How a NAPA Top Advisor is Rethinking Growth, Service, and Differentiation: Takeaways from the Summit’s Most Attended Breakfast Session 

When all the chairs filled up and advisors standing three-deep along the back wall, it was a sign that something worth hearing was being shared. That was the energy at the Great Gray-hosted breakfast panel, which drew the largest crowd of any breakfast session at this year’s NAPA 401(k) Summit. 

Moderated by Kellen Foley, Senior Vice President at Great Gray Group, the conversation featured two respected voices in retirement plan consulting: Michaela Scott, Principal and Founder of Strategic Retirement Benefits Group and proud RPAG Council Member, and Bob Foster, Independent Resource for Benchmarking Retirement Plan Consultants at Fiduciary Advocates and a founding member of RPAG. Here is what they had to say. 

01. Stop Doing Things That Feel Essential But Aren’t 

The session opened with a deceptively simple question: what have you intentionally dialed back or eliminated from your practice that once felt indispensable?  

Scott described reaching an inflection point in her firm’s growth. Wanting to scale the practice while maintaining service quality meant getting intentional about what was actually moving the needle. Her firm now operates from clearly defined service tiers. Every prospecting proposal specifies how many investment committee meetings and education sessions are included. What used to be a year-round project, maintaining a perfectly organized fiduciary file, has been replaced by a single focused annual audit meeting. Tools like RPAG’s automated meeting minutes and agenda features have supported that shift, allowing advisors to generate structured, fiduciary-quality documentation directly from their existing reports rather than starting from a blank page. The result: clients receive exactly what they use, and the advisor team is no longer maintaining documents nobody ever opened. 

“Stop creating net new content and figure out where you’re putting content together for clients that they never look at and never appreciate. Shift your attention away from those items and towards client service that actually moves the needle.” 

— Michaela Scott, Strategic Retirement Benefits Group

On content creation, Scott made a point that resonated throughout the room: she stopped trying to produce original thought leadership and started curating. RPAG membership gives her access to a library of ready-to-deploy content, along with marketing resources, content prompts, and structured content calendars designed to help advisors consistently communicate their value, help grow their book of business, and scale their practice without having to build everything from scratch. Her team can focus on how they deliver the content rather than spending time creating it. If you’re interested in Premium Marketing at RPAG, watch our latest webinar.

Foster reinforced the theme from the plan sponsor perspective. The volume of information advisors push in front of clients is often more than clients can absorb. His advice: lead with executive summaries and let clients indicate what level of depth they actually need. Some CFOs want to go deep into investment analytics. Most clients want the scorecard. 

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02. Financial Wellness Is Important. But It Has Never Been a Differentiator.  

Is financial wellness still a meaningful differentiator, or has it become table stakes?  

Bob Foster offered an answer that surprised some in the room, backed by real finalist-meeting experience. 

“Financial wellness and participant education have not been a differentiator in any of the finalist meetings we’ve run. It matters, but it is not a differentiator.” 

— Bob Foster, Fiduciary Advocates

As Foster explained, the marketplace is converging. Wealth management and retirement plan consulting are moving closer together, and plan sponsors are paying closer attention to how participant wellness sessions are structured and who is delivering them. Their standard is fiduciary. Many wealth advisors trying to move into the space operate under a best-interest standard. 

Scott added nuance. Her firm runs a robust participant education program including Financial Wellness Wednesdays, financial literacy sessions, and one-on-ones, but acknowledged the economic reality: those conversations do not generate direct revenue if the firm does not have a wealth division to complement. The challenge is delivering meaningful participant impact at scale without it becoming cost-prohibitive. Her current approach leans into AI-assisted tools, curated digital content, and smart use of platforms so that consistent, structured guidance does not always require a team member to personally deliver it. 

PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY 

Foster shared a model that worked: pre-retirement seminars for employees 55 and older covering Social Security, Medicare, and the transition into retirement. Sessions ran at no charge, and when participants found them valuable, they said so to HR. That internal advocacy became a consistent differentiator in finalist meetings and a reliable source of goodwill. The takeaway: financial wellness does not have to be a loss leader. Structure it around genuine value and clients will appreciate the clarity. 

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03. RFPs Are Mostly Broken, Here’s a Better Approach 

The topic of advisor RFPs generated some of the most energetic discussion of the morning. Foster, who spends a significant part of his work helping plan sponsors run proper advisor due diligence, was direct: most advisor RFPs, especially those initiated by plan sponsors without professional guidance, are time-consuming exercises that rarely produce differentiated results. 

The typical process he has observed: HR searches for an advisor RFP template, sends 70 questions to several firms, assembles answers in a spreadsheet, and ultimately either picks the cheapest option or stays with the current advisor. Meanwhile, multiple advisory firms have invested real hours into a process that was never designed to surface quality results. 

“If you get an RFP from a client and you don’t know it’s coming, your odds of getting that business are almost zero — because somebody else is behind that.” 

— Bob Foster, Fiduciary Advocates

Fiduciary Advocates’ model flips the process. Rather than defaulting to a full RFP, they start by asking whether the current advisor is qualified, doing a good job, and charging reasonable fees. If yes, there is no compelling reason to go to market. If a comparison is warranted, they build it around six focused questions rather than seventy, and pre-qualify advisors in advance so no one walks into a finalist meeting cold. 

Scott shared her own experience on the receiving end of that process. The focused, specific questions made for a more productive finalist meeting on both sides. Her takeaway for advisors: if you know an RFP is coming, act before it arrives. Proactively recommend the due diligence process. A good advisor doing good work should welcome the scrutiny. For RPAG members, RFP Express supports exactly that kind of efficient, structured approach. The tool streamlines the traditional RFP process into a digital workflow, delivering instant quotes for new business and side-by-side comparisons of fee structures and service levels, so advisors can move from report initiation to receiving proposals in minutes rather than weeks. 

PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY 

For advisors growing in the small-to-mid market where formal RFPs are rare, look for plans with structural issues such as high-cost share classes or fund lineups misaligned with plan demographics using Form 5500 data. The most effective door opener is not “let me be your advisor.” It is “your plan may have some issues worth analyzing.” 

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04. The Subtle Differentiators That Can Help to Win New Business 

When the panel turned to what understated practices actually move the needle in finalist meetings and long-term retention, the conversation got practical. 

Foster’s answer was straightforward: listen to the client, understand their pain points, and address those pain points directly. He has watched qualified firms lose finalist meetings by spending 25 minutes on investment analytics when the committee already indicated that was not their priority. The firms that win often do so not by being the most impressive in the room, but by being the most responsive to what they actually heard. 

Scott pointed to broader benefits literacy as her firm’s differentiator. Retirement plan advisors who only know retirement plans are increasingly at a disadvantage. When plan sponsors are weighing questions about Health Savings Accounts, employer match routing options, or how to frame retirement benefits alongside overall compensation strategy, the advisor who can speak that language stands apart. Her firm’s approach reflects this: we get you, we guide you, we make it easy. 

“Clarity is king. Figure out the point of differentiation. Figure out who the actual decision maker is. And skip all parts that are non-differentiating to get to the part that is.” 

— Michaela Scott, Strategic Retirement Benefits Group

Foley added a practical insight from his experience in finalist meetings: opening a presentation with a page that reflects what was heard from the committee, and then building the first five minutes around the client’s own stated priorities rather than the firm’s credentials, changes the dynamic of the room. 

Scott also shared a retention strategy that has supported 100% client retention for her firm: cultivating rising stars within client organizations. Bringing a future CFO or controller into investment committee meetings as a non-voting observer means that when leadership turns over, the incoming decision-maker already knows the advisory team and understands the value they deliver. 

