The Afternoon Advisor

Spending $650k/Month in Ads & Being a Contrarian w/ Aaron Cirksena | The Afternoon Advisor E10

• Nate Hoskin, CFP®, AWMA

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0:00 | 35:23

This advisor is spending $650,000 a month on paid ads. He knows exactly what he'll make back.

Aaron Cirksena is the CEO and founder of MDRN Capital — one of the fastest-growing fully virtual RIAs in the country. His entire strategy is built around doing the opposite of what the industry tells you to do: extending the sales process instead of shortening it, offering a performance pledge no other firm will touch, and going fully virtual when everyone else was opening offices. In this episode, he pulls back the curtain on the data, the hiring, and the mindset behind it all.

You'll learn:

  • The KPI framework that makes spending $650K/month on ads not just possible — but profitable
  • Why Aaron extended his prospect meeting process to four meetings instead of cutting it down
  • The performance pledge — what it is, how it passed compliance, and why it closes deals
  • How Google reviews, client testimonial videos, and PR work together to lower your cost per booked meeting
  • Why going fully virtual was the unlock for national scale — and why multi-location expansion can't compete
  • The hiring philosophy that changed everything: buy your time back or don't make the hire

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🔗 Learn more about MDRN Capital → https://mdrncapital.com/

🔗 Connect with Aaron → https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-cirksena/



SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we started out very basic again when it was just myself. I didn't have sort of the in-house marketing team that I do now that's really started to expand and make sure that we have the SEO, the GEO, all of those things that help as well. But I started out just thinking of everything from the client journey sort of perspective. Like I knew that the first place that any potential client was going to see us was probably going to be social media. Just given how much you're spending. Exactly. And so they may see my face or see our messages five, 10, 15 times before it ever resonates with them. But I knew the first step that people generally take, if it did resonate with them, some people will just book a meeting directly off the bat. But a lot of people, the first place they're going to go is where you think, right? Google. Of course, they're going to go find you. They're going to go find you. They're going to Google either your company name or your name, right? And so you want to make sure that the things that they're seeing are positive things, right? And so if they Google you and you've never been featured in an article, right, in a big publication, if it looks like you're just running a one-man operation if you have no Google reviews or client testimonials, then how are they going to see that you would maybe resonate with them more than any other advisor out there? And so once we realized that, that's when we said, okay, we want to make sure that every step along the way of the client journey, clients or potential clients are getting to see and hear experiences of other people that have worked with us that might be similar to them, basically.

SPEAKER_02

This is the afternoon advisor where we figure out why some advisors are growing so fast, it looks like magic. I'm Nate Hoskin. I'm a financial planner and a digital marketing nerd, and I spend my days building and breaking growth systems in my own businesses and in yours. Earlier this year, I heard about an advisor that was allegedly spending a million dollars a month on paid ads. That was more than enough to convince me to fly out to Annapolis to interview with him, but there are still so many things I don't understand about one of the fastest growing RIAs in the United States. Today I'm joined by Aaron Cerxena. He is the CEO and founder of Modern Capital. In my opinion, Modern Capital lives up to its name. Yes, they're a fully digital firm that offers everything from investment management to tax preparation, but they also embrace Google Reviews, AEO and SEO, organic video marketing, and paid advertising, all the things you need to grow an RAA online today. So with that, Aaron, thank you so much for joining me and good afternoon. Thanks for having me, man.

SPEAKER_01

And just to correct initially, we don't spend a million dollars a month on F4, right around probably about $650,000 a month. $650,000. Just to be exact. That is incredible. Yeah, it's become pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_02

How do you make that possible?

SPEAKER_01

So honestly, it's by just tracking every single data point in our business. We would not be able to spend what we spend if we didn't know it was going to translate into a certain level of profit for us. So one of the biggest reasons is just by being fully virtual completely, having no physical office space, no overhead in that regard. That's helped a lot. But at the same time, we know our marketing costs, we know our cost for getting a meeting booked with one of our advisors, we know their closing ratios. So ultimately, we know down to an exact dollar figure what our cost of client acquisition is. And then we know what our client long-term value is, basically, when you build it out. And so it makes it very easy to spend the large amounts that we now spend when you know all of that. If we didn't track our numbers as closely as we do, it would just be a crapshoot. And honestly, that's the realm that a lot of advisors live in. That's truthfully the realm that I lived in back when I was doing things in person and I was running seminars and you know, going out and doing in-person marketing events. I just knew if I did a seminar and I spent a certain amount of money, I usually ended up making more than that two months later, right, with the clients I brought on. But we didn't track anything. So now with digital marketing, it's just every metric has become trackable, and that's one of the things that's made it easier for us to spend what we spend.

