Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#121 - Scaling to 150+ Clients with Short-Form Video: Nate Hoskin’s Playbook
On this episode of Only Fee Only, we’re joined by Nate Hoskin, founder of Hoskin Capital and co-founder of N2 Content Marketing with Nick Meyer.
Since 2020, Nate has grown his practice to well over 150 clients using the power of short-form video. Now, through N2 Content Marketing, he’s helping advisors nationwide do the same. We break down the strategies that work, how advisors can create engaging content without overcomplicating it, and why short-form video is a game-changer for growth.
If you’ve been thinking about leveraging short-form video marketing for your firm, this episode is a must listen!
Nate’s social:
X: Nate Hoskin
How's it going everyone? Welcome back to the OnlyFeeOnly podcast and, as always, thanks for being here. In this episode we talked to Nate Hoskin, who is the founder of Hoskin Capital and Into Content Marketing, alongside Nick Meyer, where together they have over 500 million views, 2 million followers and 2,000 videos produced. They are building something special over there and Nate has built an unbelievable financial planning business with over a hundred clients from short form video. So they're doing a great job over there building something really special, and at Hoskin Capital, nate's done an awesome job as well. I don't know how he has any time in the day with everything he's got going on, but they're killing it. So, without further ado, enjoy this episode with Nate Hoskin on the Only Fee Only podcast.
Speaker 2:What's up everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travalo. I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles, and today we are so excited to have Nate Hoskin on. You guys may have seen him on social media. He's blowing up on video and that is his specialty short form content. So really excited to learn about how he's built his financial planning practice as well as how he's helping other advisors build out their video marketing. So, nate, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Peter Brock, thank you so much for having me guys, Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yes, you bet. So we've had the other business partner on. But for those who don't know about you and your financial planning practice, you want to give a little bit of a background before we dive in deeper into your special sauce.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. I founded Hoskin Capital, my RAA, back in 2020, middle of COVID not exactly the most fun thing to do, but I'm glad to say that it worked. And then, yeah, the other N in N2, content marketing, nick Meyer, was on here, but we got together and started that up in June of 2023. So now I split my time between being an advisor and doing a whole bunch of digital marketing just everywhere I possibly can. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just going to say, man, it's really cool to see the stuff that you guys are doing and the way that you've built this, and so before we dive into the content, like the digital marketing and all of that how did you get into wanting to be a family financial planner, like, where did that come from? Kind of, let's start there and then we'll move into how you grew the practice, because how you grew it's fascinating and the rate at which you grew it is insane.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I kind of backed into financial advisory. So my background is in quantitative analytics and quantitative finance, which just really got me obsessed with risk adjusted return, those kinds of things like really analytical thinking. But my whole goal was to go work for an ETF manager, that kind of thing. My uncle worked for Capital Group and so I was going full analytics, full back office, and my uncle died in 2018. And, long story short, in that happening I learned so much about the emotional side of money, because when I was looking at his career early, I was looking at the Porsche, I was looking at the tennis courts, that kind of thing. I was like, maybe I want to do that.
Speaker 3:But in his death I kind of learned all the other side of what he spent to earn that money and realized that I wanted to be on the front lines, that I could have a way bigger impact on people if I was speaking to them face to face rather than agonizing over the rate of return that their portfolio was getting. So I said, okay, how do I do that? Wealth management Very cool. So what was your first job in the back office? I was running all of their back tests and I was doing a couple of different forecasting tools, that kind of thing. I essentially started coding in Python and R when I was a sophomore in college and then just went out and shopped that out anywhere I could, and so I got a little internship that turned into a full-time job, and then in 2018, I jumped to one of their consortium firms that worked on the front end. They were in the wealth management side.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you decide that you want to eventually do your own thing, right? You decide you want to open up your own practice and you went the XY route. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:I actually went the XY route late, so I didn't become an XYPN member until 2023. And I started my firm in 2020.
