The Afternoon Advisor

Building the Full Growth System w/ Mike Barrasso | The Afternoon Advisor E8

• Nate Hoskin, CFP®, AWMA

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 28:34

Most financial advisors are looking for a silver bullet. There isn't one... but there are a lot of golden BBs.


Mike Barrasso grew his family's RIA from $150M to $400M from the business development seat. Now as co-founder and CEO of WealthReach, he's building the systems that make that kind of growth repeatable for any firm. Recorded live at Future Proof in Miami, this episode covers the three problems holding most advisory firms back, why your website is your most overlooked growth asset, and what the full organic growth funnel looks like when it's actually built end to end.


You'll learn:


- The three glaring problems killing most firms' growth — and why the silver bullet mindset is the biggest one
- Why your website is a billboard when it should be a growth engine — and how to fix it
- How to show up in both traditional search and AI-driven discovery (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude)
- When to hire a human vs. deploy a system — Mike's framework for building a firm from zero
- Why advisors shouldn't be vibe coding — and what they should be doing instead
- Where agentic AI is headed for advisor growth in the next few months

_ _
🔗 Learn more about WealthReach →  wealthreach.ai
🔗 Connect with Mike → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbarrasso/


Guest

Mike Barrasso — Co-founder and CEO of WealthReach. Previously grew his family's RIA from $150M to $400M from the business development seat. Background in software sales, where he managed growth teams before bringing that same system-building approach to the financial advisory industry.

SPEAKER_01

Uh one of the things I see a lot in the industry is that websites are pretty heavily templated. So I think that has a host of issues from fatigue from consumers that are just looking at advisors' websites and they're seeing the same thing over and over again, but also they're just not SEO optimized. The other thing that I think is a big one is that advisors don't have a full growth plan. So they're looking for the silver bullet, they're looking for one thing to solve all of their growth problems where it doesn't work like that. You need to have a full system end-to-end that's driving your growth on the front end, driving more people to your firm, figuring out how to convert more of those folks to clients, and then multiplying your clients on the back end with more referrals.

SPEAKER_00

This is the Afternoon Advisor, where we figure out why and how certain advisors are growing so fast, it looks like cheating. I'm Nate Hoskin, I'm a CFP practitioner, I'm a digital marketing nerd and a financial planner, and I spend my days building and breaking growth systems in my businesses and in yours. Today we are joined by Mr. Mike Barrasso. Mike, good afternoon. You are the co-founder and CEO of WealthReach. And from what I hear, you plugged in to your family RIA and you grew them from 150 million to 400 million from your biz dev seat. Tell me more about that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so it was a wild ride joining the industry. So I actually started my career in software sales. So kind of worked my way up all the way from an appointment center all the way up to managing sales teams and driving actual growth. When I joined the industry, I noticed that firms were focused on things that they really shouldn't be focused on. They were looking at tons of tools on a daily basis. They were focused on how they were implementing growth systems that frankly just didn't work and looking for a silver bullet. So one of the first things I did at our firm was build out a full growth system. So starting from our website, driving more traffic, putting out more content all the way into how do we capture more of that content and actually grow the firm. So that was a huge, huge focus for me.

SPEAKER_00

And you mentioned to me before we started rolling that there are really three glaring problems that you found with advisors that are trying to grow. What are those three?

SPEAKER_01

I think you mentioned two of them, but yeah, so I think one is the website that I mentioned. So uh one of the things I see a lot in the industry is that websites are pretty heavily templated. Um, so I think that has a host of issues from fatigue from consumers that are just looking at advisors' websites and they're seeing the same thing over and over again, but also they're just not SEO optimized. Um, the other thing that I think is a big one is that advisors don't have a full growth plan. So they're looking for the silver bullet, they're looking for one thing to solve all of their growth problems where it doesn't work like that. You need to have a full system end-to-end that's driving your growth on the front end, driving more people to your firm, figuring out how to convert more of those folks to clients, and then multiplying your clients on the back end with more referrals. Um, I'm forgetting the second one.

