Leveraging Video The Right Way To Add $1M Of New Revenue In Less Than 12 Months: #FASuccess Ep 508 With Nate Hoskin

Podcast Player:

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Nate Hoskin: LinkedIn
• Sage Live
• SageContent
• SageContent Advisor Video Production Course
• Kitces Report: How Financial Planners Actually Market Their Services
• Danko Education

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Nate Hoskin, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Nate: Michael, thank you so much for having me.

Michael: I'm really excited to get to talk today and, dare I say, really get to nerd out on marketing with video, because this has become a really interesting domain to me over the past couple of years. We do this biannual Kitces research study on advisor marketing, and what we've seen in our results over the years is that, when we look at all the different types of, I'll probably call it, content marketing out there, I can write through a blog, I can do audio with a podcast, I can do video through various channels, that video, first of all, consistently has much higher marketing costs by a good margin over the rest because there's just a lot that goes into production. It does not have a materially higher success rate as we measure by how many advisors do the thing and get at least one client out of their marketing results.

But for the advisors that do it well, some of the most explosive upside growth results we see are very specifically from firms that do video marketing well through a couple of channels. And so there's this very bifurcated outcome that we see in our research results that video seems to be the channel with the highest volume of very expensive failures and the one with the biggest successes. And so, I know, Nate, you have been doing this as one of the successful ones over the years. So I'm really excited to get to talk today about what you have learned. What are so many other advisors doing that lead to the very expensive failures, and what is it that you are doing differently that your version seems to work so well when a lot of others are having, dare I say, fairly spectacular failures in the opposite direction? What is driving such different outcomes for advisors that are trying to do video things? I'll even use that broadly.

Nate: Oh, man. Answering that question is going to be this full hour and a half because there are so many facets to it. But I think that I would be surprised if video didn't have a significantly lower success rate than anything else. The fact that it's even remotely close to blogging or even cold emailing, that kind of thing, would really, really surprise me because it's hard. Video marketing, in a way…blogging and that sort of thing is pretty approachable for most people. They can kind of get into it. Video is its own learning curve. It's its own entire skill set. And so I think, at a very high level, that is what separates the extremely successful people from the people who have these kind of spectacular failures, is this dedication to learning a skill rather than just doing a marketing thing. It's a whole different endeavor.

Michael: It's an interesting way to frame it that you're learning a skill rather than just doing a marketing thing. I have to admit that, actually, just as you say it that way, that resonates to me more broadly even than just video when it comes to marketing, because what we see in our research is that most advisors that have strong success with marketing outside of the "We get lots of referrals," I'll just call it an external marketing thing, whether you're doing a video or podcast or seminar marketing, or you've got a cool approach with centers of influence, or whatever it is, just some externally oriented marketing thing, that almost all the firms that have really strong marketing engines have just one or two particular anchor tactics that they really built a skill at or had some natural gifted skill at. They just have one or two things they got really good at and scaled the heck out of it.

We still see some of the biggest marketing results of the super high-growth advisors. They're still running radio shows because radio still has good reach. And if you learn how to do the radio thing and convert them to leads and get the distribution across the stations and the things that people do well in radio, it's still got volume, and it still works. But only a few people are really good at the format. So the great ones get great results, and everybody else spends 10, 20, 30 grand and gets zero and says, "This is dumb," and moves on.

The Difference Between "Performative Marketing" And "Performance Marketing" [07:32]

Nate: Right, exactly. And I think there is definitely a problem in the advisory industry that people are very used to performative marketing, not performance marketing.

Michael: Whoa, that's loaded. Say that again.

Nate: Advisors are very used to performative marketing, not performance marketing.

Michael: So, now, define those or differentiate those for us.

Nate: Yeah. So performative, in my head, is just doing marketing things because you were told by a Kitces blog or something like that. Marketing is generally a good thing that you should probably be doing for your business, and so you go and find four or five ways to just do marketing. And so you write some blogs. You make some LinkedIn posts. You set a commitment for yourself of, "I'm going to do five LinkedIn posts a week," or, "I'm going to do two LinkedIn posts a week." And so performative marketing just measures activity. It's just, "What am I doing? Am I putting in some sort of rep? Am I just doing the thing, right, because I was told I was supposed to do marketing?"

And performance marketing is really saying, "I'm going to learn this skill. I'm going to get really, really good at this specific marketing tactic, and I'm going to learn all the minutia of it so that I can actually measure the impact, the performance, the outcomes of this strategy." Because you might find…I think professional athletes are probably the easiest example to make of this. If you said, "I want to be a professional athlete," would you just go and swing the golf club a million times? It's like, "Well..."

Michael: I do have to get the reps in, but I also probably need a coach and some feedback and look at video to refine my swing and actually look at how close I got to the pin to judge whether that was a good swing.

Nate: Exactly. I'm going to hire coaches. I'm going to train the things that aren't just the reps. I'm not just going to train more so the right side of my body. I'm going to balance this. I'm going to spend time in the gym. I'm going to spend time watching game film. I'm not just going to be out there hammering at the activity of doing the thing that is part of the sport. I'm going to get into those other pieces. And I think that for video more than any other strategy, that minutia, the things that happen outside of being on camera, those are the ones that really drive the success of the campaign. And so for someone who sits down and just "does video," it's no surprise to me that you will have spectacular failures.

Michael: So, as you're framing this, there's a light bulb moment going off above my head. Because part of what you said at the beginning, what is performative marketing, as you're framing it, you're measuring the activity. Am I doing the rep? Am I doing the thing? Because, at least, I started in the industry and grew up in the world where you start out cold calling. And that was the point. That was how we were trained. When you're in that cold-calling and cold-knocking phase, the mantra is something to the effect of you cannot control the results. Really, you cannot control what any particular prospect is going to say on the other end of that phone call or at that door when you knock and they open. All you can control is your activity.

And some version now of Nick Murray's Game of Numbers comes out, and you say, "If you do the activity enough times repeatedly, eventually, some painfully small but non-zero percentage of hits are going to happen." And so I'm just flashing back. As you said, performative marketing measures activity. I'm like, "Yeah, Nate, that's literally how I was trained in this business." The only thing you can control is your activity. So if you keep your focus and keep your activity and put the reps in and do the numbers, some percentage of them are going to work out for you. So you just have to power through and keep doing the activity.

And what's striking me for how you're saying this is, okay, that technically does work with a subset of cold-oriented skills, like cold calling and cold knocking and such. The Game of Numbers percentage thing kicks in, but that entire mindset is not a good mindset to be bringing to other marketing channels.

Nate: Well, I think that the new mode, the new asset that we have available to us in marketing compared against cold calling and cold knocking is so much more data. And I think that data is used both to our benefit and against us. Because if we go...Michael, if you and I split a neighborhood and we went and knocked on every single door, you would probably have to do 40 or 50 reps before you even got 1 or 2 people to practice your pitch on.

Michael: Oh, yeah. Yes, I would be...I don't know the exact averages on cold knocking, say, but yeah, I'm probably, at best, going to get a small single-digit percentage who will just even open the door far enough for me to begin my pitch conversation. So yeah, I need 40 or 50 knocks to even have a shot to practice my script.

Nate: Right. So there's activity to measure actual performance of getting leads or getting new business, whatever it happens to be. But there's also this time-to-data thing going on where there's a lot of time before you collect enough data to even know if you're doing a good job that mandates a high level of activity. With video marketing and with really lots of marketing nowadays, you are bathed in data every single rep. You have so much to analyze. You have so much to understand and improve on. And so it's used to your benefit because you can get better faster, right? You have more data points. But it's also used against you, where you could picture the doors being these animate, intelligent objects. And the doors are actually going to vet you based on every other door that you have knocked on. And the door itself is going to decide whether or not you even have the opportunity to knock on that door.

