Heather Robertson Fortner: Scaling Your RIA From $250M to $8B AUM

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How do you blend the technical aspects of financial planning with the deeper emotional and psychological elements that truly drive decisions? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Heather Robertson Fortner. Heather is the CEO of Signature FD, which is an RIA firm that has grown from $250 million to more than $8 billion in assets under management during her tenure. In today's conversation, Heather shares how her unique background in professional counseling helped drive Signature FD's philosophy called Net Worth While, which goes beyond managing money and seeks to align wealth with a person's core values and purpose. She also discusses the importance of consistent execution execution, what she refers to as the blocking and tackling of success, and how a disciplined, team-oriented approach has fueled her firm's remarkable growth. With that, here's my conversation with Heather Robertson Fortner.

Quite frankly, I grew up in a household that we didn't have very much, and issues around money were just hard. There was a tension in our home. There were conversations that sometimes didn't get had, that did get had, where it was a difficult topic. It was a difficult, how do you make this decision? How do you decide what you're going to do versus what you're not? And I would have to say that I don't think this skill level in having those types of hard conversations was as strong as it could have been. And so that was really one of the drivers for me when I got into financial services. I got a graduate degree in professional counseling because I believed that you could make a very big difference in homes and in generations if people had just a basic financial literacy, but then also a literacy around how to communicate around hard issues and hard topics. One of which is money, because we all have to deal with it in order to survive. And so I just had this real idealistic view, I guess, that if you could be skilled in both and you could teach other people how to be skilled in both, that you could have some real impact in the world.

Clearly, growing up like that, you're going to have a formative experience there in terms of how you think about money. And with your background in counseling, you're obviously well aware of how that type of upbringing might affect us and might bias us in certain ways. So as you think back to that upbringing and you think about what you're doing today, what might be some positive lessons that you took away from how you grew up versus what are maybe some other areas where, wow, I'm a little dysfunctional. In my relationship to money because of how I grew up. And how have you tried to overcome that? Or have you tried to overcome that?

Absolutely. I think it's been a fascinating experience. I always say there are issues around money if you have nothing, and there's issues around money if you have a lot. There's issues just around money all over the spectrum. And the way that I have been able to really empathize with our clients because I am not an advisor. I'm not the person that's sitting with individual clients trying to help them with their design. The empathy in the experience is that I'm able to put myself in their shoes. I understand that my money stories, the way I grew up, the way, uh, that my husband grew up, those stories and feelings and emotions and behaviors and beliefs You know, they've joined us in our marriage. You can't run away from those things. And so being able to be honest and transparent with, hey, listen, like I still have some real anxiety around money. I still to this day really have to catch myself around, am I just pursuing a number so that it feels safe? Am I pursuing, um, something, a career? Am I working as hard as I'm working just because I'm scared to stop? What is driving my need for success? What is driving my need to save? And all of these things are real emotional stories that, and beliefs that I've carried with me from a very young age. And then you add your spouse or your significant other. Into that mix as well, they come with a whole different set of beliefs and stories and experiences. It's one of the things that I think is a benefit to me personally in building this business is that I'm able to sit on the side of the table with the client and say, these are real experiences that I'm having. I'm not the advisor in the situation. And I have a real empathy to what our clients might be experiencing as they go through this process of trying to design their net worth while, and their wealth, as they're trying to navigate estate planning issues for blended families or whatever situations they may have. And sitting in that space, being able to sit on the same side of the table and having to use the services of the advisors myself, that is, it's been such a blessing because I have learned so much about what's important, what the experience, what I would like the experience to be, what I would like for our clients to feel as they're going through this process. And then being able to design portions of our business to achieve those results. That has been, I think, a blessing of not sitting in the advisor role and being able to experience our firm as a client. Ultimately, we believe that you can design a fantastic plan as an advisor, but if your client is not following the plan, then you have failed, because ultimately Success is measured by how able clients are over the long term to be able to execute on that plan.

I want to talk about the empathy piece here for just a second. So given the background that you have, and you said here just a moment ago that you just ask yourself these questions like, how much is enough? And why am I working so hard? And so how do you answer those questions for yourself? Because those are very similar questions that a lot of clients of advisors have. So you work through that yourself. How do you answer those yourself?