SPEAKER_00

I think we tied it in though, because it was really the fact that people have these really sporadic growth systems. They have a website that is templated and probably a little bit too old, right? And then that they are really attempting to do too many things at once rather than just focusing on the things that work and kind of jumping from solution to solution. I actually just heard this quote that there isn't a silver bullet, there are just lots of golden BBs. Yeah. And I'm like, that's spot on. That is exactly how I see it as well. There are also plenty of like bronze and lead BBs that you generally don't need to be messing around with. But if you have a couple of those, they end up working exceptionally well. I see the website as the main golden BB that a lot of firms are really overlooking. And I think you and I share a mild distaste for the classic advisor website, the lighthouse, the older couple that's like letting the sunset burn out their retinas. Yep. Tell me more about that. How do you look at the website and the ecosystem of this entire growth plan? And how would you recommend that advisor make strategic changes to their website?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think first thing to say, it's not the advisor's fault. I think that there are a lot of larger companies that have gotten comfortable in the space building really templated websites, selling it to advisors at uh a pretty high upfront fee to get onboard and then collecting their monthly payment every month. So I don't think it's an advisor issue of building bad websites. I think that they were sold on an idea that these websites that kind of just sit stagnant will work. Um, I know you talked to David and I watched that podcast, and he mentioned that a website cannot be a billboard. It needs to be a living, breathing thing. So what that looks like is not only building landing pages that are targeting your ideal client, uh, but also having content that's consistently updated within the website. But one other thing that I think is super important for the website is that it's not selling services. So when I was in software sales, there's this big thing don't feature sell. Never talk about the features, talk about the pain point that your ideal client has and how you solve it. So I think a big thing that advisors need to look at is one, figure out who your ideal client is, who you want to target. You don't need to niche down too much, but have a general idea of that. You know the problems they have, you solve them every day, figure out those, and then figure out how to how you speak to those problems, how you solve those problems. That should influence everything on your website. So I think first starting off with an audit of your website, how it's doing, what your SEO looks like today, if you're even coming up in any Chat GPT or Gemini answers, anything like that. And then figuring out, okay, how does my website look from a content perspective? What does the wording look like? How often am I updating it? And then figuring out a plan from there to make it better, which we can help with.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, there's definitely this weird trade-off where I feel like I always talk to advisors. It feels like 80% of the advisors that I talk to are actively changing their website. They're like, yeah, we're completely redesigning it. I'm like, wait, how often does this loop happen? But then you have the opposite. We actually keep a scorecard right now, me and the sales team, on our favorite worst advisor websites. Like we have a we have a ranking of like worst and down. Um the middle ground must be the best place to be where you're not always in this slog of like the website is the priority, the website is the thing that I'm doing, but we also don't want to leave it alone forever. What does a healthy active website look like?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think um it depends on how much growth you want to drive at the end of the day. If you have the capacity to put out new content on a weekly basis, I think it can only help you. Um, and I think that with these new algorithms, Google's algorithms are constantly changing, ChatGPT, Gemini, all where they're pulling data from is constantly changing. So I think you need to stay on top of those things. And as an advisor, it's hard, right? You're you don't want to spend the time monitoring what these algorithms are doing, what these chatbots are doing, and how they're citing content. So I would say the best thing for an advisor is either one, hire a really great firm that will manage your website for you and put out great content, or look on the technology side, which I think we we have some things coming that could definitely help with that as well.

SPEAKER_00

Got it. Okay, tell me if you can. I know that a little bit of this is still under wraps, but what would that look like? What would consistently updating the website for the sake of auditing with SEO and AEO look like?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think I think the part I can talk about is the SEO focused part of the website. So not building out a full website, but rather plugging into your current website and supercharging it with consistent content. So what that looks like is we're on a daily basis, really, we're looking at one, what keywords are trending up, what keywords are trending down, how your content is speaking to those keywords. We're also looking at things like what questions are people searching for, what questions are they asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and then we figure out okay, this is the content, these are the landing pages we need to create on your website that speak to these. So not only, for example, financial advisor in New York, retirement advisor in New York, financial advisor in Long Island. So getting really dialed down in terms of location, but also how do I how do I deal with my stock options? How do I deal with my RSUs? Um, how do I prepare for retirement? So, what questions are people answering and having content to targeted towards answering those questions? And one of them comes in with exactly what you guys do, not just landing pages that have text content, but also video content. We're seeing that these Gemini, Claude, all the chatbots are referencing what video content is saying a lot more. So YouTube, TikTok, they're pulling from all of these different sources. So I think creating not only just landing pages focused at the questions people are answering, but also creating content around it and having that automatic automatically go into your website could be a real game changer for advisors.