SPEAKER_02

Well, and that part of the business can be borderline poisonous to new advisors because if you show up and you just do a certain corpus of work, you're probably going to get enough clients that in your head you're going to be like, yeah, that made sense, right? I think I made some money. So I'm assuming you didn't start at $650,000 a month.

SPEAKER_01

No, definitely not. So back a few years ago when it was literally just myself and I was just marketing for myself, and I had gone from doing in-person marketing to doing online and digital marketing mainly, I was spending maybe five to $10,000 a month. Okay. Right. And that was to keep my own calendar very, very full pretty much every day of the week. But it starts out gradually. You measure things, you test what works and what doesn't. You start to get your KPIs dialed in. And from that point, it becomes much more comfortable to begin scaling. And that's what I started doing by hiring my brother as my second advisor at my firm and basically trying to fill his calendar with meetings. And we just kind of kept going from there. But again, the more data we had, the more meetings we did, the tighter and tighter our KPIs got, right? Because with one advisor doing, say, 40 meetings in a month, you're going to have so much data and KPIs and closing ratios and everything can ebb and flow a lot more. When you have a thousand meetings amongst 20 advisors, right, everything kind of works its way back to the law of large numbers at that point. It converges. Exactly. So it's actually having more spend, more advisors doing more meetings, the data actually becomes a lot more consistent and a lot easier to track at that point.

SPEAKER_02

So there was kind of a critical mass there where once you had enough meetings on the books, you actually felt confident scaling the spend even higher because now you knew what the what that converged environment would look like.

SPEAKER_01

That's exactly what it was. And from there, it was just making sure that certain metrics didn't start to balloon out of control as we kept scaling, right? Like we knew or I knew what our cost for a booked meeting was when it was just me doing it. I knew what the show-up rate was to that meeting. I knew what my closing ratio was for most people off of those meetings. But ultimately, I had to make sure that as we went from doing 40, 50 meetings in a month or booking that many to booking a thousand meetings in a month, that our cost per booked meeting didn't double, triple, quadruple, right? I would almost expect it to. And so that's been one of the nice things to see is that there is such a blue ocean, it seems, of people when you can advertise and market nationally versus what I was doing in person of just marketing locally in, say, a small, wealthy town like Annapolis. There's so many people out there now that have even north of half a million dollars, which is sort of our minimum that we market to, that you really it hasn't affected the metrics very much as far as what it costs us to book a meeting. It's just we have now a massive nationwide platform to distribute the educational content that we put out there too. But we have yet to kind of hit that glass ceiling. So I don't know, maybe if we double or triple in size, like maybe we'll eventually hit it. But it's also why we're trying to expand to as many channels as possible. Like you said, we're trying to become really omnipresent if we can.

SPEAKER_02

Well, and you have done such a good job because I think that there are best practices that are being preached, frankly, by people in my position, the marketers, the marketers of the financial world. And the ones that have really been rising to the top recently have been things like Google reviews and SEO, or like AEO and GEO. What is your take? I know you do a bunch of Google reviews. What do you see the ROI being on that?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we started out very basic again when it was just myself. I didn't have sort of the in-house marketing team that I do now that's really started to expand and make sure that we have the SEO, the GEO, all of those things that help as well. But I started out just thinking of everything from the client journey sort of perspective. Like I knew that the first place that any potential client was going to see us was probably gonna be social media. Just given how much you're spending. Exactly. And so they may see my face or see our messages five, 10, 15 times before it ever resonates with them. But I knew the first step that people generally take, if it did resonate with them, some people will just book a meeting directly off the bat. But a lot of people, the first place they're gonna go is where do you think, right? Google. Of course, they're gonna go find you. They're gonna go find you. They're gonna Google either your company name or your name, right? And so you want to make sure that the things that they're seeing are positive things, right? And so if they Google you and you've never been featured in an article, right, in a big publication, if it looks like you're just running a one-man operation if you have no Google reviews or client testimonials, then how are they going to see that you would maybe resonate with them more than any other advisor out there? And so once we realized that, that's when we said, okay, we want to make sure that every step along the way of the client journey, clients or potential clients are getting to see and hear experiences of other people that have worked with us that might be similar to them, basically.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

