We talked with Jake about:

• How to create exceptional client experiences while adapting to changes
• The power of client referrals for the success and growth of your firm 
• The challenges that come along with growth as the financial advisor landscape evolves

About Jake DeKinder:

Jake DeKinder is the head of Client Communication at Dimensional Fund Advisors, where he oversees a broad range of initiatives designed to foster deeper connections with clients. His role encompasses managing conferences, webcasts, industry events, study groups, and communities, ensuring these interactions are both impactful and aligned with client needs. Jake transitioned into this role after years on the sales team, recognizing the need for more structured communication efforts. He leads a team dedicated to integrating direct feedback from advisors into their offerings. Under his leadership, Dimensional’s virtual engagements have thrived, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Featured Resources 

• Jake DeKinder on LinkedIn
• Dimensional Fund Advisors on Twitter
• Dimensional.com

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Full Audio Transcript:

00:00:00 - 22:20:00

Lauren Hong

All right. Well, Jake, thank you so much for joining us today. Excited to dive in and hear more about you, your role at Dimensional, and specifically trends around what Dimensional is seeing for firms across the board. So, before we dive into all of that, can you just share a little bit about yourself? How did you get into this role, and what are you specifically doing with the channel today?

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00:22:00 - 00:42:01

Jake DeKinder

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to the conversation. And yeah. So head of client communications, what does that mean? Well, a couple different things fall underneath the role. It's really everything around our conferences, our webcasts we put on, our industry events, our study groups, the communities we do. I think about it kind of like scaling interactions we have with all our clients.

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00:42:04 - 00:56:14

Jake DeKinder

And I got into the role after I was on the sales team for a number of years. And you go back to ‘14, ‘15, ‘16, sort of that time period. We started to say, hey, we're doing a lot of this stuff for clients but we maybe need to expand what we're doing, get a little bit more systematic about it.

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00:56:16 - 01:10:04

Jake DeKinder

So I moved into that and I have a great team that works with me in those four areas. And I think it's really good because everything we design is based on direct feedback from what we hear from the advisors working with Dimensional, like, hey, if we think about our conferences, this is what we're looking for.

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01:10:12 - 01:22:23

Jake DeKinder

We love the fact that you guys are having an increasing presence at industry events we're at, and then certainly the virtual stuff, especially during COVID, was an absolute home run for us. And we're continuing to push on that.

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01:22:26 - 01:39:00

Lauren Hong

Super interesting. I love that you guys really listen to what clients need and then are able to act on that. So I also know you run a number of surveys, right? And you're following the trends in the data with what goes along there. What are you seeing from firms? What is some of what the data is telling us?

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01:39:02 - 01:57:26

Jake DeKinder

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think a lot of people who are probably listening understand there's been just a massive amount of M&A that's taken place in the industry. So I think that really is the biggest trend. And that brings up a lot of, I think, opportunities but also challenges. With firms, I think the big question I have is are we at an inflection point?

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01:57:26 - 02:17:11

Jake DeKinder

I think M&A will still continue but will it continue at the rate we've seen over the last five-plus years? And I think there's a lot of reasons to say maybe it may not. I mean, there's a lot of firms that have already been rolled up, which means you're working with a smaller opportunity set.

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02:17:13 - 02:39:19

Jake DeKinder

You've got a situation now where you've got higher interest rates, which obviously plays into any type of deal activity. And I think also people are realizing that, hey, listen, we experienced a lot of growth but we experienced a lot of inorganic growth by rolling up these firms. And we now need to think about what we do at this point and how do we achieve a great client experience and achieve organic growth?

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02:39:26 - 02:53:04

Jake DeKinder

I think there's a lot of firms that are saying, hey, there's maybe a few more challenges around this as we switch from inorganic to organic. So those are the interesting trends I think we've seen. And the one, in my opinion, to kind of watch as we go forward.

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02:53:07 - 03:09:11

Lauren Hong

Yeah, interesting. We see that as well. So a number of firms where they've gone through massive M&A and then they get to a place where there's operations to unpack. And then how do you continue that growth at that growth clip? So anything else you guys are seeing on the trends piece for firms?

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03:09:13 - 03:28:06

Jake DeKinder

We're starting to see one emerge that I think is a really good sign. You know, for years there was a concern about shortage of talent and shortage of young talent that's coming into the industry. And while I think there's still a massive need out there — because you do have a lot of people who have been in the industry for a while who are looking to rotate out and retire at some point — we’ve seen an uptick in younger people coming into the industry.

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03:28:08 - 03:45:27

Jake DeKinder

You look at a lot of the financial planning programs that have been developed or are developing at universities. Great sign. We actually saw a tremendous amount of hiring with the firms working with Dimensional through the pandemic. So coming out of it, that was awesome to see.

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03:45:29 - 04:03:29

Jake DeKinder

So I think there's still a long way to go. And we definitely need more good people to keep coming into the industry. But that to me is really exciting. And to anybody I talked to who’s coming in, I say, listen, you have a huge opportunity in front of you. There's a huge need for you in the industry.

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04:04:02 - 04:27:23

Jake DeKinder

You get to do right by people, to take care of people, because this is incredibly, incredibly important to your clients and your prospects’ futures. And quite frankly, you can make a great living for yourself. And as you progress through the industry, you can achieve a really nice work-life balance. So the financial advice space to me is so attractive for people in their 20s because there's just ample opportunity to have a great, meaningful career.

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04:27:26 - 04:40:18

Lauren Hong

I really appreciate what you're saying. You're right. There's been a lot of investment internally within firms as well as from outside organizations to really bring in new talent but then also to be able to retain that talent as well.

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04:40:18 - 05:01:25

Jake DeKinder

One other thing, and this is probably an ongoing trend, but just the explosion of different investment choices and different investment options. I think firms are really having to kind of weed through what makes sense. Do we want to try something new?

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05:01:25 - 05:21:12

Jake DeKinder

Are there asset classes we need to explore? I think there's a lot of chatter about stuff in private markets, private equity, and private credit. So to me that's nothing new. There's always exciting new products coming about. But that's an ongoing trend I think every firm has to kind of wade through of where do we want to go from an investment standpoint?

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05:21:14 - 05:25:08

Lauren Hong

Yep. That's now very fair. Do right by their clients as well.

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05:25:08 - 05:26:22

Jake DeKinder

So yeah, for sure.

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05:26:28 - 05:38:28

Lauren Hong

With all these trends and things going on, what is Dimensional doing to be able to support advisors, guide them through these conversations and make sure they're really equipped with the resources to be able to help navigate kind of what's ahead?

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05:38:28 - 06:03:04

Jake DeKinder

So, if we go back to the first trend on M&A, I think that's something we've had a really good pulse on ever since the trend started. And we've always tried to make sure firms have eyes wide open as they go into it, right? It's not just about necessarily getting the deal done but it's understanding what that's going to mean to the point that you brought it from an operations standpoint, what that's going to be from an investment philosophy standpoint, what that's going to mean from a cultural standpoint.

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06:03:06 - 06:23:04

Jake DeKinder

So really, I say having conversations and helping educate firms on what it means to go into this M&A space. We've got events we put on — something like our deals and succession conference — where we'll actually bring in not only our own knowledge but also outside expertise to say, hey, as you go forward with this, these are the things you need to be aware of.

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06:23:04 - 06:47:18

Jake DeKinder

These are the resources you can ultimately lean on. And so I think that's great because again, at the end of the day, we want to make sure it comes down to what's the investor experience. Certainly we want the firms to get matched up with the right ones. We want culture maintained. But the biggest thing for us is that these firms that have built great businesses, how do you ensure that whatever transition you go through, your clients are well taken care of?

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06:47:20 - 07:09:18

Jake DeKinder

So that's exciting on the M&A front. On the younger advisors coming into the space, one of the things we've always prided ourselves on is taking a very educational approach to investment management, educating around what's going on in the industry, what it means to create that great financial experience. So if you look this year, we'll put on probably 70 or so conferences here in the U.S of different types.

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07:09:18 - 07:38:24

Jake DeKinder

Those can be from introductory conferences around investments to communication workshops to practice management symposiums to business development workshops so that education is ongoing. From Dimensional, one of the things I think we've done nicely to help support the advisors in recent years is really get more customized firm training. So we put on Dimensional events but we get asked all the time, hey, can you come in and work with my team around sales training?

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07:38:24 - 07:58:21

Jake DeKinder

Can you work around communication training? Can you come in and do future firm exercises so we as an organization can think about what we want to look like three years, five years, 10 years from now? And what do we have to put in place to be successful to do that? So I think that sort of ongoing education, ongoing training, is something we're continuing to ramp up.

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07:58:21 - 08:20:20

Jake DeKinder

And I mentioned the virtual aspect coming out of COVID, that's a huge part. We do a lot of in-person stuff. I'm on the road a lot. But we do a lot of virtual stuff as well. So that's an area where I think we're continuing to invest. A lot of the studies that you mentioned, whether it's our benchmarking study, investor study, arming firms with data to empower them to make really good decisions.

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08:20:22 - 08:45:13

Jake DeKinder

And then I think on the resources side and on primarily client-ready resources, if you went back about 15 years ago, most of our stuff was much more in the weeds research, deep dive. We've realized that's important and that's in our DNA. But we've really got to help on the investor education and on the communication front, and not just with the training but actually develop resources advisors can use in those conversations.

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08:45:15 - 09:02:12

Lauren Hong

Oh, super interesting. I appreciate that you guys are having those real conversations. And to be able to pull them out for leadership. Talking with others and what have you, I often see that folks sometimes want to go down, for example, an M&A route, and they have an opportunity to really unpack that and hear what that looks like and go, that's not the right route for me.

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09:02:12 - 09:07:15

Lauren Hong

And so they can really make those shifts before they get too far ahead.

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09:07:18 - 09:10:21

Jake DeKinder

Yeah, I would agree with you on that. Yeah. Go ahead.

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09:10:23 - 09:29:28

Lauren Hong

Going back to the data conversation, now that you're arming firms with these different tools, are you seeing any kind of the creme de la creme. What are the top firms doing that you see is maybe a successful trend as they look ahead? For instance, I've heard a lot of COI referrals are going away, right?

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09:29:28 - 09:41:00

Lauren Hong

How do we diversify lead sources or is it M&A or is it sort of a different bend on that? What are the successful firms — what I’ll call successful growth firms — doing?

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09:41:02 - 09:57:18

Jake DeKinder

Yeah. It's a great question. And it's one we get all the time. I do think you still see a huge amount of the growth coming from referrals and a lot of this coming directly from client referrals. I think CIO for referrals is maybe dropping off just a little bit.

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09:57:18 - 10:14:27

Jake DeKinder

But if you have strong ones and you can nurture those, those can still be incredibly effective for you. Certainly if we look at anything in the digital space, anything through social, you're starting to see some firms have more and more success there. And you would expect that because that's where people are starting to hang out. That's where people are starting to get their information from.

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10:14:27 - 10:38:24

Jake DeKinder

So if you do that well, you'd expect to see some success as well. But again, a big part of it is just coming from the existing client base and from referrals and the firms we see be successful, or ones that put a referral plan in place and actually do something about it. And I know that sounds so basic but I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years where you have a great discussion with them.

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10:38:24 - 10:57:27

Jake DeKinder

You tee someone up with good referral resources, a good referral program. Maybe it's somebody like Dean Allison. They love it. They're fired up about it. And then you come back six months later and 12 months later and you say, hey, what did you do about it? And I go, I didn't do anything about it. And again, a lot of it's just sort of that basic blocking and tackling you just got to do.

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10:57:28 - 11:18:06

Jake DeKinder

So the firms that are having success, yes, they're doing all of these things but they hold themselves accountable to actually go and execute on the stuff. Because again, it doesn't have to be complicated. If you're delivering that level of service, if you're truly delivering value to the client, you should be able to get referrals out of that. That's what you're doing.

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11:18:06 - 11:29:08

Jake DeKinder

You're creating a referral experience. You just have to have a systematic way so you make sure across the firm you're asking for the referrals, you're following up on it and you're doing it in all of those meetings.

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11:29:11 - 11:33:17

Lauren Hong

Let's see those different touchpoints and be able to create those referral moments as well. 

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11:33:17 - 11:35:20

Jake DeKinder

Sure, for sure.

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11:35:22 - 11:52:07

Lauren Hong

And when we look at the next few years, are there any challenges you see ahead? You've got an upcoming election, a potential looming recession. There's all these things that are going on, not to mention all the data sets you all have, that I would assume would impact that.

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11:52:08 - 11:54:22

Lauren Hong

Look ahead. What are you seeing?

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11:54:24 - 12:11:19

Jake DeKinder

Yeah, on the investment side and sort of the events that take place, there's always, as I like to say, there's always kind of the crisis of the day that's looming. And it doesn't mean it's not important, right? The U.S. elections are incredibly important for us here as citizens of the U.S. You've got a lot of global tensions, wars that are going on.

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12:11:19 - 12:28:19

Jake DeKinder

These are not good things. Do we need to be thinking about recessions and all of these things? Certainly. But there's always that looming next event. So on the investment side, there's nothing necessarily that says like, oh, we need to change up what we're doing or anything there. If you know Dimensional, we're pretty consistent on it.

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12:28:23 - 12:45:20

Jake DeKinder

Now, the one thing I will say is that we've definitely moved away from this idea of it's in-market prices. Don't worry about it. Don't pay attention to it. I don't think that's a satisfying response for investors. You have to be able to make some intelligent comments about it. You have to be able to sort of converse and let people share what's stressing them out.

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12:45:22 - 13:22

Jake DeKinder

But then you want to kind of move them down a path of, but we've looked into it. Here's what our approach is. If you think about the trends that are going on and potential challenges you see ahead, I don't know if they're challenges but here's a couple things I think about.

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13:27 - 13:23:07

Jake DeKinder

Let's talk a little bit about fees within the industry. And a couple of things you've seen, you've seen custodial fees I think pressed down quite a bit, especially as firms have gotten larger and scale the ability to access the markets, the cost of that has come down. You look at asset management fees and certainly here at Dimensional, we've lowered our fees dramatically.

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13:23:07 - 13:39:14

Jake DeKinder

And I think that's okay. You have to respond to industry trends. And we know there's been a move toward indexing. Although you're starting to see that kind of shift back here. I do wonder about the advisor fee. Now that said, for the last 15 or 20 years, people have been making the same argument of there'll be fee compression, there'll be fee competition.

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13:39:16 - 14:01:25

Jake DeKinder

For the most part, you haven't really seen it. I mean, you have to come down a little bit. Sure, but people have needed to continue to expand the services they deliver and the value to maintain those fees. So that's another thing people need to have on their radars. And I think they probably do. One of the things I wonder about is what we just talked about — M&A — we talked about all this consolidation that went on.

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14:01:27 - 14:23:07

Jake DeKinder

And if you go back to when we started the advisor business at Dimensional about 35 years ago, you had a very concentrated industry, right? You had a couple of really big players. They sort of dominated the market. And then there was this idea of this independent, fee-only advisor that was starting to emerge. And so you really had fragmentation, good fragmentation within the industry for several decades.

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14:23:09 - 14:44:07

Jake DeKinder

Now we're back and we're seeing consolidation again. And I think industries go through this natural sort of fragmentation and consolidation. So it's nothing special to financial advisors. It happens in a lot of different industries. But that does bring up questions of what is that going to mean in terms of the professionals you have inside of the organization?

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14:44:07 - 14:57:02

Jake DeKinder

You know, we talked about, hey, if you're going to roll up a bunch of firms, if you're going to make yourself bigger, how do you maintain culture? How do you make sure it's still a place people want to work? What's the impact of private equity? What's the expectation for growth rates? How am I going to get organic growth out of it?

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14:57:04 - 15:25:17

Jake DeKinder

And so I do think a trend you want to watch and a challenge, I think for some larger firms, is how do you ensure whatever firms you brought in, you maintain culture? And how do you ensure that 32-, 33-, 35-year-old advisor who was with a $3 or $400 million firm and was really happy, and now they're in a large organization, is still happy within a larger organization, and we're starting to see some breakaway from those big firms.

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15:25:19 - 15:41:02

Jake DeKinder

And I don't want to say that bigger doesn't mean you can't deliver a great client experience. I just think you have to have it on the forefront. And there will be some advisors who say, I want to work for that small or medium-sized firm. I want to start my own thing. I don't want to be a part of a large organization.

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15:41:02 - 15:52:02

Jake DeKinder

So I think it's an exciting trend to watch, and one we're definitely seeing a little bit more of quarter to quarter as we're out there having conversations.

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15:52:04 - 15:58:23

Lauren Hong

Yep. I see that as well. And just because we're a big organization doesn't mean you can't have a great culture too, right?

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15:58:24 - 16:26

Jake DeKinder

Completely. Okay.

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16:29 - 16:14:27

Lauren Hong

Yeah a lot of pieces to untangle. All right. So I want to just shift a little bit. I want to talk about Dimensional 360. So do you mind explaining for folks who are not familiar with Dimensional 360? What is it? And, how can we learn more about this platform?

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16:14:29 - 16:36:21

Jake DeKinder

Yeah. So Dimensional 360 really brings together, I think, everything we've built out over the last three-plus decades on the service and the resources and the support for financial professionals. I think about Dimensional 360 as everything beyond the investment solutions, the investment products we bring to client relationships. So three big buckets in that area are investments, communication, and strategy.

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16:36:23 - 16:54:08

Jake DeKinder

When we say investments, it's not just the investment solutions or the products, right? It's the research. It's the thought leadership. It's the analytics. It's some of the investment tools we've built. Something like our expanded SMA offering and the technology interface and the reporting that goes behind. And beyond that, it's the UMA offering we rolled out.

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16:54:08 - 17:13:29

Jake DeKinder

So you've got all these things on investments that can help people inside of their business. Once you get the investment piece of it dialed, you have to figure out how you're going to go talk about it. And that can be talking about your investment approach or it's answering a lot of the common client questions that are going to come in around recessions, geopolitical events, inflation, elections, all of those.

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17:14:04 - 17:14:21

Lauren Hong

Events of the day.

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17:14:21 - 17:31:21

Jake DeKinder

Yes, it's the news. It's quite frankly a lot of the conversations advisors are actually having. Let's be realistic, there aren't that many clients who walk in and say tell me more, tell me more about the size premium or tell me more about the value premium, right? It's important but those aren't the questions people are getting.

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17:31:21 - 17:47:18

Jake DeKinder

So that's a communication bucket. And if you got your investments dialed, you know how to talk about it. You're probably going to have some business success. And that's where the strategy piece comes into it. So all of the things we do around our benchmarking study helps firms say, hey, I'm a $500 million firm. I want to grow.

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17:47:18 - 18:07:18

Jake DeKinder

Tell me what a $1 billion firm looks like. It's the investor study we run to say, hey, we've got over 80, 90,000 data points, survey responses from investors all over the world saying this is what's important about a relationship with a financial advisor, powerful data we can use. It's some of the M&A stuff we talked about.

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18:07:18 - 18:20:14

Jake DeKinder

It's the future firm stuff. It's the visioning exercises. So you put all of this together, the investments, the communication, and strategy. And it's really all designed to just support that financial professional in what they're trying to deliver for their clients.

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18:20:16 - 18:26:04

Lauren Hong

And where can folks learn more about that? You have to be in a Dimensional firm to be able to get access to that?

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18:26:06 - 18:43:25

Jake DeKinder

Yeah, if you want to read a little bit more about it, you can go on to our public site, dfa dot com, and you can take a look at some of the information that's on there. But certainly we have a password-protected site. And I think a lot of the deeper stuff we start to do with firms are definitely ones that are working with us a little bit more comprehensively.

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18:43:25 - 19:06:19

Jake DeKinder

Again, we're a for-profit business like anybody else. And we want to work with firms or it makes business sense there. But it doesn't really matter what sort of type of firm you are or what channel you may operate in. Dimensional 360 is designed so any firm that's looking to deliver a great client experience and quite frankly, leverage 35 years of experience from a global asset manager like Dimensional.

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19:06:21 - 19:11:29

Jake DeKinder

They can lean into it. And as I always say, I promise you, you're going to find stuff in there that's going to help you in your business.

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19:12:01 - 19:17:18

Lauren Hong

Absolutely. And is there anything you want to touch on that we have not covered today?

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19:17:20 - 19:32:20

Jake DeKinder

No, I'm just really excited about where the industry is going. I think there's all of these challenges out there and you read a lot of I don't want to say a lot but sometimes I feel like it can be a little bit negative. And people pick on what's going wrong in the industry.

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19:32:20 - 19:56:00

Jake DeKinder

But you look at the cost of good financial advice and quite frankly, good investment management, it's come down. And that's a great thing. You look at how much more educated investors are about what's available to them and what's important. That's out there. You look at the experience that really goes from the wirehouses to the independent broker dealers to the RIAs to the banks.

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19:56:06 - 20:17:13

Jake DeKinder

All of them are looking to deliver a great client experience, and I think they really are. So I'm incredibly optimistic about where this industry is at, where it's going, what the potential is. And again, as long as we keep our focus on the investor, as long as all of us keep our focus on that and know that's why we're waking up every day and doing what we're doing, I get really fired up about this stuff, right?

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20:17:13 - 20:19:06

Lauren Hong

You take good care of people and do good work.

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20:19:06 - 20:21:01

Jake DeKinder

So exactly.

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20:21:03 - 20:36:22

Lauren Hong

Excellent. Well, Jake, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for sharing more about what's happening, what you all are seeing at Dimensional not only with the different studies you have going on, the trends, what you're doing about it. We touched on Dimensional 360 quite a bit. Really appreciate your time today. And for folks, we will include links as well.

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20:36:25 - 20:40:11

Lauren Hong

And a transcript below for more details. So thank you again.

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20:40:13 - 20:45:25

Jake DeKinder

Great. Thank you.

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We talked with Natalie about:

• How to overcome imposter syndrome while pursuing intentional growth
• How advisors can attain success by customizing best practices to fit their unique goals, team, and clients
• The importance of alignment between leaders and their teams

About Natalie Bergsma

Natalie Bergsma is a seasoned consultant and executive coach with over 20 years of experience working in the financial services industry. Her journey began unexpectedly, shifting from academia in physical chemistry to financial services, where she became a key player in helping advisory firms implement best practices. After realizing her career path was being driven by external expectations, she pivoted to focus on personal fulfillment and professional growth. Natalie has built a successful practice, BeyondFA, that combines her consulting expertise with a strong focus on mindset and personal development, guiding advisors and firms toward purposeful growth. She is passionate about helping leaders and businesses overcome mental blocks, achieve meaningful change, and align their personal and professional goals. Having relocated to Costa Rica and experienced her own personal transformation, Natalie integrates life coaching and mindset work into her practice, enabling clients to achieve success with balance and intention.

Featured Resources 

• Natalie Bergsma on LinkedIn
• Natalie Bergsma on Twitter
• BeyondFA on LinkedIn
• BeyondFA.com

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Full Audio Transcript:

00:00:00 - 00:08:15

Lauren Hong

Natalie, thanks for joining us today. Glad to have you here.

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00:08:18 - 00:12:13

Natalie Bergsma

Thanks for having me, Lauren. And I really, really appreciate the opportunity. This is going to be fun.

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00:12:15 - 00:32:28

Lauren Hong

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I know you've got just so much great experience working with advisors. And you've got a great story to tell too, with just how you’ve been able to coach, manage, and then also just lead your own life. You're kind of a representation of what you do for your clients as well.

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00:32:28 - 00:48:17

Lauren Hong

So, I'll let you get into it. I want to hand it over to you to share a little bit more about your background, how you got into the work you're doing, and why specifically you've happened to work with a number of advisors. So I'll hand it over to you.

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00:48:20 - 01:09:03

Natalie Bergsma

Thanks. I appreciate that. It's a pretty long story actually. I started in this industry 20 years ago. lt was a better paying job to work at a consulting firm than it was to work at the college. So I sort of fell into the opportunity. Was it my intended career path?

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01:09:03 - 01:40:27

Natalie Bergsma

I actually left to pursue my PhD in physical chemistry. And it was one of those moments in life where you've picked this path and you like nothing about it, and you're not finding joy and all the things that come with sort of leading your best life. And I had a therapist at the time and we had talked about why I was doing that, and it turns out it was just to fulfill someone else's desires for me.

‍

01:40:27 - 02:11:03

Natalie Bergsma

And so I left with my master’s instead of my PhD and actually went back to working in financial services and working for one of the top consulting firms in our industry. And we got bought by AssetMark at the time. So we sort of started this work learning from the ground up, really helping firms implement best practices and execute change to running a scale group coaching program to practice management training.

