How an ex-Goldman superstar asset gatherer in LA is bringing her bazooka to the RIA knife fight

Brooke’s Note: One of the remarkable happenings in the RIA business as it gains critical mass and shows staying power is the emergence of specialized firms that allow for the outsourcing of tasks previously done in-house or delivered as part of a bundle. Exhibit A is Amy Parvaneh’s effort to sell what we didn’t really know we could buy — turnkey asset gathering. Let’s call it TAG. Not only does she do what so many Zig Ziglars of times past have done and give you a pep talk to go out and make sales — Parvaneh is providing the pep along with the talk. But although the former Goldman Sachs stockbroker broke away from Wall Street leaving behind $1 billion of AUA on the table, she is finding her passion for the asset-gathering version of big game hunting to be energizing. Rather than landing accounts for a brokerage firm known for proprietary investment, Parvaneh is pitching and selling on behalf of thoughtful RIAs. This level of deal wiring would be hard to deliver for the best, thickest-skinned saleswoman. Can it be done? Kelly O’Mara came away with the impression that if anyone is qualified, that she got to meet her.

When building a high-end advisory practice, few advisors have the moxie and patience it takes to dig up, follow up and win the trust of ultra-wealthy client prospects.

Yet often, even moxie and patience alone aren’t enough when risking the contemptuous rejection that only the very rich in America can so poisonously deliver.

Fear of such humiliation keeps many an advisor holed up in their cubicle praying that Uncle Ralph comes through with introductions to those well-heeled golf buddies he’s always talking about.

But for Amy Parvaneh, a former Goldman Sachs cold-calling star, the world is nothing like that. The child of Iranian immigrants grew up keeping a Gatsby-sharp eye on her wealthier Long Island neighbors. Her startup business in Los Angeles is based on her unique training and fearlessness in the face of people who, by definition, have more money than they know what to do with. See: Dissecting the pathology of UHNW wealth managers who want brand building without marketing.

She’s now selling those skills, with a staff of nine, to the financial professionals who need them most — RIAs — at a premium but with results guaranteed.

I met Parvaneh recently at a high-end coffee shop in Santa Monica, Calif. In her late 30s, she is neatly made-up and wearing a patterned wrap-dress that looks expensive by dint of its material and cut rather than from any particular showiness. This is the Parvaneh — understated yet glamorous — who wins the confidence of the rich and the RIAs who serve them.

She filled me in the dramatic details of her life story between sips of tea.

Tehran to Great Neck

Parvaneh was born in Tehran on Feb. 11, 1979 — a day better known as the start of the Iranian Revolution. As fighting broke out in the streets of the capital city, her mother was rushed to the hospital for an emergency C-section. When Parvaneh was 12, the family fled the country with just two suitcases. They made it first to Switzerland and then on to the United States where they had relatives living in Great Neck, N.Y., a city that now has the country’s second-highest concentration of Iranians.

When the family first settled in America, no one spoke English. In Iran, Parvaneh’s dad was an engineer; in the United States he found work as a mechanic. Her mother, a lawyer by training, worked at a Laundromat. The family of four lived crammed into a one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by the wealthy families of Nassau County. See: How RIA business players in New York are roughing it through Hurricane Sandy.

Parvaneh became fascinated by those monied families, and slightly obsessed with becoming rich herself. “I was intrigued by wealth,” she says.

Accordingly, Parvaneh set out to learn the ways and wants of the very rich. In pursuit of that goal, she earned an MBA at Duke University in Durham, N.C. and then studied luxury brand management at the ESSEC Business School outside of Paris, learning what drives demand of luxury items. (The answer: not low costs but limited supply — the rare watch, not the inexpensive one.) See: The backstory of how a Merrill UHNW team found love in the time of U-5 — but not with an RIA.

'A phone, a desk and a corporate Amex’

Allan Boomer: She would figure out
unique ways to get in front
of somebody.

While still in school, Parvaneh worked a side job as a real estate agent and realized she wasn’t bad at talking to people and convincing them to buy what she was selling. See: The fine line between selling and stalking and where RIAs should walk.

When she graduated in 2005, Parvaneh’s classmates told her not to go into wealth management, saying it was field only for the incredibly established or the already wealthy. But that only made her want it even more. In 2006, Parvaneh signed on with Goldman Sachs’ private wealth management group.

In those days, a young advisor at Goldman Sachs was expected to hit certain milestones — to pull in about $50 million or $60 million in assets in their first couple years in order to become a vice president. And one needed to become a vice president in order to feel secure in one’s job. To prepare the new recruits for this task, Goldman trains its entry-level employees for about six or seven months, putting them through a second kind of business school.