With video, those doors are the algorithms. They're the platforms. It's YouTube. It's Instagram. It's Facebook. And so if you are not good at door knocking, it's not that you won't get more people to close if you just do enough activity. It's actually that none of your activity will be rewarded. You will be screened out before you even have the opportunity to give your pitch. And so when you fundamentally change the whole framework that way, right, you add a whole 'nother variable, it's no longer about, "How many doors can I knock on?"

Michael: It's an interesting framing to me that there's a...I guess it'd be because marketing sort of has several stages. The door knocking analogy is interesting here. If I can't do the first part of the video marketing well, my videos may literally not get in front of enough people to ever get the practice of whether the videos convert in the same way that if I can't actually get from door to door very quickly in door knocking, I may not get enough reps in in a week to actually get any results out of it. Step one, you have to actually get in front of a lot of doors. And in the video world, do you have to actually get your video out in front of enough people to have a shot at converting some of them? And that's not an automatic thing. There's actually stuff to do to get it out there in front of people.

Nate: Right, which is why it's much harder to calculate kind of a conversion rate on video until you have a higher number of engagement, right, until you actually are able to break through that. Because it really is a law of small numbers where you might have a 0.01% or a 0.001% conversion rate on your viewers. But that number will remain zero until you have enough engagement.

Michael: Now, I feel like there's something worth reflecting even in what you're highlighting here, because you're talking about this in the context of, I think, getting engagement on platforms like YouTube. And I'm cognizant…for some advisors that talk about video marketing, that's not their video channel. Their video channel is, "I'm doing videos on my website. I'm creating videos that hopefully engage prospects when they come to see me on my website," or, "I'm putting it in my client newsletter," or, "I'm doing something for that pool of folks." Is that still under the same video marketing umbrella in your world, or should we think about that more differently in some different category?

Nate: I would definitely put that in the same bucket, but I think that's maybe me talking from my bias where I just consider those to be table stakes nowadays. I think that is such an easy way to atomize your content. And if you're going to film a video, which, as I mentioned, is a hard thing to do, to strategize and record and have edited, it's a hard, costly thing. Then, please, use it everywhere. Put it on social media. Put it in your newsletters. Put it on your website. Use that asset as much as humanly possible. And so I have always thought of putting videos on the website or putting videos in newsletters as kind of a downstream effect of a larger campaign because I do think that it's valuable, but I don't know if the lever, what you were describing about video, that it can be this complete runaway exponential success with a thousand home runs from a single video. That piece doesn't happen in a newsletter or on a website.

Michael: Yeah. I get the crossover of, if you're making video, other places put it here, repurpose some version of it onto your website. But I still see a good number of firms, their video marketing strategy is, "We went and hired a firm, and they're going to come in, and they're going to do various videos of us of what we do and why we serve clients and why we got into this business. And they're going to put it up on our website." That's our video marketing, because we have videos in our website for marketing, which just feels, to me... I see advisors doing that. I see providers out there who deliver that service. And it feels like a different kind of thing than what you're talking about. It's taking me back to the cold calling and door knocking aspect of, I don't know, "If I'm building video and putting it on YouTube, I'm taking a swing at a billion people on YouTube," or however many it is. If I'm putting it on my website, I'm taking a swing at the 300 people a month who come to my website or whatever the number is for a typical small advisory firm.

And now we're back in the world of, "Okay, it's like I'm doing cold knocking in a neighborhood where everyone has a 20-acre farm." So I can technically cold knock, but I'm not going to get very many reps in because I got to walk across 20 acres to get to the next house every single time, because there's just no volume for most of us doing it on our website relative to doing it on the other kinds of platforms that you're talking about.

Nate: Yes. And I think there is something there where one version of that is just much, much higher potential ROI, right? As you said, you get that with a billion people instead of 300. But I would maybe put the video production for the sake of the website project specifically, right, not sending it out in client newsletters or prospect newsletters. I think that all counts as video marketing. But for the website videos, if we're going to beat this door knocking analogy to death, that is the sales asset in your briefcase. That's not so much the marketing. That's an asset that helps you when you get in the door with someone, right? That's something for them to see once you're already at their dining room table. And now that you guys are having a conversation, or they are vetting you, or they're exploring your firm, you now have a very beautiful, very polished asset to provide them with. But I don't know if I would call that part of a major marketing strategy.

Michael: I don't want to beat the analogy to death. That's actually a helpful framing to me, that the video on my website is more akin to the really good brochure I've got in my briefcase while I'm cold knocking. If I get them to open the door and I strike up a conversation, I manage to get to be sitting across from them at their kitchen table and talking about what I do. What a great thing to pull out and show and support the process. But I'm probably not getting the door open. I'm not getting the activity to their front door, and I'm not getting them to open their door, and I'm not getting to sit across from the kitchen table because of the brochure inside my briefcase. That comes later in the process.

Nate: Exactly. Yeah. Very well said. I would say that that is definitely a mistake that advisors will make, is thinking that the website is a marketing asset. And maybe this is going to be a very hot take, but I would argue that the website itself, the homepage of the website, is not as much of a marketing asset. Marketing is designed to get people to the website. There is a layer above that that is designed to earn the attention and earn the eyeballs. And then the website is very much that brochure. And so if someone's finding your website on Google, the marketing you're doing is in the SEO optimization, not in the homepage of the website or the assets on there, right? The marketing platform is Google, not your website. Your website will always be the second step. The first step will be Google. The first step will be video. The first step will be something along those lines that will then land them on your website.

Nate's Path To Founding An Advisory Firm In His Early 20s [22:45]

Michael: So, now, help us understand this in the context of your advisory firm. You did a version of this of launching your own firm and going out to get clients through video to grow the business. So take us back now to the launch of your advisory firm and just literally, how did you do this to make clients appear in your advisory business as you launched and grew?

Nate: Yeah. It was not all sunshine and rainbows. Video was very much a desperation tactic for me.

Michael: So set the context here. When did you launch your firm? What was going on? What led you to launch the firm? Put us back in that moment, in that time period.

Nate: Yeah. So I started my career at a small RIA, about $130 million, and I was brought on as a business developer. And so the entire goal was for me to be calling, to be walking around, taking people out to coffee, doing seminars, joining one of the lead advisors on the seminars that they were doing. And it was a moment in the firm's trajectory where they wanted to take it to a half billion dollar RIA or a billion dollar RIA. I think the owner was very starry-eyed on where the firm could go because they had experienced a lot of growth over the last year and a half. And so I was brought on as a very young guy. I was 18 when I started. And that was the goal, was just go and get clients from a very untrained background. So I was very much trial by fire and learning. And so I learned all of the sales methods.

Michael: I'm just fascinated even by the context. I hate to say it. Our industry has some fairly strong age bias tendencies, if only, because a lot of us are building the business with folks that are pre-retirees and retirees. And I remember this starting my career as well and straight out of college, there is a certain awkwardness of trying to meet prospects who are transitioning to retirement while they're trying to set you up on a date with their grandchild kind of effects because they...not to speak from actual experience moments.

Nate: Oh, if only.

Michael: Just because there's such an age gap, hard to relate to them. They're looking at you as the young pup, as it were. I'm even fascinated that the firm's decision to grow was, "We need someone to go out and do business development and to be taking people out to coffee and doing seminars," and they hired 18-year-old Nate.