We had an amazing conversation with Andrew Johnson, who founded Testimonial IQ. And he described it as reviews kind of being this heuristic for the plethora of data that's out there on any given person, that Googling loop that you were describing clients doing. Having something where you can say, All right, wow, I just Googled Aaron and there are 400 results, all with his full name in there. Yep. What's the way that I can get the most rich information on the experience I would have with him? It ends up being reviews, right? And then at least what we've been seeing is that that translates wonderfully to SEO and AEO. Are you seeing the same?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's what we actually saw, especially after we started getting more and more Google reviews from current clients and we started putting out some actual client testimonial videos just from some clients that we have that were kind enough to be willing to sit down and really go through kind of an interview-like experience of what we're doing of look, why did you end up choosing us? Like, what were the things that when we took you through our process that resonated with you that ultimately made you select a firm where you were never going to meet your advisor in person? Right, fully virtual. Yeah. And so literally having them just out of their own mouths answer a lot of those questions, it all translates back to how people find you, SEO, right? Like it all helps kind of as an aggregate with the overall costs of getting a booked meeting, right? If we didn't have a lot of those things and it was just people seeing us in a paid advertisement on YouTube or on uh on Facebook or Google, our cost would probably be dramatically higher, right?

SPEAKER_02

Interesting. So you're you are purposefully, consciously keeping your cost per booked meeting low by doing so much beyond paid ads. Like these, the organic video marketing, all of those elements, like interesting.

SPEAKER_01

I had not thought of it that way at all. And the way you have to think about it is like I said initially, there's always gonna be those people that if you put out a good message in a paid ad, right, and it really resonates with them, that they might just click the link and say, I'm gonna book with this person, just see what they have to say. But that's only a finite percentage of people, right? The next sort of tranche you get into is the people that it might resonate with them, but they're gonna want to do their research a little bit first, right? So you want to give them the easiest path and the easiest ability to do that research humanly possible, right? So if they can Google you and they see 100, 150 five-star Google reviews, and all the reviews are nicely written by clients that are going through similar experiences to them, and then they can just as easily find video testimonials that clients have given talking about the experience and why they chose you. It just starts to confirm things in their head that, like, look, this is a trustworthy firm that is competent in dealing with the things that I need help with, right? It goes back to even having a PR company. Like initially, I would do PR and I would get featured in publications like the Wall Street Journal or different, you know, Forbes, all these places. Again, when people see that, it just helps to build the trust. Because when you're a fully virtual firm and you don't have an office building that they can walk into, like, say a local Fidelity or Edward Jones, everybody's always going to be a little bit skeptical initially. So you have to give them a reason to trust you, right? Don't just leave it up to chance.

SPEAKER_02

When you were talking with clients and you were collecting the unstructured data on how they found you and the journey they took to discover and build trust with you, what surprised you in those conversations?

SPEAKER_01

I think what surprised me the most is actually the level of due diligence and research that most people do. It is a very small percentage of people that do just see one message and choose to book. Most people, when they would meet, they would actually say to my advisors or back when I was doing meetings myself to me directly, they would say, I have literally seen your face and heard your voice so many times every time I open my social media feed that I've started to hear it in my sleep, basically. And they were like, Finally, after hearing and seeing it that many times, I went to Google, I started looking up, I started seeing your guys' reviews, I started seeing the client testimonials, people were talking about the exact same fears and you know concerns that I basically have around my retirement. And that was what ultimately led me to scheduling. So I always say jokingly, I would apologize. I'm like, I'm sorry that you're having to see me that much. I'm sure it gets annoyed. They would jokingly say they were like, no, honestly, like if I hadn't heard it that many times, if I'd just seen it one time here or there, probably just never would have thought about it or I would have forgotten about it, right? People's attention spans are very short nowadays.

SPEAKER_02

And that wasn't enough by any means to say, oh, I saw his video once. I'm gonna entrust him with a million dollars. It seems out of the question.

