Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
# 137 - From FinTech Sales to Financial Advisor: Clark Jeffries' Journey
What happens when someone who used to sell financial technology decides to become a financial advisor? Clark Jeffries, founder of Jeffries Wealth Management, takes us inside his transition from FinTech sales to running his own independent practice.
After five years at Hidden Levers (later acquired by Orion Advisor Tech), Clark worked closely with hundreds of advisory firms and noticed a major gap. High-earning professionals weren’t being well served—many were managing money on their own, sticking with family advisors, or fielding product pitches from old acquaintances. Clark saw an opportunity to create something different.
Making the switch wasn’t without surprises. He quickly realized that while technology is helpful, clients don’t actually care about your tech stack—they care about how you can genuinely help them. Integrations fail, updates cause issues, and advisors often use only a fraction of their tools. What really matters, Clark says, is the human connection.
Instead of adopting a polished, corporate image, Clark chose authenticity. By being himself, he attracts the clients who align with his style and values. He views financial planning as an ongoing process, not a static plan, and believes long-term trust is built on real relationships.
Social and Website
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clark-jeffries-11366112a/
jeffrieswealth.com
How's it going? Everyone, Welcome back. This is the Only for you Only podcast. In this episode, we're talking to Clark Jeffries, the founder of Jeffries Wealth Management, based out of Georgia, and this was a really fun one. We talked about all kinds of stuff how he built his business, how he got into it and his interest in it, how he was at a SaaS company selling literally technology to financial advisors and also putting his own financial theories to the test. So very, very cool conversation. Interesting to learn about his background, where he came from, what's going well, what he's working on and just overall learning about him. So enjoy this episode on the Only Fee Only podcast with Clark Jeffries. Hey, what's up? Everyone, Welcome back to the Only Fee Only podcast. Appreciate you being here. In today's episode, we're talking to Clark Jeffries, who is the founder of Jeffries Wealth Management. Welcome to the show man. Jeffries Wealth Management. Welcome to the show man. Thanks, Brock, Happy to be here yeah.
Speaker 1:Happy to have you, man. I'm pumped. Are you pumped, Clark?
Speaker 2:I think I'm more pumped than you.
Speaker 1:Hey, man, I guess we'll see. I love this guy For people that don't know who you are, man, give us some background on you. It can be as long or as short as you want, but to kick off the conversation, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:So I would assume most people don't know about me. I'm not a particularly, I'm not a Fin influencer just yet. So I started my practice two and a half years ago. I worked for a FinTech startup that got acquired by Orion Advisor Tech in 21. So I've been in the FinTech space, worked in sales, primarily worked with I don't know a couple hundred advisory firms all the way up to you know we had discussions with Merrill's BNY, all the way down to your you know solo for managing a hundred million dollars. So decided to launch my firm based off of that knowledge and my own personal experiences in finances.
Speaker 1:Cool, cool, cool. So how did you get into that, because I'm looking at your LinkedIn. Here Was the Hidden Levers. Is that what was acquired by Orion, or are those unrelated?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Hidden Levers was my first job out of school.
Speaker 2:I was a finance major at UGA and I really think a lot of my life has been a lot of good fortune. You create your own good fortune, but out of school, I think most finance folks end up kind of either in the corporate world or the investment side. So you start out as an analyst, work your way up, managing and doing equity analysis, fundamentals, all that fun stuff. That's where I thought I was going to go, but fortunately I bombed enough interviews to then end up finding Hidden Levers via Indeed, which was a startup in Decatur, georgia. When I joined, there was maybe 14 full-time employees, maybe a couple more, maybe a couple of less, so we were there from. I was there 2017 to 22 post-acquisition, which was an awesome experience. Learned a lot, not only on the business side in terms of how do you scale a cash flow generating software SaaS engine, and then also on the other side, working with a lot of really smart financial advisors that had built their own practices from zero to $100, $250, $500 billion plus.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:No, go ahead. Deb Clark, touching on that, you touched on this just now a little bit and in your intro. But whether it be hidden levers or, after they were acquired, working with some of those advisors, was it more so that led you to opening your own firm? Seeing what advisors were doing that was successful, or seeing things that you could do differently, that made you really want to open your own firm?
