You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”: the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Financial advisors, we have a special, special episode for you this week. I rarely do guest episodes. I mean, there was a period, I think, in 2022 or 2023, I don't even remember, where I posted on LinkedIn and basically said, “I don't feel like doing all the work for the podcast this summer. Who would like to be a guest?” I got about 11 people in a row and that was pretty cool, but ever since then, I haven't taken on that many guests, simply because I like to keep it focused on what I've seen and what I'm doing. [00:58.2]
But every so often, I come across people who are absolutely crushing it into space and who are doing phenomenal work, and who serve a need that financial advisors actually have—and this week, I have Jeff Rusin, who is the founder, or one of the co-founders, I should say, of Advisor Tech Partners, and we are going to talk about CRMs and automation, and how that applies to your marketing.
I want to preface this episode before I let Jeff take the wheel. The reason I'm especially interested in this topic, for financial advisors who have been with me forever and ever and ever, back in 2015 the original platform of the Advisor Coach was coaching-based. Thus the name “The Advisor Coach.” A few of the things that I helped financial advisors with back in the day were things like follow-up, choosing a niche, and a little bit of CRM and automation, but I practically had to beg financial advisors to use CRMs. These are three of the things that would absolutely move the needle in their businesses. [01:52.7]
The landscape has evolved tremendously. Now using a CRM is kind of sort of like table stakes. It's not something that I have to beg financial advisors to do anymore, which I think is really cool, so a lot has changed in 10 years—and I want to get Jeff to talk about what he has seen in the marketplace, why financial advisors should, I guess, use the CRM, if they're not, and some of the things that they can do in their business to extract even more productivity from their technology.
Jeff, I'll let you take the wheel. Talk about yourself, what you do, how you got here, and whatever else you want.
Jeff: All right, awesome. James, thank you for having me. Firstly, I've noticed your LinkedIn posts all the time about the marketing for financial advisors and how important it is to be sending those emails, have different messaging, instead of just talking about holistic plans—and all that garbage, right?—actually stand out.
When we're working with clients at Advisor Tech Partners, we do a lot of automation inside of Wealthbox and Redtail CRM systems, and so this directly affects what happens inside of Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Sendinblue, any of those email marketing platforms. We set up automation so, practically, when someone becomes a prospect and then turns into a client, you don't want to be sending them those daily emails that James is recommending to ask for an intro call, right? [03:13.8]
So, I'll preface this whole conversation [by saying that] automations inside of the CRM are good for email marketing.
James: Yeah, and we'll talk about specific examples. It doesn't have to be complicated, right?
Jeff: No.
James: In the system that you're talking about, when I recommend for financial advisors to email every day, they kind of get confused, where they say, “Wait, do you want me to sit down and write an email every day? I don't have time for that.” No, not necessarily, not if you absolutely want to do that. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. But, typically, I recommend they have an email sequence. When someone joins your email list, they go through the sequence of five to 12 emails. This is typically what I recommend.
Jeff: Right.
James: At the end of that sequence, they exit and they go to some other list, so that’s what you're talking about. They could get—what do you call it? Do you call it tagging? They get tagged as a client. [04:01.8]
Jeff: Inside of Redtail and Wealthbox—I'll use Wealthbox as an example here—there's their statuses, right? There's contact types and statuses. Redtail is actually the statuses. Wealthbox is the types. So, when you change them from prospect to client or anything, what we want, we only have to get deep into it, we can make something happen inside of the email marketing software.
Let's just say that that five to 12 email sequence that you just mentioned, say that came from the website, so we could automate it from the website into the CRM as a lead, and then into that five to seven drip campaign. Then after, automatically get them into whatever audience that you want to get them into for those occasional emails, or when something big happens, like the Big Beautiful Bill, and you need to say something about it, right?
James: That makes a huge difference. I know we're talking about email. What are some of the most comm
on things that you help financial advisors with? Just big picture, what are some of the most common things? [04:58.1]
Jeff: The biggest thing that we do is automating in tandem with workflows inside of the CRM. If an introductory meeting is scheduled, then a workflow that we custom build for the firm is automatically launched, so the associate advisors, CSAs, lead advisors and owners all know what they need to do in order to make that a successful first impression.