Nate: Yep, an untrained 18-year-old Nate.

Michael: It's just an interesting thing unto itself. Okay.

Nate: Well, and I think I was part of a performative growth strategy, because I sent out a bunch of emails in college, and I said, "Hey, I'll come in. I'll work for you for free. I just want to learn." So I guess I was probably 19 when I really started. But I sent out the email, and I said...

Michael: You initiated this contact. You were sending out cold emails to firms to say, "I'll work with you and help you with your marketing for free. I just want an opportunity to learn."

Nate: Exactly. I just want to learn.

Michael: I can see why they took you up on that. Okay. Yeah.

Nate: So I think they were very much like, "Oh, well, we're trying to grow. Here are some things that we need you to do." And so I just hopped in and got after it. And luckily, the firm did exceptionally well over the course of the next couple of years. But then COVID hit. And that year, 2020, was also the year that the proprietor of the firm turned 65, and his whole mindset changed, where he was like, "You know what, maybe I don't need this to be big. Maybe I'm kind of out of time and out of energy. Maybe I'm just going to ride this as it stands and use this as kind of my semi-retirement." And so I went from being the most over-employed college kid I knew to being laid off, April of 2020, and then graduating college, May of 2020. And my graduation was on my birthday, May 7th. And I was on a Zoom call with my cap and gown.

Michael: Wow.

Nate: I had no idea what I was going to do.

Michael: So this outreach and this marketing stuff you were doing, this was part-time work in college running in parallel to your studies.

Nate: It was full-time work. It started at 6 a.m. and wrapped up about 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. And I set up all my classes, so 5 days a week, I had class from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Michael: Wow.

Nate: Yep. So I got all my hours for my CFP. I was a practicing advisor by the end of it. I had my own book of clients. It was very much the start, and it launched my career.

Michael: And I'm presuming the idea was he's in growth mode. You're coming on and growing the firm and taking on clients. You were expecting this was your job after graduation that you were going to be going on, until moments before graduation and COVID hits. And suddenly, he doesn't want to grow anymore, and you're laid off. And you're hanging out on your birthday in your cap and gown with no job.

Nate: We had had conversations about a long-term partnership and business continuity type of conversation.

Michael: Okay, sure.

Nate: I was going to be a lifer.

Michael: Yeah. And then he changed his mind.

Nate: And then he changed his mind, which I don't blame him. If I was looking at retirement, I would feel very much the same, where I would be, "No, this makes sense." I would like to change the trajectory of my life. And growth is a very stressful thing. If I could run an RIA that didn't have to grow, the job would be significantly easier.

Michael: Yeah. Growth is a stressful thing. I do not disagree.

Nate: It is. And so I was in the middle of COVID, and I figured, "Well, if I start an RIA and grow it as much as I can, it will make me more employable when firms open their doors." And so it was not intended to be a long-term thing at all. The complete antithesis of what my long-term trajectory plan had been, with the firm, this was just going to be a fun project to work on while no one was hiring advisors.

Michael: All right. So I'm fascinated with this on a few levels, that you were comfortable to open your own firm as a path to demonstrate your employability to future firms later. And it's just that your goal was still to be employable somewhere else, even as you're hanging your own shingle to run your own firm.

Nate: Yes.

Michael: Just tell me more about that dichotomy. Maybe it wasn't a dichotomy to you. It feels like one to me, like most folks…either I'm looking for a job or I'm looking to run my own firm, not I'm looking to run my own firm as a pathway to a job.

Nate: Yeah. Well, I think it came about in a couple of different ways. I think it was a direct reaction to about five interviews that I did with different insurance firms, all of which were pitching this whole idea of running your own "practice," right, but still meeting the quotas of the firm and getting the lives under your belt of selling life insurance and that sort of thing. And so that was definitely one element of it, was, "Well, if everyone who's hiring right now is going to tell me to run my own business, why don't I just run my own business?"

Michael: Okay. Okay.

Nate: And the other piece was that California at the time was paying very, very good unemployment benefits with the increase for COVID. And so I also had a layer of guilt in there, I think, where I very much wanted to do something that would give back and build real tangible value while I was in this mode of kind of just taking an income. And thank goodness it was around. It kept me fed for months. That very much set me up in a way that I would not have otherwise had. And so you can kind of envision this weirdly opportunistic moment where I didn't need to have a job, and all of the jobs I was applying for was telling me to run my own "practice."

And so I could see this runway ahead of me where I didn't need an income, but I wanted to skip kind of the level of being a little bit more entry-level or maybe service advisor at my next firm. I wanted to come in as someone who could bring a book of business and command a very high compensation. The only way to go and get that book of business would be with my own firm. And so that was kind of where I was sitting, was, "This seems like a project I can work on that would be interesting. Let's see if we can do this while people start to digest the idea of a global pandemic and maybe think about hiring people later."

Michael: Okay. Okay. I can connect these dots now. So now tell us more about what the vision of the firm was. What were you going to do, who were you going to serve, and where were the clients going to come from? Because we're in COVID.

Nate: The vision of the firm was to completely copy-paste what the firm I had been working for was doing because it was all I knew. It was the only reference point I had. At that point, I had never read a Kitces article. I didn't really know what the options were. And so copied their fee structure. But the clients that I could acquire in those early days, from my personal network and that kind of thing, they were all significantly younger. They were maybe somewhere in that 30 to 40 range. And then, of course, my mom and my grandma were the first clients that came in, that sort of thing. But I realized very quickly that the people I was resonating with with my firm was a very, very different demographic from the people that I was reaching out to, kind of with the umbrella of another company behind me. And those conversations with retirees and with pre-retirees were not going well for all sorts of reasons that I'm sure you can surmise. I was young and had my own company with no track record and no proof.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. So now the age dynamics start to kick in a little more.

Nate: Absolutely. Yeah. Whatever I was given with the other firm, right, whatever trust was bestowed by having other people at the company, I no longer had.

Michael: Right. And so I'm going to presume, in copying the old firm's model and fee structure, this was some version of, "We serve retirees, manage their portfolios on an assets under management basis, and provide holistic planning as part of the overall service." It was some version of that traditional model.

Nate: Yep, you nailed it. You lead with the investment management, lead with the portfolio, lead with those types of things.

Michael: Okay. So then, what happens next as we're going down this path?

Nate: Well, it doesn't work. It fails in spectacular fashion. Because I couldn't get the clients with asset levels to justify an AUM fee, and the clients that I could get were paying me de minimis amounts on very small amounts of assets. And frankly, they were not benefiting from any sort of professional portfolio management. The ROI on a...the scale of capital on a much smaller account just means that the work you do as a portfolio manager has a far lower impact, particularly when people are in accumulation. You're not doing any sort of income planning. There aren't ways to do massive tax optimization within the portfolio. And so the thing that I was offering was not very valuable to the people who were taking me up on the offer. And that's where the iteration really started.

And so that was kind of the frame of mind that I was in in the end of 2020, was I'm not sure if the way that I'm doing this is the correct way for the people that I'm serving. And I also realized in that same period that these were actually people that I wanted to serve. I wasn't looking at them as the wrong clients for my firm. I was looking at the firm being the wrong structure for them. I wanted to keep them. I wanted to serve them. And it was very clear to me that I was not serving them very well, and I was not doing a very good job of delivering as much value as possible.

