Marie, the floor is yours. All right. Well, welcome back, everybody. As you all know, I'm Marie Swift, Impact Communications, and I'm serving once again as the Master of Ceremonies for the NAPFA Playbook Series. Thanks for bringing the slides up, Johnny. So today, we are continuing on the theme of building trust and earning credibility in a digital world with a focus on niche marketing. And we have two wonderful RAs here today to talk about how they have doubled down on serving specific niches and thus able to multiply results. Last time, we had Steve Weinberger of HCR Wealth and Sam Brownell, if I could speak today, of Stratus Wealth. And today, Johnny, if you'll go to the next slide, we have Matt Mondew of Blue Chip Partners and James Bogart from Bogart Wealth. So if you're here, you've read their bios. You know that they are doing great things as fiduciary advisors, and they're showing some really great results in how to serve a niche. And we want to dig in and hear from them by retracing some of the same ground that we did with Steve and Sam last time. So we're going to ask them some of the same questions that we did last time, and that's intentional. You will ask questions through the chat and the Q&A, and Johnny and I will be looking for those and posing them to James and Matt today. But let's get started with question number one, which is describing the niches and how and why you serve them. How have you doubled down? So should we start with you, Matt, and then we'll go to James? Yeah, yeah. So thanks for having me. Incredibly excited to do this. So one of my niches and a couple other advisors at Blue Chip, we really look to serve that corporate executive type profile. We're looking for people who get paid in company stock and have concentrated stock positions. We view that there's a tremendous amount of planning opportunities around that, and that's been a really attractive niche to us for many reasons. And that's kind of where we choose to focus our time. I think when I think about why we doubled down to serve them, I think it makes a lot of sense. We can leverage the expertise we have when working with corporate insiders from one company. You get to learn their retirement packages, their benefit plans, how vesting schedules can work. There's a tremendous amount of information there that we get to leverage and can use with future clients and prospects along the way. Another reason I think that it's really helpful, when you walk the halls of a business, you get to meet other employees there. And it's a great way to get warm leads, I believe, as well. And in the digital world, I think one of the ways to get warm leads is looking at LinkedIn and seeing who your client knows at the same company. And that's another way to ask for intros. So for us, it's just been a great niche, just from a content perspective, knowing the plan, but also as a way to meet other potential prospects that we like to have as clients. I have a follow-up question, and then we'll jump in with you, James. But Matt, you have some advisors who specialize in other niches. It's not just that one niche. For instance, I'm thinking about Naoko. Could you talk a little bit about how she's different in her niche strategy for marketing? Yeah, yeah. So Naoko primarily likes to work with other women, divorcees, widows. That's been a great niche for her. She feels really comfortable providing advice. And again, there's a lot of leverage there. If you're dealing with a widow, there's a lot of things that are the same from circumstance to circumstance, and same through divorces. You know, they might not repeat themselves, but they rhyme. And I think that's a place where she feels comfortable, which is the most important thing. And she's able to leverage expertise that she gets through each instance that a death or a divorce occurs. Yeah. Before I forget to say it, I'll just add a point. I know that you've also had some tuck-ins, some other advisors who have come into the firm, and they're bringing their own flavor of niche marketing, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. No, it's great. And then that just provides such a collaborative environment. We have an open-door policy. I can knock on Naoko's door or another advisor's door and say, hey, this might not be my niche, but I know that you work with this type of individual. Any tax guidance you can give me on this exit sale from a business. And it just creates a great collaborative environment that occurs across the halls of Blue Chip. Yeah. James, let's have you jump in. Describe your niches and how you've doubled down to serve them. Absolutely. So frankly, ours have changed a little bit over the last 16 years. But specifically, Bogart Wealth targets employees of companies that have defined benefit plans. And so initially started, it was one company. ExxonMobil was the company that we were targeting the employees that work there. And similar to Matt, we actually had two elements here. One was the defined benefit plan and helping them with how to optimize their pension options. But also, they mostly had concentrated stock positions. So we had ways of adding value beyond just the pension itself. And interestingly enough, we actually were forced to make a decision in 2015. ExxonMobil previously had an office near our Virginia headquarters. And really, it was kind of one of those elements where we had to make the decision, are we going to follow? Or are we going to continue to do what we do, but for other companies? And the backstory was ExxonMobil had decided to consolidate all of their personnel into the Woodlands, Texas. And at that particular point in time, and I would say doubling down, but we made the decision to follow. We actually opened up an office in the Woodlands, Texas in an ExxonMobil building, because that was such a strong niche for us. The pandemic truly changed everything for us with regards to how we were targeting, marketing, soliciting. Because similar to what Matt was describing, prior to the pandemic, we could literally walk the halls. And we were able to not only have our existing customer base refer their friends to us, but our prospects who knew us, because we were adding so much value through some of the educational content, the white papers, the blogs, et cetera. They were referring their friends. And candidly, 2020, it was obviously for all of us a very turbulent time. But prior to the pandemic, everything that we were doing to target these audiences was in live events. And interestingly enough, it was, I'd call us the rubber chicken dinner guys, just the typical restaurant. And we had a lot of success with those. It was very formulaically driven. We were getting 60 to 80 attendees at every single