Read The Transcript Of The Episode:

Speaker 1:

This is The Ultimate Advisor Podcast. The podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving successful and scalable practice.

 Each week, we'll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals, your team, your marketing and your business operations. Helping you to level up your advising practice, bring in more assets and create the advising practice that you've dreamed of.

 You'll be joined by your hosts Bryan Sweet, who has more than half a billion dollars in assets under management. Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to hire, improve their operations and company culture and Draye Redfern who can help you systematize and automate your practices marketing to effortlessly attract new clients.

 What do you say? Let's jump into another amazing episode of The Ultimate Adviser Podcast.
 

Brittany:

Hello and welcome back to your Ultimate Advisor Podcast. This is Brittany Anderson and I again have with me Draye Redfern and Bryan Sweet. Today we are going to talk about something that I think will catch your fancy because a lot of you, or all of you, or most of you are financial advisors and that's allocating your resources.

 A lot of times when we're looking at building a business and we're looking at all of a sudden facing uncertainty or difficult times, which 2020 has absolutely brought to us, people can make some really sudden decisions based on emotion versus based on logic. That's what we're going to try to help with today when we talk about resource allocation.

 A lot of times when somebody or a business, in a financial advisor world in particular, when we start feeling the pressure on our margins, when we start looking at, oh goodness, what are the markets going to do? How is this going to impact the business and the bottom line? We can start to cut spending.

 The problem with that is that a lot of times people will cut spending in the wrong categories and in the things that can actually help them gain traction during uncertainty versus kind of catapult them backwards. That's the thing that we really want to touch on and drill into. Is that when you are in a period of maybe a difficult time, of facing uncertainty, you can set yourself up to do more and not have to give away the farm.

 When we look at let's just take marketing for example because that's such a big component of what we do in Ultimate Advisor through our coaching, through the mastermind and through all the programs that we offer. We talk a lot about marketing, but we do it in a way that's not like, "Hey, give away your second born child in order to make this happen." We want you to have the resources to get ahead.

 So for example, and I think Draye you'll touch on this later, is Facebook has been a big one this year because so many people pulled ad spend out of Facebook because they got nervous. This is across industries. I mean, this is not just our little world, our little bubble that we live in, this is across industries.

 What happens there is when the demand is no longer there, people aren't wanting this because they think they need to cut their spend, all of a sudden opportunity opens up. Now we have an opportunity to step into that and get a lower cost ad spend and create more value for people without having to write these huge checks. Without having to essentially give away the farm.

 That's the kind of thing that we're going to talk about today is how you can compress your margins a little bit and actually get yourself ahead during times when people are getting nervous and backing out.

 Bryan, I would love for you to step in today and just talk about how your mindset has always been, we're going to lead with value and we're going to spend where we need to spend in order to get to where we need to get. Even if it means our margins get a little tight for a short period of time. I'd love for you to jump in and add some insight here.
 

Bryan:

Yeah, this has been a really interesting time because this is kind of put your money where your mouth is timeframe because obviously when the market's dropped 35% and we get paid at the end of quarters, we got a lot less revenue than we would've otherwise have received.

 You just really need to make a conscious effort to think really about expenses. One of the things in talking to a lot of advisors with our mastermind and just trying to help out any advisors we can. One of the first things that they seem to do when things aren't going as well is they cut out marketing.

 I would tell you that that's probably the worst time to do that. If anything, you want to spend as much and maybe even more because what's going to happen is if everybody else is cutting back on their marketing and you're actually spending more, there's even a greater likelihood that you're going to stand out during those times.

 One of the things that we did is I can't say we doubled down, but we absolutely did lots of new things from television ads, to radio ads, newspaper marketing. We ramped up our reach on our Facebook ads and those things because of all the costs for these marketing things were less.

 It's four or five months later since we've done that and we're starting to see the outcome of that actually be very, very positive. Sometimes this stuff takes a really long time for it to kick in, but this has been a relatively short payback period and people that we've been reaching out to that didn't have time or it wasn't the right moment to get together for whatever reason they've gotten the right message from us and now are starting to reach out.

 Be very, very conscious when we go through these unique periods to consciously not cut out the marketing and if anything, maybe add more.

 We have a budget, which I would highly recommend if you don't, you should for all of your items, including marketing and make sure you're spending, I would say at least 5% of your gross revenue on marketing and closer to seven or 10% was probably an ideal number.