Converting Video Viewers Into Active Leads [36:24]

Nate: And so January of 2021 to April of 2021 was a very, very formative time, because January of 2021, I launched my social media accounts, which I'll talk about in a moment. But then throughout that period, I was studying for the CFP exam because I had already clocked the hours. I'd done the apprentice track. The last thing I needed to do was the exam. And I took that in April. And so I was learning so much more about the financial planning side of the business from a practitioner's standpoint, right, from a student's standpoint. And that was a lot of what I shared in some of those first videos that I ever produced, were just the cool things that I was learning from Brett Danko on my CFP study.

Michael: Go, Brett. Shout out to Brett.

Nate: I know. Wow. He passed the CFP exam for me, I swear.

Michael: Lots of good feedback I hear about Danko these days.

Nate: Yep. No, he's very, very good at this job, and his organization is pretty amazing. And so I was producing this content, and I started January 1st of 2021 with the explicit goal that if I had 1,000 followers by June, I would continue making videos. And by February, long before taking my CFP exam, I had about 50,000 followers. And I was almost at 80,000 followers when I went in and took the CFP exam and was just starting to get some lead flow. I was actually starting to get some people who were very interested in the firm and were not at all interested in the service model or the fee structure. They wanted something different.

Michael: So, all right. But now I got to understand. What are you doing already in this window? I know different platforms have some different numbers, so you can give us some context on platforms as well. But 50,000 followers feels like a very, very large number of followers for most advisors that they don't get in years, and you're a month in. So, what platform or platforms are you on, and what are you doing already at this point that follower account gets big and lead flow immediately starts firing?

Nate: Yeah. So, at the time, it was only TikTok. It wasn't until later that I expanded onto every other social media platform, so YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, that sort of thing. And so all of those followers were concentrated on TikTok. And the videos I was producing was pure financial educational content. And so I was talking about the difference between Roth and traditional and tax-deferred versus tax-free and tax diversification. Those types of topics that just roll off the tongue for anyone listening to this, those were the types of videos that I was producing.

Michael: And how long are these videos in a TikTok environment?

Nate: Those videos were somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds each. And I would produce one a day, sometimes maybe a little bit more than one a day because I didn't have anything else to do, except maybe studying for my CFP, but you can see how much those were feeding each other.

Michael: Yeah. So it feels like this is almost a...I just turn on the camera and spent a minute or two talking about a financial concept and hit post.

Nate: And that was it.

Michael: And that was enough to start getting very high volume activity.

Nate: Yes. Yeah. And I think the piece that's missing from that is how deeply I began to study social media strategy. I very much went down the YouTube rabbit hole on, how do you produce good content? And so from the very beginning, I was very focused on the science of writing a really good hook and the science of really making sure that the video has a very high value per second, those sorts of things I was working on from day one. And more than anything, I was focused on just making it feel like a FaceTime call because I wanted to make it as approachable as possible. I wanted people to really feel like this was an easy thing to watch. It was an easy thing to learn from.

Michael: Okay. Okay. So, is there some call-to-action or conversion thing at the end? Was there something that you're doing to then eventually say, "And if you want help with all of these, I'm Nate Hoskin at Hoskin Capital. Reach out to hoskincapital.com if you want to become a client?" Was there something like that that you're doing to try to pull people in, or are you just, "Here's 60 seconds of education on traditional versus Roth," or tax diversification or something to that effect, and then we just hit post, and that's that, and we're just going to let it organically happen?

Nate: Yeah, that was the big problem. I started technically to get leads when I was well under 1,000 followers, and so I'm sure it'd be easy to assume that you need 50,000 followers to even start to get some sort of lead flow. The problem was that I hadn't put my website in my profile anywhere. And so I had to add my website to my link in bio, which is just a component of your profile on any social media account, on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. There's a little field where you can actually put the link that someone can follow if they'd like to learn more about what you do. And so because things happened so quickly and I wasn't really expecting any of it to play out the way that it did, I had just forgotten that that was probably a good idea.

And so I added in my website, and then later, I actually built a dedicated landing page for social media that explained exactly what my firm did and who I was and what my accreditations were, that sort of thing, particularly after I got my letters from my CFP. And so that's where the lead flow kicked off. It wasn't that I needed 50,000 to hit some sort of critical mass to generate leads. The part that I learned too late, the part that I should have been focused on from the beginning, was this idea of a marketing funnel, this idea that someone should be able to follow a couple of discrete steps to put time on your calendar. So that's where I started to do calls to action. That's where I started to say, "Hey, this is actually something that I can help with. The link is in my bio." That was probably my most common CTA, which told people that if they went to my profile, there would be a website link that they could click and learn a little bit more about what I did.

Michael: So the video says, "Check out my firm in my bio." Then there's a link in the bio that goes through. But if I heard what you said there, the link didn't actually just go straight to your advisory firm website. It went to some other landing page for them.

Nate: Yes, exactly, which was also in my website. It was just a subpage of my website, because I always thought of the homepage of my website as a way to introduce myself to relatively cold traffic, people who would find me through SEO, that kind of thing. And for someone who's been watching me for hours, they don't need the same very high-level intro. They just need to know a couple of things. So the landing page gave them technically less information, right? They didn't need to do the same deep dive. I really just wanted to give them the right amount of information for them to be able to make an educated decision instead of asking them to pan through my about section and read the whole homepage, that kind of thing. I wanted a much more compressed version of everything they needed to know, with a form directly on there that would immediately redirect them to a Calendly link.

Michael: So I'm fascinated by this, the idea that the point of having a separate page in this flow is because they're watching all this video from you, and they're getting to know you. They already know a good amount about you. So I actually want a page with less information than my whole website and my whole homepage because I'm just trying to fill in the last bits that they need to know to decide to schedule a meeting with me.

Nate: Exactly, yeah. And we found...of course, I can now speak from the perspective of this being years and years ago, but we found that people really came into the landing page in three distinct groups. There was the group of people who just wanted to book a call. They just needed to find the link to book a call, and they were ready to have a conversation. They were absolutely ready to go. And the next group was someone who actually wasn't ready to do anything yet, but really liked my content and wanted to consume more from me. And so they were looking for a way to get on my email list. And then the final group was the group that was still in the vetting process and had a couple of very specific questions before making a decision to have a conversation.

And so that landing page, you can start to envision it, is a quick statement on exactly what I do and what my firm does and who I am, and then a button that says Schedule a Call so that that first group just can immediately book that call. They don't need any more information because they're already at saturation. They're ready to talk. Then beneath that, you can have a lead magnet, or you can have a newsletter, whatever that happens to be, but some way for them to get on your mailing list. And then right beneath that, you have your FAQs. You have the couple of questions that people always ask you. And then at the very bottom, below the FAQs, you have another button to schedule a call. And that's it. That's everything that was on the landing page.

Michael: In your world with this, what kinds of questions went on...what kinds of FAQ responses were there?

Nate: Yeah. So the big ones were around service model and pricing and locale, frankly. Do you work with people outside of California? I was in California at this point in my life. And so those were the three main FAQs, was, "How do you work with people? How much do you charge? And do you work with people nationally?" And then, over time, we filled in a couple others that we would consistently get.

Michael: What else showed up over time?

Nate: Yeah. Do you do a one-time financial plan versus an ongoing relationship? So, can I just come to you and do a one-off plan versus working with you in perpetuity or assumed perpetuity? Do you work with people who are my age? So more about demographics. So I think the way that manifested was, who do you work best with? And then we would be able to describe our target market. The people that we really did good work for in that FAQ, those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I'm not sure. Maybe we had a couple others, but those were the ones that really stood out.