one that we did. Of those, 35% were brand new names. Of the brand new names, 65% approximately would come in for planning engagement. And then of those, 87% would become clients. So the more live events we did, we just kept continuing to build the pipeline. And again, pandemic changed everything. And so what ended up happening was we transitioned everything that we were doing live to digital. And almost instantly, all of our marketing completely changed. And I'll admit, it was scary times for us. How are we going to stay in business? And for us, we're really a growth-minded firm. But the first live event that we did via web, we had 397 attendees. And it was, and then it had another 700 views the week after. And so now all of a sudden, I'm asking myself, what was I doing wrong all this time before the pandemic? And so frankly, what we ended up doing was taking all the live content that we were doing in these geographically convenient locations and taking it onto the internet. And frankly, we were doing every one once a week. And after that, we would record them. And then what happened was it removed the geographic boundaries that we previously had, which was Northern Virginia and the Houston, Woodlands, Texas market. And we, candidly, we went global because a lot of the companies that we were targeting are Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies. They have employees all over the globe. And a lot of them can't come to the live events. They might've heard who we were because of the prevalence and the value-added content that we were producing for them at the live events, but we weren't recording the live events. And so now all of a sudden, we've gone global. And the other thing that happened was we got into the audience that did not feel comfortable coming to a live event. And so now all of a sudden, we're hitting both of those elements where we had no geographic footprint any longer. And of course, Zoom became popular for all of us. But then now all of a sudden, we're getting in front of the people who weren't previously wanting to be beholden to doing business with somebody who bought them dinner. And so it was a very interesting pivot that had happened. And frankly, we tried to go back to live and live. We weren't getting anywhere near the level of success. So we've continued to pivot even further down the digital route. And frankly, I'm looking at more ways of enhancing the impact that we can have with our digital presence. Now, what's happened is we were deep within the energy space. It started with ExxonMobil. And then I realized very quickly that a lot of these defined benefit plans have very similar elements to them. So why not do strategic marketing and educational content targeting other businesses as well? And specifically ones that had defined benefit plans. Now, again, similar to Matt, they had employee stock. They had restricted stock programs, options programs, executive compensation, et cetera. So we then were building out educational programs specifically for the employees of those companies. And it's allowed us to be able to replicate what we had done very, very well within one business, one Fortune 500 company. And now we've moved it to 15 or 20 others. Yeah, that's remarkable. In fact, James, would you talk a little bit about the problem that happened when you created such a big pipeline? Probably the best problem of all. We were getting anywhere from 25 to 100 unique leads a day. And it turned into a human capital problem. We did not have enough advisors to be able to sustain the growth. In 2021, we brought a billion in assets in, all new business. And in 2022, we brought about 680 million new business in. So it's been, again, these are what my staff calls bougie problems. But it's the best of the best problems in that we have not been able to get enough advisors in to be able to handle the business. And we've had a lot of success lately. But similar, Matt, to what you were describing, we've now had a lot of tenured advisors come on board. And now we have new niches, new personalities, new collaborative thinking. I'm going to probably say I'm not as positive about all of that. Some good, some bad with all of it. But nonetheless, it's a good problem to have. I have one more follow-up question for you, James. And then, Matt, I want to give you the opportunity to come back in and add to anything that James has just said. But James, one of the things that you thought about is how to attract the next generation of talent, whether it's a tuck-in or a glide-out or somebody right out of school. And so could you talk a little bit about the training program you developed to attract talent? Yeah. So to get ahead of this human capital problem, we developed in 2021 the Advisor Growth Track. AGT is the acronym that we use for it. But really, I believe that the next generation is going to be the most prominent part of what all firms that are growing are going to need to continue to be putting resources behind. But there is ultimately a gap. There's a gap in terms of whether you define it as competence or confidence. One of the two for the kids coming out of financial kids, next generation coming out of financial planning programs. And so really what we've done with Advisor Growth Track is really empower. And it's on-the-job training, but it's giving them the ability to interface with clients right out of school, but getting them right in the trenches, understanding, learning, and really to become effective advisors. The dilemma I have is that program ultimately can take three to five years. And with the growth that we're having presently, we need advisors now. And so these are good problems to have, but recognizing in order to be able to sustain service, in order to be able to continue to have the client experience that our clients have grown accustomed to, we need to be building that depth, that bench space. So really what it's done is it's targeting those that are coming out of Advisor Growth Track, it's targeting those that are coming out of financial planning programs. So they already have the baseline level of education. They've qualified to be able to sit for the CFP exam. They're just not quite there yet. They don't have the work experience yet. And frankly, they usually are very hungry. They want to be advisors. They're very energetic. So I've been very excited to see it. We've had a ton of success with it thus far. We're year two in on it. I've got a couple of graduates coming out. And we just had two more that joined us two weeks ago. So it's pipeline building. I kind of would say all of our marketing and business development, I manage via pipeline. And that's one of the KPIs that I follow on the business development