Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Jon Randall, Founder of XFA.COACH

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Jon Randall has been coaching and consulting the fastest-growing financial advisors in the industry since 2004. As a transformational leader, he is passionate about making a positive difference in the industry and has received numerous awards, including Outstanding Leader and Consultant of the Year, and is ranked the #1 Consultant for firms that track results. The average production of practices Jon works with has exceeded $15 million.He is a sought-after national presenter at financial services conferences and a published author, with his books The Extraordinary Financial Advisor Practice and Attract More Clients, Better Clients.Prior to coaching, Jon was a seasoned financial advisor, where he learned the ins and outs of the industry. Jon recently completed his doctorate in Performance Psychology and currently resides in Greenville, North Carolina with his wife, Kathleen, and their two sons, James and William.Learn more: https://www.xfa.coach.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-jon-randall-founder-of-xfa-coach

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us John Randall, who's the founder of XFA coach, and we'll be talking about how he serves the financial services industry. John, welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. It's fabulous to be on.

I love your podcast. So great to be a guest. Hey, I'm excited to talk to you because I love, I'm a kind of like a word smith. I love seeing how people use words. And I love your phrase, you know, you're a transformational leader and extraordinary financial advisor practice. Those kind of things are very electric and exciting because as we all, as humans personally and professionally, we want transformation.

We don't necessarily want that metric or that KPI. We want some transformation. So I'm excited to hear what you do and how you do it, but get it started first with a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the industry? You know, helping advisors grow and scale their business with more profitability is really what it's all about. And there's so much ordinary in the financial services industry, right?

And I think a lot of it has to do with capacity. And so to helping advisors be extraordinary is really a big passion to mind. And I started as an advisor, which is really the root of helping others. I started an advisor in New York in 1999, where my wife's from. We moved to North Carolina in 2004, had some family here. And when I moved, that's what launched the consulting that I do. And advisors around here ask me, hey, what are those big producers do in New York? Would you show me?

So I showed them best practices. I grew really quickly in North Carolina because I knew what worked and what didn't. And people said, what would you show me how to grow like you did? And it just became this thing. And it became much spread across the country, became way bigger than my practice. So I sold the last bit of my practice in 2017. I've been all in on this business. And when I ran out of room myself, I started to scale through other coaches on our team about

seven or eight years ago. And we have a great team of coaches across the country, helping hundreds of financial advisors grow and scale their businesses. But along the way, we've learned a lot. And a big thing I've learned that it's just not about the best practices. We've switched to more of what are the things holding practices back and we've really dialed in on the theory of constraints to help us understand that. You know, I know that you've got a doctorate in performance psychology. So you'll relate to this, which I'll probably butcher, but something to the effect of we as humans are motivated more by the fear of loss than the hope of gain.

So what you just said there about the holding back. It's like you could say, hey, download our report. on the top three things to grow your practice or download our report to understand the number one thing that holds you back from growth. Probably the thing, tell me what's holding me back. And then we get into all the good stuff. Have you seen that in your practice and working? Absolutely. And I joke with advisors.

I say the reason I got a PhD in performance psychology is to figure out why you advisors don't do what you should be doing. But it's you're right. It's interesting. It's kind of a flip. on psychology. So we have all these people come to us and say, would you help me with how to acquire more clients? We work with a lot of Barron's top 100 people. Would you show us how to acquire practices like they did so I can 10x, 100x my business? Well, that's usually not their issue.

If they're not getting a lot of organic growth, it means there's an issue in their delivery, what they're doing, what clients is not optimized. And when we peel the ending back further, we find the number one constraint holding practices back, is capacity. And it's twofold. So number one is the owners typically have too much on their plates. And it has to do with how we all start in the industry. We're all taught more clients, more assets, right?

So we just build and build a build. And there becomes a point where that works against us. And we, I study a lot of industry, you know, studies, buy some research. Investment news says the same thing every year. These independent financial advisor practices are getting filled up in its stunting. growth. Suroli came out with a study that said 91% of financial advisor practices are reporting productivity issues because of too many non-ideal clients. And that's the real issue holding these practices back from the next level. And these small clients and non-ideal clients,

it's like a child security blanket. They hold on to it and they invent reasons why they should hold on to them. And it just clogs up their system. And their revenue per client is below average and it just holds them back from really being able to scale. So what you just said there makes me think of this. So let's let's see if I'm tracking with you and see if we connect the dots here. If capacity is the number one thing holding advisors back from scaling and growing because they have too much on their plate, well, guess what? Number one, they put it on their plate themselves.

