Michael Dorfman has become a minor celebrity in the Canadian media and entertainment industry.

No, he’s not an actor or a writer. But Dorfman, 48, is the financial advisor to actors, directors and other members of the Canadian film and television scene.

The investment advisor with BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. in Toronto has developed a book of about 250 clients with $270 million in assets under management. As he told advisors at the 2008 Top Advisor Summit in June, he did this by focusing on an underserved market niche and learning everything he could about the financial issues and challenges of the people in that market.

“So, by the time I sat in front of them,” he explains, “I knew a lot about them and what they were looking for. That gave me credibility — and of all the adjectives that are powerful in determining whether a prospect decides to do business with you, credibility is probably the most important.”

Dorfman had already decided he wanted a relationship-based practice when he became an investment advisor in 1992. He had honed his relationship-building skills while working at Citibank’s international private-banking division in New York in the early 1980s.

“The international private-banking world taught me a very relationship-oriented approach to my work with clients,” he says. “I naturally adopted this in my later move to the brokerage side. At the time, it was not very common; today, everyone talks ‘relationship management.’ But the industry was all about stock trading then. So, I got a real leg up from this experience in New York.”

Dorfman returned to Canada in 1987, and started a small business venture with some family members in Toronto, but sold the business five years later. He decided to go back to his first career in the investment advisory arena. He was hired by Burns Fry in 1992.

“So, I’m in my nine-week training program with no clients, no prospects,” Dorfman says. “And my wife tells me she’s pregnant with our first child.”

The firm’s training director had advised the rookies to put together a list of cold-calling prospects.

“I’m desperately rummaging around at home to come up with a list,” Dorfman says. “Lo and behold, I find a directory that my wife had used at one point to job-hunt and network during a time in which she had been laid off from work in the media industry.

“I had no idea if this was smart or not,” he adds, “but it was a directory with real people’s names and phone numbers.”

In the two to three hours a day Dorfman spent calling from this list, he discovered a few key things that would form the basis for his belief in niche marketing: the people he was calling were not being heavily marketed to by other people and they were easy to reach.

“Most of them were self-employed and didn’t have offices with secretaries,” he says. “They tended to answer their own phones. They all seemed to express a lack of sophistication and knowledge about their finances and were entirely receptive to the idea of a professional helping them.

“They were pretty nice, easy-going people in general,” Dorfman continues. “Very few ran me off the phone. In fact, I’ll never forget how one of my now-favourite clients, who has been with me for about 14 years and who has referred dozens of other clients, answered my cold call with: ‘Oh my God! I was just thinking of getting my financial life in order. When can we meet?’”

Dorfman spent 18 months calling people from that list. Over that period, he learned that people in the media and entertainment industry are remarkably interconnected; the industry is relatively small and a lot of the players know each other. Over the next 15 years, members of the media and entertainment industry would form the core of his practice.

“Now, it’s not as though every single client of mine is from this industry group,” Dorfman says. “I have doctors, lawyers and retirees who have been referred to me over the years and who I’ve attracted. But I have continued to mine this niche deeply and it continues to pay dividends.”

As Dorfman developed his niche business, it helped that he was able to tell prospects that he specialized in helping people in the television and film industry and was familiar with the challenges faced by actors, producers and directors.

@page_break@“I was, in fact,” he says, “able to become quite knowledgeable about the intricacies and needs of these types of clients.”

But that didn’t happen on its own. Dorfman invested significant time and effort learning about the special characteristics of the people he was prospecting.

Dorfman, now a branch manager supervising 25 investment advi-sors, holds the certified financial planner, certified investment management analyst and Canadian investment manager designations, as well as U.S. securities and insurance licences. He is also an associate portfolio manager, which allows him to do discretionary investment management.

Dorfman admits he has something of a name within the entertainment industry. He has heard of people meeting on a set and getting into a conversation about how great their financial advisor is only to discover they both have the same advisor — Dorfman.

“Another time, I visited a film set here in Toronto at the invitation of one of my clients, who was the assistant director,” Dorfman says. “He thought it would be fun to put me in a cameo role as a hotel security guard in a minor scene.”

Dorfman appeared on the set, on location in a hotel lobby, in his doorman’s uniform. The film’s costume designer, the props master and one of the principal actors were also Dorfman’s clients. When they saw Dorfman in his hotel staff uniform, they thought they had been duped by a bellhop posing as a financial advisor.

“We all had a few laughs that day,” Dorfman says.

A potential problem emerged about a decade ago, when some of Dorfman’s more successful clients moved to Los Angeles. That prompted Dorfman to register as a U.S. broker/dealer — Nesbitt was one of the first Canadian firms to do so — and now he is licensed to deal with U.S. residents as well.

“As a result, I am not only able to deal with my entertainment industry clients but I have also spun this off into another niche, attracting U.S. residents,” he says. “Plus, it lets me visit Los Angeles once a year or so, which is always enjoyable.”

Dorfman maintains serving niche clients helps advisors differentiate themselves from thousands of their peers.

“You need to have a good, solid answer when a prospect asks you, ‘What makes you different from my last advisor?’” he says. “Contrary to what many people think, the answer is not ‘Because I can get you better returns’.” IE

IE:TV — Niche market stars in top advisor’s business