“After that, all you’re given is a phone, a desk and a corporate Amex,” says Allan Boomer, who worked alongside Parvaneh at Goldman Sachs. “It’s all about outbound calls.” See: Why one Merrill Lynch advisor needed to break away twice to become an RIA.

Parvaneh was fast out of the gate, quickly accumulating $50 million in assets, becoming what the New York-based financial behemoth considers “self sufficient.”

“I think she was done in 18 months, which is amazing,” says Boomer. “Among women in New York, I had never heard of someone doing it so quickly.” See: Hou-Sear team applies Goldman Sachs marketing approach in second year as RIAs.

“I was a cold-calling machine,” Parvaneh recalls. (She still is. Parvaneh first reached out to RIABiz about this article through LinkedIn emails. She then called the office directly and kept following up.)

Windows of opportunity

But rather than the fire-ready-aim method that the term “cold call” suggests, Parvaneh first put in the time to identify prospective high-net-worth clients by looking at the size of their business and estimating their revenue or liquidity. See: Wells Fargo targets tempting but treacherous UHNW market with Abbot Downing launch.

“I kind of became a detective,” she says.

Parvaneh’s brand of detective work involved shoe leather in addition to research. Boomer recalls her paying a visit to the construction site of a new Goldman Sachs corporate office in New York to find out which company was doing the window installation, figuring the company must be pretty successful if it had won the contract.

Then she placed a call. “What a coincidence that you’re from Goldman,” the company owner said. “We’re installing the windows for Goldman right now!”

“She would figure out unique ways to get in front of somebody,” says Boomer, who is now a managing partner at Momentum Advisors LLC, a New York-based with $65 million in assets.

Once she hit her AUM mark at Goldman, Parvaneh worked even harder to identify more millionaires. In a taxi on her way to a gala one night she got a call from a prospect who wanted to meet immediately. Parvaneh turned the cab around and went to meet him, dressed to impress. The key, as she sees it, is to always be prepared to close the deal. After all, Parvaneh reasons, if she’d been on the couch in her sweats when the call came, she wouldn’t have been in a position to take that meeting and win that client. See: Wells Fargo targets tempting but treacherous UHNW market with Abbot Downing launch.

Parvaneh has been known to meet potential clients at yoga class, scope out museum talks for prospects and use her network of accountants and lawyers to find out who might be searching for some financial advice. One she’s made a connection, Parvaneh will follow up with emails, packages, and calls.

R-I-what?

Parvaneh was so obsessed with the
wealthy that she even has a
degree in luxury brand management.

By the end of 2011, Parvaneh, still at Goldman, had assets under advisement of $1 billion in assets and was interested in striking out on her own as a consultant to high-net-worth advisors.

But there was a complicating factor to consider: She was pregnant. Somewhere along the way to starting her own business venture she ended up talking to PIMCO. Being a single parent is stressful and, at the time, it was far easier to sign on with another firm than to go it alone.

“She definitely left [Goldman] of her own accord and people wanted her to stay,” Boomer says. See: Five reasons for RIAs to think more like Goldman Sachs about businesses owned by clients.

So Parvaneh became an account manager at Newport Beach, Calif.-based Pacific Investment Management Co., launching the firm’s Southeast RIA channel from its New York office. The RIA channel was new to her — she had never even heard of the term — but she was impressed with what she saw. See: What exactly is an RIA?.

RIAs were doing great things for their clients but there was one problem: they were terrible at getting in front of potential clients and, if they did manage that, they were awful at closing the deal. For all that the RIA channel tends to think of itself as fast growing and wildly popular, most clients are in the same boat as Parvaneh in that they’ve never heard of registered investment advisors. When most HNW clients think wealth management, they think of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley or UBS. And indeed, when Parvaneh would go after clients at Goldman, that’s who she was competing with, not with RIAs.

“Some advisors are so confident that they assume people are just lining up in front of their door,” Parvaneh says. What they don’t understand, she continues, is the amount of time and work that goes into lining up a prospect and then convincing that person to hand over their money, because so many RIAs simply rely on passive referrals or word-of-mouth. See: How and why I’m starting an RIA from scratch and what I’m spending to make it happen.

Here we go a-prospecting

In 2013 Parvaneh was pregnant again, but this time, she said, “nothing was going to stop me.”

As soon as her maternity leave ended in early 2014, Parvaneh moved to Newport Beach—her kids love the beach and her parents were happy to move to California to help out with the babies.

