Joe Martin is a Partner at Summitry, a wealth management firm in the San Francisco Bay area providing financial planning and wealth management services with a dozen advisors and managing over $1.5 billion. He is responsible for the overall management of advisory and planning services for the firm. In addition to providing leadership to the firm’s Financial Advisory team, he advises clients on a broad range of financial needs. Joe has been working in the investment advisory industry since 1997.

As Chief Growth Officer, Alex Katz is responsible for developing and implementing strategies designed to responsibly scale the firm, while maintaining a high standard in customer service and client experience.  Alex has worked in many different capacities in the investment advisory industry since 2001.

Takeaway Quote:

“Fundamental to creating any entrepreneurial offer is answering the question of who is your target audience.” 

Show Timeline:  

1:31 Joe explains the structure and mission of Summitry
3:00 Benefits of a client advisory board, such as helping to specify your ideal client
7:26 The Importance of creating a client persona
11:37 Summitry’s process of designing a persona
17:10 Navigating clients who do not fit into the client persona
21:48 Different ways of engaging clients through the lens of the client persona
24:22 The effects of a client persona on marketing strategies
30:40 Referral benefits from client persona  
32:59 How you can get started with an approach like Summitry’s

Links:

Website:              summitry.com
LinkedIn:            linkedin.com/company/golubgroup/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-katz-35a61545/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-martin-2ba2aa28/

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing.

You’ve probably heard about developing a client persona, but today’s guests have dug into it deeper than most firms and gotten real rewards as a result. We’re talking today with Joe Martin and Alex Katz of Summitry in the San Francisco Bay area of California. It’s a 15-year-old firm with $1.6 billion of assets under management, 1000 clients, and 10 advisors. They’ve really got behind the idea of putting together a client persona and involved the whole team in doing it. And once they had, they saw real results in several areas of their business.

In our conversation, we’ll learn how that persona helped them put into context what their most prized new clients value most, how it helped them refine their marketing and tailor their services. How it even helped them discover the right role for tools and technologies that will appeal most to the clients they most want to attract. It even helped them show their referral partners who best to introduce to them. It’s a very interesting conversation and an exploration into what a well thought out client persona can do for your firm.

And so here now is our conversation with Joe Martin and Alex Katz.

So Joe Martin and Alex Katz, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. We’re so glad you could join us.

Alex Katz:
Happy to be here.

Joe Martin:    
Yeah, thank you very much, Julie and Steve.

Steve Wershing:  
So Joe, let me start with you. Tell us a little bit about Summitry. Give us a little lay of the land. Who are the clients that you work with, and what kinds of things do you do for them?

Joe Martin:   
So, Summitry is an independent wealth management firm. We have about 33 employees, about $1.6 billion in assets under management, and a little fewer than a thousand clients. And these are individuals and families that primarily live in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay area. And we also manage money for some endowments and foundations. The work we do with clients, it’s financial planning, it’s investment management services. And I think one of the things that makes us unique at least is that we have an in-house portfolio management and research team that selects individual securities for clients. And we have a team of 10 financial advisors and four financial planning associates. And this is the team of certified financial planners and registered paraplanners that work directly with the clients doing the financial planning.

And then on the investment team, nearly all of them are chartered financial analysts. So when we think about what we do for clients, we think that the work we are doing with them is really just about helping them navigate the complexities and the craziness of living in a place like the Bay Area.

Steve Wershing:   
Okay, great. And we had the opportunity to work together before Joe. I came out and worked with you on doing some client advisory board meetings, and we’ve turned up some interesting things in those meetings. Can you tell us a little bit about what some of the biggest things were that you learned from your board?

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