Getting Known In Your Local (Facebook Group) Community To Quickly Add $30M In The First 2 Years: #FASuccess Ep 446 With Misty Lynch

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Misty Lynch: Website | LinkedIn | Podcast
• Money Mindset Meaning Questions – Download (PDF)
• Perfectly Planned Content
• Life Coach School
• Million Stories
• Demystifying Money: Permanently Reprogram Your Money Mindset to Achieve the Wealth and Success You Deserve by Misty Lynch
• Jyotsna Bharti
• Boston Business Women Facebook Group
• Brightfin

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Misty Lynch, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Misty: Thank you for having me.

Michael: I really appreciate you joining us today, and I'm excited to talk today about what it's like when you launch an advisory firm, and you really want to hit the ground running when you launch.

Misty: Yes.

Michael: I think, any of us, just when you get started as an advisor, when you get started any job, any career, it's like, "I want to do the things and make it grow and get my income going." But I think particularly for those of us who come in as career changers, when I was already doing another thing and I'm not coming in my 20s, early career, I'm coming in my 30s or 40s, a little bit further along, the context just feels different. There's a spouse. There's a mortgage. There are maybe kids who are staring down college in some quantifiable number of years. We have a certain lifestyle we were accustomed to because of the salary or income we were working with before. The pressures show up differently, I think, when we're launching as career changers. And I feel like there's sort of general platitudes out there. When you launch, get the word out, tell all the people you know, communicate back to them the new thing that you're doing now.

But it's hard. It's awkward sometimes for the conversations. And unless you were a power networking person in the first place, that well can kind of run dry relatively quickly. There's only so many personal friends and family who are going to take a leap with you when you get started. And I know you have lived a version of this journey over the past few years and have had incredible growth of 30-plus million in 2 years of getting started underway. And so I am really excited to talk about what you really do when you are career changing in to, proverbial, get the word out that quickly and get business and growth growing so quickly when you launch and hang a shingle.

Misty: Yeah, no, thank you. And I think that it is interesting, and I talk to a lot of different people who maybe were career changers like me that kind of happened around 2020 or age 40. And I feel like there was something that really started to get to me because I was in a good corporate job. I was paid well. Everything was fine. I just knew there was something else I wanted to be doing, that it wasn't quite exactly what the right fit for me. And so when I was thinking about pros and cons, obviously, very analytical about this decision to leave a pretty solid job. And, obviously, COVID hadn't happened yet. It was January, so a few months before that.

Michael: Okay, okay. So this isn't even a "COVID rocked my world, and I was reevaluating my priorities." That's coincidental.

Misty: This was just a fun coincidence that we could actually go out and meet people. But, yeah. So I really felt like, what's the worst case scenario? Because my father's an engineer. I've lived through businesses collapsing. When I was 10 years old, we ran out of money. No money, had to move, all of these things. So in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking about what's the worst-case scenario, and I did think, "Okay, if I try this and it doesn't work, then I have skills that are marketable." I worked in compliance. I had all my FINRA licenses for another two years that I could go back and find another job. And then it kind of clicked that I was choosing to live my worst-case scenario every single day, instead of taking a shot on what I really wanted to do with my life. And so that...

Michael: I want to pause on that. That's a really interesting way to frame it. A, just, right, I'm at a place and stage of my career where my worst-case scenario is I just go back and get another job doing things similar to what I'm already doing because I've got marketable skills. I'm an established professional in the marketplace. I get that. That's an interesting fallback unto itself, but I can't help but chuckle. So if my worst-case scenario is doing that and that is actually the job I already have, then I'm literally already living my worst-case scenario by doing that.

Misty: Exactly. Opting into that every day. And honestly, my worst-case scenario wasn't bad because I had had a nice career where I have had those skills. I know there's a demand for that kind of work. I genuinely respect everybody out there who's working back office, in the home office, in compliance, all of those, in audit, all those things that I'd done in previous times. But it wasn't my dream. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. And so I feel like it was time. I didn't see anything changing really if I didn't make a move. And I knew from what I'd been doing, working on the compliance end, reviewing sales material and advertising, that there weren't a ton of financial advisors that had a lot of their own content. I reviewed a lot of things that were kind of coming through that were already approved from a vendor at the time, 2018, 2019, that timeframe. And they were putting out a lot of the same stuff because I'd seen it on a mass end from...obviously, their audience would be different people, but there wasn't really anything that wasn't new. And I think it was more because they didn't want to have to bother with compliance, getting approval, or whatever.

But there was a few advisors who were proactively working with me and my team to say, "Hey, I want to do a podcast. I want to do a blog, a newsletter." And we were really actually fine with it. As long as we approved it and they knew what the rules were, we were definitely willing to work with those advisors. And those people, I would always think, "That's what I need. I need content. I need to reach people. I need to communicate with people in a way that really gets through to them." So in the back of my mind, 2019, I decided to start a blog as an OBA because I was working in corporate, and it was an outside business activity just on... I decided to be consistent and write a weekly blog about... I was going to stop shopping for a year because I felt like I had too much stuff. I was starting to mindlessly spend money. And as somebody who's interested in money, I thought I would try this experiment and kind of blog about it for a year. And I thought that this would give me a base of some content.

And so I just started kind of looking at what other people were doing before I'd even left and thought, "Okay, this is important. This is how people actually let people know more about them so people want to work with them." So I did that. And then, when it was 2020, I decided to finally leave corporate. But I had about a year's worth of marketing that I could cut up and use.

Creating A Base Of Blog Content Before Owning Her Own Firm [9:20]

Michael: So I'm intrigued by this. So tell me more about the blog that you were creating at this stage. How did you set it up? Are you technically inclined that you can stand up your own website and blog, or did you hire a person or buy a thing off the shelf? How did you just literally get it going?

Misty: I was at a conference because I'd gone to some conference in my corporate role. With advisor conferences, I'd gone to some of them. And I met a woman, Zoe Meggert. I don't know if she's changed her name at the time. But I met her, and we had an interesting conversation about what she did. And she helped people with their advisor marketing.

Michael: She was doing Perfectly Planned Content.

Misty: Perfectly Planned Content, yeah. And so we just kind of talked, and I was like, "What is the process behind it?" And I just got really curious. And that's one thing that I think has been helpful for me, is I don't assume there's anything out there that people are doing that I can't figure out how to do. I just have to get curious about it because I could have been, "Nope, that's something that this person does. She's got skills that I don't." And she was really helpful. Actually, I paid her to help me set it up.

Michael: Okay.

Misty: And so she kind of set up a pretty basic website, learned how to post something on WordPress and update it. And I kind of outsourced somebody to help me get that going. And she was really, really helpful and completely one of those things where just talking to people, building your network, and learning about other people that are doing things that are interesting, how they do it and how they help, could they help me? She was super encouraging, obviously, because she likes marketing, and I helped her because I knew other advisors that needed marketing that I would say, "Hey, there's a person out there doing this. Did you want to meet her?" And so we kind of became friends for that and got the blog up and running.

And really, it just was...I'm not a writer, so blogging wasn't exactly the perfect fit for me, but it was a way that my corporate role, they didn't care because this was like, "Okay, you're just doing some writing on the side." It's not talking about specific investments or anything like that. It was just basically financial literacy type of stuff. And so I just made sure that I wrote something every week about...sometimes I'd write about credit cards and credit scores, or I'd write about intentionally shopping, things you could do, so all these different things that I thought were just kind of crossing my mind that week, like a little diary.

Michael: So I'm kind of struck by the habit here. So it sounds like there was a real intentionality to "I'm going to have a weekly cadence. I'm going to write weekly. I'm going to make myself write weekly," even though that wasn't necessarily a natural style for you to do writing.

Misty: Right. It was just something that I'd seen before, and I'd seen a lot of the other advisors that I worked with. Maybe you put out something good, but then you don't put something else out for six months, and then it wasn't very effective. Maybe people wanted more, or they wanted to read more. So I learned that consistency was very important when it comes to marketing, and blogging was kind of an interesting way in. It did take a little...there was no ChatGPT helping me put together a blog, so it was a little bit of a struggle. But I felt like it was useful, and it made you think more about the topics you're writing about. I like doing research on different things. And so it just kind of became a weekly project. Once I started podcasting, I realized I liked talking a lot more than I liked writing. But it was still a way to start to create content that could kind of live out there and then be repurposed once I finally bit the bullet and quit my job.