SPEAKER_00

You raise a really good point that I I could make the argument that Google gave us the perfect answer, meaning you could get a perfect answer to the question that you're asking. Generally, right? Like perfect is used broadly in this example. But I think where we're arriving with AI is this idea of the perfect solution. So for a client, they're not just seeking a financial advisor in Long Island, but also a financial advisor in Long Island who works with someone who has RSUs combined with non-qualified stock options, which need to be vested and sold in tandem to minimize the overall tax burden. Exactly. They can receive the perfect solution, someone can solve their exact problem. So I love the way that you guys are thinking about that from an AEO perspective. Well, we have content that answers your exact question, and we have a way of wording it so that you understand that we solve your exact problem. But there's a flip side to this where advisors are kind of starting to realize that they can also receive the perfect solution, especially in technology. So because you've been spending so much time coding, from what I've been hearing from the other guys on your team, you're up to like 3 a.m. every single night. Don't show much these days. Like it's just kind of a foregone conclusion that you're going to be awake and working if someone needs to text you. Yep. We're also seeing a bunch of advisors burning the midnight oil to vibe code their own tools. Broadly, I wanted to get your take on that. What do you think about advisors going in and building their own tools? Where do you see this going?

SPEAKER_01

It's interesting. I think I have two primary concerns with it. One, the first thing is I don't think advisors should be spending their time, frankly, on vibe coding. I think from what I've seen in my firm and with the firms that David and Dan consult with, that I also have had the opportunity to work with, I think advisors uh really get the most satisfaction. And also this contributes to their the success of their business the most, is when they're one, servicing current clients, making sure their clients are happy and being a part of their clients' lives as much as possible. And I want them spending time on that, right? The the other thing is when they're when they're focused on building out these tools, vibe coding, I think there's a lot of risks that come with it. Our industry is very, very regulated. Um, it's something you've had to deal with when building out your tool, something I've had to deal with. The compliance processes are long and they're really strict. I think advisors, and I not even advisors, I think the tools, the vibe coding tools, aren't at a place where we could trust them in terms of security, and then also the things they're writing. So I think it's really important to have a human in the loop, but also not rely on a vibe coded tool to handle client communications or put things out on your website. I think these need to be built by the engineers, and I think advisors would be most successful if they're focusing on one, how do I grow my business, two, how am I making my clients happier and generating more referrals?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I frankly agree with you. I love it. I'm definitely a hobbyist coder when it comes to just wanting to spin something up and try out a different tool or get some sort of different solution. It's such a fun thing that we've been able to partake in because like you and I both come from software in different ways. And I think that we both I got into coding enough to realize how bad I was at it, and that's about where I burned out. So to be able to come full circle and be like, oh, I have just enough technical knowledge to be able to do insane things, that's been that's been a really amazing experience for me. But I've definitely found that it's great for the V1, and the moment I get into V2, I need help, I need someone to be able to do it. Getting it to actually work, yeah. Like, how do I actually make it so someone can log in every single time? That's a whole other layer. Yep. And I think there is an element there of distraction. I agree with you, that advisors to some extent are getting distracted by this. And on the flip side of that, there are dedicated engineering teams who, frankly, are probably already building the tool that you're looking for, and they're so early stage that if you ask them for something, they now have so much capacity to go and build it for them. So I'm curious to know, you guys have been building a software platform. How are you reacting to user feedback? What does that look like? And how would you compare that against when you were in software sales and people were asking you for features?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think this was one of our top priorities, and especially one of my top priorities in building the company. Um, I was in the sales seat talking to prospective clients every day and even clients at some times and trying to upsell them. Um, and I think one of the major issues was that disconnect between sales, engineering, and product, right? The feedback would take too long, people would not be happy because it would take forever for these new features to get built out. So it was a priority for us from the beginning. When we're talking to a prospective client or to a current client and they have feedback for us, we're trying to implement that as fast as possible. And that's even come in some cases where it's been 24 hours. Um, we had one client in particular, I thought this was pretty cool. Um, they had requested a specific feature in the platform. Um, and if my memory serves me right, it was a specific filter. So that night I had stayed up until 3 a.m. like I do. As usual. Like I do. Um, built that feature. We deployed it the very next day, and I sent them an email saying, hey, it's in the platform, go check it out. And they were mind blown. They weren't expecting it to even be built out if it were or if it would ever be built out. So I think that's how you get one client to just rave about you, and then if you're in a sales cycle and you build out a feature they ask for, and the next time you talk to them, you have that feature. There's nothing more powerful than that.

SPEAKER_00

Of course, especially if they're demoing the platform or they're thinking about rolling it out to the team, something along those lines. Well, it's just a no-brainer that you would build it for them. And that I have noticed is a major change with all of the companies in our space, is that they can now take and implement feedback just as quickly as you mentioned. These are 24 one-week turnarounds. We're not talking about months and years anymore. And so, for advisors who are out there vibe coding, you could also probably use an existing tool and use their massive development backend that they've worked in and request those adjustments, that might be a better use of your time. Yep. If you want to build something institutional, great and you want to have something you can trust with client data. If you want to throw together a fantastic dashboard or have fun or like uh get like stuff before your meetings, great. Like those those are so much fun.

