Next Generation Planner: March 2022
Hannah Moore, CFP®
Owner and Principal Financial Planner, Guiding Wealth
Host, You’re a Financial Planner…Now What?
www.linkedin.com/in/hannahmoorecfp
Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt of Episode 191 of You’re a Financial Planner…Now What? Click or tap here to listen to the full episode.
Hannah Moore: You’ve really embraced this idea of a lifestyle firm. Can you talk about your practice as a lifestyle firm and the decisions that you’ve made in order to maintain your lifestyle?
Benjamin Brandt: My firm is Capital City Wealth Management. We are located in Bismarck, North Dakota, which is 33 miles from the geographical center of North America if you’re near a map. We serve clients that are living off their money, so that’s generally baby boomers. That’s who we talk to with our [podcast]. I started my firm a little over five years ago on my 33rd birthday. We were the first ever, according to NAPFA, fee-only firm in the history of the state of North Dakota. Right now, we serve about 75 households, and we’ve got about $60 million in assets under management.
HM: So are you the only planner at your office right now?
BB: I’m the only planner, and we have two support staff.
HM: You talk about a lifestyle practice. So what does that mean for you?
BB: A few years ago, my oldest daughter turned 10, and I had this feeling of dread realizing that her time with me was more than half over, and I knew that I wanted to create a successful business and a profitable business so I could do everything with my family that I wanted to do. I have six kids now, and I didn’t want to miss their lives, so I knew I needed to achieve balance. I joined a coaching program, Limitless Advisor Coaching, after I heard Matt Jarvis on Michael Kitces’s podcast. He’s taking 100 days off a year, and he’s only meeting with clients a certain number of months out of the year, and I thought, “I need to figure out how to do that.” In 2018, we decided to test it out by not meeting with clients in the month of December, meaning we take all of our December clients and we just meet with them in October or November. We’re doing the same amount of appointments; we’re just doing them in a more structured way, rather than an ad hoc, reactive basis. That worked really well, so in 2019, we decided to meet with clients every other month, and that worked really well. Our goal in 2020 was to only meet with clients in May and November.
HM: Do your clients know this about you?
BB: It’s not a secret but it’s not something we really advertise. If somebody dies, if somebody’s inherits some money, if somebody retires, if somebody has a question, they can call us, and we’ll meet with them if we can’t just solve the issue over the phone. But I think if you try this out, you’ll find that 80 percent to 90 percent of your appointments are ones that you proactively reach out for, and you can schedule those anytime you want.
HM: How does it work with new clients? Do you only take on new clients in those months? How do those meetings work?
BB: In May and November, it’s going to be three weeks each month where we have probably five appointments a day, so we probably would not visit with new prospects those months. All of our new prospects come from our show. They come through our website, we nurture them in our email lists, and they have to answer a quiz through Acuity Scheduling, which is going to weed out probably 90 percent of potential applicants. We had 29 new client appointments last year; only about three of those were people that we felt good about and they felt good about hiring us. Once you set all the filters in place, that’s going to weed out 97 percent of the population already. If you have those filters set up, you’re not going to talk to that many prospects by design.
HM: You’ve been in business for about five years. That’s a pretty incredible place to be, getting $60 million in assets in five years. What’s really been the driver of your business and your success?
BB: My firm, Capital City Wealth Management, is five years old; I was with an insurance company before that. I’m all about making me sound awesome, but that makes me a little bit too awesome.
We were able to bring over roughly $15 million or $20 million from our relationships at the old company. The rest we built by podcasting, and we teach in-person courses at our local college, adult enrichment classes. And then the occasional referrals here and there. We made some really great inroads with some local companies that had generational hiring. As the generational hiring was rolling over, we were able to get several clients, maybe a dozen or two, from those efforts.
On Marketing for Balance
HM: You started podcasting in 2015. Has that been one of the biggest drivers for finding new clients and growing your firm?
BB: We ask everybody where they meet us and it’s 100 percent, maybe it’s 99 percent, from online activities, usually the podcast. We rank for “North Dakota financial adviser,” “Bismarck financial planner,” we rank really well for “retirement podcast.” We’ve spent a lot of time targeting those terms because they’re unique; they’re relevant to us. And that’s where we get all of our clients from.
HM: If you were to start over today, where would you start?
BB: I would start either podcasting or blogging, which, with the changes that Google is making, are going to be identical in the next few years. Just start to craft your message. Start to discover how you feel about certain things about financial planning and speak that to the world. Start to build a platform, start to collect email addresses, start to dial in a niche, and either you will find yourself as an independent adviser with some traffic and some potential clients, or you will make yourself incredibly attractive to a larger firm if you bring in your own marketing funnel.
HM: What are your marketing activities in a week?
BB: I do two things. I record my show, which publishes Monday mornings, and I talk to my email list every Thursday morning. The name of the email list is called “Every Day Is Saturday” to remind our audience that in retirement, every day is Saturday. I only press record on my show; I’ve got a firm that is really profitable so I can pay somebody else to do all the not-so-fun stuff like editing and creating show notes. . . . On the email list, I say this is the most interesting article I read this week, this is the book I’m reading, here’s what my family did this week. It’s an opportunity outside of the show to get more personal and nurture your audience a little bit more.
HM: What are your thoughts on paid traffic versus content marketing?
BB: I would never pay for traffic in my life. This phrase gets played to death and I hate saying it, but financial advisers love to ask for marriage on the first date. That’s what cold marketing is. You’re getting cold traffic to your website. They don’t really know who you are, they don’t care. They don’t care about your content, and they’re going to be on your page six seconds and then go somewhere else. I want to nurture people over time so that by the time they pick up the phone, they already know who I am. They know what I like and don’t like. They know about my situation, how I feel about certain financial planning topics. If they’re fans of the show, they can literally finish my sentences, which makes my job closing that financial adviser business pretty damn easy. If it’s just cold traffic, I’ve got to spend a bunch of money, I’ve got to cast this huge net, I’ve got to talk to 50,000 people a week and hope that one of them picks up the phone. You’re working twice as hard to go half as far. Whereas if you’re nurturing people over time, you’re working half as hard to go twice as far. So that money that you’re going to use to buy cold, boring traffic—use that to create content.
HM: What do you see for the future for you?
BB: So we’re transitioning right now from growth mode to sustainability mode. My goal is three intersecting goals. It’s 100 households. It’s $1 million in revenue, or it’s $100 million in assets. We’re getting very close to that. At that point, I’m just going to sustain the business I have, and we’ll have a waiting list for new clients potentially. I really don’t see myself at this point hiring new advisers. There are studies that Michael Kitces points to from time to time that an adviser overseeing five other advisers has roughly the same income as one adviser and two support staff serving 100 households. Our firm is amazingly profitable. We’ve got a better than 50 percent profit margin due to the lessons I’ve learned in coaching. I don’t see it getting much better than that, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
