In my amazing life journey so far I have met more than 10,000 IFA. Some of them come up and talk to me and many of them don’t. Many of them who talk to me have amazing stories to tell. I wish I could do a book on that, but that is for another day.

Let me talk about an IFA who will obviously remain anonymous. I do not wish to say anything about his geography, aum, etc – even one of them could give him away, so it stays anon and please don’t ask me who it is. If I wanted to give out his name, I would have – and it would have got me more hits 🙂 . No I am not interested in naming him.

I chatted up with him recently, and this post was born in my head. I asked him “How is your business doing”. He is a person I know from a previous training I had done, so “who are you” was not really necessary.

And like many successful IFA he was looking at the business very optimistically (very rare these days)..and his son was entering his business. He was creating a new office (not for his son, but for one of his employees) where he was aiming to cater to the bottom of the pyramid in his city. His target there was numbers – without worrying about the size of the SIP amount.

Of course the business was all in a corporate ARN – and it had 3 sales heads – he himself, his son, and his employee. His son was expected to start the advisory business, he was to cater to the HNI clients and his employee was working at the bottom of the pyramid. The employee’s office is in a different suburb, differently furnished, differently staffed, and differently compensated. In the smaller office he has employed boys, and girls, and hold your breath he does not mind employing a trans gender employee too. He is currently not so sure of his decision because of the employee (and client) push back. So currently not decided.

He has a lot of clients who have been dealing with him for the past 25 years. He has moved from fixed deposits, ppf, nsc, etc. to mutual funds and life insurance. Yes he was selling ULIP a few years ago, but now only gives advice on buying term insurance. Convinces people to buy medical insurance, but does not sell it himself. He says he is only on the wealth creation side – however he is adding P2P lending (peer to peer lending) to his portfolio. He is on the borrowing side – and in case his clients need money from his portfolio, he sometimes prefers borrowing instead of breaking an investment.

Amazing that he has not lost even one client to another IFA, bank, nd, etc. He is now thinking of buying some more aum (either by sale or by partnership). He has stuck to 5-6 fund houses – and about 12-15 schemes.

No generic communication – no news letter, no website, no what’s app group. Just specific solutions and good service. No new fangled ideas. No new experiments – I am not saying that is good or bad, just observing.

I guess any business is simple. Just keep doing the simple things well, and your business will grow. If you have the inclination (and energy) to try something new, great. If you don’t, you can STILL grow your business.