 Those get to be some bigger numbers when your revenue gets up there, but it's really the thing that can consistently keep your message out in front of people. What you want to do is keep that message there so that it helps differentiate you and makes you attractive to those people that you're going to do the best work for.

 One other thing that I think is very interesting is when we talk about allocating your resources, one of the things that I think is a little bit different and we spend an awful lot of time on this one. So when I try to be a resource to a client, I look at it like what it is it that we know, or what are the concerns, actions that we have with people that we can share with our clients?

 If you're very conscious during conversations and clients come up with problems, you can easily be a resource and make them aware of different services, different vendors that you have used, or that you're aware of that might help solve some of their problems. Don't always think that everything that you do has to be financial business. If it can just be helpful to them, that's being a really great resource.

 One of the other things I think is being a resource is that whenever you're with a client on the phone, in person, one of the resources that costs nothing to deliver is your energy and your attitude and each of those is a decision. So if you go into those meetings with them, the decision that I'm going to have high energy and I'm going to have a great attitude, all of that stuff is very catchy and clients aren't exposed to that as often as you'd like that to probably be seen.

 Those are just some maybe odd resources, but we've had really good luck just being aware of those and really always trying to have very high energy and attitude when we're dealing with clients because they really do get drawn to that.

 One of the other things that we do is a little gifting program. We have one person in the office, that's one of her main jobs and it adds such an immense value. She just has really free rein in what she does, but she comes up with these really creative things and if anything, it's not something that's got our name listed on it. We're sending them a knife set. It would actually have the client's name on it. Then she does a very creative way of delivering it. It's just amazing the amount of thank you's and, "Gee, I can't believe you thought of us on our birthday or this special anniversary." Or for the most part, we do these at times when nobody's expecting them.

 So we don't do any Christmas gifts. We would do it at another time when it's not really expected. People look at that stuff as optional and that's going above and beyond. Then if you deliver all your financial advice in addition to that, it really is a very big value add.

 Draye, what about any trends as far as ad spend and things like that, that you might add that would be helpful as far as allocating your resources.
 

Draye:

I was just wanting you to talk for like another half an hour, Brian. I was actually really enjoying that.

Bryan:

Thank you.
 

Draye:

That's good stuff. On the very tactical side of things, there's a variety of things that you can have as an option right now that didn't necessarily exist six months ago. If you ever wanted to advertise online, now is a great time to get started. Over the last two years Facebook has increased their costs month after month, after month, after month, after month becoming where a lot of people in the space that I operate in could not actually afford to make their conversions and make the dollars work to where advertising kept making sense.

 That all changed this year, which is great for us. Basically Facebook costs have dropped or the cost to advertise dropped by as much as 40%, which means that you could spend out at 40% less or you could budget the same amount, allocate the same amount of money. Your dollars are going to go 40% further than they did previously. It's a great way to get started. Facebook's an easy platform to start advertising on.

 The other side of this is that Bernie mentioned TV a little bit ago, but we've got some people that are friends and connections that are really making some very interesting deals with TV and radio companies. One of the deals was that, I don't want to disclose the exact dollar amount, but we'll just call it $5,000, $5,000 got them I believe it was X amount of spots on this TV channel.

 That TV channel basically said, "This is what we'll do. It's great, it's not enough." They got the price from 5,000 to 2,500. They basically cut the price in half and then they also got an additional $1,000 of additional compensation if they did not ROI a hundred percent on it.

 Meaning they spent $2,500 on these TV ads, if they did not make at least $2,500 back in business, that the TV station would comp them an additional $1,00 of spend that they would use for free to advertise on that platform. Really, really interesting and a really easy way to start taking your dollars and making them go further because the reality is exactly what Bryan and Brittany both said, is that when times get tight like this, one of the first things that goes is marketing.

 If you cut your marketing, it's like you turn the spicket off of the hose where no more leads start coming in. You may not see the ramifications of that immediately. Maybe it's okay for a month. Maybe it's okay for two months, but you fast forward three months, or six months, or nine months, or 12 months down the line.

 What sort of feeling would that be if you try to turn the leads back on in the business and nothing's coming? Because then you flip these leads back on it's not an immediate thing usually. It's like the difference of starting a bicycle versus starting a dump truck.

