3 Financial Advisor Business Models

Justin Goodbread (0:04)

Success was not supposed to feel this way. You're building a valuable financial advisory practice. You're hitting the numbers. So why do you feel like the business owns you? You didn't become a financial advisor to be stressed. You wanted more money, more impact, and more freedom. Welcome to DecaMillionaire Decoded, the show for financial advisors ready to dynamically scale their practice past $10 million in enterprise value. The strategies we decode work in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. So for those of you who are not a financial advisor, you can apply these strategies directly to your business as well. Hi, I'm Justin Goodbread, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and relentless coach. If you're ready to build a business that works for you, not because of you, you're in the right place. Let's decode the past DecaMillionaire status together.

As a financial advisor, you've been told you had to pick one, one business model. You can have high-income. Man, a lot of advisors, they make a lot of money. Or you can have real freedom, real freedom of calendar, real freedom of pocketbook. You can have real freedom. Or you can have a business that has extreme enterprise value. It's like, pick one. I just don't believe that. I believe you can build a business that has all three. Over the last few years, I've been coaching financial advisor. It has been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed it. I get testimonials every single day, instant messages from our clients inside our coaching program, telling me that they're making better strides than they've ever made before. It is a lot of fun. But one of the things I've noticed as I'm coaching financial advisors is we have this mindset as an advisor. We believe that if we step away from the table, if we take our technician hat off and put on that hat of a CEO, that our income is going to drop. And more importantly, we believe our income is going to drop and it's going to stay that way permanently. Other advisors believe that if you build a team and a system and you go to seek enterprise value, then now you're going to be running from meeting to meeting to meeting. Your calendar is going to stay constantly full and you're going to become a manager. Yet other advisors believe the only way to grow your business is to work more hours, to grind, brother, grind. Just get up at 4 a.m., we're going to grind it out. Work longer hours, not fewer. I believe that some of those things in my own life, early when I came in the financial services industry, back about 2003, 2004, I looked around and I wanted a lifestyle business. We'd already sold a couple of companies at that point, Emily and I, and I wanted something with the babies that were around the house running that I could be a present father. And so we had a lifestyle business. We had good income. It took us a few years. We built it to a quarter million dollars of recurring revenue and I had good freedom in the sense that I could take off when I wanted to take off. I could be there at the kids' events, et cetera. I had reliable hours. But I was 36 years old before I knew it, and I had not kept a promise to myself that I was gonna be worth 10 million dollars before the age of 40 What I looked at and I said, you know, I've got this practice that's provided me income, but the most I'm gonna get out of this book of business, if I were to sell it, if I were to have for big OCGs like right now, and Emily had to sell the business, the most I'm gonna get out of this is like two X recurring revenue, a lifestyle business has a lower multiple. And the reality is, is that the lifestyle business I have was built upon me.

I basically built myself a job. I'm reminded of Michael Gerber's book, E-Myth, where he says, you work for Lunatic. Yeah, us, we work for Lunatic. I'm like, I can't do this anymore. I had this goal that I had at 19 years of age to become a DecaMillionaire before 40, hurry I'm 36, we're making good money, have freedom. But dude, I don't have no net worth. Some of you find yourself there today. So I made a pivotal shift. I took like a grandfather clock, the pendulum on the grandfather clock stung from one side to the other. And I moved to this value creation mindset. And I will never forget it. I passed my Exit Planning Institute SEPA certification. I passed my certification. I went out and hired a coach before I did anything. My coach saw my aspirations. I said, look, I need to get $10 million in net worth in the next four years. I'm going to use this business. It's going to be a value creation business. My wife was 100% behind me. My kids were at that phase where they didn't need as much daddy time. And Emily didn't have as much daddy time. It was a grind. The kids were in school. The kids were going to church. Kids were playing their events. And dad was going to work. And we made a decision that for a period of five to seven years, I was going to grind it out, just put a value creation business in place before my children reach in their teenage years, so now it's time to play again. That was our family decision. So December 17th, 2017, I launched Heritage Investors, a registered investment advisor in the state of Tennessee with no clients.