It's an ongoing conversation. I literally said to myself— so it's been a dream of mine to have a little place out west, somewhere that our family can go and be, and it's just ours, and we could go there on vacations. But out west is not cheap. Right? Like it is not cheap to go out west. And so I was with a group of other wealth management firms, people that I respect that are running very large wealth management firms in our industry. And so I said, oh, okay guys, here's the deal. I want to go do this. And it was fascinating what happened. One of them was like, how much money are you going to earn over your lifetime? Like, why would you not? And one of them was like, prices are really expensive out there. And one of them was just like, wow, that's a really good idea. And it was just a fascinating experience around the table. And I found myself sitting in the seat of a client again and saying, if I was a client and I had asked a bunch of highly distinguished, great advisors this question, who would I have chosen to help me navigate that process? And the reality was that every one of their answers was valid. Every one of the questions that they asked was a good question. And I think for me, as I think through, is this something that I want to do? Is now the right time to do it? Do I have to have a certain amount of wealth before I make that type of decision? I think what I have learned over time is that I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I think that there is a space where I have to get really curious about what is driving those desires. Have I done my due diligence? Do I understand intended consequences and unintended consequences? I don't know a whole lot about owning a condo. Apparently there's a whole lot of things about owning a condo. I don't know anything about owning a rental home and having renters. And there's a whole due diligence process that you go through. Is that really what I want to do? Do I not want to do that? And so I think that creating that space for myself where it is okay to have an aspirational, we call it net worthwhile, like this is something that isn't just a fleeting— this isn't a rash. This is something that I want to do over the long haul, and I have good reasons for wanting to do it. And it's important to me. It's important to my family. Now I just have to figure out what is the best way to go about doing that. And there are a whole host of issues and concerns and potential strategies and tactics in order to get that achieved. And so I give myself the space to get really curious and to learn as much as I possibly can. I use the resources at my disposal, which are phenomenal advisors in this industry and space to say, if you were thinking about this, what would you be thinking about? And then bringing all of that together into a formulated plan that makes those things achievable., but in a, uh, risk tolerance manner that is appropriate for both my husband and myself. And so I don't know that there is an answer. And I think the answer can change with seasons. What I have learned in all of this is that's okay. And creating the space for that to be fluid and to shift and to mold That's the space that I think that our clients need and desire, which is the space where their net worthwhile— you can hold that as an advisor without judgment and just help them come to the right answer themselves. That's a very counseling-based answer, but I think it's the right answer in terms of technique.

So you've mentioned the phrase net worthwhile 2 or 3 times here. So, sounds a lot like life planning. So, is that something that has really been at the core of Signature FD from the beginning, or is that something that perhaps you started to try and bring into the firm, or how did that really develop over time?

It's always been a belief of ours as Signature FD that wealth is more than money. Money is a tool, and that wealth in service of a purpose, whatever you define that purpose to be, is the best use of the tool itself. There are multiple purposes. People have multiple goals. They have desires in their life. Our kind of honing in on the term net worthwhile was years and years of understanding that purpose matters more than the tool itself. And that purpose is different for everyone, and that everyone has a different set of wealth at their disposal to help achieve those things that they find worthwhile. And so our job as advisors is simply to help harness identify, structure, order the things that are someone's wealth, and then help them use different strategies and tactics in service of achieving those things that they find worthwhile. So it took us a long time, I would say, to get to the culmination of the language and to submit that language through the organization.

So, you've got a master's degree in professional counseling, so you can talk eloquently about this. You understand life planning and all the details that go around that. Most advisors don't have that background, and not every advisor has worked through all of their issues around money. So, how do you, or do you, help train your advisors to have these types of life planning conversations with your clients? What does that look like? Do all of your advisors do this? Because I look at your website, it says, "We activate dreams." It says, "Welcome to your net worth while." So, it's very clear that you're trying to attract people who want to have these kinds of conversations. So, how do you equip your advisors to have those kinds of conversations?

And honestly, there's been a, what I would call almost a hesitance. On some advisors' parts, which I have to say is incredibly understandable to engage, to want to take those types of conversations further, because they are hard conversations. They can be hard. They can be risky. They can take you into areas that potentially you aren't trained to go in, right? That can be intimidating. Especially for people who are highly qualified, highly professional, highly technical, and are less, or maybe less skilled or less comfortable with some of the more soft skills in which sometimes you just have to sit with. We have invested, we hired a couple years ago, a chief advisory officer who has training in both. The advisory technical world, but then also in the behavioral life planning world. And so we really wanted to wrap around our advisors several things. One is a language, a consistent language, and that is what you hear out of me, a language that means certain things in our world. Net worth while very clearly means something in our world. When you give people the language and you help define what that language means, it makes conversations easier. So that's one thing necessary to define the language. Two, necessary to define the brand. Either you want this to be who you are or you don't. And we had to make a very clear distinction This is who we are. It's not for everybody. Not every client that comes in the door wants to talk about their net worth while some just want to talk about investments. Some just want an answer to a problem. And so very similarly to how you market and serve different types of clientele, you need to clearly say, this is who we are and this is who we aren't and give people the choice. Most people, if they don't want that, they're not normally attracted to signature FD. So you got to give them a language. You got to be clear on who you are and who you aren't. You have to give them an advocate. And that's what we have in our chief advisory officer, which is someone to come alongside of the advisors to say, how are you doing? How is it going? What questions do you have? Do we have the training? We bring in all types of training. We have, we call it the SIGFD Way, and we have 1.0 and 2.0 and 3.0, and we're working on 4.0. And so really taking people through a defined training program that builds their confidence and builds their skill level of how to have these types of conversations in a better way. And then lastly, I really think you have to wrap your offering. Your offering has to be consistent. You cannot say we do this and then not deliver that in your actual deliverables and designs with clients. And so we've been very intentional about ensuring that the deliverables and the product itself matched the language and the training and the conversation and the brand.