side. But now it's added this growth element. It's added this new element where we need to be building a pipeline of new advisors and young and hungry advisors. Yeah, I think one of the other things that you two have in common, Matt and James, is your firms both run on EOS, and you are strong on developing culture. So Matt, I guess if I could pivot back to you, could you comment on the culture at Blue Chip Partners? And how did you join the firm? How did you learn about them and make your way in? Yeah, so culture is everything. We have core values that we live, sleep, and eat by. I'm sure most people do. But that's one of the most important things. When we interview, we put people, potential employment candidates through caliper tests to really get a good sense of who they are. And then when the interview process comes, we're often having multiple different divisions, client service, advisors, kind of more HR. Everybody is getting a feel for the individual that we're bringing on. You really don't want to leave any stone unturned when bringing somebody on when culture is so important. I think we have 26 employees now, maybe adding a couple more in the coming days. And it only takes one person to potentially upset culture. And it can be a big decision. Or making the wrong decision can be devastating, depending on who you're hiring. So we put a lot of emphasis on making sure the interview process is fairly, I consider strenuous when we're just bringing in a lot of different individuals. I'll from time to time interview a client service role, somebody I may not work with every single day, but it's just important to get a sense, are they going to fit with the culture? And then Marie, so my story, it was pretty unique. I started out of college working for an RIA. And I'll say the culture wasn't the best. And that ran its course. But I was very fortunate to have some really good mentors that pushed me to get the CFA, CMT designation. I had a brief stint at a business valuation firm, which I thought was going to be my dream job until I met Dan and Robert. And the rest is history. So it's been great. I think when I joined, we were in a much smaller building, probably had less than half the AUM we have now. And the next seven years have been just great. And like I said, I'm here because of the culture. Let's move on to the next slide, Johnny, and dig in a little bit differently. So for those who are joining us today, they're probably wondering, how do I replicate some of the success that they're hearing from you and how you've served your niches or picked your niches? Do you have any tips for them? Matt, since you've got the floor, why don't you start by tips for picking and serving a niche? Yeah, you know, I think how I got to be where I'm at. Dan was a great mentor, Dan Cedar at the office. This was a niche that he had really cultivated and developed and somebody I work closely And that was one way. I think the other important thing, and it just becomes evident in how you talk about what you do, is you just got to be passionate about it. Something you're really excited to learn everything about. You really kind of go the extra mile deep and learn all you can learn about, whether it be a company's benefit program or how RSUs are taxed and how they're granted and all these things. These concepts are so important because you want to sound like the expert when you're dealing with the client or the prospect. You want to be the specialist. And I think the best way to be the expert and the specialist is ultimately be passionate about what you're doing. James, what would you add? Oh, gosh. I mean, one of our core statements within the firm is subject matter expertise work. So everything that Matt just said totally resonates with everything that we do. You know, in terms of picking and each kind of taking a quick step back, you know, as cheesy as it might be, but Simon Sinek, start with why. Think about what you personally represent, what's important to you. You know, for me, my personal why is to educate and I get a lot of passion from educating. And I think that resonates with pretty much everything that we've built internally. I'm a big value creation oriented person. So, you know, I think of it in the sense of if you build a really good mousetrap and you create a lot of value, ultimately, you're not going to ever have to sell anything. And that's really how I've built the firm. You know, our niche when it started, and this is back in 2008, you know, going into kind of the embryo states of what our wealth has become. But the logic was if an employee of a company has a pension and a 401k, even if they totally dork up saving on the 401k, they at least still have the pension, which meant that they would have some money that we could at least have a conversation about. Right. I'm not saying that logic was right or wrong, but that's how it all started. And then from there, we were able to build this educational platform off of that. And so, you know, similar to what Matt said, I think it really comes down to what are you excited about? What are you passionate about? For me, it was education. There's lots and lots of different ways that you could develop a niche. The one comment that I will make, though, is commit to that niche. And like I think about what we've built with the energy sector, you know, that took 15 years to really manifest what it has become. It wasn't something by any means that we just showed up, you know, did a seminar and boom, business was rolling. We had to commit to it. You know, it definitely didn't have its luxurious moments at all times. But staying power and building that brand, building that reputation within that certain market or category, you know, for me, it's the subject matter expertise where that is truly what makes us so different than a lot of the other firms that we compete with in our market share. You know, and I think of it, I actually love when I find a firm that's worthy of competition because they push me to elevate to another level, you know, but a lot of the competition, and I don't even mean it arrogantly, though, is somebody who's willing to pay a fee or not. And because, you know, again, like what we do with value creation, you know, we're in a great tax, again, Matt, you mentioned a lot of these things. But, you know, like we talked about 401k plans, if they have employer stock, we're getting into NUA. And again, other ways of adding value, where a lot of firms can't do that. And so then from there, as we've gone deeper and deeper into these companies, we're creating content specific to them. Like, for example, NUA for our target market is a very big deal. You know, and to some people, it's not. But if you're not, if you're