The firm
Gerry Barrasso runs United Financial Planning Group, a fee-only firm on Long Island with about seven employees. He is a CPA as well as a CFP® and PFS, and he came to financial planning through tax work — which is still the firm's edge.
"When you start to work with clients, especially doing tax work, you really see everything," he says. "And then when I started to see some of the things that clients were sold, I realized there's a better way to do this." That led him to the fee-only model at a time when few advisors were using it. Clients still cite the combination: independent advice with a tax background under one roof.
It is also a genuinely narrow search category. As Gerry puts it, if someone looks for a fee-only planner in a specific location, "there's not many." That was the opportunity his old website was not capturing.
“There's no relationship with any specific investment firm. We're completely independent.”
What the old site was doing — and wasn't
The previous website was, in his words, "basically just a brochure." It explained who the firm was and what it did, and it looked fine. He had taken it through a couple of iterations to make it a little nicer with a little more information.
What it did not have was search. "I don't know if we had the SEO, the search engine optimization part of it, in place," he says. There was some traffic and some data, but almost none of it originated with the site itself.
Instead, prospects found him through the fee-only planner organizations he belongs to — directories that require fiduciary status and a genuinely fee-only model. People would search those, find his listing, and only then visit his website to learn more about him. The site was the last step in someone else's funnel rather than the first step in his own.
What changed after the rebuild
The information was already there, so the work was structural. "It was basically our original website changed a bit to look a bit more professional," Gerry says, "but then everything on the back end is not something I see." Onboarding was quick and, in his description, close to seamless.
The change in results was not gradual. "There was a definitive change. The line was clearly there" — from roughly one or two leads a week to one or two a day, booking directly onto his calendar or another advisor's. "We've never seen that many leads coming in."
The other shift was where they come from. Asked how they found the firm, prospects increasingly say ChatGPT. "That is skyrocketing," he says. "Through the roof."
“We'll get like maybe one or two leads a week to like one or two leads a day. We've never seen that many leads coming in.”
The leads are qualified before the call
Volume on its own would have been a mixed blessing. Previously some inbound was spam or simply a poor fit, and sifting took time. Now, Gerry says, a much higher percentage are a genuine fit — people he can at least build a financial plan for.
Part of that is the booking flow. The site captures what the prospect is interested in and their overall net worth before the meeting is confirmed, then routes them to the right advisor based on the answers. "Once they schedule, we already have background information."
The numbers bear it out. In recent weeks he has taken calls with prospects in the $10 million to $30 million net worth range, alongside a steady run of $4–5 million households. "These are not small accounts," he says. Attendance is consistent too: "They schedule. They show up."
A good problem to have
The growth arrived faster than the calendar could absorb. Two or three lead calls in a day, each scheduled for half an hour and often running longer, on top of servicing existing clients and onboarding the ones who move forward.
So the firm adjusted. They changed the front of the website so fewer prospects route directly to Gerry, and they hired a new advisor to take some of the calls. "I'm being honest — it was a little overwhelming at times," he says, before adding: "It's a good problem to have. I'm really not complaining about it."
His advice to advisors considering the same move is shaped by that experience: buckle up and be ready for the growth, and put someone on tracking how the lead flow is actually converting. "If you can't handle the lead flow and if you can't track how well you're doing with it, you're not going to optimize its ability."
The testimonials he almost didn't publish
One change he resisted was putting client testimonials on the site — a common hesitation among advisors, and a compliance-driven one. The SEC Marketing Rule does not allow cherry-picking. "You can't just cherry-pick testimonials. You have to ask the whole group," he says.
He asked the whole group, and the response surprised him. "We got a really tremendous number. I was pleasantly surprised." Once they went live, "we saw a spike" — and prospects now mention them unprompted on first calls. The firm collects reviews through Wealthtender and has since started on Google reviews as well.
“People say when they come to our website, 'I liked your testimonials. I liked that people had nice things to say about you.'”