Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 422nd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Kay Lynn Mayhue. Kay Lynn is the President of Merit Financial Advisors, a hybrid advisory firm based in Alpharetta, Georgia, that oversees approximately $13 billion in assets under management for 26,000 client households.
What’s unique about Kay Lynn, though, is how she developed her advisory, management, and leadership skills to work her way up from starting as an intern to eventually become the president of a national RIA enterprise and lead their proactive mergers and acquisitions strategy.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about the ups and downs of Kay Lynn’s evolution over the past decade from being a client-facing advisor to a firm leader (including the lessons she learned when once, early on, her team threatened to quit because of her original management style), how Kay Lynn grew to recognize the importance of connecting better with her team members as people rather than just focusing on business results and outcomes alone, and Kay Lynn’s strategies today around asking peers and employees for feedback (which have helped her recognize blind spots in her leadership approach, even as she’s now advanced to the highest management levels at her firm).
We also talk Kay Lynn’s current role managing her firm’s mergers and acquisitions activity (including how she and her business partner decided to sell their previous firm to Merit rather than go through their own internal succession), why Kay Lynn sees more value in selling firms when their G2 advisors are also equity owners, even if the founder is still planning an external sale in the long run (because it results in more of an ownership mindset in the selling firm’s G2 advisors that helps them see the benefit of staying on to grow their equity further after the deal is closed), and why Kay Lynn places high importance on culture when evaluating potential firms to acquire (to ensure both the right fit for her firm… and a relatively smooth transition for the selling firm’s team).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Kay Lynn shares how she incorporates the BehavioralDNA personality assessment both when hiring new employees and when working with clients, how Kay Lynn’s firm offers “organic growth tracks” that allow its advisors to plug into potential sources of clients (such as firms with Employee Stock Ownership Plans and establishing partnerships with CPAs) and then execute in that channel with an established marketing playbook to grow their practices, and why Kay Lynn thinks it’s important for advisors to reflect on the current phase of life they’re in (for example, whether they have young children or are empty nesters) and structure their work according to that phase, to be able to achieve both their professional ambitions and their priorities in their personal lives over the long run.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about charting a career path to eventually lead a large enterprise RIA, positioning a firm to attract a premium valuation when considering a sale, or how to incorporate personality assessments in the hiring and client onboarding processes, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Kay Lynn Mayhue.
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