‍

02:11:05 - 02:32:06

Natalie Bergsma

Back then, we helped start some of the industry-leading research you guys see around the day. So as you know all of that, I'm a learner. I love learning and learning new things. I really never stop. But I hit another really pivotal point in my career. And my husband really wasn't happy in his firm, in his role.

‍

02:32:06 - 03:04:03

Natalie Bergsma

And he was ready to take a break. I had two kids; I think at the time they were three and six months old, and this amazing opportunity to move to Costa Rica presented itself. And so we had one of those aha moments again where we went, all right, what direction are we going? And really wanted to give our kids an opportunity to experience a different life, a different culture, a different way of being than what we had grown up with.

‍

03:04:03 - 03:09:07

Natalie Bergsma

And it's hard to say no to moving to Costa Rica, you know.

‍

03:09:10 - 03:13:00

Lauren Hong

Yeah. A great opportunity to dive in and experience something completely new.

‍

03:13:00 - 03:35:23

Natalie Bergsma

Yeah. But part of what I learned in that process when I had my first son, I actually had postpartum anxiety. For the first time, I really connected that some of my anxiety was based on being performance driven, right? Your worth and your value is how well you do or how much you succeed.

‍

03:35:25 - 03:55:29

Natalie Bergsma

And when we moved to Costa Rica, loved the work I was doing when I loved the team. In fact, it's Limitless Advisor Coaching, actually. So coaching with them as well as running my own practice. But I brought me with me. This is what happened. And people always ask like, oh my God, didn't you love Costa Rica?

‍

03:55:29 - 04:32:27

Natalie Bergsma

And I think, no, because I wasn't living that life there; I hadn't yet made that shift from my worth and my value being performance driven to really being internal and shifting my mindset. And you know, limitless straight mindset is a big portion of their program. But also I worked with a life coach at that time and she really helped me see how my way of thinking and being was really impacting those things. When I was 26 and we were bought by AssetMark, I had the opportunity to start a business.

‍

04:32:29 - 04:55:12

Natalie Bergsma

Then the clients were willing to come with me at the time but I was too afraid. I didn't want to take those risks. And that really stopped me from, I think, doing some amazing things. And I did that work in my 40s and started my own business at the very beginning of COVID when my husband was a stay-at-home dad.

‍

04:55:12 - 05:28:15

Natalie Bergsma

No other support structure in place. It enabled me to take a risk that I could take when I didn't have any responsibilities, and there was really no concern. So that was a big shift for me. So I actually dove into that mindset, an executive coaching component, and got the credentials around that to be able to bring that into the work I do with advisors because I love helping businesses reach their potential and teams and leaders reach their potential.

‍

05:28:15 - 05:55:26

Natalie Bergsma

But in all the work I did in consulting, people would just get stuck, right? We would have conversations around changing your fee schedules or hiring or letting go of team members who wouldn't get a good fit, and I just couldn't get them past something. And what that really boiled down to was they weren't in the right mindset or the frame of mind to make those kinds of decisions.

‍

05:55:26 - 06:21:05

Natalie Bergsma

So I decided to bring that into the work I do and merge those two practices together. And that's really what we do today. We've been doing that for a while now, really helping lifestyle solo advisors and the coaching side, leading and running their businesses and making shifts and implementing all the changes but doing the work that goes with being able to make those changes on the personal side.

‍

06:21:05 - 06:47:22

Natalie Bergsma

And then for the ensemble, larger firms, we come in and do that hands-on work with you. But I'm also still working with leaders around change management and people and how they're showing up as a leader. To do that. And we really focus on working with a different kind of firm, for a purpose-based firm, we kind of help firms grow with purpose and intention.

‍

06:47:22 - 07:16:21

Natalie Bergsma

So a lot of the work we do, you're already successful. I was already successful. But I was overwhelmed and I was stressed and I had to make changes to have the success and feel really good about it and have all the other things I wanted in my life. And so that's kind of what brought me into it, to your point, I had to go through that experience, and I want to be able to bring that to other people.

‍

07:16:24 - 07:41:29

Lauren Hong

And I love that. Your story also just has these very raw and real moments of transparency that allowed you to be able to have clarity around those shifts, and that you're comfortable being able to share that because I think sometimes that's not always the case, right? Of it's the reality, right? Everyone here, the sort of peaks of what you see on social media or the success stories but so much of the real is not what you see above the water.

‍

07:41:29 - 08:05:18

Lauren Hong

So I appreciate that insight in the narrative to where you are. So how did you go about building up your advisor base? Did you tap into those relationships you had? And then, I guess I sort of question A, how did you build that up? And then question B, you talked about merging this kind of mindset model meets consulting.

‍

08:05:18 - 08:14:10

Lauren Hong

And I’d love to hear how you came up with that. So maybe advisor and then kind of what was that offering that brought them in that was different.

‍

08:14:13 - 08:37:22

Natalie Bergsma

It was different. Yeah. You really just tapped into existing networks, as I mentioned. Limitless and I are still very connected. So we kind of made the decision that I really wanted to work one-on-one with clients, have that individual impact and shift people's lives in a very direct way. And so we sort of split ways.

‍

08:37:22 - 09:01:28

Natalie Bergsma

And I had some clients coming with me who are still part of the Limitless program. So I was really lucky because I think all throughout my career I've been really supported. I've had a really great support network. I've had really great leaders. So it's probably why I'm one of the things that I'm maybe a little pushy about when it comes to this industry is you have to be a great leader because it makes such a huge difference, right?

‍

09:01:28 - 09:22:24

Natalie Bergsma

I've seen other women in this industry just struggle because of the types of firms they were in and the kinds of leaders they were under and the limiting factors that go with that. And I was like, I didn't really get that experience, maybe a little ageism along the way. I started really young. I finally look like a grown up now.

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09:22:26 - 09:46:16

Natalie Bergsma

But then, like advisory firms, one client begets another client. And you just try to impact people's lives and help them with their businesses. And that creates the momentum you need to continue to grow and develop. And then consistency in marketing is super key as you obviously know.

‍

09:46:16 - 09:49:28

Natalie Bergsma

So it's really about getting up every day and doing the work.

‍

09:50:00 - 10:08:27

Lauren Hong

Doing good work. I hear you. So what kind of got you at the fork in the road to see this consulting meets mindset opportunity? And how have you positioned that to really help people do good work and help to be able to make those shifts, as you alluded to earlier?

‍

10:08:29 - 10:37:27

Natalie Bergsma

Part of it was introduced me through the work I did at other firms and through having honestly, over the years, my own therapists, my own coaches, really seeing how that impacted my own life and my ability to get past these stops I had for years in terms of executing and a couple of clients along the way early in my career.

‍

10:38:00 - 11:13

Natalie Bergsma

We had some really tough decision points for them. I had a client who was going through a divorce and I was coaching them. And that conversation was, well, I have to work on the business. And I’m like, no, you don't have to work; it's good. Let it run. You have to take care of yourself. And so I see it so much in our industry.

‍

11:13 - 11:04:18

Natalie Bergsma

It's so driven by numbers and by AUM. And how big you are.

‍

11:04:20 - 11:07:21

Lauren Hong

How many employees do you have? And yeah, all the milestones.

‍

11:07:22 - 11:33:15

Natalie Bergsma

You know, drive, drive, drive, drive, go, go, go. Show performance oriented. But you see so many successful people sort of struggling and under water. They look great on the outside but they're struggling on the inside with their teams, with their systems, with how they feel. You know, for almost 80% of the advisors I talk to, imposter syndrome is a huge deal for them.

‍

11:33:15 - 12:02:14

Natalie Bergsma

So really being able to make the shifts in the business. The way I talk about it, it's really growth with intention. Growth for the sake of growth just creates more stress and creates more overwhelm. But if you look at your business, your vision and where you're going and getting your team on board and what you should focus on and why should focus on your energy.

‍

12:02:16 - 12:19:01

Natalie Bergsma

If you can bring all of that together, then you can do it and you can enjoy the ride along the way. And I think that's what so many business owners are looking for right now. I want to have that success but I don't want it at the cost of everything else in my life.

‍

12:19:04 - 12:43:13

Lauren Hong

Some of my favorite conversations with firms are just getting to know them or things like we've grown into a very intentional club. And this is why we, our business, is healthy and we feel good about it or what have you. It's the firms that say we're at this size, maybe they've got a dozen employees and we want to grow because fill in the blank, right?

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12:43:13 - 13:08:07

Lauren Hong

There's that intentionality behind it. And that goes back to serving clients and just having that clarity. That in itself is a gift. So I appreciate what you're saying. So tell me more. You talked with a lot of leaders, right? And I feel like sometimes we're always looking for these hacks, like, okay, if I'm going to grow, do I need to put together this whole plan? Is there a blueprint for a strategic plan or what things should I be thinking about?

‍

13:08:07 - 13:26:02

Lauren Hong

Or what books should I be reading or systems to tap into? And I'd love to hear from you about how you approach working with leaders. And if there's more of a, I'll call it a blueprint or a playbook, or if it's more kind of uncovering things through a mindset perspective.

‍

13:26:04 - 13:50:12

Natalie Bergsma

So yeah, we call them best practices, right? That's what you're saying. Just give me the best practices, tell me what to do and what order to do it. In some ways that does work. But I think in working with a lot of firms, what I've noticed is you have to adapt it, sort of like in the work we do, we always customize best practices.

‍

13:50:12 - 14:10:03

Natalie Bergsma

You are not the same person as this leader or this firm over here. You don't have the same team. You rarely have the same kind of client base. So you're just trying to take someone's models and fit it onto your practice. And then for some reason, it's not working and you can't quite figure out why it's not working.

‍

14:10:03 - 14:34:12

Natalie Bergsma

And it's hey, we actually need to to adapt that. So best practices are great. They're a really good guideline to work with. But quick fixes don't really work, right? That miracle solution solvable isn't there. You have to do the work. And so you know in the work we do with firms, we customize it.

‍

14:34:12 - 14:58:14

Natalie Bergsma

So where is it you want to go and what are your goals? Or if you want to be a lifestyle solo advisor that looks different than if you're a solo advisor or trying to grow into an ensemble business. And if you're a lifestyle ensemble that wants to stay at a certain size, let's say 10 people or under, the strategic decisions you make are different than if you want to become an enterprise.

‍

14:58:16 - 15:27:00

Natalie Bergsma

So you always have to look at those things. And I think we're always looking for the right answer. And there isn't a right answer. You know most of the successful firms I've seen have just made decisions and leaned into those decisions and committed to doing that. And so I think looking for the quick fix, you end up doing a lot of research and not a lot of execution, right?

‍

15:27:00 - 15:45:00

Natalie Bergsma

You spend a lot of time in theory and not a lot of time in doing. We talked about podcasting and your time management is a really good example of that. When you think of the thing we want the quick fix for, it's so I need to be able to better manage my time.

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15:45:03 - 15:56:21

Natalie Bergsma

And this is a universal challenge of leaders, of business owners. So of everyone. And there are a hundred time management tools. I could give you just a stack of books this big.

‍

15:56:24 - 15:59:08

Lauren Hong

I know; it's so true.

‍

15:59:11 - 16:03:20

Natalie Bergsma

But Lauren, how many time management techniques have you used?

‍

16:03:22 - 16:11:04

Lauren Hong

Oh, I don't even know. I honestly test them and then I kind of throw them out or I just adjust them. And there's a few that stuck.

‍

16:11:06 - 16:34:16

Natalie Bergsma

Yeah. So you know that's part of that. You have to get it to work for you. But what we're talking about is these are the tools and techniques we need. But if we don't have the right thinking in place, they just don't work really well. And here’s a really good example. I have a client — we're working on her time management — and we had a conversation.

‍

16:34:16 - 17:05:10

Natalie Bergsma

She was just beating herself up. She said to me, Natalie, I don't understand why I can't do something so simple. Why can't I just follow the model? And that was creating so much stress and anxiety and overwhelm that it made it even harder to follow the model. And sometimes we think, why can't we just do these simple things, whether it's time management or if you change, it's because it's more complicated than that.

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17:05:13 - 17:28:09

Natalie Bergsma

If you think of time management, you've got our culture of distraction. Do you have the right team in place to be able to delegate? Do you have the right systems and tools to create efficiency? And then how do you think about time? How do you relate to time? And for most of us, we're a victim to time.

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17:28:11 - 17:52:07

Natalie Bergsma

We don't have any control over it. We have time scarcity. So our mindset around being able to have enough time to even make changes in the business, is nine times out of 10, what's going to get in our way for improving our time management techniques, which then improve our ability to work on the business and do these other things.

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17:52:07 - 18:11:02

Natalie Bergsma

So you can kind of take that concept and really apply it to any change or pattern or behavior you're trying to shift as a business or as a leader. And that takes time. And I had a quick conversation — I just want a two-day bootcamp; just fix me in two days.

‍

18:11:05 - 18:14:18

Natalie Bergsma

No, time management takes three to six months for you to see some patterns, right?.

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18:14:18 - 18:38:12

Lauren Hong

Those patterns of behavior. I hear you. So speaking of time, to be mindful of time, I want to make sure I get to one other question I've got for you. I know you've worked with leaders and teams. I know you've gone a little bit into the data of what makes great leaders maybe taps into what makes great teams.

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18:38:12 - 18:52:21

Lauren Hong

I’d love to hear a little bit about that kind of data you've been able to pull together and then also if you just have first-hand experiences and working with leaders, any insights folks would have as far as best practices go.

‍

18:52:21 - 19:21:26

Natalie Bergsma

So yeah, we did a study last year and instead of asking advisors how they felt about things, we actually asked their teams, right? We asked the boots on the ground people about how they felt about leadership. And two kinds of really interesting things came out of it. One was what the teams thought leaders most valued in terms of their leadership was very different from what teams valued.

‍

19:21:26 - 19:37:25

Natalie Bergsma

So the top three traits in leaders for teams were communication, adaptability, and honesty and transparency. And when describing from their leader’s perspective the number one thing was expertise.

‍

19:37:27 - 19:40:21

Lauren Hong

Interesting.

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19:43:09 - 19:45:08

Lauren Hong

There was no match, no direct match.

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19:45:08 - 20:05:24

Natalie Bergsma

Well, communication was up on the list. So I think we all know to be a good leader you have to be a good communicator. But what I see with a lot of leaders who are trying to grow their businesses is they have trouble getting out of their own way, right? They struggle to delegate or build teams.

‍

20:05:27 - 20:30:00

Natalie Bergsma

They become the bottleneck in the business. And so that becomes a really big challenge when you're trying to grow an organization. And it's interesting, about 15 years ago when we asked team members in our client relationships, hey, what's the struggle? They said we don't know what the vision is. We don't know where we're going or that's shifted.

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20:30:02 - 20:43:20

Natalie Bergsma

Now they know where they're going. They just don't know how it applies to them. So leaders are still missing that gap. You can point the firm in a direction but you've got to get everyone on board and bring them with you.

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20:43:22 - 21:09:05

Lauren Hong

I hear you. I've been fortunate, much like you, to be plugged into the C-suite and see behind the scenes of a lot of different companies. And one company we worked with for a number of years, one of my favorite transparency components they've added to their business is they have what they call their monthly State of the Union, and it's just literally updating teams about where they're going, where the business is headed.

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21:09:08 - 21:25:00

Lauren Hong

Major project initiatives that are going on and opportunities to celebrate others and good work. And so I love that component. We've applied it to us as well. And it's funny. We do it. I'm sure a lot of firms are familiar with Net Promoter Score, as I'm sure you're familiar as well. There's a Net Promoter Score for employees.

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21:25:00 - 21:40:05

Lauren Hong

And that's one of the things that at least on our team, a lot of people talk about; they love that transparency and I think really appreciate being a part of that business journey along the way. So that's interesting to hear that. I guess from my personal experiences, it kind of aligns with some of the data and research you did.

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21:42:06 - 21:50:03

Natalie Bergsma

Yeah, we definitely see it in firms, right? Teams don't want to come to work just to do a job anymore, right? They want to be a part of something bigger.

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21:50:06 - 22:05

Lauren Hong

Yep. That's right. And I hear you, well, this was so fun. Any other final thoughts or things you want to make sure to share?

‍

22:07 - 22:33:01

Natalie Bergsma

I think one of the key components of — you just mentioned it — doing that State of the Union address and what comes next, we talked a little bit about the leader bottleneck but it's also the business bottleneck. So having a clear plan in place for what we're working on and who's responsible and really having a strategic planning process to make sure you're working on the things that are going to create the growth you want in the order you want it.

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22:33:01 - 22:57:04

Natalie Bergsma

And that's part of the work we do is really helping firms identify what those things are and then put them in the right order and then help them champion their teams to execute and move forward on them. So it's a big component of getting all the pieces to line up, right? The strategy, the teams, the mindset, the systems, really driving everything in one direction.

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22:57:04 - 23:06:00

Natalie Bergsma

That’s the way firms are seeing that intentional and purpose-oriented growth and creating meaning in their businesses and their lives.

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23:06:03 - 23:24:03

Lauren Hong

That's great. And then it sounds like you also support the change management component as well. So not just the strategy of putting together the big picture. And then supporting those teams as they actually implement that action. Are you kind of more or less tapping back into the consulting as the project moves forward?

‍

23:24:06 - 24:03

Natalie Bergsma

Yeah, depending on how you engage with us. We have done engagements where we lead and coach and we have done engagements where we become a strategic member of the team, sort of a fractional COO, helping design that strategy and then helping implement and build it out, whether that's a service model or a fee schedule or advisor career paths and milestones — really helping execute that and then implement it. So our engagements are a little bit longer term because we don't really believe in, hey, let me build you something and then hand it to you. 

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24:09 - 24:17:01

Lauren Hong

Yeah I hear you. It's getting past that stuck point. Kind of like you were sharing earlier, being able to help actually get some traction as well. Great. Thank you so much for your time. Where can folks learn more? What's a good website or email?

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24:17:06 - 24:24:06

Natalie Bergsma

You can visit us at beyondfa.com or email connect at beyondfa.com. And we're happy to chat.

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24:24:09 - 24:27:20

Lauren Hong

Wonderful. Thank you again for your time exploring.

‍

24:27:23 - 24:29:01

Natalie Bergsma

Appreciate it.

‍

‍

We talked with Mary about:

• Embracing the “blue ocean mentality” instead of competing 
• How to elevate your voice to make an impact in the thought leadership space
• The consistent effort and ongoing learning it takes to be a thought leader

About Mary Carlson:

Mary Carlson is a financial expert with a passion for integrating financial education and human behavior. After earning a financial planning degree from Texas Tech University, she worked as a lobbyist for the Financial Planning Association, focusing on retirement, taxes, and financial education. Her career later took her to the Pentagon, where she taught military personnel about budgeting, savings, and retirement planning. While earning her doctorate in financial therapy, Mary researched the financial behaviors of soldiers, deepening her understanding of the emotional aspects of money. She also spent three years at the CIA providing financial counseling. Today, she runs her own consulting business, Financial Behavior Keynote Group, using her unique blend of financial knowledge and behavioral insights to help others.

Featured Resources 

• Dr. Mary Carlson on LinkedIn 
• Financial Behavior Keynote Group on LinkedIn
• Financial Behavior Keynote Group on YouTube
• Financial Behavior Keynote Group website 
• Kitces.com

Enjoyed This? You’ll Also Love: 

• Telling Finance- and Caused-Based Stories through Filmmaking with Robin Hauser
• Making Noise to Tackle the Financial Education Problem 
• Navigating and Optimizing the Strengths of Your Team with Gretchen Pisano

‍

Full Audio Transcript:

00:00:00 - 00:06:24

Lauren Hong

Mary, thank you for joining us today.

‍

00:06:26 - 00:08:29

Mary Carlson

Yeah. It's so great to be here. Thanks, Lauren.

‍

00:09:01 - 00:33:04

Lauren Hong

Oh my gosh. Yes, I had the best time checking out your website. You work with so many amazing folks. Not to mention your speaking credentials and how deeply you know the advisory community and the work that's going on there. You've done such a great job of positioning yourself, and I am really looking forward to hearing from you today, not just about how you got here in your journey and the day-to-day work you do.

‍

00:33:07 - 00:51:04

Lauren Hong

But I know we're going to get into a little bit more about how you even get going with identifying a topic and speaking and really building a thought leadership platform. So we have a lot to cover and a short period of time. Over to you. How did you get into this world?

‍

00:51:04 -00:54:04

Lauren Hong

And tell us a little bit more about your business.

‍

00:54:07 - 01:12:05

Mary Carlson

Sure. I thank you so much, Lauren. And yeah, I feel lucky every day to be able to work with some of the most incredible minds in the industry, some of the most developing thought leadership I've ever experienced. So it has been really fun. But let me take you back really quick and give you a quick backstory of where I came from.

‍

01:12:05 - 01:33:00

Mary Carlson

So I came out of Texas Tech's financial planning program. I love financial planning. It just makes me so excited to know these things I feel like everybody in the world needs to know. And so my little 25-year-old self, and I have a degree under my belt and thought, I'm going to go to Washington, D.C. and knock on the halls of Congress and teach the world financial education.

‍

01:33:00 - 01:55:20

Mary Carlson

So that's what I did. I came out to D.C. Long story short, I ended up at FPA as a lobbyist and did that. I had a portfolio of retirement, taxes, and then financial education. We met in the Treasury's Gold Room and I had some really cool experiences with senators and representatives and in the White House a few times, some really cool, interesting things.

‍

01:55:23 - 02:12:27

Mary Carlson

And I just kept being a fan. Well, long story short, I ended up going into wealth management for a short period and never found my footing. I just never felt like it was a total fit after I had these big dreams. I'm a big dreamer and a big idealist. And so of course, I went to the Pentagon instead.

‍

02:12:29 - 02:42:23

Mary Carlson

That's the next logical bit of it. I had a great experience traveling all over the world teaching members of the military about financial education principles and everything from budget and savings to their specific retirement plan to how very specific military benefits and services work. And that was really fun. So that's where I got into this idea of speaking and really latched on and thought, I really like this.

‍

02:42:26 - 03:13:16

Mary Carlson

Fast-forward, I ended up going to Fort Riley, Kansas, which is right next to Manhattan, Kansas, where Kansas State is, and worked on my Ph.D. simultaneously while also working on the military compound there. And I worked with families of the fallen. And so specifically, what they would get, almost half a million death benefit and gratuity, after their loved one died, which really came with a lot of emotion attached.

‍

03:13:16 - 03:35:10

Mary Carlson

That felt like blood money. I'd much rather have my loved one here. But in this program and the Ph.D. program I was in, we were in financial therapy. We're talking about financial behavior. And that's where my real interest in this idea of money is not just money, right? Money is so tied to emotion and behavior and psychology.

‍

03:35:17 - 04:02:02

Mary Carlson

And I was seeing it firsthand play out in a life and death scenario. The quickest we ever saw half a million spent was three months. And there's so much guilt and shame and anger and all those intangible feelings that came along with that. And so I ended up writing my dissertation on the financial behaviors of soldiers before and after deployment and really fleshed out what that looked like.

‍

04:02:04 - 04:35:14

Mary Carlson

And we were actually right there. And so we were able to get over 800 soldiers before and after deployment. And mind you, this was a time when they were going to war zones four or five, six times, back to back to back. It was putting a lot of stress and strain on these families. So that really kind of was my entrance into this whole idea of money's not just about learning what to do and what not to do but it's that whole integration of the human side of money and what makes us us. I went back to Washington, D.C. and worked for the accounting associations.

‍

04:35:14 - 05:22

Mary Carlson

I've worked for federal. I've been on the Hill, worked at the federal and local level as well and then I got married, started having kids and decided — You know what I wanted? I've always wanted to own my own business. So I started a consulting business and ended up at the CIA and spent three years at the Central Intelligence Agency doing financial counseling for members of the CIA.

‍

05:22 - 05:27:04

Mary Carlson

And so it was really, really interesting to learn. They are very different from my military experience. Yeah, a population but also some different experiences and the coolest part of that experience was I was embedded in an EAP or employee assistance program. So they work with therapists. So I was working right next to marriage and family therapists, counselors, psychologists, and social workers who could help with addiction.

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05:27:07 - 06:04:07

Mary Carlson

And it was a really cool experience for those three years to be able to say we can come at issues with a holistic approach, right? So if you have a gambler addicted to alcohol, you're not just sending him to me to fix the financial side of it but you're working with the social worker who works with the marriage and family therapist who works with me, and there was a lot of back and forth and integrated work, and that's where I saw the beauty of all these different service providers come together and solidify. So fast-forward, what came along after that experience was over.

