SUMMARY
In this episode of The Rare Advisor, Aaron Grady explores a challenge that many advisory firms are experiencing but rarely address directly: the hesitation that shows up in next‑gen advisors when it’s time to lead conversations. Despite being intelligent, well‑trained, credentialed, and exposed to countless client meetings, many emerging advisors struggle to step confidently into a lead role. The problem isn’t knowledge. It’s development—specifically, the lack of a complete development system.
Aaron explains that true advisor development requires three components: materials, modeling, and mentoring. While most firms deliver the first two consistently, they often miss the third, which is the most impactful and the hardest to operationalize. Materials create knowledge. Modeling creates awareness. But mentoring creates judgment, the quality that ultimately builds lasting client trust and internal confidence.
Many firms unintentionally fall into the trap of equating exposure with development. They assume that if a next‑gen advisor attends training, earns credentials, sits in meetings, and observes skilled advisors, the growth will happen naturally. The issue is that exposure alone tends to be passive. Without structured reflection, guided feedback, and intentional conversation, next‑gen advisors may log hundreds of hours watching client interactions but never translate that exposure into the intuitive judgment required to navigate real‑time decision-making.
Aaron illustrates how each component plays a distinct role. Materials—books, CFP programs, scripts, frameworks, and training content—build intellectual confidence. They help advisors understand what should happen in a meeting. But intellectual confidence does not automatically convert into experiential confidence, which is the ability to lead the conversation in the moment. The jump from knowing a framework to executing it requires observation and practice.
Modeling, the second component, brings concepts to life. When next‑gen advisors shadow experienced advisors, they absorb subtle elements of communication that no training manual can teach: tone, pacing, restraint, confidence, and presence. They see how objections are handled, how difficult questions are navigated, and how trust is shaped in real time. Modeling begins the process of transforming knowledge into intuition.
However, Aaron emphasizes that even modeling falls short when it stands alone, because observation without reflection can remain passive. The key to unlocking development is mentoring—the most overlooked component across advisory firms. Mentoring is not training and not simple exposure. It is the guided processing of experience. It happens through intentional conversations before and after meetings, through one‑on‑one discussions, and through thoughtful coaching that challenges the next‑gen advisor to articulate what they noticed, what they were thinking, and how they would act in various scenarios.
Mentoring compresses the learning curve by converting experience into wisdom. When experienced advisors ask next‑gens questions like "What do you think the client is most concerned about?" or "What would you do differently next time?" the advisor begins to develop judgment. And judgment is what separates technicians from trusted advisors. It’s also the foundation upon which transferable client relationships are built.
Aaron highlights that most lead advisors naturally excel in leadership—setting direction, inspiring others, and modeling excellence. But many are accidental managers. They didn’t enter the business to manage people, and the shift from being the primary advisor to being the primary developer of advisors can be uncomfortable. Yet it is essential. For a firm to become a scalable enterprise rather than a founder‑dependent practice, it must cultivate advisors who can earn client trust on their own merits.
Mentoring isn’t about sweeping organizational changes. It can start with simple, consistent practices. Before a client meeting, leaders can ask next‑gen advisors what they expect to happen or how they would handle potential scenarios. After the meeting, leaders can ask what they noticed, what they learned, and what they might improve. These short conversations transform passive exposure into active development. They accelerate confidence, deepen critical thinking, and build the judgment required for advisors to eventually lead client relationships.
The long‑term implications are significant. Firms grow when advisors grow. Enterprise value increases when the advisor bench is strong, and succession becomes feasible when clients trust multiple advisors—not just the founder. Transferability is built when next‑gen advisors demonstrate judgment, and judgment is built through mentoring. This triad—materials, modeling, and mentoring—creates advisors who can guide clients effectively, contribute meaningfully to the firm, and carry the practice forward.
Aaron concludes with a reminder that the future of an advisory firm is not only in the clients it serves but in the advisors it develops. Growth, scale, and legacy are all tied to building people, not just serving clients. When leaders commit to mentoring alongside materials and modeling, they build the foundation for a scalable, transferable, enterprise‑level advisory business. And as he often closes, when the why is clear, the how becomes easy.
TRANSCRIPT
Aaron Grady, Advisor Consulting Director at USA Financial - Welcome back to another edition of the Rare Advisor. I'm your host, Aaron Grady, and today we're going to dig into a very important topic, the missing link in developing next-gen advisors. So let's start the conversation with a question. Why is it that so many next-gen advisors, smart, capable, well-trained people, still hesitate when it's their turn to lead the conversation? They possibly have their CFP. They might have attended conferences, they've read books, they've sat in hundreds of client meetings. And yet, when the moment comes to lead, to ask the difficult question, to handle the objection, to guide the decision, you can still feel the hesitation. It's not a knowledge problem. It's not an intelligence problem. It's a development problem. Because most advisory firms unintentionally skip one of three essential components required to truly develop an advisor. These components are materials, modeling, and mentoring. And most firms, especially founder-led firms, are often missing the most important one, mentoring.
Here's the mistake that many firms make. They treat development as exposure. They send next-gen advisors to training. They invite them to sit in on meetings. They assume that time and proximity will eventually produce confidence and mastery. But development doesn't happen automatically through exposure. Development happens through a system. And that system has three distinct and equal and equally important components. Materials, which is training, modeling, which could be also deemed observation, and mentoring or guided feedback. Each one plays a different role.
