Frequently Asked Questions

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Video overview of the Compliance question

Video overview of the Competition question

Q. How does an advisor from AskMyAdvisor.co communicate with its client?

This process involves five simple steps.

1. A client asks a question on AskMyAdvisor.co URL through its connection
2. Clients' connection (family, friends, work, school, social media circles) receives the AskMyAdvisor.co URL
3. These questions are automatically sent to the Advisor's inbox
4. A new connection is established, and it's private and secure
5. The Advisor (you) then responds to the clients' questions via email, phone, meeting, virtual meeting (Zoom, Teams, etc.)

Q. At what term (s) do you offer a contract? 

The terms are pretty simple. You pay the access fee, followed by a smaller monthly payment. Access fee is non refundable. No contracts, pay as you go, and this includes 60 days no questions asked guarantee (cancelled members will have 6 months waiting period to rejoin. You can pause your account and drop the monthly down to a reduced rate).

Q. How significant is a connection for AskMyAdvisor.co?

Very significant. According to research, an average person is connected to 600 people through its family, friends, work, and social media circles. This means, on average, each client is at 1 degree of separation from those 600 close connections and who else would closely mirror them other than their family, friends, coworkers, and social media members. 

Q. What is the scope of AskMyAdvisor.co?

AskMyAdvisor.co is designed explicitly for convenient bridging communication between thousands of clients and financial experts that are just a click away.  

Q. Why don't just people ask questions through email (or phone)?

They can. But guess what? Most do not. Why? Because it's a bit of a gray area at times. What does the gray area mean? Inaction or delays. Brian, as a retired financial advisor, has talked about it. Often, you put off asking questions for another day, or you don't want to bother your advisor. You have conversations with people, things come up, and it's cumbersome to say,  

“Hey, call  my financial advisor for an answer OR second opinion. Here's his/her phone number or email address.”  

It happens, but most often by chance. With this platform, there is a specific place to direct people for Q&A from expert advisors (you!). 

It's funny, often even as a top client, you feel like, "I don't want to bother them." This (AskMyAdvisor) provides a platform that is designed for the questions to be asked.  

AskMyAdvisor.co URL is aimed to receive questions removing any gray area, making it very black/white and straightforward to ask those questions. Often these are the questions that have been waiting for an answer. 

Let's use Twitter as an analogy. There's nothing that Twitter does that you cannot do via email, right? The same can be said of Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. 

But look at Twitter and the others, they've created these powerful channels of communication & connection.  

Why? They are focusing on particular needs and solutions. People know, with crystal clarity, what each platform is made for and use them accordingly, no gray area.  

AskMyAdvisor provides a trustworthy Q&A platform to link financial advisors with their clients & clients' connections.

BTW, the primary focus of AskMyAdvisor is to provide a simple platform to share you and your expertise, right?  

Guess what? The profile description area shares more information about your background than a standard bio page or LinkedIn profile. 

Because of this, it can be incredibly useful in strengthening your current client relationships and creating those, "I didn't know you….." Moments. 

This is a fantastic way to create new conversations & connections with your current clients regarding additional: questions, needs, other brokerage accounts, ASSETS, etc. 

Q. What is the key requirement of AskMyAdvisor.co?

The key requirement of AskMyAdvisor.co is a "connection" and this is the goal of this platform, open up new connections that are 1 degree of separation away. 

Q. What is the motto of AskMyAdvisor.co? 

"Help more people by actually...Helping more people."

Q. How significant are top clients for AskMyAdvisor.co? 

Your top clients are your biggest COI (Center of Influence). Sometimes this is forgotten or ignored, but it's a fact. 

These are the people voting for you each month, and they have assets with you or work with you.  

Until someone “puts their money where their mouth is,” they do not come close to being the COI your clients are.  

Focusing on your top 25 clients only (we're talking about an incredibly influential group of people, connected to 1,000s of people) makes this a laser focused marketing endevor vs. the traditional shotgun approach many take. This makes this campaign highly personalized and highly transparent.  

