Your brand already exists. Go where the yeses are.

Every financial advisor has a personal brand, and the only open question — as Sheri Fitts argues on the 504th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast — is who gets to write it, with the writer she recommends being the advisor's own recent clients rather than a logo refresh.

Fitts founded Sheri Fitts and Co., a marketing, event, and consulting practice that works with advisors and firms. Her starting premise is that an advisor already has a brand whether they cultivate one or not, so the practical question is whether it is the brand good-fit clients actually responded to.

Her recommended first step is to go where the yeses are: rather than dreaming up a target client in the abstract, the advisor should investigate why the last few clients onboarded chose to work with them, since those reasons are data showing what clients truly value and which attributes to lean into in marketing. That step is easy to skip, which is why much brand-building reads generic.

The second step is segment selection: Fitts advises picking the client group that fits the advisor's strengths and brings them joy to serve, then determining whether that segment represents a viable market, possibly using AI tools to get a rough count of how many such clients exist and where they gather. The final step is the cheapest one — experiment by meeting people in that segment, hearing the financial problems they are wrestling with, and seeing whether those problems match the advisor's strengths.

This sequence is the thing worth stealing, because most branding exercises start on the inside — a mission statement, a color palette, a website — and work outward to an audience, while Fitts starts on the outside, with the decisions clients have already made, and works inward to the advisor's presentation, turning branding from self-expression into a market test. A brand is the last handful of yeses, not the advisor's own description.

There is a strategic edge in that: every RIA can claim fiduciary duty, and most will, but a brand built on the specific reasons clients choose a particular advisor is much harder to copy. It is self-reinforcing, because the more the marketing leans into the attributes that won the last clients, the more likely the next clients are to be the same kind — the play becomes a narrower, better-fitting pipeline.

Fitts ties the exercise to purpose, saying identifying a sense of purpose matters not just for career decisions but for constructing the brand itself, and she credits her own business-building journey with demonstrating the payoff of taking risks that align with values. That part is easy to hear as inspiration and easy to skip as strategy, but it belongs in the same frame, because a brand out of sync with an advisor's values may attract clients and still not feel like a practice the advisor wants to run.

The same insight surfaced on the companion podcast, where this publication noted in its coverage of the Kitces & Carl episode that the client's gut is financial data; feelings belong in the plan, and reasons belong in the brand, so the practical task is to collect those reasons on purpose.

Fitts's sequence is the right one because it gives a practice something most marketing plans lack: a falsifiable test. If the last few yeses don't point to a common attribute, the marketing is guessing; if the segment is not big enough to sustain the practice, the branding will produce a busy calendar and a thin pipeline; and if the work does not bring the advisor joy, the growth may be real but the exhaustion will follow. The advisors who skip the test will keep refreshing logos and wondering why the calendar stays quiet.