Many of the most effective growth strategies for an advisory firm are hiding in plain sight—including creating processes that help you uncover opportunities within your existing client relationships.

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a multipart series focused on building a successful, sustainable financial advisory firm. The series explores foundational practice management strategies, client service models, and business development approaches, offering insights designed to give your firm an “adrenaline boost” for growth. Please check out the first two articles in the series: “The future of your firm starts with a clearly defined foundation” and “Turn prospects into believers: Onboarding that converts 85%.”

If you’ve read the first two articles in this series, you already know something important: Growth doesn’t come from motivation or even talent. It comes from installing structure and consistently executing systems and processes.

What happens after your foundation is clearly established?

Once your roles are defined and your onboarding process is dialed in, the question becomes simple:

How do you consistently get new people into the top of the funnel?

Even the best onboarding process in the world can’t convert prospects if they never show up at your conference table.

This is where so many successful advisors get stuck.

They know what they should be doing, but they’re relying on referrals alone, chasing shiny marketing ideas, or trying to prospect when time allows.

Hope, unfortunately, is not a growth strategy.

What works (every time) is installing intentional, repeatable prospecting systems that match your personality, your niche, and your capacity—and then executing them relentlessly and consistently.

In this article and the next, we will walk through several of the most effective strategies we teach advisors, all of which can coexist within a single integrated growth engine.

Capturing new assets inside your existing client base

Before chasing new households, start by looking inward.

One of the most overlooked growth opportunities in any advisory firm is hiding in plain sight.

Yeah, I know … we’ve all heard it before. “You don’t have all your clients’ assets.” I didn’t believe it either. No one does.

However, there’s a reason we keep hearing this. Many of your clients—even your best clients, the ones you have the closest relationships with—have assets held elsewhere.

So, here’s what you do.

First, review the onboarding process we taught in the previous article in this series—the one about how to convert 85% of your prospects into clients.

Then, take your current clients through that same process, but position it as a new and improved discovery process. Explain that you’ve expanded your process for bringing on new clients and would like to ask them some new, thoughtful questions you may not have asked in the past—just to make sure no stones have been left unturned and that they’re receiving the most comprehensive advice possible.

So as you can see, this isn’t selling—it’s stewardship.

In fact, one of the secrets to the growth we’ve experienced over the years is that I personally hate being perceived as a salesperson. Instead, I choose to educate—empowering our prospective clients to implement their financial planning and investment management through us.

The beauty of “not selling” is that you build a deeper relationship. When you take current clients you’ve already built a great relationship with back through your new onboarding process, “magic” can happen.

Other advisors who have implemented this process have been shocked to find millions of dollars in new AUM within a very short period of time, simply because they implemented our onboarding process and then revisited those existing clients to deepen those relationships with better questions and better advice.

So, when paired with the onboarding process discussed in the prior article (discovery, education, financial planning, and the “Safe Haven Kit”), this alone can generate meaningful AUM growth without adding a single new household to your book of business.

LinkedIn mining: Turning connections into conversations

Most advisors have LinkedIn accounts, but very few actually use them.

LinkedIn is not social media in the traditional sense. It’s a searchable database of professionals, relationships, and warm introductions waiting to happen.

Effective LinkedIn mining begins with the basics:

• A friendly, professional photo (please, I’m begging you … smile in your photo)
• A clear headline written in human language
• A story-driven profile summary
• Consistent visibility through light engagement

But the real power lies in second-degree connections.

So here’s the process.

Start with your best clients. Pick three to begin with, and make sure you’re connected with them on LinkedIn.

Click on their connections and look at who they know. Then scour that list for people who fit your niche and might make great prospective clients.

Next, build a simple spreadsheet that connects client names to potential prospects so that you have something to track (you can also use your CRM software).

Then, pick two or three connections you’ve discovered in their network and send an email to your client with a simple question:

From there, your client will let you know if they know any of the people you mentioned. If they do, you can politely ask for a brief email introduction.

Here’s the fun part. If your client knows any of them, there’s a very good chance they’ll make that introduction for you. Unless there’s some uncomfortable history there—maybe they had a bad parting at a prior job.

The old methods of asking for referrals often feel like a sales tactic. For example, asking the intentionally open-ended question, “Is there anyone you know who would benefit from the conversations we’ve had?” Then comes the awkward pause while you stare at your legal pad, pen in hand, hoping for a name.

Ugh. Talk about the opposite of deepening relationships!

LinkedIn mining is a warm-introduction and name-recognition strategy that is much more passive and positions you as the advisor and friend looking for a favor. It might sound counterintuitive, but psychological studies suggest relationships are actually deepened when you ask someone for a favor.

And by the way, when you implement this strategy over multiple clients, it can become an extremely profitable passive prospecting system.

But get this. When those prospects you “mined” become clients, you can eventually ask them for introductions to people in their network. They’re already familiar with the passive process, which means they’re likely to be comfortable introducing you to their connections as well.

This approach removes cold LinkedIn outreach entirely. You’re not interrupting strangers here. Rather, you’re leveraging trusted proximity and building one component of your marketing machine.​

Scaling with Google reviews

I’m throwing this in as a “bonus” because it’s a strategy that not everyone can implement.

