Organic growth is more than a metric and it starts with a mission to help more people access financial advice.
Abby Salameh of RFG Advisory breaks down how scalable systems, automation, enriched data and hyper personalized marketing fuel real growth, and shares why women focused initiatives like RFG’s StrongHER Money program are becoming powerful accelerators for advisors.
Read the full raw transcript below:
Organic growth is the holy grail, right? Like, how do we generate organic growth? How do we drive leads to help our advisors help more people? So, at the end of the day, I think we always forget, like, we talk about organic growth, but we don’t talk about the why. Like, the why is so important. It’s the reason I’m in this business, probably you’re in this business, because we want to make sure that financial advisors and financial advice is being offered to more people. So driving organic growth is not just for growth’s sake. It’s really with the noble cause and mission to be able to help more people.
That said, if you’re not doing it in a scalable way, meaning if you don’t have the automation set up to automatically engage with the folks that you’re trying to target to give them more financial advice, then it’s never going to work. So, you know, what I’ve been seeing, what we’ve been following at RFG, what we’ve been doing is really driving organic growth in a scalable way through programs, technology, people, marketing, hyperpersonalization of content, enriched data and all the fun things.
We all know that women are a very critical and important market in the industry, as consumers, as business owners, professionals, mothers, sisters, and financial gurus themselves. And as we look at the numbers of women that fire their financial advisor when they inherit money, when they go through a life transition, when they get divorced, even as they continue up the career ladder and make more money, we recognize we need to help our advisors, both men and women, engage with female investors better. They do want to be engaged with differently. They do want to have an advisor who gets them, and all of those things are wrapped into our StrongHer Money program, which we launched just a month ago, maybe after building it out for a year.
And again, it ties back to organic growth because truthfully, it’s a growth accelerator program for our advisors. It’s going to help our advisers attract, engage, win, and retain the female clients that they already have. So we’re super excited. We’ve been getting a lot of media around it. We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about it, and the program itself is quite robust. So I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done there.
I love the FAB sessions for so many reasons. Number one, having grown up in this industry myself, it has not always been easy being a woman in the industry, but not for the reasons that you think. Like, I personally feel like I benefited very much from being one of the only women in the room at many times, and I always had very strong male sponsors. But as a woman in the industry who was working on Wall Street with 3 children, it was more of like the nonlinear path to getting where I wanted to go because of the stops and starts in my career to take care of the children, to be home with them at certain times, the leaning out at times.
And I think that anytime we can get a group of women together, and that room was packed, anytime we could get a group of women together to share their experiences, to help with important topics like negotiations, and how you negotiate your salary, your benefits, how to ask for equity in your firm if you haven’t done that, how to have difficult conversations about, you know, whether you’re a manager or whether you need to talk to your manager about something. Like, how do you approach that? How do you give feedback that’s not going to feel critical, but will feel more like radical candor and instrumental? How do you assume positive intent from people that you’re receiving feedback from?
So the conversations we had in the room were just, I think we could have had a whole day. And it’s exciting to see that there are so many women willing to share with one another, because I’m not sure that’s always the case.