I mean, you're coming right off that email, which, if they scheduled, is a good impression. You want to have a workflow in place, so those pre-tasks leading up to that intro meeting are perfect—and a good example is sending a Loom video to that prospect before, right? That's a high-quality touchpoint you can do to really get them to really stand out and probably convert them before they even get on the call.
James: You mean if someone schedules an appointment, or once someone does schedule an appointment, you can record videos saying, “Hey, thank you so much for scheduling the appointment. I look forward to meeting you. Here's what you need to bring,” that sort of thing. [05:53.2]
Jeff: Yeah, you can do that and, if you trust your associate advisor enough, you can make it so that task goes to the associate advisor. They record the Loom video. Say, “Hey, James, it's great that you scheduled a call with us or a meeting with us. You need to bring X, Y and Z. We really look forward to meeting you,” and can reference some information that they put in the notes inside of the scheduling link automatically launched when an intro meeting is scheduled. Right?
James: That's cool. When you talk to financial advisors about these sort of workflows and processes, are they generally open to that? Are they happy to get on board with that, or are they a little skeptical and hesitant where they don't want to do all this automation?
Jeff: It really starts from the ground-up. They need the customizations in their CRM, so they need to make sure they know what's what and who's who in their CRM, first of all. That's the first step. After you get all that groundwork in place, like prospect, client, client tier levels, all that stuff, then you can move into what I've talked about, which is the workflows. [06:57.5]
We always start off with the customizations first. Because all firms have their own lingo, we want to make sure that lingo translates customized into the CRM that they're using, whether that be Redtail or Wealthbox. Then they get more comfortable with the workflows, and then we get team meetings with associate advisors, CSAs, lead advisors, all talking about the processes, and it ends up being a good mediation session, a good therapy session for people to get the real processes in place, because without those types of calls, we're not going to get the custom result that we want that actually fits the firm likely glove.
James: It's cool that you get everyone on board, because that saves a lot of time. At least from my perspective, it's not even just about the advisor and the client or potential client. It's actually about all the internal communication. That saves a lot of time, too. You don't have to go to your associate advisor or your receptionist, or whoever you have in your business, your assistant, and say, “Oh, I need you to do this, this, this and this,” or even remind them. It just all happens automatically, which is cool. [08:00.0]
Jeff: Yes, very much so. Posts, like actually implementing this for firms, we encourage people to reach out to us, because there's a phase where we're actually revising workflow steps. If the CSA doesn't like a workflow step, they can reach out to us, tell us why they don't like it, and then we can change it. Maybe there's a different outcome to the step. Maybe it needs to be worded differently, but whatever floats their boat. Then we'll send out. We'll make the changes in their Wealthbox or Redtail CRM and shoot them over a Loom video with the changes, explaining why, and then we encourage them to save that video, put it in their server for future reference.
James: That's a good business practice, too. I mean, that's just a thing that you should do. Even if you're not using all the fancy automation or whatever, this is something that you should just [do]. You should listen to your team members. I think that's a great thing to do.
I have a question for you that's kind of like from my selfish interest, simply because I've been around long before Redtail and Wealthbox really became massive and took over the space, so I've kind of seen this evolution of the two, and really, I love to see their growth and I've loved to see their evolution over the years. Why do you think they have become so successful and have been the dominant players over the past, I would say, five to 10 years? [09:10.8]
Jeff: Firstly, I'll get into, okay, with Salesforce, you need an admin. No question about it. It's that complex where you just need an admin for the CRM. I think a lot of advisory firms, especially RIAs just starting out, don't want to be spending that capital on a Salesforce admin, number one.
Number two, you can start using Redtail and Wealthbox fight out of the box. Especially with their marketing placement being a CRM for financial advisors, it really catches a lot of attention, so I think both of them have done a great job in putting their niche in. I think simply because of their niche is why they get all the business, you know what I mean? And I do think they do a lot of enterprise deals with bigger firms where there are IARs, independents, working underneath them that choose it because it's recommended to them. [10:06.3]
James: Okay. I mean, that's a huge deal, especially for cash flow, or just from a business perspective and I think in terms of being an entrepreneur, if you could land those big whales in the industry, you're going to get a huge infusion of cash that you can use to better your product to help your people perform better. It snowballs, right?