This (personalization & transparency) makes it simple to replicate what is working, while improving & fixing what is not, quickly. This accelerates end results.  

Q. Which payment method is used by AskMyAdvisor.co?

Any credit card accepted. Less than 60-second checkout. 

Q. Is this business investment tax deductible? 

Yes.* There are many business expenses that advisors can deduct in the same manner as any other small business. These include Marketing, advertising, and more depending on the situation.  

Tax Tips For Financial Advisors - Investopedia 

*Now for the disclaimer: AskMyAdvisor™ and its affiliates do not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only and should not be relied on for the entities mentioned above. You should consult your tax, legal, and accounting advisors before engaging in any transaction. 

Q. What's unique about AskMyAdvisor™?

Industry polls show that only 10% of the financial advisors consistently ask for referrals. In the same survey, 90% of financial advisor clients say they will refer. Why don’t they? Well, 90% say they are never asked. We call it the 90/90/10 rule. 

Asking is one way to get introductions & referrals, and it is a bait in the water. We always recommend bait in the water (taking action) vs. no bait (not taking action, not asking), so this is not terrible of course...BUT is there a better way?

Based on helping more people by actually helping more people, we realized that people have endless questions (problems). Good financial advisors (all advisors, including: attorneys, real estate agents, sports agents, etc.) are experts in answering those questions (solutions). 

Often times, there is a gap between the people with questions and the people who can best answer them (rock solid advisors: financial advisors, attorneys, real estate agents, sports agents, etc.).

Based on this given, building a simple one-stop platform for this PROBLEM & SOLUTION equation can be a powerful center of communication. Out of this, AskMyAdvisor was born.  

Q. How AskMyAdvisor.co is different from other social media platforms?

We provide a safe and private connection between clients and advisors.  

It is singularly focused on providing a communication platform for Q&A to take place, eliminating space for a gray area that often equates to inaction.  

Sure, people can use the phone to call their Advisor. They can email too, but most of they do not because it's a gray zone.  

Or, an advisor can even direct their clients to send people to their websites, etc. The problem? This screams sales pitch, overwhelm, clutter, etc. People do not want to be sold, they want a solution (answer) to their problem (question). BTW, COVID has opened up a can of ENDLESS QUESTIONS, CONCERNS, making our platform more in need than ever, we strongly believe. 

"Oh, I'm not going to bother my advisor with this dumb question, I'll just wait till our quarterly meeting." 

Or they're having a conversation with a buddy who just sold their business. Your client is thinking, "Hmmm, It would be great to talk to my Advisor, but this person is not their client, I'm not going to bother." 

Now (with AskMyAdvisor), you have your private, personalized URL (askmyadvisor.co/YOURNAME or FIRM NAME or whatever you choose. BTW, during the rollout, you have unlimited changes to your URL). 

In hypothetical situations noted above, this is a simple place explicitly designed for those questions that arise. 

Now, let's do some math.

Our case studies (click here to open the infographic) show that an average person is connected to 600 people among family, friends, work, school, and social media circles.  

This means your average client is connected to 600 more people. Your top 25 clients are connected to over 10,000 connections. 

Now that it is established as a given, do you think those people (close to mirror your top clients) DO or DO NOT have ongoing questions, concerns, queries, etc. that you can answer? Heck yes!

Sprinkle in the fact that COVID has created a whole new list of questions, needs, concerns, etc. This is the perfect time for you to help more people by actually helping more people. With this simple new software platform, you can do that. 

Oh yeah, once you're in the membership, your personalized URL can be LIVE, ready to share with your top 25 clients in less than 15 minutes!

Q. Do you have a mobile app?

The URL and Q&A landing pages are built mobile-friendly. This is key since mobile has become so dominant. 

SNEAK PEAK: We are building our specific AskMyAdvisor app that will instantly send you QUESTION notifications. 

So the moment a question comes in, you will be able to reply on your phone instantly. This is an incredible approach for making quick, same-day connections. Think of the possibilities this opens for you. 