going after, for example, an Exxon Mobil household, and you can't talk about NUA, you don't stand a chance. Right. And that's just one example of an advisor trying to compete in a market space that they don't understand or know the benefit programs. Yeah, I would just add to that both Blue Chip and Bogart have recently received nods from the judging committees at the wealthies and the luminaries for thought leadership. So listeners, if you want to study, take a look. There are some clues that we can't get into today. But in a minute, Johnny's going to do a little visual show and tell for you. But check out what they're doing in the area of thought leadership at Bogart and Blue Chip. And congratulations, gentlemen, on that acknowledgement. I know it's hard work. Is there anything else from either of you before we go to the next slide? I would just add, you know, to James, James, add on to James's point, you know, it's so great when you can explain to a CPA what NUA is, the client CPA, because not everybody knows this. And you're that just makes you look like such more of the expert. Like whenever you're so dialed in on whatever your target niche is, you can explain to other service professionals in that client's life what what concept you're trying to illustrate and how it can benefit them. And it really makes, I think you feel feel and look like the quarterback of that client's total household, financial household. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. The one other thing I would say to is to obviously commit, but stay focused. And I'll go back to my younger years. I early on, I'm like, oh, well, entrepreneurs would be a really cool niche to go after people who are really going after estate planning would be a really good thing, a good niche to go after. And I was trying to do too much all at once. It's honestly, it's the more and more I narrowed the scope and focused on our target initiatives is when we really started seeing the benefits of our results. Not to mention, we really had a shoestring budget to go after things at the very beginning. So it was one where the more you spread your resources, you're not going to be quite as effective. All right, Johnny, what's next? All right. So next we're going to talk about some examples of client communications and content and hyper-relevant messaging from both of these firms. So we're going to start with Bogart and start with just the main sections of their website. So one of the first tabs when you visit the Bogart website is a who we are section that who we are tab. And then you'll see this drop down list, some general niches like retirees, families, and individuals, entrepreneurs, but then some of these more targeted niches that James has been talking about, energy sector, technology sector, government contractor employees. So here's the page that you can see for government contractor employees. And you can see right at the top, it has logos of specific companies that Bogart Wealth works with. So if an employee from Lockheed Martin or Boeing visits the website, obviously they see their company logo right there. It lets them know that Bogart works with colleagues of theirs within those companies and just helps them feel represented. And like Bogart's going to be the right choice for them. Obviously the page speaks to how Bogart specializes in all aspects of retirement benefits planning and lists out a bunch of specific services that Bogart helps their clients within this target demographic. And obviously they serve a lot of these government contractor employees in their McLean, Virginia office right outside of DC. And also as James was talking about, here is the page for the energy sector employees, where they do a lot of work in Texas, out of their Texas office. So same thing at the top, specific company logos, that ExxonMobil one, very prominent, and a lot of other really prominent energy sector companies. And same thing, talking about all the different retirement benefits planning that Bogart helps their clients within these companies and within this industry work towards. And then also a lot of this niche marketing shines through in the content that Bogart Wealth is creating and participating in. So on there in the news page, you'll find a lot of articles that speak towards these specific types of clients. So last fall at the Schwab Impact Conference, James had the privilege to be on the investment news game day stage and do a video interview there where he spoke about better planning for clients counting on pensions, how the rise in interest rates is causing employees to make difficult choices about retirement, and speaking to Bogart's niches within that video interview. The next one here was an article and video in Yahoo Finance that James was featured in that was all about how, you know, not as many Americans as we think are adequately prepared for retirement. He was speaking on Secure Act 2.0, which is a big topic within the firm. They recently, earlier this year, put out a white paper on Secure Act 2.0. And so within that interview, James was also able to speak to some of the niches that Bogart serves. And then this third one was a different team member from Bogart Wealth in an article in Wealth Solutions Report, an industry publication, speaking on how to guide clients through potential layoffs in the wake of a potential recession coming. And so that team member was able to speak to the specific industries and companies that Bogart serves and how they work with clients to be prepared for potential layoffs in that terrible situation. So plenty of other examples on their news page in terms of articles that speak to the niches that Bogart works with. And then also some of their more customized content through their blog posts. So this first one here is exploring the differences between pension plans and other retirement accounts. This second one speaks to corporate executives, how to handle equity compensation and restricted stock. And then the third one here speaking to entrepreneurs and business owners on what they should know about an operating cash formula of cash flow formula. So the blogs, you know, a lot of more general blog content, but a lot of specific content that speaks towards those specific niches. And this kind of blog content is really useful because not only if someone within that demographic visits your website is looking for that value added content, will they kind of like see themselves within this content. But because blog posts are so content rich and so text rich and are stuffed with keywords, they can really help your blog posts and therefore your website show up high in search results when these types of people in this target audience is searching for these