Speaker 1:Okay. So was it hard, like was it hard getting all the pieces together, knowing how to do that, because I know a lot of people say biggest thing about XY is like getting up and running the compliance standpoint, helping them write you know your ADV, all of that. So what was that like getting running without that additional support?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was pretty brutal. It definitely took a couple of tries. I worked with another compliance advisory firm and they luckily did a really good job of getting me my first contracts doing the ADV filing, that sort of thing, so that was pretty straightforward. Thing was was that then I just had an RIA, everything had been filed, and then I started figuring out how I would serve people and what my tech stack looked like. I think that's where XYPN has really helped is saying, okay, here's a consolidated tech stack. By the time that ADV hits, you have everything you need to start working with people Got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very important to differentiate. So I mean, you started the summer of COVID, right, summer of 2020. Your RIA set up. Now your doors are open. What was marketing day one? Look like Like what, what were you doing? Did you start on video? Then Like, what was your journey kind of into video? Yeah, so I started with my nuclear network.
Speaker 3:What was your journey? Kind of into video, yeah, so I started with my nuclear network. I was doing a lot of the same work I had done for the wealth management firm, where I was cold calling, I was sending emails, I was trying to get these conversations on the books. Zoom didn't even work super well back then. I don't think people remember that very clearly that all of that software was terrible in 2020. And so I had the 45 minute time cap on all of my meetings because I wouldn't pay for premium. It was mayhem, it was absolute mayhem, and I got a couple of people in the door, but it just wasn't working super well.
Speaker 3:I didn't jump into video until 2021. And January 1st 2021, I said look, this new app called TikTok is coming on the scene. I might as well give it a try and see how things go. If, by June of 2021, I have a thousand followers, I will continue. I will consider that to be just a runaway success. And by February, I had about 50,000 followers. So I was like all right, we're going to keep doing this for sure.
Speaker 1:So what were some of the things I mean like? So you started seeing the firm take off, I'm sure, pretty quickly. I mean, if you've got access to 50,000 people, you're doing short form video, you're you're going to get some inquiries right. You're going to have people reaching out asking about your services, wondering, wanting to know if they can work with you. So what was that like when you started seeing some of that in the beginning?
Speaker 3:It was definitely overwhelming to suddenly have four or five, six meetings a week just on my calendar, with people saying hey, I know a little bit about what you want. What you do, let's have a conversation, let's see how this goes. What you do, let's have a conversation, let's see how this goes. And I think I didn't do a great job with my sales pitch at the beginning, simply because I didn't really know what my offer was. I had essentially taken my fee model and my service model and copy pasted it from the firm that I was working at before.
Speaker 3:But they worked with millionaires and a lot of the conversations I was having early were with 26 year olds, 35 year olds, that kind of thing, and a lot of the conversations I was having early were with 26-year-olds, 35-year-olds, that kind of thing, and so I could bring them on and I could charge them a management fee, but it would be a management fee on $30,000, something along those lines, and that didn't make a lot of sense for them. They felt it was very cheap but oddly, therefore, they didn't really see the value in it and for me I wasn't being compensated enough to show up for them the way that I should have. So I learned the word fee only fee only podcast really quickly. I knew that that was something compared to commissions. But I didn't learn flat fee until 2022. I didn't understand that that was an opportunity that advisors had. It was when I switched to flat fee and said, hey, this monthly retainer is going to cover X, Y and Z that I really started speaking the language of my prospects and really started growing the firm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's so crucial. So I mean, you started on TikTok and you quickly learned that your, you know your audience. Most likely they're younger, they're in their 20s and 30s. Like what were some other keys, like you know, like service offerings or things that your clients needed that were not met in another compensation model, like you said? Oh well, the clients, they felt like it wasn't even a fee, that it was worth anyone's time. So how did you figure out what they needed? And then how were you able to market that and start to put it into your videos?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when I left the advisory firm, I knew I wanted to work with younger people. I don't think that was as much a symptom of the social media platforms as it was my dialogue with them and a lot of what I was talking about was really baseline money management. That was a lot of what I felt people needed to know and weren't very good at, and so that turned into a core offering of my practice, was saying okay, yes, I will do a lot for you, I will manage the money, I will handle a lot of these logistical things on the back end, but on the front end, I'm going to teach you how all of this works. I'm going to teach you the adequate behaviors. I'm going to teach you what a healthy financial ecosystem looks like. So that, plus investment management, formed the initial core.