A question comes in from one of your top clients’ best friends. You get it, know the exact answer that can help him or her. You reply, thru the app, to the best friend in <4 minutes. We already know your client prefaced how great you are. So trust is baked into the cake, BUT…This person is blown away by our quick response. 

This strengthens that first impression in a big way, right? Also, what do you think your client thinks about this when they hear about it? They are proud of their advisor, and (since the referral game is driven by status) possibly open to sharing you some more? HECK, YES! 

This is the core of this service. This can still be done by the traditional ways (a client shares the advisor: phone number, email, website, etc.), but far too many times, the gray leads to 0 action. This intros, in turn, take days, weeks or months to happen OR they never happen. 

Providing a low barrier of entry way to Q&A thru the AskMyAdvisor platform can instantly eliminate this risk.

Look for this launch in less than 29 days. 

Q. What about Compliance?
Click here for an overview on this from Brian 

(video, opens in new window) 

When Brian was in production (PaineWebber, UBS, Oppenheimer & Co.), the compliance dept was where brilliant marketing ideas died on contact.  

Sound familiar at all? 

We understand that things have loosened up a bit since then, BUT it's still a challenge.

What’s the compliance solution with our software (this is mostly for financial advisors. Real estate agents, attorneys have a bit more flexibility)? 

All communication is time-stamped and recorded within your portal. The compliance dept automatically gets a record of every communication received whether through email or any other channel. 

Also, these records are automatically saved and managed within your portal for easy XLS download.  

Now, we don't know your compliance dept & we’re sure they are lovely people:), but this makes it a low to no compliance situation.  

BTW, much of your profile info is copy/pasted from your LinkedIn profile, which the compliance dept already knows about anyway, right? Outside of some special questions (by design) we ask in the About & Focus area (fully editable by each member), it’s basic information about you. 

Q. What about Competition? 

Click here for an overview on this from Brian 

(video, opens in new window)

What about the competition with other financial advisors (or real estate agents, attorneys, etc.) in your office, other wirehouses, RIAs' etc.  

There is NONE. Zilch. Nada. Goose egg. Get the picture?  

Why?

100% of this is directed through your current clients. The current top 25 clients during the first 45 days (you'll learn in the membership why this is so important) are your #1 COI on this planet of +7.5B people. 

They vote for you each month trusting you to take excellent care of them. So, there is no competition.  

BTW, with our parent company, Pro Athlete Direct, where our members were targeting a finite number of “active” sports agents (there may be several thousand people with the title of sports agent, there are only a few thousand who are active and manage clients. The competition challenge was real. We have a limited pool of prospects. This made running masterminds, best practices among the members was a challenge. 

With AskMyAdvisor™ this is non issue. So not only does this open up our service for you, making it easy to share (DO NOT keep us a secret, if you know of fellow advisors this can help, share the URL) this simplifies us building out our Mastermind arm of the business. 

All members will get access to our general Mastermind to share best practices, practices to avoid and everything in between (from real life trial & error from the members). 

We will also have masterclass Masterminds available. Stay tuned for this.  

In addition, this will be a tremendous platform to build out your Mastermind to ally yourself with fellow rock star advisors (financial advisors, real estate agents, attorneys & sports agents).

The big picture of possibilities here knows no ceiling. Come join us for the ride! 

Q. You like to help others win big?

Speaking of, are you someone driven to help other people by actually helping other people? Of course, we are, that's why we are in the businesses we are in, right? 

With this preface...Who can you think (in your business, office, buddies, etc.) our software service could be of interest? 

Don't keep this launch a secret. Share our URL, www.askmyadvisor.co so we can help them out. 

Have an FAQ we missed? Ask us here. Thanks! 

AskMyAdvisor™…”The simplest way to Q&A with the experts.” 

*Disclaimer: AskMyAdvisor™ and its affiliates do not provide tax, legal or accounting advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice. You should consult your own tax, legal and accounting advisors before engaging in any transaction.