$1.2B AUM RIA Redhawk Wealth Advisors generates 25% more AUM each year using Nitrogen

About Redhawk Wealth Advisors

Established in 2008 by Dan Hunt, AIF®, Redhawk Wealth Advisors is an SEC Registered Investment Advisory firm. Through its 40-advisor-strong team, Redhawk prioritizes accountability with a Fiduciary-Shield™ Promise to consistently educate its clients about their investments and offer an honest approach to portfolio management. The firm offers a comprehensive set of services to investors from financial planning, investment management, tax planning, and insurance to legacy planning.

Challenges

There are three main challenges that faced Redhawk as they grew their firm beyond $1 billion in assets under management.

Finding new business is a never-ending story

Redhawk opened its doors on April Fool’s Day in 2008, but the challenge to grow revenue has never been a joke. Even as the firm grew to manage more than $1 billion in assets, that mentality of “survival mode” never left the firm’s founding members. Choosing technology that grounds the sales process in objective discussions about investing not only benefits the firm, it benefits individual investors as well.

Setting compliance controls to keep advisors on the right track

When you set up an RIA, “compliance is pretty important,” says President and CCO, Rick Keast, AIF®. That’s putting it mildly. Early on, Redhawk did not have the controls in place to efficiently monitor its advisors and their investment decisions for clients, making the entire process much more manual than the firm would like. Having a single solution that helps to control the investments that advisors recommend to investors has been a clear differentiator as Redhawk’s adoption of Nitrogen has grown.

Identifying the best investments for every client

As part of its unwavering focus on providing fiduciary advice to clients, Redhawk has developed an investment committee to guide its advisors’ processes. “When the DOL rule was coming up, we worked with one of the top ERISA attorneys in the United States to review our entire process,” says Rick. ”When many were afraid of the DOL, we embraced it.” Since its implementation at Redhawk, Nitrogen has become an integral part of that fiduciary process, and Keast says, a primary point in the attorney’s glowing review of it.

Enter Nitrogen

Reflecting on the impact of Nitrogen, Rick puts it this way: “Even beyond our company-wide directive, our advisors have embraced Nitrogen. But with a lean and mean corporate office, we didn’t have much space to add training to our plate. We pointed advisors to Nitrogen, and the support has been tremendous.”

According to him, approximately 75% of Redhawk’s advisors use Nitrogen’s self-guided training materials to sharpen their skills in the system, and any questions go directly to Nitrogen’s customer experience teams.

“The support staff gets back to us right away. Any question we’ve raised has been resolved within 24 hours. The customer service is always fast and thorough.”

Building a billion-dollar RIA is no small feat, and Rick attributes the enthusiastic adoption of the Risk Number® among Redhawk’s advisors as an important factor in the firm’s ongoing growth.

“I definitely believe there’s a correlation between advisors who use the Risk Number in their prospect meetings and Redhawk’s explosive growth over the last five years. A major change has been that as our usage of Nitrogen has increased, our conversion rate has also improved significantly.”

The addition of Nitrogen has helped Redhawk Wealth Advisors improve its average new client AUM to the $500,000 to $5 million range, up from $250,000 or lower, in only four years.

ROI matters to Redhawk

When talking to Redhawk advisors about their asset growth since adopting Nitrogen, a few improvements became immediately clear. “My advisors told me that they began to grow at a faster rate, and that they could attribute their revenue growth to using Nitrogen,” Rick says.

Every advisory firm wants to know the technology it adds helps put it in a revenue-positive state, and according to Rick, Redhawk began to see a return on its investment in almost no time at all.

It didn’t take much added AUM for Nitrogen to pay for itself–or even time. “Nitrogen paid back its cost in four to six months,” he says. “I would estimate that we bring in 25% more AUM each year because of Nitrogen.”