It’s well known that successful, driven entrepreneurs can be the best clients for financial advisors today. High-net-worth business owners have both substantial assets and complex needs that require high-quality expertise.

Trouble is, far too many advisors who work with entrepreneurs aren’t serving them well. The evidence: A full 59% of entrepreneurs recently told CEG Insights that they plan to switch their primary advisor (or bring in an additional advisor) within the next 24 months.

That fact could spell trouble if you count HNW entrepreneurs among your existing clients. Of course, if you’re looking to bring more business owners aboard, it could represent a major growth opportunity for your practice—if, that is, you understand what these entrepreneurs really want from their advisors and position yourself to deliver it.

4 entrepreneurial stages

Ultimately, successful business owners don’t simply want you to review their portfolios’ performance. They want to know how to break through to a higher level of success and relevance, in business and in life. So says John Bowen, CEO of CEG Worldwide and co-author of The Greater Game: Your 100x Blueprint For Exponential Growth, Freedom, And Legacy. The book is designed to help entrepreneurs—and the financial professional serving them—architect tremendous success.

The first step, says Bowen, is to recognize that each business owner client or prospect is in one of four entrepreneurial stages.

Foundation for freedom. Entrepreneurs in this stage seek the security that gives them the needed confidence to pursue their latest vision and next-level ambitions. A key aspect of that security is, of course, rock-solid finances and capital positions. By delivering a comprehensive wealth management experience—via a virtual family office model, for example—advisors can give entrepreneurs the launchpad they need to expand.
Energy for expansion. Entrepreneurs seeking to build true enterprises must institutionalize all the knowledge, skills and contacts that may exist only in their own brains. Advisors who can help business owners identify their intellectual property and formalize it will demonstrate their ability to help a business grow from a founder-dependent company with bottlenecks to a rapidly expanding enterprise that grows without the owner having to be involved at every step.
Collaboration & multiplication. Entrepreneurs need systems to build community and collaborate with the people who will be instrumental to their growth—both internally and externally.
Exponential impact. This is where entrepreneurs possess the courage and the agency to not just serve existing markets, but create new ones—taking their companies from crowded, hyper-competitive markets (red oceans) to new uncontested market spaces (blue oceans) where demand is generated rather than fought over.

Delivering value

Clearly, many entrepreneurs need far more than the standard advisor toolkit offerings of portfolio reviews, basic estate planning, insurance and the like. The advisors who will be best positioned to attract, serve and retain top business owners are those who can deliver tremendous value in areas such as:

IP and transferable property
Self-managing team design for greater personal freedom
Pre-transaction positioning/succession planning
Coordinated advisor orchestration
Identity, legacy and post-exit work

These are the areas that keep entrepreneurs up at night—not their portfolios’ returns. And it’s in these areas that entrepreneurs feel underserved. Just one example: 84.6% of entrepreneurs surveyed by CEG Insights want help with succession planning from their advisor—but a mere 21.7% feel they’re getting that help.

The upshot: If you can provide successful entrepreneurs with the advice and solutions they truly value, and demonstrate that you deliver in those areas, you can capture more than your fair share of this amazing growth opportunity in the months and years to come.

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