SPEAKER_01

That's the other thing, and that partially goes back to our meeting process too, because I've seen other firms that have tried to do virtual meetings, and I think a part of where they get hung up or they get poor performance out of it, and they just go back to doing it in person, is if you try to cram the trust building into too short of a process where a lot of advisors will say, all right, great, we're gonna do a discovery session, and then the next meeting, I'm just presenting you with the plan and take it or leave it, basically, right?

SPEAKER_02

Kind of a close-on call, like you're here or you're not.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, if you have people with two, three, five million dollars, their life savings, and they've never met you in person, they've never shook your hand, it's very difficult to build that level of trust in a two-meeting process. I don't care how good it is. So we've sort of built our process. Learning this after doing a lot of meetings and listening, I'm sure, yeah. Listening to feedback, figuring out what works and what doesn't. We've stretched our typical meeting process to not just three, but typically four meetings. So we put in a lot of time up front with prospects, whether they become clients or not, because we want them all to have the experience of being educated first and not to feel like anything is just being, here you go, like here's the plan, take it or leave it. We want to take them through that process and have them educate themselves so that ultimately they're the ones making the decision and feeling good about it of whether they come on board or not.

SPEAKER_02

Everything you're telling me sounds like the things that advisors avoid, like the plague, because we are trained that those are not profitable. Correct. That you shouldn't be spending a huge amount on paid ads, that you shouldn't be investing in all of these organic channels, that you certainly shouldn't be extending your prospect meeting timeline, your sales cycle. Exactly. Because the whole point is to condense that and reduce the cost per client. Seems like you guys are so willing to invest in the client before they invest in you, and it's paying massive dividends for you.

SPEAKER_01

Honestly, whatever the common sense sort of world and financial advising would tell you about all of those things, I think from the very onset, I've tried to do the exact opposite, like actively. And it's because by doing things differently in almost every single possible way, we are the firm ultimately that stand out to people. Because look, we know if they're meeting with us, they're probably meeting with two, three, sometimes five other firms, right? But I know that those two, three, or five other firms are gonna do things in a very, very similar method and similar process one to the next. So I know that just by the way that we do things, by the content that we put out, like our process in its entirety, is gonna be so different of an experience to them that I think that's what leads to more people rather than less choosing us at the end of the day. Absolutely. What else are you a contrarian on? I think the digital marketing side I'm a contrarian on. I think the passive versus active management I'm a contrarian on. You know, we've sort of put out something called our performance pledge. You know, a lot of companies are, I think, nervous to try and take on the responsibility of tax planning or tax preparation, estate planning, like all of those things. Like most financial advisors, I think, would rather just stick to their wheelhouse of we're gonna help manage your investments and that's what we get paid for, and that's it. Yep. Those, I think, are the firms that as AI gets better and better over the coming, you know, five, 10 years that are really gonna go by the wayside. You have to almost from the onset, I think, have that one-stop shop mentality because that's what people are still willing to pay for. Like ultimately, they're paying us to make their life as easy as humanly possible. So if we're only focusing on one sort of siloed segment, like just the investment management, that still leaves a lot of other things for wealthy clients to have to worry about on their own.

SPEAKER_02

And often you will only add to that tumult because you will be handing them, like, oh, here's your tax form, here's your financial plan, but I need you to go talk to six other people to actually make this happen.

SPEAKER_01

Correct. So we've literally gotten things to the point where we don't even ask clients to gather their own tax forms. We just gather them for them from their accounts at our custodial platform. We internally have uh staff members that basically are tasked with doing this during tax season. So if they get a 1099 or a W-2 from work, right, that's basically all they're having to send us. Everything else we pretty much do for them. When it comes to estate planning, we literally walk them through the estate planning process. We have online notaries that will notarize the documents that get created through the estate planning process. So everything from start to finish of our process is a handheld experience. Because again, when you're working virtual, it's gonna be difficult for some people. Not everybody's gonna be comfortable with that using technology. So we want to make it as seamless and painless of a process as humanly possible.

SPEAKER_02

But the trade you make for not having people come in person is that you can serve people nationally, which it sounds like has also borne huge dividends for you.

