RPAG and the Path to Success

Watch the podcast below and listen to Jeff Cheshier, Vice President, Retirement Services, Institutional Client and Member Relations for RPAG joins John Pojeta, from PT, to discuss RPAG. Jeff discusses our mission of providing premier technology, training, solutions, and resources for retirement plan advisors and institutions who want to reach their highest potential.

Key Questions

What do you do, how do you do it, and then your role with inside of RPAG as well?

You can think of RPAG as a membership organization. The easiest analogy to make is that it’s kind of like joining a country club. So once you join, you’ve got access to the tennis courts, the golf course, and the dining room in the weight room. And you can use any of that, all of that, or just what works for you.

We are all about trying to help advisors build scale and scope into their practice, creating repeatable processes that help reduce the amount of time behind the curtain that is required to properly serve retirement clients. So you can increase the amount of time in front of the curtain, working with your prospects and your clients and doing the job of being a retirement advisor.

Can you talk a little bit about the advisors that utilize the service and sort of the makeup of their world?

We have very large practices that have 30, 40 members of their team. We have one-person and two-person operations. We have members who are only broker dealer affiliated. We have folks that are both broker-dealers as well as RIAs. We also have people who are only RIA. The one thing that unites everybody is a desire to grow their book of business and their practice and gain efficiencies and profitability.

If you are a retirement plan financial professional that is on the fence asking "at what point of my book growth should I engage with RPAG?" The answer is that it’s not where your book is. It’s where you want it to go. You could have a practice that has 30 plans and RPAG might not be a fit. If your model you’re happy where you are, you have the lifestyle that you’re looking for. You’re not really looking for growth. You might not need RPAG, but. Four plans, or 400 plans. If you’re looking to grow, RPAG is here to help you do exactly that.

What are some of the changes you really see and how they’re positioned to help advisors manage that?

One of the changes that has been it’s already underway. And it has been for a number of years now, is the move away from broker-dealers to either being part of an exclusive RIA or even starting someone’s own RIA. And that, I think, is not slowing down anytime soon. There is also the trend of the big consulting groups moving down-market.

They can absolutely survive this change, but they’ve got to affiliate with the bigs and leverage the resources of the bigs. And that’s one of the things that RPAG is uniquely positioned to do, which is to be that resource to where the smaller groups can not only compete against the larger groups as they’re coming into the smaller.

I’ll get a call from somebody saying, "Hey, I just got an in on this hundred million dollar plan that I can, I’m going to be able to, they’re going to get me into to bid on this plan." I need some advice. And my response to that is usually, "That’s awesome." But no matter the strength of your relationship that is getting you in the door, at some point in that evaluation process, somebody at that company is going to. What other horses do you have in the barn that look like us? That brings us back to one of your original questions. And if you don’t have a really good answer for that, you’re going to be in a world of hurt and your odds of being able to win that piece of business have gone down into single digits.

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