By Michael Kitces’ Financial Advisor Success Podcast, featuring Kelli Kiemle, AIF®, Managing Director of Growth and Client Experience
My guest on today’s podcast is Kelli Kiemle. Kelli is the Managing Director of Growth and Client Experience of Halbert Hargrove, an RIA based in Long Beach, California, that oversees $3.1 billion in assets under management for 750 client households.
What’s unique about Kelli, though, is how she leads efforts at Halbert Hargrove to maintain the firm’s 4 core values and build a strong culture, even and especially as their team has grown to 50 employees and, with ongoing expansion, is now situated across 10 offices in the western United States (which means even their in-person offices are ‘remote’ and ‘virtual’ relative to the leadership team in the firm’s main office headquarters).
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Kelli has worked to develop programs at Halbert Hargrove to maintain communication and strong relationships across the firm and its disparate offices, including by holding twice annual in-person meetings at Halbert Hargrove’s headquarters both to discuss firm business and to provide opportunities for more informal social interaction amongst the firm’s otherwise-dispersed staff, how Kelli uses weekly, company-wide all-hands meetings first thing every Monday morning to review key company metrics to increase accountability, and how Kelli established a mandatory, 2-year formal mentorship program for all new hires to help them get better acclimated to the firm’s culture, and to have an outlet to whom they can ask question and seek advice as they grow into their role.
We also talk about how Kelli has created initiatives that help solidify Halbert Hargrove’s core values of being fearless, constantly improving, having fun, and giving back, including by having employees share not only their “Gladiator Stories” of fearlessly going to bat for their clients, but also their “Goofs That Give Us Guidance” to reflect on mistakes that were made to align to their core value of constantly improving, how Kelli has aligned her firm’s employee benefits with its core values as well, including by funding educational opportunities for employees, providing a match for employee charitable donations, and offering child care subsidies, and why Kelli finds that her firm’s policy of offering what it calls unlimited “responsible” vacation time doesn’t lead to employees taking too much time off, but instead ironically still requires her to encourage staff to take more time off to avoid potential burnout.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Kelli shares how she has helped increase Halbert Hargrove’s AUM over the $3 billion mark in part by leveraging a public relations firm as well as local search engine optimization to attract new prospects and lift their organic growth rate, how Kelli brought on a sales coach to help her firm’s existing advisors get comfortable trying to close more clients (overcoming some initial skepticism about how a fiduciary firm could ever have “sales training”), and why Kelli decided against pursuing the advisor track at her own firm, instead carving out a role focused on growth and client experience that fit her strengths in creating and managing complex firm-wide workflows and juggling many tasks at once.