topics. So that kind of really heavy keyword rich text rich content on your blog, speaking to your niches can be really effective for driving traffic within those niches to your website. And then here, Bogart also has a lot of video content, webinar content. They do regular webinars with different team members that speak to ExxonMobil employees. So this one is how to discount rates affect my ExxonMobil lump sum. And they have different team members do those on a regular basis and give updated information. This other one is how to discount rates affect my pension lump sum that's more generalized to different employees with pension plans. So, you know, this kind of video content is not only great for displaying the expertise of different Bogart team members, but also it just allows clients and prospects to see their advisors, see different team members at Bogart on screen, build that trust and credibility and authority and expertise, and also build that familiarity. So prospects feel like they know that Bogart team member a little bit before they even meet them. James, anything you want to add about any of the other content we've shown off here? No, I mean, I would say our YouTube channel has gotten so much activity that it's exceeded a lot of our blog posts, a lot of our white papers, a couple of the videos that are on here that haven't been highlighted, like our mega backdoor Roth video, which that's a strategy that we target related to company 401k plans. But I mean, that got 17,000 views in the month of April. I mean, who would have thought, but, you know, just shows the volume that those things are producing. The NUA video is actually being used in a lot of CFP programs to educate their students on NUA, which who would have thought, you know, the video we have on NUA is the number one video on YouTube for NUA, which I'm a little proud of that. Here's a question from one of our participants today. Johnny, a little while ago, you showed a screen where there were company logos of some of the companies that Bogart works with. James, this question is for you. Did you ask permission to use the Exxon logo or shell? No. Say why. So again, most of it, actually, I'll tell you, even within like Exxon, we've had a couple conversations with the law department about trademark because of the marketing that we're doing. As long as we openly disclaim that we are not being endorsed, these snips don't show as all my disclosures, but that we are not being endorsed by the company. And if you scroll down and you go to my disclaimer page, you'll see that their law departments are by and large, I don't want to say blessing it, but they're not coming after us for that. So if you want to check out any of this content, visit the Bogart Wealth website, and you can easily find their blog and video page under resources there, and also the news page and so on. With that, I want to show off some other examples from Blue Chip Partners here. So this is a really prominent page on the website that speaks to corporate executives. It's all about executive compensation. And you can see Matt's nice photo here with a quote about how they work with many clients who are successful executives, burning the candle at both ends, and how Blue Chip has the expertise to help with those specialized needs. So then there's a bunch of really nice graphics throughout the page and different ways that they work with these kind of corporate executives in terms of knowing their blackout periods, implementing a 10-B-5-1 plan, diversifying the proceeds, reinvesting in the portfolio that aligns with your financial plan, talks to how Blue Chip understands the constraints that blackout periods presents, and talks about the different experience and expertise that the firm has in working with people like this within this niche. It even has some embedded videos on the page that speak to when to sell company stocks strategically, how to structure a 10-B-5-1 plan, how to reduce risk, the importance of intrinsic value and time value and things like that. So this is a really valuable page that the Blue Chip team often links to and drives traffic to when they're targeting this niche. And then if you visit their blog, you'll see a lot of blog content that speaks to corporate executives and equity comp. There's one written there by Matt on company stock got you down. And the top left, there is one from an advisor that we mentioned earlier, Naoko, who wrote a blog post on financial planning items to consider during a divorce or death of a spouse. So another niche that that advisor specializes in, and she creates a lot of content around. And same thing here. This kind of content is not only great for when people visit your website and visit your blog and are looking for something that they resonate with, but also really valuable for SEO and driving traffic to your website when people within those niches are looking for those kind of topics. And then same thing with the video content. This is Dan Cedar, who Matt mentioned earlier, but he does these kind of educational videos at the whiteboard where he really clearly lays out concepts that speak towards corporate executives. So year-end moves, voluntary separation packages, both of these videos actually spoke to corporate executives within specific companies that we then took and boosted on LinkedIn and were able to target specific companies that these videos speak to. So when you can take it a step further and not just target a specific industry, but a specific company that can be even more valuable there. And Dan is really great at explaining these types of concepts. He actually was just named a finalist for the wealthies, as Maria mentioned, and thought leadership. So we were happy to see that. And then if you visit their news page, you'll see a lot of articles that speak towards corporate executives. This first one, Dan was also on the Investment News Game Day stage and was speaking towards two executives holding restricted shares. This last one here was advising clients with large equity comp holdings. It's not really a niche, but something else that Blue Chip speaks about often as a differentiator for their firm and a value add is that they do most of, if not all of their portfolio management in-house. And so they were featured in this investment news article on why some advisors refuse to outsource investment management and how they do all of their portfolio management in-house. They build portfolios of Blue Chip stocks and dividend paying stocks. And so they also try and be featured in articles on dividend stocks. So the Director of Investments was featured in Forbes on best dividend stocks to beat inflation in 2023. And so those are always really valuable, even though