So they're the ones to blame. Number two, it's the wrong things on their plate like what you just said is the wrong type of clients. So maybe you need to fire, air quotes, or literally fire, you know, certain clients like, you know what, how do we know how much is too much? How do we know the proper things to put on our plate and how do we know who to fire? Well, maybe one of the things we need to do is go, you know, what, let's do a quick assessment. Let's take a two-day break, get out of the business and pull up our client list and go, you know, keep, keep them or pun them or have a junior advisor handle them and really even do an assessment. Like when you pull up Joe Schmo's name, do you get

a little not in your stomach or do you get excited because they're coming in. So talk a little bit about that concept and where you would guide your advisors on that thought process. Yeah, I find that we need to replace the revenue before advisors are willing to let go of any revenue. So they will hold on to them. Right. Right.

Because it takes a little too much faith to do it the other way. Yes, it does. So I always suggest, you know what, let's just put these people on ice for a little bit. We don't have to be as proactive with them. If they need something, sure, we'll help them out. Let's put them on ice over here. Let's focus on your ideal clients and find some revenue boosters within there. Every practice has that.

Every practice has opportunities to increase revenue per client. So let's do that. And very quickly they can replace the revenue of a lot of clients very easily. So it really lies in there. But something you mentioned here is a related issue that we see. So a lot of the people we work with are they're usually doing over, million. They usually come into us about 1.5 million, and they're stuck. We find that being a common ceiling. So, I mean, the average practice we work with is over 5 million of revenue. We even

have one doing over 100 million in revenue. But the sticking point at 1.5 million, to do multiple millions, it requires leveraging other advisors. And it's a completely different game that we learn being an individual advisor. So everyone makes the mistake of, oh, let me just take these small clients and dump them on a junior advisor. It's great that owner and founder's freer, right? That's a good thing, but you'll never have leverage a profit margin on that other advisor in your team. So according to investment news, the average advisor working for, you know, an owner or

founder is producing over a million in revenue. And they didn't go out and find it. It was given to them. So you as an owner and founder, how can you get freer of a million in revenue? And then go out and replace it, either by, you know, organic growth. or integrated growth like practice acquisitions, that's the key to scaling. And you can drive a profit margin if you're sourcing a million,

one and a half million, you place it with advisory to manage, play the industry average rates. You can duplicate that over and over. And a lot of our practices that have 10xed within five years, that's been a big part of the formula. So I think there's just this, these old rooted beliefs in just thinking as advisors

that stem from how we start, they end up holding us back. And it limits advisors from actually being able to scale. They get stuck around these common points between a million and two million. And they just constantly struggle to breakthrough. You know, before what you said is just stellar. And it's like we're playing ping pong. It's like you said this makes me think of that.

And here's, here's my next point. Before we started recording, you and I were talking about how Zoom exploded because of COVID and how we noticed that. And they did it the right way because in fact, you know, too many times if you build, you need to build capacity in advance of demand. And if demand is exponential and you don't have the capacity, you implode. So what you just said about, you know, someone might hear that and go, oh, yeah, yeah, to scale, I'm going to buy another practice. And boom, they don't have the foundation or the capacity for the growth and they can implode. What do you say to someone that goes, yeah, I want to grow, but you need to look at your foundation and framework first.

Yeah, and that word foundation is exactly it. I really frame the concepts of scaling, then client optimization as the foundation of a house or a building. And the first floor is what you do with clients. Because you have to be really good at those if you're going to start building above. You can't start building a home on the second floor. It just doesn't work. So it really is about capacity management. What's the right structure for your team to grow and scale?

Then it is optimizing what you do with clients. And I'm telling you, if you get great at this, how to segment, how to price your services, properly, how to add additional revenue boosters to increase revenue per client, that's what drives your revenue per advisor and drives profit margin for the business. If you get really good at those, I'm telling you, every time, usually within three to six months, practices just start getting organic growth without even doing anything. It just comes. With the foundation, the first floor are strong, you can go as high as you want. But it's that gap right there. We have so many people say, I just want to buy. And it's, well, how can you possibly buy? He can't.