Whether this is for you and your firm depends on compliance rules and/or the state you live in, so please check with your compliance department or clear this with your attorney before proceeding.

With that being said, if Google reviews are something that you’re allowed to do in your state and/or practice, don’t overlook one of the most powerful digital trust engines available today.

First off, it’s shocking to me that many advisors haven’t even claimed their Google Business Profile. And many who have either have no reviews at all … or worse, outdated negative ones.

Talk about growth prevention!

Many advisors are surprised to hear that the slowest-growing financial advisory firms get more than 80% of their new clients from referrals, while the fastest-growing firms get only 30%–40% from referrals.

Interesting, isn’t it?

The takeaway is simple. Referrals, something none of us can fully control, should be the cake topper, not the cake.

So, how do you get Google reviews without being annoying?

I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but it’s all about repeatable systems and processes … and warm, sincere processes too, by the way.

Start with the low-hanging fruit: friends, former colleagues, or other close acquaintances who are currently clients of your firm. This is the best place to start a campaign because these people already know, like, and trust you, so they should be happy to leave a review.

Next, use software such as SurveyMonkey to send surveys to each of your clients immediately after a review meeting.

Once they fill out the survey and you review the response, assuming you get “straight A’s” across the board, reach out with a warm, sincere message. Explain that in this post-COVID world, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to your online presence and that you’d truly appreciate it if they’d take a couple of minutes to submit a Google review outlining their experience with you and your firm.

The message our office sends includes a link that takes the client directly to the page where they can leave a star rating, type their review, and click “Submit.” This makes the process simple and virtually effortless. The more work you make the client do, the less likely they are to submit a review.

Finally, we have another process for those who do not fill out surveys. After all, some people just aren’t “survey people,” and I don’t blame them. I’m busy. I probably fill out 20% of the surveys I’m asked to complete—and only when I have a stellar experience.

We have an automated process that identifies clients who have attended a review meeting but haven’t completed the survey we sent them. At the end of every month, it looks back at the prior month and flags those clients. They then receive a follow-up survey request with similar warm, sincere messaging and the same review link.

From there, everything is tracked in our CRM and a spreadsheet because we don’t want to ask anyone more than twice. Think about it from the client’s perspective: If you received a request for a Google review last year and another one this year but chose not to respond, what if you got another one next year? That might get a little irritating.

In the end, once you get 10 or more reviews, Google starts to pay attention to you—and so does the public. As you make this a systematic process, you’ll continue to get more reviews, and Google rewards recent, consistent activity.

Before you know it, you’ll have 15, 35, or even 50-plus reviews, and you’ll start getting phone calls and emails from prospective clients like never before.

So, when compliant and properly approved, consistent Google review strategies can:

• Improve search visibility
• Reinforce credibility
• Create social proof before the first conversation even occurs

In our experience, Google reviews—combined with strong onboarding and education—can quietly but quickly snowball into millions in new AUM over time.

Again, it’s not a strategy that works overnight. You’re probably looking at a six-to-nine-month runway after implementation before you start seeing results.

The crazy part is that so many advisors don’t think this works. In fact, one of our coaching clients disregarded this strategy for the first 18 months we worked together because he thought it was a waste of time. “There’s no way that’ll work,” he’d tell me. “Okayyyyy …” I’d respond.

But he quietly implemented the strategy without telling me in January 2025. Within eight months, he’d brought in more than $8 million in new AUM from Google alone.

The lesson here isn’t that Google reviews are some magical growth hack. It’s that visibility creates opportunity.

In a post-COVID world where prospects Google you before they even reach out, that credibility can be the difference between being chosen as one of the advisory firms they interview or being completely invisible.

Final note: Execution beats ideas every time

While all of these strategies work, none are revolutionary on their own. The magic happens when they’re stacked together.

Prospecting isn’t about finding a silver bullet. It’s about installing a blueprint.

When advisors build repeatable systems and automations, and then execute those processes consistently, growth becomes controllable, predictable, inevitable, and far more enjoyable.

If you’re the best financial advisor in town, and you give top-notch, ethical advice, it’s not your privilege to get good at marketing and prospecting. It’s your responsibility.

Because here’s the irony: Good advisors don’t want to embrace social media advertising, videos, podcasts, webinars, in-person educational events, Google reviews, or many of the other strategies we teach because they see these marketing strategies as the domain of “charismatic, unethical salespeople.”

The truth is, in many cases, they might be right. But don’t you find it ironic that some of the lower-tier advisors out there are getting the most clients because they implement these types of strategies?

I’ll say it another way—these advisors are stealing your prospects.

So instead of sitting back in the corner with our arms crossed, scoffing at these advisors, why not implement strategies to save prospects from mediocre advice? It’s a win-win, don’t you think?

In the next article in this series, we’ll shift from business-building strategies focused on current clients to creative ways to develop new clients independent of your current client base.

Because when structure meets visibility, business growth follows.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and the sources cited and do not necessarily represent the views of Proactive Advisor Magazine. This material is presented for educational purposes only.