Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis.

Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 420th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Michelle Underwood-Gass. Michelle is the founding principal of Paradigm Advisors, an RIA based in Dallas, Texas, that oversees approximately $110 million in asset center management for 80 client households. What's unique about Michelle, though, is the way that she created a structured meeting process to navigate around the places where new clients often get stuck, standardizing their experience and navigating through her deep planning process, but still retaining a way to ensure that each client's plan, focus, and implementation is really customized to their needs and prioritize what they want to tackle first and foremost. In this episode, we talk in depth about Michelle's five-part planning process, which starts with a get-to meeting with prospects that includes some life planning exercises to both help Michelle understand what the client's real issues are and help the client understand Michelle's planning approach and whether a planning relationship would be a good mutual fit. How Michelle begins onboarding new clients using a tech-enabled uncluttering process that helps reduce friction in clients collecting and organizing documents and information. And how Michelle holds what she calls an intrinsic discovery meeting to go deeper and really get to the heart of clients' true values and goals. We also talk about how Michelle then engages in a discovering opportunities meeting to highlight particular key planning opportunities for clients to pursue first, rather than just giving them a long list of recommendations that can overwhelm her busy working age client base and lets them focus on the few issues that are most important to them. How Michelle leverages eMoney's decision center tool during the plan implementation process to help clients really visually see the impact of different planning options and potential recommendations that Michelle is making. And how Michelle's firm uses workflow management software Hubly, which sits on top of her Wealthbox CRM, to ensure that planning tasks that require input from multiple firm stakeholders across the business are still completed efficiently. And be certain to listen to the end, where Michelle discusses how she charges a flat planning fee alongside an AUM fee to be able to serve high-earning professionals who could benefit from their comprehensive planning process but might not yet have sufficient assets to be served profitably on an AUM fee alone. How Michelle crafted a pair of specialties to serve two different ideal target clients, busy working-age professionals and relatively older hedge fund veterans who she knew from her prior life running a hedge fund.