Anjali Jaiwala is the founder of Fit Advisors, a financial planning firm serving physicians and business owners, virtually, across the United States. With over ten years of corporate and personal accounting expertise, she knows exactly where her clients are coming from and how she can help. 

Her success stems from being intentional while she was creating Fit Advisors. By paying attention to the people she served, she was able to narrow in on a micro-niche, allowing her to charge five figures per year for her services. 

In today’s podcast, Anjali will go into detail about her success and give us insight into how she stays intentional with her business, sets her prices, and her plan for growth moving forward. 

Podcast

Summary

• Overview of Fit Advisors Services
• Being Intentional When Designing Your Business
• Setting the Right Price
• What Is Next For Anjali and Fit Advisors
• Value of Micro-niching

Connect with Anjali

• Visit her website

Overview of Fit Advisors Services

Since Fit Advisors’ start in 2015, with a focus on physicians with complex tax needs and small business owners looking to transition out of the start-up phase and into a full-fledged business, Anjali has grown her business into a well-known financial planning firm in her niche. 

She takes pride in knowing she is helping people all over the country bridge the gap between personal and business finances as she helps them prepare for the future. 

Being Intentional When Designing Your Business

Before starting Fit Advisors, Anjali was working a job that required her to pay a lot of detailed attention to one project at a time. This was something she was good at, so when she began to make the transition to a financial planner, a career that requires more of a generalized approach, she wanted to make sure she could narrow her practice to focus on one specialization.

After finding her very specific niche, she began looking for ways to set her prices so that she was getting maximum value out of her time and business. To do this, she made a plan to reassess fees and her value proposition every three months. Anjali would set goals based on how much revenue she wanted to generate in a certain amount of time and base her prices around that. Even now, after proving successful, she reassesses every six months. 

A micro-niche coupled with always evolving price points, allowed her to stay intentional when growing her business. 

Setting the Right Price

During the early stages of Fit Advisors, Anjali used a flat rate price, with a possibility of extra fees, for each customer based on material status. However, once she started gaining traction, she realized physicians made up the majority of her clientele, which led to doing things most advisors don’t have the knowledge to do. Because of this, she raised her minimum. 

Anjali quickly realized a downfall in charging a flat rate; two people who look exactly the same on paper may require significantly different amounts of time and work. To avoid this issue, she came up with a complexity model. Her complexity model is a spreadsheet outlining everything. It includes her base price and additional costs based on complexity and allows clients to see fees for each service she provides. 

Currently, Anjali’s base service package sits at about $15,000 per year. This package includes base planning, a dashboard, ongoing planning, access to her whenever it is needed, insurance reviews, estate planning, home affordability, and large life changes. Anything outside of these areas will be considered as a complexity fee. For example, things like 1099’s, making more than one million each year as a small business owner, and using real estate as a passive income are all services she offers, but charges an additional cost for. 

For Anjali, it is important to charge accurately for the time and services she provides. Her goal is not to have a lot of clients, just the right ones so she can maximize the value she provides. 

What’s Next For Anjali and Fit Advisors

Anjali’s original goal for Fit Advisors was for her, and a partner, to serve roughly 50 clients per year. Currently, they are working with 45 clients with new clients on the horizon. While growing Fit Advisors is not out of the question, she is keeping her options open as she explores other opportunities. She often goes back and forth with her decisions, but knows her business is in a great place for growth, should she decide to take that route. 

The potential for growth is largely reliant on her marketing tactics. Noting that getting her first 10 clients was the hardest, she has had no problem getting clients since because of her marketing strategy. 

Around the third year mark of Fit Advisors, she began creating her own channels of content instead of relying on exposure from other businesses. Anjali launched her blog and her podcast, the Money Checkup Podcast. It took about six months to a year for her content to gain traction, but once it did, it proved to be helpful. 

Not only has her business grown, but so has Anjali’s financial planning toolkit. Since starting Fit Advisors, she has had to teach herself how to do things she was not familiar with. Usually, she starts with researching a topic, talking with professionals in the field, and then begins a process of trial and error until she learns the best way to complete the task. She takes pride in her self-taught skills.

Value of Micro-Niching

Anjali doesn’t consider her move to a micro-niche as much of a choice. At first, she noticed there weren’t many people providing the services she was providing. However, after a while, everyone was doing it. From there, she determined her strengths and used those as tools to set her apart from her competitors. This is what caused her to narrow her niche. She used her marketing efforts to highlight her strengths, which helped clients find her based on her services and their needs. 

With an abundance of people discovering her platform, she had to lean into her newfound commitment to micro-niching. This meant saying no to clients who didn’t exactly fit within the services she provides. Turning away clients who don’t fit ensures she doesn’t have to learn any new information and she can improve the services she already provides to better fit her clients. 

Overall, Anjali’s insight taught us the importance of intentionally designing your business, provided a look at how she has set her prices to give and receive maximum value, and showed how micro-niching can be extremely successful with the proper marketing and skillset. 

For all of this information and more, be sure to listen to or watch the podcast above!