Speaker 2:Definitely both right. So I mean, for me, personal finance and financial planning always helped me navigate my own professional career and kind of how do I want to navigate these decades of working Like what was my purpose, where's the end destination? And financial planning provided a roadmap to that and I thought financial advising was a great space to be in. My family is full of engineers, so it combined a lot of the more technical math aspects of things with more of the personal relationship side of things, and being able to help people is, I think, the biggest thing that I was able to want to do in financial advising.
Speaker 2:So, with working with advisors, you see really great advisors maybe less great advisors, the majority of which that we worked with were great, really smart people helping massive, fluent up to ultra high net worth investors better manage their finances.
Speaker 2:But what I saw in the space was, when I'm talking with advisors, there weren't that many that I would want to work with that would also want to work with me. So as I'm talking with these really successful, smart people, I realized there was essentially a gap in the marketplace, right, for folks like me, henry's at that particular time is a pretty I think kind of a silly term right, but wealth accumulators there wasn't a really great solution for folks to go out there and work with right. Most of those people end up either DIYing, working with a family advisor or getting pitched products from an old college colleague that they haven't spoken with in five years and end up doing them a solid right. So I was always wanting to get back into that space and you know, you end up doing a job for five years and for me, I'm always looking for what's next.
Speaker 1:What? What do you think some of the things were? Because you obviously, um, like we've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of advisors and kind of peek behind the curtain of, like their practices Right, and obviously we see some advisors that are doing really well, scaling the practices, you know, growing at a rapid rate or just rate at which they want to, and then you obviously see other advisors that grow and then it doesn't end up, you know, going the way that they wanted, or maybe they could tweak something in their practice. Like what was some of the the good things that advisors would do to make sure that their their business was going in the way that they wanted? And then what were some of the good things that advisors would do to make sure that their business was going in the way that they wanted? And then what were some of the mistakes that you would see be made?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. I mean to be honest, I think a lot of the conversations that I would have with advisors was very narrow and focused, right. Sure, I think the end goal for any business that most businesses will struggle with is revenue generation. So we sat at an interesting crossroad for advisory firms. So we were an analytics tool, so think of like a Morningstar, think of like a Riskalyze type product. So now Riskalyze has turned into nitrogen. But we were a stress testing, risk analytics tool with a risk tolerance questionnaire but also could generate investment proposals for advisory firms. So we kind of had a couple of different hats of how we could help advisors. But the primary driver of new revenue for us was advisors using us for sales right and being able to show a potential prospect. Hey, here's your current allocation that you're DIYing or that another advisor has you in. Here's how we propose a different solution that's better across maybe fees, or aligning to your risk tolerance a little bit better performance, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that necessarily answers your question exactly, but I think that a lot of the times advisors would struggle really on the tech side, right. So I thought that I would be able to pretty easily enter in the space and be able to build out a tech platform that was best of breed. I probably what I underrated, which was the biggest issue that advisors would come to us with, which is sourcing new revenue, finding new people to help, getting in front of prospects, getting in front of people that need help. The converting side isn't necessarily as difficult for me because so much filtering happens to get to and do a discovery meeting with me. They're pretty much a good prospect and a good fit and I have a good sales background to help out with that, sure, but yeah, I would guess maybe technology to answer your question.
Speaker 3:Cool. So, clark, now that you obviously have had your own firm for a few years, some of the things you thought about, you know, when you're still on the tech side and seeing from other advisors and you that you wanted to implement yourself, what's been some maybe challenges that you didn't foresee and what have just what have been some things that have been different than maybe what you thought. It would know that you've been growing your firm for a few years tech isn't.
Speaker 2:It's not a, you know, it's not a silver bullet, right like I think that I probably thought that technology had more power to it than it necessarily does. Right things break, integrations break, um updates happen. It messes with your workflow that you've kind of become accustomed to. Some of the technology that I use is very robust, but I use a very niche or particular part of it, so it feels like you're just kind of scratching the surface. So I think that I probably thought that technology would be like this, like really easy value add. Look at all this technology, this cool technology. Look at all my technology, mr Prospect, ms Prospect. Clients really just want to know how you can help them and the technology is just a nice piece operationally on the back end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that makes total sense. So deciding to break off, where was it when you were at Orion where you were like, all right, yeah, like what I'm doing here? Basically, you have that epiphany where you're like I want to go do this. I know I've had a passion for it. It's something that, even when you were not necessarily doing financial planning, you still enjoyed the concept of financial planning. What was that trigger where you were like time to go off on my own and do this thing?