Michael: So, when you were starting on this road, how long were the posts? How long of an article were you trying to write?

Misty: I think they were 800 words.

Michael: Okay. That's a good-sized chunk.

Misty: Yeah. So kind of trying to do that because I'd read what gets... I really tried to figure out what I should be doing, and I kind of follow the rules a lot. If they said, "Okay, make it this many words with some headers and things like that," that's how I tried to do it. And I think that...it wasn't like it made me any money or was a success overnight, but it just made me have content that I could post on social media, "Go check out this blog." And it started to have people think about me and finances versus just me as their friend or me as the person in town. So it just kind of showed people I'm comfortable talking about this stuff, I talk about this stuff a lot, which, for some people, they might not know even if they've known you a very long time.

Michael: That's interesting framing to me that when you're not an advisor already, your friends and family and personal network know you for a thing. You're in compliance at some financial firm.

Misty: Yeah. But they don't know anything, what that means.

Michael: Right. Yeah. But they don't know anything, what that means beyond that. And for better or worse, they've got you in that frame. You've got a compliance job for some corporate thing, not you're a financial advisor who talks about money.

Misty: Exactly.

Michael: So I'm struck just how you're framing that. Okay, so I just started writing this, and I just started sharing it out on my social channels. That might have already been a lot of friends and family and colleagues. But now I'm starting to change their perception of me more substantively because they're seeing the steady drumbeat of content that I'm putting out from me talking about me things. But it's money and finance stuff. It's not corporate things.

Misty: It did work out. There was definitely ups and downs with it. And I had to come up with content every week. So it wasn't just about my current spending. It was about the psychology of money. I started reading a lot of different books about heuristics, all these things I kind of was able to learn about and write in a blog. And so it was fun.

Michael: You had to go on a learning journey to find things to write about.

Misty: Yeah, I did, but I felt like this content base was going to be important at some point. Even if not too many people read it, it would give me some material to repurpose, to point back to, and it was just kind of getting a baby step into working for myself and having to not have a marketing firm or a team or anybody here to go to once I was on my own.

Michael: And so, how were you trying to just get the word out, get found? "I'm a blogger now. I'm making this content. Please, someone in the world, read it."

Misty: Yeah. So it was really social media. It was kind of low at first, kind of just my networks. But then, when you used different hashtags about the blogs and things that I was writing and people like Zoe and other people who had started blogs or financial coaches or people in the literacy space had talked about ways to get people to see yourself, and so I kind of learned a little bit about that, a little bit about marketing and SEO, and stuff like that. And it wasn't like I was super focused on it. It wasn't my full-time job. But I was trying to learn, "Okay, what worked? Okay, this worked. Oh, people liked this content. Maybe I could write more about that," just see kind of how things worked out.

Michael: What worked, I guess, either content-wise or get-the-word-out-wise? What was actually working that got some traction for you?

Misty: Facebook was pretty good for me, and then Instagram, because I would find a picture and then write a little bit of short content and then direct people to the blog. So it was kind of visual. LinkedIn at that point was somewhat okay, but I feel like most of my LinkedIn connections were other advisors that I know of or other financial professionals. So this was kind of a different track where I was in some mom groups in Facebook, and I was in some local groups. And Instagram was just kind of more of I would just put things everywhere. And I used Twitter as well at the time to see where people found it. And I felt like Facebook and Instagram were a little bit more popular, and so I started to just make sure that I consistently showed up everywhere. But those were the ones that really worked for me starting out to get people to read the blog or leave a comment or engage with it somehow.

Michael: And so you said at the beginning, when you started down this path, you formally set it up as an OBA. But was there any money changing hands? Was there any income coming in? Was there a "business" as an outside business activity?

Misty: I would say this was an expensive hobby.

Michael: Okay.

Misty: Money was going out maybe to pay for it. It wasn't very expensive, and I was saving money, not shopping so much. So it was kind of a wash. But I did set it up as an OBA, and I did set it up as an LLC so that I could use the expenses for running it, because businesses don't have to be profitable at first. So my accountant knew what I was doing, but I kind of always liked the idea of having an outside business activity where I would be able to be more creative, maybe not limited to what I could say. But being in compliance for so long, I kind of knew what I could say and what I couldn't. Instead of feeling like everything is going to be off limits, I shouldn't even bother.

Michael: And so last just a quick question on this, where did you actually...what was the website? Did you make intentionalspending.com because that was the theme? Did you do it under your name, because Misty is writing it, so it's the Misty website?

Misty: No, I called it notanotherthing.com because I think that was the first post. I think my mom asked what I wanted for Christmas, and I said, "Not another thing," because I don't like clutter. Kind of when there's too much stuff, I get overwhelmed. So that was what I decided to name it, and I did not put a lot of thought into it, Michael. It just was available, and I bought it.

Michael: Cool.

Misty: And then I was like, "Should I just buy domains?" And this seems like a very interesting industry, too, because it was...

Michael: They're pretty cost-effective. Yeah, yep.

Misty: Oh, this is super fun to unbox. And so I just kind of started. I didn't expect it to be very...and I think that's one thing a lot of people do, is they expect everything to be perfect A-plus material coming out of the gate. And I was happy with B-minus effort and having to change the name of it eventually, or doing something and then scrapping it, or kind of reworking it and just getting started.

Making Key COI Connections By Hosting A Podcast [19:48]

Michael: So, what happened next, just on this journey? It's 2020. You're thinking about alternatives. You've launched the blog. You've been writing for the better part of the year. So, what happens next on the journey?

Misty: Yeah. So January 2020, I actually had left corporate, and I'd gone to work…one of my old neighbors had been working at a firm nearby, and he'd seen me posting on social media. He'd seen me on...wherever he saw me, Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever, and he was like, "I need more marketing at my firm. What are you doing? Because I see you everywhere." So I was like, "I'm still working in Boston. Thinking about leaving, though, and I'm thinking about starting my own firm." I had been lurking on the XYPN platform for a long time. I'm sure there's some...shout-out to my lurkers out there.

Michael: Oh, yeah, yeah, lots of lurkers.

Misty: Yeah. And so I had been really toying with leaving for way longer than anybody should. But he was like, "Come work for my firm. Come be an advisor." He offered me a salary to kind of help with maybe doing some financial planning and maybe helping with some marketing and social media stuff. And so I was like, "Okay, this is better than starting out with zero," going from six figures to nothing. So I decided to do it. And so I joined their firm, and I worked there from 2020 to 2022. And then, 2020, the blog was fine. My year was up with that. And I had been a guest on a few podcasts when I was in corporate because they were starting to get into that, and they wanted me to talk about certain financial planning, literacy topics. And I loved it. I loved it.

So I had gone to the firm and said, "What are your thoughts about radio or podcasting?" And they were like, "We're open to whatever." They were very cool about exploring different things. These guys were my age. They were ready. They were building their firm really, really fast. And so I had a friend who was at iHeartRadio, and so I talked to him, and he kind of pitched some ideas to WRKO in Boston about a financial podcast. And here was my thought. I needed to get people to know who I could help. And also, I didn't have a ton of centers of influence, I think, is the term that's commonly used for connections or people who...and so my thought, and this is what I brought to the guys at my firm, I said, "I don't know. I want to get to know some business owners in this area. I love working with small business owners. What if I had a podcast and I interviewed them and talked about their business, how they help people, what they do, how their financial journey had changed. Because most entrepreneurs started out wanting to do something else or thinking they would do something totally different than where they are today. And I would get to really know them in about half an hour."

And instead of being, "Hey, can I pick your brain over coffee?" "Can I have you on my radio show or my podcast?" Then they're going to come to me with their best stuff. They're going to be prepared. They're going to have marketing material, which everybody wants. And it's not going to be annoying or a waste of their time, or something like that. And so the guys were like, "Whatever. Whatever you think is going to work, we could try it." And WRKO, actually, they liked it. Radio was expensive at the time. So I think there was that end of it, too. So we tried a radio show for six months called the...I think it started out as Modern Money, and then we changed the name because somebody else, another lovely woman in Atlanta had Modern Money as her firm. And so she reached out to me, and I was like, "Okay, I'll just fix it." Because I didn't get too attached to anything really. So I changed it to Demystifying Money, which was something that somebody in my corporate job had come up with as a play on my name. And at first, I thought, "No one's going to take me seriously. I hate it."

