) by framing index investing as a way to tap into the best entrepreneurial minds in the country but in a diversified and hands-off manner, and how Ali finds that (despite their sometimes very significant wealth), many business-owner clients still have to overcome feelings of financial scarcity (given how many high-net-worth entrepreneurs come from very financially difficult backgrounds).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Ali shares how, as an advisory firm owner, he sought out feedback not just from “squeaky wheel” clients but the ones who best represented the target avatar of client he wanted to serve (to better understand how to find and serve those clients he wanted to replicate), how Ali found that the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur himself were getting other team members on board with delivering the same level of experience that he as the founder wanted to provide to clients (and the subsequent challenge of letting employees go when they aren’t a good fit to deliver up to those standards), and how Ali’s own entrepreneurial journey led him to sell his advisory firm and focus full-time on coaching business-owners and the advisors working with them because, as he puts it, “the gems are in the details” of the process needed to really serve entrepreneur clients and their needs effectively.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about attracting high-net-worth business-owner clients, how to handle the topic of concentration risk with entrepreneur clients, or strategies for receiving valuable and actionable client feedback, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Ali Nasser.
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