How to run a discovery meeting as a fee-only advisor

A good discovery meeting confirms a decision the prospect has mostly made already. Kitces puts a good close rate at 50% to 80% of qualified prospects, and suggests at least 75% of inquiries should be a real fit. By the time someone books, they’ve often read your website and may have checked your SEC record: in our study of 600 AI answers, 40% told the reader to look the advisor up before hiring. And your own Form CRS has handed them a list of questions to ask you. Here’s what prospects arrive knowing, what they ask, what to send before and after, and how to tell whether the meeting or the funnel before it needs work.

What a working first meeting looks like in numbers

Close rates are only comparable when they count the same thing. Here are the sourced figures that count meetings or qualified prospects, rather than raw leads.

Read it as a funnel. Kitces’ April 2024 example for shared leads was 20 leads, 3 meetings and 1 client, so even a lead who agreed to meet hired the advisor about a third of the time. A qualified prospect, someone who fits your service and fee, should hire you most of the time. One fee-only firm on r/CFP said about 90% of prospects who reached its written proposal became clients.

So if your first meetings close well below half, look at who’s booking before you rework the meeting. Kitces’ benchmark is that under 75% of inquiries being a fit means you’re spending time on people who were never going to hire you. That’s usually fixed on your website, not in the room. Full figures by lead source are in Shared leads vs exclusive leads vs referrals: close rates.

What prospects have checked before they arrive

No survey yet measures how many prospects check each place, but the usual three are your website, your SEC record and, more and more often, an AI assistant. What they find there shapes the first ten minutes.

Two things follow. If your website doesn’t state your fee, the prospect’s first real question in the meeting will be the price, and some prospects who’d have balked never book at all, while others book only to find out. If it does, they’ve already accepted the number and the meeting can be about their situation. And if they looked you up on the SEC’s adviser search, they’ve seen your Form ADV and relationship summary. Anything in the meeting that differs from those documents, such as a fee described another way, is the thing they’ll remember.

The fix is upstream: state who you serve, your fee and your minimum in plain text, and say what the first meeting is and what it costs. See What prospects check before they book a call.

The questions prospects bring

Every SEC-registered adviser with retail clients has to give them a relationship summary, Form CRS, and the SEC prescribes “conversation starters” in it: questions the prospect is invited to ask you, set apart in prominent type. Because the wording is required, your prospects may be reading these exact questions in your own document. For an investment adviser that isn’t a dual registrant, they are:

1. “Given my financial situation, should I choose an investment advisory service? Why or why not?”
2. “How will you choose investments to recommend to me?”
3. “What is your relevant experience, including your licenses, education and other qualifications? What do these qualifications mean?”
4. “Help me understand how these fees and costs might affect my investments. If I give you $10,000 to invest, how much will go to fees and costs, and how much will be invested for me?”
5. “How might your conflicts of interest affect me, and how will you address them?”
6. “As a financial professional, do you have any disciplinary history? For what type of conduct?”
7. “Who is my primary contact person? Is he or she a representative of an investment adviser or a broker-dealer? Who can I talk to if I have concerns about how this person is treating me?”

Have a plain answer ready for each, in your own words, and make sure it matches what your Form ADV says.

• The fee question deserves real arithmetic. At 1% of assets, $10,000 costs $100 a year in advisory fees, plus the expense ratios of the funds you’d use. For a flat or planning fee, say the dollar figure and, if it helps, what it comes to as a share of their assets. The fee-only median for ongoing planning is $4,500 a year in our fee report; if you charge more or less, say why.
• The conflicts question is where fee-only firms can be specific. Say how you’re paid, that no one else pays you for a recommendation, and name the conflicts you do have, such as an asset-based fee that rewards keeping money under management.
• The “should I choose an advisory service” question is a fit question. Sometimes the honest answer is a one-time plan, an hourly engagement or another firm. Saying so is part of why the rest of your answers are believed.

Prospects also ask what’s specific to them: what you’d do first, how often you’d meet, what happens if they move or retire, and whether you’ll work with their accountant. Write down the questions you hear more than twice and answer them on your website.

Before the meeting: what to send

A short confirmation does most of the work:

• Time, length and cost. “A free 45-minute video call on Thursday at 2pm” removes three questions.
• What to bring. A rough list of accounts and balances, recent tax return, any pension or equity statements. Make it optional; some people won’t share numbers before they’ve met you.
• Your fee in writing, the same way your website and Form ADV state it.
• Links to your relationship summary and Form ADV Part 2A. An adviser must deliver both before or at the time of entering into an advisory contract. Sending them early costs nothing and answers questions before they’re asked.
• One question for them. “What made you look for an advisor now?” Their reply tells you what the meeting is about.