So let's talk about leadership. I think you started at the firm roughly 20 years ago in more of an entry-level position, but now you're the CEO. So what advice do you have for aspiring leaders who say, I want to get to the top like, like Heather did?

My advice to anyone, whether you want to be at the top, whether you don't, whether there is a top, One, I figured out very early what I didn't like versus what I did. I did that by trying a lot of things. There was nothing that I was unwilling to try. And then I just went and found Signature FD and I was willing to do whatever because I was just willing to try. We didn't have a chief compliance officer. We needed a chief compliance officer. I didn't know anything about compliance. Legal, regulatory, but I was willing to go and learn it because it was something new. And so I just tell people all the time, the process of trying a lot of different things helped me land on the thing that I love, which is I just love to build. I love to build things and I love to help people be their best selves. Whatever that looks like to them. And so in building this business, I've been able to marry those two things together to just continually build the business and help people build into their best selves.

Since you've been there in the past couple decades or so, you've grown from about $250 million to about $8 billion. So pretty good growth, I'd say. What are some things that you would attribute to that since I don't think a lot of that growth has come from M&A type work?

And I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I think it is understated how much growth can come from working to run an excellent business day in and day out. So I equate that to baseball. I've watched a lot of baseball in my life. The teams that win consistently know how to manufacture runs. They know how to hit singles and doubles. And then when somebody is on second base, they know how to steal third. And then just another single puts them home. And so they're consistently executing on the fundamentals of the game. Over and over and over with excellence. And then they have hopefully one or two superstars, right? One or two that can always hit a home run every time they get up. They can always make some, some type of crazy play that ends up on ESPN. And I think sometimes as businesses, we forget there is just an undercurrent a stable undercurrent of growth that happens when you are solidly hitting singles and doubles and manufacturing runs day in, day out, every year, because it's not sexy, right? Like they get out there and they practice and they go to the pitching range and they do their batting practice. And they take fly balls and they take— none of that is sexy, but they deliver over and over. And I think from an operational, from a cultural, from an experiential, from a running an excellent business, from a people perspective, those are the things that you cannot compromise on. And I think a lot of times businesses Specifically entrepreneurs, they get bored with the unsexy part of running an excellent business day in and day out, year after year. And it can get hard, right? It can get hard. We have focused all along on being excellent at the business, being excellent culturally, being excellent with our people. Being excellent in the product and the service that we provide, providing an excellent experience to our clients, and never compromising on those things. So do that at the base. And then the next layer of that is what are the big bets you're going to take, right? And that's really where you have to look at your core competence as an organization. A couple of the things that we've done that have made a difference for us, we have some amazing strategic partners. We were born out of an accounting firm. We have focused on ensuring that relationship over the decade has been a strong relationship, not just in service of us, but also in service of their business. So strategic partnerships that last decades, that are beneficial for both and for your clients. Like, that is— that's been enormously beneficial for us. We got really clear. You said it earlier, it's like we got really clear on who we were, who we wanted to be, and it was okay not attracting some, but it does attract others. And trying things in that in the marketing space that can be a little scary to others when you say we're not going to do this. The third thing specifically from a marketing perspective was being willing to try new things. So a couple of years ago, we leaned heavily into digital in the sense of we didn't know anything about digital. We didn't know what we didn't know. And so being willing to take some of those risks, to be first, to go with testimonials, to try new websites and campaigns and lead generation tools, and to spend some money in advertising that we had no idea whether it would work or not. Those types of things, I think, are always calculated but important risks to take. And then I'm just a huge fan of— we run small experiments through the organization all the time. What is working? What is not working? Can we pivot quickly? And then nothing can underscore the importance of having the best talent with the best service, because ultimately word of mouth is critical.

