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Welcome back to the 189th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Taylor Schulte. Taylor is the founder of Define Financial, an independent RIA based in San Diego, CA that oversees $76 million of assets under management for 60 families in or approaching retirement. What's unique about Taylor, though, is the way he's grown his practice by proactively spending on marketing, from hiring a branding and website design agency to a PR firm to running ongoing advisor marketing experiments, and everything from local SEO to email marketing automation.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about both the hits and the misses in marketing that Taylor has experienced along the way. From the initial $12,000 he invested into his original website that, in retrospect, wasn't focused enough to succeed, to the $24,000 he spent on a PR firm that was deemed valuable but not something he continued, how Taylor figured out how to turn podcast listeners into clients (but only after 3 years of trying), and the way all his marketing results accelerated once he decided to narrow to a more focused target clientele to pursue, even though it meant firing his mother and his grandfather from being clients, such that today, 75% of all of Taylor's new clients first reach out to him through his well-targeted website that speaks to his niche clientele.
We also talk about Taylor's own evolution within the business. How he hit the wall at $250,000 of revenue and got stuck, unable to grow further, not because of his marketing, but his operations limitations, the way he got through the blocking point by hiring an office manager to take over and focus on those operational aspects, the unique hiring process that Taylor used to find the ideal office manager, and the journal that Taylor now keeps to monitor what he should be doing and what he needs to start delegating.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Taylor shares how working with business coaches have helped him break through the key blocking points in his business, how he has come to rely on CRM workflows, even though Taylor in his own words is not operations-minded, and why Taylor's biggest regret is that he didn't focus on his niche clientele earlier, even as he recognizes that struggling without a niche focus for several years may have been the only way he could eventually accept why getting more focused would help the way that it has.