it's not speaking towards a certain niche, it definitely is explaining their investment philosophy and talking about a value add component of the firm. And then finally, speaking to these types of niches can really create client advocates and allow you to collect testimonials. So many of you that are SEC registered under the new SEC marketing rule, you can now collect testimonials and endorsements and feature those on your website and throughout your marketing materials. We've talked about that before in the NAFTA playbook series. And so on Blue Chip's website, they have some raving testimonials from clients, some video testimonials here. They also underwent a Google review campaign and they now have 159 five star Google reviews. They sent out that opportunity to leave a Google review to their entire client base, which was really valuable, helps a lot with SEO showing up higher in search results. They're getting cold calls from these Google search results and because of these Google reviews. And so when you can target a niche like this and serve them really well, you're going to create raving fans essentially within that demographic that are going to refer you to other colleagues, people within their company, people within their industry. So Matt, anything you want to add on to there in terms of the content that Blue Chip's producing around niches? Yeah. You know, just to maybe even highlight the Google reviews, it's been really interesting. I mean, we've had people, employees of companies that I would consider outside of our sphere fall in as they found us online through Google. They might work remotely for a technology company that we really never would have even thought of. And it just becomes another company to try to get a foothold in. But also, you know, they found us through Google and they were able to see all the content that was on the website. And they can, again, like see themselves reflected in that content, which makes us so interesting to them if they're interviewing multiple advisors. I have a question for you, James. This is from someone who's on the call today and they're wondering about YouTube, specifically how you handle comments without violating testimonial rules. Specifically, they've heard that scammers can be an issue and undesirables may go so far as to impersonate the advisor or the firm. Well, I'll tell you, almost every video we've done at this point has been copied by someone. And I've gotten to the place where I would just say that imitation is the ultimate form of flattery. But, you know, I actually have had people who I openly, as you can tell today, I'm open with what we do. I'm very transparent, I share it all. I've done a couple of these podcasts where I talk about what we do. And next thing you know, I've got three or four new competitors, a few of which will literally go and have taken our slides and recreated them and changed nothing, you know, which is fine. But I think, you know, I saw that question and I think related to YouTube. So what we're doing on our website is we're embedding them within the website. So it's YouTube's hosting, it's embedded in the website. We have turned off the comment section on the ability to comment on the video. Now, when we get questions that come in, we keep them generic. If it's relevant to the conversation, we'll make sure to answer it without obviously providing anyone's name. But normally I wouldn't say that the nature of the questions that we get in the events are testimonials by any means, right, they're usually related to asking a question of the content that we're presenting on. Now, admittedly, you know, we've gone back and forth related to if we want to use testimonials or not. I've taken a pretty hard stance on, no, I don't right now. I know that the rules continue to change. That's just kind of my two cents on it. I don't really want to deal with one more question related to an audit that is inevitably coming. We all have them, but you know, my interpretation is more strict in that regards. So I try to avoid comments altogether. What I found is because all of our stuff is hosted, they literally can be, our target audience can literally just forward it to their friends. And that in itself is enough of a testimonial. Yep, and for anyone concerned, you certainly can completely turn off comments on YouTube videos. So that might alleviate a concern or two. Well, if there are no more comments on the show and tell section, we will go to our final question and we continue, we encourage you to continue to post your questions here on the Q and A. So let's go to Matt first. How has niching in helped your firm? I think you touched on some of this, but as we look towards concluding the program today, what would you like our participants to take away? How can it help them and how has it helped you? Yeah, you know, I think it empowers advisors within the firm. I think about the different niche that I may serve versus NowCo. They're nearly polar opposite in some cases, but we both feel empowered and confident to have these conversations, in-depth conversations and add layers of expertise to client situations. And I think that's been great from an advisor perspective. I also kind of will piggyback on what James said as far as training the next level advisor. It can really help us hone them in and get them relevant training for what they're gonna be experiencing on a day-to-day. And again, I think help their confidence as well. I would say one of the great things about having a niche when you're at that cocktail party and somebody asks you, what do you do? I can say, you know, I help people deal with concentrated stock positions. It could be as simple as that. And I feel like it's such a better opener than I'm a financial advisor. You often get the, they fold their arms. And that way, I think, you know, highlighting what your niche is when somebody asks you what you do can be empowering and also just lead to a better conversation with, you know, with people. James? It's scalable, right? I mean, you can build an entire platform off of a really good niche. And so I think about what we did just kind of at its embryo state, we were able to build our entire planning department within the firm off of the specializations that we do. And then we have proprietary tools that we've built like an annual analysis tool and a pension analysis tool, a RSU analysis tool, right? Different things that are adding value to our target client bases, but it's beyond scalable. And so then coming back to Matt's comment on training, right, like so anybody who's in our planning department, they're trained on each of those tools and it becomes very uniform in terms of the client service experience. You know, again, we