Michael: Because you're Misty, and you're demystifying money. I love it. I love it. Okay.

Misty: I hated it at first because I thought, "I have to be a serious businesswoman. People have to think of me like..." And then I was like, "You know what, that's kind of actually cute." And so I stuck with it. And so we changed the show. And we did radio for six months. COVID hit. Nobody was commuting. No one was driving to the Cape on Sundays. I thought I would have people in the car. And so we stopped radio. But I kept up the podcast because, in that six months, I had weekly shows where I had a guest on. I got to know student loan attorneys, estate planning attorneys, lots of different small business owners in my community. And it was a really, really great way to get to know people, build my network. And they started either becoming clients or sending me people because I'd helped them where we got to know each other. And so that kind of helped me really kind of get my foot in the door as far as what I did in Boston, because they didn't know me at all. So it really was kind of helpful to really start to build that network that way. So I stuck with...the podcast is going on since 2020, and we're still doing it today.

Michael: I'm struck by, again, just the way you frame it. If I'm trying to get going as an advisory firm, I'm going to go out there and try to meet with at least one business leader or center of influence in my community every week and hopefully take them out to lunch and get to know them a little bit, and maybe I build a relationship that goes well. Or I can run a podcast and invite them on my podcast so they get some free marketing visibility, which makes them really want to do it and really want to show up and be really engaging in the conversation. And then they even feel gratitude to me because I got them out there. And I'm going to have a similar conversation where I probably would have had over lunch anyways, but they're so much more engaged and excited to do it because I made a platform, and they want to be on my platform.

Misty: Exactly. And so, "Hey, do you want to come on my radio show?" is a lot better than, "Can I pick your brain?" Nobody wants...people will do that as a favor and to be nice, but they might want to cancel that morning. They're not going to get up, shower, and be ready with their coffee, "Let's go. We're hitting record." So, to me, I thought it was just a better way to offer something of value for people that I really wanted to work with and get to know.

Michael: So, how did you find guests and do the ask?

Misty: So I really looked around. There were some people, when I was thinking about who…there's a lot of information out there about who financial advisors should network with, attorneys, accountants, all of these different professionals. Or there's also a lot of big financial questions that I had come up. And so one of the first guests I had on was a website designer. She designed my website. And so I asked the value of a website. Why should people put money into it? What are some of the basics and how she kind of works with her clients to figure out how to present them well? And then she didn't have a 401(k) for her business. She didn't have...she was looking at all these things she wanted to do, and I was able to help her. And then there was another...I started out with people that I'd kind of known, doing really cool stuff, or who were referred all the time in some of the groups that I belonged in on social media. And so they were very popular to begin with. Other people who'd worked with them had really liked them.

So I had a social media person on pretty much second, and she talked about social media and how she helps businesses grow. And then I had a student loan attorney on because that topic had come up, and I was like, "This guy is an expert. I wanted to meet him really badly." And so I pitched Adam Minsky, and he was delightful, came on my show to talk, and one of the nicest people that I met. And afterwards, we did become friends and met for coffee and stuff like that. He wanted to tell people how he could help them, and then it just kind of went from there. If I saw somebody who was out there, maybe they were focused on the news or maybe I saw them somewhere, I'd find them and reach out to them and see if they wanted to come on the show and kind of solve some problems. If people had divorce questions, questions that came up a lot, I'd find an expert, see if I could help.

Michael: So tell me a little bit more about, just literally, how you made the ask. You're cold emailing a stranger to be on your podcast and/or radio show.

Misty: So it wasn't cold because what I would do first was find them, and I would find people that I really either wanted to connect with and I would start to, not stalker-y, like their stuff ten things in a row where they would log in and be, "Oh, wow, who's this person? They liked 500 of my posts last night." But I would start to comment on their stuff on LinkedIn or wherever, or share it. If I thought it was interesting, I'd share some of their articles and things like that. And then I'd make an introduction to see if they wanted to come on the podcast. So I didn't feel like a stranger to a lot of those people, even though I probably was.

Michael: Oh, interesting. And so, ideally, hopefully, they've seen your name...

Misty: A little familiar. Yeah.

Michael: ...in their social media notifications or something before you do the outreach.

Misty: Yeah. And I'd spend some time. Yeah. Because I think I can tell who's engaging with my content. There's an estate planning attorney who's just started to comment and share certain things that I'm posting. She's on my radar, and I feel like now I'm probably going to invite her to the show next. And she probably wants to be on it, and that might be why she's doing it. So it's interesting, but I think that's how business kind of works. If I think someone's interesting or they share my stuff, you're genuinely going to be more open to that conversation. So that was my method at first. It was genuine. I really did like a lot of the people's...what they were sharing was important.

Michael: And what was the hit rate? How often do people actually say yes? How often did they decline?

Misty: It was pretty good. I really think there's some people that were like, "I can't do it right away, but can I meet with you in a couple of months? Or can I meet with you in a couple of weeks?" So I would say most. I never really had trouble getting guests on the show. I might have had a few people that never got back to me that maybe were kind of a longer range goal, some people with huge platforms that were writing books or something like that that I might reach out to to see if they want to come on. There might have been, yeah, maybe five of those. But other than that, I tried to stay fairly local, and that was pretty helpful because then people saw me sharing stuff of people they know, and then they wanted to...they were more open to it, too.

Michael: And just curious if you recall, what did radio actually cost for you to do this?

Misty: Yeah, I think the radio was, I think, a couple of thousand dollars a month, and it was split between me and my firm. I don't think I would have...it wasn't the right path, but it was compelling because a radio show is interesting if somebody asks if you want to go on the radio show. But it wasn't the right fit. So I didn't stick with that too long. It was about six months. But then they were super nice. They gave me all the episodes and the speaker and the setup for the podcast. And so I just kind of moved on from there and kept the show going.

Michael: And did anything change in how you do the asks for guests or got them to connect when it was a podcast versus a radio?

Misty: No, I just probably changed it to, "We were formerly on WRKO, and now this podcast here." And it was...yeah, I included that, but just as where we'd been featured before. But it was true. Yeah.

Michael: Okay. Very cool.

Misty: And some people really like going on podcasts. A lot of the time, I'm the first podcast that people have ever done for some of the business owners and some of the people that I work with, which is really exciting, except when they're super nervous and things like that. But it's still exciting. I think a lot of people enjoy that media still, obviously, hopefully, as we're doing one today.

Michael: It feels good to be asked, especially if you've never been asked before as a local business owner.

Misty: Right. Cool.

Buying A Firm From A Retiring Advisor To Jump Start Her Firm Ownership Journey [31:55]

Michael: That's really cool. So then, what came next in the growth journey?

Misty: So I'd realized probably I had trouble growing at the firm. The firm that I was with had some...they didn't have high minimums, but they had pretty high fees comparatively. So if somebody was just working with a financial adviser for the first time and wanted to look at what an average fee was, it was about three times that. And this was their firm and how they ran it. And so if they wanted the fees to be what they decided them to be, instead of beating my head against the wall, trying to get them to change or get them to be flexible with me, I realized that this was a better fit than where I was at, but it's still not exactly what I want. I didn't have enough control over certain things, like the portfolio or the fee structure. And so I'd worked there two years. I had not grown very much, maybe from pretty much zero to maybe 5 million under management with people that I had a pretty strong relationship with. But it just wasn't the right fit.

And they're awesome. They're really nice people. I'm still friends with them. And they just knew. They hired a lot of people like them who were aggressive and wanted to run things and try things and be innovative, but that doesn't necessarily make for the best team if all of us want to go do our own thing.

Michael: Right. Sort of you launched a firm and work on your own because you're innovative and like to try new things and don't want to have to answer to others. It's kind of hard to make a firm full of people like that for the same reason that you probably started your own firm in the first place.

