Building Success by Building a Team

Based in Menham, N.J., James Hofmann is managing director of the Ridgedale Financial Strategies Group of Wells Fargo Advisors. He has worked to develop his team members with a focus on providing excellent client service. He and his colleagues grow their expertise by taking advantage of coaching programs, such as those offered by Horsesmouth and by Wells Fargo Advisors.

In 2022 and 2023, James was recognized as a Forbes Top Next-Gen Wealth Advisor, and last year he also was named as a Forbes Best-In-State Wealth Advisor in New Jersey. James credits his team’s focus on client service for the recognitions.

Hofmann talked with Horsesmouth Executive Coach Chris Holman about his work in a conversation edited here for clarity and to give you the highlights. Click to the video to listen to the full conversation.

Background

Four years ago I was a standalone advisor with a shared client associate doing much less than $1 million a year in production. But now I have a team and I really thought a lot about it. They say if you want to do something big or go really far, you can’t do it on your own. You need to build out a team. And I’m really excited to be doing that.

You have to get everybody rowing in the same direction, working as a team and working on the same initiatives at the same point.

Putting together a team

Our team, the Ridgedale Financial Strategies Group of Wells Fargo Advisors, has really only pulled together in the last 18 months. It’s me plus two other seasoned advisors. We also have a newer advisor and she’s really excelling in her career now with our two firm assistants.

I’m hoping to add another client associate that’s a broker or financial advisor funded out of our budgets and potentially two more junior advisors or advisors in training, which I believe we’ll probably be training from zero, which is something I never would’ve imagined being willing to do a couple of years ago. But it’s through being in programs, learning what other successful teams are doing, getting coaching and mentoring, that’s really made me confident in that process.

A lot of what I think really helped us with a lot of that integration is programs like Horsesmouth as well as internal Wells Fargo Advisors coaching programs.

Becoming financial educators

We became Horsesmouth members in 2022, starting off at the Advisor/Client program and then immediately seeing the value and upgrading to the Master Membership in just a few months. We went from never doing a webinar to doing four webinars last year. We went from almost never doing a referral letter to doing the referral campaigns, like “50 Things a Financial Advisor Does for You.”

[In 2023] we did an eight-part webinar series, much similar to your Financial Educator program—Social Security, Medicare, long-term care and estate planning. We did all four of those in the month of October with a mailing from Leading Response and also hitting on our own clients.

And I believe now, too, we are one of the first teams I know at our firm in our region to start making one-minute videos for clients and putting them on our social media.

A lot of that inspiration came from the programs that we get at Horsesmouth and seeing other advisors doing it and saying, “Why can’t I do this?” Or, “Why aren’t we doing this?” And then really embracing that.

I also attended the Build a Better Business Workshop last year and the Discovery Workshop with you, Chris, last year as well. And I got something from each of those. We really learned how to do it consistently over and over again, but not just any more for myself, but for others on the team so that we’re all roughly doing the same thing and ensuring a consistent client experience. It’s really given us so much leverage in the marketing, the client outreach, the planning and the investment management.

Working together to reach goals

We have to integrate all those pillars of running a practice together. This is my 12^th year in the business now. If you would’ve asked me if I would’ve believed I’d be doing $1.4 million in revenue in the year 2023, I probably would’ve doubted it. And I would say for any of our other people on here, we had no tailwinds pushing us. Our growth has largely been fueled by enhancing the client experience—just really giving clients more to know about what we do.

Our team is going to likely do over $3 million in revenue combined [in 2023]. And really we’re setting the vision for $5 million in total revenue for our team in five years. I believe we have the asset base, we have the households. We can just engage it more and more and deepen those client relationships, get more of that relationship, and then also expand through the referrals that we get from the programs and campaigns that we run.

Believe me, I would’ve been really nervous about setting goals like that a little while ago, or really nervous about building out a team, being responsible for those employees. The training and the costs. It can all be scary. But somehow I’ve gotten a growth mindset around it now maybe because of all the systems in place. I think I can really embrace it and believe that together we’re going to provide, as we build a team, a much better client experience.

As we grow our business, all the team members that we currently have and that we’re going to hopefully add, will really excel at their careers. They don’t have to go it alone. They don’t have to get to that million dollars in production on their own or learn how to do it the hard way. We can do it together and grow together and really excel through that leverage that we’re beginning to get through each other.

I really think now I’m excited to build a much bigger team and deepen those client relationships and try to grow from there.