Business owners can be some of the most valuable clients a financial advisor serves. They can also be some of the hardest to prospect.
I spent 23 years owning a service business before eventually selling it, and today I work with financial advisors who want to build deeper relationships with business owners. One thing I've noticed is that many advisors genuinely want to grow in this market, but their approach to prospecting business owners isn't much different from how they prospect everyone else.
That's a missed opportunity.
Business owners think differently. Much of their financial life is intertwined with their company. Their income, wealth, retirement plans, family, employees, and legacy may all be tied to a single asset, the business.
If you want to become known as an advisor who understands owners, your prospecting strategy should reflect that. Here are eight principles that can help.
There is an important distinction between hunting and farming.
Farming means nurturing existing relationships, expanding accounts, and staying connected to your network. Those things matter. But if your goal is to create new relationships with business owners, you also have to hunt.
That means proactively opening doors, creating conversations, and putting yourself in front of people who don't already know you.
Prospecting is a discipline and, to some degree, a mindset. You can't control whether someone ultimately chooses to work with you, but you can control your activity, your consistency, and how you respond when something doesn't work.
The best prospectors rarely rely on one source of opportunity. Think about your prospecting in three lanes:
You don't have to do everything. In fact, you probably shouldn't. But I would encourage advisors to have at least three tactics working consistently. Just as importantly, know your numbers. If one activity produces ten conversations and two legitimate opportunities, while another produces 50 conversations and none, that should influence where you spend your time.
Prospecting becomes much less mysterious when you begin to treat it as a process.
“The riches are in the niches” may be an old saying, but there's a reason it has stuck around.
A good place to start is with a specific type of business owner, so people can associate you with that type.
Maybe it's dentists. Construction companies. Manufacturing businesses. Professional service firms. Family-owned businesses preparing for succession.
Once you identify an area that interests you, immerse yourself in it. Ask your existing business-owner clients which conferences they attend, which associations matter to them, and what they read. Learn the language of the industry and the issues owners face.
There's another advantage to specificity: it makes you referable.
“I work with business owners” requires someone to search their entire mental Rolodex.
“I work with second-generation construction business owners preparing to transition the company,” immediately causes them to start thinking of people.
One of the easiest traps for an advisor is leading with everything you can do. Investments. Retirement planning. Insurance. Tax strategies. Estate planning.
All valuable. But an owner may not yet see why any of those things matter. Instead, identify a gap.
One powerful example is the owner's wealth gap: the difference between the wealth they need to support the life they want and the investable assets they currently have. If a significant portion of the owner's net worth is trapped inside the company, suddenly, enterprise value becomes highly relevant.
A simple question can create an entirely different conversation:
"If work became optional tomorrow, how much annual income would you want in order to maintain your lifestyle?"
From there, you can begin exploring whether their current investable wealth—and ultimately the value of the business—supports that outcome.
Now you're not pitching financial products. You're helping the owner see something they may not have seen before.
A name on a list isn't necessarily a prospect. A prospect is someone who has expressed enough interest to take the next step with you. So give owners something worth raising their hand for.
That could be an educational event, a wealth-gap conversation, an assessment, or an enterprise value appraisal. For example, we frequently use an Enterprise Value Assessment that provides an owner with greater clarity on what the business may be worth, how it compares with peers, and which factors may be holding back its value.
A good offer provides value before asking for much in return. That's increasingly important. Information is becoming commoditized. Trust isn't.
This is one of the biggest mindset shifts an advisor can make. When you first meet an owner, your objective doesn't have to be convincing them to move their wealth to you.
That's too big a jump. Instead, sell them on the next step.
Maybe the next step is simply agreeing that understanding enterprise value is important. Then it might be completing an assessment. Then, reviewing the results. Then, identifying a wealth gap. Eventually, those conversations can naturally lead to broader financial planning.
A good business-owner process creates value at every stage rather than asking for a giant leap of faith at the beginning. The presentation frames this as moving from enterprise-value buy-in to identifying business value to identifying the owner's wealth gap.
You are often judged less by the answers you give than by the questions you ask. Have three or four meaningful questions ready whenever you meet an owner.
Questions like:
Good questions get owners thinking. Great questions cause them to tell you what matters to them. Once you understand that, the conversation becomes far more relevant.
Ultimately, owners need to trust three things about you: your character, your competence, and whether you genuinely understand what they're trying to accomplish.
Competence doesn't mean demonstrating every sophisticated strategy you know within the first 20 minutes. Sometimes competence is demonstrated by asking a question that an owner has never been asked before.
Your job is to build enough trust and curiosity to make the owner willing to explore. That's the real objective of prospecting.
You don't need to rebuild your entire prospecting strategy tomorrow. Pick two or three areas where the greatest opportunity exists.
Maybe you need to get clearer about your niche. Maybe your value proposition needs work. Maybe you have plenty of leads but no compelling offer that gets them to raise their hands. Or perhaps you need a dedicated business-owner process that is visibly different from the experience you provide every other client.
Start there, because becoming a business-owner specialist is about creating an experience that makes business owners recognize that you understand them.