Misty: Yeah. Yeah. So my kids, I'd walk them to the bus, and there was always a firm kind of on the corner of the street. I knew it was one woman. I'd known her through NAPFA. Nice person, really liked her. And so I would kind of walk my kids to the bus, walk my dog around the block, and be, "This is going to be my walk to work someday." So I don't know how much you feel about manifestation or anything like that, but I really had...I was closer to what I wanted to be, but this was exactly where I wanted to be. And I'd randomly run into Susan in the grocery store who owned Sound View Financial Advisors. And this was around the end of 2021. We still are wearing our masks. I could have easily walked the other way. She could have ignored me. But instead, I approached her, and I asked how she was doing, how's business. And she was like, "It's okay. How's business for you? Are you still over there?" And I said, "Yeah, but I think I'm going to do it. I think I'm going to start my own firm. I noticed that there's an open office space in the building you're in. And I think I'm going to take it, and I'm going to start my firm. I'm going to do it."

And then the next day, she'd reached out to me and was like, "I've wanted to retire for a while. I don't know what to do with all my clients. I don't have a ton of clients, but I really care about them." And she had a few large clients. She had about 9 million [dollars] under management. And so she didn't have a ton of clients, but only some firms wanted to take two of them, and then she wouldn't know what to do with the rest. And so she asked me to come back in. And then, at that point, we kind of were like, "Look, I want to start a firm, and I want to start a firm right in this building. And you want to leave. So, what if we made a deal?" And at that point, neither one of us really knew how to sell a firm, how to buy a firm. We just kind of knew, "This timing is right. I want what you've got, and you want to retire." She wanted out. And so I reached then back out to my network, and I had some friends that I'd made through when I worked in corporate who were in RIAs or helping with valuations and things like that. And I was like, "How do you buy a firm? How do I do this?"

And so I got really curious about what were the multiples, what are the offers. And so I, again, had reached out to people I'd known to see how to do this. And so I had some help kind of putting together evaluation of the firm, and I made her an offer. It was one times revenue. And she was pretty much thinking that her firm was going to either just dissolve, and her clients were going to go somewhere else, and she would get nothing from it, or she would have to break it apart. And so she thought that sounded like a pretty good deal. And we worked together for six months so I could meet her clients with her, sit in their houses, chat with them. They felt comfortable knowing that Susan had kind of handpicked me and that I was not going anywhere for a while. But also, they didn't have to do anything. They were going to be taken care of.

And then, six months later, she fully retired, and I owned the business. So I got what I wanted. I didn't have to go dark. I didn't have to be a brand new firm, go through the registration. I was able to kind of take it over, and it just kind of worked smoothly. So there was not too much interruption for Sound View clients and then the few clients that I had who came with me. And then I was able to kind of own it and do and change it from there.

Michael: And so, again, just for context here, so what was the size of the firm as you came in, I guess, by assets or by revenue?

Misty: Yeah. So it was about 9 million under management. And she had not raised her fees in 13 years, so the revenue was about $90,000.

Michael: Okay. Okay. And so, as you came in to do this, did you have to pay it all at once as you did this purchase? Could you still finance it over a couple of years? Just how did you cash flow this coming in?

Misty: So she didn't necessarily want all the income coming in at once. So she...I gave her...

Michael: It's good tax planning. Yep.

Misty: Yeah. So I gave her $15,000 up front, and then I had made payments for $2,100 for 36 months. So I think, could she have sold the firm for more? Yeah, probably. But it was a fair deal that I think made her happy. I could afford it because I kind of saved. I was saving money because I thought I was going to go out on my own and maybe have three months where I couldn't even talk to anybody, depending on how quickly Massachusetts got back to me.

Michael: Right.

Misty: So, yeah. So that was the deal we came up with. And there was definitely a few things that we needed a little bit of help with. But I think both of us ended up being very happy.

Gaining Additional Television Exposure And Writing A Book [38:58]

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. So now you're on your own. You've got 10 to 15 million between what you bought and the few clients you had previously that came over.

Misty: Yeah.

Michael: And now it's your firm.

Misty: Yes.

Michael: And game on.

Misty: Yes. Yes. So, in 2022, I had decided to, now that I owned the firm and that Sound View was my firm, these were my clients, I knew that this felt right. This was where I wanted to stay. I was thinking about, "Okay, how do I get more exposure?" And then randomly, one of my friends that I used to work with in corporate had seen an Instagram post that said, like a casting call for somebody who was a financial advisor and then also somebody who was maybe a therapist or something along those lines to talk about money mindset. And so she forwarded it to me and was like, "Oh, I think they need you," because I was a financial planner, and I got a life coaching certification in 2020 because I wanted to figure out how to talk to my clients better and be better at asking questions and the real problems that they had, because they weren't asking me for this in their portfolio or any of the questions that I thought they wanted to feel different, and they all had different things going on. So, in my head, getting the life coaching certification made sense because life coaching had helped me kind of wrap my head around money.

Michael: So, what life coaching certification or program did you pursue?

Misty: I went through The Life Coach School.

Michael: Okay. So, what is The Life Coach School?

Misty: So, basically, the whole time that I was thinking about leaving corporate, I had some real issues with the fact that I never wanted to be broke again. When I was young, we had a lot of money from when I was born until I was about nine or ten years old. And then my father's business had a...there was a slight recession in the early '90s that impacted him very hard. And so we sold our house. We moved to an apartment. We had to get rid of our dog. We went from having a lot to like nothing, in my 10-year-old brain, overnight. And so I had some real money mindset issues. And so I was always trying to achieve the next thing, the next license, the next...just really the next whatever I could get to kind of make sure that I was not going to be at risk of losing everything I had again. And it wasn't very easy to help clients with their money when you had all of these things in your head about money.

And so I'd started listening to different podcasts about mindset, about growth, about changing…kind of thought work really. And it had helped me really kind of expand what I could do, what I thought was possible. And it really helped me clarify that my real goal was to be out there, helping people, to work with them, to have my own clients, to run my own business. I wanted freedom with my time. I didn't want... My father was self-employed. I saw the dark side of it, but I saw the really good side of it, too. He was at every single one of my games. I always could talk to him. He was never rushing me for something. And I really just kind of...there was a lot of good things that I'd seen, too. But it took me a while to work on that fear of "What if it fails?" to get to the point of, what does successful actually mean to me? And so...

Michael: What if it doesn't fail?

Misty: What if it doesn't? Yeah. What if it's really good? What if it's beyond your wildest dreams type of good? And so I'd kind of used that a lot for myself. And so I'd gotten that certification. I hadn't really used it. Well, I guess I used it in different ways. Every time I talked to clients, kind of I would weave it in. I would really talk to them about different things than, "What type of growth would you like to see this year in your portfolio?" trying to get different questions to them.

And so, anyway, in 2022, this request came up for a person like that. And so I'd reached out randomly to this casting agent and said, "Hey, I think I can help you." And so Million Stories Media was doing this TV show called "HeartBroke" that was talking with ten couples about their money problems. And so I ended up going through this process and getting hired by them to work on this project. And so that was the first part of 2022. And Susan was like, "Wait, what are you doing?" And I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go do a TV show. I'm going to get out there. People are going to know Sound View. I'm going to try to reach as many people as I can." And so she was kind of, "Okay. I don't know."

Michael: Youngins these days market it the way we did it or market it different. But, I guess, you be you.

Misty: Right. You go ahead and try it. This sounds really weird. I didn't think I was going to get trafficked, but she was like, "Where are you flying to? Let me know when you got there." I was like, "Okay." So I just was really open to any kind of opportunity that kind of came my way. And I love financial literacy. I love talking to people. And this was just a different...it was just I was open to different opportunities. And if it worked, it was kind of a "Yeah, let's try it." And so I worked on that show, which was really interesting. And then I went back six weeks later to see how the couples were doing, so kind of a little bit of a reality show.

Michael: Yeah, like makeover style, before/after.