The Challenges Of Digesting Explosive Client Growth After Adjusting His Service And Pricing Models [48:24]

Michael: Okay. Interesting. And so you're going down this route to build. And so, what happens next? You're putting out these educational videos because it runs in parallel to the video market. The CFP classes you're doing, got a new cool concept from Danko, going to do a 90-second video on this, we're posting, activities starting to happen. So then, what on this journey?

Nate: Yeah. So then I started getting turned down a lot because my pricing model and my service model were not what people were looking for. And I was clearly resonating with younger people because that's the type of content that I was producing. I was producing the content that was very interesting to me, now, as a 22-year-old. And so that was very much what I wanted to produce. That was what I was personally interested in. And so I was starting to get a lot of meetings with people who are generally between the age of 27 and 37, somewhere in that range. And these were people with generally low assets. They had a lot of money locked up in 401(k)s. They did not need a very specialized portfolio, necessarily.

Yes, they needed some form of money management, and for many of them, they just needed to go invest that money. But really what they needed was planning. And I didn't offer much planning. I didn't really know that that was something that investment advisors and RIAs did, which, looking back, it very much just was a point of ignorance because I only had one frame of reference at the time. There was only one way to do this work, right, which was the way that I had learned at my previous firm. But I had just done or was about to complete the CFP exam and had learned all of these crazy things in a massive cram over the course of the last three months. And so I had to change my pricing model and my service model.

And we ended up moving all the way to the other end of the spectrum. We ended up moving to flat fee planning first and, in many cases, planning only. And that resonated unbelievably well with our clients. That was very much what they were looking for. And it's not like it was a new model. We certainly were not the pioneers of flat fee or anything of that sort. But even five years ago, it was not anywhere near as popular as it is today.

Michael: So in this version, planning fee only, no AUM fee, is this one-time planning fees and one-time engagements, or is this a subscription retainer, ongoing kind of model? Which version of planning first, planning only was coming forth for you?

Nate: It was subscription retainer. We played around with doing some one-time plans, and the model that we landed on was charging upfront for a one-time plan and having a subscription and a retainer and not allowing clients to just do the one-time plan. It was a package deal. It was about $3,000 at the beginning for that one-time plan and then somewhere in the $400 to $600 a month range for that retainer.

Michael: Okay. Okay. So it lets you get to a good, healthy revenue per client, right, if you're averaging in the middle at $6,000 a year ongoing and some additional dollars in year one for all the year one initial planning work.

Nate: Yes, exactly. And when our marketing was very, very cheap, that all balanced, right? We never went negative on a client. We were able to be positive on day one, and then we're able to kind of plan the revenue from there.

Michael: Okay. Okay. So you revamped the model with the lead flow that you've already got, and then I'm going to presume now growth starts happening because you're already getting the flow. They just didn't like the old AUM portfolio-centric model. So now we have a model that fits them, and all of a sudden, we're aligned. And off we go.

Nate: Yes. Yeah, we got an initial bump. I hired an operations manager, and then we proceeded to onboard 172 clients over the course of about 9 months.

Michael: A hundred and seventy-two clients in nine months?

Nate: Yes.

Michael: So, talk to us about that because that sounds bonkers volume, just the sheer number of financial plans that have to get created and done. So, take us through that. I can't even wrap my head around how many plans and meetings that takes.

Nate: Yeah. I have the benefit of hindsight now, and I sold my firm.

Michael: Nine months is not that much more than 172 working days, I think.

Nate: Yep. No, it was...we had weeks where we had 14 or 15 new clients.

Michael: Saying we, is it just you? Do you have a team? Are you frantically trying to hire a team member in the middle of this? I'm just trying to envision. How does this happen when there's a fricking new client every day that you are trying to navigate?

Nate: Yeah. It was the worst decision I've ever made to try to do that. It is not...it was awful, Michael. It was the most stressful, most exhausting, most horrifying period of my life. And I think, for a while, I was so proud of it that I wasn't even really willing to admit that to myself. I thought that I had cracked the code. I thought that I had done what other people couldn't. And it was terrible. It was.

Michael: It was a lot, right?

Nate: It was 17-, 18-hour days. It was meetings from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It was me and one operations manager, and we were trying to hire a team. And yes, we had decent unit economics on clients, but we were working from zero. And I was trying to pay salaries in the first couple of months and trying to find new people. It was terrible. It was just terrible.

Michael: Yeah. I get it. The math is fine from an economics end. If 172 clients pay $400 to $600 a month ongoing plus an upfront planning fee, you come out of this with close to $1 million of annual run-rate revenue, "Oh, my Lord, how amazing," except you have to onboard 172 clients in 9 months, which just sounds mind-bogglingly overwhelming.

Nate: Yeah. And so you get to a point where $1 million is enough to go and hire a team and to go and figure things out and to make all of this kind of thing work. But it doesn't happen on the right timeline. And so what we ended up with was us being completely overloaded. And even when we were able to hire, we were still just in a really bad spot as a business. Because, I think, when you look at it from the amount of work that we were doing, the forward revenue wasn't showing up in our bank accounts fast enough to justify that, right? And so, really, what we ended up doing long term was then raising our prices significantly and downsizing aggressively.

Because we worked...the piece that I did, that I just made my life harder, I guess, was we also just gave a lot of discounts. We waived financial planning fees. I was so desperate to take the firm from nothing to something that there's kind of this weird pricing curve as you go through that period where it's not working. And so you work discounts and try to close anyone that comes in the door, and you're still in that mindset, even though people are flooding in. And you can't raise prices fast enough to make things make sense. You can't get harder on your model.

And so I had different service models for different people, literally depending on what week they came into the firm. I had different pricing structures, everything of that sort. And so you end up with these tiers of clients where the clients that we got in our ninth month were fundamentally different in every way from the clients that we got in our first month. And now you're promising the same level of service to all of them.

Michael: Because as the growth comes, you're adjusting your pricing, you're making changes to the service model, and that's what you tell new people coming in. But the old people signed up under something else, and you're growing so fast that half of them literally haven't even had their first review meeting after originally signing up for you to tell them that you do different things because it's growing that fast.

Nate: Exactly. Yep. And so about a couple months later, maybe it was 14 months after the start of that insanity, we raised our prices significantly. We pretty much doubled our prices across the board. And then we, of course, had a very large cohort of that client group that was too price sensitive and had not...frankly, they had not even had an annual review meeting, some of them, to even know if it was worthwhile to accept a raised price. But we could not provide any level of reasonable service to that group of people. We needed to change something. And so we significantly raised our prices and dropped to about 90 households.

Michael: So you went from $400 to $600 a month to $1,000 a month or something like that?

Nate: Right, yeah, somewhere in the $600 as kind of the walking-in price and then a lot of clients at the $1,000 to $1,250 a month range.

Michael: Okay. And you said, "And dropped to 90 clients."

Nate: Correct. Yep.

Michael: Because you put the price increase through to everyone and just let people decide where they wanted to land.

Nate: Yes.

Michael: Because I guess, at this point, you're not worried about clients leaving, it would actually be a relief.

Nate: Yeah.

Michael: And I guess I'm thinking about this. The pure math of it, you get 170 clients this rapidly, and then you roughly double your pricing, and it drops to 90 clients. You effectively ended out with, it sounds like, what would have been remarkably similar revenue. It's almost exactly twice the fee for half the clients. So you end out with very similar revenue. You just have half the people to serve.