Jeff: Right.
James: We talked a little bit off air. I don't know how deep you want to go with this, but you talked about how a lot more advisors that you've seen using Wealthbox. I'm not sure, did I say “Wealthfront” before? I’ve got a different [name] just on my mind.
Jeff: No, Wealthbox. It’s Wealthbox.
James: I know. I think I may have done a tongue, a Freudian slip with Wealthfront. I've been working on something with robo-advisors this morning—but Wealthbox and Redtail. You mentioned that a lot more advisors are using Wealthbox, or at least, it seems to be that way for you. Why do you think that has happened? [10:54.0]
Jeff: I think it's, number one, their marketing, and, number two, their innovation. They have an AI note-taker coming out soon and a lot of the automations that we build are from Fireflies, and then Fireflies find the client or prospect email and then automatically post that note to the contact with Wealthbox, coming out with that AI built-in note-taker. It's just going to go directly to the contact, I believe.
And just innovation overall, such as in workflow steps now, you can send emails from workflows. You can do send-to actions. You can do contact updates, all within the workflow. So, they’ve done a great job with innovating and I think that's why a lot of people are on Wealthbox. Their innovation has been great.
For me, I like iPhone. I don't know if everyone else does, but I like the simplicity of it, and I don't care if Android came out with something better 10 years ago. iPhone is simple and I think Wealthbox is the iPhone of CRMs, even though it is great.
James: Did they pay you to say that?
Jeff: No, no, no.
James: No, I know.
Jeff: Advisor Tech Partners gets nothing from either of them. [12:03.6]
James: Yeah, I got you. By the way, advisors, I have no relationship with Wealthbox or Redtail, or any of the advisors-specific CRMs. Years ago, we're talking 2016 maybe, I wrote a blog post about the CRM that I recommend for financial advisors, and at the time, that was a company called Capsule.
I want to make it very clear to advisors, the reason I recommended that specific CRM was because this was an article that was going to get viewed by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands people who all had different needs. If I had to make one standard recommendation, it's not even about the company, it's about the simplicity, okay? That's how I was thinking at the time. I wanted to give financial advisors something that was absolutely drop-dead simple to use that they could get up and running, because you have to view it from my perspective.
At the time, financial advisors were not using CRMs as much as they're using them today, and the percentage of advisors who were using them was not as high as the percentage of advisors who are using CRMs today—so, getting them to do something was better than them doing nothing, which was typically what they were doing, CRM-wise. So, getting them to use something that was just drop-dead simple was what motivated me to recommend that specific tool. [13:15.8]
I imagine that Wealthbox fills that need even better today, I mean, based on everything I've seen. I'm not a Wealthbox user. I have a CRM that's a little clunky, but that's also because the tech that I use is a little more fragmented, I guess you would say. But it's just been phenomenal for me to see that growth over the years of Wealthbox and Redtail, and I think you're right—I think that advisors crave simplicity, because in a lot of ways, productivity improvement is really the killer app for advisors. That's what they buy. They buy the thing that is going to save them time, which helps them get more clients and make more money, and that's how they view it. Would you agree? Is it productivity? [14:00.4]
Jeff: I would agree, and I'll give you a little secret here about Advisor Tech Partners. We have no partnership with Wealthbox at all. We use Wealthbox internally for our own business, and we use workflows, and we use the opportunity pipeline. It's been wonderful, and I'm not saying that you can't do that in Redtail, because you can, but we've chosen to go the Wealthbox route. It's been helpful to use Wealthbox and then have a lot of our clients be on Wealthbox, right?
James: Like I said, it's just been cool to see advisors gravitate towards these. Who knows? It may be a bad thing in the future, I think, if you get concentration in a space that lends itself to some problems, but that's neither here nor there right now.
Jeff: Right.
James: What are some of the big mistakes that you see advisors making with either their CRMs or automation, or the things that you help them with?