Misty: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And then I got to know Million Stories Media and the Singleton Foundation, and they're just fantastic with their desire to get financial literacy and entertainment put together to make it more consumable, more appealing, more real. And so I realized the conversations I was having with these couples, it felt like this is exactly what I need to be doing. I loved working, just really kind of getting to the heart of the financial struggles that people have. And instead of my past being a problem that I should hide, it was something that I could actually lean into to relate to more people, because they understood that I got how horrible it is to run out of money in this country, how time consuming it is to be poor, and how much mental stress. And I had always...for the longest time, I thought that happiness was equal to success, and the more money you had, the more happy you were, because when I was little and we had money, my parents didn't fight. So I thought that was happiness.

It took me a while to, again, work on those things to realize, "Okay, getting another designation does not mean I'm a success. It also doesn't mean that I'm happy." It's just trying to figure it out, with, obviously, what limited information I had as a kid, it just seemed like money was it. And for a lot of these couples, it wasn't money that was the problem. It was communication. It was trust. It was all sorts of different things. So just kind of looking at the whole work that we do from this bigger lens of...and that's why I love the talks about financial, not just financial literacy, but kind of the feelings and the thoughts behind it. So I really felt like everything that I'm trying to do now was just kind of pushing me more into that lane of behavioral finance and why we do what we do and how we can kind of make some changes. And so a lot of the...I wrote a book in 2022, kind of about the thoughts and this mindset work that I'd done to try to help other people, to help my clients who were dealing with these things. And then I just kind of kept leaning into the press and the podcasts and things like that.

Michael: All right. Wait. So, where did a book come from when you earlier were like, "I'm not really writing inclined, and I'm working on 800-word blog posts?" So, where did the book come from?

Misty: I think that I love speaking, and I liked being on panels and things like that very much. And somebody had told me, "Oh, if you want to really get booked as a speaker, you have to have a book." And so, again, I said, "Okay," and I put that on my list of things to do for work.

Michael: Okay.

Misty: And one of the people that I had interviewed on the podcast was a writing coach, and she helped people self-publish books. Her name was Jyotsna. She had a nice business. And someone had asked if I would have her on my podcast. So I met with her, and I learned from her about the process. And so I'm the type of person where if I say I'm going to do something, I'd do it. And so she had a process where they could angel write for you, where they write the book kind of after interviewing you. And then she had a process where you'd have a book coach where they would say, "I need a chapter by Friday on this, and then we're going to talk about it." And then you had...there was another option, I think, that was a little bit less handholding. But that middle option of having somebody be, "Hey, Friday, we're going to work on this chapter about boundaries," or, "We're going to work on this chapter about time management," or goal setting. And I was able to, like I'd done with the blog, get my words done and get it to her on that weekly basis. And so, with that goal-setting approach, we were able to get a book done in about six months.

Michael: Okay. So how long it took, so six months of "I just make a dent every week," and eventually, it adds up.

Misty: Yep. And again, this is...I would say I'm still a work in progress as far as my thoughts about success, because, I think, okay, well, successful planners have a book, successful if they have this. And then you go get it and do it. And then I kind of just put it on the shelf. So I felt like it was helpful to have a book, but I didn't...I feel like if I was to do it again, I've seen what other people are doing, where they're doing a different launch, they're not just checking it off the list of things to do. And so it was good, though. It was, again, just more material, more stuff that kind of reinforced that this is what I like to do and this is what I talk about, and I can help people. Because it was hard to help everybody as a financial advisor, especially if they were starting out from nothing, where maybe a book would be more in their price range than a financial plan.

Michael: Right.

Misty: So I liked having a lot of different ways to kind of having something instead of being, "No, I'm sorry, I can't help you," be, "I don't think this is the right fit right now, but I can send you my book," just to kind of have more ways to communicate with people. And, yeah, the book was just one of those ways to do that. I love to read, but yeah, writing was kind of a struggle. But again, when someone else was kind of asking for my homework to be sent in, usually, I got it done.

Creating A Fee Model That Reflected Her Preferred Service Model [49:50]

Michael: So, now, help us understand when and where this starts turning into business, into revenue, into clients coming in.

Misty: Yeah. So I would say, 2022, when I took over the firm, was doing the television show, writing the book, that was a lot of head-down work. It wasn't a ton of…necessarily growth. The firm had grown, I had gotten some clients, but I would say probably all of the effort started to pay off in 2023 when the firm went...it basically doubled because I really got clear on...2022, I was trying to figure out, "Okay, I have to talk to these clients that I just took over about raising their fees." And that was kind of a mindset fear, "Oh, what if they all say no, and they all leave?" They didn't, but it was like, "How do I want to help people? What do I want the fees to be? Do I do flat fee planning? Do I do hourly? All of the things that I was trying to figure out as now this is my business, how do I run it? And what's the best use of my time?"

And so I was doing flat fee plans for $2,500, and I was trying to pretty much figure out how I could make anything work for anybody versus what actually works for me. And so that was kind of where I got a little bit more clarity from 2023 to 2024 of what I actually liked to do and how I liked to help people, how busy I actually wanted to be time-wise. And so kind of normalized the fee structure, realized I like ongoing financial planning work and I like the AUM work, but I don't really like the one-time or the hourly things. So just kind of figuring out exactly where I wanted the business to be.

Michael: What made some of those more or less appealing for you?

Misty: I think that sometimes I would do a one-time plan for somebody, and then I wouldn't know if anything got implemented or actually how they were doing. I think I get too invested in people and wanting to...that was the hard part about all the other roles that I was in. These clients weren't mine. When I was in court, I would... When I even just started doing financial planning, and then I'd have to be, "Okay, well, then go have somebody else implement it," or something like that, it wasn't enough, start to finish. So I kind of like a longer-term relationship with my clients.

And then some people would come back to me after we'd done a plan a year later, and everything was different. They had different jobs. They lived somewhere else. And I was like, "I want people who have these expensive questions," because most of the people I work with are probably in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They're still making these huge changes and decisions, but they had to decide, "Is this worth another $2,500, $3,000 to talk to her about it or not?" So I kind of liked having more of an ongoing "We're going to talk at least every three months," or something like that, every four months, just to even make sure that things...so things don't go too far before we're on each other's radar again.

So that just kind of was a personal thing for me. I know plenty of people who do flat fee plans and love that. And also, it's been helpful to kind of meet other financial advisors and figure out how they help people, so I can have the right people to refer to for people who aren't a great fit for me instead of trying to make everybody a great fit for me.

Michael: So then, what did you do with respect to fee changes? What changed?

Misty: Yeah. So some of the clients that I got when I acquired the business were at 50 basis points or something like that. She really didn't have a very set structure, so I kind of put in a very set "It's 1% under a million," and then I had it broke down after that, and that this was kind of what everybody is going to be on. For those people who had been with her for a while, I did explain that costs have increased. There hasn't been a fee assessment since the firm was founded in 2010. And everybody thought it was fair. So that was fine. And then the clients who'd come with me from my last firm, they just got a big discount because the fee over there was 3%.

Michael: Was 3%?

Misty: Correct.

Michael: As in an advisory fee, all-in?

Misty: Yeah, yeah. So that felt too high for me from my compliance background. It's fine. They can do whatever their clients want to do. But for me, it felt like this was just about right. And then I started to look at the size of the accounts that I took on because, for a while, I wanted to help a lot of people, everybody. And so it would be really smaller accounts. And then figuring out that, really, now, at this point, it's kind of $500,000 or more is what I like to have as a minimum, or we have this offer where you could do ongoing financial planning starting at $5,000 a year kind of felt right to me. That might change in the future, but at this point, it felt right.

Michael: But do I still have the planning fee once I get to $500,000 of assets?

Misty: No,

Michael: Or it's like planning. So I effectively have a $5,000 minimum fee nominally to cover all the financial planning work. And once your AUM would take you over a $5,000 fee, you're simply paying AUM.

Misty: Yeah. And that, again, could evolve, could change. I see people that are raising their fees and have different minimums and stuff, and it's what feels right right now might not feel right next year, but it's kind of open to...I don't really have to do what anybody else says or thinks is right if I feel good about it and I feel like the value is there. And I think what's more likely is, as the firm grows, trying to find things that add more value to those relationships and charging accordingly for that.

Michael: And breaking the news to prior clients, you went in the context of just the firm was founded in 2010, it's been a long time, we just have to update fees. So, was it mostly changing AUM fees or putting minimums?

