John Prendergast is the co-founder and CEO of Blueleaf. He serves on the board of oneforty.com, the social business software hub and WiredTiger, a developer cloud optimized databases. He is also the founder and organizer of the Lean Startup Circle Boston. In addition to his decade and a half as an entrepreneur, John spent nearly a decade as an investment banker and financial advisor.
While they’re not wrong, traditional free consultations often aren’t good business. There is a simple reason: Most advisors mistakenly think of consultations as a prospecting tool that helps fill the very top of their funnel (TOFU). WRONG. If Free Consultations aren’t good for TOFU, then what are they for? Meet MOFU, Middle Of the FUnnel. MOFU, is about developing relationships by moving people through a process to get to know you well enough to make a commitment. In other words, MOFU helps people move down the funnel. This is the point at which a traditional free consultation can work. Continue reading
It’s true. Blueleaf has no salespeople. But why? Are we a bunch of hippies uninterested in profit? Given that I spent time as an investment banker, not likely. Does our team have a thing against polyester? Well, maybe. But that’s not the whole story. Our goal is to create happy customers. So I have a question for you: when was the last time you thought, ‘I’m so glad that salesperson called!?’ Our team had trouble remembering too. In fact, we don’t believe that traditional selling is an effective way to make people happy. Continue reading
We’ve heard from many of you that you want help with your billing calculations. You want it simple, flexible, and automatic. And now it’s here. Billing at the touch of a button. Billing should be simple. You should be able to turn it on, tell us how you bill and get a file with all your calculations in a format that is easy to change and audit. And it should be as simple as a spreadsheet. So that’s what we’ve done … Continue reading
You’ve told us that you want Blueleaf to deliver our brand of simplicity and ease of use to document sharing. We’ve heard you and it’s here. Automated Integration with Dropbox. We’ve partnered with Dropbox to bring you the very best in document sharing for your clients. Dropbox has over 40 million users and is growing at nearly twice the rate of anyone else that provides a document sharing platform. Why? It’s because it just works. Continue reading
The invasion has begun. The assault on your Financial Advisory business has started in earnest. Godzilla’s baby – another VC funded super advisor – wants to play in your market. What will you do about it? What can you do about it? The good news is you’ve got some advantages. The bad news is those defenses can be overwhelmed if you don’t adjust your business starting now. Continue reading
My friend Carl Richards recently posted this sketch; I think it captures something critical to the work of financial advisors, and central to the reasons we founded Blueleaf. At Blueleaf we’ve learned something fascinating and (to some) counterintuitive. It turns out the information can make you feel better, calmer and more in control. That’s right:
More information = Feeling in control = More peace of mind. But it has to be the right kind of information … Continue reading
The reason I believe in Blueleaf — and the reason we started the company — is to help people in the middle, people like our Blueleaf team, with their long-term finances. We want to give them transparency and a complete view of their money that helps make everything clear and simple to understand. It started as a “make something useful for us” strategy. On the path there, advisors started to contact us about using Blueleaf with their clients, and we learned a few important things. Advisors had challenges serving people like us, the “mass-affluent,” and as a result the number of exceptional advisors serving our market was limited. So we got to work … Continue reading
“And suddenly it was all pretty clear. The answer was fewer clients.” — Jerry Maguire
Translation: “I’m abandoning the people who need me the most for the clients who can afford to pay a lot for my time.”
Some advisors would agree, finding the logic simple and obvious “to make more money I have to replace my current clients with wealthier clients.”
It doesn’t need to be that way. You can serve more clients well … Continue reading
For a long time I’ve been frustrated that no matter where I hold my savings and retirement accounts, I can’t find out what kind of returns I’m getting.
Seems strange, right? Most people want to know the market returns of their investments — for example, I might like to know how my particular investment choices compare to an index like the S&P 500 — but most financial institutions … Continue reading
Do you invest in stocks? Most people would say no; they say, “we only invest in mutual funds.” And for most people that answer is wrong. Or at the very least, dangerously misguided. That’s because the mutual funds and ETFs that we invest in usually have most, or sometimes all, of their assets in stocks. It means that, while you personally may not be actively picking stocks, someone or some computer is. Those choices and how (un)diversified they are can give you an unexpected wallop when you can least afford it. The good news is that by law, any single mutual fund (or a hedge fund, or anyone else for that matter) can’t own more than 5% of the stock of a single company without at least making a filing with the SEC. So, for example, your mutual fund is Read More…