Speaker 2:I think it was honestly just a slow process of realizing and seeing that there wasn't ever going to be a perfect opportunity, like the timing wasn't going to align, and what I found in life is it's not black, it's not white, it's all gray, right? So if you're just looking for this perfect symbol from you know the signal like, oh, like God is telling me, this higher power is telling me now's the time For me. That never happens, right? It's always ah, should I go? Ah, no, let's wait. Ah, timing's not perfect, right? So it was just timing.
Speaker 2:You know, we were midway through the year, we had been doing it for a year and a half or whatever it was, and it just seemed like the time it had run its course. It was just time for me to try something else. I don't know. There's a Jeff Bezos quote where he's talking about how he could never live with himself on his deathbed if he didn't try to start Amazon, and that was his purpose for starting Amazon to a certain degree, and I don't think Jeffrey's wealth management is necessarily going to turn into Amazon exactly, but I've always enjoyed entrepreneurship. I've always liked the idea of starting a business, running a company, and it was just time to give it a shot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah for sure. Well, so when you did decide to give it a shot, right, there's a lot of different ways about going into that. Me personally, like I've always had, I had a sales background. So when my business partner Pete and I, like when we decided to start, we were pretty clear about, like, what each of us was going to do. Right, I was doing a lot of the outreach. He was helping scrape data, get stuff together, and that's kind of how we work together as a team. He's always been more operations focused, but when it's just you, that creates a challenge because you're doing operations and you're in charge of your own growth. But obviously you had experience in that. What was your go-to-market strategy? Was it LinkedIn posting? Was it cold calls? Was it email marketing, reaching out to people in your natural network? What did that look like?
Speaker 2:Great question. So the short answer is people within my network already, I think, with a finance background, people knowing that you work in finance. To the lay person, that's just like can you help me with taxes? Oh, can you help me with investing, right. So I had a good um initial group of people that I knew would want and would be willing to work with me. So it was just starting there and then, uh, building a little bit in terms of linkedin right.
Speaker 2:So at Hidden Levers, you know, circa 2017, 2018, 2019, we did a ton of email marketing right, and that never made sense to me exactly from a personal financial perspective of, like, buying a lead list and cold emailing people. It seems like a really silly way to try and reach out to people. But, on the other end, linkedin cold DMing to me seemed like a pretty natural way to build out a list of people that I can just kind of organically market to and post content to provide advice. So when I decided to build my business, my primary goal wasn't financial necessarily. It was to help people manage their finances right.
Speaker 2:I think, very simply, if I can help people in general, I've won to a certain degree right, like especially with my particular financial situation getting ahead on the personal finance side. It's not that I need to stack away 20% of my income to get by and get ahead. I've done that and I front loaded that. So now I'm able to cover the bills with my financial planning business. And then, if it scales dramatically, it scales and that's awesome, but at the end of the day, I just want to help people with their finances better. But at the end of the day, I just want to help people with their finances better, right? So when I started, I don't know if it was a thing called LinkedIn DMing I'm sure it was, but it was novel to me. I didn't look at any courses or anything like that. You just reach out to people sales navigator, hey, who's an account executive in Atlanta, you know like pretty simple stuff. So that, along with my network, has been my primary driver of clients very cool man, very cool.
