Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 425th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Sebastian Guerra. Sebastian is the President of Guerra Wealth Advisors, a hybrid advisory firm based in Miami, Florida, with nearly $15M of revenue and almost 60 team members, supporting over 1,700 client households.
What’s unique about Sebastian, though, is how his firm has implemented a financial planning quality control system, where a dedicated team member touches base with clients immediately after their meeting with an advisor, often before the client even leaves the office, to ensure that clients are receiving a high level of service, get feedback on where they can improve… and drive referrals, online reviews, and social media engagement by asking clients to engage immediately after they provide positive feedback.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Sebastian hired a team member to become a quality control specialist (and has now added a second) specifically to follow up with clients after meetings to ask about their experience with both their advisor as well as with other departments in the firm with which they interact (from the front desk to operations), how Sebastian’s firm has received 400 client referrals annually (averaging nearly 25% of their total client count) in part by having these quality control specialists ask clients not to provide referrals, per se, but to name individuals they would reach out to if they ran their own wealth management firm (who then receive invitations to attend one of the Sebastian’s educational events), and how Sebastian’s firm has also gained more than 600 Google reviews through this quality control process (making the firm easier to find for prospective clients, and drowning out a series of three fraudulent negative reviews that a competitor once posted against them).
We also talk about how Sebastian’s firm attracted and onboarded approximately 480 new households in 2024 (including through a one-day educational event that led to 115 prospect appointments all by itself), how Sebastian’s firm expands its relationship with existing clients by tasking everyone, including operations team members, with the goal of having clients consolidate more of their assets with Guerra Wealth advisors, and how Sebastian enables his lead advisors to hold up to 35 prospect and clients each week by leveraging both technology (including Salesforce to prep advisors before meetings and AI to transcribe the advisors’ meeting notes and follow-on tasks) and a robust service team to provide further support for each advisor.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Sebastian shares how using the Entrepreneurial Operating System has allowed him to clarify his firm’s goals, vision, and mission at a time of rapid client and employee growth (as the firm has nearly doubled over the past two years alone), how Sebastian’s firm leverages an in-house recruiter to hire fast enough to keep pace with its rapid growth while staying true to the firm’s core values, and how Sebastian’s roles as a new husband and father have begun to shift his priorities away from ‘just’ running a thriving business (and the long hours that doing so can entail) to also focus on the ability to delegate specific tasks to team members in order to spend more time with his growing family.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to implement a financial planning quality control system to drive referrals and online reviews, how to leverage a single-day marketing event to generate planning prospects, or how to design firm operations to maximize advisor face-time in front of clients and prospects, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Sebastian Guerra.
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