Speaker 3:Then I realized very quickly that they needed a lot of tax help on the tax planning side sure, from the advisor, but also the tax prep. So that was. The next step was to bring on a CPA and be able to offer the planning, the investment management and the tax preparation. That, I think, is really what I learned from my clients. That's what they wanted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what was the growth trajectory? Like man, I mean with like, obviously you started doing video. A little bit later, when you started doing that, you start having these conversations with people. How quickly did it take off? Because I think that you had something like over 150 clients or something.
Speaker 3:Now, right, okay, I'm at at the end of this month.
Speaker 1:I'll be like 178 clients, okay, 178 clients okay, a lot of people that would be like 178 clients Okay, 178 clients. Okay, a lot of people that would be like that's a crazy amount of clients. That's insane that you grew that fast. How quickly did it actually happen? From the time that you start posting videos, it grows, did you see? You know, all of a sudden there was like one video that went viral. It contributed to a ton of followers. A lot of people trickled in after that, or was it kind of just like that consistent, slow roll and consistency? That kind of helped that out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think in the early days, if I had any idea what I was doing, I would be three or four times the size that I am right now. The challenge was that 2021, 2022, even parts of 2023, I always had the traffic that I needed. I had hundreds of meetings every single year. I had four to five a week on average for essentially three straight years that I really wasn't using because I couldn't figure out my offer. I couldn't figure out my service model. I wasn't as systems driven as I should have been.
Speaker 3:I made a lot of mistakes as a business owner, which completely changed the growth trajectory. So, essentially, I built up to a core of 60 clients by the beginning of 2023, which was quite good, like that was enough that I could pay my rent. Things were happening. I was starting to feel pretty comfortable, but it wasn't until August of 2023, that all of the systems came into play. I really started making an offer that resonated with the people that I wanted to work with, and that's where the growth came in. And so we got 110 clients in about eight months, once everything actually locked in and started to work, and that was without a change to the performance of my videos. In fact, I actually got less views. I got fewer meetings in 2023 and 2024 than I did in 21 and 22. So there was definitely a missed opportunity there. Hindsight's 2020. I'm over it. I'll stop lamenting it, but it wasn't until 23 that it really started to hockey stick.
Speaker 1:Go into that a little bit more. What was it about the systems and the processes that you didn't have down? Because I think that's something a lot of people can relate to, right, like, a lot of times it's about grow, grow, grow, whereas realistically you're like okay, what was our closing rate last year? How did we do? What if we focus on service being a bigger part of the business? Or what if we change some things around over here? So what were you seeing Because I think a lot of advisors out there can relate to that what were you seeing in your business as far as processes or inefficiencies that were prohibiting you from really taking that next step or getting to that next level?
Speaker 3:The biggest one was over-customizing.
Speaker 3:Every client for years got a completely different service, and I felt that was what I should have been doing as an advisor was doing exactly what they needed, down to the decimal, and so it meant that the fee structures were different, because I would have to charge some people more, some people less.
Speaker 3:The compensation structure for me, like the actual profit I was earning per client, was totally different, and so the other challenge was that you can't systematize. If you're mailing one person statements and then you have to send out some digital ones, and then you have some people that you're meeting with monthly to try to get them out of credit card debt and others don't want to hear from you more than once a year, you can't write any systems around that. It's just not really going to work. So the main thing I did that changed was I said here is what I offer. You can go down the list on my pricing page and you can check the boxes of what you want and then choose the tier that fits you the best, and when you sign up for that tier, you're going to get that and you're only going to get that.
