At Twenty Over Ten, we take pride in the work that we do for our amazing advisor clients everyday. Once we go live with a website, we like to have candid chats with our users to see how they like their new site and showcase their unique features and processes. This week, we got to speak with Zachary Harrington, financial advisor at NorthLanding Financial Partners. Zachary and his team are firm believers in being true partners to their clients to help them seek the financial clarity they deserve.
Tell us a little bit about NorthLanding Financial Partners and how you got your start.
NorthLanding is a hybrid RIA founded in 2013 by four partner/owners, we now have a total of seven advisors and five staff people. We got started as a group because, despite having individually successful practices, the four partners felt that synergy and opportunity was much more available in the independent RIA/hybrid channel if we went out on our own. While there are many challenges creating the infrastructure needed if you break away from an established firm and or broker dealer, it’s been a lot of fun mostly and knowing we have control over our professional futures and the type and quality of services we can provide to our clients is priceless.
What makes you unique compared to other investment advisers? Can you provide some details that sets you apart?
The main differentiators are our planning and investment management processes. With relatively few exceptions, all clients pay a separate flat fee to engage The Financial Clarity Advantage Process (our terminology for comprehensive financial planning or wealth management) to ensure their situation is thoroughly audited before becoming long-term clients. In cash, tax, estate, insurance and retirement planning issues, we find that process uncovers valuable areas of planning many advisors overlook. On the investment management front our main differentiator is that we don’t outsource investment management. By managing model portfolios internally and using primarily index funds, we eliminate two layers of cost that can add to our clients long-term investment returns.
The live chat feature on your site is becoming a popular trend. Have you seen this addition to be fruitful to your site visitors? From a business perspective, has it helped you gain and qualify leads?
In our short time using LiveChat, we have found it to be an effective tool in actively talking to people when they are on the website, as well as analyzing how they got to the website. There were some compliance hurdles through our Broker Dealer, but LiveChat is well equipped to handle the compliance needs for RIAs/BDs
We love your use of lead capture forms throughout the site. Have you found success in capturing qualified lead information this way?
While the site is still new, we had one lead so far that has already come into the office for a seminar. So far so good!
You worked with our team to develop a custom calculator for your site to help visitors estimate their investment fees. Tell us a bit about the choice you made to use a calculator like this and what value you’ve seen it bring to your clients and prospects.
We firmly believe in the transparency of our fees and we feel we have a competitive fee structure at NLFP. We view the calculators as an opportunity for prospects and clients to see what they will pay for the services and what they will get for each service we provide.
We love your podcasts! This is certainly a new trend we’re seeing as well. Tell us more about your process and how you go about developing your podcasts.
This is a very new and young process for NLFP. We use Soundcloud for hosting, equipment owned by the company and Hindenberg for audio recording and transcription. This is helpful for compliance review/approval and retention. Right now our process is to take questions from clients, develop them and find subject matter experts on the topic to help answer the questions.
Your blog is incredibly robust, as well. We see you are leveraging Content Assist, which is now included in all of our website packages for no additional charge. What has your experience been so far working with and publishing your Content Assist articles?
Content Assist is easy to use and has a nice selection. The variety of the articles are nice and we like that it is updated on a periodic basis.
If you could pick one favorite feature about your new website what would it be?
The interactive calculators that allow us to be transparent with our clients and prospects.
If you could give one piece of advice to other advisors embarking on launching a new website what would you say?
Have a realistic timeframe and budget. There are many different vendors that provide many different sites. Take the time upfront to find the one that is the right fit for you.
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