handle what you have. Yeah. It's like pouring more and more water into a bucket full of holes. You know, yeah, there's more water going in, but it's flowing right back out. And if you can plug up as many of the holes as possible, because there's no way to totally eliminate, you know, any of the negative you just described. We can't eliminate taxes, but we can mitigate them. We can't eliminate a lot of things. But to your point, when that foundation is right, and what you described there, the word value is screaming to me, you know, we need to be a go-giver. We need to give value and when that is done, some of the best marketing is a job well done, which means a devoted value-filled relationship, not a transaction where the client feels like, oh, I came in, I got

my cookie cutter, a little plan. We did our annual review, quarterly review, check, check, check, see you later, goodbye, but they don't even really care about me. But in reality, when you treat those people like humans, real is rare. And that can help you stand out. And that becomes a good part of that foundation you're talking about, right? Yeah, and especially with the top tier of clients, right? Less than 10% of clients are the absolute ideal. And that's the profit center, right? And a lot of times when there are too many non-ideal clients,

they're just stealing time away from the profit center and being able to do more and then duplicate those people. Now, I tell you what, the growth things are some of my very favorite topics. Practice acquisitions, ideal client duplications. This is some of my favorite stuff. And there's so much noise there, too, with how to acquire clients. There's a lot of shiny new objects that advisors get all excited about that don't work. I notice this trend that advisors go through, they'll have uninformed optimism about some shiny

new object that, oh, if I just sign up for this, they'll get me a lot of new clients. And then they go through and it doesn't work. Then they have informed pessimism. Okay. Well, because they saw the shiny object on social media. and they tried it for 10 seconds. And that shiny object may have worked for that other advisor, but you didn't try it for long enough.

And now all of a sudden you're just like the fly in the summertime buzzing up against the screen door trying to get out. And you're just like banging your head against the wall. So I think that's a really neat, neat analogy you just gave there. Yeah, it's so advisors. I mean, you nailed it. They want it to be quick. It might be something that takes a year or two to really stay consistent with.

to make it work. But, and it's hard. I get it for the advisors out there. You're trying to build your practice. You want it to happen faster. I hear you. And it's not a painful thing to go back and just tighten up your foundation in that first floor. It can be done really quickly.

It's really not that hard to do. We've just pinpointed a very small number of things that move the dial the best, that let's fix capacity. Let's optimize what you're doing with clients. And in a matter of a very small number of single digit number of months, you can rock and rolling with better revenue, less clients, and really be in position to optimize then. The practice as a whole to duplicate ideal clients, to get practice acquisitions, you know, have enough profits to hire the next advisor in your team if you want to go in the

scaling path, bring in others. It's really in there, but it's just what do you work on first? And there's a very specific order we found helping hundreds of advisors scale that we've developed that's been really fun to see in action, give the copy and paste that shortcuts for them, that works for other people, help them customize their version of it, and then see them just implement grown scale. I just talked to one this morning. They started with us in 2019, the very December 2019, right before COVID hit. They were doing $1.2 million. The founder was completely stuck, completely stuck. They just hit $20 million in revenue in 20,28, and they're working on a massive acquisition that will put them over $30 million in revenue. I mean, that's a

huge amount of growth, but it was based on this basic stuff. It was based on the basic and how much, how many more hours is the owner working? Oh my gosh, so much less. Take so much time off. They're working with less than 20 clients. I mean, it's, it's really, it's a totally different business than it was when he was just totally clogged up hitting a ceiling 1.2 million. You know, and a couple of things you just mentioned there, the word implement jumps out because I've said this for years and you've probably heard it too. Knowledge is power. Yeah, yeah, it sure is. Nope. Knowledge is potent. power and it only becomes power when you implement it.

So I would venture to say that, you know, you've got some advisors that are sick and tired of being sick and tired. They come to you. You put together a blueprint and a plan and it's up to them to then take action and implement it. So what do you say to someone that says, I need your help, I'm ready, you lay out this plan and then they're kind of slogging through and not going through the process the way they should?

Well, implementation is the toughest part. I think you nailed it, Mike. And that's where we're really trying to be a guide or a Sherpa through the process and help them through it. I find a lot of times that advisors are just busy, right? They're busy in their day and they're weak. And what they need to shift or change is difficult. And they go back into the old routines.

And that's a lot of the things I learned with psychology and performance psychology, how we can slip back into our own ways because it's uncomfortable to do something different. So we give them the easy path and to help to just take a little bit on the way. uncomfortable step out to grow and to double quickly really is in that implementation point. So we just, we just, I mean, that's where we held best is not just what is the path to do it, but also a guide to help them do it, give them a community of other advisors that have done it, that they can learn from and they can quickly implement. So let's talk a little bit about your point about ideal client duplication.