Speaker 3:I will flex a little bit here and there. But then, once I knew three different ways that we offer services, I could script the entire engagement, which meant that I could make promises in a sales call. I could make a promise about what someone would receive rather than saying well, what do you want? Tell me what you want and I'll build your offering around that. That completely changed the game, and it felt really scary to me as an advisor to say wait, what if someone doesn't get every box checked? And I had to be okay with that because they knew what they were paying for. They had already decided that the value was worth the price and I learned very quickly that they weren't going to lament those few checkpoints because I was covering so much for them.
Speaker 1:Not to mention, they might not know what they want, right. That's why they're coming to you when you start the engagement with what do you want? They're like you're the one that has CFP after Hoskin. Like you, tell me what I want. That's why we're having this conversation, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well said. And so they had no idea, which meant that if I gave them a price, they couldn't really tell if that was a valuable number or not. They couldn't make that connection as easily, which meant that they didn't close with me or they didn't stick around very long. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mm, hmm. So I mean, were there like other filters besides that? Like you know, because I feel like a lot of people in the beginning, you want to say yes to everything right and you don't want to get too in your box and in your lane because you know you also have to survive, you have to pay rent, there's bills.
Speaker 3:Yes, so I mean, like what's kind of maybe some like tips to your younger self, right that like you wish that you got over younger I think the biggest one is being okay with someone not accepting your offer, because I even in 2023, I was touting the fact that I had a 90 plus percent close rate.
Speaker 3:I could close anyone on the call because I could just make them an offer that worked for them, and I thought that that was the pillar of success for me. But, at the end of the day, if you're making an offer that everyone will accept, it's probably not the best offer, particularly for you as a firm. Instead, it should be an offer that a very small percentage 20%, 25% is willing to accept, because it gives you the space to serve them the way they deserve to be served. Because you have one offer that you know works, you can record the results of it and the people that accept it are going to get those results. The people that don't that's okay. Learning to be okay with that was something that my younger self would just not have understood, and I wish I could have overcome that earlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Now talk to talk to us about real quick. I want to ask you a question about the financial planning industry, but I have two questions, so I want to pivot to that one after this, and it's about starting the content marketing right. What is one thing that if you could change about the financial planning industry, what would it be? Because a lot of people are like I don't like this. I wish this was different. This would make it better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this might be a hot take, but I think that the financial planning industry, oddly, is one of the least generous industries.
Speaker 3:Industry, oddly, is one of the least generous industries, and I think that financial advisors constantly make the mistake of charging too little for their services. And those two things go hand in hand, because when you're not willing to be generous, you're withholding all of this information that you then kind of have to see if you can get some sort of compensation for, but that stuff actually isn't worth a whole lot. And so then you're charging money for something that isn't crazy valuable, that you could have given away for free, built a huge amount of rapport, a huge amount of trust and then been better compensated for the people that you do work with. And so there is this weird interplay where advisors are scared to be generous with the information that they have under their hat and therefore they charge too little for information they could be giving away for free. If I could change that and show advisors that education and generosity is the most profitable thing you can do with your day, that's the change I would make, hands down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's a great point because I mean, you throw so many things out there, right, and it's like a lot of people will listen to what you have to say, but then what does that do? It makes them ask more questions. Then they want to get in contact with you. Then eventually they want to work with you, and that's right. So many people hold it in here like, well, you can't see what's behind the curtain. It's like, show them what's behind the curtain, right, and then when they want to engage with you, they want to ask more questions. Ultimately, they're going to want to work with you.
Speaker 1:So that's awesome, man. And before I lose my train of thought, so I'm thinking like, right, as you're kind of learning about systems, processes, how this stuff works, you get you guys launch the content marketing firm, right, so like that must've been, like we've got this rocket ship, but we already know how to do it from over here, because I've just gone through this understanding the offering, being confident in the offering, not wanting to work with everybody, making sure that the offerings similar across the board. So talk to us about how that helped the growth on that side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, hoskin Capital was an amazing sandbox to educate what we did at N2 Content Marketing. First and foremost, both Nick and I just speak the language of advisors. If they say something like Irma or required minimum distributions, we know those words. That's a great thing to have under our hat, absolutely. But yes, it was the systems and it was the offer.