Materials build knowledge, modeling builds awareness or pattern recognition, and mentoring builds wisdom, or ultimately judgment. And judgment is what ultimately builds trust. Not just client trust, but internal trust. The kind of trust required for a next-gen advisor to truly become transferable, to become someone clients rely on and someone the firm can scale through. Think of development like learning surgery. You don't become a surgeon by reading books only or watching surgeries only. You become a surgeon by learning, observing, and doing with supervision and feedback. Advisory mastery is no different. Knowledge alone does not create mastery. Mastery requires observation and guided refinement. So let's dig into the components. The first component is materials. This is the most familiar form of development. It includes things like training programs, professional designations like the CFP, internal playbooks, discovery questionnaires, planning frameworks, communication scripts. Materials are essential. They build intellectual understanding. They give next-gen advisors the language, the structure, and the conceptual foundation. Materials answer questions like, What should a discovery meeting include? Or what should a planning conversation accomplish? What are the key components of a great client experience? This creates intellectual confidence. They know what should happen, but intellectual confidence is not the same thing as experiential confidence. Knowing the framework is different than leading the conversation. Materials are necessary, but insufficient on their own. They know the answer in theory, but they don't yet trust themselves to execute it live, which leads to the second component. The second component is modeling. This is where learning becomes real. This is where next-gen advisors observe mastery in action. This happens when they shadow client meetings, when they watch you give guided discovery conversations, when they see how you handle objections. when they witness how you navigate uncertainty, emotion, and hesitation. Modeling teaches things that materials never could. Presence, tone, timing, restraint, and confidence. Modeling allows them to see how trust is actually built. Not in theory, but in practice. They begin to recognize and internalize patterns. They start to see not just what you say, but how and when you say it. This is where knowledge begins to convert into intuition. But even modeling is not enough because observation without reflection often remains passive, which brings us to the most important and most commonly missing component, mentoring.
Mentoring is where real development happens. Mentoring is not training. It's not shadowing. It's guided thinking. Mentoring happens in conversations before and after the meeting. It happens through regular one-on-one conversations, pre-meeting preparation discussions, post-meeting debriefs, and real-time coaching. It even happens in decision making conversations or when reviewing what worked, what didn't and why. It happens when you ask questions like, What do you think the client is really concerned about? Or what did you notice in that conversation? What worked well? What would you do differently next time? What were you thinking at that moment? Mentoring focuses and forces processing. It turns experience into learning. Without mentoring, next-gen advisors accumulate experience, but they don't necessarily accumulate wisdom. They may sit in hundreds of meetings, but if no one helps them process what they're seeing and experiencing, the learning curve remains slow. Mentoring compresses that learning curve. It allows them to inherit judgment, not just accumulate experience. And judgment is ultimately the differentiator between a technician and a trusted advisor. Here's the reality: Most advisors, and I've seen this from working with hundreds of teams, most advisors, most lead advisors provide materials, most lead advisors provide modeling, very few consistently provide mentoring. And it's not because they don't care. It's because mentoring requires something different. It requires intentional management. And this reveals an important distinction. Most lead advisors are strong leaders, but accidental managers. Leadership sets direction. Management develops people. Leaders or leadership says, this is where we're going. Management says, this is how you grow. Founders of firms naturally excel at leadership. They inspire people. They model excellence. They set the vision. But mentoring requires stepping into the role of a developer, not just a producer. And this is where enterprise firms are built. This isn't just about development though. This is about scalability. This is about succession. And ultimately, this is about increasing enterprise value. A firm becomes transferable when the client relationships become transferable.
Client relationships become transferable when client trusts other advisors. And advisors become trusted when they demonstrate judgment. Judgment is not developed through materials. Judgment is not developed through observation alone. Judgment is developed through mentoring. This is the bridge between a founder-centric firm and enterprise firms. Because practices that depend on one person and firms that scale beyond one person are distinct and different. So here's the good news. The good news is mentoring doesn't require massive structural changing. It just requires an intentional conversation. Simple practices make an enormous difference. So for example, before a client meeting, you could ask, what do you expect may come up? What do you think the client is most concerned about? How would you have handled that? Or how would you handle that?
After the meeting, circle back with your next gen advisor, ask questions like, what did you notice? What did you learn? What would you do differently next time? These conversations take five minutes, but they accelerate the development by years because they transform passive exposure into active learning. At some point, every founder must make a transition. And this is difficult for many. Management is not, most advisors didn't get into the business to manage people. They got into it for other reasons. They got into it for the lifestyle. They got into it to help people. But ultimately, at one point, they wake up and they have a business now. And a part of that management, which is one of the things that most advisors don't like to do, is a bit of a struggle. And so at some point, every founder must make a transition from being the primary advisor to being the primary developer of advisors. Because the ultimate measure of your firm's strength is not how well you serve clients. It's how well your firm develops advisors who can serve clients. Your greatest long-term contribution is not the relationships you build. It's the advisors you build because firms scale through people and people scale through materials, modeling, and mentoring.
So remember, materials build knowledge, modeling builds awareness, and mentoring builds judgment. And judgment is what ultimately builds trust, not just client trust, but trust within the firm. And trust is the foundation of every scalable, transferable, enterprise-level advisory business. Thanks again for listening to it, this episode of the Rare Advisor. If you found this valuable, make sure to like and subscribe and share it with other advisors who may be building their next generation of advisors inside their firms. Because the future of your firm is not just the clients you serve, it's in the advisors you develop. And as always, as we say, when the why is clear, the how becomes easy, so never lose sight of your why.
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The RARE Advisor is a business model supercharged by Recurring And Repeatable Events. With decades of experience coaching successful advisors, your host, along with other leaders in the industry, discusses what it takes to grow a successful practice. With the aim of helping financial professionals and financial advisors take their business to the next level, this podcast shares insights and success stories that will make a real impact. Regardless of the stage of your practice, The RARE Advisor will provide thoughtful guidance, suggestions for developing systems and processes that work, and ideas for creating an authentic experience for your clients.
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