Misty: Yeah, mostly for that group, it was just changing the AUM fees.

Michael: Okay.

Misty: And then the ones that were under a minimum, I still worked with them because that was part of the deal. But it wasn't too many people. And they were all okay. Most of them had been familiar with letters from there. Obviously, again, this was during COVID as well, when that letter went out. So everything was getting a little bit more expensive. And so it was just making sure they saw the value there and that I was proactively reaching out to them, that they were happy.

Michael: And it sounds like you did it by letter. It wasn't necessarily by meeting, phone call.

Misty: It was both. It was both.

Michael: Okay.

Misty: I sent a letter out, and then I also had reached out to people to make sure they got the letter and talked to them about it. And most of them understood that it made sense.

Michael: Well, or failing anything else, they get really upset and indignant and say, "Well, then, I'm leaving and find another advisor." And then they go talk to another advisor. It's the same 1%.

Misty: Yeah. Basically, it was pretty much, kind of from what I've seen, this is really what's fair or kind of what's average out there. And also, it was hard. When I was looking at people, even with the financial planning, I couldn't find anybody in my area that was doing flat fee plans for what I started out doing them for. So, basically, if people thought it was too expensive, I'm like, "I can't even help you find less because I don't know if it's out there anymore." And so that was something, too, that kind of just reinforced, "Nope, this actually probably has to happen to be a firm that stays in business."

Generating New Client Leads From Facebook Groups [57:55]

Michael: And so, now, as the growth started to come in, in 2023, just where was it actually coming from? Now, you'd done the TV thing and the book, and you had the blog that you put on social media, and you're a few years since the podcast now. So, where did the business actually start showing up from? Which of these channels was getting you results?

Misty: Yeah. So I would say that I probably got...a lot of my business was from Facebook groups. I'd been pretty active sharing weekly content and things like Massachusetts business, Boston Business Women groups, everywhere that I just showed up. And so I noticed, when people would do a search for "Hey, I need a financial planner. I need a new financial advisor," people were putting my name in there. Some people had been guests on the podcast that referred me a lot. Some people I'd never met were putting my name in there for people. And so I would get a lot of people who just...and then, when I'd see myself tagged, I would respond with my Calendly link. And then, a lot of times, it wasn't necessarily even the original poster who would set up time on my calendar, but I would get four other appointments from people who were looking and maybe thought, "Oh, I should do this, too."

So that was just...it's not something that I've heard a lot of people talk about, but I felt like that consistent showing up and providing value and information, it got people to the point where they felt like they'd known me when they hadn't. So their decision-making to work with me was a lot quicker than having to interview five other advisors. Most of them had already decided that they wanted to work with me, and they just wanted to find out more about what the process would be and what it would look like, which was a very warm way to get clients that I hadn't really been introduced to yet. So I think that that social proof and just having stuff out there, so if people were scrolling and, "Oh, I should think about that, too," and then they dug a little deeper to find out more about me and how I help people. There was a lot of stuff out there to find. So that was probably one of the biggest ones. The podcast was helpful. I did get a lot of clients who were actual guests on the podcast or referrals directly from them. And then being a part of different networking groups like the Women's Business League and things like that, I feel like my network has been really, really helpful to just help out somebody's client if they need it. And then, usually, all of that would come back around the time I spent with other people.

Michael: So, when you're doing this in areas like Facebook groups, can you share examples of what kinds of groups you are getting involved with? Just Facebook has so many bajillion groups in so many different ways, I'm just trying to visualize what kinds of groups or organizations were you finding that you were able to get in there, you were able to get some traction with.

Misty: Yeah, so the Boston Business Women group, it's over 40,000 people.

Michael: Okay.

Misty: So it's a large group. And I'm in the Boston area, there's a lot of...I like working with people who are self-employed. I like working with people who have maybe some more complicated financial planning, whether they're in corporate and have stock options or different things, or they have two different forms of income in their family, where one is maybe more stable than the other. Those are kind of the people that I like working with. So a lot of my content talks to those things, to things business owners can do, people with multiple different regular income sources. And so those were the articles that I was posting.

Also, I was interviewing a lot of people on the podcast from the Boston Business Women's group. So they would then share it to the Boston Business Women group. So people who were friends with them or followed them were directed to my podcast. And so that really started to help when it came to, if anybody was looking for a financial advisor, that was a very easy way to say, "Oh, yeah, go talk to Misty. I just spoke with her for half an hour. She helped me with this." And so, kind of, that was a really...and 40,000 people in a group is huge.

Michael: Forty thousand people in a group is larger than a lot of towns. And towns have non-business owners and children and dependents, a lot of other people you can't work with. You can only work a portion of a 40,000-person town. Forty thousand actual qualified prospects...

Misty: Actual qualified prospects.

Michael: ...it's a 100,000-person city to get to that many prospects. It's interesting to me in that context when so many of us have always built business by getting known, liked, and trusted in our "local community." And so your local community could be Facebook-organized and be larger than an actual town.

Misty: Which is wild because it seems like...and they did the best of...last year, they did the best of for 2024, and so they voted me the best financial advisor of 2024. All of those things then get kind of promoted and shared, all of us who are business owners or working in business or thinking about it. And so that just really helped kind of solidify a place in there, saying, "I'm a lot like you. I think about the same things you think about. I think about taxes. I think about all these things that we have to deal with as a business owner." And then I think, a lot of times, with my dad being a business owner, there wasn't a lot of people to help him. There wasn't a lot of conversations about, "Hey, you should put some of this money away. You should do something besides buy a cooler car or a boat when you had money." And so I'm like, "What kind of help would have been useful back then starting out, or how do you actually think about this stuff?" If, say, you're really good at what you want to do, but maybe that's taking pictures or designing, giving people fashion advice, it's not business, it's not the money side, but they all have those same issues and questions. So kind of trying to fill that space because I think it's super important, too. People are all just trying to figure it out on their own, which is really hard.

Michael: So I'm curious to understand a little bit more what you did, how you showed up in the Facebook group. Because I know just different online groups have different styles and sort of culture and rules around them. For some, they're very limited or anti-self-promotion. You can have conversations, but don't ever post your own stuff. That's verboten. From what I'm hearing, it sounds like that's actually a little bit different in the context of this group because you actually were posting some of your own article content or podcast content. So share a little bit more. What were you doing in the group? How did you show up? What did you do to start getting noticed, building traction, building your reputation in the group?

Misty: Yeah. So I would look at the group rules, and so for something like the Women's Business League or the Boston Business Women group, they might say, "On Tuesdays, you can share a tip, or you could share..." you can promote on specific days. And so I had a lot of short-form video that I was doing every month. I have, once a week, a short-form video. Once a week, I'm doing a podcast that's completely separate. And so I would just schedule those videos to show up on Tuesdays, or on those particular days, and then kind of just to fit in with the group rules. Also, if somebody was posting anything financial-related, a lot of times, I would get tagged. So I would make sure to go in and either comment. And I'm very careful about giving financial advice on social media. I don't think that's a good idea. But I would say, "This is an article that..." or "I wrote this blog that might help you," or "I recorded this podcast with this person who does estate planning. You might learn a little bit from that." So kind of sharing things that I've done or that I think would be valuable to them, not so much in a...

Michael: Okay. You're not going out there and self-promoting your own content and posts. It's literally someone asked a question, someone else tagged Misty, "Hey, you should get in here," and now you're just literally giving a helpful reply, "Hey, I actually did a podcast about the exact thing you're talking about. Here's a really useful resource to answer the question that you're asking."

Misty: Yep. And then just trying to help there, or also, if I see people looking for other things, making sure that I'm tagging those people that I'd interviewed or those people I'd met that have those other different skills that people are looking for. So trying to make sure that I'm engaged in there enough. I wouldn't say I spend a ton of time on social media, it might sound like I do, but it's all kind of planned out in the beginning and then kind of targeting different months. Tax season, I might talk a lot about taxes, and I might share those tips, or year-end planning, open enrollment, stuff like that that might be on people's minds at that right exact time and trying to make sure that if it's helpful to them, that I can kind of serve it up to them at the right time.