And I would venture to say that if you had someone like your example of the client with $1.2 million, And if he said, I want to double my practice. And I have 50 clients, let's say. Doubling the practice does not necessarily at all mean 100 clients. Guess what it does mean. Pareto's principle of 8020. You got, well, you know, 40 clients are your, no, no, no. What is it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 40 clients is the 80%. So really, you want to look at the 80, 20. You want the 20% that are bringing you the 80% of the benefit. in the revenue and you want to duplicate and clone them because then it's not an exact doubling of the business, but you want to clone the right people. So where do you help your clients realize where that ideal client duplication is? And if you determine that who you're working with, really you've got like 1% ideal clients, we need to really amp that up and get the

ratio back in play. Yeah. In the industry statistics are the lion's share of new clients for professional services, which is very much the case in the financial advisor business, they're mostly coming from referrals from existing clients. Everything else is way behind. I mean, referral some other professionals is a very distant second. I'm talking a very distant second. And everything else is way after that. So let's just be good at what's working out there. And I find there's two constraints within that. One, there is a lack of focus who really is the avatar or the ideal client. They're sitting there in the book, right? They're in that top 10 or top five. They're just not able to really define that this is the ideal person and there's other people in the world exactly like

them. And so it's defining that focus. And then it's framing it. It's really helping those people understand. They specialize them. Their ideal client is them. They can help other people who are exactly like them. I think there's all these weird referral scripts that don't work and lead to random clients coming in that are not ideal in the book. They come all over, you know, the size clients in the book. So it's really in the focus and the frame. is the easiest ways to pivot to duplicating like the top 10 in this case or even I even push for the top five is there one in there or two in there that we could duplicate that of others in the world just like them it's the fastest way to grow really really quickly organically it's free right it's

just a little bit of effort a little bit of focus it doesn't cost anything at all it's not uncomfortable at all it's just it's just really thinking a little bit differently so it's very much you know performance psychology base and and at some point let's kind of start thinking here of this shift, you know, in our conversation. You get your people that are ready to scale and they put the things in place and they do great work and they're growing and growing. What if one day you have an owner that goes, you know what? I love my business, but it's time to move on and exit. And there's a whole conversation about what exit looks like. But what if someone says, I want to prepare my practice to be acquired. What are some of the things that now you're helping them shift their mindset on from

growth in growing the practice to being acquired or does it look the same if you're doing it right? No, you know, our, I mean, we mostly work with buyers. So we help them prepare for what our buyer is going to look for. And there's two drivers that we see that buyers love. What's the profit margin? How can we get it higher? And what's on the owner's plate that would have to be replaced? If there's a high profit margin and the owner's not working with any clients and doesn't have a lot of duties, that thing is going for a big premium. Yeah. And it's actually the number one reason people end with us is they sell the practice

to someone else they're working with. And we work with here next day. But yeah, it's it's, it is these same fundamentals that get them there. But it's profit. If it's Tom Smith advisory services and Tom Smith is the guy, then I don't know that I want to go by that because when Tom Smith sales out into the sunset, where do the clients go and where does the brand go. So you need to build that framework to go, you know what, Tom Smith built this framework called the whatever system. And Tom now is not the face of the brand.

His team is we're implementing this framework and we've got everything dialed in. And maybe Tom goes, well, shoot, maybe I don't sail off into the sunset. Maybe I come in once a month or once every two weeks and kind of hang out with the team and be the brain, you know, the brain child and kind of help out. But I'm not in the day to day. Maybe that's one of the options. Exactly. Or maybe they just meet with some of their favorite clients for a very limited amount of time and they're done, right? I mean, that's a very, that's becoming a more common option to sell and stay in some kind of capacity. It helps keep those people around. So it can be done when those, you know, single solos do get out. I mean, they can be replaced. But the scale or big business is, I mean, it's, yeah, yeah, it's just a little bit of preparing and absolutely can be done.

Yep. Well, John, I think this has been super exciting. I love that. your perspectives and if someone is interested in connecting with you and seeing what it looks like to become extraordinary, what's the best way that they can do that? The easiest thing is go to our website, which is www.xFA.coach. And one thing that we ask and require people to do when they come in is go through a workshop. We have workshops every other week and they're about 10 to 3 o'clock and they really go through identifying your constraints. What are the things that are holding you back?

And it kind of gives you the roadmap of how to grow and scale, like some of these very successful Barron's Top 100 practices that we work with. So there's information about it right on the website. It's the easiest way to at least get a roadmap to your success. And then if you want some help implementing after that, we're certainly available to do that. Perfect. Well, John, thank you so much for coming on. It has been a real pleasure chatting with you.

Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it. Keep the podcast going. I love it. Thank you. You've been listening to Influen Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.com.