Jeff: From a marketing standpoint, firstly, they're not able to segment out their clients. There’s a lot of firms out there that have Tier-1s, -2s, -3s, and -4s that maybe they're trying to offload. They want to invite their Tier-1s and Tier-2s to a special sort of event during the year, right, like an in-person meetup or something. Maybe it's a baseball game, basketball game, football game, whatever it is, or maybe not sports-related at all. [15:14.6]
But being able to simply, in your CRM, categorize them as the tier that they are and then having that reassurance, knowing that in their email marketing software when they're sending out those invitations, it's a great way to keep things organized and have peace of mind, which is a lot of things that financial advisors try to give to their clients. So, we try to give peace of mind to financial advisors.
James: I think that financial advisors are surprised when they start tagging and updating their status and their types, right? I call it tagging because I'm a marketer first. That's what everybody calls it in the space. But when they start tagging and organizing, they notice patterns, and you'd be really surprised to notice, like, Hmm, my best clients all have this in common, and it might come completely from left field. Then you can repurpose that in your marketing and keep going and keep going and keep going. [16:07.8]
In my case, I have noticed some bad patterns, so I have the Inner Circle, right, the community of financial advisors, and every so often, I'll do a little bit of a deep dive into either the entire database or just a cross-section to make it statistically significant, and I'll notice, okay, the pains in the butt tend to have this pattern or they tend to have joined in this manner, or they tend to use certain words and phrases. It's really insane. You have to have that data first in order to have the decision making.
Jeff: We do the same thing here in the opportunity step, and we have some things inside of the opportunity and we check them off, and then when we review our data at our quarterly business review, we start to notice patterns as well, same as you. So, that's why it's really good to have good organization in your CRM, because you'll notice those patterns and then be able to push your efforts towards those, the top 20% that caused the 80% your results, right? [17:10.3]
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James: How did you get started with Advisor Tech Partners? What is your story? How did it come into existence? [18:15.0]
Jeff: I needed a job out of college so badly to pay those Sallie Mae loans, right? I studied finance and economics in college, so I was like, Okay, I'll just go to a financial place, and it was me and the boss. It was a small shop, right? Immediately, he wanted me learning Redtail, Zapier, which is a big automation tool.
James: I love Zapier.
Jeff: Yeah, I loved it, too, so much. He just let me go at it and take on all these projects that he didn't want to take on because he was busy with clients, and so that's what I did. I just kept learning Redtail and Zapier, and all these other advisor-tech platforms, FMG, the list goes on and on, but I was exposed to that. [19:04.6]
Eight months after, I stopped and started cold-calling advisors and it worked out. That was the beginning. Then there came a point where I was working with a firm out of California and then I met Matthew, the co-founder, and Matthew had left that firm and then shortly after I left, and then I was just like, We can build something bigger. Let me hit him up and see what he's doing. He was looking for a financial advisory job, coming from a CSA position, and I was like, Matthew, dude, let's try. What's the worst thing that happens? He hopped on board, and without him-- I mean, he’s half of the whole thing, so we’ve done great since Jeff and Matthew became co-founders.
James: A lot of successful companies are built that way, I mean, Microsoft, Apple. Partnerships are extremely important. I personally could not do a partnership. Just knowing my personality and my type, I could never do that, but I think that's to my detriment, right? I think maybe I could have accomplished a little bit more, and in the future, who knows? I mean, never say never, but I'm just not that guy. I wouldn't be able to do it. [20:18.3]
Kudos to you, because statistically speaking, your chance of success with a partner is higher than my chance success with flying solo, so I think that's awesome.
Jeff: It's quite the relationship, but I think we've done a great job in the beginning of making sure that we're organized, making sure that we have our weekly meetings where we don't just say ideas throughout the week. We focus on our client work. We focus on the business. We track our on-the-business versus in-the-business time. So, I think just out the gate, we knew the pitfalls, and then went on that way. [20:53.2]
James: What are some of the things that you like most about financial advisors? The reason I want to ask you that is because a lot of the financial advisors listening rarely, if ever, get to hear an outsider talk about the relationship side of working with them. It's either clients or prospective clients or other financial advisors. It's very rarely what vendors think about them. What do you like most about that market?
