How do I tell my clients that I'm offering financial services?

You conquered the Series 65. You chose your custodian. You spent days researching your tech stack. You're ready to do business. Now what?

Clients always ask me how they should bring up their new financial planning/investment management venture to their tax clients. There's no right way, there's no wrong way, it's just a matter of what will work best for you.

Here are a few options you can consider for getting the word out to your tax clients:

Letter

This can be as simple as sending out a letter to your existing clients and telling them about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how it could benefit them.

Make sure you (or better yet, someone on your team) hand-writes the client name & address on this one. Hand-sign the letter. Use regular stamps. Is it more work? Sure. Does it dramatically increase your open rate? Yes - significantly.

This letter also needs to be compliant and archived - so check with your compliance officer if you're under a corporate RIA.

E-Mail

Same concept as the letter, but much more efficient. The downside is that you'll get much lower open rates than the hand-addressed, regular-stamped piece of mail.

Not a bad idea to follow up the letter with an email as well.

Again - it's gotta be compliant, it's gotta be archived.

Phone Calls

The least efficient method, but also very effective. Here's a sample script you can mold to be your own:

(NOTE - this specific script will NOT work if you've always had a good working relationship with an outside financial planning firm. You'll see why.)

"Hey Mr. Smith, this is Joe over at ABC Tax. I just wanted to call you and tell you about a new service we are offering to our best clients and I'm super excited about it. Do you have 2 minutes?

"Great! Mr. Smith, in all of the years we've been doing this, we've found that a lot of our clients need help with financial planning & investments. We've also found that many of them weren't happy with the service given to them by their current advisor - so I decided to get my licenses and offer financial planning services to clients that need that kind of help.

"We strongly believe that this "one-stop shop" approach will help clients like you to be better informed when making decisions. Every financial decision we make has some kind of tax consequence.

"If you ever find yourself in a situation where you'd like to see how we can help, I'd be glad to talk further."

You don't want to go for the kill on this announcement call. This is purely an announcement call with a very soft sales pitch at the end.

You can have a more direct approach the next time you're talking about their taxes and you see some big capital gains, or you know they're approaching retirement and want to talk about taxes & Social Security, or you ask a younger client if they've made any IRA contributions this year, etc. etc. etc.

Social Media

If you do social media, this is a great way to reinforce the messaging around your new services.

Don't sound like every other financial advisor out there.

Did I mention that this stuff has to be compliant & archived? Sorry, compliance can be a pain sometimes.

Just get it out there

Like I always say: everything works and nothing works - it's just a matter of how much you work it. Let people know what you do, do it well, and the clients will come.