Turn it over to questions. All right, hello, everyone, I'm Zach Hubbard, the webinar coordinator for NAPA Genesis, and welcome to this NAPA Genesis webinar sponsored by LLIS in Tampa, Florida. LLIS is the exclusive sponsor of NAPA Genesis, bringing you these webinars, national conference and symposium scholarships, social events at NAPA National Conferences, plus two Genesis webinars per year on the latest in risk and insurance management. I'd like to welcome our guest today, Thomas Kopelman is a financial planner and co-founder of All Street Wealth, as well as a blogger, podcaster, content creator and heavily decorated financial advisor. I think if you look at any young advisor award, I think Thomas has it in his repertoire. After graduating from Butler University, Thomas has spent his career in the financial services industry as a financial planner. He's passionate about helping millennials cut through the noise and figure out how to use their resources to accomplish what they truly want in their life. So, Thomas, thank you for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate the intro. Yeah, absolutely. So let's just kick it off, just tell us a little bit about the firm, All Street, your background, how you got started and where you are today. Yeah, so I mean, I started like everybody else, had a broker dealer out of college, quickly realized like this was the industry I wanted to be in, but I wasn't in necessarily the right place at all. I mean, still focused on insurance sales, wasn't really focused, you know, everything was, you know, go to networking events, try to find clients there. And it just really wasn't what I thought was the right way to do it. You know, everybody talked about how important financial planning was, how valuable it was. But what I didn't understand is why I'm trying, why I have to sell it to everybody versus be able to attract people. And I really thought, hey, social media is probably the best way to show what I know, educate people on it, make them want to work with me because they need my help. And it just wasn't really an option to do there. So I did a bunch of networking, you know, had a bunch of offers, but the offer I really wanted was to join Justin Costelli. He's an advisor near me. Everybody knows him pretty much. And so I basically begged him to hire me for about no money just so I could learn from him for a good period of time. And so I went and worked with him, you know, had a good opportunity to like really be by myself, but like have him, you know, mentor me on things that would be helpful, but still kind of create what I wanted. And he never really wanted to be a manager or like necessarily have me there. So we knew that the exit was going to be me launching my own firm once we thought I was ready. And so that point happened. And he was like, you know, go launch your own firm. If you need my help, just kind of ask as you're doing stuff. So I launched Allstreet with my co-founder Trayton in October of 2021. So this 2023 was our second full year really of being open. But really, the REA is kind of just me. Trayton is more in kind of website design, marketing work. He isn't really working with clients right now. So the REA is me and I have, you know, a full time EA in-house where we do a lot of tax planning. I have a part time CFP and then an assistant. But yeah, Allstreet's been up and running for a little over two years at this point. Awesome. Yeah. About how many clients are you working with at this point? You have about 70 ongoing households, I would say. I think about 45 of them are really good fits. 25 of them are clients I've had for a really long time that pay way lower of a fee, have less meetings a year, but probably about 40 to 50, 45 to 50 ongoing clients that are the right fits, business owners, really highly compensated people in tech with equity comp. And then we do a bunch of just financial plans as well. So probably did 15 to 20 of those last year as well. And we'll probably do about the same this year, too. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And so that's that's a pretty big ramp, pretty quick ramp right from from launch to where you are today. And I know you've attributed a lot of that growth to social media and the success you've had there. So could you give us some insights into what that success has looked like for you on social use, some metrics around maybe how that's contributed to your growth and just what you've seen in terms of that social media success that you've had? Yeah, social is the ninety nine percent of our clients come from social, which I think surprises people. And they're like, hey, they're like, you're only going to find young people want to work with you or like nobody with any money is going to find you on social. And like, you know, our average client coming in is making above seven hundred fifty thousand dollars a year. We got a few clients, 20 to 30 million net worth. You know, my top client, I partner with another firm should sell his business for one hundred and fifty to two hundred million dollars in the next two years. And I've probably sat down with five hundred plus million dollar clients all from social. So, you know, last year was our big year of growth. I started last January at about ten to eleven thousand of client revenue. December, I had fifty thousand. And, you know, some of that's with financial plans. So about thirty five K a month and reoccurring ongoing client revenue. And then we take on about three households a month. So I'm thinking by the end of this year, I'll safely do five hundred, somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred thousand in client revenue. This year is our estimate. Well, yeah, that's great. Yeah. What's what's maybe one of your you mentioned a couple there. What's one of like your favorite stories? Like how the heck did you get that client from social media? You know, like what's what's your go to there? Yeah, I mean, they're all the same story. They follow me for a really long time. They learn from my content. They never engage with it. They all all of a sudden decide, hey, I need a financial planner. They directly go to my website. They apply to work with us and then we reach out. So none of them are really like exciting stories because it's not like I'm messaging people in the DMs and saying, like, you need to come work with us. Like we're doing I do zero outbound prospecting. All I do is create a bunch of educational content and then make people feel like they want to work with us, which is honestly a really good funnel, because I'm sure a lot of the advisors in here know, but whether you get a client from a refer or prospect from a referral or any other way, you have to prove value. Right. You have to build the trust, prove the value, potentially build a financial plan. We don't because we've proven our value and people know we know what we're talking about because of how much content I create and how deep I go through the content that the first meeting literally is. Let me get to know you better. What are you looking for? Here's how I work with clients. Here's what it looks like. Here's our fee. Do you want to work with us or not? And that's