The managing partner of a three-partner advisory firm is having lunch with a tax attorney she has known for years. Near the end of the meal, the attorney asks a simple question: “If I have a client who should talk to you, who exactly is that?”
She answers well. She mentions families selling a business, physicians nearing retirement, and people who have just inherited a portfolio they did not build. She talks about planning, taxes, and the firm’s careful approach. It is all true. On the drive back to the office, she realizes that the attorney now has three possible clients in mind and no sentence to repeat to any of them.
The firm has the same problem everywhere. One partner writes thoughtful posts about retirement income. Another sponsors a charity golf event every spring. The third wants a new website. The newsletter goes out when someone has time to write it. The compliance officer reviews every piece at the last minute and sends half of it back. None of this is careless. Each partner is doing something sensible. Together, the activity does not add up to a firm that a referral partner can describe in one breath.
That is a brand problem, but not the kind a new logo solves. It is a planning problem. This piece is about what a clear marketing plan actually does for a financial firm: how it settles the brand question, why it makes referral partners more willing to open doors, and what a strategy session has to produce for the plan to be worth having.
Most firms that come to a strategy conversation are not short of ideas. They already have a website, a newsletter, a few events, and a partner who is good on a stage. What they lack is a sequence they can defend.
A sequence answers three questions in order. Who is this firm for, specifically? What does the next year actually have to produce? And what will the firm not do, so that the first two answers stay true? When those questions are unanswered, every new idea gets judged on its own merits, and most ideas have merits. A podcast sounds reasonable. So does a seminar series, a new brochure, and a refreshed set of headshots. Each gets approved because nobody has a reason to say no.
The result is scattered activity that feels productive and produces very little. Spend goes to whatever was proposed most recently. The compliance officer sees each piece in isolation and has no way to know which ones matter. And the people most able to send new relationships to the firm, its accountants, attorneys, and existing clients, hear a slightly different story every time they ask.
There is a further cost particular to financial firms. In a regulated business, every public statement is a commitment. A firm that is unsure what it stands for will say more than it can stand behind, or it will say so little that nobody remembers it. Neither helps.
A strategy session is not a longer proposal meeting. The difference matters, because many firms have sat through the second and assume they know the first.
A proposal meeting is a presentation. An agency describes what it would do, the firm reacts, and everyone leaves with a document that lists activities. The firm’s own choices are mostly untouched. Nobody had to agree on who the work is for, and nobody had to give anything up.
A working session is the reverse. The firm’s leadership does most of the talking, and the facilitator’s job is to force decisions that the firm has been postponing. The session is uncomfortable in a useful way. Partners who have described the firm differently for years have to agree on one description. Ideas that everyone liked have to be ranked, and some of them have to be dropped.
At WeKinnect, the founder or managing partner and the leadership team work through those decisions with us, and they leave with a written plan. The plan is the point. A session that ends in a good conversation and no document has not done its job.
For a session to be worth the time, it has to produce four decisions. If any is missing, the plan will drift back into scattered activity within a season.
A priority. One primary audience and one primary result for the coming year. For the advisory firm, that might be families preparing to sell a closely held business, with the result defined as first meetings that come from referral partners. Naming one does not mean turning away everyone else. It means the marketing is built for one group, and everything else is welcome but not planned for.
A capacity limit. How much new work the firm can take on without lowering the standard for existing clients. A financial firm that markets past its capacity does damage twice: new clients get a rushed start, and existing clients notice the partners are stretched. The limit belongs in the plan in writing, set by the people who will do the work.
A channel choice. Where effort and money will go first. For many advisory firms, the most valuable channel is not advertising at all. It is the small group of accountants and attorneys who already trust the partners. A plan might decide that the first quarter goes to making the firm easy to refer, and that public channels follow once the message is settled.
A measure. One number that tells the firm whether the plan is working, chosen before the work starts. For the advisory firm, it might be introductions from referral partners that lead to a first meeting. It should be something the firm can count honestly and something that connects to the priority. If the measure cannot tell the partners whether to continue, it is the wrong measure.
For a financial firm, the plan needs a fifth element: a written list of what the firm will not say.
This is not a compliance afterthought. It is part of the brand. An investment adviser registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission is subject to the SEC’s marketing rule. The SEC’s small entity compliance guide to investment adviser marketing summarizes the general prohibitions: an advertisement may not include untrue or unsubstantiated statements of material fact, may not discuss potential benefits without fair and balanced treatment of material risks, and may not present performance in a way that is not fair and balanced. The rule also sets conditions for testimonials, endorsements, third-party ratings, and performance information. Broker-dealers have a parallel framework in FINRA Rule 2210 on communications with the public, which, among other things, requires many retail communications to be approved by a qualified principal before use.
A good plan treats these rules as design constraints rather than obstacles. It decides, in advance, that the firm will not lead with performance, will not use client stories without the required disclosures and approvals, and will not describe outcomes it cannot substantiate. It gives the compliance officer a seat in the planning, not only in the review. And it builds a short library of pre-approved language, so that the partners can write quickly without starting a new review cycle for every sentence.
Restraint also reads well. A firm that describes its process precisely and makes no claims it cannot support sounds like a firm that is careful with money. That is the brand most clients are looking for.