Speaker 1:Um, was there any like when you were reaching out, like, did it? You were saying kind of felt foreign to you on linkedin, because that was one of the way the ways that we built our business in the early days. Right, it's just like we didn't have any people like we knew we wanted to work with feeling financial planners, that's what we knew, so we just started reaching out to them. Were there ways when you were reaching out to people that felt more natural, more you? Because I feel like a lot of times people are like oh, what the hell am I getting? Like, what's the cadence? How often should I reach out? Should I start with just like a hey, nice to connect with you, and then when do I actually come in with the do you have an advisor line?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of people, especially if they don't come from a sales background, feel a little, maybe slimy about a sales process. Right, being in a sales role, you get very used to just reaching out to people, connecting and just being transparent. Hey, do you work with an advisor? Right? So I started with a couple of different AB tests. Essentially, one was hey, thanks for connecting, do you work with an advisor? And then the second version was hey, my name is Clark Jeffries. I'm the founder of Jeffries wealth management. Here's how I help young earning hybrid. Nobody ever would respond no, it was like the response rate was abysmal. But you know, I'm here, I'm an advisor. Do you work with one? Oh, you do. How did you guys meet? Are you happy with your services? Oh, you don't. What's your strategy? Are you thinking about this, right? Like, like I said before, just being able to provide value, I think, and be human.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of times people are not being themselves and that was one thing that I always wanted to make sure I was doing in my own business was not putting myself into a box. That wasn't sustainable. I know people that I like working with. I like working with people like me, like you guys, people that have a similar ethos to me, have a similar philosophy on life. I didn't want to build a business even if it made way more money or financial sense around an ICP that I didn't enjoy working with, right.
Speaker 2:So once I kind of figured that out. And it's not perfect, right, no business is necessarily perfect and mine is far from perfect, but it's at least something that I get excited about. When I have a new client and we're going through the financial planning process and we're essentially a lot of these things, we're transforming their future trajectory. They're going from nothing to something substantial, right? No, of course, maybe eventually they would have been at 45 and be like I should probably start saving for retirement, but a lot of the times people are just not focused on it. They're not thinking about it, something I talked about with Dev. You end up in these LinkedIn echo chambers where it feels like everybody knows everything. When you talk to people, it's night and day knows everything.
Speaker 1:When you talk to people, it's it's night and day. Yeah, for sure, that's a great point.
Speaker 3:Dad, you're nodding like you're gonna, I did you have. No, I love that because something this is totally off topic, but we, of course, all do a lot on on linkedin. I think that's a great platform. Especially, uh, clark, like you have, have great content. Um, I think even like what you talk about.
Speaker 3:I noticed with your stuff, even compared to, of course, brock, and I see a ton of advisors posts, because that's who we're trying to connect with and work with, um, how and I think this stems a little bit from your sales background, like you talked about how natural your seams are more conversational. Um, I honestly always notice that on your post when I'm scrolling through there. But something I chuckle about is I feel like you and I are maybe brought to, but similar of not that I either of us go off the rails or unhinged on X, twitter or whatever, but it's I feel like it's more of our natural tone and it's like LinkedIn. You gotta be buttoned up a little bit. But I think the cool thing about that and social media in general is, within reason, you're always going to find who you're trying to connect with. So even though, like, I'm not super active on X, like though you know I feel like it's a different kind of advisor that primarily utilizes X. But, to your point, as an advisor and for other advisors, like you know, there are going to be certain types of for you, like account execs that are really active on LinkedIn and see your stuff and learn from you and like, oh man, I need to reach out to Clark. There's a different type of account exec that you know is a total finance nerd and like utilizes X for everything.
Speaker 3:So I think it's just it's always fun for me to talk about and hear from advisors because we're in a similar role. You know, yeah, we're trying to connect with advisors like yourself. But, hey, how can we be? You know like the the skit today, how we be you know like the the skit today, how can we be? You know, brock and I are just like you reaching out to clients. We're just people too, like we're yeah, we're offer a service and have a business, but like we put our pants on the same way, we're not some robots trying to sell you something kind of thing. So it's really cool to hear you talk about that and just hear from different advisors all the time what, what works and how you go about that. So I enjoy definitely. I definitely enjoy hearing about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we all have jobs and we're all trying to make a living Right, and I think the more that you can be transparent about that with people and then also follow that up with trying to provide value, not sell you. Hey, here's how you could find a small business, hvac company in your area and sell them five AI agents, it's like sometimes you're just like going through LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:You're like what is going on? It's just like a bunch of resellers playbook Right. So I don't know it's, it's interesting. I've. I would hope, hopefully soon, that I can not exit LinkedIn necessarily or social media entirely, but bring back and, you know, go deeper into really just meeting people in my area, networking more organically and things like that, because you know I don't have too much social media content. You start going a little bit nuts why isn't it working?
Speaker 1:where are the impressions? What's going on? And then like it well, and I think the other thing is, like, as far as strategies that do work, online is, a lot of times people don't understand. Like, just be your authentic self, like in the video that dev and I did today. Yeah, it's goofy, it's funny, but like this is stuff that we talk about all the time anyway and we find to to be really funny and you know, so many people are like well, this is who I have to present.