try different ways of handling the client experience, specifically the prospect onboarding experience. And what it came back to was everyone really needs to have the same experience, right? Odd concept, but in order to do it, we then departmentalize everything. So similar to Matt, we manage our own portfolios. We have a portfolio management team and I have a CIO who runs that team. We've got our research, we've got our trading departments. Then we have our financial planning team, all of them are building plans out. So every prospect who comes to the firm gets, again, not cookie cutter, cause they're all customized and the needs of each one are the same, but the department is building it out. It also takes all of that time off of the advisor and the associated advisors. It's built departmentally, comes back, advisor gives their input, any tweaks that need to be made, the department's doing it, but it also helps us scale from a compliance perspective. And so we can maintain a unification of the client experience much, much better by having a niche. It then also gives us a tremendous amount of clarity. Where are we going? I can paint that picture very, very easily. So, and now as we've talked about replication, I mean, I shared, we started with Exxon and now you can see all of the other companies that we're targeting, right? So we've got different elements that have allowed us to scale this thing pretty quickly. I mean, and fast and it's exciting. For us, the constraint now is human capital. So we have enough advisors to be able to maintain the service experience. And thinking about targeting, sometimes we hear about ideal client personas, ICPs or avatars. How do you think about that? Does that feel apropos or sophomoric for some of your clients? Matt, what do you think? Yeah, I think everybody kind of has the ideal person in mind. I think that, you know, oftentimes you wanna be a little bit flexible with that or you wanna, in my mind, kind of explain what that looks like within your niche, right? So if you're serving niche, you know that you can leverage the knowledge that you already have, but you might be willing to take on somebody who's a little bit lower. It doesn't quite have the asset base of your ideal avatar, let's say, but I know I can leverage this person and grow with them. Their career trajectory could be one of, you know, onwards and upwards. And it's great to get in with that person at the ground floor. And likewise, you know, you can work with maybe the more ideal avatar, somebody closer that's three years out of retirement, really help them refine their plan and help them have that smooth transition from work to retirement. So I think when you're niching, you can expand that avatar a little bit because you have just so much, you know, so much expertise within that silo. I know that Johnny showed some examples of how we at Impact think about ideal client personas. He's also written for Net for Advisor Magazine. James, how do you think about expressing your ideal client when you're out in the real world or putting something online? So candidly, you know, we've actually transformed this a little bit as well. And I completely agree with what Matt says. I've made it a little bit more generic in terms of what our ideal client persona is or avatar is. You know, first and foremost, they have to be willing to pay a fee. They have to let us do it and they have to be nice people, right? So ours is almost, dare I say, vanilla enough that it can be all-encompassing. But part of what I do with regards to pipeline management, and this is developing kind of the future iteration of growth. So like, for example, one of the things that I'm looking at constantly is how big is the pipeline? Because to me, that's the future of the company and ultimately how I'm looking at my upcoming staffing needs and I try to manage the pipeline to be as big as the firm. Now, admittedly, we've had a lot of onboarding that has happened to our pipeline is lagging a little bit, but I got 1.6 billion in the pipeline over the next three years. And so, of course, that's giving me line of sight in terms of who I'm gonna need from a personnel perspective. But the reality of it is, is that part of that pipeline is because we'll bring somebody onto the firm before the event happens. And a lot of ours is the retirement itself. And if you're going after entrepreneurs, it's gonna be the transaction, right? But you can't just expect that life event happens and all of a sudden you're gonna get the business. That doesn't, that's not how it works. You need to spend time committing to that relationship and cultivating that client experience. Yes, of course, that means you're spending your time, but what I'll tell you is when we have a relationship with somebody prior to their retirement and we're consistently engaging them at differing levels, and a lot of times when somebody is actively employed, there's not a ton that we're doing for them other than maybe managing a small portion of their portfolio or updating their financial plan periodically, et cetera. But when they go to have that life event or something happens quickly, it's closer to 100 than it is 99 that we're getting the rest of the business. And it's because we've already had that active relationship. And again, I know this is kind of deviating a little bit from the question of how niching has helped the firm, but, or excuse me, from having that ideal client persona, but ultimately what I tell you is once you've developed that platform and allowed it to scale, it's very, very easy to keep everything consistent and back to that point of focus. Fantastic. Johnny, it appears that there are no more questions from the audience. Audience, this is your last chance to enter questions. I'm gonna throw a bonus question out there. So this is not about niche marketing at all, but it's about tools to be productive as a busy professional. Do you have any favorite tools or life hacks? James, you go first. You didn't even give us time to prep that question. So tools, frankly, I'm a Google fanatic. And so I have Google notes that I then have that's on my phone, it's on my PC. So like literally I've got my dual screens right now. I can see all my Google notes on my right screen. I've got multiple tabulated notes between personal things, all my goals, by the way, I'm a huge goal guy. So all my goals are the top one, they're pinned at the top, but the next are business related action items. I am a daily six guy. Marie mentioned that we're EOS, but every day before I go to bed, I write down my six priorities for the next day, which even when I'm on vacation, I still do my daily six. So these little consistencies, life hacks, if you will, you