 Well that dump truck, once you have a business that's got critical mass, you've got leads, sorts of things. You cut that momentum off, you stop pushing on that gas pedal, that thing can still run for a period of time. Starting that dump truck up again, takes a lot of power, takes a lot of force and it takes a lot of anything to even get it or see any positive movement on that.

 That's what's happened though. Is you hear a lot of these big behemoths, a lot of these big advertisers have been these 800 pound gorillas. They're the dump trucks. They've had all this momentum, they suck up all of this budget. When someone who's smaller, they're just getting started. It's like you operating a bicycle, doesn't take a whole lot of movement or emphasis to get that thing moving and really make a big difference.

 In this instance, I think considering a lot of our podcasts listeners as the bicycle, they're not spending 5 million, 10 million, 100 million a year on Facebook ads, but you can make a big difference spending as little as like 300 to $500 a month sometimes.

 Now is an opportunity to do that because it's a 40% discount, your dollars go so much further and the barrier to entry is so much lower. Those are a couple of examples that if you're going to negotiate something with TV or radio, you got a lot more negotiation power now than you did a few months ago and even have some sort of back end ROI guarantee.

 One of the easiest ways to find that and track that is to just buy a separate 1-800 number or use a separate email address for tracking purposes to see who ends up replying to that email and you can see how many phone calls you get via some of these 800 numbers and tracking things so on and so forth. So you could see the exact effectiveness of what some of your advertising on radio and what TV are.

 There's a couple of tactical things to do, but when it comes to allocating your resources, having some tracking mechanisms like that go a long way. Also,. if you were going to any spend, now's a great time to do it because you can build in a lot of additional benefits into your agreements. Brittany, anything else you want to add to that?
 

Brittany:

Yeah, I think there's just something to add there and you bring up that point kind of to round that out is you have to pay attention to what's working because what's one of the biggest mistakes we make when we're looking at allocating resources? We get so excited about an idea. We're like, "Let's just throw all of our spend on this because this is for sure going to hit," but if you fall in love with your own message and your prospect or your clients don't, that's a problem.

 You need to make sure that you are looking at what people are actually engaging with. There are ways through social media to see what are people actually clicking on? What are they engaging with? What do they like? Same thing with your website and if you're directing them to different call to actions. You have a checklist that you're driving people to. You have a resource center, you have an ebook, whatever the case is, you have to be looking at what's actually working and what's not because if you don't, you're going to spend a lot of money for a very little result.

 That's something that you really need to pay attention. To stop doing the stuff that's not getting traction and start doing more and more of what is actually working. I think the bottom line here is that there are so many resources out there. There are so many ways that you can continue to serve your clients, that you can add additional value, that you can reach prospects, that you can engage your team.

 My goodness, when you look at allocating resources, right now there's so many different things that you can do all virtually. So you don't have to send people across the United States or across the world to get training right now. I mean we believe in this so strongly, we did a summit earlier this year geared towards strictly financial advisors to be able to help them to really ignite or reignite their business during one of the probably scariest times that we've faced.

 We're doing another one coming up. It's September 21st through the 25th. I'm giving a shameless plug here because it's a huge value. You look at allocating resources, we're charging $97 bucks to advisors to attend this. I mean, you can absolutely allocate that resource to be able to get traction, to find out what are the hottest trends? What are some of the best speakers out there and how can they add value to your business? Which in turn helps you add value to your clients, to your prospects and to your team members. It's a total win.

 There are just so many resources and ways that you can spend to enhance your business without giving away the farm. You just need to do your due diligence. You just need to pay attention to what's available. What's out there and what's going to help you escalate and get even further in your business.

 Something else that this is kind of a random one off, but I thought would be a really good opportunity here. When we're talking about allocating resources and Brian brought up some really great points about how you can do the little gifty things. How you can gift and surprise people. We talked about that last week with leading with value and how you can do that in ways that again, don't give away the farm.

 Something that we hear and right now people are facing challenges that they maybe hadn't before. Maybe there's loved ones that have been lost. Maybe there's different transitions they're going through with a layoff from a job or whatever the case is. There's two points I want to make here.

 Number one, if somebody's already down and they come into your office and you're like, "Yeah, things are pretty rough, but we're all hanging in there." Oh my gosh, puke because the people are going to feed on that. Then what do you think that's going to do for the quality of your appointment? What do you think that's going to do for the quality of that interaction if you're like, "Well, we're getting by, how about you Harry?" That's terrible. You want to bring the energy.