Jeff: For the ones coming to us, I like how forward-looking they are, because the advisors that are coming to us are really trying to scale and grow, but at the same time, give those quality touchpoints to their clients—so, being able to figure out those tiers and making sure that those clients’ needs are being met.
There are some cases where there's a Tier-1 client who doesn't even meet the AUM threshold, but it's just because they're a grower, right? We know that they're going to keep putting money into their 401(k) or whatever it is, their retirement account, and so you need to just pay attention to that. [21:53.5]
So, I really like the forward-looking advisors that want to keep promoting their team, first of all, and that's where workflows help do, and I like advisors that really, truly care about the end client, not just looking for that asset under management payment that comes through quarterly or monthly or whatever, because there's a lot of times where we run into advisors where they’re truly like, Hey, I can't come to the meeting. My top client just hit me up, and that makes me feel good about it.
For us, we care about the end client. I'm thinking about Joe Schmo who's been working his whole life and I would hate for Joe Schmo to get his money managed by someone who just wants money and doesn't care about the planning process. So, I love advisors who really care about the planning process and making sure that their clients understand and know what they're getting into, why, and when the market drops, they're there for them so they don't sell, you know? I really enjoy that about advisors that they understand the market swings, they're taking care of their clients, and understand the emotions behind it. I think it's very emotional. [23:03.8]
James: It is. I love that that's actually one of the harder things for me to do, because in the marketing world, I kind of sort of have to default to “We're going to market your services and your offers and your business, and you're going to get more clients and make more money and grow.” You have to be careful with that, because I want advisors who genuinely care about the clients. It's hard for me to qualify and quantify that for advisors.
If I go too hard on the “make more money, get more clients,” I can attract the people who are just truly money-motivated and don't necessarily care as much as they should about their clients. That's really bad. I've had people come into my world who are like that. I try to filter them out. I try to get rid of them. There are warning signs. It's kind of nutty. I have a psychology degree. That's what my actual academic background is and a lot of that seeps in. You realize that 2% of the population is there is a psychopathic. [24:03.4]
Jeff: Oh, okay.
James: There are literal psychopaths walking around, and it's even higher in men and it's even higher in certain occupations. But let's just say it's 2% right? That means for every 50 of these people that I'm meeting, one of them is going to be a full-fledged psychopath, like, grow at any cost, don't care about the clients.
It's crazy when you think about it like that. If I have 1,000 financial advisors that I'm marketing to, 20 of them are going to fall into that category. I mean, it is what it is, you have to work with the market that you're given. You have to play the cards that you're dealt. But I have to straddle that line of “grow, grow, grow,” and also care about your client.
Jeff: Absolutely, absolutely, and I think it's great that you have a psychology degree so you can actually figure that out pretty quickly, right? Yeah, I feel like people without that type of background or knowledge or intuition, they can just fall into the trap and then get a bunch of those types of clients, and then that can really hurt your business if you deal with those people. [25:02.6]
James: I try to warn advisors, too, because some of the other marketing-- There's a ton. I feel like sometimes there are more coaches and consultants and gurus for financial advisors than there are actual financial advisors, and some of these people are not coming from a good place, and I know that because I've met with them directly. I've talked with them. I've had behind-the-scenes conversations with them.
The language that they use to describe financial advisors is not empathetic. It is not caring. I catch a lot of flak because I tend to be more blunt and direct and to the point, so I come across as someone who is kind of like a jerk, and maybe I am. Maybe I'm a huge jerk, I don't know. It’s neither here nor there for that. [25:45.2]
But I would rather be myself with advisors than not two-faced, but I guess that's the best way I can describe it, and those are the people I feel like I would want in my corner in business. I want someone who's just going to tell me as it is always, because at the end of the day, it's up to me to improve myself in my business. I have to do the right thing with the data that I've been presented. If I'm offended by the other person or if I can't handle the data, that's on me. That's my response to the situation.
Jeff: That's what I love about you. That's what I love about owning a business, and that's actually the biggest trait I love about financial advisors, the ones that don't have to put on a mask to do their profession. That's the best right there, because it's not draining when you don't have to put on a mask. Putting on a mask is so draining, and when you have to play someone who you're not all day, eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, maybe 16 hours a day, that's just not a life right there, and that's pretty tough to live.