Under the SEC marketing rule, a standard email you send every prospect is an advertisement, even though each copy is addressed to one person: the SEC said in adopting the rule that bulk or template messages filled in with a name aren’t one-on-one communications. Write the template once, have it reviewed, and keep a copy, because advisers must keep copies of every advertisement they disseminate under Rule 204-2. A note you write for one prospect about their situation is a one-on-one communication and generally outside the rule.

How to run the meeting

There’s no single script that works for every niche, but meetings that end in a clear decision tend to cover the same ground in the same order.

1. Why now. Let them describe what prompted the call: a retirement date, an inheritance, a job change, a spouse who handled the money. Listen for the problem they’d pay to solve.
2. Their situation, briefly. Enough to judge fit and complexity. This isn’t the data-gathering meeting.
3. How you’d approach it. Pick one real issue they raised and show how you’d think about it. That shows your judgment without writing the plan for free.
4. How you work. What happens in the first 90 days, how often you meet, who they’ll deal with, what’s included and what isn’t.
5. The fee, in dollars, for them. Not a range for everyone. If you need more information to price it, say when they’ll have the number.
6. Fit, both ways. Say plainly whether you think you’re the right firm, and if not, who might be.
7. The next step, with a date. A proposal by Friday, a second meeting next week, or “think it over and I’ll check in on the 15th.”

Two common habits are worth reconsidering. One is holding the fee back until a second meeting, which mostly delays the question the prospect came to ask. The other is presenting a projected-returns illustration in the first meeting. Under the marketing rule, hypothetical performance is the exception to the one-on-one exclusion: it’s only excluded when the prospect asked for it unprompted. Performance generated by an interactive analysis tool, such as a Monte Carlo simulation run on their own inputs, is excluded from hypothetical performance. If you use either, check it with your compliance team first.

Saying no is part of the meeting

A fee-only firm’s discovery meeting is also a screening meeting. If the prospect needs something you don’t do, such as hourly advice when you only offer ongoing planning, or a balance below the point where your fee makes sense for them, say so in the meeting rather than in a follow-up email. Refer them somewhere specific if you can. One fee-only firm on r/CFP said about half of its web inquiries wanted hourly advice it didn’t offer, which is why it screens before booking.

If you’re saying no in more than a quarter of first meetings, move the screen earlier: put the minimum, the service and the fee where the prospect reads them before booking.

After the meeting: what to send

Send the follow-up the same day while the conversation is fresh:

• What you heard. Two or three sentences in their words: the goal, the worry, the deadline.
• What you’d do first. The first two or three pieces of work, with rough timing.
• The fee for them, in dollars, and how it’s billed.
• The documents. Your advisory agreement, Form ADV Part 2A and the Part 2B supplement for the advisers who’ll work with them, and your relationship summary if they don’t have it yet.
• The next step and its date.

A recap written for one person is a one-on-one communication, so the marketing rule’s advertisement requirements generally don’t apply. The anti-fraud provisions of the Advisers Act still do, so everything in it has to be accurate. Keep a copy: written communications relating to your advice belong in your books and records. If your firm is registered with a state rather than the SEC, your state’s rules apply instead; see The SEC marketing rule for small RIAs.

Track it like a funnel

Four counts, kept by source, tell you where the problem is:

1. Inquiries. Everyone who writes or calls.
2. Qualified meetings. Inquiries that fit your service and fee. Kitces’ benchmark: at least 75%.
3. Proposals. Meetings where you both wanted to continue.
4. Clients. Kitces’ good range is 50% to 80% of qualified prospects.

Ask every new client how they found you, and write down both steps: “a friend gave me your name, then I read your fee page” tells you which page earned the meeting. If inquiries are high and qualified meetings low, fix the website. If meetings are qualified but proposals stall, fix the meeting. If proposals stall at signing, look at the fee and the agreement. For what each source costs, see Client acquisition cost for financial advisors, by channel.

Where Wellspent fits

The cheapest way to improve a first meeting is to have the prospect arrive knowing your fee, your specialties and who you serve. A Wellspent record puts those facts, with your registration checked against SEC data, in the public graph at find.wellspent.co, which AI assistants and search read. Prospects who find you there write to you directly, with no lead fees and no share of client fees. Membership also includes a monthly report on who AI assistants recommend in your market and quarterly press placement with media partners, for $89 a month. See How it works.