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06:04:07 - 06:23:24

Mary Carlson

I still teach at a couple of universities and have taught for University of Georgia for several years now but really wanted to do even more. And that was when three years ago, I came together and said, hey, there were three other academics with me; why don't we do more speaking, consulting together?

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06:24:01 - 06:43:04

Mary Carlson

And so hence the idea of Financial Behavior Keynote was born. We have these backgrounds and experiences in this group but really honing in on behavior. And I would say that's what sets us apart from any other group out there. It's a very niche group. It's especially niche in the speaking arena, right?

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06:43:06 - 06:44:04

Lauren Hong

It is.

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06:44:09 - 07:21:07

Mary Carlson

We really want financial behavior but we also have this component. Our tagline is “Where education meets experiential learning.” And so part of learning that you have to have is the research side, right? You want that research side, that empirical research to back up what we're doing in practice. And so that's a lot of what we're trying to do is bring practice and academia together and facilitate more conversations and have more conversations and make the research we do know about more understandable to be able to be practically implemented.

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07:21:07 - 07:29:06

Mary Carlson

And so that's what I get up for every day now. That's what excites me. But that's kind of the background and how I got into it and where I came from.

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07:29:06 - 07:48:26

Lauren Hong

So, oh my gosh, it personally speaks to me so much. I spent time in D.C. — my husband's navy. So it's just hearing you talk about your journey and of course, I work in the financial services space. There's so many connections, connecting the dots in so many ways.

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07:48:26 - 08:08:24

Lauren Hong

So let's dig a little bit deeper. I feel like we need to have a whole conversation about these things that impact more or unpack them more. But let's dig specifically a little bit deeper for you're working with people and correct me if I'm wrong, who have really established their focus, right?

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08:08:24 - 08:19:19

Lauren Hong

And in this work you're then helping them, placing them for various speaking opportunities. Tell us a little bit more about that component of the business.

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08:19:21 - 08:47:24

Mary Carlson

Sure. So really when it came together, the four of us were like, hey, we want to do more of this. The whole idea behind it is to leverage each other's social networking ability, right? Because I'm a big believer in a blue ocean mentality. I think too often we sit in what I call lobsters in a bucket where we kind of tear each other down or little circles and fight over some little piddly thing and sort of look out and say, there is enough.

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08:48:01 - 09:19:12

Mary Carlson

There is enough work. There are enough people, there's enough space. And your voice needs to be heard, who you are. And so regardless of someone else speaking on your topic or doing what you do instead of fighting about it, let's garner together. Yeah, harness those assets to move forward. And so that's where that idea came from. And as we started to band together, what we started to find is some incredible speakers, Paul Richards, Sarah Newcomb, some really incredible people came and said we want to be a part of this.

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09:19:12 - 09:39:18

Mary Carlson

We said, well by all means, come, let's make it happen. Why not? So it quickly grew. We started last year with four. We ended last year with 32. And it grew so quickly that at one point last fall I was like, time out, I don't know what I'm doing.

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09:39:18 - 10:05:16

Mary Carlson

We've got to slow down because typically what happens in a speaker's arrangement or a setting is a speaker's bureau is really not interested in you until you're charging a minimum $10, $20,000 or more. And so if you think of a lot of speakers' bureaus, you're looking at the creme de la creme. You're looking at people who have studied this, who have done it, and who have spoken a lot like in houses of the world, right?

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10:05:16 - 10:25:21

Mary Carlson

Or if you go to the Washington Speaker's Bureau, that's like the who's who of every political act, president, or director or some sort. But the problem with those is what about those who have been charging nothing and they just want to improve, or those who are maybe charging a thousand bucks? No speaker bureau is interested in taking on someone charging 1,000 bucks.

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10:25:21 - 10:50:24

Mary Carlson

So I just felt like I was sitting in a speaker course in January, and I looked around and there were 60 people in this room, and I thought, all of them are great. There was an FBI hostage negotiator. There was a cartoonist. There was one other financial services person. I thought, oh, yeah, I can go to this FBI hostage negotiator and get help with my speech but he's not going to know the ins and outs of this topic.

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10:50:24 - 11:11:06

Mary Carlson

I'm going to have to spend more time explaining the topic than I am the stuff. And so the idea hit me of we need community. And that kind of added to that blue ocean mentality. Instead of being an elitist group that's like, well, unless you charge X amount, right, it becomes, hey, are you interested in this topic?

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11:11:06 - 11:30:19

Mary Carlson

Do you want to learn more? And are you willing to put forth the work it requires to go? And so that was born this year. The idea of a thought leadership community. And so that's what we have and that's what we grow. And really we have a lot of really different individuals. Some want to be speakers, some don't.

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11:30:21 - 11:54:22

Mary Carlson

Some want to just come and learn, some want to be better communicating with their clients. Some want to teach, create online courses, or teach in an online type format. We even have writers in the group of people who want to be better bloggers or podcasters. We do have a few of those. So at one point we had called it content creators, and I wanted to get away from that.

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11:54:22 - 12:14:19

Mary Carlson

And here's why I think it's in the DNA trend. Experts are everywhere, right? You just get a YouTube channel and call yourself an expert and suddenly you're an expert. The other thing is, there's so many influencers out there it's hard to tell an influencer to create content, right? And that's not what we're in the business of.

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12:14:21 - 12:51:04

Mary Carlson

We're in the business of thought leadership. And I think the important takeaway from this is it's not just blowing smoke up and saying, hey, this is something I read about one time but this is rich, developed, evidence based content we can implement. And so that's what this group has become, a really rich, diverse group that has various forms of communication — written, verbal, etc. — that is coming together and saying, hey, we created content before, how did that work?

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12:51:04 - 13:13:04

Mary Carlson

How did you have the lifespan of it? What did this look like? And what I find to be the most beneficial, and those in the group do as well, is it's not learning. There's no teacher, right? I'm not the Amy Dani that has all the answers but instead it's us learning from each other. It's that blue ocean of everyone has something to give and everyone has something to learn.

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13:13:04 - 13:23:18

Mary Carlson

And as we learn and grow together, we become stronger together than we are separate. And that's what that really is, that community and thought leadership.

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13:23:20 - 13:45:05

Lauren Hong

Oh my goodness. So I'm sure there's folks who are listening and thinking, I want to be in that thought leadership space or I'm being told I should be in that thought leadership space or they’re sort of pulled toward it. They feel a tug for that, right? To be able to better educate prospects and clients and just to really position themselves, especially if they really defined a target.

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13:45:11 - 13:56:20

Lauren Hong

Where do you recommend people even start with this? If, like you said, you can be a YouTuber, you could do a blog, you could do so many things, speaking, where should folks start?

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13:56:22 - 14:17:13

Mary Carlson

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say first off, start with where you feel most comfortable. There's so many who are teaching great things on video or how-to bloggers will take a course on it. I don't care if you take a public speaking 101 from your local university, get a little interest and get your feet wet, try something new out.

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14:17:13 - 14:45:28

Mary Carlson

It's expanding those horizons. I'm a lifelong learner, and I find many of those in the group are just constantly learning. Some are far in their career and almost ready to retire but they want to continue teaching. And so that's what's cool about it. Now what we do inside the community is help people take them from where they're at and add a little more value. Bring everything you have is essentially what I say and see if we can't add to it because of that collective wisdom together.

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14:46:03 - 15:02:25

Mary Carlson

And so by all means, we want you. If you're a financial planner and just want better communication skills and how to communicate maybe better through your newsletter or better on video, we've got that community now. We don't teach video one-on-one like some others do, but we will refer you to those groups.

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15:02:25 - 15:29:19

Mary Carlson

We also offer discounts because we have that ability to offer the services we need. So we're not speaker coaches, we don't do speaker training ourselves but we have the ability to collectively come together and say, yeah, there's three individuals to take your pick, and here's a discounted rate for that. So we have some cool opportunities inside the community just because we've come and banded together and said, let's see what we can build together.

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15:29:22 - 15:45:18

Lauren Hong

Yeah, I know whenever we're talking with folks, sometimes I think it's just like, what's the most natural? If you don't like writing and you feel like you're like, where do we even start? Then maybe you explore something else. But if you've got that tug and that pull to be able to lean into it, you’ve got to listen to that, right?

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15:45:18 - 16:03:05

Lauren Hong

When we talk about thought leaders, you can't just do one blog post and then all of a sudden you're a thought leader or something like that. How do you define thought leadership? When it comes to either frequency or it’s around a subject matter expert, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your thinking.

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16:03:07 - 16:05:23

Lauren Hong

And the group's thinking around thought leadership.

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16:05:25 - 16:31:00

Mary Carlson

Absolutely. So we purposely call it a thought leadership group because we know what we thought. Leaders are created over time. It's a lot of work to get there. And that's not everyone's bailiwick. But I think it's really important to recognize thought leadership as it goes in. And so one of the things we've started to recognize over time and realize is one, let's go back to experts.

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16:31:00 - 16:55:14

Mary Carlson

Experts really since the rise of YouTube. It used to look on it like, hey, you've got great certifications, you must be an expert in that field. And we're just seeing it watered down between the influencer world and the ability to get degrees and certifications. And I mean fly by night stuff. So this idea of just being an expert really isn't enough, right?

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16:55:14 - 17:11:20

Mary Carlson

And so experts teach you what you should do versus a thought leader is someone who sees the future and breaks it down to envision how you can get to that area.

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17:11:22 - 17:14:01

Lauren Hong

Yeah to frame it, but keep going. Yes.

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17:14:04 - 17:34:00

Mary Carlson

Well, whether you think that or not, right? Let's use Bob Veres. Bob Veres has been a thought leader in this business for decades. And so we're not pretending to make everyone a Bob Veres after this. But what we are saying is what gives you particular insight, and how can you maybe be a visionary for your own clients?

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17:34:02 - 17:54:18

Mary Carlson

But it can be at a very large level, like a Michael Kitces or a Bob Veres where you're helping tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. But it could also be how do you better serve those you help every day and that takes skill because it requires good communication skills. 

17:54:21 - 18:19:23

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Mary Carlson

Like you, I use those two examples. Bob and Michael are incredible writers. They're incredibly able minds. And so how can maybe you take one skill that's a weak skill for you and strengthen it just little by little? And by adding this component of a helpful community, that helps strengthen that thought leadership. So we're there to create thought leadership in a space we want to see thrive.

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18:19:23 - 18:46:26

Mary Carlson

We want to see variation. We want to see not just variety in how financial advisors look and who they serve but also in how we think and how we do financial planning, right? And we think that comes from a broad scope, from with a lot of different voices and a lot of different input, and yet it will look different in every single person's practice.

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18:46:26 - 18:54:25

Mary Carlson

And that's the coolest part, is how you implement it. It's going to be different. And that's okay. That's good. We want that.

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18:54:28 - 19:14:08

Lauren Hong

Love it. I also really appreciate the learning model you have created, and that it's collaborative and you've got that push and pull versus kind of the preaching to. So hats off to you. I'm sure there's pull just from your numerous amounts of speaking and being in the classroom and years of experience there.

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19:14:11 - 19:21:06

Lauren Hong

I appreciate that too. Do you guys have a forum? Are you just meeting in person or Zoom or how does that work?

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19:21:09 - 19:43:04

Mary Carlson

No. Great question. So we use a circle community. So it's an online platform. It's a community. We do a lot of virtual opportunities as well. And they just have a lot of communication ability. We haven't had an in-person yet. Occasionally, several of us will meet up at a conference. But what we really like is this new age ability to connect people.

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19:43:04 - 20:03:24

Mary Carlson

Literally. We have people in this thought leadership who are all over the world. And that's the other cool part about financial behavior is whether you're in England or South Africa or Australia. Yes, behavior is about people. We're going to tax law, right? Tax law is going to be dead in the water, totally different.

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20:03:25 - 20:31:27

Mary Carlson

But yet when you really get into the cycle of money and how people interact, we're human at the base level, whether you're in Asia or whether you're in South America. It's about how people work regardless of language or lack of money or more money, right? So we also don't differentiate on ultra-high-net worth versus emerging, middle market, or low income or whatever, everyone.

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20:31:27 - 20:52:04

Mary Carlson

And that's why I think the power of this group is there are so many different speakers who speak to all and we need more of that. But whoever your target market is is going to look different. And that's good. Because these are important messages that need to get out to the world to change the world.

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20:52:04 - 21:03:27

Mary Carlson

That and we believe through a speech or through the written word or through video — that's how you change the world little by little by little. By helping yourself and inspiring people around you.

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21:03:29 - 21:19:19

Lauren Hong

I love that in the force of bringing it together. Oh my goodness, I feel like we could talk for such a long time. This is a fascinating topic. Not to mention, I know you can speak on a number of topics. You have quite an impressive portfolio for a variety of topics you speak on and the group and what have you.

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21:19:19 - 21:28:04

Lauren Hong

So where can folks learn more? Where should we go if we want to learn more about everything we've been chatting about today?

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21:28:07 - 21:47:12

Mary Carlson

I love it. Yeah. Go to keynote Dot financial. So k-e-y-n-o-t-e dot financial. So if you are hosting an event and let me pause right there on this part, this is primarily what we do with clients is help you get a client or get a speaker at your event. So that could be a chapter.

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21:47:14 - 22:12:10

Mary Carlson

That could be a large conference. It could be a small conference. It can even be client events. And so think about wanting to add value to your clients, what do speakers love? Doing these intimate events where clients are touched. Because our speakers can speak not only to B2B but also that B2C side. And so we'd love to work with you on any of those realms.

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22:12:12 - 22:29:23

Mary Carlson

So you can go there, you can see our list of speakers. We constantly are updating topics and ideas. And if you're like, hey, Mary, I don't have a clue, reach out to me, let's have a call and I'll help you find the right fit for your speakers because the ones you're seeing on the website are really the tip of the iceberg.

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22:29:23 - 22:53:11

Mary Carlson

We've got a lot more great minds behind the scene. If you're interested in learning more about this but don't really have an event, go to our education page. And on that education page we offer monthly webinars, and I'm really excited to announce next year we'll be offering longer term workshops. So right now we do webinars and book studies, which are very popular.

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22:53:13 - 23:12:11

Mary Carlson

And we're going to start offering workshops that will be smaller broken down chunks. I'm showing you exactly how to do something and how to implement it rather than just a one-hour webinar takeaway. So be on the lookout for that. And if you're like me, I'm still wanting more, then join our community. We would love to have you.

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23:12:11 - 23:38:18

Mary Carlson

And so that would be our community tab and just jump in there. If you're like, I have no idea where to start, just get on my calendar. And we'd love to talk to you, and see where you're at in your journey. But we're really excited about talking about what we know. It really started out where I began, if I came to Washington, D.C. to change the world, because I feel the information we know inside is so important, it's so valuable, and so many people need this.

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23:38:20 - 24:03:09

Mary Carlson

And so now it's fun to look back 20 years later and say, wow, this is how I believe we are going to change the world, and it's not going to be me by myself. It's going to be a whole ocean of us together saying these are really important and we want to change your life. Whether it's B2B, B2C, or you're helping hundreds or thousands at a time.

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24:03:09 - 24:10:12

Mary Carlson

And so that's the exciting part behind it. So go to our website, check it out, or just jump on my calendar. And I'd love to have a conversation with you.

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24:10:14 - 24:25:26

Lauren Hong

Oh my goodness, Mary, thank you so much. This was such a fun conversation and so many good insights, right? For folks who are looking to get involved, there are a number of ways, or looking to bring a speaker and also just tips. So thank you for sharing your knowledge and also just your passion for the work and what you do for this community.

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24:25:28 - 24:31:24

Mary Carlson

Thanks for having me on, Lauren. It's been great.

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We talked with Catherine Tindall about:

• Why planning, forecasting, and analysis are essential components in building an effective tax strategy
• Key tax considerations for advisors and firms as year-end approaches to help optimize income taxes and future growth
• Why working with a tax professional who understands the advisory space — and knowing the right questions to ask — can help enhance an advisor's CPA relationship, experience, and outcomes

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About Catherine Tindall:

Catherine Tindall, CPA, is the founder and head tax strategist at Dominion Enterprise Services and host of the podcast “Financial Advisors Want to Know.” Specializing in helping RIAs, independent broker-dealers, and other 1099 financial advisors, Catherine goes beyond routine income tax return filing to offer proactive planning that supports growth and expansion. Observing a gap in strategic tax analysis and planning, Catherine takes a client-focused, holistic, and proactive approach to tax strategies — the opposite of legacy CPA firms — to help advisors and firms grow more efficiently and achieve their current and long-term goals.

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Featured Resources 

• Catherine Tindall, CPA on LinkedIn
• Financial Advisors Want to Know Podcast
• Dominion Enterprise Services 
• Financial Advisors Success Podcast with Michael Kitces

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Enjoyed This? You’ll Also Love:

• Business Growth Tips for Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Financial Services Business Owners
• Using a Coach Mindset to Unlock Your Full Leadership Potential
• How to Navigate Financial Services Compliance in 2024

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Full Audio Transcript:

00:00:00 - 00:25:18

Lauren Hong

All right. You guys are in for a treat. We have Catherine Tindall joining us today. She is a CPA, specifically working with advisors, and I'm excited for her to share a little bit more about her story. I should say, not just advisors, independent registered advisors, independent broker-dealers, and other 1099 financial advisors. What is your background?

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00:25:18 - 00:29:09

Lauren Hong

How did you pick this space? We'll just dive in.

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00:29:12 - 00:59:13

Catherine Tindall

Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Lauren. So it's funny because I'm a second-generation CPA. My parents had a tax practice growing up. And I always knew I wanted to go into tax once I was in college and had gone through different things. In my firms, specifically when I worked for other CPA firms, I was pretty dissatisfied with the model of service delivery a lot of the time, because they were more interested in getting forms executed than actually looking at what is the client experience in relationships.

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00:59:13 - 01:28:19

Catherine Tindall

And so when I started my firm, five years ago now, a big part of that was wanting to switch the service delivery model. So our firm has always been really focused on planning first and advisory work first, and tax compliance work second. And then over the course of our firm's experience, I realized my favorite clients I was working with were financial advisors because they were growing quickly.

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01:28:19 - 02:06:17

Catherine Tindall

They understood it. They like strategy. They want to understand, and for them, the income tax piece is really significant. It's a really big cash flow hit. It's hard to manage. There's not a lot of ways to shield it and they want to be proactive about it. So we decided to niche into just working for advisors because I realized there wasn't really anybody leading in the space for serving them in this capacity of doing the tax strategy work for their firms as they're growing, and they have really niche and weird issues. Some of them have statutory W-2s, and a lot of them are subject to FINRA rules that regulate how they’re able to recognize income

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02:06:17 - 02:23:05

Catherine Tindall

and where they can record it, and entities they're trying to buy other people's books of business. And there's different ways you can structure that. And there's just a lot of dynamic activity going on, especially to that. They grow really fast so the income tax piece becomes really challenging really quickly.

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02:23:08 - 02:43:09

Lauren Hong

Super interesting. And then I also can appreciate too, that you have that focus on customer experience and so many firms also. That's really important to them. And that high-touch relationship, so you made that a part of your business versus just the transactional component just feels like there's a good fit there. 

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02:43:09 - 03:05:18

Lauren Hong

Okay. So tell us a little bit more like what else is unique and working with these firms? I know you mentioned some other pieces. Are there any unique periods firms should be aware of when they're thinking about that growth phase — they might be a 1099 or just getting started to really expanding and growing their firm? What are some of those key milestones advisors should be thinking about?

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03:05:20 - 03:25:19

Catherine Tindall

Yeah, I think the big one I always take away when I have these conversations with advisors is a lot of the time I ask them, okay, what does five years from now look like for you? And it's so funny, they are so good at doing this for their clients. But I think for themselves it can be really challenging because I ask them are you just trying to build up a lifestyle practice?

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03:25:19 - 03:43:07

Catherine Tindall

Are you trying to build something big? And it really depends on what that initial goal is to then what the trajectory of the firm is going to look like. And then also when we're going to do tax strategy work, what that looks like, because I'll give a very different recommendation to somebody who tells me I read 10X is better than 2X.

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03:43:14 - 04:04:03

Catherine Tindall

And we're going to go to a billion under management. Well, we're going to have a very different strategy of how we're going to get there versus — I had a client prospect come in a couple weeks ago who we're working with going through an assessment, and he wants a lifestyle practice. He's going to eventually get up to a top-line revenue of about a million, million a half, something like that.

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04:04:03 - 04:22:00

Catherine Tindall

And that's where he wants to end up. And he doesn't want to hire a bunch of people. So we're taking a very different approach. So I think for a lot of advisors, there's an initial point where they're kind of in the same pack together, where they're in that building stage, and then some of them will just stay on the lifestyle firm side, and then others will be I want to grow.

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04:22:00 - 04:41:02

Catherine Tindall

I want to build an empire under me. For that first threshold they're together in the same pack. The biggest initial question is usually entity structure, because a lot of them will be going from maybe they were somewhere else where they were a W-2 advisor, and then now they're okay, I can bring my book with me.

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04:41:02 - 04:57:07

Catherine Tindall

Hopefully you can bring some of your book with you. And then it turns into, okay, when do I get to the point where doing something like an S Corporation makes sense? Or if I'm really going to have an aggressive M&A strategy, do I need to have a more complex entity structure? Am I going to have junior advisors under me?

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04:57:07 - 05:05:04

Catherine Tindall

Am I going to have partners? How am I actually going to go through the growth phase and then getting your entity structure to reflect that so you can grow into it? 

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05:05:05 - 05:22:05

Lauren Hong

Super interesting. That makes sense logically just for how businesses grow. But I think for the advisory community, if it's an LLC or like you said an S Corp or however the cards fall, it would probably be much different strategically depending on the goals. So that makes a lot of sense.

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05:22:05 - 05:41:07

Lauren Hong

So tell me a little bit more — shedding the light on so many different firms. And I assume that's one of the reasons people are coming to you. You've kind of seen the behind the scenes. How much are you using that to sort of guide decision-making or is it just super unique for each firm and where they're at?

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05:41:09 - 06:02:07

Catherine Tindall

Oh, it's really dependent on their particular situation. But it's also industry things. It's really funny the things I learn in certain cases, because we're so specific in the niche we work with, we get to use the same material in all the client relationships. And so I was having a conversation with somebody earlier and they were struggling with something.

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06:02:07 - 06:18:04

Catherine Tindall

And I said, oh, well, this other client we had used this vendor for this and had a really good experience — do you want an introduction? And it's a lot of that kind of a thing. Or we had a client who had the same issue with Northwestern Mutual and the way they were recording income or whatever.

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06:18:10 - 06:32:21

Catherine Tindall

And this is how we were able to structure the entity to make it work for them and also be compliant with the IRS rules. And so just being able to have those experiences of, well, this is what we did in a previous situation and this is how we were able to make it work.

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06:32:26 - 06:56:05

Catherine Tindall

It's kind of similar to yours. We're able to go more quickly through those decisions. But I think with a lot of strategy work, it's so integrated with people's personal lives too. Like in the assessment process. For us, it's really a lot of conversation around really personal things because it all ties into what's going on.

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06:56:07 - 07:14:06

Catherine Tindall

Just the way your tax code is structured, it's really personal. I always joked earlier on in my career, if you were a really creepy person, becoming a tax professional's actually a way to get the most information about people than probably anybody else. Maybe financial advisors get more information.

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07:14:08 - 07:14:18

Lauren Hong

A little bit.

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07:14:18 - 07:36:18

Catherine Tindall

But we know about the medical bills, we know about the kid's tuition. We know where the kids are going to college. We kind of know everything about people. And it's because your income tax touches every part of your life. So it does end up being really unique. But in a lot of ways, especially with the different institutions people are working with — we've gotten used to now, okay, you're with LPL, this is how we're going to be seeing things.

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07:36:21 - 07:41:23

Catherine Tindall

You just get used to some of those nuances and then how to navigate it to make it more tax- efficient. 

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07:41:23 - 07:58:27

Lauren Hong

Super interesting. We feel a similar thing; we've worked with LPL firms before and we're familiar with their compliance processes, so on and so forth. Or you're alluding to that kind of quarterback who can help make those referrals because you've got those interconnections or you've seen other similar examples.

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07:58:27 - 08:19:12

Lauren Hong

So you can help shed the light before someone gets there, to help with that proactive decision- making. So I hear you, I think it's one of the unique things that makes it really valuable. And working with an outsourced partner that really knows your space. So you mentioned earlier you just really enjoyed working with this demographic.

