Q&A: An interview with Laetitia Boyle

Business owners have become a highly sought-after niche for advisors seeking to serve a high value, often underserved clientele. The largest share of business owners’ wealth is often bound to a single illiquid asset, and they carry complex risks on account of that. An enterprising advisor can help mitigate those risks, then support their client in turning business success into diversified personal wealth.

Raymond James Investment Banking can help.

Raymond James Investment Banking is on a mission to help advisors serve this dynamic group of investors. Laetitia Boyle, Director, Investment Banking, is part of the business development team taking them to the next level.

Boyle, a 20-year Raymond James veteran, joined Investment Banking in the past year, coming from Raymond James Bank, where she focused on enhancing connections between the bank and advisors. There, she was instrumental in creating the bank’s Securities Based Lending program.

In what ways are financial advisors playing a different role today when clients are preparing to exit their businesses?

Traditionally, many advisors have started contributing to planning conversation post liquidity event. The advisor would make a plan for the owner before a business sale that would cover estate planning, philanthropy, reinvestment, wealth preservation – traditional advisor activities. However, a majority of business sales or transitions are involuntary, brought about by life events outside of control such as death, divorce, etc.

We believe that by getting involved earlier and putting focus on building business value in the years before an exit, an advisor can materially impact the outcome – help with the timeline and really set their client up for creating a stronger return. Someone can be a great business leader but have no experience with capital markets, so the advisor can help them keep from making mistakes. In one case, we had an advisor encourage his client to explore opportunities after the client got what he felt was a really attractive offer for his business. What he sold for was $250 million higher – nearly triple the initial offer.

This is where that layer of expertise and resources from Raymond James Investment Banking helps advisors better serve their clients.

What resources does Raymond James Investment Banking have for advisors?

Our referral program gets a lot of notice, but most of our engagement with advisors and their clients is in providing insight and education around engaging business owners in constructive conversations and helping them achieve business goals and objectives.

IBex – the Institute for Business Owner Excellence – is the preeminent example of this. It’s an education program designed to create knowledge and confidence in advisors to successfully add value to their business proposition or when interacting with business owners. The IBex conference is an annual, multi-day event, which teaches the basics of identifying investment banking transaction opportunities and guiding business owners through a capital raise or sale process. This gives advisors another thing to look for when prospecting clients.

For those who want to go deeper, and really wrap their practice around business owner clients, we offer Master Class as a follow-up to IBex, a year-long deeper learning program. We teach how to identify, engage and close with business owner clients. Advisors who have completed Master Class become known as educators and effectively become centers of excellence for transitioning business owners and are encouraged to ultimately put on their own business owner education events in their local markets.

We see advisors with decades in the business and some right out of AMP shaping their practice around this clientele and doing well with it.

Advisors also shouldn’t miss our full slate of educational resources, client literature and webinars. All of this is on RJnet.

Our team members can also support events hosted by advisors for their clients, prospects and centers of influence. In addition to the analysis and insight our team members can provide, being able to hold out a relationship with a major investment bank is a powerful statement about the depth of your practice.

What makes business owner and exit planning a useful focus for an advisor looking to grow their business?

Business owners are high-value prospects, and they have needs pertaining to the business that extend beyond traditional wealth planning. This is a major opportunity to differentiate.

Industry experts expect approximately eight million businesses will transition over the next decade representing $14 trillion in wealth capture opportunity for our advisors.

When people think of businesses that use investment banking services, they think big companies on the coasts, the large metros, but I can’t overemphasize how many great small companies are tucked into small towns, underserved by advisors.

Advisors should be on the lookout for these kinds of companies that might not be so obvious – such as multi-location dental practices, painting companies or manufacturing businesses – they can be very attractive to investors. Some of our fastest growing advisors are spending more and more time recruiting, nurturing and executing exit strategies for their business owner clients. They are finding it is sometimes easier to create a high net worth client than to prospect for a new one.

How are advisors positioning this part of their business?

Positioning comes from what advisors say, what they show and what they do.

Our programs help teach advisors how to successfully interact with Raymond James Investment Banking on behalf of their business owner clients or prospects. Everything from updating their websites, creating effective CRM/tracking systems to developing a solid transaction knowledge base.

And it can be helpful to adjust your website messaging to put business owners at the forefront. These clients don’t want to be part of someone’s sideline.

We have advisors who introduce themselves differently as a result of partnering with us. They'll say something like, “I help successful business owners become financially independent of their business.” They won't just introduce themselves as a wealth manager or wealth advisor – that change in introduction unlocks so many doors. We hear how people perk up because they like to talk about their business. That's where I think the advisors are having a lot of fun. Even though it doesn't seem like a traditional wealth management fit.

Raymond James Investment Banking works on a global scale. How do advisors bring this to their local market? 

If it’s important to the advisor it’s important to us.

We work in the middle market, transacting with businesses flexibly valued between $100 million to a $1 billion. If an advisor comes to us and is looking for ways to help their client with a $30 to $50 million business, we can still offer expertise and insight through a network of 20 lower-market partners to which we can refer. These are investment banks we know will reflect well on your practice and on us.

We’re not the only diversified financial services firm with wealth management and investment banking business units, but we do it differently. If you bring a $30 million, or even $100 million business to those firms, they might tell you to go pound sand. For us, we see advisors and their clients as an important partner.

Or as Ken Grider, Senior Managing Director, Investment Banking, says about how this relationship differs at Raymond James compared to other firms: “It works here.”

Follow along on social media with #RJBFAN.