So as you think about the sources of new business today, if you had to put a percentage on it, like how much might be coming from referrals from the accounting relationship versus referrals from existing clients versus existing clients adding new assets versus digital marketing, what's the mix of new business coming in today?

Yeah, about 40% of what we have this year has been from existing clients. Client referrals in the door, new assets in the door, new clients in the door. We've got a fairly decent amount coming from our strategic partners, probably 20 to 30% coming from strategic partnerships. We've done a lot of brand work. So if I were to say coming from marketing overall, and that is we consider marketing to be not only our executive bench marketing, also our brand marketing, paid marketing, that type of stuff. Let's say it's probably 10 to 15% of business coming in that way. And then our advisors are out there doing new business development as well. So that is a very large part of our culture. Some of that's in the other numbers as well. Marketing's harder because usually it's multi-attribution. Someone has seen us multiple different places or talked to multiple different people, but it's a healthy mix, which is one thing that I'm always watching across the organization, which is I don't ever want to be too beholden to one type of business development. I, I don't know whether it's right or wrong, but I tend to view the organization from a leadership perspective, similarly to how I would expect someone views a portfolio, in that there should be a pretty decent amount of diversification in revenue lines. There should be diversification in how your new business is coming into the organization. We're looking at ROIs of where we're investing dollars and how that's happening across the organization. I will also say, and I can't measure it, and I'm We'll always try to. But I do think momentum is a thing. Momentum is a real thing. It builds an excitement and an engagement internally and externally to your organization that is— it's almost intangible, but it is real.

You talked about the blocking and tackling and how you do the unsexy stuff in the business, and that's certainly a key part of being successful. So as that relates to the business development side, the marketing side, you've got the corporate marketing where you're doing your branding, you're doing digital marketing, you're trying to create leads for the advisor, and then you've got the advisor. They're out in the community, they're trying to get referrals, and they're trying to meet new people. So a couple questions there. One is, are you seeing a shift more towards what I'll call the corporate marketing where at a corporate level you're trying to generate the leads for the advisors? So maybe The corporate piece takes it 80% of the way, and then we give a warm lead to the advisor. Now you take it the last 20%? And/or do you still expect advisors to spend 20% of their time trying to bring in new business? What happens when they get at capacity? And how closely do you measure and what expectations do you set for your advisors? Hey, you need to bring in business. You need to get X number of referrals. We're going to measure that. We're going to track that. How do you think of that in terms of blocking and tackling?

So yes, to your question about corporate marketing and branding, my goal is that we build a machine. My dream would be that our marketing was so good that we were driving hundreds of leads. Right. Like, I want to be like Creative Planning. I want to be like all these other very large—

Fisher Investments.

Yeah. Yeah. That is a vision. Absolutely. I think that is amazing and is definitely a goal of ours. Are we there? No, not at all. However, I can look back and say, oh, we're making progress. Right. And we are very tangibly measuring I was just in a meeting with our chief marketing officer, you know, looking at evaluating how many leads have we gotten for the beginning first 6 months of the year? What do those leads look like? How do they fall out? Where are they coming from? All of those types of things. So definitely using data. I do believe that good people with good data make good decisions. And I have learned in my 25 years, 30 years in this industry, advisory firms, specifically smaller ones, are not necessarily great at the data. And so a lot of times they're making decisions based on feelings versus facts. And so I've really tried to drive our organization to have better data with numbers so that we all know the facts so that we can make better decisions. So marketing, yes, definitely have a vision that the corporate brand is driving more leads than our advisors can absorb. That would be a dream, an absolute dream. And we are going to continue to chip away at that vision as we go. We made a very clear clear decision. Our dollars are limited. We spend a significant amount of money on marketing, but dollars are still limited because we aren't— we don't have a private equity backer. We don't have someone with a blank checkbook to just stroke us a check. So being smart about how we deploy those dollars is also very important. We want to be dominant in the Southeast, but before we can do that, we have to dominate our backyard. We want to be known in Atlanta. And we also have an office in Charlotte. And so really focusing our dollars on those two markets specifically, and then also taking our executive bench, our PR, our advertising, all of those things, and really focusing all of that together, not on differentiated strategies, but here. On those two markets, I think has yielded a better brand awareness. Now that again takes time to play out. However, as your advisors are out there in the community building the relationships, right, that brand presence, that awareness of who you are in the marketplace, that is multi-attribution, right? They're going to hear a podcast, they might see a Google ad, they might have seen you out at a Rotary meeting or wherever it might be. Like, all of those things begin to matter when it comes to decision-making. However, if you're scattered and all over the board, you're diluting your efforts. And so we've just really tried to focus those efforts on one or two strategies so that we can execute well. As it relates to growth targets, we decided— we've tried a lot of different things. Our evolution has been that we work in diamond teams. Our advisors work in a diamond team structure. And so each seat on the diamond team, whether it's a senior advisor seat a lead advisor seat or an associate advisor seat, each one of those seats has a very defined new revenue target per year. And so we wanted it to be not reliant on who you were. It needed to be consistent and fair across the board, but we also wanted to give advisors the ability to opt in or opt out. If you don't want— our senior advisors right now have a $300,000 a year new revenue goal. If you don't want a $300,000 new revenue goal, then you're not going to sit in the senior advisor seat. Senior advisor seat comes with you're leading a team. And most of our advisors eventually work into a senior advisor seat. They ultimately, they want to be leading a team, but they also understand that with each seat in the organization, and this is true across our entire organization, not just in the Diamond Team, every seat in the organization has a very defined roles and responsibilities. Abilities, so that we are clear, so that you as a team member understand, here's how we at Signature FD are defining success for this seat. We want you to understand that going in so that you can make a good decision for your career of whether or not this is something that you truly want.