 Bryan brought up such an amazing point about your energy and your attitude being two things you can control and how you need to show up as your best self when you're engaging with your clients. When you look at allocating resources, look at how you allocate your energy. I think that's something that's really important to pay attention to.

 Then on top of that, when you're facing hardships and you're looking at well, how can I best allocate my resources to wow people? To maybe lift them up during times of them being down? Something that we've been doing here within Sweet Financial is there's something powerful to writing your thoughts down. There's something powerful to writing your words down.

 For a couple of different instances, it might've been a loss of somebody or a family member that's sick or whatever the case is, we've been gifting, a journal with the person's name actually put on the front of it. It's stamped in, we've done a leather one. We've done other little tidbits here and there, but giving a special message that's customed to that person saying, "Hey, during a difficult time, write down the things that you're grateful for or write down the happy memories you have with this person, or write down the things that you know are keeping you moving and keeping you going every day."

 It's those little things. Allocating resources to really be a wow impact for your clients and prospect, that's going to make a difference.

 Before I round out what the key takeaways, Bryan, Draye is there anything else that you want to add?
 

Bryan:

The only thing I would say is for anybody that has a broker dealer relationship, don't forget to work with your wholesalers and people that you have contact with because they can be very helpful with marketing ideas. They can maybe provide some marketing support that doesn't really cost you anything, or they can get you access to speakers, or information that you can share with clients.

 If you haven't been doing that, reach out to them and find out what they have available and find out what would work for you and make sure that you get that built into your marketing calendar.
 

Brittany:

That is such, such a great point. Don't forget about the resources you have access to. To give you a few key takeaways from today's podcast session.

 Number one, look at your marketing budget. If you don't have a budget, let's work on setting one. Bryan gave a couple of different percentages that you could go off of. Around 6% is really what you should be. If you want to get a little bit more aggressive, you could go seven to 10% of your budget. Some people go as high as 15. It really depends on where you're at within the company.

 I understand if some of you are listening that maybe aren't quite to that seven figure mark, you might want to be a little bit more conservative. If you're in that growth mode or whatever the case may be, but the bottom line is, is regardless of what percentage you pick, just pick something. Just pick something and go after it and make sure you're allocating those funds.

 The second and I think probably the most important is to really do a quick self check on your attitude and your energy. I mean, I know that doesn't necessarily have a tie into the resources, but I think it's one of the most important themes that comes out of anything we've talked about. Is if you can manage your attitude and your energy and go into something understanding that the attitude and energy that you bring to any given situation is likely what you're going to get out of it, that's a really different way. That's a little bit of a different spin to put on things.

 If you go into a meeting and you're like, "Well, it was kind of hum hoe drab," well, that was your fault because you were not bringing the energy that you wanted to come out of it. I think you need to own it. Own it and be accountable for it and know that you have an opportunity to change somebody's day in a really positive way by how you choose to act. I think that's really, really important.

 Then finally, you need to do your homework as far as the resources that are out there and available to you and the ways that you can spend. Draye gave some great examples about how you could spend with Facebook and how that's been kind of at a discount lately and probably will continue to be for a little while at least. No guarantees there but that's what it's looking like.

 Also, with your gifting strategies and understanding that you don't have to spend a huge exorbitant amount and we can't spend that within our industry, we have certain limitations. You can do these little things that make a really darn big difference if you just look at what's out there. Just pay attention, just look at your resources and make sure that part of your resource allocation is really getting your team the training, the experience, the knowledge, the exposure that they need to be able to deliver that killer experience to your clients and to future prospects.

 That's a huge, huge one for you. If that's so happens to be by you and your team attending our summit coming up September 21st through the 25th, so be it. Remember I said, it's 97 bucks to attend. It's going to be absolutely amazing. You can go to ultimateadvisorsummit.com and you'll be able to see the lineup of speakers, the great value, content. Again, just like anything we do, we're focused on leading with value, not only in our financial practice, but in Ultimate Advisor as well. So we highly encourage you to come join us there.

 That rounds out today's episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast, we're going to see you next week as we continue the conversation on building your business during some challenging times.

 Hey Brittany here, before you go, we wanted to share with you that we are running another Ultimate Advisor Summit coming to you September 21st through the 25th for a mere $97. That's right, five days of killer speakers, killer content that's going to help you to continue optimizing your practice during a really interesting year. Go ahead hop on over to ultimateadvisorsummit.com and grab your seat today.