SPEAKER_01

100%. Yeah, if if the client data is out of the picture and you're not putting any of that out in public, I totally advocate that for that. It's a it's a blast to do. One, and two, you learn from it. You learn how to better interact with AI and kind of the inner fixings of how it actually works, the code and and how it all talks to each other, which I think unlocks how do I prompt AI better? How do I use it for more things in my business to give me more leverage? So, one example is at our firm. Um, my dad had always used Chat GPT in the past. Claude had come out with their new cowork feature. So he had an Excel spreadsheet, um, and there were client holdings that were coming over, and it was hundreds of different transactions that he had to comb through. And just for the fun of it, I was like, Dad, download this, pull out any of the important information, like any account numbers, anything like that, and run it through Claude and see how it does. So it was matching two spreadsheets of transactions, one and one PDF as well. So different formats, pretty wild. Um so it went through, it matched all these things, and he didn't even include some of the nuances that he caught on because he wanted to test it. It was perfect after he checked all of his work. So I don't think the the tools are in a place where you could rely on them for really important tasks like that yet, but they're getting there and getting familiarity of where you can use them uh in a day-to-day as an advisor, you could save yourself hours of work.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Especially when you have something doing it for you, which is definitely something that I've noticed in the AI space over the last couple of months, is this shift from copilot to autopilot. Because the copilots we would think of as the software we interact with on the day-to-day, right? I would say most software that as we think of it are copilots. It is a tool that enables you to do a task more effectively, but at the end of the day, you're still doing the task.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, Microsoft calls a copilot. Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_00

It's called copilot, like you're still in Excel, though. Like you're still there, you're still in the sheets, that kind of thing. But now we are getting into this agentic world where something can do it 100% for you. If we look forward, even we have to work in months now. We can't even say, like, oh, next year. Yep. In the next couple of months, where do you see that going for advisor growth? Where do you see them implementing fully autonomous systems or near fully autonomous?

SPEAKER_01

I think in a lot of other industries, you're gonna see these happen first. So you're gonna have completely autonomous systems that are running everything from SEO to your website to ads to cold outreach, uh, which is fantastic. Our industry with compliance, I think it's gonna take a little bit longer. Um, but I think we're gonna get to a point in I think under three, four months where we're gonna start seeing systems that handle your SEO for you, and all you need to do is approve it. So, like I said, creating those landing pages, helping create that content, all the advisor needs to do is approve it. And then also, how does that flow into how you prospect? How do you do cold outreach? So recognizing those visitors on your site, being able to reach out to them. And then once you close them as a client, how do I implement a referral methodology like Dan Allison, who is on your podcast, and and uh getting that implemented and having a full system to generate more referrals and being able to automate some of that as well. So I think we're gonna soon see the full growth funnel be more automated, but not quite autopilot yet in the next couple months.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and kind of like an autopilot in kind of where I always associate the term, which is the pilot takes the plane off and then presses the autopilot button that I don't even know if it exists. I've never been in a cockpit, but you kind of hit the autopilot button, but the pilot is still there, right? There is always the opportunity to audit what that machine or what that system is doing. Yep. But you know that if you go to the bathroom, you're gonna be okay. You're not gonna fall out of the sky, and you can come back and still be that overseeing layer. You just don't have to be the one actually pushing the buttons and making it happen. 100%. Does that does that excite or scare you?

SPEAKER_01

Uh it excites me. Um there's a little bit of fear uh because you have a lot of people that are being very negative about it, but I like to be, I like to take kind of the glass half-full mentality. So I think that it will only allow advisors, coming back to what I said earlier, to spend more time on the things that matter. I've seen firsthand in a firm that advisors spend a lot of time on things that they should not be spending time on. Um, from menial work to answering a quick question that could be answered very quickly to just trying to do cold outreach manually and cold call even. So I think there are a lot of tasks that advisors spend time on that can be automated to a point where it doesn't hurt or affect the client relationship, it'll actually only make it stronger because they'll be able to spend more time with that client.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I'm with you. And I I agree that there is an element of fear there, but the excitement for me comes not just from being able to buy back someone's time, but being able to buy back someone's ownership because I come like I had started a tiny little RIA, and I wanted my ownership of my practice, of my book. And I was luckily just at this point where I was able to use all of these systems and be a very effective one man shop. And it was actually in 2021 that I sat on stage in front of a crowd full of about. Like 16 trillion dollars in overall wealth management, like just insane, insane people sitting out in the audience. And I said on the panel, there will be a moment in the next five years where someone my age, I was 24 at the time, someone my age will be able to sit in their bedroom on their laptop and manage a billion dollars. I believe that has never been more true because these systems are going to enable us to scale in a way that isn't the traditional method. It's not headcount, it's not, it's not outsourcing that work to an RIA that takes 50% of your revenue. You get to buy back a good portion of your ownership.