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Powell That was the big thing, and I think that's what allowed us to scale as quickly as we have, is you have to think there are other firms, I know a lot of them, even in the independent space, that are pretty well-scaled firms that might have 10 or 15 different office locations amongst, you know, five or 10 different states, even. That is a very slow grinding process. There is so much more that goes into logistics of having to find office space than find local advisors that you can hire and local staff members that you can hire to fill that office space, then doing local marketing, right? And you only have a certain amount of people that you can market to in a given area and you're competing with all the other local firms. So for us, it was a much more simplified sort of streamlined scaling process. We didn't have to worry about any of that stuff. All we knew is we can hire the best talent, as far as advisors, operational staff, anybody at our company, no matter where they are in the country, doesn't matter, right? And same thing, we have the ability to market to anybody in the country. And so the only things that we have to worry about when we're scaling is what is the cost of marketing, what's the cost of client acquisition, and we have to make sure that we get ahead of any potential hires that we need to make earlier rather than later, right?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I I have insight that the people listening to us don't, but I know that this will tie in. What would you say is the smartest decision you've made in your business so far?

SPEAKER_01

The smartest decision, I think, other than just going virtually when we did, right? And just really saying we're gonna jump in with both feet, not trying to do sort of the half in-person, half virtual model, and we've really built our brand around being fully virtual. I think overall that was probably the smartest decision. But as far as right after that, it would be starting to expand the team and starting to hire people other than me. I think so often, and I was guilty of this myself, we as advisors will try to wear so many hats and we will try to do a little bit of everything. We try to run the business, we may try to do the books of the business, we're trying to meet with clients, we're trying to do the investment management ourselves. Run payroll. Exactly, run payroll. I mean, I was doing this myself for the first six months of the, you know, the time where we formed our company and I had hired three advisors, I was the one running payroll for them, right? Just wearing hats that I had no business wearing. And eventually, right, I wish I had done it even a little earlier, it got to the point where I was wearing myself, you know, thin and I was burning myself out. So I had to go find some help. And luckily I found our COO, Josh, uh, who's the president of our company, but he was strong in all the areas I was weak, right? I was very good at being creative, at coming up with marketing. Concepts, coming up with a good offering for our clients, he was very strong in putting processes around all of the things that we needed, right? Whether it was the tax, the estate planning, how we go about hiring and recruiting talent, just everything around that.

SPEAKER_02

So you have you've landed on what I think is the true separator between really successful firms and unsuccessful firms because it there are a million and one ways to break the lead problem, right? You can get people in the door to have meetings on the calendar, you can grow your AUM, but true scale, from my perspective, lies in talent and hiring. How do you approach that as you grow so fast? I'm sure you're still hiring like crazy to this day. What's your approach there?

SPEAKER_01

Our approach is we're very, very patient. We go through a lot, and I mean a lot of potential interviews with a lot of different people before we ever pull the trigger on one. And we learned that early on, right? That it can be a mistake to just hire somebody because they might have, you know, a certain number of years of experience, or they might have a CFP designation, or whatever the case is. They also may not end up being great with people, especially not virtually, right? So we've gotten so much more refined in what we look for in someone. And we have a full-time staff member that that's all their job is, is just recruiting, just doing interviews with potential advisors or other operational staff members that we have needs for. So it makes it much easier to be patient when you have a dedicated team member that that's all they're doing every single day. It doesn't feel like you have to hire the first person that comes in the door. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

But you did have to hire people on your own for a good while. And for plenty of advisors, even some, I'm sure, who have achieved similar scale to you, they're still making hires for job positions that they don't know what to expect from. Correct. What was what was your experience like with that? Because now you have CMOs, you have you have people that have levels of expertise that you don't yourself possess.

SPEAKER_01

It's one of the toughest things about hiring at the beginning that starts to get easier as you really start to build out a team, right? When I first hired my COO, Josh, I had never hired anybody in an operational type of role. I had basically just hired other advisors. I sort of knew what to look for in another advisor myself, and so I was fairly confident hiring them. But I'd never hired somebody operationally. And so all I knew was immediately when I met with him, the way that he thought about things resonated very, very well and meshed very, very well with the way I thought about things, but he was complimentary to me. It's almost like a spouse, right? Where they'll say, like, your spouse, you want them to be strong in the areas that you're weak. That's exactly how he was, right? I complimented him, he complimented me. And from there, he had such a breadth of experience in different uh companies in the industry that he had a very good sort of Rolodex of people in different areas, whether it was marketing, whether it was, you know, our head of sales, Eric, now that we have, so that he could go out and reach out to some of these people and collectively we would interview them and make sure we both felt strongly about them. But those initial hires are tough because yeah, you are a little bit treading outside of your, you know, your comfort zone and your waters of what you know. So I just think you have to jump in and just test it eventually. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Do you subscribe to the trust fast and remove trust fast type of approach where it's like, yeah, we're gonna hire you, we're gonna trust up front that you can do this, and the moment you prove us wrong, you're out.