gotta do them. Now, after that, it's systems processes and delegation. I have had a really hard time with delegating. My leadership team, which again, we're EOS, so we're all in on L10s and using I-90, has really been an integral part in terms of building as we started as a very, very, very horizontal company, small, and then now we've gone vertical as we've scaled up staff. We went from 12 employees to 35 in three years. And as we've done that, now we've got tiers of management. So it's required more productivity. And frankly, with this human capital issue that I think all of us are dealing with right now, and I think we're gonna continue to deal with, it's gonna need more and more emphasis on technology and efficiency associated with that. And so because of that, for example, we use Salesforce for everything. It's the epicenter of everything we do related to the firm. And then on the backend, we've got, we use Black Diamond as part of our tech stack. But it's being okay trusting those pieces of technology that they're gonna do what they're supposed to be doing. Hard to do, because I will admit I have control issues, but leveraging technology has been important for that. Well, A-plus on the answer with no prep. I knew you could handle it. So Matt, anything to add productivity hacks? I agree with James. I mean, it's tough. You have, you delegate a task and then a day later, you're like, where's that at? And you kind of email it yourself and you gotta trust the process. So we have CRM, we have workflows associated with task delegation. Culture is a big one. I trust that the team's gonna get things done. In culture and communication, really important. The other thing I like to do personally is create some folders within my email system. So if I can't get to something, a client email me, requests me, I like to move that out of my inbox into a specific folder. And then with the goal to have that folder be empty every single day. So I don't wanna have any number of emails, client requests backed up in that folder. So do I need to delegate them? Do I, can I just get it done in the moment? What does that require? But at the end of the day, I have a red folder and those are things that I view as urgent that I need to get back to or delegate. And that's been a really effective solution for me recently. Yeah, I would still say filtering out solicitors, filtering those things out, managing the purity of your inbox, email inbox, the best you can is just, I think, best practice and something everybody should really consider doing if they haven't. Yeah, and it's no small feat to keep up with all the solicitors these days, especially with AI. Can I get on your calendar? No, you may not. So that's a whole nother subject and perhaps we'll talk about AI and automation and other things down the road, but let's wrap up for today. Jenny, let's go to the next slide. First of all, James and Matt, thank you so much. I got a lot out of your sharing and learned some new things and I know our participants today did too. So participants, as a reminder, we are now concluding session number two in this module called Building Trust and Earning Credibility in a Digital World. And so I hope you see how it touches niche marketing. And even if you don't have a niche that you are specific about as you've been hearing in the last few sessions, perhaps some ideas are bubbling up and that you could come prepared to share how you think about niche marketing and getting deeper with your clients when we get back together for our Capstone Interactive Coaching session next time, that's July 27th. So your homework between now and then is relatively simple. So if you would think about your niches and come prepared just to talk or to show and tell, you can describe your niches and how you court those specific clients, share some success stories or challenges, ask for advice from your peers who will be on the session and Johnny and I will be there, of course, to interact with you and to provide whatever advice and value we can. And so just come prepared to talk. And if you have something to share visually, a document, a website, some social media, we can pass the baton to you. As always, be on the lookout about a week ahead of time for an email from NAPFA that will ask you to click through and tell us, are you planning to share something or show and tell us something? So let's go to the last slide and just- Hey, Marie, can I jump in? If you wanna take it a step further, we would absolutely love if some of you created a piece of content that speaks to a specific niche you serve, so maybe a blog post or a video or a white paper or something along those lines, or maybe even an ideal client profile, or maybe even taking a step further in creating a case study. We'd be happy to help you talk through how you can improve those pieces of content if you feel up to it. Absolutely, and thank you for your comments. We appreciate you being here. We see your appreciation and notes of thanks here on the console. Looking ahead to the fall, we are delighted that Bob Veras, George Kinder, Eddie Kramer, Meg Bartelt, and I will be talking about sales skills. Yes, sales skills. It's not slimy if you do it the right way. And we're gonna hear from Bob, George, Eddie, Meg, and I'll chime in too, about the art of conversation, the art of conversion, executive presence, and how that can all work together. So mark your calendars. I don't think that registration is open yet, but it should be any time now. So keep watching the NAPFA communications. Johnny, if you'll go to that last slide here, well, actually there's two more. One is just a reminder how you find out about the playbook series and access all the recordings and register for future ones. And then we have a list of resources to leave you with, and here they are. It's building on what we started last session, and then adding the resources from Blue Chip and Bogart Wealth today. So with that, we are about three minutes ahead of time. All right, thank you, Kevin. I appreciate that. This is an embarrassment of talent for the sales conversation. Thank you. I'm excited about next time as well. And we hope to continue to bring you the best of the best, the brightest in the industry to share what they think and how it can help you with your own business building and whatever you are, wherever you're on the path. Thank you again for joining us, and we'll see you in July for the interactive session. Thank you, Marie. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Bye-bye. Thanks guys, bye.

Marie Swift

niche marketing

concentrated stock positions

defined benefit plans

digital channels

targeted prospects

training program

collaborative environment

financial industry