Nate: Yeah. I think we did end up lower simply because not everyone jumped to that $1,000, and people who came in at $600 stayed at $600 with a different service level. And so I think, yeah, we dropped down to about $650, somewhere in that range.

Michael: Okay. Okay. So, what's the team at this point?

Nate: Yeah. So by this point, we are hiring like crazy and have brought on a CPA who came on as a contractor and then ended up coming on full time and bringing on a lead advisor. And so all of that happened in pretty rapid succession.

Michael: And you still got an operations manager as well.

Nate: And still had an operations manager. And so, by that point, we were a team of four. And yeah, rotating cast in there, trying to hire a salesperson to take the sales calls, that sort of thing. But really the core team was four.

Michael: Okay. So, what's happening with the growth in the meantime? Is the flood still coming? Is the marketing still going? Do you pause on the marketing? Do you just raise the fees and let that reduce the volume because it's more expensive, but you keep taking whoever comes at the fee? How were you managing the growth flow of this engine while you're trying to handle the overload of how many came?

Nate: Yeah. So paused on a lot of it. And I won't get into it too much, but essentially, I had a pretty major falling out with a co-founder. And so the timeline and the stress levels just got a little bit wonky. And so we just had to put a complete hold on something, on everything really. And so, to kind of draw the timeline for you, because there is a gap in there that I need to explain, which is that, 2021, things really started to work. We started to see some lead flow. Things started to go well. And then I very quickly had a falling out with a co-founder in 2022. And so that nine-month window that I'm talking about is really spanning between 2022 and 2023.

Michael: Okay.

Nate: And then, as we start to get into the end of '23 and the beginning of '24 is when we start to hire and really start to catch up after that. And so, trying to remember exact timing, but really it was late '23 and into '24. We did a full pause on bringing on new clients and said, "We're not taking anyone else from this point," and growth ground to a halt on purpose, where we said, "We just need to figure out how to be a company first."

Michael: So, do you put them on a wait list or do something, or you just cold stop it?

Nate: We had a wait list.

Michael: Okay.

Nate: Yep.

Michael: Okay. And I've seen so many firms really struggle to put growth on pause, even when it hurts to keep taking it, some version of, "But if I put it on pause, I don't know if it's going to come back when I turn it back on again." Did you have any of those fears or concerns or worries about putting the growth on pause?

Nate: I didn't because I chose to keep making content. And so that was where that fear lived for me, was if I turn off making videos, it might never work the same way again. And so the commitment that I made to myself was I'm going to continue to make video content, and I'm going to continue to post, even if I'm not taking clients from this, because it will mean that I always have the faucet on. And when I'm ready to put the bucket back underneath, I can get that.

Creating A Video Production Company To Serve Other Advisors [1:03:55]

Michael: Okay. Okay, that's a good distinction. So then, what happens next in this journey? You do the growth pause, things stabilize. It's you and team, but no longer co-founder, who I'm just presuming didn't want to build this version of the thing that you were building on the journey and the ride that you were creating.

Nate: Right. Yeah. So then I started to get a lot of questions from advisors about video marketing. And I started having a lot of people reach out and be like, "Hey, I'm kind of watching this. I'm seeing in your comments that people are saying, 'Hey, how do I work with you? Or what do you charge?' I can tell that you are getting a serious amount of lead flow from this. How is this happening?"

And it just so happened that I went and did a spot on Denver7, the local TV station here. And this guy, Nick Meyer, who goes by Nick Talks Money on social media, saw me on that spot, and he was like, "Wow, I know Nate. We're in each other's orbit. I've seen him on TikTok. I didn't know he was in Denver at this time." Because I had moved in this process as well. And so he cold-DMs me on TikTok and says, "Hey, let's go get breakfast." And we totally hit it off. For anyone who doesn't know, Nick has about 1.8 million followers across social media. He's the single most-followed CFP professional as far as social media metrics are concerned, at least.

So I was kind of starry-eyed when I met him. I was like, "Really? Nick wants to talk? Nick wants to hang out with me?" Because I had 250,000 followers at that point. And we got to talking, and I was telling him about the questions that I was getting from advisors, and he was talking about wanting to move out of kind of the influencer game, not wanting to be a full-time influencer the way he had been for the last couple of years. And he said, "Well, what if we kind of find a way to help these advisors? What if we kind of codify this into a newsletter or a course or something like that to start to share a little bit of this knowledge that we've gained over the last couple of years?"

And I said, "Sure, that actually sounds great. That would be a really fun thing to work on," fully expecting it to be a fun little side hustle, right, expecting it to be a fun thing that we could build together. It was a way to work with someone that I really, really admired. And it absolutely exploded. And so that was the birth of SageContent. That was where we started to do a little bit more on the video side for other advisors.

Michael: So then, I guess, what is SageContent?

Nate: Yeah. So SageContent is the firm that makes video as easy as humanly possible for advisors because both Nick and I know exactly how hard it is, but exactly how much upside is possible when you succeed with video. And so what we do at Sage is we just try to remove all of the barriers and all of the speed bumps that we hit when we were producing video as much as possible. And so handling scripting, providing tools for recording and for editing, handling the posting and the delivery and coaching to the strategy, that sort of thing. And so that's really what Sage has become, is a multi-tool for any advisor who wants to do video marketing.

Michael: And so you're effectively a B2B service provider to other advisors. I guess I'm trying to envision. How much of this is courses and training versus service provider and doing? Obviously, you can't literally do the be-on-camera part.

Nate: Right.

Michael: How much is teaching and training versus doing service provider?

Nate: Yeah. So it started as a course. It started entirely as training and then very quickly evolved into a full service provider because of the feedback we were getting from advisors. They were like, "This is great to learn about. Will you do it for me, please?" And we were like, "Yes, we can make that happen." And so today we have two full-time studios here in Denver where we do all the video production for our advisors. We have a software platform that all of our advisors use to stay organized and interact with all of the tools. We have a team of 20 video editors that do all the editing for all of our clients. It has become a fully done-for-you service.

Michael: And the idea is, as an advisor, I fly to Denver to create a slate of videos with the team because you've got studios there?

Nate: Yes. For a very good number of our advisors, that is, of course, something you can elect into. I was actually just in Dallas yesterday. We were actually building a studio for one of our advisors in his office because he had decided, he's like, "I want to be able to do this whenever I want. I would rather invest in the gear and invest in the kit so that I can have something here that allows me to record." So we also have a good slate of advisors that will do all of the production from their home office or their office.

Michael: Okay. So I guess, just take me through a little bit more at this point. What literally do you do? If I'm an advisor, I guess, I'm an advisor, I want to start doing video things, what am I still going to do? What do you do?

Nate: Yeah. So there are really two ways to work with us. One is the more DIY way. DIY is specifically around writing scripts. So coming up with the ideas and writing the scripts for your videos, our DIY advisors do all of that. And then they will come out to Denver and film with us or film from their home office, depending on what they choose. We will do all the editing for them and then deliver those videos back so that they can distribute them to their social media platforms.

Michael: So this is, "I have stuff to say. I can kind of figure out how to script what I'm going to say. Either I want to come to you to literally do the video thing, so I just show up and talk, or I can turn on a camera in my home office, but I literally don't know what to do once I hit start and stop on the camera. So make all the other things happen, Nate. But I can figure out what to say and turn on the camera and do it. I just need help with the rest."