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08:19:15 - 08:34:20

Lauren Hong

Because you ended up working with this demographic, did you just sort of learn along the way and deepen your roots in this industry? How have you learned about all the ins and outs? Because I do feel like this world is very — I mean, you can't just jump into it, right?

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08:34:20 - 08:43:20

Lauren Hong

There's plenty of jargon. And in connection, tell me a little bit about your journey in finding this hub and really kind of learning the ins and outs.

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08:43:22 - 09:10:25

Catherine Tindall

Yeah. I guess for me, I've had advisor clients for a lot of my career. So I’m just used to working with them in that capacity. And then really just diving in, listening to podcasts and just engaging with things, finding thought leaders and listening to them and watching the different kerfuffle that goes on, like the CFP Board advertisement thing that's going on right now.

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09:10:28 - 09:29:27

Catherine Tindall

And it's just one of those things where once you find a niche of people you like, you just kind of get into it. And if you're curious and genuinely, I think for me it comes from a place of the better educated I can be holistically, the better my niche advice, my specific slice of things on the tax side is going to be better advice.

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09:30:02 - 09:53:19

Catherine Tindall

Because what I deal with is kind of the remnant of everything else that's going on in their situation. Like the tax at the end of the year is a reflection of their activity, of what's going on. And so if I don't have a more holistic approach when I'm just talking about this tail of the dog, like in order for me to do a good job on the tail of the dog, I kind of have to understand the whole dog, right?

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09:53:19 - 10:14:21

Catherine Tindall

So that's been my approach with it and the curiosity and running my own podcast and those kinds of things come from that place of me knowing as much as I can about my clients and what they care about and what's important to them besides just the piece I touched, which is the tax advisory, it's just going to make that so much better.

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10:14:24 - 10:33:00

Catherine Tindall

It's so much more robust and having those deeper relationships with them, being in the cockpit with them, trying to advise them. And I see so many tax professionals where they're not genuinely interested in their clients and they're really great at tax but they're not genuinely interested in the client and more of a transaction.

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10:33:02 - 10:51:11

Catherine Tindall

And so it ends up you give bad advice. And so I see different maneuvers that happen. For instance, people being told, hey, you got a big tax bill, why don't you get an SUV? Because then you can get a big write-off. Well, I don't like that advice.

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10:51:11 - 11:11:12

Catherine Tindall

Why don't you invest into a coaching program? Because that's going to produce an ROI. And I know if you can work with this coach, this coach or this coach, this is about what you could expect on an ROI. You'll get a deduction this year but then you'll defer the taxes into the growth in the future years you'll get from doing this versus an SUV, which is just all depreciation.

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11:11:14 - 11:23:02

Catherine Tindall

So it's stuff like that where I think once you really get to know, okay, what's the end game you're really trying to drive toward. It just makes the advice so much better. And I'm sure you've seen the same thing on the marketing side.

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11:23:02 - 11:24:12

Lauren Hong

Like literally, I mean.

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11:24:12 - 11:25:06

Catherine Tindall

Big difference.

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11:25:09 - 11:40:22

Lauren Hong

We see sometimes firms will come to us and they're really hungry for organic and they want it now and they're getting pitches like that or just drinking from a firehose of you pay X number of dollars and ad dollars and this and that, and all of a sudden you're going to have this flood of clients. It just doesn't happen like that.

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11:40:22 - 12:05

Lauren Hong

You're still dealing with humans, lifecycles, trust building. So it's a balance, right? I mean, maybe you could have something like that if you've got a huge base built, and you've got a full funnel, pieces in place but there are absolutely cautionary points on all of it.

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12:07 - 12:20:08

Lauren Hong

Okay. We've got a little bit of time left. So as we look ahead, we're toward the end of the year going into the next year, what should firms be thinking about from the tax side or what are you trying to make sure is on top of folks’ minds as they go into the end of year and beginning of next year?

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12:20:10 - 12:36:02

Catherine Tindall

So I'd say a big one is — and it will be completed by the time this comes out — for advisors who are listening to this and are interested, I have a guide that goes through all the major questions I get from advisors, like should I be an S Corp? Just all the things I'm constantly hearing from people.

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12:36:02 - 12:51:19

Catherine Tindall

I'm putting it into a guide people can get. So if you're interested in that, just send me a DM on LinkedIn and I will send it. I'm not going to put it online on our website or whatever, just send me a DM and I'll send it to you. It's going to be partially like what we use internally in the firm too.

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12:51:22 - 13:22:05

Catherine Tindall

And my user on there is just Catherine Tindall, CPA. You can find me and ping me for that. That's going to be a much more comprehensive answer than what I can give you right now. But so basically, looking into next year, everybody's talking about election stuff and my crystal ball is imperfect. I think a lot of the things people are worried about, we just won't be able to tell until we get farther in in terms of things that are going to be sunsetting from the TCG act like, is the QBI deduction going to go away, all of those kinds of issues?

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13:22:05 - 13:40:26

Catherine Tindall

It's just too hard to tell. Like the fact we don't have a strong sense of who's even going to be in the Oval Office. It's just going to be hard on the tax policy side. What I have been seeing is a number of tax proposals that get pushed out there and sound bites that sound good. 

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13:41:04 - 14:04:04

Catherine Tindall

Are they actually going to turn into tax policy, yes or no? So the things people I think actually should be paying attention to are the parts they can control. A common issue I see with advisory firms is that a lot of them really want to have tax planning work done and they just do not have a CPA partner who has a deep understanding of what their requests are..

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14:04:04 - 14:32:14

Catherine Tindall

I had an advisor this week who had asked his CPA for two years in a row, should I be an S Corporation, and the CPA was like, no, I don't think so. And that was the level of planning that went into that versus when we actually dug into his situation, he had wasted over $100,000 over the course of a couple of years, which was meaningful money for him and his practice size.

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14:36:09 - 14:37:21

Lauren Hong

Regardless of practice size.

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14:37:23 - 14:55:27

Catherine Tindall

Especially when it's just waste. It's tax waste. Absolutely. He was like, well I asked the CPA; is this malpractice? And I asked if he actually did a real engagement for you or did he just think it was a casual conversation, not realizing that actually we should do some analysis here.

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14:55:27 - 15:24:14

Catherine Tindall

Like let me run some projections, let me run some numbers. Let's do a reasonable comp study and see, because that's one of the core issues with corporations is you have the owners have to pay themselves a reasonable compensation. Let's do some math. Like let's see what it would actually be. And so I think for a lot of advisors, that's something you can control — if you haven't had tax planning work done that's a formal engagement, you should be signing up for it. I think a lot of time they will ask for that from tax professionals.

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15:24:17 - 15:44:19

Catherine Tindall

And the tax professionals just don't see what they do a lot of the time. And our firm is different. We're completely structured that way. But if you're happy with your existing tax professional and need to advance that forward, sometimes it's having that conversation of, hey, I need more. 

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15:44:23 - 16:02:17

Catherine Tindall

They just think they're being hired to get the forms filed on time, rather than looking in the future, into what you've got going on. The number of times I've had advisors come back to me and they're like, yeah, they gave me estimated payments that were 20% of what they should have been because we grew double this year.

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16:02:19 - 16:20:28

Catherine Tindall

And I called them and said they never did anything. So it's like those are things you can control. If you're not having a responsive relationship, make sure you've set that relationship up correctly for your growth and for what you've got going on so you're not walking into a surprise at the end of the year.

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16:21:00 - 16:37:24

Catherine Tindall

Because I always tell everybody, the carriage turns into a pumpkin at midnight, December 31. That tax bill is set. There's a couple of maneuvers you could do with retirement planning but for the most part that tax bill is basically set. And so it's not a mystery.

‍

16:37:24 - 16:47:09

Catherine Tindall

You should know what that is. And it's not something where even during the year forecasting into, we can do math, we can do forecasting and things like that.

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16:48:01 - 17:10:07

Catherine Tindall

And so I think for a lot of advisors, my piece of advice going into the end of years is pay to have some projection work done, figure out if you've had significant change, figure out what that's going to be so you can cash flow forecast for that. And so if you're getting big quarterly brokerage checks, you know how much to push aside, there's a plan there; you have a plan on how you're making your estimated payments.

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17:10:09 - 17:21:24

Catherine Tindall

And if you're going to be making a change going into tax season or a change into a relationship, now's a good time to do that. Because then if there's other issues, you have the time to correct them before the end of the year.

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17:21:25 - 17:40:14

Lauren Hong

Such good advice — that forward thinking, not just looking at the kind of the business plan, right? Which I think a lot of times folks are doing end of year, thinking strategically about the new year. But it's the other parts of the business that, well, this just taps directly into the business plan. But it's a component that's worthwhile to take that time and energy to look ahead on.

‍

17:40:14 - 17:55:03

Lauren Hong

Well, this is wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing so many good case studies and just examples of how you have been able to help advisors and firms with projections and just supporting them with where they're at. So we can find you at Dominion dot CPA. Did I get that right?

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17:55:03 - 18:12:01

Catherine Tindall

Yeah, that's the website. Best way to get me though is LinkedIn. I'm really active on there. So for people who are interested in the work we're doing, send me a message. I'm always interested in learning what's going on in your world and being able to provide resources that'll help people get where they need to go in terms of questions they have.

‍

18:12:01 - 18:17:18

Catherine Tindall

Hey, I heard this; I get a lot of those kinds of emails. Hey, I heard this.

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18:17:21 - 18:32:22

Lauren Hong

Hey, you know, we do that too. I watched this video. Somebody told me I should be doing this. I'm like, okay, let's take a pause. Do we really need to do that shiny object? Unpack it, like you said. That's awesome, Catherine. Thank you so much. Always good to chat with you. I appreciate your time.

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18:32:29 - 18:35:09

Catherine Tindall

Yeah. Likewise. Lauren, thanks so much for having me on.

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18:35:11 - 18:41:02

Lauren Hong

Of course.

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We talked with Brandon about:

• How early financial education can help service members avoid common money pitfalls
• The importance of understanding and maximizing military benefits, available resources, and financial tools to grow wealth
• How financial advisors can effectively reach the military community to support members as clients

About Brandon Lovingier:

Brandon Lovingier, ChFC®, MQFP® aka The Enlisted Money Guy™, served over 19 years in the Army — including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. After navigating his own financial challenges, he became committed to helping other service members avoid similar pitfalls he experienced and achieve financial freedom. Through his Enlisted Money website, blog, and educational videos, Brandon shares practical resources and strategies to empower the military community to make smart financial decisions.

‍

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Featured Resources 

• Enlisted Money
• Enlisted Money Confessions
• Enlisted Money Success Stories
• MilMoneyCon
• ChooseFI Military Facebook Group
• Military Financial Advisors Association

Enjoyed This? You’ll Also Love

• A Journey from Army Officer to Fee-Only Financial Planning through Reading and Teaching with Ian Gates
• Scale Your Financial Services Team By Hiring Military Spouses With Instant Teams
• Financial Literacy: The First Step in Becoming Your Own Money Boss with Jamie Bosse

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Full Audio Transcript:

00:00:00 - 00:08:11

Lauren Hong

All right, Brandon, thank you so much for joining us today.

‍

00:08:13 - 00:13:08

Brandon Lovingier

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be on the show and get to chat with you a little bit here.

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00:13:10 - 00:24:17

Lauren Hong

Yeah. So, we're going to get into it, and I am excited to hear about — is it enlisted money guide.com? Is that the website?

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00:24:19 - 00:26:16

Brandon Lovingier

It just enlisted money.com.

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00:26:18 - 00:38:21

Lauren Hong

Okay. So we were just chatting a minute ago. How in the world did you get in the space? What made you look for this? Tell us about who you are, your background, and Enlisted Money.

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00:38:24 - 01:02:15

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah, I'm a little bit all over the place but long story short, I was terrible with money and ended up realizing in a cold, stinky tent in Afghanistan that financing a brand-new pickup truck maybe wasn't the best idea and kind of realized that I could have almost bought the truck I had before that I loved in cash for what I'm paying in interest on this truck.

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01:02:15 - 01:25:02

Brandon Lovingier

So that led me down a whole long journey, through blogs and all that. Ended up doing the Total Money Makeover thing, the Dave Ramsey deal, getting out of debt. Fast forward, all that change has been really excellent in our life. And I wanted to help other people. And when I finished my bachelor's degree, I kind of had a void there.

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01:25:02 - 01:42:20

Brandon Lovingier

I was used to getting up at 4:30 in the morning, doing my studies and all that kind of stuff. And after I finished my bachelor's degree, I just started reading a lot of personal finance and getting into it and pretty soon I was like, I'm kind of at the end of all the 1.0 stuff, so where's the 2.0?

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01:42:20 - 01:56:14

Brandon Lovingier

The 3.0? And so that's when I really started kind of getting into just digging deeper and ended up looking into coaching, planning, all that kind of stuff. So that was really kind of the nexus for me, getting into the space in the beginning.

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01:56:16 - 02:07:01

Lauren Hong

So tell me about the 2.0 version. Have you been to it? I’d love to hear about how you unpack that and how you're supporting other people and that side of things.

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02:07:04 - 02:29:25

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah, I think there's so much stuff, especially whenever you get into a lot of blogs and stuff like that, it's like save more, spend less. What? Whatever. I got that. I got Roth versus traditional but why? And then I’m like a little kid — why is it like that and why is this like that and why is that like that?

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02:29:25 - 02:50:13

Brandon Lovingier

And what is this thing? So just the more threads you pull, the more questions you have. The internet has some ideas but there's nothing concrete. And so that was where I was like, I'm gonna have to go back to school to really understand this stuff because I wanted to help other people but I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about.

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02:50:13 - 03:09:19

Brandon Lovingier

I needed that confidence to make sure I wasn't giving bad advice. And so I originally looked at coaching and it seems like that's not really that well regulated. You don't have to have anything to be a coach, or you could do this AFC thing, or you could do, you know, whatever.

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03:09:19 - 03:36:26

Brandon Lovingier

But then I kind of stumbled into financial planning. I literally had no idea there was a profession called financial planning. And then before I knew it, I found a scholarship through the American College, applied for that and fast-forward, I've started a pair of planning businesses, started a couple different blogs, and I'm just doing stuff and trying to help people like me.

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03:36:29 - 04:02:14

Brandon Lovingier

Well, preferably somebody who was like me when I was 18, before I made all the mistakes. So that's really kind of what I'm trying to do and circumvent people having to learn the hard way. I've already made those mistakes. There's a lot of us who have already made those mistakes. And so I'm trying to kind of share what I know, and share other stories as well so people can see that and go, oh, I don't have to do it that way.

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04:02:14 - 04:08:25

Brandon Lovingier

I can do it a different way and have a much better life. So that's really kind of what I'm trying to get into as far as all that goes.

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04:08:27 - 04:20:13

Lauren Hong

So tell me a little bit more about who you're specifically targeting. Are you exclusively working with the military community? Or tell us a little bit more about that.

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04:20:15 - 04:43:14

Brandon Lovingier

So basically for my personal project, Enlisted Money, I'm trying to find PFC Lovingiers of today and help them out. But also, interestingly enough, I've been starting to write about preparing for my own retirement. And so I've been getting a lot of good feedback and a lot of questions and dialog with that.

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04:43:14 - 05:02:10

Brandon Lovingier

So I've been kind of leaning into that a little bit here lately. But ultimately I'm trying to get that information out. So literally if I could find somebody who’s coming into the military and be like, here's the information you need — do this, don't do that. And you'll never have to worry about money.

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05:02:10 - 05:13:04

Brandon Lovingier

And that's kind of what I'm trying to do. I even wrote the first draft for my book this summer. So hopefully I'll get that going too.

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05:13:06 - 05:21:29

Lauren Hong

Wow. Congrats. That's a huge undertaking. Yeah. Any sneak peeks you want to share? 

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05:22:01 - 05:45:14

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah. The working title is Enlist to Wealth, The Enlisted Service Members Guide to Avoiding Money Mistakes and Living a Better Life. I think that’s the subtitle now. I finished it in June, and then just said, I'm going to set it aside and I'm going to come back with fresh eyes later on.

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05:45:16 - 05:59:11

Brandon Lovingier

And plus I'm in kind of a busy season. I'm still on active duty. And so, I'm doing all this stuff in the margins before work, over lunch, at night. So I have to pace myself a little bit.

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05:59:13 - 06:14:02

Lauren Hong

Yeah, that's totally fair. Well, it's kind of nice that you're still in the thick of it because I'm sure you're having conversations and things are coming up so you definitely have your ear to the ground with all of that. But early congrats on the book. Do you have a timeline for launch?

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06:14:04 - 06:34:23

Brandon Lovingier

I don't. I'm just giving myself a little bit of space and taking my time with it. I'm not going to let it sit there forever. You know there's a tendency to be like, I could always make it better and all that, but my plan is to this winter, dig in and do my own first self-edit.

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06:34:25 - 06:42:23

Brandon Lovingier

And then save up a little bit of money to pay for an editor and kind of go through that process. So hopefully about the time I retire I'll have that ready.

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06:42:23 - 07:21

Lauren Hong

That's so awesome. Okay. So since you've been going through this whole process of writing the book and figuring this out, and then also just like your own personal experiences, are there any stories like the one you shared earlier about how you bought your truck?  

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07:23 - 07:18:08

Lauren Hong

Are there any stories that would help listeners, kind of like lessons learned if they were in your shoes? It was a great example about the truck. Any other kind of thoughts like, hey, if you do X, Y, and Z or be aware of this big red flag, what would you like to tell folks?

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07:18:10 - 07:45:16

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah, really the biggest thing is just understanding what pay and benefits you have and what you can actually do with that. And being really cautious about that. There's so many people out there who really prey upon service members and go, hey, look, you've got this steady paycheck. You're making the big bucks now or whatever and then get you to finance everything.

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07:45:16 - 07:59:29

Brandon Lovingier

I literally mean that. It’s kind of laughable now but I literally financed our wedding ring set at a place you could also buy subwoofers. So just to give you an idea of the kind of places that soldiers find themselves.

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07:59:29 - 08:03:12

Lauren Hong

It’s a real story, right? So go ahead.

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08:03:15 - 08:24:01

Brandon Lovingier

And as a recruiter, I got to see this a lot as a lot of us came from places where money management wasn't a thing because there was no money to manage. And so you're kind of in an uphill battle to a certain extent, at least with the enlisted folks.

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08:24:03 - 08:39:21

Brandon Lovingier

But getting back to stories and things like that, I actually have two pages on my website, one for Enlisted Money confessions and one for Enlisted Money success stories, just to be able to share those kinds of stories and things like that.

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08:39:21 - 08:57:26

Brandon Lovingier

So I don't have a lot of them out there yet but I'm starting to build up a few, I think. I just posted success story number five. And I think I'm up to confession number three or four. So we're getting there. I’m just trying to share that and let people know you're not alone.

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08:57:26 - 09:10:29

Brandon Lovingier

There's other people who are going through this or have gone through this. And, if you just take small, consistent action over time, you can do a lot with even the little pay you think you have there.

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09:10:29 - 09:26:16

Lauren Hong

So, with that, are there any good habits or takeaways or things you would say if you could go back to your former self and say? I’d love to hear that too.

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09:26:19 - 09:46:06

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is just understanding some of these things that are out there, and understanding the power of some of them, like for instance, when I joined, the only thing I remember from my brief on the TSP, which is our equivalent of a 401(k), is they're going to take money out of your check and you can't use it until you're 60.

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09:46:06 - 10:04:16

Brandon Lovingier

And I was like, hey man, I need this now. I don't know if you know much about my life but I need this cash now. And so I didn't invest anything in the TSP. Just by really dumb luck, I ended up starting a Roth IRA and putting 50 bucks a month in there.

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10:04:19 - 10:27:04

Brandon Lovingier

Before I knew it, there was $20,000 in there. And then it doubled, and it's continued to grow. I was like, man, if I would have done this, like 5% with my TSP from the get-go, I would have been in a much better spot.

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10:27:04 - 10:48:11

Brandon Lovingier

And I would have never missed the money. I spent money on cigarettes and everything else, and I never missed that money. If I would have put a little bit into something like that, I would have been in a much better position and I would have had a lot more confidence to leave the military sooner, if that was my choice.

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10:48:11 - 10:53:17

Brandon Lovingier

But I kind of always felt stuck, at least in the beginning part of my career. 

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10:53:20 - 11:10:27

Lauren Hong

Well, like you said, there's a lot of mixed messages. And then also, when you jump into the beginning part of your career, when you're thrown in, you're going for it, so you might be 18 but you're doing stuff — they throw you into the deep end of it.

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11:10:27 - 11:14:15

Lauren Hong

So there's that too. All of it.

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11:14:20 - 11:36:27

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah, definitely. And there's a book called “Scarcity” that I really like, and it talks about that a little bit too. When you have a lot of stuff going on and you're getting thrown into the deep end on many different fronts, you don't make the best choices because you're just doing everything fast and in a hurry.

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11:36:27 - 11:52:05

Brandon Lovingier

And there's so much information that's getting thrown at you. The way the military trained you a lot of times it's just drink from a fire hose. You get bombarded with all these mandatory trainings and you just become numb to it.

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11:52:05 - 12:05:06

Brandon Lovingier

And maybe it's good information. Maybe it's okay but you just end up going, this is too much. And I'll figure it out later. And then later comes and you're like, oh gosh, this isn't exactly where I wanted to be in life.

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12:05:08 - 12:23:05

Lauren Hong

Yeah, well, I appreciate what you're doing because by educating others who are willing to pick up the book or read the stories or listen, whatever it might be, hopefully you're cutting through the noise to be able to say these are decisions you don't want to make super quickly. These are the decisions you make to be smart for your long-term planning.

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12:23:08 - 12:43:15

Lauren Hong

So I appreciate that you're paying it forward in that way. Any other kind of thoughts you have for people who are at their 2.0? What things should they be thinking about at that point? Should they be talking with someone like yourself or what advice would you have for someone who maybe has done the Dave Ramsey, they've taken in these tips.

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12:43:15 - 12:47:26

Lauren Hong

And now they're ready to kind of go upstream.

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12:47:28 - 13:09:01

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah. I think that unless you want to do what I did to actually go back to school, there's a lot more resources available out there. The Military Financial Advisors Association is definitely one of them that's growing. I've got the MCV designation, the military qualified financial planner designation.

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13:09:03 - 13:29:26

Brandon Lovingier

So there's some grassroots efforts to create some of those next-level military-specific places you can go and you can turn to and get advice. And there is some advice on the options if you want to do that. There's a lot of different coaches and things that are available as well.

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13:29:28 - 13:55:28

Brandon Lovingier

Also another thing too. There are a lot of folks who just don't know they have some of these resources available, like having a personal financial counselor they can go to on post and pick their brain. That's literally their whole job, to answer questions, help you with a budget, talk you through the TSP, talk you through home buying, credit building, all those kinds of things.

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13:56:01 - 14:21:13

Brandon Lovingier

But just knowing that, getting the basics right, is the first thing. But then, once you have a little bit of — I like to call it Play-Doh — you can't make a great model if you don't have a lot of Play-Doh but once you have a little bit of Play-Doh built up and you can start making some cool stuff, then it's helpful to have somebody who’s been there before to say you might want to build this framework first before you start piling stuff over here and make it a mess.

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14:21:13 - 14:24:03

Brandon Lovingier

So yeah, that's kind of the way I think about it.

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14:24:05 - 14:43:21

Lauren Hong

Yeah. That's fair. I think sometimes there are so many resources for military personnel that it can also be overwhelming. And I often see too, if there's somebody who’s been through this or you can lean on, maybe they can just help connect that dot with the right resource to go to or what have you.

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14:43:23 - 15:12:07

Lauren Hong

Those are really good tips. And then any other kind of thoughts for folks who are listening in who might have a target market of working with the military and supporting them with making sure they're making smart money decisions? Any thoughts about how to reach that audience or things about how they communicate and talk with that demographic?

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15:12:09 - 15:40:25

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah. As far as financial professionals who want to serve the military community or think they might want to serve the military community, I would definitely first say get yourself out to ___________ at some point. I'm a huge fan. There’s a lot of wonderful people out there but there's a lot of different spots and things like that where you can find some other like-minded individuals; there's Choose Fi military Facebook group, things like that.

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15:40:25 - 15:57:11

Brandon Lovingier

There are some folks out there, good people. You just have to be cautious of folks who want to try and get you to replace all of your benefits with a particular policy of sorts, and things like that.

