Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the 409th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Travis Hornsby. Travis is the founder of Student Loan Planner, an RIA and student loan consulting company based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that serves nearly 1,400 households with ongoing financial planning (as well as consulting with over 15,000 clients on student loan debt).
What’s unique about Travis, though, is how he rapidly built out a base of 1,400 financial planning clients in barely more than a single year, by hyper-scaling his financial planning offering from a base of nearly 10X as many student loan consulting clients that his firm had already provided advice to over the past decade.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Travis originally developed his specialization of student loan planning through first correcting the misinformation given to his (now-)wife and her friends in the medical field (and realized that he could give high value to a chronically underserved population), how Travis first started his student loan consulting firm charging for just 1 hour of highly relevant student loan advice (and how Travis vetted which prospects were serious about wanting that advice), and how, while Travis initially priced his consulting work intentionally below-market in order to get opportunities to practice his advice, and build trust and momentum with a high volume of clients, Travis then raised his fees to the full market rate of his expertise once his brand was established (and then even leveraged his price increase as a marketing tactic to drive more business growth, using campaigns such as, “Book a time with me at this price before it’s gone!”).
We also talk about how Travis built the onboarding and compensation plans for his own (contracted) student loan consultants to scale the business while incentivizing them to take on a greater volume of meetings (and still ensuring that they could give high-quality student loan advice), how Travis decided to diversify his business’s income streams when the pandemic and the ensuing student loan legislation wreaked havoc on his consulting business model, and how Travis navigated the leap from student loan consulting to operating an RIA (with all of the additional compliance obligations that came with it).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Travis reflects on how a high quantity of clients and his own personal journey through FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) both give him the leverage to only work with people he truly enjoys, how Travis’ journey into niching, even into a fairly broad subject, amplified the number of people who showed up on his website (and subsequently asked for help, paying him for advice that grew his multi-million-dollar business), and how Travis feared launching his own RIA for years but ultimately realized that the risk for the “worst case” for a failed RIA startup was worth the upside ‘risk of success’ if he was able to gain traction offering ongoing financial planning to his student loan consulting clients.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about developing a profitable client niche, how to effectively raise fees to match the planning value being provided, or marketing strategies that can be used to rapidly gain clients within a niche, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Travis Hornsby.
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