Michael Porter made the point plainly in his Harvard Business Review article “What Is Strategy?”: strategy requires trade-offs, and the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without trade-offs, there is no reason for a firm’s choices to hold. Every good idea gets added, and the firm becomes a slightly different version of every other firm.
Marketing plans fail the same way. The hardest line to write in a plan is the one that says “we will not do this, this year.” It is also the line that makes the rest of the plan believable. When the advisory firm decides that the golf sponsorship continues for relationships but stops being counted as marketing, or that the podcast waits until the referral message is settled, the partners gain something they did not have before: permission to say no to the next good idea.
Partners at a financial firm know their own work so well that they cannot easily remember what it sounds like to someone who does not. Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe this in The Curse of Knowledge: once people know something, they find it hard to imagine not knowing it, so they speak in abstractions that feel full of meaning to them and sound empty to everyone else. “Comprehensive, goals-based planning” summarizes years of experience for the partner who says it. To a tax attorney, it is a phrase that could describe almost anyone.
This is why the referral question at lunch was so hard to answer. The managing partner was summarizing everything she knew. The attorney needed one concrete picture: a specific kind of client, at a specific moment, with a specific problem the firm handles well. A good plan writes that picture down in plain words, tests it on people outside the firm, and keeps it the same long enough for others to learn it.
Referrals are a favor with risk attached. When an accountant introduces a client to an advisory firm, the accountant’s own reputation travels with the introduction. People are far more willing to take that risk when they know exactly what will happen next and can describe it without hedging.
A clear plan reduces the referral partner’s risk in three ways. It gives them a sentence they can repeat accurately. It tells them which clients to send and, just as important, which not to send. And it tells them what the first conversation will look like, so they can set expectations honestly. A referral partner who can say “they work with families in the year before a business sale, and the first meeting is about the timeline, not about investments” sounds informed. That confidence is what makes the introduction happen.
The same logic applies inside the firm. A plan that an associate advisor or a new operations hire can read and follow without asking the partners what they meant is a plan that will survive a busy quarter.
Planning has a well-known blind spot: people are optimistic about their own plans and reluctant to voice doubts once a plan has momentum. Gary Klein’s project premortem is a simple correction. Before committing, the team imagines that the plan has already failed and writes down the reasons why. Because the failure is assumed, people who have reservations can say so without seeming disloyal.
A premortem is one of the most useful exercises in a strategy session. For the advisory firm, it might surface that the compliance review will bottleneck the new content, that one partner’s calendar cannot absorb more first meetings in tax season, or that the referral partners were never asked whether the new message makes sense to them. Each of those becomes a line in the plan instead of a surprise in the spring.
A plan earns trust when the people who must approve it can see the decision inside it. A deck can be impressive and still decide nothing. A plan worth adopting makes its choices visible: who the work is for, what the firm can take on, where the effort goes first, and how anyone will know whether it is working.
For a financial firm, trust also depends on what the plan keeps private. Partners need to know the plan will not push the firm into public statements it cannot stand behind. Compliance needs to know it will be involved before content is written, not after. Clients need to see the same calm, precise voice in a newsletter that they hear in a review meeting. A plan that protects all three relationships is one leadership can approve with confidence.
Trust also grows from the handoff. The best test of a plan is whether the managing partner can give it to someone who was not in the room, and that person can act on it without asking what any line means. If the plan has to be explained every time it is used, it is still a set of ideas, not a plan.
The session produces the decisions. The package is the scoped plan that carries them out over the coming season. For a financial firm, a finished package should include:
A package like this is not a list of deliverables. It is a description of the decisions the firm has made and how the work will protect them.
The same four decisions apply outside finance, but they look different. A trade business planning its spring season sets its capacity limit by crew hours and its priority by the jobs it most wants in range. Its “will not do” list might rule out jobs outside its service area, however tempting. The financial firm’s limits are set by partner attention and regulatory care. The discipline is the same: choose, write it down, and let the choice protect the work. What changes is what the choice is protecting.
Firms get far more from a working session when they arrive prepared. We ask leadership teams to bring:
Before committing to a session and a package, a firm should settle a few things internally:
None of these require outside help. All of them make outside help more useful.
Go back to the lunch. Six months later, the tax attorney asks the same question, and the managing partner answers in one sentence. The firm works with families in the year before and after the sale of a business, and the first meeting is about the timeline. The attorney repeats it to a client the following week. A first meeting is booked. The partners count it, because it is exactly the result the plan said to count.
Nothing about the firm’s expertise changed. What changed is that the firm made its choices, wrote them down, and kept them steady long enough for someone else to repeat them. That is what a clear plan does for a brand. It turns a firm that is hard to describe into one that is easy to recommend.
If your firm’s partners would answer “who is this firm for?” in different ways, that is the right place to begin. Write down each answer separately and bring them to a conversation with us. We will show you what a working session would ask the firm to decide, and what the written plan that follows would contain.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
Written By
Darlene Gagnon is the founder of WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she works with entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. She focuses especially on restaurants, arts, and travel and tourism. Darlene writes on Branding, Positioning, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, Storytelling, and Entrepreneurship. WeKinnect serves entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry, and Darlene brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
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