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15:57:11 - 16:21:17

Brandon Lovingier

So there's a lot of people who would rather have money to put into a product as opposed to letting you use your benefits. So people got to be cognizant of that, I guess. But if you're looking to get into this, I think that it’s really rewarding. And the military personal finance community is fairly small but the nicest and most welcoming group of people I've ever come across.

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16:21:17 - 16:25:10

Brandon Lovingier

I absolutely love this community. It's really awesome.

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16:25:12 - 16:42:06

Lauren Hong

So awesome. I really love hearing that. And thank you, among all the things you're doing in between writing a book, full-time active duty, and all the other pieces, you're running a website, all the things you have going on, just for taking the time to be able to share a little bit more behind the scenes of what you're doing to pay it forward.

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16:42:08 - 16:49:25

Lauren Hong

That's not easy to be able to squeeze out. And as you were saying earlier, in between everything that's going on. So we appreciate you sharing some insights today.

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16:49:28 - 16:59:16

Brandon Lovingier

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it. I love talking about this kind of stuff and yeah, if we can help somebody out then it's definitely worth a few minutes of my time.

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16:59:18 - 17:05:03

Lauren Hong

Well, thank you. And I'll just say like, go Chiefs there, a shoutout to your background as well.

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17:05:04 - 17:07:18

Brandon Lovingier

Thanks!

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17:07:20 - 17:11:01

Lauren Hong

Awesome. Well, thanks again. Have a great rest of your day.

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17:11:04 - 17:16:27

Brandon Lovingier

All right. Yep. You too. Thanks.

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We talked with Ellie Alexander and Josefina Terrera about:

• How simple website upkeep can keep your inbox from going spooky silent 
• Haunting compatibility issues and how keeping up with today’s “digital hygiene” like routine backups and testing can keep you from spooky surprises 
• Cross-platform compatibility and how to keep your brand materials looking their best no matter what program they’re viewed in 

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About Ellie and Josefina:

At Out & About Communications, Ellie and Josefina are dedicated to guiding clients to achieve their brand and digital goals. As design director, Ellie collaborates closely with clients to refine their brands and showcase what makes them unique. Her background spans traditional ad agencies, in-house branding, and boutique marketing, all of which have shaped her expertise and approach. Josefina serves as senior developer, crafting visually appealing and functional websites to meet client needs. Together, they bring creative precision and dedication to Out & About website projects, helping clients stand out and connect authentically.

‍‍

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Featured Resources 

• Ellie Alexander on LinkedIn
• Josefina Terrera on LinkedIn

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Enjoyed This? You’ll Also Love:  

• FAQs: When to Engage and How to Navigate Outsourced Marketing in Financial Services
• Website Redesigns: The Process Behind Building Websites for Financial Services Companies 
• Financial Services Branding: When and How Should You Redesign Your Company Logo?

‍

Full Audio Transcript:

00:00:00 - 00:22:21

Lauren Hong

All right. Welcome. We have a spooky on purpose podcast today for Halloween. Ellie, you are dressed very much in color. And Josephine, you’ve kind of got it going on. Maybe we should have worn costumes; that would have been fun.

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00:22:21 - 00:25:25

Josefina Terrera

I was going to bring a flashlight and a hoodie but decided against it.

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00:25:25 - 00:48:25

Lauren Hong

I've got a lot of princess gear around the house with kids. So many ways to dress up. Okay, so speaking of Halloween, we have seen some spooky things. We have some spooky case studies regarding website design — all kinds of things where you're like, oh, I didn't want that to happen.

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00:48:28 - 01:09:20

Lauren Hong

We're going to talk through some of those and how we can avoid them. So, Josefina, I'm going to pass it over to you because you have a pretty meaty case study you were able to pull up that I think really helps to connect the dots. If you're a small company or if you're a pretty large organization, you can be in the way of a digital threat.

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01:09:20 - 01:13:21

Lauren Hong

So, you want to share with folks?

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01:13:28 - 01:39:11

Josefina Terrera

Yeah, sure. Well, for me, I guess the spooky part is the things we cannot control and in our websites we cannot control what other people are doing. So I was howling about this story that happened in 2016, and I knew about it because it was all over the media. It involved many presidents and prime ministers.

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01:39:13 - 02:06:00

Josefina Terrera

It's called the Panama Papers Breach, and it's the largest breach documented, because it involved 11 million documents. I just read about it at the time and how all these people were involved with tax evasion and offshore activities. But as you know, I was reading recently that everything started with a WordPress website, from a law firm in Panama.

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02:06:02 - 02:33:03

Josefina Terrera

They had an outdated side and the plugin Slider Revolution, which is what you would use for your slideshows. And hackers were able to enter the site through that plugin. But it didn't stop there. They didn't have the 11 million documents on the website. They had them on the server, which they were sharing with the website.

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02:33:05 - 02:58:01

Josefina Terrera

Well, everything else is history. People went to jail and whatnot. But it does leave some very important takeaway lessons from other people's mistakes. Number one, keep your website up to date, keep your plugins up to date. Plugins are somebody else's code and you don't know what they're doing.

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02:58:01 - 03:29:18

Josefina Terrera

You don't know they're maintaining it. Personally, I don't even like to use that many plugins. I trust some basic building blocks — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — and use as few plugins as possible because you know you're giving too much control up to other people. Keep your themes up to date. Number two, practice some digital hygiene where you keep your website in one place and your sensitive data in another place.

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03:29:18 - 04:03:00

Josefina Terrera

Be very cautious about what data you're taking from your clients. We're dealing with financial companies. People are very cautious about their data. So treat it with respect. And then I think number three is to have a password manager, which seemingly contradicts digital hygiene because you are having all your passwords in one place. But password managers work all day, their brand is working all day to keep your passwords safe.

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04:03:02 - 04:38:25

Josefina Terrera

So I guess also encrypting your passwords, suggesting hard to guess passwords and everything they can do in terms of security they're going to apply because they're training for that all day. So I would say if you have a password manager just memorize that password or maybe you can write it down in your one safe spot, have two-factor authentication, and as an extra level of precaution sign in from a browser that doesn't have any Google extensions.

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04:38:27 - 05:10:18

Josefina Terrera

Because somebody could sometimes inject malicious code. I think if you do all of that, you should be relatively safe. I have other stories too. I just don't want to take over because we have not experienced some serious hacks in our websites. I do remember at some point we had a situation that is very common in WordPress where things just get abandoned.

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05:10:21 - 05:37:00

Josefina Terrera

So you buy a theme, you build the whole website around the theme but then the developer decides it can’t be yours. Then the theme is there but you still have to update WordPress and the plugins and it's like WordPress goes this way and your theme stays here, and they're just not synced anymore.

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05:37:03 - 06:08

Josefina Terrera

What happened to a website was that every time we would do an update, we would risk having all these shortcodes and gibberish appearing on the website, and we had to recreate components. That's something to think about when you're building with WordPress. Eventually there was a happy ending; they didn't get hacked, fortunately.

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06:08 - 06:26:05

Josefina Terrera

And they got a new website. But you have to be very vigilant. Don't depend so much on plugins. I guess if a plugin has one million installs, it's steady. You can trust that plugin because then you only know that one million people will have your same problem. But you don't need a plugin for everything.

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06:26:07 - 06:36:19

Josefina Terrera

I'm very adamant about adding things that later on, you just have to deal with, all that junk on your website and you don't know why.

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06:36:21 - 06:50:06

Lauren Hong

Yeah. And we should run quick introductions too. So for folks who are listening and aren't familiar with your background, you might just share a quick intro and then Ellie we’ll pop over to you to do a quick intro. And then unpack some stuff because I'm sure you're like, yes, I've seen this and I've seen that.

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06:50:06 - 06:56:10

Lauren Hong

So yeah. Josefina, you might just do a quick intro.

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06:56:12 - 07:13:10

Josefina Terrera

Well, I'm Josefina and the developer here at Out & About. I'm based in North Carolina. I love geeking out about this stuff.

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07:13:12 - 07:33:12

Lauren Hong

Totally. And you are so well versed in a number of different things. You’ve worked on a number of different backends. You're not platform agnostic. And you also know a number of different languages, website development languages. So you've seen a lot over the years.

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07:33:14 - 07:52:03

Josefina Terrera

Yeah and over the years you just develop your preference and your way. It's not even your preference, oh, I like to do things this way, I find it more sustainable doing things this way or that way. But I know from experience.

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07:52:05 - 07:53:24

Lauren Hong

Ellie.

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07:59:29 - 08:19:09

Ellie Alexander

I'm Ellie, I'm the design director here at Out & About. So my specialty is a little bit more design focused and broader. Josefina knows much more of the technical background, like web development stuff. And my purview is more of the design side, the esthetics, and the brand.

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08:19:11 - 08:32:03

Ellie Alexander

I've been in the industry for, gosh, about like 15 years now. And I've worked in small agencies, corporate, all over the place and I still see the same issues pop up, the same spooky things over time.

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08:32:06 - 08:38:10

Lauren Hong

What kind of spooky things are we seeing? I feel like we need some intro music.

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08:38:12 - 08:59:04

Ellie Alexander

Yeah, I know. So one of the most serious ones — none of mine are as serious and catastrophic as Josefina’s example — I guess that's since I'm coming more from the design side. But one of the more serious ones I have seen is not having your website at least somewhat accessible. 

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08:59:06 - 09:11:26

Ellie Alexander

And to be accessible in this context means for people who might be hard of sight and have to use a screen reader, or for people who might have other disabilities that make it difficult to interact with websites.

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09:11:28 - 09:12:06

Lauren Hong

Yep.

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09:12:14 - 09:33:05

Ellie Alexander

And at its best, it can simply be that the text is too small. And if you're someone who even just needs reading glasses, you pull it up on your phone and you're like, well, I can't read this. Thanks, guys. This isn't helpful. Or not having good enough contrast, like if the text and the background are too close in color or tone it can be really difficult for certain people to read.

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09:33:08 - 09:49:29

Ellie Alexander

And including text in your images is another thing I see a lot that's just a big no no because then it's completely not screen reader-enabled. Or if someone just even happens to be on a bad broadband connection, the image just won't load and they might miss a really important piece of what the content of your website is.

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09:50:01 - 10:12:06

Ellie Alexander

But worst-case scenarios, especially for midsize to large organizations — and I've seen this happen at past workplaces — there are predatory people whose whole job is filing predatory lawsuits on companies whose websites aren't accessible, and they just scour the internet for websites they can think they can file a reasonably founded lawsuit.

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10:12:06 - 10:36:09

Ellie Alexander

And it's just unfortunate because in these cases it's not coming from anyone disabled who is actually impacted by it. It's just people looking for people they can sue to make money. So that's one of the more serious ones I've seen. But other ones are just not having your website optimized for mobile. That's gotten a lot easier over the last couple of years, since now drag and drop platforms like Squarespace and Wix will let you do more customization for mobile.

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10:36:16 - 10:54:24

Ellie Alexander

But if you don't take that into consideration, you could just end up with content that's out of order and no longer makes sense. Or as I mentioned before, is simply too small to read. So in this situation, it's more just usually like it makes your website look awkward and not as professional. That's usually not a catastrophic issue, like a lawsuit or a breach or something.

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10:54:27 - 11:14:16

Lauren Hong

Totally. In going back to Josefina’s point, I've literally seen websites on the brink — they look great on the outside but on the backend it's a hot mess. So I really appreciated your takeaways too about how we make sure we're keeping up the backend so it doesn't fall apart on the frontend.

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11:14:20 - 11:41:12

Lauren Hong

And what you're saying too is like on the frontend that it's accessible for people if they're on mobile, if there's like you were saying, a challenge with being able to see or access the website from a variety of different angles. So any other like spooky situations or things you guys can think of that we run into or things to avoid?.

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11:41:14 - 11:59:22

Ellie Alexander

This is one actually. It honestly just popped into my head while we were talking, and it's more from a consumer angle. I've actually taught a couple of my friends this. There are so many borderline, questionable e-commerce sites that pop up these days. Say you get an ad on Instagram and you're like, oh, this looks cool.

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11:59:24 - 12:04:00

Ellie Alexander

And this is why it's spooky. Because the websites can look pretty legit.

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12:04:02 - 12:09:19

Lauren Hong

Definitely, like Tiffany and Company. I’ve totally seen fake websites like. 

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12:09:21 - 12:25:17

Ellie Alexander

That's spooky. Yeah, that's really scary. You’re usually like, it must be a small startup I've never heard of but no — and then you've got the product and it's complete garbage. There are ways that people who are really savvy at doing that can make it extra impressive.

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12:25:17 - 12:45:13

Ellie Alexander

But a really good way to tell is, especially if it's a retail site, look at the photography and see if the photography is all done in the same style. That's one way I've been able to get them and teach my friends about them. If you look at all the clothing and one photo is done on a white background and one photo is in nature and another one is very bright and another one is very dark.

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12:45:13 - 13:11

Ellie Alexander

If the photography is all over the place, it's probably because they stole the pictures from different websites. So that's a big red flag. If the photography on a website, especially their product photos, is not consistent, unless you know it's legit, probably don't trust it because they're probably just stealing those images.

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13:14 - 13:12:03

Lauren Hong

Yeah, totally. I know we do a lot of website backups too. I don't know if you want to talk to that because that's another preventive way to avoid issues or just the importance of digital hygiene.

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13:12:05 - 13:40:29

Josefina Terrera

Yeah, just do regular backups because sometimes malicious code is just so hard to take out or whatever, just having previous versions of it and an external backup. Many hosting companies provide you a backup for 30 days but sometimes it's hard to know when things happen. One code gets injected.

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13:41:01 - 14:11:16

Josefina Terrera

I mean, what Ellie was saying about sometimes what they do — there was like a famous case of pharmaceuticals where hidden things get injected into the website and people pressed a link from the pharma website, and then they go and buy something on a counterfeit company. So you don't know what may have happened over 30 days ago.

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14:11:16 - 14:40:01

Josefina Terrera

So it's good to just keep those regular backups outside of the hosting and going back to that ecommerce website like Ellie was saying, I am very cautious with my credit card. At this point, I don't pay anything unless it has PayPal, Stripe, or Apple Pay. You know, I just don't trust your website.

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14:40:08 - 15:13

Josefina Terrera

I don't trust it. Random websites holding your credit card data is not safe anymore. And you know there's safer methods to do it. So if that's a product I like and they don't offer alternative methods of payments, I'll just learn to wait.

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15:15 - 15:26:29

Lauren Hong

Totally fair. And I think that's also a good reminder. If you are looking to take digital payments, make sure you have a secure methodology to be able to take that payment in. I totally hear you. Ellie, you were going to say something. Do you agree? You had mentioned earlier before we started, one thing I think is super spooky and very real — broken forms — so that's a very real thing.

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15:26:29 - 15:30:24

Lauren Hong

What was it? The other thing that you said was a snag.

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15:30:27 - 15:39:07

Ellie Alexander

It is a snag. I don't remember the thing I said. There was a snag in the contact form; maybe you can remember while I'm talking. So I don't recall. Yeah.

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15:39:07 - 15:40:04

Josefina Terrera

Yeah.

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15:40:06 - 15:53:24

Ellie Alexander

The contact form, especially for small businesses. I definitely think people are like, oh, I'm just surprised we haven't gotten leads in a couple of weeks. Why? What's going on? Maybe we need to do more in a marketing push. Well, have you checked your contact form to make sure it's still working? 

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15:53:24 - 16:15:14

Ellie Alexander

It could be a WordPress plugin issue like that plugin is no longer supported. So the form is simply not working. Or did the person who used to get your inquiries leave the company and we forgot to set the contact form to redirect to somebody else? Or did you, as an organization, change the format of all your email addresses?

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16:15:14 - 16:29:27

Ellie Alexander

And that didn’t get updated. There's lots of reasons why a contact form can just not work — if it's just being sent to an old inbox or not going through. So just check that, especially if it seems like you're getting a lot lower level of leads recently; just make sure the contact form is working.

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16:30:00 - 16:48:28

Lauren Hong

Totally. It's basic. I've also seen hackers input malicious code through contact forms too, which I think is another good thing to know. And Josefina, to your point earlier, keep those plugins updated and it's so easy to do shortcuts. So I'm going to throw another plugin on the site, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.

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16:48:28 - 17:05:18

Lauren Hong

And then you forget about it. And then you go to the backend of the site and you're like, oh my gosh, there's like 50 plugins here. We're only using five of the 50. Those other ones need to just say goodbye to, so just that idea of hygiene. I don't know, Josefina, if there's anything more you want to share on that too.

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17:05:21 - 17:31:21

Josefina Terrera

Yeah, it's definitely a very important step. Like being on top of what’s in your house. What happened? What is all this stuff in the closet? It’s good to always be checking. The more familiar I am with a website, the easier it is for me to maintain that hygiene, because it's like, okay, I know this.

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17:31:21 - 17:56:06

Josefina Terrera

I know when this was inserted. One common thing I like to do is deactivate things, keep them deactivated for a while. Nothing happens. Then we consider deleting them. There're many WordPress plugins that have to do with searching or nothing that will affect your frontend; they are just tools.

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17:56:13 - 18:18:15

Josefina Terrera

So those are the easiest ones to delete. And then there's one like Slider Revolution that goes with a slider somewhere. Because I've learned many stories start with Slider Revolution. I for one don't like sliders and don't like plugins for sliders. 

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18:25:29 - 18:52:17

Josefina Terrera

And as far as forms, I'm very attentive to forms because it's what the whole marketing effort is about, from beginning to end. You want to reach people. You can have the most awesome website but if you have a form that hasn't been set up properly, the whole thing feels incredibly frustrating.

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18:52:17 - 19:21:25

Josefina Terrera

So, I'm very intentional about it. I know with our own website, we even have a backup because ours is with Webflow. So even if we miss some submission or whatever was to happen to our integration, Webflow will say whatever was submitted. So that's my favorite platform; I always feel safest with that one.

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19:21:28 - 19:46:21

Josefina Terrera

You can still get hacked with a Webflow website because there's always the possibility that you can add a third-party library. You can always inject some code or there's always the login credentials, everything is vulnerable. But at least with that, it is a hosted platform. So everything that's a plugin, even HubSpot.

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19:46:21 - 20:17

Josefina Terrera

I don't like HubSpot but it is a hosted platform. So they are going to handle security stuff with WordPress. Sometimes it does feel like the wild, wild West, so you have to be very diligent. 

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20:20 - 20:24:10

Lauren Hong

Yeah, yeah. Different people maintaining different code, which is not bad. Actually there's a beautiful thing about it, right? There's an art to being able to pull these pieces together but you just want to be smart about how you do it. I think just another takeaway, as you guys are talking, is that these things, why they seem simple are never really simple, because like you were talking earlier about, well, I'm going to take a plugin away and I'm going to wait to see if it impacts anything else.

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20:24:10 - 20:39:24

Lauren Hong

Sometimes there's domino effects. So just being really cautious about changes that are being made, and taking those backups and just that overall digital hygiene is important as you proceed forward. So any other thoughts guys?

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20:39:26 - 21:13:09

Josefina Terrera

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of spooky things. We were talking about CSS stuff. Fortunately many of those things have been solved with time but it used to be the worst thing having to deal with Internet Explorer. Because let's just say, I used to create websites for pharmaceuticals and many boomers use IE.

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21:13:12 - 21:35:14

Josefina Terrera

So you have to be building for IE. So let's just say you have something, some component that's working perfectly in any browser but it's not working in IE8. But then if you Google analytics I was like oh, I guess people are still using IE8. You know, you call your doctor.

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21:35:16 - 21:38:23

Josefina Terrera

I used to be using IE.

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21:38:25 - 21:41:26

Lauren Hong

In finance too, which is crazy. 

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21:42:03 - 21:49:04

Ellie Alexander

So secondly, I thought what you were talking about was AI. I was like, I'm embarrassed to ask. That is oh my gosh, Internet Explorer. That's a throwback.

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21:49:06 - 22:10:05

Josefina Terrera

Yeah. But this wasn't so much way back. Let's just say 2018, 19. And yeah, what was interesting is sometimes you had that dilemma and fixed it at IE but it looks a little bit more messed up now in Chrome. I'm making compromises for the sake of IE.

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22:10:07 - 22:38:22

Josefina Terrera

Even Microsoft has said we stopped supporting IE, so it's like you were really on your own. Or they would stop supporting older versions. They were using Edge. Eventually Edge started using Chrome. So it just became a more homogeneous environment that (       ) and different browsers, videos, we use BrowserStack, which solves a lot of these issues.

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22:38:22 - 23:01:26

Josefina Terrera

So it's like a virtual computer that allows you to login to your website on any computer, on any device you can think of. Let's say you run your analytics and you realize many of your clients use Android, then maybe you want to focus a little bit more on Android. it's worth it.

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23:01:26 - 23:23:15

Josefina Terrera

So those are some other spooky things. There’s a lot of things you have to keep in mind when you're building components and yeah, with CSS, all kinds of fun things. 

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23:35:21 - 23:46:27

Ellie Alexander

This is borderline website related but something you just said Josefina about things being updated and new versions of things aren't supported anymore.

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23:48:28 - 24:06:01

Ellie Alexander

One thing that just drives me crazy is, especially now with cloud storage and like, some organizations use Google Drive and they use Google Docs and they use that and some organizations use Microsoft programs, and you think, oh, I can just put one into the other. 

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24:06:01 - 24:36:26

Ellie Alexander

Especially if your organization is using both or people in your organization are using different versions of those, it can really mess up your documents. Because a lot of our work focuses on business to consumer materials but we also do a lot for just organizations internally. And so if you're even making your email signatures, if you create a beautifully designed email signature but then you send it to someone in your organization who uses Outlook and someone in your organization who uses Google or Apple Mail, they could put them in and they would look completely different because those programs use different default fonts or they’re running on different versions.

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24:36:26 - 24:52:23

Ellie Alexander

And it's just so spooky how you can design something like a beautiful PowerPoint template or a beautiful Word doc. But then as soon as it starts going off to different machines and gets uploaded into Google and then downloaded back and used in Microsoft again, it can just get trashed. And it drives me crazy.

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24:52:29 - 25:13:10

Lauren Hong

You know, again, it's not just machines, like you're saying. Sometimes it's just because you're on an Apple or a PC or different versions or printers. Yeah, it is kind of wild and there's ways to avoid certain things but there's also system upgrades. You can get it just perfect and then it's like, whew, like email.

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25:13:12 - 25:37:20

Lauren Hong

That could be a whole other podcast. So oh my gosh. So fun. Really appreciate the conversation expertise you brought to the table and to some really good takeaways. I think, like websites, all of this can totally be spooky but making sure we're a smart website with digital hygiene and backups, and not taking shortcuts on things is the way to go.

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25:37:20 - 25:40:17

Lauren Hong

So thank you guys for your time.

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25:40:20 - 25:45:18

Ellie Alexander

Thanks for having us.

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We talked with Brendan about:

• How to listen on a level that involves engaging with empathy and curiosity
• Why building relationships with clients should start with understanding their fundamental motivations and desires 
• Creating deep connections by making clients feel heard and understood 

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About Brendan Frazier:

Brendan Frazier is a former financial services consultant with over a decade of experience helping financial advisors across the country. Through his interactions with thousands of advisors, he recognized a recurring theme: many felt they were acting more like therapists than financial planners. This insight led Brendan to explore the often-overlooked human side of finance, prompting him to launch his own advisory business. Committed to improving his understanding of behavioral psychology and communication, he started a podcast where he interviews experts in these fields. Brendan’s passion for merging the human aspect with financial advising has created a growing community of like-minded professionals eager to learn and evolve in their practice.

Featured Resources 

• Brendan Frazier on LinkedIn 
• RFG Advisory 
• The Human Side of Advice Podcast
• Psychology of Money
• Advice that Sticks
• Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss
• Shaping Wealth
• Money Quotent

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Full Audio Transcript:

00:00 - 00:07

Lauren Hong

Brendan, thank you for being here.

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00:07 - 00:09

Brendan Frazier

Well, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

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00:09 - 00:29

Lauren Hong

Yes. And we're talking about your topic, the human side of advice. You are a podcaster, keynote speaker, going to conferences, doing all kinds of things. How did you get into this world? How did you get into the whole human side of advice? I'm just going to throw it over to you. Share a little bit more.