SPEAKER_01

No doubt, no doubt. I think it's just gonna enable advisors to take on more capacity at the end of the day, like you said, and I think it's gonna give them more opportunities to touch base with their clients. Um, I remember very clearly when um when COVID happened in 2020, and I was home from college and my dad was working from home, and all of his clients were calling. 150 plus people were calling him. Um, just crazy times. But on top of having to field these phone calls, calm his clients down, which is the most important, important thing in wealth management, no doubt. But also, he had to manage payroll, he had to manage all of these other different aspects of the business and couldn't focus on this. So being able to delegate those things, if it's not to an AI and then to a human, massive for advisors. I think advisors should focus on the things that they crush and then the other things that they don't excel at that they don't like doing, figuring out a way to delegate it, which is hard. I I've struggled with it, but delegation is so massive for advisors. Yes.

SPEAKER_00

And being able to delegate to new systems has been an amazing way to approach that. Yes. How do you think advisors should balance the let's say, let's say we're starting an RAA together, right? And I I love the way David framed this when he was on the podcast. He said, well, in that case, let's assume that we have the resources to do this right. It's not gonna be you and me putting our last dollar on the table and saying, let's go do this. Got it. So we have enough money that we can make a decision between hiring a human over hiring a system. When do we hire the system? Like for what parts of the business, and when do we hire the human?

SPEAKER_01

That's a really good question. I think that there are certain things that should take priority in a firm. Um, and I think if we're starting from zero, um, I want to any client communications, I want to be manual and I want them to be human. So I think a really good customer success person, um client service manager, so someone that the clients know really well and that they're able to communicate with on a daily basis if they need anything at all. I think the systems that the things that I would rely more on technology is the growth part aspect of the firm. Um, super important, but a lot of the things that you could do when you're hiring an agency to run your ads or you're hiring an agency to do your SEO, a lot of AI systems could do these things already. So for example, the website. Um, one of the things that we'll help with is generating that website at a lower cost, it's a monthly cost instead of paying a firm 20, 30, 40, 50, talk to someone the other day, $100,000 uh for a website. Um we don't want to we don't want to spin up a new firm and immediately drop that much cash into a website. Um the other things is the SEO. Instead of paying an SEO agency four, five, six grand a month, we have systems that can put out SEO-friendly content for you, and then you backfill it with the videos. That's another human aspect of it, creating content, real face-to-face content through videos. So that's another human aspect of it. The last part of it that I think would come into play is um the cold outreach aspect of it. I think there needs to be a human in the loop here because we don't want to just blast out cold outreach to people. But I think uh if we're at the stage of basically zero with some resources to invest in growth, I think that the advisor could start by doing this and then hand it off to a person immediately. So, what that would look like in practice is we're driving people to the website through SEO, through ads, through content. From there, we have a system that's capturing those people. So they're gonna be people that do form fills, they're gonna be people that download things, they're gonna be people that book meetings. But a really great site, one out of every 10 people is booking a meeting. So, how do we capture those other folks? How do we reach out to them, re-engage them, tap them on the shoulder, see if they need anything, and hopefully book them for a meeting? I think reaching out to uh an advisor for a lot of people is tough. Um, it's a weird thing to talk about your money, especially when you feel lost. Like I think when people get divorced or someone dies, really tough times for people to tap an advisor on the shoulder. Someone's on your website and you tap them on the shoulder and just check in and say, hey, do you need anything? You might help one more person. So converting more folks that are hitting your website and optimizing that. The last piece of the puzzle is once you convert people to clients, how do you multiply those clients? So at my firm, at so many firms I've talked to, it's just they wait for referrals. They don't have a system that will help them generate more referrals by making their clients the best salespeople that are possibly out there. And there's ways to do this that are not salesy. So I'd recommend checking out your podcast with Dan Allison. He's the master. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00

We had so much fun talking with him about that too. It's been so much fun being here in Miami with you guys and being able to run through and just like have these sorts of conversations with people who are quite literally writing the books and building the systems behind organic growth. So I am unbelievably excited. We now get to get out of here and actually go to the announcement at Future Proof. So it is day one. We are super excited to go and hang out with the Wealth Reach guys and everyone else who will be joining us at Future Proof. And if you are in Miami, well, you're gonna miss it because you're not gonna see this podcast until we're already gone. All right. Thanks so much. Have a great one.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you too.