Speaker 3:We spent so, so much time on that and the way it took shape is kind of the Chick-fil-A offering, where it's either what we offer or it's free. And so the end result is that, like, we have an hour and 45 minutes of a video blueprint that anyone can just go and watch for free, and it's going to have everything. You need to be able to make videos on your own yeah, like, we don't need to teach that. You can learn to outsource to a video editor, you can learn how to write scripts, that sort of thing and then what we're able to offer as a result is the completely done for you. Like, you're going to come out to our studio, you're going to film with us, and we're going to make sure that every step in the process is perfect, instead of making the mistake that Hoskin Capital made, because what we tried in the beginning was trying to sell that information right.
Speaker 3:We had a newsletter with N2 teaching people those things, and then we had a course with N2 that was teaching people those things, and we took that learning from Hoskin Capital to say, oh, we've already seen this before. We know why this is not working as well as we want it to. So instead, let's be extremely generous, let's give that information away for free and let's make a better offer that we know that we can drive results with. Really just trained me how to have conversations with people where I make an offer that kind of makes their eyes pop, where we're not expecting 100% of advisors to work with us, but the 10% that do, they're going to give us the space to educate millions of advisors about short form video. That learning came directly from Hoskin Capital.
Speaker 2:So what are some main lessons? Like you know, you guys are making a name for yourself as video marketers. Like what are some just main bullet points? Like you need to be doing this in 2025 to grow your financial planning practice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, we know video is just taking the world by storm. There is going to be a clear dichotomy between the advisors who are making videos in 2025 and those who aren't, and we're just going to see that evolve over the next couple of years. We know that that is just a given at this point. We've already seen it happen in terms of what people can be doing. To be on video is separate yourself from the noise as much as humanly possible Because, frankly and again, maybe a hot take, but no one will know who you are, and so there is no credibility for them to believe that what you say carries any value. And so, instead of just telling someone a high level topic or something it's very common on LinkedIn, people are just running commentaries Instead, give someone a really actionable takeaway.
Speaker 3:So, for example, if you're going to make a video A, you should brand it as yourself rather than branding it as your firm, making sure that it's you as the figurehead and then they get to learn about your firm with you as the conduit. That is an actionable takeaway that you can go and use. Then, when you're writing the scripts, the hook that you write is going to be 80 to 90% of your video success. So you should put 80 to 90% of your energy into the first sentence of your video. If you can do that, then you can fine tune the structure of the script once people are actually watching and you can push those watch time numbers higher and higher and higher. And then, finally, you have to be really, really consistent.
Speaker 3:Rather than doing seven videos a week for two weeks and then just completely burning out, I would so much rather an advisor goes ahead and does three videos a week or five videos a week, but structures it where they film a batch, they do 60 videos in one go, or maybe they do 20 in a month, something along those lines, so they don't spend every single week worrying about what video they're going to make next. They do it in one push, they get it done. They have it on autopilot for a month, for three months, for six months. That way they get to see this consistent progression of their videos rather than saying, oh well, I did video for two weeks and it didn't work, so I'm never doing this again. They need that statistically significant result.
Speaker 1:Because it builds over time, right, like I know when we were talking to Nick and I know you I'm sure you believe the same thing it's like it's not about having one video that goes viral, right, people might be able to go back to that, or you might have it pinned on your profile or whatever it might be, and they might get to see it.