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00:29 - 04:01

Brendan Frazier

Yeah. So I mean really the short and sweet version of it is because I often imagined when I did these things, I always wonder how much do people really care? I want to know about the background of my journey and how much are they just wondering, what can you teach me and tell me that I can take back and use to make myself better off? So I'm going to tell this story, short and sweet. Here’s the setup. I used to be — about a decade ago, a little less than that — in financial services, working as a consultant to financial advisors. So the luxury of that or what that meant was I got to meet with, over the course of time, literally thousands of advisors around the country. So you learn a lot from that. You learn about how to do things, how not to do things, what you like, what you don't like. One thing I learned, because it came up over and over and over again, was you would hear something along the lines of, you know, Brendan, sometimes I feel like more of a therapist than a financial advisor. Or if it wasn't that, it would be, you know, Brendan, there's times where I think I'd be better off with a degree in psychology than I would a degree in economics or accounting or finance or financial planning. And so you'd hear it over and over and over again, and if you've ever worked with a human being about money, if you haven't said that out loud, you've at least started at some point. It's just the nature of the job we're in. And so I heard it over and over again, and I kept thinking, okay, what do we do about that? That's true. That's how we feel. Let's say it's at least equally important. A lot of people would say that. It feels like it's more the job. Let's say I don't believe that to be true. So let's say it's equally important. Then what do we do about it? We have trainings, designations, and certifications we can take to hone the money side and the technical side. What do we do for this human side? And then the most common response I would get was first of all, blank stare. And then second, it would be, I mean, read a book, man. Hey, is that good enough? I don't think that's good enough, right? If it's that important, we probably should be doing something more. So I started my own advisory business, got into that side of things. And so at that point in time, I decided, you know what? I want to get better at this. I know how important it is, this human side. I want to get better at it. I want to go on this journey to get better. And so why don't I start doing some research but then also start this podcast? I'll get to talk to some really cool, awesome, smart people who are experts in behavior and psychology communication. Worst-case scenario, I'll learn a lot, get to apply a lot, and use it in the work I do and in my business. Best-case scenario, it turns out there are other advisors out there who are like, you know what? I'm interested in this too but I didn't know at the time, right? So I launch this podcast. I'm learning a lot. Next thing you know, look at six months later, a year later, two years later, and lo and behold, there's an appetite for this out there. And so that's when I sort of started doubling down and went, okay, there are people who really want to know and learn this stuff. So I'm going to keep doing more podcasts, more research, more articles, speaking trainings, and all that. So it was sort of like this natural evolution of I sort of dip my toe in. I didn't know it was going to happen. I saw there is interest and demand for it. And I was enjoying learning the human side more than I was working with clients and learning the technical side. And so eventually just decided, hey, if you're having more fun, if you're enjoying it more and there seems to be an opportunity here, why not go all in and see what happens?

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04:01 - 04:22

Lauren Hong

Super awesome. I hear that too. You know, like sales is all about people, right? Relationships. Like being able to pull out the nuances of conversation. That's all the people side of it. So you're right, it's not solely the things you know; it's the street smarts a little bit. Super interesting. So after having these conversations, are there any key takeaways you've had? I mean, doing this podcast and you know, giving these talks, any kind of themes you've seen across the board.

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04:30 - 06:41

Brendan Frazier

So first of all, I just mentioned a second ago that I was going to go on that little rant there but also bring it back and make an example out of it. And so this kind of ties into what you just asked. But one thing we can learn from what just happened at the beginning of that conversation is you asked me a question about myself that was easy to answer. It had an emotional component. It was exciting to answer because it went back into my past and let me tell about myself in my past. And so, whenever we get to talk about ourselves, there's this part of the brain that lights up. It feels good. It's like a pleasure center. It's the reward part, the same area in the brain that lights up when you engage in sexual activity and eat chocolate. And so, as I'm sitting there talking about myself, I'm like, man, I enjoy this, this is fun. I mean, I'm not thinking it right. It's subconscious, right? But I'm enjoying it. It feels good. And what you've done, whether intentionally or not, is sort of create this conversational flow and momentum that can carry you through the rest of the conversation. And that's something you can apply to every single conversation you have, whether it's a podcast episode or just a meeting with a prospect or client. You sort of prime the pump. I'm getting a little bit out of my head, into my heart, feeling emotional and feeling good about talking. And you did a great job listening as I was talking. So, yeah. So I wrote a whole article and recorded a whole podcast episode. I now have a presentation called The Top. So sure, the human side of advice. And so what that was, was me going back and saying, we've done over 120 episodes. There's a lot in there. You could literally learn something every single episode. But what are the core themes that emerge that we can learn from, that we can take away? And most importantly, the core themes you can apply immediately in your practice that can make a big impact. And so there's 10 of them. I probably can't mention all 10 — that would take a little while — but I can pull out a few. There's one that always sticks out to me every time. And there's one that comes up over and over and over again. So it's what I've eventually decided to deem the most important skill in financial advice. So on the podcast.

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06:41 - 06:44

Lauren Hong

Drumroll I feel like!

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06:44 - 09:18

Brendan Frazier

Cliffhanger! I had to tease it. I know I've had the experts on and it's cool. I think back on those that are at education skills. I just had another guy on who teaches at Stanford, teaches communication skills. And everybody in the world of communications says the most important skill for improving your communication is the ability to listen but not just listen, right? But actually truly engage and listen with empathy and curiosity. And I don't even team up for this, by the way. If you had to pick one thing, we know listening is important. How important is that? It naturally comes up and also they'll just mention it. By the way, the most important thing you can do as far as communication is improve your listening skills. So it's one of those things I always knew was important, thought was important. One of the questions I ask on the podcast, to every guest, is who's the best listener in your life and what do they do so well that makes them such a great listener? But naturally this keeps coming up over and over and over again, which is just kind of cool because I believe in how powerful listening is. It's just really, really hard to do. So that's one of the main skills. And the big wrap up, time and again, is this idea of doing better planning and having better competence around money by not just focusing on their goals and what they want to accomplish financially but actually on Earth — what they value most in their life and are trying to create. How do you create a process that goes beyond what you want to do but goes into why you want to do it? Because once you know not what people want to do but what really lies behind it, the emotional motivating reason why, you really get to the point where you can align money with life, and then you take your conversations and your relationships to the next level. So some people are like, okay, what does that look like? Well, it's not the fact that I want to retire at 65. That's what I want. That's what the client wants to do. And that's good. That's fine. What do you want to do? I want to retire at 65. Okay, great. Well, behind every what lies a why. Why is it that you want to retire at 65? There's a driving force behind it. And so like one example would be, well, I want to retire at 65 because I want to be able to maximize the time I have with my family while I still have the energy and the ability to do so because my dad died when he was young, and we felt like we got robbed of time we should have had together.

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09:18 - 09:19

Lauren Hong

It's the heart and soul of it.

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09:19 - 10:22

Brendan Frazier

And it just changes the entire planning conversation. Now it's not like, oh, you don't want to retire. You want more time with your family. Are there other ways we could create that for you? Or is there a way you could retire now and then still do the work on the side, and you still make some money while maximizing time with family? I was talking to an advisor yesterday. He's in one of my mastermind groups and said, hey, what's going well this week? What do you guys run into? He was like, I've just been reminded lately of the power of what we do and how cool it is when I can just sit down with somebody and point out or show them, hey, I know you're planning on retiring in four years but here's a way to do it today. And they just look at me with a sense of relief. And so they're like, no way. Thank you so much. I didn't even know. What do you want to do? And have them say, I want to retire at 65, plan now and walk off. You've got to truly understand, hey, do you really want to retire at 65? What's actually the why driving the what. So those are two things are super cool.

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10:23 - 11:39

Lauren Hong

It's really interesting. So we probably like a lot of organizations run a Net Promoter score. And you get the word bubbles at the end. And one of the things that always comes up is communications. And I've also had firms say to us that listening component, which is really interesting to hear, the way you pin it down because firms will say to us, you really listen to us and we're able to pin down who we are and where we want to go, not just all this kind of other stuff the world is trying to tell us. So I think applying it across businesses, right? And just relationships of really being able to listen but then being able to pull out those nuances is really interesting too. So, okay, so we covered those kinds of conversations, how to be able to stage different pieces is really key. I think you said there are 10 parts in your book or in the presentation you're doing. Are there any tips you would give to firms that go, we feel like we're doing a pretty good job with us but we want to do better, like ways to either train employees, maybe how they onboard or hire, I don't know if it's like coaching conferences they go to, just mentorship. What would you recommend to those firms that are saying we want to dial it up and aren't sure where to turn.

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11:39 - 15:18

Brendan Frazier

Yeah. So real quick, I have to go back to something you just said before that question. I'll come right back to this because I think this is a really important point. You were talking about how you'll have like the call, you'll have clients say, and across businesses, one of the things they enjoyed or valued the most was that it felt like you truly helped me pin down what it was that I wanted, what it was I valued. So translation, what does that mean? It means they feel heard and understood, right? Which is what at our core, that's what all human beings want is for somebody to know you, trust you, and feel understood. And so, the “Harvard Business Review” did a study across industries where they found if you can create emotionally connected clients, if you can get to know clients and their fundamental motivations and desires, the things that truly matter to them, that creates clients they call emotionally connected clients, clients that pay more, refer more, follow through, and do what you ask them to do. And then also and for financial services specifically, they're more willing to consolidate or bring up doing more. That hey, there's this thing you can do, this method you could take or follow through and then collate assets. So you'd be like, tell me more about it. But that's ultimately what it boils down to, is creating emotionally connected clients by understanding their motivations and desires, make them feel heard. And okay, so I had to get that in there because I think it's the study that's out there that I've known about for years using a lot of my training. If for some reason it hasn't, I feel like we need to know more about it. So I just want to mention that. But yeah, so your question is what would you say to somebody who says, hey, we think we do this pretty well but what can we do if we want to do it better, do it differently? I mean, that's the fundamental question because everybody wonders if it's important. Everybody wants to know what to do about it. First thing I would say is that, just know in this realm, just like on anything on the technical side but in the realm of the human side, I've never met anybody who's nailed it to 100% completion where they're just like, we're great at it, and there's nothing more we could do to get there. It's like it's a constant practice. You have to be working on it growing over time. But I would also say I've met very, very, very few people or firms who are even really good at this stuff. So if you think you're good, maybe you are. We could be. And there's like some checkpoint assessments you can do to sort of feel that out. But I would just start that with the assumption that there's a lot of improvement to be made. So that's number one. And then where do you go from there? Why start a build? That's sort of what I started trying to focus on was to say, okay, how do we bring this to the firm so they can incorporate it, embed it, and simpler, I think it comes down to two things. At the highest level, number one is skills. So you first have to learn, know, and hone the critical skills of communicating and dealing with humans. And then the second part after skills is systems. So you've got skills and systems and systems is zero. Basically how can I apply this, embed this in my practice and my processes so it's there and it's consistent. And I'm not always wondering what I could do but it's just embedded in every part of your process throughout your practice. So now those are like the two places where you start. What skills do I need to learn how to develop? And then where can I systematize this? Where can I put this in our systems and our processes to make it a consistent, repeatable experience.

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15:18 - 15:51

Lauren Hong

Are there any tips you would give to firms where sometimes certain skills are really hard to train to and sometimes people skills are really hard to train to when they're hired, like cues or red flags to watch out for, for candidates. Because there's a technical skill. But is there anything as part of the process, like questions asked when hiring or the way the job description is written to be able to pull that human side of do we have the right fit or can we further train to that skill set for the right fit?

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15:52 - 17:10

Brendan Frazier

Yeah, I don't know. I've never really delved into or talked to anyone who researched how you filter and learn in the hiring process whether someone's got communication skills, right? I do think communication skills are important pretty much in any area of life, right? So they can always be honed and trained. But I think the principle that would probably apply is even if you hire somebody, if you're hiring somebody for a client-facing role, they need to have some level of skills, or they at least need to be willing to work, hone, and adapt those skills. If you have somebody you find out just doesn't have it and they don't really care, and they don't want to get you better at it, and they just want to look at spreadsheets — well, they just don't want to be client-facing because it really is that critical, right? But if they have an appetite to get better at it and learn, I think you can always hone and practice these skills. In fact, I would take somebody who as far as communication skills goes is a C but has a desire to grow over somebody who’s naturally a B but doesn't want to get any better and thinks they've already got it completely nailed down. I think the main point is to put people in roles they excel in but if you don't have these skills, they can be trained and developed. Doesn't mean it's easy, right? I guess I'll say that too. It's not easy to do but it can be done.

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17:09 - 18:04

Lauren Hong

Yeah, I hear you. And I know earlier I talked about how you've consulted with tons of firms and have kind of the luxury to see the inside. I feel that too because we're consulting and working with tons of firms, and it's a real luxury to be able to do that and have that vantage point. One of the things I often see, too, is just the value base, making sure you've got that right value base when hiring, and even little things. Like for us personally, thank you notes. I know that sounds little but it's like those little extras that can make a really big difference. Just to see if that person does have that kind of extra thought to go above and beyond. Any final thoughts or things I should be asking that I haven't or any good books? You've got so many books back there; are there any good ones to read or things we should be watching out for?

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18:04 - 21:29

Brendan Frazier

So I'm trying to think. I guess I would say two things. A question I get a lot of times so I know this is important is where should I go? What should I do if this is something I want to focus on, learn and get better at; where should I go? What should I do? So naturally, the answer to that question is almost always what resources are available? And that is important, and I'm going to get to that. But what I found, and it took me a while to figure this out, by the way, so I would have not have these trainings, have these advisors come in and teach the same things, you would give them the same resources, the same curriculum, same exercises, the same deliverables. And two people would get different results all over. Two people get completely different results. And so it bothered me for a while. I was like, I'm letting this other person down. And there's certainly an element of it, in terms of just like, being brought in and engaged. But it wasn't like that didn't seem to be the main differentiator. What I eventually sort of started passing out was those who got the better results. Those who truly saw the impact of embracing the human side were those who fully believed in why it was important in the first place. In other words, it's one thing to know, yeah, I think this is kind of important, and I want to try a few things here and there. It's another thing to fully embrace or have this mindset that if I embrace the human aspect, it's going to lead to better client relationships, better conversations, more levels of trust, more referrals. It's not only going to enhance my client relationships, it'll help them get better outcomes, and it's going to grow my business as a result. And so you first have to start with, why is this important? Now back to the why thing, right? What's the purpose? Why is this important? And then once you're dialed in there and you kind of have this foundation of why the human side is important, then you can go and that'll direct you in terms of now what do I need to go work on next? So now do the resources part, right? So as far as books go, “The Psychology of Money” is always a great intro, kind of a gateway book. Then another great gateway book is called “Advice That Sticks” by Dr. Moira Somers. It's up here in the bookshelf. Every time I mention that book, I always make a note to say it should be required reading for anybody who works with human beings and their money; it should be like CFP® and then “Advice That Sticks.” “Never Split the Difference” by Christopher Voss is one of the best tactical or practical books on communication skills. And then, other resources would be — I mean, I really don't want to do this because it feels awkward to say — but that's why I started the podcast; we really do work hard to try to make it the best resource for this out there. If you hear me say that and you're rolling your eyes, I got you. Don't download it. It's not going to hurt my feelings. But I think I would feel bad if I didn't at least mention it. And then, as far as trainings go, there's more and more that are cropping up. You've got Shaping Wealth and Building the Behavioral Advisor. There's the Kinder Life Planning Institute. Golden Gate University has some good programs. Money Quotient has some good programs. So there's also some trainings out there as well. And I think there's more that are cropping up. But that's where I would start essentially from the resource side. 

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21:29 - 21:45

Lauren Hong

I love it. I also appreciate just directing folks to the podcast. I do appreciate it that you can get nuggets of advice to be able to take it in. Sometimes I think these things are like building habits, and being just self-aware of the things that are going on. So I like the kind of bite-sized content to be able to apply to your day to day.

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21:46 - 21:58

Brendan Frazier

Yeah. No doubt. Now my podcast is not bite-size by any means but you'll definitely get good ideas from it because our whole focus is not what do you need to know but how can you apply? How do I apply? How do I apply?

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21:58 - 22:13

Lauren Hong

So I really love it. Well, thank you again for your time today and just for digging into this topic and helping people connect with people. And I mean, ultimately to be able to keep business, take good care of their clients, and just help people feel heard. So appreciate your time.

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22:13 - 22:20

Brendan Frazier

Well, thanks for having me and for shining a light on what I obviously in a biased way consider to be an important topic in the industry.

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22:20 - 22:22

Lauren Hong

Absolutely. Thank you for your time.

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22:22 - 23:26

Brendan Frazier

Yeah. Thanks, Lauren.

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We talked about:

• How to effectively collaborate with your C-suite or leadership team to ensure outsourced marketing efforts align with business objectives
• Why providing solid input to outsourced partners is essential for integration and consistency across the organization
• Why investing in pinpointing your ideal prospect is crucial — and how it can influence various aspects of your business strategy

Featured Resources 

• The Role of Marketing and the CMO in Today’s Financial Services Industries with Nick Richtsmeier
• Business Growth Tips for Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Financial Services Business Owners
• Tips for Effective Branding and Website Strategies for Financial Services
• Financial Services Branding: When and How Should You Redesign Your Company Logo?

Audio Transcript

00:00 - 00:36:10

Lauren Hong

We're talking about outsourced marketing. Sometimes what happens is we start an engagement and we have a client who says okay, we're ready to outsource, ready to go online and dial up our marketing. But what are we going to keep in-house versus what makes sense to be able to outsource? What are you guys going to run with and what are some swim lanes or domains that we would put up, such as it makes sense for us to keep XYZ in-house because this makes sense for us to really lean on our team for that?

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00:36:13 -00:41:25

Lauren Hong

Okay. Let's share some examples. So I think it'd be really helpful to just share what we've seen.

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00:41:27 - 00:52:05

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah, I think the biggest differentiator for data points is whether they actually have someone in-house for marketing.

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00:52:07 - 00:53:16

Lauren Hong

Totally. Yeah.

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00:53:18 - 01:22:13

Tiffany Silverberg

If it's someone's extra job that they also do marketing. So if they have someone in-house doing marketing oftentimes then scheduling of things, calendaring of things falls to them. And then we can come in and fill in blanks where they need support, often for design or doing technical stuff like SEO research, things like that, that they're just not ready to do day-to-day.

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01:22:15 - 01:31:15

Tiffany Silverberg

But if it's someone's extra job on the side, we can come in with that more stretched strategic operation, taking stuff off their plate so they can keep moving forward.

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01:31:17 - 01:52:14

Lauren Hong

Totally. I can also see, okay, so you have a situation where copy, written words, is really, really close to people's hearts. And sometimes there's firms and clients we work with, their voice is what makes them different. It's their selling point, the human part.

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01:52:17 - 02:09:02

Lauren Hong

So I feel if you're in a seat where you're leading the copy team and you do such a great job of helping. I feel like clients also feel like I don't have to totally give that up. My voice can still be a part of what's written without me having to literally type every single word.

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02:09:10 - 02:20:13

Lauren Hong

That's another place where it's kind of like a hybrid between you kind of keep it in-house but you can also outsource some of it. I don’t know if you want to talk to the specifics of that.

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02:20:16 - 02:42:15

Tiffany Silverberg

Oh yeah, I mean, it can really look different for every client. So for some clients, it really is like whoever and I’ll make up a name like Sarah here at our agency loves to write and is really good at it. She's basically become our voice. So they can write things and we can clean it up or support them.

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02:42:18 - 03:02:02

Tiffany Silverberg

Templating things like this is what we need written and then we run with it because they just know it's going to feel like them. Or we're at a place where, thinking about other clients, where they have a specific voice, they can feel it. We can feel it. But they trust us to be able to deliver that.

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03:02:02 - 03:24:01

Tiffany Silverberg

And so maybe they send bullet points or maybe they send recordings of their voice and things like that. And we can kind of step in and create that voice. So, like you said, it really looks different for everyone. I don't know what's really valuable to them. I mean, it's always valuable but like you said, it just feels really like this is our thing.

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03:24:01 - 03:24:14

Tiffany Silverberg

This is our baby.

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03:24:14 - 03:47:25

Lauren Hong

I’ll give you another example of a company we're currently working with, and they have a whole in-house graphics team that does a lot of work. But there are certain things where it's like, hey, if there's additional support that's needed, more arms and legs, we can totally help with that. I can you give another example of a firm we've worked with that's rather large.

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03:47:25 - 04:05:19

Lauren Hong

They've got a whole marketing department but they just need support because their team just can't take on the project. So why couldn’t their team keep it in-house? It's a bandwidth thing too. I feel like that's another kind of great example of when we could keep it in-house but this is going to be a backburner project.

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04:05:20 - 04:13:00

Lauren Hong

If it's really a priority, we've got to be able to figure out how we're going to get some fuel in the engine.

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04:13:02 - 04:45:23

Tiffany Silverberg

Well, and sometimes I'm thinking of a couple other clients too, where they're a department within a bigger company. They need to get their — well, let's talk about trains — they have to get their wheels rolling on that little project. And so we can come in and use all the data, use what this marketing department has worked really hard on, to create style guides and all that, to get this off the ground because they're busy with their day-to-day, what’s happening in the next month or whatever.

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04:45:29 - 04:47:21

Lauren Hong

You need a trusted agent.

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04:47:22 - 04:54:12

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. And like you said, the volume I think that's a big part of it too, is just how much volume support is needed.

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04:54:14 - 05:30:28

Lauren Hong

Okay. Another question talking about outsourced marketing. So we've seen situations sometimes where there is a CMO, an internal leader, and oftentimes we're in that role too, right? We're more in that strategy role. And you're trying to balance both the business needs but then also just the super shiny object of marketing, massive data points, different levels of understanding of what you can do with marketing, if it's digital or not or what, how marketing is connected to sales, all these kinds of things.

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05:31:00 - 05:46:04

Lauren Hong

It would be kind of fun to have a conversation about how you navigate the C-suite just to make sure we're constantly connecting it back to the business strategy. And you do such a great job of that, Tiffany, being able to really hear the clients and connect the dots.

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05:46:04 - 06:05:11

Lauren Hong

So I’d love to hear about some of those lessons learned along the way, not just for how we navigate conversations but also for folks who are in more strategy roles. How do they make sure they don't lose the strategic direction of the decision-makers as we're proceeding forward? 

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06:05:13 - 06:32:09

Tiffany Silverberg

It feels like that's the case with so many clients. So some clients are the founder and CEO and that's our main point of contact. So that's a little different conversation. But oftentimes our day-to- day point person is someone in the business or that marketing person, and they really do have that tough task because at the end of the day, everyone wants leads, which equals sales, right?

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06:32:09 - 06:56:25

Tiffany Silverberg

Everybody just wants more clients. And so trying to figure out how to connect those dots. I think we've spent a lot of time in conversations just turning down the noise but calling our focus down because there's just so many data points. And I think this marketing world is just so like data, data, data.

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06:56:25 - 07:20:13

Tiffany Silverberg

And there's so much data available. And I feel that's been kind of the buzzword of late that every data point is promising something. But I think just again, just focusing it down to okay, if we know this is going to be presented — I'm thinking of a few clients that tell us every year at this time, I have to give a marketing presentation.

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07:20:15 - 07:28:22

Tiffany Silverberg

How am I going to help connect those dots? So it's again, it's helping them say, okay, you need five leads or whatever it is.

‍

07:28:24 - 07:29:18

Lauren Hong

Right?

‍

07:29:20 - 07:47:20

Tiffany Silverberg

So your lists have grown or this many people are coming to your site, not even your site but this particular landing page we've built for this project. I think zeroing in a little bit is the answer because it's just so easy to kind of go all over the place..

‍

07:47:22 - 08:04:11

Lauren Hong

I feel like there's like 1,000,001 dials you can turn, which is very easy to do in marketing. Because we get all the noise, right? So I totally resonate with what you're saying: okay, let's not turn up the volume on everything; let's just turn it up on the right piece.

‍

08:04:11 - 08:13:25

Lauren Hong

That connects back to the business strategy. And that's where we really need to turn up the focus and the noise. And then we can turn it down there or we keep it in whatever kind of state it is and then turn it up elsewhere.

‍

08:13:25 - 08:40:03

Tiffany Silverberg

And again, thinking of a couple specific clients, here's the buzzword but it's also the target market or the niche. It helps if they can say in those marketing meetings, presentations, if they can say, well, here's the — I don't want to say growth — but here's the activity we've seen in this particular area.

‍

08:40:05 - 08:58:16

Tiffany Silverberg

And this particular thing we all know as a company is so important that we're hitting this client right now or this cross arena. I think that kind of helps too, so that it's not just so broad — everyone's like we need to reach these 500 million people and we're all going to Zoom.

‍

08:58:16 - 09:29

Tiffany Silverberg

It's just that.

