Transform your finance processes with the digital conversion funnel for Finance

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five years ago ron bulles and his business partner they started lifeworks advisors with zero revenue and zero clients and now they're one of the fastest growing wealth management firms in the us and a big part of that is because they figured out this lead engine and how they attract clients their core offer is a subscription model but they are clear on that difference between the value of planning and also managing assets so many of their clients will actually they'll start on the subscription model and then they'll ask to have their assets managed and that actually leads to aum for life works i believe it's more than this now but last i saw was around 200 million or above 200 million and that happened in just a few years and it's growing rapidly every year so be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss the other videos in the series with ron on how to build enterprise value even if you're a firm with less than 100 clients and then how to future proof your business as well i'll see you in the video where we're finding clients you guys are national how did you do that it considered a concerted effort to focus nationally what what did you do to get there or maybe you know what did you do that failed and then uh did you or did you have success right away what how did you do it so very rudimentary uh we met a company that specialized in helping financial advisors build out sales funnels on facebook and so the first big shift i had was what's a sales funnel right i mean we were we were exiting a large national firm where how we had been trained to develop business was asking for referrals nothing wrong with that right we had zero experience in marketing we had zero experience in advertising and other than you know kind of putzing around on facebook for myself i had no knowledge of this and so we go to a presentation from this consulting agency that does this and part of that like light bulb went off in my head of well if i want to build a national practice what's the best way to meet people well it's social media and we launched our first national social media campaign in summer of 2018 and it bombed miserably right because the things that we thought you know like we do holistic financial planning we have a custom financial planning process we're better than blah blah blah they can complete swing and misses right so we stayed committed to it it cost us some money running ads and trying to figure this out and that would be one of the keys i would say to anybody listening that maybe thinks well that wouldn't work for me it will it can but you have to stick with it and you have to be willing to go through this like iterative process this kind of like lean entrepreneurial mindset where you test something and see how it goes then you iterate on it really rapidly and then you build from there so we ended up figuring out hey we do something that retirees really really find valuable right which is we run a hedged equity strategy for clients and so we end up building out this campaign that said hey instead of buying annuities or going to cash trying to time the market or buying life insurance like you can have downside protection on your equity portfolio right it was almost as simple as that put it out there it was like bang the thing exploded we had more people calling us and more business than we could actually handle and so we've had some evolution since then where we've ramped it up we've ramped it down but we've gotten to the space now where we believe we have a fairly predictable pathway to building clients and looking at it from an investment perspective when i put in x thousands of dollars i expect to get this much back in revenue right this you know we measure uh net new revenue and that new assets uh from clients and so that's something that um it's not a perfect lever we can't just you know you know dump a million dollars on it tomorrow and expect it to scale because there's still service pieces to it and there's still you know the size of the market we're going after but it is it is a very powerful tool for getting very laser focused in who you want to serve gotcha so in the beginning summer of 2018 you focused you started with facebook and you started with ads yep and then you iterated and then you found one that clicked and that's been the thing that's been working since then yep have you had to change it along the way since you found the first one that worked or have you kind of had a consistent go-to type ad yeah we've had some consistency around the messaging but we've had to change a lot of things right so part of what happens in this space is you know apple changes the ios security protocols right and then that changes what kind of data is being shared right through cookies and pixels and stuff like this which then changes how you have to find identify and meet people facebook made changes around you know what type of data used to be able to target so there's there's this kind of like technological layer that's constantly moving and it's hard to keep up with right then you have just the what consumers want and where their mindset is right and that's something that's also moving but maybe not as fast right there's probably some continuity i think there's a longer run there so we have found some messaging that i would say is a little bit more evergreen but we've had to change the techniques and the tactics for how we put the message in front of prospects interesting okay um last question on facebook are you are you are they going straight to a meeting are they going to a webinar what was the initial thing that was of interest to them so when we first started the funnel was essentially see an ad on facebook go to a pre-recorded video we'd call like a a video sales language a bsl video sales letter and they would watch that and then the offer was book a meeting with our team and get this this this this right we then pivoted in 2019 early late 2019 early 2020 to start doing live webinars right where ad they could then watch a short video if they wanted to on a landing page but the offer was reserve a spot for one of our live webinars and then in the live webinar we will make an offer right here's what you get if you book a meeting with us you know one two three four five this kind of thing interestingly enough we are just starting to explore pivoting back to running um very short more like vignette type of videos so think like one to three minutes or maybe two to five minute long videos in a series that somebody can watch and then decide to book a meeting with us and have a conversation the live webinars still work really well but there's a fair amount of commitment to like technology you know lighting cameras mics structure space for it and if we can get to the same objective in terms of reaching people and explaining our value proposition and having them select us which is one of the most unique things about this if we can do that where they're watching a video 24 7 on their time that's better than you know probably the live webinar where it's restricted to hey we're doing one a week or two a month or you know something like that so we're testing going back to and i think there's some good indications that we might wind up more focused on delivering like educational videos specific to topics but still promoting those as paid ads so not unlike what you're doing kind of on youtube but essentially bundling that and then running posts on facebook instagram other you know social media platforms you