all we do. We don't do a second meeting. We don't do anything else. And last year I had about 180 prospects come in from social media, about 130 to 140 were qualified. And, you know, we brought on we were pretty selective. We bring on about three households a month and busy and four households on some of the months we don't have reviews. Wow. Yeah, that's great. That's great. So what what platforms do you use primarily? I know you're on Twitter a lot, obviously, so you and I got connected. But what other platforms are you using aside from, well, I guess it's X now. Yeah, well, I think, you know, the biggest piece of advice I give people on social is like, stop trying to do it all right. Like, you know, if you're trying to do four different social channels, you're just going to be super average at four channels. If you look at all of the advisors that are killing it on social, they're owning one channel. You know, you have James Canole. He just has YouTube. That's where all of his clients come from. Me, all of my clients come from Twitter. There's a couple of people who just have, you know, a podcast. Some people just have LinkedIn. Some people just have a Facebook group. But, you know, that's where they spend their time and energy, because it takes a lot to learn how to be good at content, but also how to be good at content in the way that that, you know, channel likes to have content, right? Like the way that I post on LinkedIn is very different than the way that I post on Twitter. But, you know, my story was I was posting mostly on LinkedIn. And one day I was like, man, I'm just I don't spend any time learning on LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn is just kind of a sales channel. Everybody's selling. But I follow really smart people on Twitter that are CPAs, estate plan attorneys, et cetera. And I refer them clients because I learn from them there. And every advisor had told me for so long, like LinkedIn is for selling. Twitter is for engaging with advisors like don't do it. It doesn't work. And I had this realization that I'm like, you know, I don't know why I'm listening to an advisor who's 30 years older than me is getting no clients from social media. Like maybe they're just not right. And so I pivoted last to two years ago to Twitter, like January of 2022. I had like 800 followers. And I was like, I'm going to go all in on Twitter. There's going to be my focus, spend all my time there. Like I spend under three minutes a day on LinkedIn. I probably spend about 30 to 60 on Twitter. But I went from 800 followers to now 22000 in the last two years. I was at 7500 last January. So growing at 1000 ish new followers a month and somewhere between two to five million impressions a month. Right. That's great. That's great. So when you were going through that process of thinking about where to focus, what what how did you go about evaluating the different platforms and how did you come to Twitter as the one that you wanted to use? Yeah, I think first is like, where do I like spending my time? Because like I hate Instagram, I hate Facebook, like I don't want to be creating on there because that's just not where I really want to spend my time. Like I'm already spending time on Twitter, learning from other people and engaging with them. So like it's a natural place. Additionally, like, you know, the audience I work with, like millennial business, like business owners in their 30s and 40s and like up to, you know, mid 50s. A lot of them do live on Twitter and are doing the same thing they're learning. And so, you know, a lot of my life is I own all street. I own all street academy. I have equity compensation. I'm the head of community for wealth dot com. So like what I understand is equity comp running a business, growing a business, et cetera. Like, why would I not work with people in the same age range that have the same things? Like, that's what I know really well. And so I figured like, hey, if this is where I'm learning, this is probably where other people are learning. And I talk to people about LinkedIn all the time. Like nobody's like, yeah, I spend a lot of time learning on LinkedIn. They spend time engaging because they're told to do that. And maybe that'll help push them. But, you know, I literally just take what does well on Twitter and I just copy and paste it to LinkedIn. And still like nine out of 10 prospects come from Twitter. But I think you have to figure out where your audience lives. And I think a lot of people have this like head trash that like, oh, I work with retirees, so my audience is non-social. But James Canole is on YouTube and he grew 100 million in AUM in eight months. He had to hire like eight advisors in the last year and a half because they can't sustain the growth that they're having from YouTube. You know, there's Taylor Schulte can't handle the growth that they get from a podcast. There's people who can't handle the growth from Twitter or YouTube. Like audiences are everywhere. Like pretty much everybody engages on social now. And like I find the restaurants I go to, the hotels I'm going to stay at, the professionals I'm going to work at some way from social. So if you don't really have a good social presence, you know, I think Samantha or Samantha Richards had a. No, sorry, Samantha Russell and Richards is somebody I work with, but she had a statistic that it was like you like 60 percent of prospects if they don't find you on social won't book a meeting with you. And so if they find your social and your social is bad, you've already lost that client. And I think that was really important to me. And so everybody can check me out on social. People reach out and they're like, hey, you know, I you know, I've heard about qualified business income deduction. You know, what is that? And so instead of me sending them a link to Investopedia, I can send them a link to something I've written. And so every time somebody needs help, I can show them what I've explained about it so they can say, Thomas knows this. He explains this really well in his own voice. I don't really understand this. I need to go to Thomas for help, and that's my goal through social. Right. Yeah, it's great. So question did come into the Q&A. I want to pull up. I feel like now's a good time. So obviously you mentioned trading your co-founder. So how do you and this is a common question that I think comes up as we're talking about advisor marketing across the board. So if you're an advisor, that's either a co-founder of a firm or your multi advisory firms. How did you guys think about balancing being individuals and collective marketing for the firm? How do you guys think about that or manage that? I think collective marketing is just not what you want to do, right? Like we live in a world where like if I left Allstreet, people are going to work with me, regardless of whether this is behind me or not. They want to work with the person. And that's just the truth of it. So like brand marketing your firm, unless you're a really big firm and even when you are, then that firm has firm branding and you have your own individual run. Like nobody is coming to Allstreet Wealth and saying, tell me what advisor