Speaker 1:They'll be like, oh, that's cool. But it's like you popping up in the feed over and over and over and over again, to where, when somebody says like, oh, I have a question, or they're having a conversation with someone else and they're talking about a question that person has, and they go oh, actually, I just saw Nate talk about that the other day so you become the narration or the voice in their head because you're the one that's constantly educating them on these things. So that's huge. It's like that was the thing I've always tried to concentrate on too is like don't try to go viral. Some of the stuff that I thought was going to do the very best didn't do anything. And then some of the videos I was like, ah, that's kind of stupid, did really well, you know, just because, or you meet somebody through them, or something like that, so I love that you say that about the consistencies and you know the views don't have to be insane for the videos to be effective.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. I mean, I had a video do 7 million views. It did 10 million across all the platforms. I did not get a single client from that video and I've had videos get a thousand views and I get four clients. Virality and views is just one number. It just proves to us that people are interested in your content. That's just one part of the mix. That people are interested in your content. That's just one part of the mix. And I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head by saying people are going to remember because you're front of mind, because you're being consistent, you're always in front of them. And this is going to sound like a complete non sequitur, but I promise it ties back in.
Speaker 3:I think advisors make this major mistake around niches. They niche down to a specific person. I work with surgeons, I work with dentists, I work with lawyers, whatever it happens to be, but really a buyer is not a person. Buying is a state and that state comes into play for the advisory world when someone is experiencing a problem and that problem is not local to surgeons, it's not local to doctors. It might happen more with that demographic. I work with executives at tech companies.
Speaker 3:Well, no, you solve the problem of RSUs. You solve the problem of deferred comp, that kind of thing, and so you need to hit someone when they are having that problem in their life. The way you do that is you make a video showing that you've seen that problem before, you've solved that problem before and you're intellectual and witty enough to deliver it quickly. And then in the moment that they're having that problem, they're probably on Google looking up should I be selling my RSUs that just vested and the algorithms are so good at then connecting those dots and providing that video to the person the moment they're thinking through that problem. That's when they become clients. They don't become clients when they become a doctor and get their MD. They do it when they deal with that massive change in compensation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, got to have that buying signal. Yeah, that is interesting because you do hear niche down, niche down, niche down, and it's not like just because you're in one profession, that that's what it is. So that is an interesting take. Any other golden nuggets you want to throw out there for the financial advising community or any must dos?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, going back to the generosity thing, one of the main things I see advisors missing is free content that people can download for an email address called a lead magnet for anyone who is hearing about this for the first time but just having some method of value that you can deliver in exchange for the privilege of contacting them in some way.
Speaker 3:And I think one of the big unlocks that Nick and I have seen, both in N2 and myself at Hoskin Capital, is the existence of an email course. We have one that people can enroll in and I have one at Hoskin Capital that drives an insane amount of business. The thing I love about email courses by comparison to download this PDF or download this tax guide is that then they get the tax guide and they're surprised when you send them an email, whereas with an email course, when they get that first email, that's what they signed up for, they train themselves to open your email and you prove to them early on that it's valuable when they click on that, and so when you send them an email inviting them to a webinar or sending them a new piece of value I mean we send three or 4,000 emails a month and we have a 55% open rate, and so that engagement is so so beneficial for the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's not cold, right? Because it's like, oh, I got an email from N2, right. It's like, well, yeah, you signed up for the email course, like, of course, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but if you got a PDF, you're like wait, why did you sign me up? I didn't want to receive this Like unsubscribe.
Speaker 1:I'm done Exactly. That's fantastic. Well, man, it's always good to talk to you. I think you guys have so many great things going on and you have an awesome story as an advisor, and also what you guys are doing it into is huge. So I do want to get that message out there, because I think I really do believe if you're not doing video right and you don't have an established practice where you're sailing off into the sunset, if you're actively trying to grow, you're not using video, you're going to miss out on a huge opportunity For those people that want to follow along. Where can they do it and how can they get in touch?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Our website is just n2contentmarketingcom. Finding me on LinkedIn or finding Nick Meyer on LinkedIn are absolutely the best ways to go, because, hey, we eat what we cook. We are always posting videos on there, we're always sharing the value, much like I tried to do in this podcast. So it's a great way to just take a look, kind of see what other advisors are up to and then come have a conversation with me.
Speaker 2:Love it. Nate, thank you so much for your time today, thank you guys, Thanks man.