Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Today I'm thrilled to share with you some thoughts about career development.

Most importantly, I'd like you to have a real live case study of how applying some of the simple steps that we've talked about on this show of Brian Tracy's the thousand percent formula can lead, even if by accident, to your increasing your income by a thousand percent every ten years.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Tuesday, February 17, 2015. Today I bring you an interview with financial planner extraordinaire Michael Kitsis, one of the more well-known writers in the financial planning space. He writes at kitsis.com. This is a repeat appearance for him on the Radical Personal Finance Podcast and today we're going to talk about his career.

I had the opportunity to interview Michael when I was out in Dallas last week at the T3 Technology Tools for Today conference for financial advisors. I jumped on a plane real quick and shot out there and one of the things that I was able to do was to do a bunch of really great interviews.

Most of them are very focused on the financial advisor space and you'll hear that in this interview. This interview essentially follows two parts. The first part is a discussion of Michael's career and especially as it relates to conferences. I thought this was such a timely topic in light of yesterday's show and in light of some things that I've been wanting to bring you here on the show, of just talking about the importance of conferences as they might be for your career.

I thought it was a useful story of how careers can develop, even if by accident. Now, one of the cool things, if you know something can develop by accident, what about developing it on purpose? That's what we can choose to do. I want you to listen to Michael's story.

That's the first part of the interview. The second part of the interview talks a little bit about marketing for financial advisors. If you're not interested at all in marketing or interested in the financial advisory space, feel free to skip the second half of the interview. But if you ever have thought about being involved in any kind of business, you might want to know some of the information in that marketing space.

Especially if you're a financial advisor, you might want to know about that. This is Michael's second appearance on the Radical Personal Finance podcast. If you're interested in listening to his previous interview on the show, that was episode 92, which we titled, "The Business of Financial Advice. Opening the Curtain on the History, the Present State, and the Future of Financial Advice." You can find that at radicalpersonalfinance.com/92.

And now, as we go to the interview, I just want to say thank you to the patrons of the show. Thanks to the patrons of the show, I'm able to present this to you commercial-free. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen who support the show. Here's Michael. So, Michael, welcome back to the show.

I'm glad to have you here. Thank you. Welcome to be back. Welcome to be back. Good to be back. It's been a long three days. Yeah. So, for those who are catching up with us, it's day three of a conference. You can tell by the fact that my words do not sequence properly anymore.

But yes, here we are. And these things are hard work. What time do you start? Early in the morning and it goes till midnight, right? Yeah. Also, this conference is kind by some because at least the sessions don't really get started until eight. Right. But yeah, then sessions go until four or five in the afternoon.

And then you do evening gatherings and you're being social and you're networking. You're connecting with people. Yeah, I probably got to sleep after midnight last night. And yeah. So, it's a work. It's not a vacation. It's definitely work. Yeah, it's definitely work. It's not vacation. Like, and I, you know, we'll probably talk about this later.

But it drives me nuts watching people who go to conferences. And it's like, "Hey, what did you think of the sessions?" "Oh, I didn't see them because like I went up and I played golf for three hours because there's a cool golf course nearby." Like, "All right, like power to you for loving your golf and hitting the back nine for a couple hours." But like, you're here at a conference.

You will not have a better opportunity to meet and connect with a whole bunch of people that can improve your business and career. And like, you're hitting the links for a couple hours because there's a neat course nearby you haven't played. And well, like certainly in our advisor world, like we, a lot of golf lovers.

Absolutely. Popular thing here. So, that's a perfect place to start. When you started your career in the financial advisor space, you were pretty green, right? You would... Oh, yeah. Like, I came straight out of college. Like, graduated Saturday above Memorial Day weekend, packed my stuff on Sunday, drove home on Memorial Day Monday, Tuesday morning at 8 a.m.

showed up at the office for my first job in the financial services industry. So, I could not have packed it closer. At what point in time did you start going to conferences? First four years in before I ever went to my first conference, my first event of any sort.

And was really ignorant of the opportunity, the value, the possibilities. I'll give them full credit. I went to my first conference because the firm I was working for said, "You're going to go to a conference this year. So, let us know which one you want to go to and that's the one you'll go to." And I'd pick something that sounded interesting in our industry.

So, like, I didn't send myself. I didn't pay my way. They paid for me to go. Even though it was available for me, they basically had to, like, give me a kick to tell me, like, "So, you're going to go to something this year. Just let us know what it is." So, I was completely ignorant to the possibilities, what was out there, much less the value proposition of going and doing something like that.