Speaker 1:As on links, like no, go out there. And I understand. Like if you're a part of a larger company, you don't own it, you're not really creating the culture, it's more buttoned up and you have to wear a suit every day. Like there's only so far that you can go without HR calling you and being like hey, get it together. Like that's not what we're doing here, right, but when you do come off as authentic and people can actually see that, what happens is you're actually going to attract the right people for what you're trying to do. So I think that's a really cool thing.
Speaker 2:One thing my old boss would always talk about is he's like an old school. So we had two co-founders. Raj was your kind of classic creative genius like business development guy and one thing that he would always talk about and he had a lot of sage advice, a lot that you probably wouldn't share on a podcast. But one thing you would talk about a lot is people want to do business with people they like at the end of the day, right? So some people want to do business with a ultra professional advisor that wears a suit and a tie and has a, you know, a high rise office in Buckhead, you know, and that's their thing. Go for it. That's perfectly fine, you know, and I'm happy that people are able to find people that serve them well.
Speaker 2:I don't want to do that, right, and that's a compromise that I'm not really willing to. You know, change, right? So if I'm my authentic self, I'll attract people that want to work with somebody like me and it makes a better working relationship. Right, because at the end of the day, my particular version of my particular financial planning advisory firm is decades of working together. It's not transactional, it's not a one-time financial plan. I hate the idea of one-time financial plans. Financial planning is an activity. It's not a noun, it's a verb right, and if we're going to be working together for decades, they have to trust me and I also have to trust them that they're going to be good clients to work with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt. So what's the direction that you're trying to go with eventually, man? Because obviously there's people that want to be solopreneurs, people that want to build a small team, people that want to build a massive RIA. Maybe the last one I'm thinking probably isn't you, just because you seem like a freedom type, like I want to do my own thing. I front loaded this thing to be able to help people, but maybe I'm wrong. Where do you want to go as far as the size and the future of your firm goes?
Speaker 2:My philosophy on that has always been that the market decides your future, for you, to a certain degree right. So if the market said, Clark, your pricing model, the subscription, financial planning, working with accumulators, smaller AUM fee, like this is the future, like you've really got it and the demand was there, then of course, how can you not scale that, hire help, bring on other advisors, things like that. I think there's a lot of different directions you could go there especially. The market's probably changed a little bit in this regard. But a lot of the times at Hidden Levers and Orion we would be talking with TAMPs, aggregators, people that were buying firms and practices.
Speaker 2:So I do understand that side of the business to a certain degree, high level, conceptually. So if the business took off and we got to a certain scale where it was, you need to hire, help and bring on people I would never say no to that. But if it was, say no to that. But if it was, hey, Clark, 70 people want to work with you and sometimes it'll go up to 75. Sometimes churn will go down to 65. But you've kind of capped out and found your kind of sweet spot. That would be totally fine with me too, man, If I was able to help 65, 70 people be more financially confident, have a better version of a retirement not die with $10 million, not die with no money right, Just be able to navigate their finances better, that would be super rewarding to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I love that man. Good deal man Clark. We appreciate you having me on brother that man. Good deal man clark. We appreciate having you on brother. Um, where would be? I know I, you and I stay in touch on socials, but for people that want to learn more about you or your firm, where's the best place for people to follow you or connect with you at?
Speaker 2:kicking me off, man yeah you got 15 more minutes of just nonsense talking. We didn't even talk about ai agents. I was about to promote my next AI model and my future action.
Speaker 3:I'm sure we all have multiple tools. I've hired 20.
Speaker 2:I have 20 AI advisors just waiting to get more clients. They're starving. Best place to find me. I don't even know what my LinkedIn handle is, but Clark Jeffries on LinkedIn, jeffrieswealthcom. Um, you can call me directly.
Speaker 1:Go ahead and throw it out there, man, throw it out there for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just email me, clark at jeffrieswealthcom.
Speaker 1:Awesome, man. Well, thanks so much for the time today, man. It's great to get to learn a little bit more, and maybe we'll do an update episode in the future to see where you landed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with my 30 AI agents.
Speaker 1:Thanks for the time, dude.
Speaker 2:Appreciate y'all.