Nate: Right. So that's version one. And those are often for our newer advisory firms, the people who have more time to commit to something like scripting, right? They have the bandwidth to do that. They're in growth mode, but maybe don't have the client load or the management load that would take away from that time. And so a good number of our advisors will delegate the entire video production process to us, where we will do all the strategy, all the ideation, we will do all the scripting. And then they will fly out to Denver after they've reviewed and approved those scripts, and they will film all of the videos in Denver. We will do all of the editing. We will be the project managers to review those edits, turn everything over. And then we will do all of the distribution and the analytics.

So that's kind of the full-service version. That's Sage Concierge. That's where we will kind of take it for them and really run with them rather than saying, "We are the resource that you can plug into when you have the scripts that are ready to film."

How Nate's Video Production Services Are Priced [1:11:49]

Michael: Okay. And then, how do you price each of these?

Nate: Yeah. So really it comes down...there are two things that are exceptionally costly when it comes to video production, because you said it at the very beginning that, far and away, video has the highest cost of any of these marketing strategies that you can potentially do. And the two really costly components, or I should say three, are scripting, editing, and project management. And so for someone who really needs the editing, right, they want to do more of the DIY or they want to come out to the studio, they can just pay a per diem to come out to the studio. We charge $2,000 bucks a day. And then they can pay for the editing on an editing credit basis.

So someone can say, "I'm going to produce two long-form YouTube videos a month, and I'm going to do eight short-form videos a month. And I'm going to show up to the studio for two days. We're going to film five months of content. And then I'm going to get that edited." And so that would probably be in the $950 a month range for the editing and the platform, plus that $4,000 bucks to come out to the studio. That's the flex version of Sage, is going to be in that $16,000 a year range.

Michael: And there was a notable piece there to me in just how you framed that. If I come and say, "I want to do two longer form and eight shorter form videos every month," so I guess I'm sort of thinking one big thing every other week and two short ones every week. I'm not engaging you to do one long and two short videos every other week ongoing. I come to you for two days. I record 10 long forms and 40 short forms in 2 days, 5 months' worth, and then you'll produce and help drip them out over time. And then I come back half a year from now to do another set. They're chunked together. You're not necessarily doing a small bit every day or every week ongoing.

Nate: Right, exactly. You're batching it. And the same thing goes for the advisors who come out and say, "I want you guys to do everything." We will have them out to the studio once every six months, and we'll do all of their content.

Michael: Okay. Okay. That's helpful. So, all right. So one group is like, "I can set up some of my stuff. I just want to come out in blocks and do five months' worth and have you all do the studio thing and all the editing and things that come after." So then, what are the other models, or how do I think about the other models now?

Nate: Yeah. So then the other model is we do everything for you, right?

Michael: Okay. Okay.

Nate: And so that one is we do 196 videos over the course of the year. And so it's 51 long-form videos, it's 145 short-form videos, which then allows you to increase that volume to about 1 long-form a week and then do 3 short-form a week, right? And the reason...

Michael: Is that the recommended amount that you found works with all the things that you do?

Nate: Yes. And if you look at, really, any of the major creators, even outside of the advisory space, that's the cadence that they stick to. Unless they have a full team of 15 people, and then they will produce far more content, but that's generally where people end up.

Michael: Okay. And so, how long is long-form? How short is short-form?

Nate: Yeah. So a long-form video is 15 to 20 minutes. It can sometimes go down to that 10- to 12-minute range. And then short-form videos are those 60- to 90-second shorts that you would post to Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, that kind of thing.

Michael: And obviously, we're fans of long-form, as we sit here more than an hour into the discussion. But I know there's so much debate out there these days of, how much attention span does the average human actually have at this point? The general consensus view is not much. So I'm curious just to hear your perspective on, "Really, 15- to 20-minute videos? People watch 15- to 20-minute videos? They don't skip out after the 48 seconds? This is a thing still?"

Nate: Oh, absolutely. The attention span is bifurcated in a big way, where everyone is presented with the option to go and consume 90-second content in quick succession. Those are your YouTube shorts. There's an entire feed dedicated to that. And so there will be a very large group of people that will intentionally choose to go and watch longer form content, which is why a lot of advisor videos don't do very well, is because they're in that five-minute range, which is too long to be included on any of those scrolling platforms, but too short for someone who has very consciously opted into consuming long-form content.

Michael: Right. You're too long to be short, but you don't have enough time to really do something interesting in depth where you're going to teach me something new because you only got five to ten minutes.

Nate: Exactly. So that's where that 15- to 20-minute range comes in. And what we're seeing is that, for many of our advisors, more than 60% of all of their viewers that are consuming their long-form content on YouTube, they're watching that video on their smart TV. And so it completely changes the content you're competing against. You're no longer competing against a blog necessarily or a news article that you might read on your phone. You're competing against Netflix and HBO Max. And so that comparison has driven a lot of our strategy when we think about advisor video, is that you need the production quality to be really high because people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV shows. And you also need that value to be high and the entertainment to be high to compete in this very different arena.

Michael: And so, thus, the studio and full-service kinds of solutions because we need to do 50 long-form and 150 short-form. We're doing them in blocks. We've got to script all these things. Then we have to record them, and then we have to edit them. And we have to do it a certain level of quality. And so now we're into the...if you just want to be the advisor who shows up and talks and everything else happens, we're into the higher tier.

Nate: Exactly, yep. That's where you're going to be able to achieve that level of quality that's required on those platforms and be able to do it at scale, right, be able to do it without having it be a whole other full-time job, this whole other skill set.

Michael: And set my expectations here. So, what kind of costs should I expect at this tier? What does it take to say, "I want to be out in full force. I'm going to do the weekly long form and the weekly short form and all the things. And, Nate, I just have to show up and talk. You all do the rest?" So, what does that take?

Nate: Yeah, that's $5,000 a month, somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 a month. And so that...

Michael: Okay. Depending on...what changes that range?

Nate: Depending primarily on the number of advisors that firms would like to do. And so if someone wants to come out and they just want to do a single advisor on video, they'll be at that $5,000 a month range. But we have a number of firms that will send two, three, or even four advisors out, and that's where you kind of get these volume discounts for having multiple people iterating on this strategy. But yeah, really, for a single advisor who wants to come out, you're going to be in that $5,000 a month range.

What Surprises Nate The Most When It Comes To Advisor Video Marketing [1:20:12]

Michael: So now, as you've gone this path, both in your firm and now teaching other advisors and providing as a B2B service as well, what has surprised you the most about doing video marketing as a way to get clients in the advice business?

Nate: I think the biggest thing that has surprised me is advisors' willingness to do performative marketing. Like we were talking about at the beginning, people coming and talking to us and being like, "How do I just make this so I can do it without having to think about it?" And, of course, I think there is an issue with that when it comes to marketing your firm, but it's also an issue when you're investing a lot of money in a process. And I understand the desire to say, "I want to delegate to an expert. I want to have other people in the room who are better at this than I am." And delegation, I'm a fan of.

What I'm surprised by is the abdication in some cases. And those are the people that I try to have very serious conversations with at the beginning and say, "No, this is you. We need to train you on this. We need to teach you the skill of content creation." Because even though we can take so much of the drudgery away from it, we can take away a lot of the work that just needs to be done, at the end of the day, you're the one on camera. You need to understand why we are doing these things, why this is important that we do it a certain way. And there is this desire to say, "No, I just don't want to think about it." And I don't think that's the same as delegating it effectively.

Nate's Decision To Sell His Advisory Firm And Focus On Advisor Content [1:21:58]

Michael: So, tell us more about the low point for you on this journey and what turned it around.

