#FASuccess: How Miye Wire Uses Client Events to Build a Community

Welcome back to the 221st episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

My guest on today’s podcast is Miye Wire. Miye is the founder of her eponymous hybrid RIA based in Reston, Va., that manages $200 million for about 250 young professional families.

What’s unique about Miye, though, is how she’s developed a referral engine around her work with Microsoft employees, hosting several unique and memorable client events throughout the year to instill a sense of community amongst her niche client base, and how that also ends out driving even more referrals from clients who are excited to share that they’re a part of Miye’s community.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Miye has become the go-to benefits and equity compensation expert for Microsoft employees at their hub in Reston (and even gets to provide benefits training for their new hires who have recently graduated from college), how Miye’s clients’ challenges in finding the bandwidth to manage their nearly monthly Microsoft stock events has led her to make her own main client deliverable a simple one-page financial planning summary that just lets her clients know where they stand in relation to their goals and includes her planning recommendations, and why Miye structures those recommendations to be so detailed that clients could even implement them themselves if they wanted (although most have still hired her to do it for them).

We also talk about how Miye structures her fees, starting with a $300/hour fee for creating an initial financial plan for new clients (and how she communicates that fee so clients don’t feel like they’re “on the clock” during the process), why Miye feels that structuring her business as a hybrid-RIA on the AUM model allows her to best serve her clients (even though less than 5% of her revenues are generated from commissions), and how Miye ensures that all client-initiated communication gets a prompt reply from her team by setting up a catch-all “Team” email address that goes to everyone’s inbox at once.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Miye shares the mindset shift early on in her career that helped her to stop worrying about trying to “fit the mold” of a “typical” financial advisor, the key insight around what her value was as an advisor that prompted her to outsource many of her firm’s back-office functions in order to spend more time on client-facing activities, and her ongoing recognition of (and appreciation for) how the hard work that she put in the early stage of building her practice has had a tremendous compounding effect that is now paying real dividends.

So whether you’re interested in learning how Miye has developed a niche of working with Microsoft employees, how operating as a hybrid-RIA allows her to run her business more efficiently and do more for her clients, or how she fosters a sense of community amongst her clients, then I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast with Miye Wire.