Let's take that senior advisor role for a second here. So you said they have a targeted goal of $300,000 of revenue. What happens if they only bring in $225,000 for a couple years in a row? Because I know that's something that advisors struggle with in terms of leadership is, how do I hold my team accountable when they fall short of the goal?

Here's what I will tell you. It feels very lonely if you were just to say, Mr. Senior Advisor, you have a $300,000 target. That feels very lonely, right? But what we're saying is, okay, but you're part of a team. And Mr. Senior Advisor, you've got a $300,000 new revenue goal. And Mr. Lead Advisor, you've got a $175,000 goal. And Mr. Associate Advisor, you've got a $50,000 new business goal. Together, that's a $700,000 goal. Y'all work together. I don't really care if Mr. Senior Advisor hits $225,000 if the team itself is hitting their goal consistently year over year, because business development is really hard. Let's be honest, right? That was another, I would say, benefit of me not being an advisor. Was that I had always built the business. So in 2020, when I became president and CEO, I said to myself, you know what, I'm going to go sit in that seat. I'm going to sit in their seat and I am going to get real clear on what it takes to do what an advisor does. And so I set myself new sales goals. I'd never done business development before in my life. Life, it is hard work and it takes time. Right. And so there's a real appreciation on my part and on the part of the leadership team to say, look, this takes time. But again, here's the other piece of that. If you are consistent in your activities, if you make the activities of business development habitual, you will build momentum and eventually have success. It might not come as quickly as you would like for it to, but again, it is the unsexy part of achieving a goal. And so that, that is where I believe good advisors and good people in a good culture at a firm where they are valued and appreciated are going to do everything they possibly can to be successful for themselves, for their families, and for the organization. When you structure the organization in a way that supports team and values team over any one individual's contribution, I think that's where you start to get the engagement. That's where you start to get the momentum. That's where you start to get progress. And then everybody works together because everybody's going to experience years, no matter what seat you sit in, where it is just harder than others. And I have to say, in organizations where there is no space for that, it just doesn't even feel human.

Speaking of not feeling human, Let's, in the final minutes that we have here, let's talk about artificial intelligence. Yep. What are you guys doing with AI specifically for your company and how do you think it's going to affect our profession?

So a couple things. I think it's going to be wildly impactful to our profession. We started a program process project 2 years ago. To create a data warehouse for ourselves. So a place where we could pull data from all of our different systems, pull them into one place so that we could have one true source of data that we owned. That has been wildly beneficial, specifically from a business intelligence perspective. My belief is that our next foray into how to use AI will be to layer on a ChatGPT or some type of artificial intelligence on top of that true source of data and start to build our own basic ChatGPT that is specific to Signature FD. Every organization of size that I've talked to, and I've talked to very large institutions, AI is only as good as the data underlying it, as the data you're feeding to it. And so having— again, not many advisory firms are great at the data, and so having that one true source of data was very important to us. So that's where I think we will go with that. The other thing that I am willing to experiment with is an AI-based financial planning tool. And so just researching what those potential tools are and how they might work within our ecosystem, that is really on the forefront of my brain right now.

Great. Heather, folks want to connect with you or learn more about what Signature FD is doing, what's the best way to, to do that?

Yeah, you can find us at www.signaturefd.com. And I am on LinkedIn, feel free to connect with me and send me a message. I'd love to hear from you.

Alright, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.