James: I think that's why a lot of advisors like the independence. If and when they go independent, they realize, phew, they breathe a sigh of relief. They don't have to keep that mask on, or at least for as long. I think everybody wears a mask to some extent, but it's just how long are you wearing it, right? I actually toned down my stuff. [27:06.0]
This is off-topic, but I am very like, Let's go. Stop being so weak. Don’t be timid. Go hard. In real life, that's what I'm actually like. I'll keep a boot on somebody's neck. That's why I couldn't do the partnership, because I would be like, Why aren't you doing your effing work this week? That's what I do, right?
Jeff: Right.
James: I tone it down on this podcast. A lot of people think maybe I'll amplify it a little bit. That specific slice of my personality is toned down quite a bit. So, in a nutshell, I'm wearing a mask in that sense, but I don't do it all the time, and I think one of the goals that we can have as financial advisors and as marketers and as vendors to financial advisors is to slowly but surely reduce the amount of time putting on that facade. But, I mean, we all do it to an extent. [27:56.7]
Jeff: Yeah, and I think it is okay to put on a mask, but just make sure it's a light one. You know what I mean?
James: Yes, yes.
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. And you just talked about people who were like, Oh, finally, when they go independent. We see a lot of people go from Edward Jones, for example, and they become their own RIA, and they can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel of being themselves and running a firm the way that they want it to be. They just need those systems in place so they can replicate what was done for them before, but make it even better. Right?
James: I asked you about what you like about financial advisors. What are some of the things that you believe they could improve on, or some of the little quirks that you don't like as much?
Jeff: I think generally, shiny object syndrome.
James: Oh, yeah.
Jeff: There's always these things going around and it's too much, right? So, if you have shiny object syndrome and you're an advisor, and you're working with a team, you're going to kill them. Get Asana or something, a project management system, and just put all your ideas there, and then on a quarterly business review, prioritize the ones that actually make sense or get rid of them all, or whatever it is. [29:05.8]
But don't come to the office or come to work with 10 different ideas, and then the team is going to be overwhelmed. They're trying their best, and they don't own the business. Your team doesn't own the business you do, and so they don't have the skin in the game like you do. You have to understand that completely.
James: I haven't thought about that in a long time, because I agree with you, the shiny object syndrome, it just gets so tiring. It's like every other day there's a new thing and a new fad, and marketers are some of the worst at instigating this stuff because they create new names for old stuff. Right? They'll make up some new word, like, I'm just going to use a nonsense word, like, “Hee-bee-flee-bee. Have you done your hee-bee-flee-bee today?” and in reality, it’s literally just following up, and there are entire books. I rag on books like Who Not How. I'm not calling out that book specifically. I'm calling out the genre, right? The genre of Who Not How literally just means hiring people, right? [30:07.1]
Jeff: Right, right.
James: You don't need a book. You don't need a book, a 250-page book, to tell you to hire people. If you've ever had a leak in your house and you've hired a plumber, then congratulations, you have thought in terms of “who, not how.” If you've ever sent a letter in the United States of America and had a postal worker deliver it for you, congratulations, you've used “who, not how.”
So, marketers are so horrible for this, because they perpetuate this nonsense, and I could have made a lot more money by buying into that, but I just couldn't sleep at night if I knew that's what I was doing.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah.
James: It is horrible. I didn’t think about it in terms of the team. Years ago, because I'm in the marketing space, I did some marketing consulting for an employment attorney in the Southern New Jersey–Philadelphia region, and I didn't want to do it. He begged me to do it. Yeah, I am a little bit money-motivated, so when he put a figure in front of me and said, “I need you to do this for me,” I was like, Yes, sir, you know what I mean? [31:08.5]
So, I did, and the thing he hired me for on day one was to basically clean up his Google Ads. He was running a ton of “Have you been hurt? Have you been bitten by a dog? Have you been fired?” those sorts of ads because that's what attorneys do, and I started trimming it and split-testing, and as every marketer on planet earth knows, who's at least worth his or her salt, that stuff takes time. You can't just flip a switch and have a hugely converting campaign overnight, especially not with someone like this guy who literally had 1,000-plus Google Ads because he was targeting all sorts of campaigns or all sorts of keywords with different campaigns across Philadelphia and New Jersey.