‍

09:01:01 - 09:21:06

Lauren Hong

And also just to underscore all this, I think we can't take away from the fact that obviously you've got to be light on your feet, right? And they're in a meeting. But the prep that's required, I'm thrilled to do that and turn over all those stones and really be able to make sure we're helping the team navigate that so we're not saying you need to flex and bend, right?

‍

09:21:06 - 09:31:22

Lauren Hong

As an organization, you're always evolving but you're not deviating so much that you lose sight of the bigger picture between those reporting kind of meetings or conversations.

‍

09:31:24 - 09:56:01

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. And really again, when you're zeroing in on the data points, making sure they are really strong data points. I think marketing can also get a bad rap for making up the numbers along the way. And so I think that's where it can get tricky. For those who are in that CMO sort of role, they don't want to feel like they're just bringing in numbers for the sake of it, you know?

‍

09:56:01 - 10:04:28

Tiffany Silverberg

So I think, again, zeroing in and really having hefty, meaningful data points. Yep. There's a lot to that.

‍

10:05:01 - 10:11:10

Lauren Hong

All right. Ready for another question.

‍

10:11:12 - 10:15:02

Lauren Hong

I can throw it out, okay. You ask me..

‍

10:15:08 - 10:33:29

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. Actually, I have a good question for you. So, talking about outsourcing, we were just talking about sometimes they keep copy in-house or sometimes they only keep this or that in-house. So there's probably different levels of outsourcing people can go to. Can you talk a little bit about that and how do they know what they need?

‍

10:34:02 - 10:52:25

Lauren Hong

Oh my gosh okay. So I can think of a company, they were about, I don't know, maybe 150 employees at the time. And they had a situation where their Salesforce, which was their CRM, needed to be customized so they could tweak and turn the dials. This isn't really related to marketing but it's an example of “we need something done quickly.”

‍

10:52:25 - 11:12:25

Lauren Hong

So they went on, I think they ended up finding someone through Fiverr, somebody to stop the bleeding, just help us turn these little tweaks and dials so we can make the output stronger. And they're a big company, right? But they just needed to find a trusted agent to be able to slowly kind of adjust the styles as they proceeded forward.

‍

11:12:27 - 11:34:16

Lauren Hong

I can think of another example if you go up the food chain, going from a one-off quick piece to now we want to get really specialized. There is another client I can think of where they realized strategically they really wanted to work on SEO but they wanted to be in the thick of it.

‍

11:34:18 - 11:53:12

Lauren Hong

Like they wanted to see the backend of all the data and the numbers, and they wanted to help with the manipulation of it and really unpacking all of it. And so they worked with an outsourced SEO team that could literally take them in the kitchen and show them around; this is how we make everything.

‍

11:53:12 - 12:15:04

Lauren Hong

And these are our processes and that kind of thing. So there's kind of that one-off, I need a quick provider. It could be a freelancer engagement. It could also be like a very specialized kind of partner. And then a lot of our clients are like, okay, we need a whole marketing department but we're not ready for that yet.

‍

12:15:10 - 12:33:16

Lauren Hong

But we need strategy and all the other parts and pieces of marketing. And so that's a good fit for an agency. Or you might have a marketing team of maybe two or three people, and you need additional support both on strategy and implementation, or you have a whole marketing department but you just need a little bit more, like an agent,

‍

12:33:21 - 12:53:00

Lauren Hong

a trusted agent that can help you with a project. So it kind of depends, honestly, where you're at and you can outgrow your provider. Or you could sometimes work with multiple providers at one time but it really depends. There's a lot of things you can outsource and a lot of different ways you can outsource.

‍

12:53:00 - 12:54:24

Lauren Hong

So feel free to jump in.

‍

12:54:26 - 13:16:01

Tiffany Silverberg

Maybe we can chat about the difference between that specialty provider and an agency. So like you were talking about the SEO provider. So how does someone know when it's like, I just want to focus on this thing, like I said, I want to know the nitty-gritty versus I need everything.

‍

13:16:01 - 13:36:18

Lauren Hong

Okay, so this is kind of like a catch-22 because you could go with an SEO provider, let's say I'm just going to specifically work with an SEO provider. But if you're leading that engagement, you're also helping with the input to make sure it connects not only with the business goals but then the umbrella of all the other marketing.

‍

13:36:24 - 14:03:14

Lauren Hong

So you just want to make sure if you're leading that initiative, either you or the individual who’s leading it is seeing how those efforts kind of sweep across the company at large, and likely that provider and your resources are really going to be like a deep dive on that particular specialty. We're on the agency side; we act as that umbrella to see how everything is integrated across the board.

‍

14:03:17 - 14:25:03

Lauren Hong

But then we would have those deep dive conversations with an SEO specialist or developer, someone who just does video, all these other kinds of facets — graphic design, website development — those facets of it. So we kind of work as I'll call it that strategist, to be able to connect the dots, manage the projects, and then implement them and bring in the providers as necessary.

‍

14:25:06 - 14:39:18

Lauren Hong

So this is a different kind of engagement. And if you're going to do just a specialist — I shouldn't say just; it's a left right. If you're going to engage with specialists, you just want to make sure that the input is solid so the output can be solid as well.

‍

14:39:21 - 14:49:14

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. And what about, I don't know if we talked about a business consultant or a CMO sort of role. How would that differentiate?

‍

14:49:17 - 15:24:15

Lauren Hong

That's a good question too. Okay. So feel free to jump in here. We have seen situations where a business strategically may need to have an offsite to really unpack everything, pull back layers of the onion and put it back together. And an offsite would be a great opportunity for a business consultant to be able to come in to support with that and might be behind a particular initiative, like a target market: where are we going to go after and what does that look like, and how are we going to put our efforts behind it?

‍

15:24:18 - 15:48:07

Lauren Hong

It could be conversations around strategic goals and mission, vision, value statements, maybe unpacking that a little bit more. And it could be a reshaping of understanding — how does the business strategy specifically connect with the marketing strategy and help identify needed campaigns or what have you, before you even bring in a team?

‍

15:48:09 - 16:25:19

Lauren Hong

And those conversations are usually had in a little bit bigger organizations. And they oftentimes kind of unpack things related to fee structure or your service offerings. It could be, gosh, it could go a number of ways. Your target market, your culture. So those offsites more are the business consultant, marketing consultant sometimes while you zero in on hopefully a key project you might want to focus on, which is then going to help all your other efforts when you actually get to the implementation side of it, be that much more successful.

‍

16:25:19 - 16:34:14

Lauren Hong

So feel free to jump in. I feel like that was a long-winded answer to basically say it's more of like leaning on the business strategy.

‍

16:34:16 - 17:05:01

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. And I think like the question earlier of how do you know when you need each thing. But I think that's the kind of stuff that if those are the pieces that are missing, it has to sort of happen before you bring in a marketing team because you don't want to be operationalizing, putting calendars together or things like that, but still not really knowing who is our target market or like you said, even more, like what sort of offerings are we even providing, what makes us different?

‍

17:05:01 - 17:24:11

Tiffany Silverberg

Those sorts of things. I think when you don't have that clarity and we see this time and again when you're sort of trying to figure out clarity in the midst of strategizing it gets tricky. And I guess I go back to the earlier question too, about keeping everyone focused when everybody knows what the goal is.

‍

17:24:14 - 17:31:21

Tiffany Silverberg

And we're not still trying to do development midway. It's so much easier to get everyone to that same page.

‍

17:31:23 - 17:37:15

Lauren Hong

Yeah. I totally like what the goal is and why that goal. 

‍

17:37:18 - 17:46:18

Lauren Hong

Not just we want to grow. Because as I was saying earlier, why do we want to grow? How is that going to impact the company? How is that going to impact the team? And what's the heart and soul behind that?

‍

17:46:18 - 18:12:03

Tiffany Silverberg

So yeah, absolutely. Okay. One more one more question. Or maybe there's more. But so this kind of ties into something you said earlier but now it ties into this question too. So marketing, marketing and sales always sit together. We talk about that. But marketing also is involved cross- departmentally and it impacts other things, especially when done really well.

‍

18:12:03 - 18:17:19

Tiffany Silverberg

So I don't know if you want to sort of touch on that.

‍

18:17:22 - 18:40:28

Lauren Hong

Oh my gosh. Yes. So you really feel this when the company gets bigger. So you start to feel it if the employee count is around a dozen. Because what happens is marketing is your face to the world, right? It's a reflection of, ideally, your mission, vision, values, your business strategy, where you want to go.

‍

18:40:28 - 19:04:09

Lauren Hong

It's kind of that first interaction someone's going to have with the brand. But if you're at that dozen employee-ish place, you probably have a CRM in place, or you might have onboarding materials or ways you hire people, like job descriptions, things like this, right? And all of these are going to require considering how does the company sound, like in a job description?

‍

19:04:09 - 19:29:18

Lauren Hong

What's the voice and tone of the company? We're going to have our logo out across our CRM. And what does our training look like? And does that feel like the brand, the voice and everything kind of exuberate through all these other parts of your business. And so that's when you start to see marketing really plug into other parts of the business.

‍

19:29:18 - 19:52:08

Lauren Hong

And then as you grow. So now let's say you’re at 75 employees, 150 employees. Marketing is connected across departments because what happens is you're going to have one department, any department, it might be HR. And so they're going to have all kinds of communications that are going to go on just within their department.

‍

19:52:13 - 20:12:29

Lauren Hong

There might be another department that's working on webinars that are externally facing. There could be another department that has regular communications that are really timely that need to go out. And so marketing acts like the glue for all of that but it's making sure the brand doesn't lose its essence as it grows, because that's so critical, frankly, to the value of the company.

‍

20:12:29 - 20:25:01

Lauren Hong

If you're going to value the company. And then as you're hiring, you want to make sure people really exuberate in the brand personality. So who the brand is and how they show up. But you can totally talk more to this.

‍

20:25:02 - 20:44:07

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. And I was thinking of one particular client who, I don't know their employee count but I think it was around a dozen and they were struggling to hire. They weren't attracting the right people. And it was having those conversations with us, the marketing team, where all of a sudden it was like, this is what makes you really special.

‍

20:44:07 - 21:06:22

Tiffany Silverberg

You need to go positive with those things that are making you really special. And then everything trickled down, the visuals became really obvious for social media posts around that hire, the job description, everything just became really clear because everybody knew this is what your brand is about. So yeah, it definitely matters cross-department.

‍

21:06:25 - 21:11:28

Lauren Hong

Totally. Okay. Any other things with outsourcing we should chat about?

‍

21:12:00 - 21:13:02

Tiffany Silverberg

All the things.

‍

21:13:04 - 21:15:09

Lauren Hong

I feel like we could do this for a long time.

‍

21:15:12 - 21:16:19

Tiffany Silverberg

Yes.

‍

21:16:21 - 21:18:29

Lauren Hong

Okay. Plus rapid-fire questions.

‍

21:19:02 - 21:19:29

Tiffany Silverberg

Yes, okay.

‍

21:20:01 - 21:26:15

Lauren Hong

We're talking big picture. What's the best way to identify your ideal prospects?

‍

21:26:17 - 21:28:13

Tiffany Silverberg

So that's a rapid-fire question?

‍

21:28:16 - 21:45:02

Lauren Hong

Yeah, sorry, I know that's not a very good rapid-fire question. I should be asking you something really simple that you can respond to. Like where is your favorite place to vacation? Okay. So let's just unpack that a little bit.

‍

21:45:05 - 22:10:09

Tiffany Silverberg

Now that's a really good one. Because we were saying earlier, if you're going to work with a business consultant, a big part of it is kind of figuring that all out. But even in the marketing level, the best answer to the rapid fire question, the best way to identify your ideal prospects, I don't know, who do you love to work with and who's bringing in good money?

‍

22:10:11 - 22:26:20

Tiffany Silverberg

Which is not always the same. So we'll start with the first one. Who do you love to work with? You want more of those. There's all kinds of tips out there about putting them all on a spreadsheet and how much money they bring in and which are the ones you want to call more.

‍

22:26:23 - 22:47:06

Tiffany Silverberg

But that's really the answer. Who you really, really are good at serving. There's data points you can look at too. You have a starting point of who your ideal clients are — maybe we'll use the obvious one.

‍

22:47:06 - 23:09:26

Tiffany Silverberg

Retirees. You can start to look at your data and see popular blogs the people are reading. Which newsletters are my clients actually opening? Those sorts of content data points can help kind of go, okay, we tend to track that. I think that's happened with a few clients too, where they're like, we've been writing a lot about this particular thing.

‍

23:09:26 - 23:28:27

Tiffany Silverberg

We have one client in particular who had one person in there — I'll be vague about this; I don't call them out — but one person in their firm had a previous job where there was an obvious connection there of the kinds of people they could serve. It just became obvious, so we put stuff out.

‍

23:28:27 - 23:39:09

Tiffany Silverberg

Everybody loves it. Well, we should just put more of that out and make that a target because people eat it up every time we post it. So I think that can make it obvious.

‍

23:39:15 - 23:57:16

Lauren Hong

There's so many ways I'm like that. I'll just say I'd encourage folks, if you're going to narrow a target market, spend the time on it because it's one of those forks in the road with your business, where then you get behind it and there's a lot of effort, so you don't want to just kind of do this stuff like willy-nilly.

‍

23:57:16 - 24:21:27

Lauren Hong

You really want to take the time to invest in it as a team. And if you're smaller, then you're in more of a decision-making hat and you can have those tough conversations but then act accordingly. But it's worth the time and energy to put it behind either hiring a consultant or doing an offsite or working with an agency, whatever kind of makeup that looks like.

‍

24:22:01 - 24:28:28

Lauren Hong

But to really kind of unpack that because then you start aligning everything behind that strategic decision.

‍

24:28:28 - 24:46:19

Tiffany Silverberg

So, yeah, like you said, if the whole team can be behind it, that's the best because I just gotta say we've seen it get a little tricky when some people are super excited, some people are not. The flip side is I'm thinking of one particular client, they have a new target market and everyone's excited.

‍

24:46:24 - 24:54:13

Tiffany Silverberg

The website's going to be about it. Social is going to be about it. So the opportunities are immense because they're ready to go all out.

‍

24:54:15 - 25:12:11

Lauren Hong

What I was going to say too is like, sometimes it's really scary to get behind a target. Especially if you come from a second generation of owning a company. You don't want to ruffle feathers. If you have a lot of different stakes in the game, like a lot of different players.

‍

25:12:11 - 25:32:11

Lauren Hong

But part of that leadership we see that's so successful is when you do have a team or an individual who gets behind that and invests in it, and that's really where you start to see that traction. It's a hard call to make but it's one that when you make it, it's kind of where it all starts to funnel into.

‍

25:32:13 - 25:52:17

Tiffany Silverberg

So yeah. And one more thing: it doesn't always have to be like a demographic, right? So you’re like we have to go after dentists or whatever. And then especially bigger firms, they're like, well we're not all going after the dentists. So they start to know our clients are just into this kind of investment or they like this kind of philosophy.

‍

25:52:17 - 25:57:17

Tiffany Silverberg

How we serve them is different. And I think that can absolutely be a target market for them.

‍

25:57:18 - 26:14:28

Lauren Hong

Yeah, even to the bigger firms, like sometimes how the targeting starts to happen is by geography and locale. So it just depends where you are and kind of the bend of the strategy. So okay, we could talk about this for a whole other thing but super fun.

‍

26:15:00 - 26:20:29

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. Thanks.

‍

‍

‍

We talked about:

• How no campaign is truly isolated — exploring how the CFP Board recruiting ad campaign reached unintended audiences and the unexpected consequence that followed
• Why staying true to your brand’s identity, values, and mission is key to creating marketing campaigns that resonate and deliver the outcomes you want
• The surprising silver lining of the marketing misstep, and how it gave the financial planning community an opportunity to showcase its passion and profession in a new light

If you enjoyed this episode, you will also like: 

• Tips for Effective Branding and Website Strategies for Financial Services
• How a Brand Personality Can Drive Company Culture and Build Trust With Your Audience
• Your Media Marketing Strategy: Start By Letting Your Why Shine Through

Full Audio Transcript:

00:00 - 00:28

Lauren Hong

All right. Tiffany, so we’re doing this recording to talk about the CFP Board and the recent campaign that came out. It's a tricky topic. There's a lot of emotions and feedback, right? Where do we start? 

‍

00:29 - 00:48

Tiffany Silverberg

Well, like you said, it's very tricky. And we're not on the inside. We saw it come live, just like everyone else did through so many LinkedIn posts and people sharing and the reactions. So we've talked about it a lot internally. We want to make sure we're not being reactionary because again, we weren't there.

‍

00:48 - 01:00

Tiffany Silverberg

We didn't get to make the decisions. But we're also seeing kind of how it's impacting people. And just kind of want to have a conversation about that and about how marketing means something. Marketing impacts things.

‍

01:01 - 01:28

Lauren Hong

So it does and it has a domino effect, intact or not. And that can happen internally with an organization or externally as well. So to be a little vulnerable here when this campaign was released, it reminded me of a campaign that came out about five-ish years ago. I'm not exactly sure.

‍

01:28 - 01:51

Lauren Hong

And the reason it feels vulnerable is because it's a campaign that was really close to me. So I'll just kind of share this to maybe help frame it. You know I love my undergrad, Drake University — I've sat on boards, I've flown back. I mentor students. All these things. It's a place that helped me grow up, right?

‍

01:51 - 02:09

Lauren Hong

And they came out with this campaign, and like I said, about five years ago, they did all the research. It was a campaign that was to help recruit new students to come in. They did research. They spent budget. They tested it. They did focus groups. They came up with all kinds of ads.

‍

02:09 - 02:34

Lauren Hong

But when it was released, it didn't sit well. Drake University starts with the letter D. It was D+ for a collegiate university focused on education, a grade with a D+, or that's how it was perceived and did not sit well with those who received it. But the concept was supposed to be, okay, you come here and you're going to get this.

‍

02:34 - 02:57

Lauren Hong

Like first you have these experiences, you get this plus this. And so part of it was to send this out to all these new students to let them know, okay, you've been admitted and you get this and you're going to have a plethora of experiences and things you can dip into to explore. But the messaging and the way it came off from an alumni standpoint was bad.

‍

02:57 - 02:59

Tiffany Silverberg

It was that you chose poorly, right?

‍

02:59 - 03:20

Lauren Hong

Yes.

‍

03:20 - 03:03

Tiffany Silverberg

You could have gone to the A school but instead you chose the D school.

‍

03:03 - 03:26

Lauren Hong

Yeah. And we're all like, oh my gosh, this is not the intended message. It just didn't sit well. And especially an organization that you take so much pride in and helps you to be able to stretch your own wings. And so messages from alumni were flooding inboxes and there were conversations and there was social media, public comments.

‍

03:26 - 03:57

Lauren Hong

And, the university rallied behind the messaging. And it helps to explain the why for what had gone on. But part of it, for lack of a better word, is a little bit of damage control. To be able to really help put things in place. But I think one of the takeaways for me was kind of what you were just alluding to earlier, too, that marketing does touch everyone, even if it's just related to this particular demo or graphic, we feel it in different ways.

‍

03:57 - 04:07

Lauren Hong

Yeah. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that. But that was one of the things I was like, okay, do you want to pull up those skeletons again because it feels personal, right?

‍

04:07 - 04:28

Tiffany Silverberg

The skeletons came out for you. It felt like you were living it again. Well, and I think it's a good similarity to this situation because as things came out, it became very obvious this campaign was meant to be, well, interestingly, the same thing, a recruiting campaign meant to be very siloed.

‍

04:28 - 04:46

Tiffany Silverberg

And I think, again, I'm sure they did all the research. I'm sure they did all the focus groups and things like that. But I think the idea sometimes is that, well, it's all going to be okay. I'm sure everyone thought it was a great idea but it'll be okay because it's a separate thing.

‍

04:46 - 05:13

Tiffany Silverberg

It's a separate audience. It's going to be on a different platform. These guys probably aren't going to see that but that's the way the digital world works. And we have a colleague who we were hoping could join us but it didn't work out who always shares this phrase and I'm going to butcher it. But basically the marketing either adds to your brand or it takes away from your brand. Everything that goes out is either going to add more to your brand or it's going to take away from it.

‍

05:13 - 05:42

Tiffany Silverberg

And I think that's what we saw here is I know the idea was that it was supposed to be separate but everyone else felt it. And especially, again, alumni or those who hold the CFP®; there's so much pride there, there's so much identity there that when they see something they feel is taking away from what they've built internally, what's so much a part of them, I think that's where a lot of it came from.

‍

05:42 - 05:59

Tiffany Silverberg

It's not that it was necessarily a bad idea, I mean, maybe it was or maybe it wasn't, but not to pick on the idea or the creative but it's just the feeling that it took away from something that I hold dear. 

‍

05:59 - 06:19

Lauren Hong

And that was kind of the parallel with how I felt too, and even feel that kind of vulnerability of being able to kind of pull up those skeletons, right? Because the way it came across wasn't the perception of how I think others perhaps saw that, even though that wasn't the intention behind it.

‍

06:19 - 06:36

Lauren Hong

But yeah, shoutout to Jimmy, our colleague, who has that great quote of everything you're doing is either adding to the brand or taking away from the brand. And so I think it's almost like a good buffer to say, is this helping us along our mission or is this deviating from those pieces?

‍

06:36 - 06:45

Lauren Hong

And how do we react in times where things might feel like they're a little bit off course, right?

‍

06:45 - 07:09

Tiffany Silverberg

So yeah. And that's kind of the thing about the silo, because it can be easy to just connect the dots. I mean, we talk about connecting the dots all the time — we want this piece, whatever this campaign is, to hit these targets. We have these goals. We want people doing these things. But again, I think it's just like looking at the big picture.

‍

07:09 - 07:32

Tiffany Silverberg

How is it just going to make people feel? Is it reflecting the greater part of what we're trying to accomplish? Does it reflect our mission statement? So, just let the cat out of the bag, like we always talk about when we put a brand book together or a strategy document, it's got all the pieces: mission statement, vision statement, values, and brand personality.

‍

07:32 - 07:50

Tiffany Silverberg

What do we want people to feel when they interact with us? And all those components are kind of the filter for anything we design or any words we put out. And it's always like it. It has to stay within those guardrails. Anything outside of that is just not going to work. It might be fun.

‍

07:50 - 08:03

Tiffany Silverberg

It might be creative. And I think especially in a TikTok world where new trends are happening, it's like, we should go do that. But if it's not within our values, it doesn't mean they're bad. It doesn't mean that thing outside of it is bad.

‍

08:03 - 08:04

Lauren Hong

It is judging, right? And simply.

‍

08:04 - 08:18

Tiffany Silverberg

It just means it's not us and while we might all like it, some of our teammates are going to be like, oh, that wasn't us, because it's not in those guardrails, that fence.

‍

08:18 - 08:45

Lauren Hong

I love that. That's a really good analogy. The guardrails. And I feel like it's what helps keep you along that path. And from a business standpoint, like you mentioned earlier, mission, vision, values; I love the brand personalities we put together. I feel like that really helps to exuberate in a word or two, what's the energy we want to really channel through those guardrails.

‍

08:45 - 09:05

Tiffany Silverberg

And that's kind of what the two examples we're talking about — it was the energy that was missing. That's not how we want to be perceived in the world. That's not the energy we want to put out. And so it's not that it wasn't clever. Both of the examples — it wasn't that they weren't clever or even potentially even potentially even hitting those goals.

‍

09:05 - 09:22

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. But openly, it's not putting out the energy we want to be perceived like. When we talk about personalities and just the whole brand, whether it's somebody picking up the phone talking to you or a social media post, we want them to feel the same energy.

‍

09:22 - 09:44

Lauren Hong

That's right. And that's easy to be able to pull out through every visual piece or how you're hiring or training or keeping that momentum going. But it gives you that. Again, you said like those guardrails to be able to go back to. And I also think in challenging times, I mean, we see this with all kinds of situations, right?

‍

09:44 - 10:27

Lauren Hong

I feel like there can be unexpected things that happen or clients have to really kind of pull back. I think it really helps you keep on pace amid the unexpected — I don't even know if I want to use that or crisis. But sometimes in a crisis just to be able to say, okay, if we're showing up in every day, this is how we're showing up in every day but how do we show up to be able to keep that energy along those guardrails so that it's a calm, cool, and collected or if it's we've got your back or whatever that message might be, that there's that continuity.

‍

10:27 - 10:58

Tiffany Silverberg

Exactly. We talk about that in voice guides all the time, right? That there's going to be a tone that might have to shift, maybe something's more urgent or it's left less urgent. Maybe it's a social media post versus a memo but the voice is always going to be the same. And I just thought of a great example of a wealth management and planning firm we work with, and they brought out the point that they're coming from a place of trust — that's a core part of their personality.