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05. Make Them Feel Good About the Work You’re Doing Together 

The panel closed on what may have been the most actionable thread of the morning: how do you ensure plan sponsors leave a meeting feeling genuinely good about their plan rather than just checking a compliance box? 

Scott described a commitment her firm made after last year’s conference: investment committee meetings needed to feel like an experience. This meant rethinking the structure top to bottom. Her team now sends a prep packet one week before and a follow-up one week after. In the meeting itself, they pull an executive summary first, ask committee members to guess at metrics like participation rates before revealing them, and weave in fiduciary “hot topics;” meaning, real stories from the industry that put the client’s own good governance in favorable relief. 

“All we hear is: ‘We’ve never had our plan explained to us like this. This was fun. Wow! I learned something I can actually take away.’” 

— Michaela Scott, Strategic Retirement Benefits Group

Foster closed with a simple but often overlooked practice. Once a year, outside of any committee meeting, take the client to lunch and walk them through everything accomplished together over the past twelve months. Clients often forget work that was done early in the year. Reminding them is not bragging; it is helping them see the full picture of value. 

He also shared a participant education feedback loop: when employees found a session valuable, his team would explicitly ask them to let HR know. The resulting internal endorsements became a consistent source of goodwill and a reason for the plan sponsor to want more of the same. 

PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY 

Foley summarized the closing theme: at year end, send clients a recap letter. Not just a holiday greeting, but a tangible summary of what you accomplished together. It sets them up going into the new year with a clear sense of what the relationship delivered, a small gesture with meaningful impact on renewal mindset and referral likelihood. 

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ABOUT THE PANELISTS 

Kellen Foley — Moderator 

SVP, Great Gray Group 

Kellen Foley, CFA, serves as Senior Vice President at Great Gray Trust Company, LLC. He brings more than a decade of experience advancing retirement plan investment solutions, including work on a custom target date fund series that grew past $100 billion in assets. Kellen has a deep background in investment research and institutional consulting across mutual funds, ETFs, separate accounts, and collective trusts, with a strong focus on solution development, partner coordination, and fiduciary support informed by hands-on research and industry engagement. 

Bob Foster 

Fiduciary Advocates — Independent Resource for Benchmarking Retirement Plan Consultants 

Bob Foster brings nearly 30 years in financial services, with the majority spent as a retirement plan consultant and longstanding fiduciary model advocate. After building and selling a successful advisory practice in Omaha, Nebraska in 2019, he and his son Nathan Foster founded Fiduciary Advocates in 2022 — dedicated to helping plan sponsors select and monitor their advisory relationships. 

In less than two years, Fiduciary Advocates has advised plan sponsors overseeing nearly $3 billion in assets, working to make advisor due diligence more efficient, effective, and accessible. 

Michaela Scott 

Strategic Retirement Benefits Group — Principal & Founder 

Michaela Scott is the Founder and Principal of Strategic Retirement Benefits Group, partnering with businesses on the financial dimension of their benefits programs — specifically retirement plans. She has been recognized as a Top Women Advisor Captain, Top Plan Advisors Under 40, and her team has earned the Top DC Advisory Team distinction. 

Michaela holds an MS in Financial Services with a concentration in Retirement Planning from the American College of Financial Services, where she served as President of the Advisory Committee. She holds the CFP®, AIF®, RICP®, ChFC, CHSA, and C(k)P designations. She was selected to serve on the Retirement Plan Advisory Council (RPAC) for OSAIC Wealth, one of the largest networks of independent advisor firms in the country.

Great Gray Trust Company, LLC (“Great Gray”) serves as trustee and provides administrative services for collective investment trust funds (“Great Gray CITs”) that are scored by RPAG. Great Gray and RPAG are wholly owned by Great Gray Group, LLC (“Great Gray Group”). Great Gray has a commercial relationship with RPAG that does not involve the evaluation and scoring of Great Gray CITs.