High-net-worth clients have options—lots of them. In this episode, Steven Weill shares how elite financial professionals differentiate themselves through deeper relationships, exceptional service, and a more comprehensive approach to wealth management.

Hi, I'm John.

And I'm Julie.

We're the hosts of the Hartford Fund's human-centric investing podcast.

Every other week we're talking with inspiring thought leaders to hear their best ideas for how you can transform your relationships with your clients.

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I'm so excited to welcome Steven Weil, CEO and founder of Global Performance Solutions to the Human-Centric Investing Podcast today. Steven, welcome and thanks for being here with us.

Julie, thank you so much for the opportunity.

Steve, would you mind sharing with our audience a bit about your background and the work that you do with financial professionals before we dive into attracting high net worth clients?

Absolutely. You got 35 years, 30.

I do, I have all the time in the world.

No, absolutely. Thank you for that. Yeah. So, to your point, I mean, I've been in the industry for about 36 years now, which is just crazy. Started my career as a financial advisor. So as people say, I sat in the seat. Did that for 10 years, I was an advisor in the New York area. From there, I had the opportunity to go to Morgan Stanley. And this is, you know, 20, 25 years ago, I was national sales director of financial planning. When financial planning wasn't even a household word. So had about 10 to 12 people around the country trying to sell financial planning to financial professionals within Morgan Stanley. Did that for six years. From there, I went over to UBS and that's kind of where my career really changed. At UBS, I was probably the second or third coach brought on and we developed a coaching program, a really robust coaching program. For financial advisors private wealth advisors all the way up through the ranks of management and they saw such success with it. Me being the second or third coach helped developed it. We went up to about 54 coaches around the country Um where we saw doubling tripling if not quadrupling of the amount of assets coming in By driving accountability by driving execution things like that and then um outside of the last year and a half I spent the last 15 years at Goldman Sachs as US head of business strategy. Very similar to my role at UBS, I worked with financial professionals, investment professionals, really around the globe. Asia, Australia, Europe, doing what I did at UBS, helping them get better at their craft. About a year and a half ago, I left Goldman and started my own firm, Global Performance Solutions or GPS for short. And really what that is, it's a performance company. I do coaching, consulting, and training, mostly of wealth and financial professionals around the globe, but I also am in other industries as well, helping them with leadership as well as teaming.

Well, thank you for that background. I think it's so important to understand that you are working with financial professionals and teams every single day and understanding their best practices and their challenges. And I think the topic that we're about to dive into today is near and dear to many teams' hearts. And that's really how to attract and retain ultra high net worth clients. And I know that as I am fortunate to speak with many teams across the country, as you are, Many teams have a handful of these clients. Maybe they've grown them throughout the years, or maybe they sold a business, or maybe there was a inflection point of wealth, but it's not necessarily a part of their niche or strategy. And so I would love to dive in with you, maybe just kick things off and talk about how do you see financial professionals really differentiating themselves with the ultra high net worth or high net worth clientele.