to work with. Like they're coming to work with me. And Allstreet Wealth is just the company that I work at. And this is something I talk about all the time. Like people are like, hey, I have this business page. Well, one, nobody wants to follow a business page like they just don't. Like they follow people. Two, we're in a high trust industry where people want to work with people. They don't care about the company. Like we have one clients to Goldman Sachs, right? Like big name, big marketing. They just cared about who was going to be helping them and how they were going to be helping them. So like, yes, you can funnel some of your content to your business. Like you can write some blog posts on your business page. But like people follow people and people want to work with people. So I think it's really about marketing yourself. And this is where the people say, well, like, well, what if I put out content and people that know me don't want to follow me? It's like being a financial planner. Like your life is being a financial planner, teaching people about money. If somebody doesn't want to follow you because you're talking about money, like, are they really your friend or somebody you cared about in your life? You're literally educating people for free and they hate that. Like that's just you having your own head trashed. That isn't true. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, so as you are creating content and you're finding that voice, obviously you've done a really good job of that. What is there? Is there a specific process that you went through or maybe maybe just talk a little bit about the trial and error that you went through? Because I think a lot of times your folks will look at someone like you or others that are super successful in social media and say, well, I can never get to that point because I've got 20 followers on Twitter, right? And I don't like how am I going to do this? So maybe talk a little bit about the process of building that up and how how that went for you and how you went through that. Yeah, I think, you know, what you said is really true, right? You don't have very many followers in the beginning. So like that's your time to get out bad content, which we all are bad at it. Like I think people start and they're like, why is my content not amazing? But it's like if I told you to go pick up a basketball today, you're not going to be in the NBA. You're just not right. Like you have to put in the work. You have to put in the reps. And, you know, you're doing that behind closed doors in the beginning. So I think what I always tell people is like. You have so much knowledge about finances to be a financial advisor, like we are in the deepest industry of things to talk about, right? You have ash flow, you have budgeting, you have debt, you have retirement planning, you have investing, you have insurances, you have business planning, you have equity compensation, you have planning for college, you have planning to buy a house like in every single one of those things. Tell me 20 different points that you talk about clients about cash flow. They could do it. Tell me 20 different facts about debt, how you pay off debt, snowball avalanche, how to prioritize investing versus debt. You know, whether you want a 15 year, 30 year mortgage, when do arms make sense? SBA loan, like whatever, right? Like there's so many points, like 10 topics, 20 points is 200 different posts. You could write those 200 different posts. And then you could say, hey, I just talked about reverse budgeting. Now I have a post about mistakes people make with reverse budgeting, right? Or like, hey, you know, most people are fearful of reverse budgeting and automating things because they don't have enough. Well, that's why you should always have half a month of extra income as a buffer, right? Like that's a new point. And so I think like, it's not that hard to come up with content if you are a financial advisor that knows what they're doing, right? And like, I'm sure everybody in here is. You go through the CFP textbook, you could find so much content that you could do. But I think it's early on, just do it, right? Like I started small. My big thing was I started with a blog a week and three social media posts. That took me about 10 hours a week early on. I, it was horrible. I hated it. You know, eventually I got better at it. I reduced the time to about five hours. So then I started at a newsletter, right? That's not that different. Got used to that, cut down the time there. I added my podcast in, cut down the time on there. I decided to start posting every day on social. Cut down the time on there. I started to add in Twitter, right? And so like, right now my social media calendar is, I schedule three posts a day on Twitter, two on LinkedIn. And then on top of that, I always add in my podcast with a video a week. I have a YouTube video. I have a promotion a week. I have a YouTube short per week. I have two threads per week. Like, and I spend five hours a week total on social media. And I know I'm the most active and it's just because I did the building blocks, right? Like I'm on year five of creating. If I did this year one, it'd be horrible. I'd be bad at all of them. But instead I focused on how do I get good at each individual one before I add to that next skill? It's kind of the idea, like you wanted to start weightlifting today. You wouldn't walk in and do five days a week of seven like lifts. You'd be like, I'm gonna do an upper body day. I'm gonna do a lower body day. I'm gonna do a full body day. I'm gonna do a few core lifts, strengthen my body, get there. And I'm gonna add more. And then potentially I could add cardio in there. Like there's building blocks and you just need to take the steps. Because what happens is people start their REA and they're like, I'm gonna get started on social. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna do my podcast, my newsletter, blah, blah, blah. And it's just like none of them are optimized. But if you had one that you did really, really well, you're gonna be way better off than having four things you're super average at. Right, right. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I appreciate you walking through that. So when you're thinking about engagement across your platforms, how are you tracking that at this point? I know each one has its built-in tools. Are you using anything else to kind of track that on a broader basis or looking at engagement across platforms? So it's interesting because, you know, everybody says impressions and things don't matter. And they don't, but they do. It's weird because like every month that I have the most prospects are months that I have the most engagement on social media. And my thought is like, I look back, like last year I did 30 million impressions on Twitter. If I wanted to grow at 30 clients, like think about that conversion. I wrote a thread a couple of days ago, it's like 50 posts long about company benefits, for example. It says 80,000 views on the last tweet, which means somebody who read all 50, there was over 2,000 people who read a 50 tweet thread, right? Like that's a really important metric way more than that top tweet because that's 2,000 people who wanted to learn enough from me that they read something that would take them 20 minutes to read. And those are, I think, are really important metrics to look at of saying like 2,000, if I want to grow at 30 clients this year and I have 100 posts that get to that level, the amount of people that I have to get to want to work with me is super, super low. So I do think impressions matter, but I think quality of your content matters even more because if you just are putting out like a spam post, right? That's like grab people's attention, but it doesn't educate them and it gets a bunch of views. That's not necessarily going to funnel people to your business. And perfect example, right, is Douglas Bonaparte is one of my great friends. I talk to him all the time. I get 10 times the prospects he gets from social media, but because my social media is only about finance, right? He's so funny. He has a lot of an audience of people who aren't looking for financial planning. And so the way that my content drives people to my business is different than somebody who might have a lot of followers but isn't necessarily about finance. Right, right. Yeah, and that makes sense. And that's another interesting question for those that have, most of us have existing social media, right? We have our personal accounts. We have our, maybe a separate business account. Do you kind of, as you're talking with advisors, do you recommend maybe going and opening a new kind of full business only account if you're going to go all in like you did? Or because some of that personal stuff out there, right? Is, I mean, you could have something from when you were 15 years old that you just said something dumb in high school, right? But it's still on your timeline here. How do you balance that? I mean, you could start a new one, but again, like people want to follow people. They don't really want to follow professional pages. Like my Twitter is the same one that I've had for since I was that age, right? Like are people really going to go back and look? I mean, you can go delete old things that you want and clean up your timeline if you want to. But yeah, I think it would just be like, you want to have an optimized profile. Like I think if you look at mine, right? I have, my photo could be better on Twitter, but like every time you change your photo, it takes them like a long time before they keep you as verified. But like, I have a good bio talking about exactly who I work with. I have the link exactly to go apply to work with us there. I have a background that shares all the top 100 advisor, top 23 millennial financial planner, financial advice and education for our generation with like all the main places I've been seen in. So you definitely want to have a profile that's optimized. And then like my pinned tweet is a thread I wrote about tax planning for business owners that got 540,000 views, right? So they're like, look, this is very educational. I want to work with business owners. So here's my top resource I have. So I think doing all of those things is the important part. I doubt people are going to go search back through your Twitter to find something from 10 years ago. Right. But who knows, I guess. Yeah, right. There are some crazy people. Exactly, exactly. But thinking about engagement and views, as you mentioned, it kind of doesn't matter. But is there anything that you do when you think about your content or as you're tracking engagement ongoing and conversion rates in particular, is there anything that you do to maybe drive some of those, for lack of a better word, window shoppers over to actual clients or at least meaningful prospects and leads? So, well, I'll answer two parts. So one about the impressions and tracking, I don't use any separate tool other than what exists in the platforms. Like in Twitter, there's a whole part that you just click on your profile and you go to premium and you go to analytics. And I'll look at mine. It says 600,000 impressions in the last week, 220 new followers, blah, blah, blah. And I check that. But sometimes the algorithms are just kind of broken, right? There's periods of time where Twitter's messed up and nobody's getting impressions. So I try not to get too stuck in it. But it is a good teller of like, is your content resonating with people? Are they wanting to read it? But the important thing that I spend so much time on, always reiterating, Samantha Russell talks about this all the time too, is like good content is not enough, right? Like we are scrolling all day, every day. The only reason we're going to read your post is because you grabbed my attention. So if like, I wrote a thread about tax planning for business owners and it just said, here are 10 tax planning moves for business owners, like nobody's going to read that, right? And so like, I look at like my main one on my profile and it says, I have clients making close to a million dollars a year as a W-2 employee taking the standard deduction. Then I have business owners making a quarter of that with hundreds of thousands of in deductions. The tax code is built for owners. Here are the 11 of the best tax planning moves you need to consider as a business owner, right? Like it did enough to grab people's attention where they're like, I'm a business owner. I feel like I pay way too much in taxes. Like I need to go learn about this, right? Right. So I think like focusing on that hook, like for me, I spend at least a third of the time putting out a post on the very top of that post to grab people's attention as I do writing the pages of content that come after that. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Of course, it wouldn't be an advisor webinar conversation without asking about compliance. So how are you, with all the activity that you're doing and all the posting that you're doing, how are you capturing, tracking, monitoring this for compliance purposes? I mean, I'm an XY, so I use XY archive to archive everything we have. Like, obviously I save every video, every podcast is saved. So like, I think there's so much fear pushed out about social at the end of the day, but like if you're not giving people investment advice or promising investment returns or lying about things, like I just don't see a situation where like, oh, I put an educational post about tax planning moves. Like, wow, that's gonna be really bad because it said the word tax in it when it's a tax planning thread. I just make sure everything gets archived. Like, I don't delete anything. And I think that's more than good. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I know XY has those tools. So anyone listening that's an XY member know you have those tools available, right? Yeah, I don't know how well everybody else does it. Like LinkedIn and some of them, they do, you can download the archive of all of your stuff. But the reason why apparently auditors don't like that is because like, if you delete things, it's not in that archive download, but like XY archives specifically saves all of them. Yeah, yeah, and there are a boatload of services out there specifically for that. Not all of them connect to all social platforms. I know the one we use here is specifically LinkedIn. So there are a bunch out there. You can look at Kitsis' very busy tech map to see what all those are available. But kind of making the transition here from tech or social media tech is the other part of this conversations about the technology that you use for your firm, which you've also been very open about in some of your posts, especially specifically for advisors. Before I get into that though, I want to talk just very quickly, where do you see, or as somebody that creates a ton of content on Twitter, how do you approach the new AI tools? Do you use them at all currently to edit or create your stuff, or do you typically kind of shy away from those at this point? I do because I don't have any problem coming up with content. Like, and it's bad with coming up with content. I think additionally, if you use it for editing, you're going to take out your voice and put it in AI voice. And like marketing is a financial advisor isn't marketing is personal branding. It's letting people know he knows his stuff. He is easy to talk to. He explains things really well. Like I want to work with him, right? And so I don't want to get rid of any of my personality, any of the way that I talk about things. Cause like I write in the exact way I would explain something to a client. Like that I think is really important because a lot of advisors fail at social because they write like they're writing the CFP textbook. And you know who doesn't want to read the CFP textbook is the people that you work with, right? Like if they're searching through your reading, your thread or your blog post, and you used some acronym because you sounded smart, they're not going to go Google that. They're just going to leave your post. You need to write it. Like I try to write like in a fifth grade reading level. Like I want to explain the qualified business income deduction to somebody who's could read at a middle school level, right? Otherwise they're not going to understand it. And they're not going to get anything from it enough to want to work with me. So I don't use any AI. Like I use scheduling tools. So I use Hype Fury for Twitter. Like I said it that I want to schedule three posts a day around these times. And so I'll just type a post. I hit schedule and it just goes to the next available time. It can give me like good posts that have done well for me from a long time ago. So now I can just repost that or slightly edit it and post it. And then for LinkedIn, I schedule inside of LinkedIn. Cause all I do for LinkedIn is I say, let me go look at my last month of Twitter. What were my best performing posts? Because I'm putting out five to 10 posts probably per day on Twitter. And I'm only going to put like one on LinkedIn aside from like my blog and podcasts and YouTube, et cetera. So all I have to do is go find 20 good posts from the last month and schedule it. And that's all I do for LinkedIn. Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So that was Hype Fury you said for Twitter. I think it's really great. I can schedule threads in there, which is really helpful. And like, if I wanted to go look at like best tweets and finance, like I could look at other people's tweets and use that as inspiration. I don't do that often, but it is a part of it that some people use. Got it. Yeah, what about another question in the Q and A? Any tools that you use for like grammar, copywriting, editing, anything like that? No, again, like I think if you go read mine, you'll realize like I run from that. Like my goal isn't complex, long sentence structure, perfect intro and conclusion. Like I write simply like you just, you came to me and said, hey, I heard about the qualified business income deduction. Like, what does that mean? I would write back exactly how I would explain that to you, which is not how most people would write in proper grammar. Like if you look at Twitter, like every line I have a double space in between. It's not like paragraphs, there's no paragraphs. It's one line, no period, extra space, next one. Like, because again, Samantha Russell, she talks about this all the time, people skim. And if you have paragraphs, you know what they don't get out of it is they don't get anything. But if you have lines, they'll pick out the key little parts. And so like, I focus on what is really simple and easy to read on that person. And like, I have a new hire, he's an EA, he helps me on writing some of the things. I take some of the things he writes and then I go rewrite it in a way simpler way because he writes like it's a textbook. Like that's, he's a great writer for school, terrible writer for content. And for me, that's almost why, almost why I think I'm not the best school writer, but I'm really good at writing in my voice in simple terms. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important distinction for folks to understand, right, is the way you write on social media is not gonna be the way that you write on your firm website or your firm blog for the most part. And you know, especially if you're part of a larger firm, you're not gonna have the same type of content, same type of voice typically between those two, those two types of platforms. And I think even on your company blog, it should be the same way. Like, I think that's, again, like if you want people to read and understand, like, I don't know about you, like I sit down with $20 million clients and they're still asking me about what a backdoor Roth is. They're still asking me about the basics. So you need to write in the way that like, that it is explaining the basics for somebody to know. So like, even on our company website, it's still gonna be in simple terms, right? Cause like I go Google, like when I was trying to learn about QBI, I would go Google it. I don't understand what this is saying. And if I'm a financial advisor that knows a ton about money and tax and I don't understand it, you guarantee somebody is not gonna go there and be like, that's the person I wanna work with because they make things make sense, right? Like that's our job. Our job is everything is on Google. What applies and how do we explain it to them and make sense? Like you have to be able to do that through your social. And I think that's the best way to learn for me in the early years. Like my content was my learning. I wanted to learn about trust. I'm gonna read everything I can about trust. I'm gonna listen to every podcast I can be about trust. I'm gonna teach people it through content. And now I learned it really well. So it's not only like a learning tool of the areas you wanna learn, but it's also a great way to drive in people who wanna work with you after you do it for a long time. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. So shifting gears here into technology, so what role does technology play in the client experience as you're having this significant growth that you're experiencing and onboarding clients, even three a month is quite a bit for the team, the size that you have. So what role does technology play and how do you essentially build that tech stack out as you're growing the firm? Yeah, I mean, technology is huge for us, right? Like all of our clients are virtual. Like I live in Indianapolis. Most of my clients are New York and California and Texas and Florida and big cities around the country. And so like, we need a really good way to get everything. So obviously we have financial planning software, use right capital. Everybody aggregates everything in there. We have the vault. We aggregate every single possible thing that has to do with money inside of there. But like, we have a ton of automation. So from the time somebody, they book their get to know meeting after applying to work with us, we say, hey, great, you're a good fit. You wanna book a meeting. After that, there's an auto email with a video, me just introducing myself, what to expect in the meeting, blah, blah, blah. They decide to become a client. As soon as they book that meeting, we have automations created where they're putting Google Drive. All their folders are put in there. They're added to our CRM. And that's a really great automation. Then we use like advice pay to collect fees. You use DocuSign to sign client agreements and whatnot. Then they get everything into right capital. We obviously use that for aggregation, for having all the documents in there. But like financial planning for us is really about knowledge. It isn't like, how do we get you from 60 to 80, right? Like it's, how helpful is a 35 year old making $600,000 a year with an arbitrary retirement goal who might make a million dollars in two years? Like it's more so about like, what are the actions to do? What's the good tax planning? What's the investments? What account should we be using? Like all the insurances, the business planning, et cetera. So we don't really use it much for like the Monte Carlo scenarios. Cause like all of my clients, it says they're going to have a hundred to $200 million, right? Like they're not, they're going to spend it. Things are going to change. We want to focus on the right actions, right behavior. We obviously use a list of plan to scan the taxes and model out the tax planning moves that we think that they should make. We create all of our financial plans and templates and stuff in Canva. We use Altruist for investment management, which obviously speeds things up. And then, you know, obviously I use wealth.com for the vast majority of the estate planning for our clients, as long as they don't need irrevocable trust at that point, obviously we use an in-person estate planning attorney. But I think that's probably the breakdown of all the most valuable pieces of tech we use. How do you evaluate, you know, obviously all of us are getting constantly pitched with new tech, new providers. As I mentioned earlier, Kitsisis Tech Map might be the most stressful thing for an advisory business owner out there. How do you evaluate new technology and avoid the clutter that can come as you're just adding new tools to the tech stack? Yeah, I just don't need to change something that isn't broken, right? Like if somebody comes, like obviously I have a really great circle of other great financial advisors. If they say, you gotta check out this tech, great. I'll check it out. But people messaging me, I'm not gonna change financial planning software for it to be 1% better. Like, I'm not gonna go through the pain points of doing that. Like, you know, we tried Elements. It wasn't the right fit for us. Like with the complexity of our clients, you know, you have to use that in a financial planning software. Like just ended up really being a waste. You know, people come with, hey, here's a tax planning software. It's like, well, this plan's great. Like, you know, we can do everything we can. So there are certain times where you're looking for a solution. Like, hey, I didn't really feel like any of the estate planning tools were great. I fell in love with wealth.com. I thought it was significantly better. So we implemented that and that was an easy change, right? Like CRM, you know, we don't use our CRM other than like client info, you know, their CPA, their social security, their address. Cause like we have client notes and all of their folders in Google Drive from every meeting. And we're not just going to copy and paste it over there to paste it over there. So I think there's always new tech. You can always, you know, get shiny object syndrome and all of the things, but at the end of the day, like, unless you're looking for the solution, I don't know if you need to be having 10 meetings a year. Like other people will bring forward the tech that you think that you need within a few months. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, another question came in kind of along those lines, probably more specifically along the wealth.com, but how do you balance, you know, educating others on tax, state insurance, all that, while not crossing the line where you're giving advice, if that makes sense? You know, cause you're not, if you're not a professional in those areas, right? I mean, with the tax planning, we map out, here's the tax planning moves you should consider. Here's the impact. Great, we're going to coordinate with your CPA. Hey, CPA, here's the things that we want to do. You know, what are you thinking? You stamp the approval. CPA is like, great, that's great planning. Like, you know, we're not very proactive. We're reactive. We send the email or hop on the call and they're like, we'll get it done. So I think it's always like, consider, here's the planning move. Here's the potential impact. Is that worth exploring? CPA, you agree, do you disagree? And then they enact it. Cause at the end of the day, most people don't even talk to their CPA until after the calendar year, right? So we're proactive in the year. We'll add a call in with the CPA or just at least email them and say, here's what we're thinking. What do you guys think? They're good to go. And then they go file the taxes. You know, I think that works out pretty well. On the estate planning, very similar, right? Like even if you're going to estimate, you know, here's some trusts, here's what could potentially work. Here's some things to think about. Like the way that I do it, even the irrevocable side is we educate them on all the tools that could make sense. We sit down for the meeting and we let the attorney know, hey, here's all the info about them. Here's the situation. Here's the things that we're thinking about. Help us make the decision on those. And so we can focus the time, reduce the fees there. With using wealth.com, it's literally, hey, it's either gonna, it guides you through and it tells you what they need, whether they need a revocable trust, whether they just need a will. And they can book an attorney through there. So they can pay 200 bucks for an hour consult with an attorney and say, hey, this told me I need a revocable trust. Is that true? Do I need it? Do I need to put my business in it? You know, I think it's really easy to say like, hey, client, you have rental properties in three states. Here's why you might want to consider a trust. Do you want your family to go through probate in three states? Probably not, right? Or, hey, you know, you own a business, financial power