SPEAKER_01

I very much do. I give a little leeway to people, obviously, but what you don't want to do is you don't want to hire somebody that ultimately is sucking time away from you, right? The goal with any hire that you make, whether it's operational or another advisor or anything, is that you're essentially buying your own time back, which is what we've done. So if you end up finding somebody that you're having to constantly remind them to do certain things, or you're having to constantly double check their work or sort of look over their shoulder, that's a person who ends up taking time away from you, not somebody that's giving you time back.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I've seen in a lot of firms that the worst decision they have made is often talent related. Is it the same with you, or is there a different worst decision you've made in your business?

SPEAKER_01

So the worst decision I think that I've made is just waiting too long to start hiring people. You know, I really was working, even back when I was working in person back in 2015, you know, prior to COVID happening. I probably very early on could have hired at least an assistant or some additional help to sort of, again, buy more of my own time back. But I was very type A, I still am, so it's very difficult for me to relinquish control of things. Like I wanted to make sure that paperwork was done properly. I wanted to make sure that a client was getting a response in a timely manner, right? And I felt like for so long that I was the only one capable of doing that. That I think is the biggest mistake that I made. You have to be willing to accept and trust that people other than you might not do things 100% of the degree that you do them. But the only way that you can scale and get better and get bigger and help more people is if you find people that can do things competently and can do things to as close of a degree as possible to how you would do them yourself.

SPEAKER_02

Well, and I find that I definitely overestimate my ability to do things sometimes where I say that I'm doing it at 100% effectiveness, but payroll is such a poignant example for me because that is such a hard one to relinquish. Yeah. Because you're like, well, this is like the money of the firm, my like my capital that I need to be in charge of stewarding going out to my team, and I need to make sure it's perfect. And it's like, yeah, but then you're just gonna run it on a Saturday after a long week of work, and like, are you really double checking?

SPEAKER_01

And so it's funny, when I started to really get into the realm of doing things like that, that I was just not the best person to be doing it. Luckily, I realized it fairly quickly, and that was really the time where I was like, okay, I've got to start finding some other people for some dedicated positions for this stuff. Now it's almost after doing it for, you know, two plus years at this point and hiring the amount of people that we have. I'm almost the opposite mentality now. It's like anything that I think of, I'm like, who can we hire? Who can we go get the best person who's best suited for this exact role or task that we need them to do, versus trying to just have somebody take on like a secondary task or me to do something myself anymore. Right. Yeah, it flips where you're like, there's actually no chance that I will be doing this.

SPEAKER_02

So either it's not happening or I'm gonna go realize.

SPEAKER_01

What role are you hiring for next? So we are continuously hiring for more advisors. We have recently brought on uh a number of additional onboarding staff just to make sure that from an onboarding standpoint, we are always consistent as being able to onboard people quickly and efficiently and never having them backlog. Outside of that, we'll probably eventually hire more advisor coaches. So we actually have coaches for our advisors that will watch their meeting tapes, make sure that they're helping them to be as effective as possible and helping them track their statistics. So for every certain amount of advisors that we hire, we'll typically bring on another coach for that group of advisors. But those are really the main positions right now. We've filled out most of our leadership team. Uh we've got about four people in our marketing department. We are going to be adding some SDR roles in our marketing department just so that we have in-house uh outreach, basically. Got it for things like calling of old prospects, confirmation calls of people that have meetings with us, right? Just because it's more controllable. But slowly over time, we've realized that the more and more things that we can bring in-house, the less reliance we can sort of have on like partners and agencies. It gives us more control over the process itself and kind of what that process looks like. And it's always ended up panning out better for us.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you can build it in directly to the DNA of the firm instead of hoping that that vendor or that agency is going to line up perfectly, especially when your expectations are so high, right? Like your level of excellence is so elevated compared to where most people are.