Michael: I'm fascinated by a lot of this that, notwithstanding the amount of content you started to create, the podcast, the blogs, the book, it sounds like it wasn't just literally the content going out there and a random stranger sees your blog posts and says, "I want to work with you," or here's a podcast episode and says, "I want to work with you." The guests you invite on the podcast become relationships and centers of influence. It's the community that you're getting involved in. The content becomes a way to show that you have expertise on the thing because you wrote an article about it, you did a podcast on it, which is even more credible than just typing out a response online, perhaps. So it was you distributing the content, using the content in relevant places in the communities that you're trying to show up with that drove the outcome more than just, literally, "I made the content, and when people hear it, they reach out and call me to do business."

Misty: Yeah, because I feel like that doesn't happen, unfortunately. I'm known from having a very unsuccessful...a blog that made no money for an entire year. And the podcast isn't really a moneymaker either. And I spoke at...I went to Joel and talked about it, and I talked to Altruist about, too, the podcast and how I use it, which is very different than how a lot of other advisors use it, where they're just on talking maybe themselves, and sharing information, and getting people to come to them for that reason because they're an expert, and having a lot of success that way. Mine is I like talking to people and kind of building a big network, and so that's how I used it and how that led to clients. So there's a lot of different ways for it to work. It really just depends on kind of how you want to grow.

But just by having it and recording it once doesn't really bring in clients. It's really kind of whenever anybody's looking for something that I have in that content bank, firing it back up, sending it their way, because this content exists, but it can also get really...it could just kind of sit there and never be looked at again. So realizing that people...and I think, a lot of times, when it comes to social media, advertising, or marketing, I think a lot of us feel like people are going to get sick of seeing us or we can't be too out there. We can't be in people's faces too much, so we should really limit it to a little bit. And I think that's really not true. I think that most people don't even see your stuff the first time.

Michael: I was going to say that social media algorithms in practice are so curated that the people who don't engage with your stuff basically won't see it much anyways, and the people who do engage with a lot will, which is good because they engage with it a lot.

Misty: They like it.

Michael: So they're probably not going to be bothered.

Misty: No. And you think about...

Michael: Social media algorithm kind of makes sure you don't overdo it.

Misty: Yes, you can't overdo it. And the people that love you and love hearing from you because they're clicking on your stuff or liking it so much, they're not going to be...they're going to enjoy it. I can't think of any of the business owners that I love and that I talk to or my clients, when I see their stuff, I'm like, "I love it. I think it's fantastic." I'm proud of them. So I just like it even more when I see more of it. So that's just one of the ways that we kind of like to stay small. And people are going to hate it. People are going to think that I look awful on video. You can do that because you like video. And I'm like, "No, I don't. Nobody likes listening to their own voice or seeing themselves. You just do it anyway." It's fine. It's fine. No one cares.

What Sound View Financial Advisors Looks Like Today [1:10:45]

Michael: So, where does the business stand today? Bring us up to present on what it looks like now.

Misty: Yeah. So, as of today, I've got 11 ongoing financial planning clients who are people that just pay the annual fee. They want to meet and talk about their financial situations, and they don't have assets to manage. And I feel like that's a good...

Michael: So those are the $5,000 minimum planning fee clients.

Misty: Yeah. And they're all so different. I couldn't say that I serve them all in the same way. One guy just loves to talk about the market because no one wants to talk about the markets with them. And then other people are planning early retirements and stuff like that. And it's cool, whatever. I can adapt to their needs and what makes them feel better about their finances at the time. And then we've got about 73 clients with assets that we manage, and that is...we're at $46 million, $167, and 8. Yeah. So, yeah, 46 million as of this morning.

Michael: Up from nine that you bought, plus a couple of million that came over from the prior firm in two years.

Misty: Yeah, 2022. Yeah. So it went from 9 million to 20 million. And then, in 2023 to 2024, 20 million to 41 million by the end of. And then, since the start of 2025, it went from 41 million to 46 million, so steady growth.

Michael: And it continues with networking in the Boston Business Women group in Facebook, networking Women's Business League, and then relationships from the podcast guests itself, who, it sounds like, are often people from the Boston Business Women group or the Women's Business League. The content guests are in the same community that you're otherwise building.

Misty: Yeah. And it's kind of...I know there's a lot of clients all over the place, but I understand New England, I understand what it costs to live here, so I kind of understand them really well. So it's a good fit. It works. And I think that, a lot of times, a lot of women, especially a lot of women starting a business or growing a business, they haven't exactly gotten a ton of financial education from anybody in their lives, and so having a person that they can relate to. And I would say, when I first started, in the early 2000s or after I graduated, I thought being a woman was the biggest drawback that I could have possibly had to deal with in financial services and then learning there's not much I can do about that. I should probably embrace that being authentic is way more important than trying to be an imitation version of somebody else who's been successful in this industry in the past that I've seen from the other advisors I'd worked with in corporate and stuff. I wasn't going to be them. I wasn't going to get clients on the golf course. I wasn't. It had to be different, and I had to find out who I really, really liked working with and then what they need and how I can show up for them in the best way.

Michael: And is it you on your own, or is there team support in place now?

Misty: So when I took over the firm, there was one woman who was working as a financial planner, very independently, very part-time, and her name's Gina. And she's still here. So she has some of her own planning clients, a couple that she works with. And so she operates kind of under the umbrella here. But maybe when her kids are a little older, she might start to ramp up her business and things like that, which is good. And then I hired somebody in August of 2024, who was a CFP candidate, and she needed to pass the CFP and get some experience hours. And so she'd been...she was at a firm, and it wasn't a great fit. I ended up meeting with her and bringing her on board to kind of help with a little bit of paraplanning and some client, kind of making sure I was reaching out to people enough, kind of that more administrative business end of it.

And so she joined the firm, and we started working on segmenting the client, getting some workflows in place, and things like that, which has been really helpful. And she ended up passing the CFP in March. So now, we're at a new spot where I'm trying to figure out how much of her work she wants to continue to do for the firm as administrative and backup, or does she want to start being out there, getting clients? And so it could change. Again, like I'd mentioned at the firm that I was with before, you hire a lot of people who are like you, and then you wonder, "Will they want to run their own thing?" But I'm kind of open to whatever I can do to help her grow, and hopefully, she stays here and grows her business here, but also thinking about, "What does she want her future to look like as a CFP?" and just trying to...I think there's more of us needed. I think we need more CFPs. We need more women out there. We need more people doing this work. I certainly can't help everybody myself. So it's great to kind of hopefully start to build a path for more people. But it's pretty small. Pretty small.

Michael: Because it sounds like for where you pulled the trigger, it must have been 60, 70 clients, was getting to the breaking point of "I just need another person."

Misty: Yeah. I really felt like I need to...

Michael: You need more hands on deck.

Misty: There was stuff that I wanted to do at that point that I wasn't doing. I was doing the stuff that I had to do. And there was a couple of times where I felt like I haven't talked to this person in a while and just kind of making sure that things didn't kind of slip through the cracks. And so I'd actually spoke at a conference for the FPA about succession planning, and so there was a panel of people who bought businesses and a panel of people who sold businesses. And one of the women on the panel that sold a business was a peer of Susan's. So she came up to me afterwards and was like, "You need to meet this woman. She's so great. She's getting her CFP. She's worked in different client experience type of roles." And so I just listened to her and met her. I really hadn't planned on hiring. I hadn't really put anything out there, but I decided that it would probably be a good idea to talk to this person and see what she did at her other firm and see how she could help and what she was looking for. So it kind of just fell on my lap, and I went with it. And then, of course, I was like, "Oh, my God, can I afford to hire somebody?" All of these things. And I kind of talked to my bookkeeper, my accountant, and figured out a way to do it. Because, again, I try to just be open-minded with the things that I could be doing with my time if I had more of it.

Michael: I was just saying, where was gross revenue by the time you're deciding to pull this trigger?

Misty: Yeah. So I would say we were probably...maybe it was $200,000, $250?. It felt good. I felt like I could afford to bring somebody else on. If I wanted to grow, I think I knew that I had to. I needed some help, or else I'd have some people start to leave because I wasn't working with them. So I think...