Yeah, you know, it's a really good question and you know it's amazing because you know throughout the years I always tell advisors that this is truly the best time to be in the business for for many different reasons, but one of them being that there's more wealth than any time before and ironically I was just out at a wire house about a month ago and I was truly amazed Julie about sitting down with some of these top teams and it's no more, you know, 500 million or 750 million, it's in the billions of dollars that they're managing, which is crazy. And so, the concepts that we're gonna share today, they're relevant for all teams that are out there, whether it's Ultra High Net Worth, High Net worth, or even just the affluent client, there's a lot of things that we're gonna talk about. And I hope that advisors take some notes. And what I find is that the new High Net-Worth and the Ultra High-Net-Wore playbook is really no longer about outperforming the market. It's about helping wealthy families manage complexity with clarity, with confidence and trust. And what we found is that the most successful advisors today are not just investment managers, they're orchestrators. You know, the old word used to be quarterbacks. I like the word orchestrator because it's a little bit different than quarterback. And what they do is they help families make better decisions across all aspects of their life. Investments, estate planning, tax coordination, they can't give tax advice, but they could coordinate and provide that business succession, philanthropy, family governance, risk management. And as we all know, the hot topic for today is this next generation preparation, if you will. So the advisor who wins is the one that I find simplifies complexity. I think that's really important. They personalize the experience. And what they do is they become the deeply trusted with the entire family, not just the matriarch and patriarch, but they become the primary wealth creator for the family. And so it's very different. So, based on your questions, I think about what truly differentiates. And I talk about five things that truly differentiate these financial professionals today. Number one, they lead by coordinating the family's full advisory ecosystem. Number two, they advise beyond the portfolio. They lead with deep discovery. They personalize the client experience and they build trust across the generations. And what I find is that they're not trying to be everything to each and every client, but they're making sure that everything in the client's financial life is expertly coordinated. And so, if I could, maybe let me just dig a little bit deeper into each one of those. Absolutely. Yeah, the first differentiator, as I mentioned before, is moving from portfolio manager to becoming that family orchestrator, if you will. The portfolio is just one piece of the equation. These clients may have operating businesses, real estate, private investments, concentrated stock, trust, estate structures, philanthropic vehicles. Lending needs so on and so forth but what beats the best advisors do I find Julie is They connect all of those pieces together and that matters because wealthy families families offer suffer from something I call fragmentation. They have a CPA they have an estate attorney. They have an investment manager maybe they have insurance professionals a banker and maybe business consultants and No one is truly integrating all of the advice. And I think that is one of the key differentiators is being that orchestrator of all of their financial and wealth needs. The second differentiator is they understand the client's total balance sheet, if you will, assets and liabilities outside of just managing the portfolio. And they understand all of them moving parts, the liquidity picture, their tax exposure. Private assets, estate plan, their charitable intent. They know everything about all of the family. Again, not just the matriarch and patriarch, but what are all the moving parts within the family? And they know where the family has opportunity, but they also know where the family has risk. And so how do they do that? And that comes to the third differentiator. And a lot of people don't think this, but I do a presentation on consultative selling, and one of the things that I say is that questions are like fuel to an engine. And Many advisors want to prove their expertise too quickly. Elite advisors slow down and they ask better questions. I still remember, Julie, you know, back in the day when I first started to be a financial advisor there was a gentleman, Bill Bacharach, who today I think is more of a consultant and a coach. I think he's still an advisor. But I still Remember the one simple question that he asked, you know that should start out every conversation. Mr. And Mrs. Client, what's important to you about money? Simple question. Other questions. What does this wealth need to accomplish for you? And what does it need to accomplish for your family? Where is your financial life more complex than it needs to be? Who else is advising you and how well are those advisors working together? What would a successful transfer of wealth look like in your family? What I always find is that the quality of the relationship is determined by the quality of the questions that are being asked. We'll talk about this a little bit later. That's where emotional intelligence comes in and being aware and being on top of what's important to the clients. The last two that I'm, I'll share with you the dig a little deeper. The fourth differentiator, I think is all about personalization. It's all about the client experience. And you know, I think There was a research done a while back that with all the stuff that I could talk about, the client experience, and we can maybe have a talk about that another time. The two key words that constantly come up in research is customization and personalization. The advice that you give and the experience that you provide needs to be different for each and every client. Not that you have to upset the apple cart. But a founder may care more about liquidity, control, identity, and maybe their life after the exit. A widow may care about the confidence, the education, control, and those trusted decisions that you help them make. So I think it's really important that as we think about all that, five things that need to, when you think about that experience, that boil down to everything. And this was in one of the research reports that I read. Flexibility. Relevance, transparency, simplicity, and guidance need to be part of everything. And then the last differentiator, sorry to be long-winded about this one question, but I think there's so many things that helps advisors differentiate themselves, is as we think about this amount of money that's being transferred across all generations, this hundred trillion dollars, building trust across generations must be imperative today. You must win the family as much as you're winning the assets. So thinking about that, listen, the technical competency matters, but the emotional intelligence is what truly deepens the relationships with the families. And you need to provide that to, again, not just the matriarch and patriarch, but to the second and third generation as well.

Steve, thank you so much for that overview. And I love the customization, the personalization, the asking of great questions. I mean, I think you made such a great point, right? The better the output, the better the question. My head is spinning. I have so much to think about. I'm curious because you are fortunate to speak with teams every single day in the coaching and consulting work that you do. Where do you find that financial professionals or their teams overestimate their value? And where do they underestimate it? I'd be curious for some examples for our listeners as they're starting to maybe assess their practice and team and processes and learning from what others have, the trail that others have blazed.

Yeah, you know, more so than ever before, and I don't want to minimize it. I think at the end of the day, investments are important, getting them the best rate of return that they can to be able to achieve their goals, goal-based planning, right? Really, really important. But at the end of the day it's all of that other stuff on the periphery, if you will. Right. It's all the it's the education that's important. It's it's that emotional intelligence that's important. It’s providing value across the generations that's important. You know, the old things about investments, stocks, bonds, listen, at the end of the day, that's still really important. But at the of the end day, the number one reason why clients are hired and fired has to come down to the client experience and how you make the clients feel. And what's so interesting today is, you know, We talk about AI and leveraging technology. And I just put together a presentation on AI. And one of the slides talks about absolutely AI is important, but where advisors alpha is, is in a simple formula. It's AI plus EI equals advisors alpha. And again, I keep going back to that emotional intelligence because that's where the genuineness, the caring, it's about the relationship more so than any time before. In You know, in helping a lot of advisors out there with this transfer, if you will, these, a lot advisors are retiring more so than ever. We've developed a process around the transfer of trust and everything comes down to the relationship and making sure as we'll talk about in one of our future podcasts, how the team surrounds the client. And it's not just one advisor or one support staff, but it's the whole team.