He had shiny object syndrome, and it seems like every day he would text and say, “What about this? What about advertising in the Sixers Stadium? What about this billboard? What about Facebook ads? What about this?” It was so exhausting. It was actually one of the reasons why I had to terminate our agreement. I just couldn't handle it anymore. [32:10.6]
So, I had added at least seven figures of revenue to this guy's business in a couple months, and it was simply by him. He got it right in the beginning. He gave me something that I could work with. If I was working in Google Ads, I could be a rainmaker, and I was just having them work and having them work and having them work. But then he started doing other stuff. He was sabotaging himself. I don't know if he thought of it that way, but I'm sorry, but a billboard is not going to bring you the results that me getting you a million-plus impressions a year is going to get. It's just not.
Jeff: Right.
James: So, I’ve been there.
Jeff: You can't build the house without the foundation. You can add stuff to stuff that's already working. I think you've posted about something like that pretty recently -
James: Yes.
Jeff: - but don't bring in something new when something's already working. Just keep making the thing that's working better, right? So, I feel that. [33:06.0]
James: He did that. I think what's related to shiny object syndrome is the idea that “if other advisors are doing it, it must be a good idea and/or it must be something and I should do, too,” and, absolutely, that gets on my nerves so badly. When financial advisors see so-and-so do something on LinkedIn or do something on YouTube or a podcast, or they do it a certain way, “Oh, that must be the secret. That must be the thing.” Or, like, This guy does 22-minute podcasts instead of 23. Twenty-two must be the thing that gets clients. That's insane to me, too.
Jeff: Yep, yep, that's the worst for me, too, because I know there's advisors out there, reading these books, listening to these podcasts, and seeing what other advisors are doing, and they think they need to do all of it, but the case that they're looking at, that advisor focused on that one thing and really dug deep into it. They're hearing a conglomerate of a ton of different things that work for advisors and think that they need to be doing it all, when, in reality, they're listening to a podcast episode of an advisor that did one thing good. [34:10.6]
James: Yeah, it's kind of like in the lifting world. If you see a strong man deadlifting 500 pounds and you think to yourself, Okay, I need to do that then. In order for me to get strong, I need to deadlift 500—you can't. You literally cannot on day one.
Jeff: Right.
James: You don't see the work that went into all the stuff. You don't see all that. You only see the 500-pound deadlift. You don't see the accessory lifts and building up and five pounds a week, and recovery and sleep. You don't see all that. You just see the event.
Jeff: Right.
James: Great conversation. We're going to wind this down. Is there anything that you would like to add or anything that we missed, or anything that I didn't ask you that you think would be really important for advisors to know? [34:52.8]
Jeff: I think it'd be really important to know—I want to go back to the shiny object syndrome—please, please, please stop. Focus on what's in front of you. Look, and I mean, if you had your customizations and your CRM set up correctly, you'd be able to see where your revenue is coming from. Therefore, focus on the thing that you're good at.
So, please, if I could give advice, focus on what you're good at. Keep adding to it, and don't let the shiny object syndrome take over you, your firm and your team members, because it will only cause issues. That’s all I got to say about that.
James: You can help with that. You can help financial advisors understand what they're good at. You can help them understand who their most profitable clients are. You can help them understand who's likely to grow. You can help them understand how to become more productive. So, if advisors want to reach out to you and learn more about you and how you can help, what should they do?
Jeff: They should go to AdvisorTechPartners.com, and there's orange buttons everywhere saying “Get Started” to schedule an introductory meeting. Or a pop-up will come up with the CRM Mastery Guide, where they can put in their information, which will then go into our Wealthbox as a lead, automatically put them in the drip campaign, just like what we do for the people we work with. So, everything that we practice and do internally for our firm, we do through financial advisory firms as well. [36:09.6]
James: Super important, you heard the man. Advisor Tech Partners. I love people who practice what they preach. Thank you so much for appearing -
Jeff: Thank you.
James: - on your Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. Financial advisors, I will catch you next week. [36:22.7]
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