Michael: I guess, when you're growing that quickly as well, you're forward-looking revenue will look a lot better than your past 12 months revenue as well, as you're thinking, "Going forward, can I afford this?"

Misty: Right. Because when I was making $100,000, I didn't think I could give somebody $40,000, $50,000. I was like, "No, I need all of it." But it was starting to the point where I was seeing, okay, more business is coming in. I'm getting actual, more potential, more leads coming on the calendar. Maybe she could start taking some clients if she passes the CFP, and maybe we can help more people. And I was really just...it was really hard for me to not help somebody out who was looking to pursue this industry. It kind of just felt too off-brand for me to say no. I had to do it.

What Surprised Misty The Most Building Her Advisory Business [1:18:44]

Michael: So, what surprised you the most about building your own advisory business now that you're several years into it?

Misty: Yeah. So I think what surprised me the most is how much I enjoy it. I feel like what I've seen and what I'd read, it sounded like you're going to eat ramen for three years. It's going to be painful. It's going to be so hard. And that wasn't my experience. I felt like success, it wasn't like corporate where you get paid this, and then you get this bump, and then you move into the salary band. And it's very linear. I felt like growth and money, depending on how you think and feel about money, you can make these quantum leaps in months. It doesn't necessarily have to take so long for it to be successful. But I feel like there is a lot of that out there where I assumed, "Okay, I'm going to be broke for a little while. This is how we're going to do it." And it just wasn't that way. But I think the more I started to enjoy where I was at right now versus thinking about, "Once I get to 50 million [assets under management], I could be happy. Once I get to 75 million, I could be happy."

I could be happy at 9 million. I could be happy at 20 million. You'd be happy at 46. It didn't matter. That was a choice to feel successful. That was available to me any time I wanted it. And I think that the less I felt like I had to be graspy and help anybody and try to desperately get clients to survive, the better clients I got, because nobody's really attracted to that kind of energy when it comes to money. And so really doing some more, I think the work that I'd done on my own mindset had really helped me with this experience as I started, took over the firm with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of questions to where it's at now, which just felt pretty, pretty...I don't want to say easy, but kind of, kind of easy.

The Low Point On Misty’s Journey [1:20:45]

Michael: So, what was the low point on this journey for you?

Misty: The low point, I would say, it was probably back in the...like I said before, I think I probably wanted to leave. I wanted to actually be a financial advisor, and I got my CFP in 2011. And I really, really wanted to help clients and work with people. And I remember so many things I'd heard when I had worked in different jobs. You're not going to make any money just doing financial planning. You're going to have to work with millionaires. You're going to have to do this. Nobody's going to... I remember somebody telling me that nobody's going to want to work with somebody who grew up broke. And I believed that. I believed all of these things that people had told me for quite a long time. People aren't going to want to necessarily give a lot of money to a woman. People are not necessarily going to...you don't have a natural market. You don't have family members to go pitch to. You don't have this. And so I believed them instead of thinking that they could possibly be wrong about that.

And so, after starting the...I think I started the CFP training in 2006 and then finally finished the courses in 2011 and passed the exam because I took my time with it.

Michael: Because you were already convinced it wasn't going to be viable...

Misty: I was convinced it wasn't going to work.

Michael: ...because that's what everyone was saying.

Misty: Exactly. I knew I was good at taking tests. I knew I was good at studying. I had started...I had every FINRA designation I could get, thinking, "Well, if I get this one, then people will think I'm successful," or, "If I get this, then people will think that I'm worthy of working with." And now I'll talk to people who say the same things to me. "Well, I can't do this until I have a CFP because no one's going to want to work with me if I'm not a CFP." And half the time, I'm like, "People are going to want to work with you, or they're not. Do you think that they're going to want to work with you? Do you think you deserve to get clients? Because I didn't at the time." That was the real problem. It wasn't that no one wanted to work with me. It was that I didn't think I was good enough. So I think that the low point was probably sitting on all of those thoughts for years and believing that they were true and waiting until I was 40 years old to actually make a move and do what I wanted to do. Because, yeah, I was just so afraid of if it didn't work out.

Misty’s Advice For Her Younger Self And For Newer Advisors [1:23:10]

Michael: So then, what do you know now you wish you could go back and tell you from 15 years ago? How would you reframe it back for yourself now?

Misty: I think I would kind of reframe things to make sure that...and this is if you're a younger advisor out there listening and you're thinking, "Well, no one's going to want to work with me until I'm 40." It's not true. I think that you have to really...I think you have to be really clear on who you are, what you want to do, how you can help people. And if you know that you could help somebody, that's really what most people care about. It might not be where you went to college or your certifications or your designations. But if you could be really clear about how you help people, and it can be genuine and authentic, then I think that that's something that is probably one of the most useful things in this business. So I know we talk a lot in the industry about finding your niche, but really find out who lights you up, who do you love helping, and what do you know that you're good at, and then kind of figuring out, how do I let everybody I can know about this? Because we might assume everybody already knows what we do, but they don't. They probably don't. Or they might not think about it at the right time. So really, how can you share enough and make people know who you are and how you help them?

Michael: So, what advice would you give other younger, newer advisors looking to come into the profession today and navigate their path?

Misty: Yeah. So I was a bit of a designation chaser. I thought the more numbers and letters I had next to my name, the more people would want to work with me. And I love the education piece, I will say that. I think that if you're not constantly trying to learn and innovate and change, that it's going to be a tough industry for you. But you don't necessarily have to be perfect before you could present yourself to the rest of the world and start helping people, because I think people care a lot less about having the perfect advisor versus having somebody that they really like working with or that they can relate to. So figure out what that is for you versus, once I get here, then I'll be able to relax or be happy or get clients. It's really just more getting out there and getting started, even if it's not perfect work.

Michael: So, what comes next for you at this point?

Misty: So, yeah. Well, one, we're kind of working about how to develop the team and kind of grow to decide if we're going to have a lot of CFPs working here, if it's still going to be small. And also, I had an interesting opportunity with somebody that I had on the podcast who founded a FinTech firm called Brightfin, which is a financial...it's basically a budgeting app. And so she's looking to have me help them kind of with some speaking and some financial literacy events to kind of promote financial budgeting and different things people can do to start to get more awareness around their money. And so I've started to help them out. Because I think there's a lot of different things going on in the industry, which are really cool, and FinTech is one of them. And I do love the speaking, the being able to talk to other people in larger groups and platforms about how they can start to kind of get control of their money, because I think that awareness is really where everything starts. And I talk to people who have a lot of money that have no idea where it's going or what's happening to it or why they don't have more of it. And so really things that can...just as long as it feels like I'm helping more people handle all of these things, it seems like that one fits, which is kind of cool. That's kind of a new thing that I'm learning. I'm not much of the...I don't know much about the startup space or getting investors and things like that. So that's kind of a new thing that I'm learning, which has been really cool.

What Success Means To Misty [1:27:09]

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. So, as we come to the end, this is a podcast about success, and one of the themes that comes up is just that word success means very different things to different people. And so you're on this wonderfully successful growth path with the firm and 30 million in 2 years, astoundingly successful growth. And so, to me, the business is in a wonderful place and continuing to grow. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

Misty: Yeah. It's definitely changed. I used to see success as money, as basically profit, accomplishment, achievement, popularity. That was, in my head, what success was. And I think, now that I've kind of done some more work on my thoughts, I think, success, it has a lot to do with that. And I love achieving goals, and I love being able to be on a show like this. This is cool. But also, success is kind of, for me, having a business that I enjoy going to, having clients that I like to pick up the phone and talk to, being able to coach my kids, and being able to eat dinner with them and laughing with them and seeing my friends. And so it's more of, success, for me, might not necessarily be having $100 million AUM or the biggest firm in town anymore, which I thought it was. And so those, kind of separating out what happiness is versus success, and I do like setting goals for the firm, I do like setting goals for myself, but also realizing that enjoying that process and enjoying where I'm at today can be really, really cool as well. So I think success looks a little bit different than being the biggest, most well-known, but also just feeling like I'm doing good work and providing a service and can kind of sleep well at night with how I live my life.

Michael: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Misty, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Misty: Thank you for having me.