While I have written several posts on branding, I still felt a strong urge to write a few additional thoughts on this topic as this is such an important one. Let me begin this post with a question for you – How many people walk into your office door simply on hearing your name, or company name?

 This answer is the same for all of us. Not Many! A Few or None! This is because there are no real brands in the wealth space. Even if you think there are brands (or consider yourself to have one), these brands are largely irrelevant because they do not drive volumes of potential ideal clients through the doors of these firms. For example, most of the biggest firms in the MFD space are not even known in their geographical markets or their hyper local markets. Compare this to a bank or a large FinTech player (which has spent hundreds and thousands of crores on branding and marketing) attracting thousands of prospects.

The truth in our industry is that the vast majority of prospects for most industry participants come from client referrals. And how many ideal clients does a firm really need? Not too many if you are a solo professional. I have discussed this before in my post on the Dunbar Number. The point is that it is often your personality as well as your connection (chemistry) and not your brand that persuades most of these prospects to work with you.

 The painful reality is that we do not have a brand. Many are simply living under the illusion of having one.

The medical profession shares common ground with our industry when it comes to brand recognition and personal connection. For most general physicians and specialists at the early or middle stages of their careers, the personal brand is often overshadowed by the institution they are affiliated with. Hospitals and larger healthcare institutions, much like the banks or FinTech firms, are the brands that patients recognize and trust. They are the entities that invest significantly in branding, not the individual doctors who work for them. As a result, patients typically seek care from a hospital based on its brand, not specifically for the doctors who are there.

However, an interesting shift occurs as medical professionals advance in their careers and specialize further. The most senior and specialized doctors do begin to build their own personal brands, often through a combination of peer recognition, publications, speaking engagements, and patient testimonials. This is analogous to a small but significant segment of financial professionals who, through specialization, thought leadership, and a high degree of personalization in their services, succeed in creating a personal brand that can attract clients independently of any larger firm’s branding efforts.

The key thing then to recognize is that the first step in building a brand is to develop a capability to effectively diagnose and solve problems for a certain kind of ideal client. The words to understand here are Specialize, Specialize and Specialize. In short, build a Niche – become the best at solving problems for a certain type of ideal clients.

Niche marketing is effective marketing. Everything becomes easier the clearer it is that you are solving specific problems for a specific set of people. Leverage what you learn about solving these problems by turning it into content (thought leadership). The medium doesn’t matter; making it possible for people to find you does.

In our program, the Real Financial Professional (RFP), Carl Richards wrote something fascinating on this front.

The key to solving problems is to start small.

The key to having a massive impact is to find the smallest audience. This is the opposite of what you’ve learned. We are all taught to think big. Scale. Find the biggest market. I’ve read all those books and listened to those speakers at the conferences, too.

But BIG is a big lie. If we believe it, we will never change the world. Real Financial Professionals change the world by solving one problem at a time. That work compounds. If we’re busy thinking about scale and big, we might feel like we’re solving problems, we can point to big important things we’re thinking about doing. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to making an impact on anyone.

Real impact comes not from big and broad, but small and focused. The key is to find the smallest possible audience with a shared, meaningful problem that we are interested in and able to solve. Learn to do that, and word will spread.

You know that money is a means to an end. Mutual Fund investments are too a means to an end, and this end is all about what the clients want to use their money for. What do your clients want to accomplish? What is the life they imagine living with their money? Your job first and foremost is to diagnose this