There, Parvaneh started her new business while teaching investment classes at Pepperdine University on the side. Select Advisors & Co. coaches RIAs in how to set up and close the deal with wealthy clients, charging $4,500 a month for the service. So confident is Parvaneh in the efficacy of her techniques that her fee comes with a guarantee that the advisor will score at least one meeting with a potential client each month. Parvaneh even sits down with advisors at those meetings just to make sure they don’t do anything too stupid. See: Five ways that big, savvy RIAs are winning clients online.

Select Advisors serves fewer than 20 RIAs, mostly in California and with some clients in New York. Parvaneh says she’s trained her staff to know how to follow her process of inundation and to learn what words will get them in the door. Select Advisors conducts marketing and public relations on behalf of the RIA and goes through a firm’s business development plan. Parvaneh first sits down with the advisors to obtain any information that might help her prospect on their behalf, keeping in mind things that might connect with the ultra-wealthy and establish trust. Where did they go to school? Where do their kids go to school? Where do they live? What are their hobbies? The more things you have in common with a potential wealthy client, the better. Next come email campaigns with a crafted message about who the advisor is.

Parvaneh’s silver bullet, she says, are her carefully crafted emails to prospective clients. Parvaneh follows up the emails with calls and more emails. Eventually, the prospects say yes to a one-on-one meeting or to attending an event. Parvaneh is on hand to help direct the conversation, especially when it comes to scheduling the next meeting before they leave. See: What is the value proposition of a financial advisor — and how is a budding RIA culture upping the ante?.

At $4,500 a month, Select Advisors is simply not affordable for RIAs with less than $100 million in AUM, says Parvaneh. The firm is geared toward the $100 million-to-$500 million AUM advisor who is going after the $5-million-plus client, though obviously firms with less than that are still welcome to spend their money on her services. In fact, her old colleague Boomer, with his firm’s $65 million AUM, is considering hiring Parvaneh to expand his business.

“Since we started, we’ve never had anyone fire us,” Parvaneh says.

Out in front

Karen Frigon: What we really needed
was for her to get us
in front of people.

Late last year, Karen Frigon, chief operating office of Taylor Frigon Capital Management, a four-advisor firm that manages $167 million of AUM in San Luis Obispo, Calif., was talking to her husband Gerard Frigon, who is president and CIO, about expanding their firm’s marketing effort, when they got a message on LinkedIn from Parvaneh. Something about how that message was written made them take a second look.

“We thought, that sounds like something we were just talking about,” Frigon says.

The Frigons were also impressed by Parvaneh’s experience at Goldman Sachs and her history of bringing in the big assets.

“We haven’t put much effort into the marketing. I am wearing a lot of hats and that’s one of the hats that just kept staying on the shelf. What we really needed her for was to get us in front of people,” Frigon says. See: How Google Love can put an RIA onto an equal marketing footing with BlackRock.

At the time, Parvaneh had multiple levels of packages. The Frigons signed up for the middle package: $3,500 a month for some help with website and marketing materials and leads, lots of leads.

“We thought we had done pretty well, but we aren’t marketing experts,” says Frigon. One problem was that the firm never seemed to actually get any calls from their website. See: The one act of image-ination RIA’s must undertake before debuting on social media.

Most advisors don’t understand how to market themselves, says Parvaneh. They go to expensive galas to meet rich people or they spend money on Google AdWords and search engine optimization. But they aren’t good at getting across what value they, specifically, add. While there are plenty of lead-generation and marketing companies available to RIAs, Parvaneh says that what makes her offering different is its top-to-bottom approach. See: How RIAs can maximize their web marketing with nary a 'friend-ing’ or tweet.

Ferrari in the parking lot

Too many RIAs develop all their marketing materials when they first start out, but then never change or update them. “You’re building a high-end Ferrari, but it’s sitting in the parking lot,” Parvaneh says. See: How a 33 year-old advisor ditched the Midwest for California and used mad blogging and SEO skills to hijack annuity-bound web traffic to propel giant growth.

Parvaneh convinced Frigon to update her company’s website so that when she did send people their way, they’d be impressed. Parvaneh advised Frigon to get rid of excess text.

The new website now sports vivid California coastal photography and a few key words. See: The one act of image-ination RIA’s must undertake before debuting on social media.

Frigon has been working with Select Advisors since January, and while the association has not yielded an actual account yet, she says she’s optimistic — perhaps a contagion from her indefatigable consultant.

“I’ve been able to call and get meetings with Forbes 100 billionaires,” Parvaneh says.