SPEAKER_01

And you know where that person's time is being spent, right? And it's only being spent on your business. It's not as a vendor being spent on 50 different advisory businesses that they're having to help. So yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02

So going back to the lead gen side of the business, you make a guarantee. You have a you have your uh what is it called the pledge? The performance pledge. Yep. Tell me more about that because that I can imagine is a risk to take, or at least that's what your average advisor would say.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so we had to run that by compliance. We actually uh got the full okay with it, the way that we have the language written and the way that it's actually formed out. But it really came about because I have done so many meetings myself and collectively across our advisors, we've done tens of thousands of meetings. We have so much data and information and feedback from all the meetings of clients we did not win and the clients that we did win of what makes them happy versus what irritates them. And I can tell you 100%, one of the most consistent things that irritates people with our overall, like advisory, just firms in general, basically, our overall profession, is they don't feel like we have the same skin in the game that they do. Clients and prospects feel like I've spent my whole life working for this nest egg that I'm going to choose to hand over to you. And whether that nest egg does well or whether it does poorly, you're gonna be making money. Of course. Right. And so it can be frustrating to them when they hear things like, Well, yeah, but we'll do better if you're doing better. People think of it as, yeah, but you're still gonna do just fine, even if my accounts are doing worse, right?

SPEAKER_02

The AUMP fallacy of like, yes, yes, you're right. We will do better when you do better, but we're gonna, we're gonna be fine.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and so that's we were racking our brains, and I was racking my brain around trying to think of what we could come up with as an offering to make people understand that we truly are sitting on the same side of the table as them and we are taking a similar degree of risk that they're taking, right? And that was kind of where the performance pledge was bred. And so we have it on one particular growth portfolio that we offer to a lot of our clients. Most of them choose to use it, but it's unique in that it's a tactical strategy. It's got a very long track record of history that I was able to look back to see how often has it ever had two quarters in a row of negative performance, which is that's the way our performance pledge works. And it was extremely rare. I think it's only happened one, maybe two times over a 20-plus year track record. And so to me, the risk, if you want to call it that, was very well worth the squeeze because it is such a differentiator when people are meeting with multiple firms, and we can say as they're going through that process, by the way, you might want to ask firm X, Y, or Z, like, what happens with your advisory fee if your accounts are going down? Do they ever stop it? Right. Or are they just gonna keep on billing you whether your accounts are doing well or whether they're doing poorly? Right.

SPEAKER_02

That's a layup against any other advisory firm to say, well, we have a guarantee, like that's a competitive advantage. And yes, it's absolutely a risk. Like, but I think that risk sharing is such an amazing thing to be able to give clients because absolutely, like there might be a time where markets are bad enough that you will need to, you will need to make good on that pledge and pause advisory fees. But the additional business you win from it and the services you can provide to those, because you will then serve those clients. What's your what's your LTV? 10 years?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, exactly. So if we plan out our LTV and we know what that is, and it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 to $150,000 over a 10-year period, like we know very easily if it is to happen. We can easily as a company absorb that risk. And so to us, it just gives us something that, again, we can sit on the same side of the table as the client, whereas they're going to feel meeting with a lot of other firms that they're kind of sitting on opposite sides of the table. And we tried to do that with everything. Like with our overall offering, whether it's the performance pledge, the covering the cost of tax planning and filing, estate planning and trust work, like all of this stuff, having a Medicare team, like social security professionals. We have tried to cover every single base that somebody who is a pre-retiree or retiree could possibly need throughout their life, basically. And I do that because I want my advisors' jobs of bringing on clients to be as easy as possible for them. I want to make our offering as differentiated as humanly possible from everybody else. So some firms, yeah, they might think that we're crazy for offering that, but again, we're trying to be almost the opposite of every firm out there, you know, and that's how we stand out.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Your booze mean nothing to me.

SPEAKER_02

I exactly what makes you cheer. Exactly. I love it. Well, this was incredible. I have learned so much from you, Aaron. Thank you so much for joining me here in this random top of an apartment building in Annapolis on a Wednesday or Thursday. Absolutely, man. So thank you. Much appreciated.