I think that's such an important component and a distinction that you make is that I always say, co-pilot or chat GPT can't pass the box of Kleenex during an emotional conversation, right? I mean, that human touch, that emotional piece is so crucial. So I thank you for creating that point of distinction. I think it's so important. I'm curious again, in the work that you do with teams. How important is specialization or having a niche when trying to differentiate oneself from affluent or high net worth or ultra high net-worth families? What have you seen in this area and how does that expertise sort of play into the attraction of these families and bringing them into the practice?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And, you know, I used to do a presentation on niche marketing and in doing the research, we always found that advisors that focus on a niche are happier in the business. They're more productive in the business and they just connect with clients more so than other advisors because they share a common thread If you will. What I find is that specialization is one of the clearest ways for advisors to stand out because Affluent clients are not looking for generic advice. We know that. They want someone who understands their specific complexity. A niche creates clearer messaging, stronger referrals, deeper COI relationships, better content, and just overall a more, I guess, relevant client experience. And what we find is that many advisors are afraid to specialize because they think that it will narrow their market. Correct, but some things to consider for advisors as they're doing this is in reality done Well, what we find Julie is that Specialization makes an advisor's value clearer. When an advisor for example says, you know, I work with individuals families business owners executives retirees and institutions, What the prospect or the potential client here is on the other side is so basically you work with everyone. But when the advisors say, you know, we help with founders preparing for life changing liquidity events. We help multi-generational families prepare wealth for transitions or we help corporate executives manage concentrated stock decisions and retirement decisions or we help family owned businesses plan for succession, liquidity and legacy. What we find is that message is so much easier to remember as well to be able to refer to them. What I also find is that, you know, specialization increases credibility. Affluent clients want to know that you've worked with other people before that you've been in this space before. And so that specialization allows clients to realize that, you know a multi-generational family wants someone who understands family governance, they want family meetings, you know, how do I communicate with, you know my family. They want to know that you've been through that wealth transfer process before and the preparation of errors. So, you know, I think specialization helps in so many different ways. It also helps with centers of influences because again, centers of influences know the type of client within their book of business who they can refer. It also I think is that best niches are built around complexity, not just demographics. So it's not just doctors, it's just business owners or women, it's founders, you know, 18 to 36 months before liquidity events, it's widows navigating a loss or entrepreneurs off after an exit, simple things like that. What we find is that truly, the best niches are not just about who the client is, they are about the complexity that the client's trying to solve.

That's interesting. I love that angle and I'm curious, how would you guide a financial professional to start to identify that? To see if any of these niches already exist in their book, right? Because if I'm sitting here and I've listening to you and I I'm compelled you've caught me I know I have some work to do and I thinking I might have a couple of founders I might a couple widows navigating this I might You know, I, my mind right now thinks I have some small pockets. How do you help financial professionals really dig into that and say, Oh, there are a lot more of this niche of client than I realized because I wasn't looking at it from the right angle, or I wasn't looking at it, from that angle that you just talked about.

Yeah, you know, it's a great question, right? How do we execute on this? And so, you now, I think one of the things that we used to do, and I still do today, is there's a worksheet that we have that we give advisors and they put their clients down the left-hand side and all the things that, you know the associations, where they work, the religious kind of take, you know everything about the client goes on top and then they fill out this document and then we see where there's similarities. And so It's pretty straightforward. You know, it's not rocket science. It's not something you have to throw into AI. What I do, and I have thrown into AI for advisors to show them is once they identify this niche, hey, I have three clients here. I really like working with this type of client. Well, then you can throw into a AI, listen, I wanna work with women professionals of women entrepreneurs of this age. Where can I best reach out to these people in my community, in whatever, Honolulu, Hawaii? And what comes out of AI are all the associations, all the business places, all the networking groups, you know, how to contact them. All of that information comes to your inbox within 10 seconds. So before you had to do all of this research, you don't have to do it anymore. That's a great way to leverage AI and co-pilot or whatever it might be. That business development is already done for you. You just have to figure out where the similarities are within your book of business.

