Barron’s Top 15 Advisor Steven Cassaday on His Unorthodox Way to Billions in AUM

I’ve long said that there are many ways to be successful as a financial advisor. My guest today, Steve Cassaday, founder and CEO of Cassaday and Company, Inc., is a perfect example. His main marketing plan is a throwback to the 1990s. He spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per year doing high-end dinner seminars for a carefully selected group of people. And when they become a client, he creates a comprehensive financial plan for them but he does NOT use financial planning software to do it.

Steve Cassaday and I talked about how he’s grown from $44 million in AUM to the #12 ranked advisor in Barron’s list of the Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors and $2.7 billion in AUM. We also discussed the principles that guide his business, how he explains the firm's value proposition, the service differentiators that his firm delivers that are above and beyond what most firms do, and the marketing strategy that has added about one billion in new assets and is still working today.