of attorneys are not always honored. You know, potentially putting the business since you're a sole owner into this trust with somebody designated to make financial decision for you if you can't, can help do that. But like, see what wealth.com says and hire the attorney to get that approval. So I always just push them to do it. So instead of having to pay four to 9,000 for a trust, they pay nothing other than the consult, the attorney, and then potentially detransfer of a house and moving the business ownership to there. So it's like maybe 400 to 800 bucks. And so I moved from clients don't get their estate plan done to now like everybody gets it done because the friction is broken down. And then you know what people don't do after they get theirs done? Well, one is fund the trust. We can help make sure they do that. But two is update their estate plan. Updates are free. Hey, you had a new baby. Let's get that on. Hey, you're moving states. You need a new plan. All of those updates can be done for free for them. And all they have to do is get it done and get it notarized. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and yeah, I think it's important to make sure that you're taking that planning approach right and not necessarily giving specific advice on any of those things. You know, there is a clear line that we have to draw. I'm figuring out, because like we have it, like my hire has passed his EA. So we're deciding whether it's even worth doing the advice or just staying in the planning lane if we don't file. So we don't have to really worry about it, but haven't made a decision yet. Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of the, maybe a lot of the folks on this call are, you know, hopefully younger advisors, right? It is the Genesis Group. So those are folks 33 and under. So a lot of them are probably in the process or maybe thinking about kicking around the idea of starting their own firm. What advice would you give to an advisor that's maybe in that process or thinking about starting their own firm in terms of selecting technology, building out their tech stack for a new firm? I think that's like the best part of being in some community is like they really narrow it down, right? Like X, Y is not perfect. I'm in it. I think it does a solid job. Like they've consolidated like the top tech options and you just like kind of have to pick through there. I think it's one, like being a study group of advisors who serve a similar audience, right? Like potentially ultra high net worth, older clients that might be better to use, you know, e-money. But you know, for younger accumulators, you know, Red Capital is really good. We have tasks in there. We can build their financial plan in there. You know, they'll actually go in there and use it. There's budgeting feature that works really well. But I think it's like a mix of like study groups of people who are similar to you. And like almost anybody going to launch their own RIA is gonna be in some community that's probably gonna have, you know, narrow down the tech to what works for them. But most of them, you know, you can just book a meeting and they're gonna walk you through exactly how to use it. Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Well, I have one more question for you and then anyone on the call can also feel free to type them into the chat or the Q&A. There's especially recently been a lot of negative press around Twitter, right? And some changes to the platform, obviously under new leadership, big changes, big cuts, some issues with bots and other things on there. How do you stay on top of those changes as they're coming given that's your primary platform? And I guess, how do you address those or think about those as you're continuing on your strategy? I just don't really think about it, to be honest. Like, it's so easy to find any little problem with anything, right? Like, what, like, you're gonna go to Facebook and be like, Mark Zuckerberg's probably like this amazing guy who doesn't do anything wrong or like, hey, I don't like Elon Musk for X reason. It's like, you know, whether you choose to leave Twitter because you don't like Elon Musk is not gonna make a difference to that, right? Like, you can make the stand that you want, but I just think it's a good platform to learn on. I like spending time there. I don't think about when I buy a pair of Nike shoes about the CEO. I don't think we really do it about any company. And at the end of the day, right? Like, to create a free speech platform is gonna be pushed down upon by the government, right? Like, if you are allowed to post whatever you want, that's the opposite of what happened pre he was there, right? We saw all the Twitter files come out, all this. The government tries to censor things and put out what they want. Of course, there's gonna be negative press around somebody who doesn't really fit that agenda, but I don't know who's the CEO of LinkedIn. I don't know who's, you know, I guess I do know Zuckerberg, but like any of the other platforms, YouTube, I just don't really think about it, right? Like I'm using the platform to the benefit of me and my business. And I kind of leave it at that. Is there times that it's not working as well? The algorithm's broken? Sure. Is there times where they're promoting something different? What I try to focus on is, hey, right now LinkedIn is really pushing threads, or I mean, Twitter. Before it was really pushing long posts. Before it was really doing video. So kind of seeing what's working well and doing a little bit more in that lane, I think is the area that makes way more sense. But if we only work with companies where we agree 100% with the person that runs it, I don't think we'd ever use a single company's solution. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That makes a ton of sense. And I tend to agree with you there as well. I can see. Always one of the more common objections you hear when somebody is trying to get started on Twitter, right? Yeah. What's maybe one final closing thought that you would have for everyone, or maybe one key takeaway you'd like for everyone to take away from this conversation? Yeah, I think the way that I try to educate people really on social media is that at the end of the day, people wanna work with people who know their stuff, right? And we all have egos, right? For me, if I hired a financial advisor, I would wanna work with the best financial advisor that helps 30-year-olds build their business, right? That's how we should be marketing ourselves and building the branding. So I am writing exactly to that type of person. Nobody wants a generalist, right? I wouldn't be like, hey, this person, he's a good financial advisor. Who does he serve? Well, he serves 70-year-olds. He serves 25-year-olds. He serves 40-year-old business owners. And then he serves 30-year-olds in the military. It's like, so what's he gonna know about me, right? He probably not that much. So I think understanding that your job is to know exactly who to work with. And if you know how to help them, then you know the problems that they're facing and educate them on that. But don't only talk about that. So I met with