Nate: Yeah. By this point, you know the low point, which is really nice. It's weirdly relieving to say it and to tell the full story start to finish. So thank you for giving me the ability to do that and to share it. But I think that the thing that turned it around is that I was able to find amazing humans who could help me navigate it. I am so unbelievably grateful to Brian and Sebastian, the two people that really helped me turn not just the firm around, but also my state of being. And it culminated actually in Brian actually buying the firm.

Brian was the full-time CPA that we hired on. And so that came full circle earlier this year. And that was a massive relief to me for lots of reasons and giving me the space to do the thing that I realized I am the most passionate about, but that was the thing that turned it around. I don't think I turned it around. I don't think I could have turned it around without the humans who made this possible.

Michael: So Brian and Sebastian were the team members that got hired in the dark days to help get all the stuff done.

Nate: Yes, exactly.

Michael: Interesting. And then, ultimately, Brian bought the firm. So you're actually out from the advisory firm now.

Nate: Yeah, that's correct.

Michael: So full time for you now is the content for other advisors' end?

Nate: Yes. Yeah, which really was how I always wanted it to be, right? My favorite thing about all of this was the content creation. And even in crazy, busy days, I still found time to write scripts. I still found ways to post videos despite being so unbelievably busy. And I think that was sign and symptom of me loving that more than anything else.

Michael: Because I was going to ask, how do you get to that decision to make the transition, to pull the trigger, to let go of the advisory firm after all the crazy insanity you went through to get it there? How did you come to the moment to make the decision?

Nate: Yeah. It wasn't an easy one. It very much was something that I built and that I still am exceptionally proud of. And I think that because of the way things played out and you now know the whole story, my whole experience with owning an RIA in the beginning was content creation. Those are the parts that I enjoyed the most. And so I realized very quickly, with, of course, lots of caveats of things being crazy, that was the thing that I was always looking forward to. I would write scripts all the way up to a client meeting and then kind of play catch-up in the first five minutes. And I just wanted to be producing content. I wanted to be in the strategy of producing content. I wanted to be in the scalability of content and the mechanics of it.

That was the place that I was so drawn to. And for years, I assumed that that was because I loved owning an RIA, that that was my favorite thing to do, was run an RIA. But it became very clear that that was just the environment that the content creation had existed in, was owning an RIA, right? But really, the decision came in the form of admitting to myself that the thing that I wanted to do was be a professional content expert, content consultant. I wanted to be a marketer, and I could never have known that from the beginning, but that was really what drove that decision, was the desire to do the only thing that I love all day long. And I really think I achieved it.

Nate's Advice For His Younger Self And For Newer Advisors [1:26:08]

Michael: So, any other just pearls of wisdom you know now from your experience you wish you could go back and tell you six years ago as you were looking and going out on your own and launching the firm?

Nate: I think the biggest pearl of wisdom that I wish I could have given myself is to do the right reps. And it really comes back to what we started this whole conversation with, talking about not just going and doing the activity, but really focusing on the outcomes. And I think that, throughout this entire journey, I spent a lot of time doing the wrong reps. I spent a lot of time trying to optimize things that really didn't move the needle at all. I was just trying to do everything everywhere all at once.

Michael: So, what were the wrong things getting optimized?

Nate: Changing CRMs three times.

Nate: Redesigning my website, changing my logo, just little things like that that I thought were going to make massive differences or were the thing to be focused on at the time that didn't matter at all.

Michael: So, what did matter?

Nate: I think the two things that mattered most was making videos and doing marketing and then really spending time with my clients and hearing and learning from them. Those are the two things that I should have been doing 100% of the time. And of course, as the firm grew, it turns into kind of having your team as your new clients, right? And those are the things that I've very much taken with me. The two things that I want to do is I want to market and I want to work with my team, who now are my clients, right? And I want to hear from them, and I want to understand what's going on there so that I can serve them better. And at least in my experience, it very much felt like everything else faded into the background when those two things were going well.

Michael: So, any other advice you would give advisors that want to start down this marketing road now?

Nate: I think that the biggest one is that my experience was definitely an outlier. I've seen only a couple of other firms that have created the good problem of having so many leads that they didn't know what to do with them. It is a longer process in most cases, and so I think that that would be a terrible reason to start video, is to be like, "Everyone's going to have the experience that Nate did." And you've seen from your numbers that that's just not the case. That's not how this goes.

Michael: So, what made your journey, at least with the benefit of hindsight, what made your journey turn out so differently in a better way?

Nate: Yeah. I don't really want to say it in platitudes. I think the real things that people could operationalize are I outsourced editing as quickly as I possibly could. I batch recorded videos as much as I possibly could. I did 30 or 40 videos in a day or over the course of a couple of days so that I didn't have to think about it every single day or every single month. I could kind of set myself a timer on that content creation so that I could only accept A-plus ideas and A-plus scripts. I didn't have to come up with something to say that day. I could be more strategic about it. And I could work in these batches where I could look at the analytics on those videos, and then I could work backwards and come up with things that I wanted to improve on and things that I wanted to do better the next time.

And then I dedicated the vast majority of my time, probably genuinely 80% of my time, to the packaging of my video, which, in the framework of short-form video, like on TikTok or Instagram Reels or something like that, is the hook and the completeness of the script. How good is my time-to-value? How quickly do I deliver value to someone? And then, do I keep that value per second very high? And is my hook the best it can possibly be? And then in the framework of long-form content, it's the thumbnail and the title and the hook. It becomes a little bit more dense because your videos are delivered to people in a different way. That got all of my time. Everything else was an afterthought because there was no point in recording the video until I was exceptionally proud of the script. And so everything that I did was designed to make the rest of the process easier because that, to me, was the place I felt I could have the greatest impact.

What Success Means To Nate [1:31:12]

Michael: So, as we come to the end here, just this is a podcast about success, and one of the themes that comes up, right, that word success means very different things to different people. And so you built this incredibly successful business. Nine months is probably one of the fastest of anyone to get to $1 million of revenue from cold start. Objectively, the business was incredibly successful. How do you define success for yourself personally at this point?

Nate: I think some of it is financial. We actually beat that with SageContent. We hit a million in about eight weeks. But I think that that is only a tiny portion of it for me because I think that's just a better indicator that you're doing a good job for someone, that you're delivering value for someone, and it's less about what is valuable to me. What's valuable to me is helping millions and millions and millions of people become more financially secure.

And I know we're at the end, so I'll keep this very, very short. But my uncle was my career idol. He was the guy that I wanted to be, and he was a portfolio manager at Capital Group. And he died of cancer at 54. And so I got a very unique window into how money can both buy financial security but also can't create the life that you want on its own. It is stored energy that needs to be directed. And so success to me is helping millions and millions of people use their stored energy more effectively. And when I was 22 and starry-eyed, I thought that I had to do that myself. I thought that I was the only one in the world that could make people more financially secure.

And if SageContent has taught me anything, it's that I'm actually probably not the best person to do that. There are actually advisors out there who are 100 times or a million times better than I am. And so with Hoskin Capital and with SageContent, the entire goal is just to help those people become financially secure. And being able to do that via other advisors and being able to empower them and provide them with a platform has been the more magnified version, right? We reached significantly more people because there are so many advisors who are actively producing content that is fundamentally different from what I would have been doing myself. And that is where I feel the most successful, is knowing that I'm helping people have a positive impact on their clients' lives and that those clients are becoming more financially secure and making really good decisions with their money.

Michael: I love that. I love that. And I will admit, "Money is stored energy that needs to be directed," is an interesting framing that's going to stick with me for a while. I like that. Well, thank you, Nate, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Nate: Michael, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Michael: Thank you.