‍

10:58 - 11:18

Tiffany Silverberg

And so they're like, well, we could play outside of that and we could play on fears but that's never going to feel authentically us. Every time we show up, it should be promoting trust. It should be building on that. Like aspiring to more and more, trust me and take it down a notch and kind of play around with that.

‍

11:18 - 11:20

Tiffany Silverberg

But it just will never feel right.

‍

11:20 - 11:23

Lauren Hong

It's sort of going against the grain.

‍

11:24 - 11:36

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's where even situations like this one where it was supposed to be funny, if it feels so opposite of what we've built, then I think that's where the problem can come in.

‍

11:36:24 - 11:44:04

Lauren Hong

Yeah. It was the deviation. It's just too far. Too far off.

‍

11:44 - 11:53

Tiffany Silverberg

Yeah. Or maybe not even that. It was too far off but it was literally the opposite. And now that's what I'm working against. 

‍

11:53 - 12:14

Lauren Hong

Sort of scribbling against those guardrails or it's growing outside of the lines of what's been established. I think of another example, there's a firm we've worked with for a number of years now, and very much has that calm, cool, and collected feel. But they had a totally unexpected issue that happened.

‍

12:14 - 12:32

Lauren Hong

It might have been last year. And part of it was a crisis situation. Not going to go into all the specifics but it was almost like externally you don't want to have that sort of Doctor Jekyll, kind of like Mr. Hyde. Like you’re flipping from that work of calm, cool, and collected. We got it.

‍

12:32 - 12:54

Lauren Hong

You know, there's that trust like you were alluding to earlier, in these kinds of pieces. And then all of a sudden it's like everything's untangling. And so part of it on the inside, which people don't always see, is to take that stress anxiety out, right? Because they're trying to do the right things for their clients or trying to take care of things, make sure things are buttoned up, and people are well taken care of.

‍

12:54 - 13:18

Lauren Hong

But trying to take all that energy and then saying, okay, let's return back to our brand. Like you said, we can slightly adjust the tone. I mean, not even slightly, right? But we're adjusting the tone enough so there's that constant, like, we've got it taken care of, right? And we recognize what's going on but we've taken this step that is consistently aligned with how we show up every single day.

‍

13:18 - 13:19

Lauren Hong

So yeah.

‍

13:19 - 13:31

Tiffany Silverberg

The same firm I'm thinking of also just won a pretty great award. So obviously when they're posting something about that the tone is going to be different than having to put out a memo communicating about that serious thing.

‍

13:31 - 13:32

Lauren Hong

Yeah.

‍

13:32 - 13:52

Tiffany Silverberg

But we're about, like you said, trust and confidence. And if they had put out something that was anxiety-ridden in that first one, it's kind of like we said, everything adds to or takes away from the brand. And it would communicate to clients that, oh gosh, if things got crazy on my end, like if I was in a crisis situation, they're going to panic.

‍

13:52 - 13:54

Tiffany Silverberg

Like, that's who they are.

‍

13:54 - 14:16

Lauren Hong

So yep, it's so true. So another thing that personally helps me is I like to get a lot of big ideas. And they're not always realistic, right? Sometimes you think, I'm going to do this project, it's going to be no big deal. And you're like, okay, let's take a minute back to see where does that fit in?

‍

14:16 - 14:36

Lauren Hong

And I think to connect the dots here is this idea of are we adding to the brand or are we taking away from the brand allows us to take ideas and say, that might be a great idea but that's not the right idea that's going to propel the company forward for the the business objectives we're trying to hit.

‍

14:36 - 14:42

Lauren Hong

So it does help to be able to keep within that one line.

‍

14:42 - 15:01

Tiffany Silverberg

So yeah, I think that's what we saw too with people reacting to the CFP campaign. Or again, I know there was something strategic, we're hoping to get these outcomes. But I think a lot of people felt like the way we got to those outcomes, and even the outcomes themselves might have deviated from what they felt was the business goal.

‍

15:01 - 15:20

Tiffany Silverberg

And that's a big disconnect too. I was thinking about it. It's almost like sometimes we see marketing as like the kid brother building mud pies in the backyard; it's just fine. Whatever you build, it's fine. But I don't know, probably because I'm a mom. I feel like it's more like marketing for the mom. Like she's setting the tone.

‍

15:20 - 15:34

Tiffany Silverberg

She's setting the schedule. Not that we're running the show but setting the tone. It's not just like, whatever Bobby does in the backyard. It's not just too far.

‍

15:34 - 15:53

Lauren Hong

The energy impacts everything, right? If you're inside of the house or not. So, yeah. So, it's keeping that constant and it's a tricky campaign to talk about because it has a lot of emotions and reactions and what have you.

‍

15:53 - 16:04

Tiffany Silverberg

You know, there's a lot of people who were involved or weren't involved and I know a lot of people feel a lot of things about it. So that's a tough one.

‍

16:04 - 16:30

Lauren Hong

But I also think it's an opportunity to also reflect on businesses like your own business and say, how does this impact me and how can I take lessons learned here? And then, also a reminder that we're not all on the inside, right? Not having those initial strategy conversations, what's happening, what's the direction and the thinking.

‍

16:30 - 16:36

Lauren Hong

So really. All right. Any other thoughts?

‍

16:36 - 16:55

Tiffany Silverberg

I think the only other great takeaway I saw happening from all this is just what an amazing community the CFP® community is and how quickly people were like, let's flip it on its head. Let's remind people of all the amazing things we do for our clients. Let's remind them of the fun stuff. You know, the good stuff we do in our free time and taking care of our community.

‍

16:55 - 17:11

Tiffany Silverberg

And it's been really fun to see people step up and play with it in that way. You see that passion, right?.

‍

17:11 - 17:18

Lauren Hong

Because we can all be passive and just sort of throw your hands up. But that's not been the reaction. There's a lot of heart and soul people who care, have opinions, are sharing their own thoughts, having side conversations, all those sorts of things.

‍

17:18 - 17:37

Lauren Hong

And I felt that, linking back to the Drake campaign too. I felt that energy almost just like it's on the surface. It was like almost after a rainstorm, where they're like, oh my gosh, all these things surface. The soil’s rich and you feel that sort of piece of it.

‍

17:37 - 17:45

Lauren Hong

And so I think that's also a reminder, like you said, just about the positive energy that's going on with the community.

‍

17:45 - 17:47

Tiffany Silverberg

So thank you.

‍

17:48 - 17:54

Lauren Hong

All right. All right. Thanks. Good.

‍

We talked with Broc about:

• The power of authenticity and trust when cultivating long-lasting relationships
• Digging deeper to ask the right questions when choosing an insurance partner
• How to align values and goals to spark collaboration 

About Broc Buckles:

Broc Buckles is the co-founder of BC Brokerage, a company dedicated to serving financial planners across all 50 states. BC Brokerage focuses on providing honest, efficient, and transparent insurance solutions exclusively for financial advisors and their clients. Recognizing the challenges financial planners face with traditional insurance brokers who often push products for commission, Broc and his team offer a trustworthy alternative. BC Brokerage empowers advisors, especially fee-only fiduciaries, to confidently implement insurance plans without concerns about upselling or misaligned incentives.

Featured Resources 

• Broc Buckles on LinkedIn
• BC Brokerage on Instagram
• BC-brokerage.com 
• Alan Moore on LinkedIn
• Michael Kitces on LinkedIn

Enjoyed This? You’ll Also Love:  

• Business Growth Tips for Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Financial Services Business Owners
• Reaching Gen Z: How Financial Services Companies Can Engage and Hire the Next Generation with Mary Wisniewski
• How Authenticity Can Help You Attract Your Tribe, Find Your Target Market, and Add Passion to the Bottom Line

‍

Full Audio Transcript:

00:00 - 20:03

Lauren Hong

All right, let's do this. So excited to hear from you today about business, insurance, online yards. You guys are an indie. Where should we start? I'm gonna throw it over to you to share a little bit about background. Like what you guys got going on over there.

‍

00:20 - 00:46

Broc Buckles

Yeah. For sure. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on, Lauren. Good to be here with you. My name is Broc Buckles. I'm one of the co-founders of a company called BC Brokerage, and we work all over the country — all 50 states — with specifically and exclusively financial planners to help their clients be able to implement insurance in an honest and efficient and fair way so they don't have to kind of deal with the dark side of the insurance industry.

‍

00:46 - 1:11

Broc Buckles

I know a lot of people come from broker dealers or captive places where they're kind of pushed to do one thing, and it always feels like people are being sold one thing. And so the idea behind creating the company was really just to give advisors, who we believe are the true fiduciary, the true advisors of the world, which is fee-only, the opportunity to be able to implement things for their clients.

‍

1:11- 1:34

Broc Buckles

But when we were talking to them early on, one of the biggest things was, I don't know what's going to happen when I ask my client to get some insurance from these random people, and a lot of times they end up selling them. And so, we really pride ourselves on being the antithesis of that. And whatever they come recommended with is the insurance they get.

‍

1:34 - 1:52

Lauren Hong

Okay. So let’s kind of back up. How did you decide to work specifically with the advisor community? And how did you kind of navigate that path for you guys in the insurance world before? And then you kind of narrowed in here, or was it the other way around? Were you on the advisor side? And then you go, hey, you know, we see a problem.

‍

1:52 - 1:53

Lauren Hong

How did that come about?

‍

1:54 - 2:19

Broc Buckles

Yeah. Good question. So we started our careers — actually Peter and I met the first day of intern training — at a big Fortune 500 company that I eventually became kind of disenfranchised with. I was there for about five and a half years. Peter was there for a couple of years and kind of got on the brokerage side. Basically we met up one day, and I was like, I'm not happy with what I'm doing.

‍

2:19 - 2:45

Broc Buckles

And he said to me, well, it's funny because there's this type of financial planner who's out there. They don't do insurance but obviously good financial planning includes insurance. And so I think there's a good opportunity out here. And it was so funny because he always said to me, you know, get the phone to ring the other way — make good B2B relationships with people and then have them call you when they need help with their clients.

‍

2:45 - 2:50‍

Broc Buckles

And back then I thought he was crazy because the model we were using is you cold call everybody.

‍

2:50 - 2:51

Lauren Hong

Oh yeah.

‍

2:51 - 3:05

Broc Buckles

No one's going to call you. So he kind of told me about it and I said, hey, you know what? Let's run with it. And we started in January of 2020, which was a great time to start a business, right before a big pandemic hit.

‍

3:05 - 3:06

Lauren Hong

Yeah. Yes.

‍

3:06 - 3:18

Broc Buckles

It was rough but we were very disciplined about it. He took advantage of his operational strengths. And I love talking to people. And so it just kind of worked. And here we are today.

‍

3:18 - 3:43

Lauren Hong

So it's a whole world, right? Like the advisor community. There's a lot of jargon, a lot of inroads to be able to figure out and what have you. How did you guys go about that? Did you or Peter come with a base or a subset of that, or how did you help to navigate this community and kind of learn to speak their language and their needs and their clients’ needs?

‍

3:43 - 4:01

Broc Buckles

Yeah. So I mean, it came with just the very small sample size of the people in the Indianapolis area we had talked about. And then we had conversations with them and just asked them, what are your pain points? What is it you struggle with? What are the experiences, both good and bad, you've had when implementing insurance?

‍

4:01 - 4:24

Broc Buckles

And so we took that small sample size and just very literally applied it into a national concept and just said, hey, you know what? We're going to start going to these conferences. We're going to start looking at people who are only on LinkedIn. And honestly, it started with me probably calling 10,000+ people just trying to get appointments because that's what I knew how to do.

‍

4:24 - 4:26

Lauren Hong

Yeah. You were used to that.

‍

4:26 - 4:47

Broc Buckles

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, those days aren't really here anymore. We don't really do those anymore because there's a lot more inbound stuff. But it was that. And then we just kind of started meeting with more and more people. The more we met with people, the more we actually realized it's a small but it's a large world.

‍

4:47 - 5:09

Broc Buckles

It's a lot smaller than other parts of the industry but you definitely have everything from solopreneurs all the way up to firms that have billions and billions and billions of dollars under management. And we work with all of them, solopreneurs all the way up to the firms that have close to 100 advisors.

‍

5:09 - 5:26

Lauren Hong

Wow. Yeah. So you really see the full spread there, what's going on. Definitely challenges of those growth periods. So I know you guys work with a lot of IT firms that are part of the Philly network. They're doing really good work out there. I'm assuming a lot of NAPFA firms.

‍

5:26 - 5:35

Lauren Hong

We were talking right before this but just to give a shoutout to XYPN. I know you said it earlier. You're doing their conference, I believe.

‍

5:35 - 5:57

Broc Buckles

Yeah, we're going to be sponsoring it. Shout out to the XYPN community. Awesome community. And what an opportunity Alan Moore and Michael Kitces have given to people who really want to go out and do their own thing. So it's been so cool to watch that grow. And I mean, it was going five or six years before we even started our company; to see the evolution in the five years we've been around has been huge.

‍

5:57 - 6:07

Broc Buckles

And the people I talk to who have been there since the beginning can't believe it. It was like  one roundtable when it first started. And now there's thousands of advisors with them. 

‍

6:07 - 6:21

Lauren Hong

Well, they tapped into a need and yeah, shoutout to Alan too. We had him on our podcast here. It must have been several months ago but he gave a really good overview of how they built that up and the communities they're building and all that. So I'll make sure to link it to.

‍

6:21 - 6:38

Lauren Hong

Okay. So just to go back to what you were saying earlier about this subset, right? You're like, okay, like let's talk with people in our local area, figure out what their needs are, apply that at a national level. I'm sure you guys have learned a ton since then. So if you were in an advisor’s seat, right?

‍

6:38 - 6:52

Lauren Hong

What questions should they be asking if they're thinking about working with someone like you? What are the questions, the top questions they should be thinking about asking? Maybe what people start telling them to make sure it's like the right fit for wherever they are.

‍

6:52 - 7:03

Broc Buckles

Yeah. So I mean, there are obviously other firms out there that do what we do. But I think first and foremost, you have to make sure people have honest business practices, right?

‍

7:03 - 7:05

Lauren Hong

So have that alignment.

‍

7:05 - 7:24

Broc Buckles

Yep, exactly. Just mirroring their fiduciary responsibility in our own work is, I think, one of the things we pride ourselves on the most. And we encourage people to grill us and ask us questions, like why are you choosing this carrier for this client? Why are you deciding to do that? Planning this way? Why are you making this recommendation?

‍

7:24 - 7:42

Broc Buckles

And we build a lot of trust through things like offering some free offerings. We'll review policy analysis with people. So I would say the big thing you want to get a feel for very quickly is, is this a person you're just going to send business to and they're going to make money off the clients you're referring to them?

‍

7:42 - 8:06

Broc Buckles

Or does it really feel like an authentic partnership? And one that's going to create reciprocity and make sure you actually feel like you can lean on them not just for implementing business but also asking questions, and understanding things about the insurance world that maybe are a little bit more nuanced, that you're just not spending your day, every single day as a financial planner, focusing on.

‍

8:06 - 8:20

Lauren Hong

Okay, so the first thing is really just basically getting value alignment. Is this a fit? How do they go about picking their carriers and making choices so they can be rolled along the way and that's okay.

‍

8:20 - 8:21

Broc Buckles

So absolutely.

‍

8:21 - 8:28

Lauren Hong

Any other questions that you feel like advisors should be asking when picking the right vendor to work with?

‍

8:28 - 8:54

Broc Buckles

You know, I would say to ask them what their philosophies are on certain types of products is a really good thing to do. Like, I have advisors all the time ask me about the big, bad permanent insurance world where it's like a lot of advisors are recommending term insurance all the time but they want kind of as a test to ask why, when, and where do you recommend permanent insurance?

‍

8:54 - 9:12

Broc Buckles

And you better have a pretty good answer for that question. There are certain situations where it definitely makes sense; if people are over $10 million net worth, they have special needs planning, if you're looking to do long-term care planning. But ask them questions that are related to not just everyday product lines, right?

‍

9:12 - 9:35

Broc Buckles

Ask them questions about specific products and what situations you would use those products in to see if you align. Because I think you could say, are you going to be honest? Okay, can we trust you or are you going to sell our clients? And that's one thing. But if every single time you recommend something, they're trying to lead you in a different way or it's just a very hard conversation that's never going to work.

‍

9:35 - 9:45

Lauren Hong

So are most of your engagements where you're building the relationship with the advisor, and then they're referring you to their client? Just to make sure I'm following that.

‍

9:45 - 9:45

Broc Buckles

That's how it works.

‍

9:46 - 10:03

Lauren Hong

Okay, cool. That's helpful. Another thing I see sometimes is you can work with a provider and everything looks great on paper with the communications. It's totally want want, like it just falls flat, you know? What do you guys do to make sure that follow-through happens, right?

‍

10:03 - 10:13

Lauren Hong

And making sure people have what they need and the check-ins. Do you have any kind of systemized cadence you've got working with your clients? Because things can get stale, right?

‍

10:13 - 10:34

Broc Buckles

Yeah, things can get stale. So yeah, that's a really good question. And that's more of Peter's department. He's the operation mind. But we have definitely done some things that have truly improved the efficiency and the way things get done. So one of the things was automatic email reminders, right?

‍

10:34 - 10:51

Broc Buckles

So we have a cadence once a week from the time we're introduced. They're going to get a reminder; I would like to say we're pleasantly persistent. And so once a week, we're going to politely remind them to please fill out their intake form if they haven't done that. When we hit a month, we loop the advisor back in.

‍

10:51 - 11:09

Broc Buckles

And then we also created a portal. You know, I think we're a very tech forward firm in the way we want to keep everybody in the loop. So it's a portal that actually talks to our CRM. And then every advisor has an account name, and all of the deals we do underneath their account name with their clients, they can follow along instantaneously.

‍

11:10 - 11:20

Broc Buckles

So the minute we have an update about a case, there's no manual process of email, anything like that; everything happens right away. So that's cut down on processing time, which has been cool. 

‍

11:20 - 11:36

Lauren Hong

And communications with the advisor too because they've got that transparency, the same with your system or what have you. Oh that's really neat that you guys have built that in tandem. So it's not just like a referral relationship but you actually have a portal where they can have that hub and have that transparency to develop that trust.

‍

11:36 - 12:02

Broc Buckles

Yeah, exactly. We took a survey in the beginning, asking how are you keeping track of your clients’ insurance policies once they've been completed? And we heard way too many say via Excel spreadsheets and so were like there has to be a better way. So, when they're done and we've completed something, they can literally go into that portal, click on the policy’s tab and see every policy we've ever implemented with them.

‍

12:02 - 12:17

Broc Buckles

They can actually also add policies we haven't even implemented just to have a filing cabinet system for everything insurance related. There's a note section. So it's literally everything you could want from an organizational standpoint.

‍

12:17 - 12:21

Lauren Hong

Super cool. That's really helpful. Like that one-stop shop.

‍

12:21 - 12:22

Broc Buckles

Yeah.

‍

12:22 - 12:45

Lauren Hong

I also really appreciate how you guys are like, I don't know, in a high tower thinking about what people need but you're actually talking to people, like boots on ground, and then creating real solutions to be able to solve those problems. So, it's good to hear that too. Okay. So you've got the advisor side about how to potentially see if you guys would be the right fit.

‍

12:45 - 13:02

Lauren Hong

But let's kind of flip the table. So let's say an advisor is talking with a client. And they're trying to figure out if they need an insurance solution. What questions do you often tip off to advisors to help them kind of guide them down those right questions if their client does need a service like yours?

‍

13:02 - 13:07

Broc Buckles

So I want to make sure I understand your question. Like how are they figuring out if the client needs the insurance?

‍

13:07- 13:09

Lauren Hong

Yep. You got it.

‍

13:09 - 13:24

Broc Buckles

So, I mean, a lot of them, some of them come from the insurance world so they have a pretty good handle on it. Others, kind of the extent of the insurance knowledge they have is what they learned in the CFP® curriculum, which is not a ton. So there's a lot of on-the-job learning.

‍

13:24 - 13:49

Broc Buckles

But as a general rule of thumb, most people need life insurance. It's just a matter of figuring out how much. For disability income, that's one of those things to where you probably have some through work. Most of the time it's taxed. And so we tell them, if your clients can't live on 40 to 45% of what they're making right now if something were to happen, we probably need to be having a disability conversation.

‍

13:49- 14:07

Broc Buckles

Annuities and permanent insurance, that's getting into the weeds a little bit. So that's a lot different. But then we also recently started within the last about six months offering property and casualty, both commercial and personal, across the United States so that more or less just has to do with, hey, let's check your current coverage, make sure everything's adequate.

‍

14:07 - 14:24

Broc Buckles

Your limits are where they should be, if you wreck into the back of a Lamborghini, you're not going to have to pay out of pocket for it. And that's a little bit more black and white but that's kind of the way we just put the things into their ears and say, here's what you should be looking at.

‍

14:24 - 14:30

Broc Buckles

And like I said, a lot of people already know how to do it. But for the people who are kind of new in this space, those are kinds of the tips we try to give them.

‍

14:30 - 14:36

Lauren Hong

Yeah. So here's a spread of options. Here's the key things to be thinking about when talking with clients. So they have an idea.

‍

14:36 - 14:37

Broc Buckles

Exactly. Yeah.

‍

14:37 - 14:52

Lauren Hong

Okay. Do you mind putting this into reality too? Can you share a case study, maybe an advisor you worked with and kind of like how that engagement went, maybe like a timeline and how things are built over time. And working with them and their clients.

‍

14:52 - 15:10

Broc Buckles

Yeah. It's like a sample case of how we have moved forward with relationships with advisors, as I was talking about.

‍

15:15 - 15:01

Lauren Hong

Yeah, yeah.

‍

15:01 - 15:18

Broc Buckles

Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny how this happens, actually, we have an advisor we've worked with basically since the beginning. And in the beginning it was very much like, here's what the client needs, this is what we want. A lot of the dialog was not rigid but very specific about what the client needed.

‍

15:18 - 15:34

Broc Buckles

And then, as they continue to work with us and we work with case after case and they knew our planning philosophy, when it came to certain product lines, was about the same as theirs was, it's been really cool because now the emails consist of, this person needs this product, take it away.

‍

15:34 - 15:53

Broc Buckles

I trust you guys. And so it was really cool over the last several years to be able to build that relationship to a point where they just know we're going to do the right thing. And when the relationships get to those points that feels really good because that means we're all doing a really good job of making sure we're on the same page.

‍

15:53 - 16:10

Lauren Hong

Yeah, I hear you. It's that trust component too. I think that goes back to your earlier initial question of make sure the value base is there. I mean, that's a good question for vendors in general, make sure there's a good value for it. But I think in this space in particular, like you said, there can sometimes be a bad rap that's associated with it.

‍

16:10 - 16:15

Lauren Hong

And being able to make sure there's that alignment, that philosophy alignment and fiduciary alignment.

‍

16:15 - 16:29

Broc Buckles

So yeah, and you have to stay on your stuff because one thing is for sure, you got to keep people happy. Because, like I said, it can be kind of a big community but it can also be a small community. So you need to make sure you're doing a good job for people.

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16:29 - 16:39

Lauren Hong

That's right. That's so true. Okay. So any other final thoughts, shoutouts you want to give anything to?

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16:39 - 17:03

Broc Buckles

Yeah. The thing I would say is if you have any questions about what we do, feel free to reach out to me. It's Broc at bc hyphen brokerage.com. Check out our website, BC hyphen brokerage.com. And if anybody's listening who’s thinking about starting an RIA and wants me to put you in touch with someone who's been doing it, I know a lot of people who are very generous with their time, so I'm happy to do that.

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17:03 - 17:07

Broc Buckles

And if you want to bounce ideas off me, please don't hesitate to reach out.

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17:07 - 17:13

Lauren Hong

Broc, thanks so much. I also want to give you a plug for your podcast as well. So is it fee-only? Is that right?

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17:14 - 17:23

Broc Buckles

Only fee-only podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Those are the two main hubs.

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17:23 - 17:38

Lauren Hong

Okay. Sweet. So we'll make sure to include that link below also to your website, BC Brokerage, as well. So thank you. Appreciate your time and the work you do for this community. Paying it forward. Thank you for sharing your time and insights today.

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17:38 - 17:40

Broc Buckles

Yeah. Thanks a lot. Was great to talk to you, Lauren.

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17:40 - 17:44

Lauren Hong

Thanks.

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