an advisor. He was like, hey, I work with teachers in California and I just am running out of content. Because the only thing he talked about was the things that were unique to that group. But there's still all the things that aren't unique that do apply to them, right? Retirement and budgeting or whatever. He was like, I'm only writing about their teacher retirement plan and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, that's great. Weave that in with all the other stuff that they still need to know that might apply to other groups. So I think it's get started, educate, focus on educating people. I don't try to sell it all through my content. All I try to do is educate people to the point where they feel like they need to work with me. And give yourself a couple of years. The time is gonna pass. It's gonna take time to build this up. It took me a year before I started to get any prospects at all from social. And then year three, I was getting good prospects from social. And then year four, the prospects I was getting from social were 10 times wealthier and making more income than the group before that. So it's gonna take time. It's gonna take time for you to get better at it, but put in the reps. Yeah, that's awesome. Awesome, thanks, Thomas. Anyone have any other questions they'd like to address today? We've got a few more minutes here in our time slot. Oh, and yes, one more thing to mention. At the end of the call, once we hang up here, there will be a survey pop-up. So I know in the past, the surveys have been emailed. We switched that back to be live in the presentation. So we'd appreciate the feedback. It's helpful for us. It's helpful for our guests as well. So just please take the time to give some feedback from this conversation. But any other questions, comments, wanna challenge us on anything, please feel free to throw them in the chat or the Q&A. I don't see anything coming in, but I want to just give it another second. I know it takes some time to type every once in a while. Okay, question came in the q&a. Missed the first couple minutes, you touch briefly on it, but maybe touch a little more. I know you mentioned, you don't love Instagram. But is there any specific reasons to why you don't, you don't like to use it? I I'm not anti it as a channel to grow. It's just not a chance. It's not a place I spend any time on personally. So I think, you know, it's, you have to learn what works well on each platform. And if you don't spend any time on it, it's hard to know what's working well, right? Like you're not following the top people. And so for me, just naturally, I spend the most time on Twitter, so I can see and replicate what other people are doing. LinkedIn, or like, you know, Instagram would be like a whole new language to me. And you know, and now I do YouTube, I have YouTube longs, I have YouTube short, so I could do Instagram, but it's just a whole nother job. And so my thing is, when I'm getting too many prospects to handle right now, I'm going to stick with those lanes. And if anything were to change, then I could always slightly start to move to something different. But you know, I don't want to have to learn five channels, because I only have so much time in the day. But I think it can be a great channel. I know people who do it well, it's just harder to grow on most channels than Twitter, because Twitter has retweets and reposts, which gets pushed other audiences, LinkedIn, or like, you know, YouTube is really hard to not YouTube, Instagram is really hard to get pushed to a new audience, because it's kind of only the people that are seeing your stuff unless they somehow find you in like the discover area. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. A couple other have come in here. I know you don't use LinkedIn, specifically, but I know you're pretty plugged in with advisors that are successful on social what, for those that are that you know, that are successful on LinkedIn, which do you think educational videos are kind of what they do best, or maybe just graphics and sort of blog style posts? Okay, that's a great question. I think it's a mix, right? Like, I think you become really boring. If you do one thing, if you just do three line posts, it's gonna be boring. If you just do videos, it's going to be boring. If you just do really long wordy posts, it's going to be boring. You want to mix it up, right? So like, I have one video, we got LinkedIn, I've one that goes to a blog, I have a bunch of shorter posts. And I think at the end of the day, shorter posts are the way you stay active. long form content is how you win, right? Like anybody can write like, HSA, most people are overlooking HSAs, their triple tax advantage, make sure you consider it this year, right. But like, not everybody can write 10 tax planning moves to make and then, you know, blah, blah, blah, like longer posts. So I think you need to have a mix of long form content that can be video and written, as well as short form content also stay active. Yeah, I think it is important to have video to let people kind of see you. There's all the research, like the more somebody sees you in your face, the more they are inclined to like you. So it is important to like hear from you in your voice and see you. So I do think is important. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a lot of there's actually a lot of research out there about that, right. And the fact that mirror image effect or something like that, I think it's called Yeah, and it feels like you know, somebody, if you see them on video enough, right, then you know, if you kind of search and, and you get to see their dog, right, if they're on video. So that's our prospects always say is they're like, you know, you're exactly what we thought you were because they come in knowing me so well, because they've got they've listened to my podcast, my videos, etc. Yeah, absolutely. This is just kind of a business question. What's the average age of your client base? Would you say? Yeah, I'd probably say like late 30s is the average age, especially because we do a $12,000 a year minimum fee. So like you kind of have to be we have some clients in their mid 20s that are just, you know, run a business and they're making a million dollars. But, you know, the average person, it takes a little bit longer to get to the point to pay $12,000 in fees at a minimum. Right, right. Awesome. Sweet. Anyone else have any final questions? Cool. Well, Thomas, appreciate the time. I really do appreciate it. I know you got a busy schedule, so I appreciate you jumping in here and spending some time with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Folks on the call, if you have a little bit of time after this, please feel free to fill out the survey that pops up on the screen. This will be available, recorded version as well, if you missed any of it or want to rewatch it and get some more great information on the Learning Center. So thanks again, Thomas, and folks, we'll see you for April's session. Thanks, guys.

NAPA Genesis webinar

Thomas Kopelman

All Street Wealth

social media

Twitter

financial planner

content creation

technology tools

financial advisors