And is that one of the first steps that you would guide a financial professional to perform if they wanted to elevate their high net worth strategy say in the next quarter? Or what in your mind if you were a listener right now, what would be that first step that you would take to say, Okay, I've been thinking about this. This is in my good ideas folder, right? Well, you know, everyone has one. And I haven't gotten to it, and this is my time. I want to prioritize this because it is really important to the future of my practice. What's that first step that you would guide our listeners to take?

You know, I, you know, if there's three steps, number one, I think you need to segment your book and, and what segmentation does, and I load a lot of advisors push back on it or financial professionals, but I think segmenting your book allows you to understand what each and every client has, where they come, came from, you who the children are, so on and so forth. So that's the first thing. Segmentation is more, you 30,000 foot view from there. Then you do a relationship network map, take each client. Top 10, the next 10, next 10. And then figure out all the different networks that that client belongs to. Okay, so. Where do the kids go to school? What type of work do they do? Who's your alma mater? So on and so forth. Once you know all of that information, then you could do the third step, which I referred to before. Then you fill out that document that has all your clients down the left-hand side, all of those different relationship networks. So education, associations, so on and so forth are across the top. And then you can figure out where the similarities are from there. So that's how I would recommend it.

Excellent. That's great guidance. And one final question. I know that in working with teams, and as you mentioned, we'll discuss the team topic in a separate episode. But what I find is that in teams, I call it the we syndrome, right? So the team comes together and says, we should focus on this. This is a really great idea. And then we leave that meeting and we all go back to our desks and our emails and our phones ring and we don't do it. And then the next week at our team meeting, we say, Oh, that's right. We were going to look into some of these similarities. Who on the team do you find that typically owns this, at least in the initial steps or how, if I were a leader of a team and said, how could I actually get started? What, how do I hold someone accountable to doing this? Is it, is it usually the leader of the team? Is it someone in a client relationship role or an associate role?

Great question. And to your point, we'll talk a little bit about accountability and execution in our teaming podcast. However, with that said, you know, there's a couple of ways I could answer that number one, because they just had this conversation with a team, I think more and more teams, whether it's an RIA or whether it in a wirehouse environment, more and more teams are understanding that they need a COO, a Chief Operating Officer. Absolutely. And so my first response is probably the Chief Operating Officer Would manage that activity, would work with the senior advisors and understand the clients a little bit more and do some of those documents that I talked about. And then pulling in other people along the way. That's my first response. If you don't have a COO, I don't believe that it is the role of a senior advisor to do that. Their time is too important to handle relationships and do all the other things that we talked about before. So I do believe It's a great role for a junior advisor or a team associate or a client service associate to fill out those documents because they know as much about the clients as the senior advisor does. And, and again, I'm not trying to diminish the client associate or the team, but understand that this is a business development activity and it takes time and I think that time shouldn't be imposed upon the senior advisor.

Absolutely. Well, what, one of my favorite questions that I always guide financial professionals to ask themselves, is this the highest and best use of my time, right? So I think it goes right along with that. Yes. Well Steve, can't thank you enough for sharing these, this framework and the great questions and the starting steps. I know I'm very inspired and I'm excited to share your ideas with other teams, but We kicked off talking a little bit about great questions to ask, and if you're comfortable, we would love to lead into one of our favorite segments on the Human Centric Investing Podcast, which is the lightning round of questions. So, if we could go. Perfect. Yes. Okay. So, first question. If you could instantly master one skill, what would it be?

Being able to hear what people are thinking.

Mm-hmm. Oh, that's a good one. What's your superpower in one word today? Not not the dream one

Emotional intelligence.

Excellent. What's your favorite way to unwind after a long day? Perhaps a long of day of travel, like many of us have.

Good question. Depends, is this R or PG? I think just being able to relax, I do like working out. So I'm going to the gym for a half hour. I always enjoy that. Or I live down here in South Florida. Taking a walk on the beach is also very minimizing.

Very therapeutic for sure.

Yes.

What's your favorite quote or mantra? Um, you know, I was going to share it. I think it's in the teaming way and simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.

Oh, that's a great one. I love that. What's your favorite board or card game?

I always loved Monopoly. I grew up with it as a kid. I still enjoy it. Good question.

I was always the banker.

Of course you were.

Well, Steve, we can't thank you enough for joining us here today on the Human-Centric Investing Podcast and sharing all of your insights. And for our listeners, if you're interested in learning more about Steve and his process and his coaching, please feel free to visit his website, Global Performance Solutions at globalperformancesolution.com. Thank you again, Steve for being here with us today.

Thank you so much, Julie. Really appreciate the time.

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