And for your first one, did you just show up, you know, maybe sit in the back with a notebook type of thing or were you very active and engaged and making full use of the time? So, it's kind of a weird blend. So, yeah, like, I was certainly there as a bit of a wallflower.

And frankly, like, I'm actually very much an introvert by nature. So, like, I love the blogging world because I could sit in my computer on my four walls. And like, even, so even conferences for me, like, as an introvert, like, I enjoy coming here, I do enjoy connections, but I'm much more small intimate groups than large groups.

Like, conferences are actually very draining for me. So, like, you know, I get to the end of the day at the conference and I need to go upstairs and just, like, decompress in my room for an hour and, like, get my head sorted back together before I can even relax and go to sleep.

So, yeah, so going to my first conference in particular being some combination of introverted and shy and just young, young dude. I mean, I was 24, 25 in an industry where even then the average age was probably 50. Now we're, like, mid-50s. Right. So, yeah, like, I was, you know, a wallflower, newbie, young dude.

I looked it, it showed. Now, the weird thing that came from that is the first conference I went to, I end, you know, you go to a conference, you end up making connections with people like you, like, the sort of what we seek out. So, finding people like me was really easy.

There were four of us at the conference under the age of 40. It was probably, well, how old I had been, like, 26 or something, 25 or 26 at the time. So, there were four of us under 40. So, it was not easy, it was not hard to find the other three and form a connection with them.

And so, we made a connection. We sort of said, like, hey, this is actually supposed to be an advanced planners conference, like, future of the profession. There literally is no one here who will be in the profession in the future because 99% of the people are over the age of 40 and they're only going to be here so long.

Like, we should make a group for people like us to try to draw other people out for this. And so, literally, like, my first conference out of the gate, we founded a group called NextGen for next generation of financial planners. That was a little over 10 years ago. There are now 2,000 members in NextGen.

It's a massive, like, growing movement thing across financial planning around the country. And it was just like, yeah, I showed up at a conference and there were three other people like me. So, we said, hey, we should hang out. Next thing you know, this thing got created. So, and just like that itself was very impactful on my career overall.

It plugged me into a world of working with next generation financial planners, being a next generation financial planner. I've founded two or three different businesses off of serving that group now of my peers. Like, just that one moment, literally, from the first conference has been massively formative on my entire career.

And in addition to those businesses now, you're a sought after speaker, making substantial speaking fees and you speak at 50, 60 conferences a year? I've done almost 70 for the year, for the past two years. I'm trying to, my goal this year is basically to cut it back to 50.

And I keep raising speaking fees and people keep saying yes. So, like, nice business problem to have. But I'm still doing even more travel than I want to do because it just, it works well. There's a lot of value to it. There's a lot of value for people that come to conferences.

They want content. It's been a pretty amazing ride for a couple of years now. Was that an intentional career path that you sat down and planned it out or it just kind of happened into it? It definitely happened into it. There was no plan for it. I, and like, frankly, I mean, just as an introvert by nature, like I did not relish getting up in front of large crowds.

I did not feel like, hey, I've got a great idea for a career. Let's be like an introverted person who likes to stand in front of hundreds of people at a time. In fact, ironically, like I was actually a theater minor in college because I was a set design and lighting design geek because I was terrified of being on stage.

So like I truly never, never went up in front of people, even as a theater major, never went up in front of people or a theater minor. For me, like it basically evolved from a teaching education perspective. So being more introverted, you know, what did I like doing? I like spending time with textbooks.

So I got started in my career and I started accumulating knowledge and education. Basically, I started accumulating degrees and designations. And so in the span of the first four or five years of my career, while working full time, I basically just left myself continuously enrolled part time in school on doing little classes evenings and weekends.

But you do that for years continuously and all of a sudden, like degrees and designations start popping out. So I got my certified financial platter marks. I got a master's degree in financial planning and added a bunch more thereafter and became a technical expert. So my career began to shape in the direction of I'm going to be a technical dude.

I'm going to be the knowledge dude in the firm. And this was kind of early mid 2000s. So that was actually a new phenomenon emerging that there was even a career track for just being a good technical expert and not going out there to be a salesperson. I didn't want to be a salesperson.

I didn't want to be a prospecting person, meeting strangers and going out and doing that with kind of my whole introvert thing that was terrifying to me. I technically started doing that in the first job. It was horrible. I lasted barely a year. I was getting nothing done. So I was going down this whole road of, all right, if I want to make it in this industry, I've just got to be technically sharp.

I've got to be able to contribute something with my knowledge because I sure as heck can't contribute anything by going out there and getting business and getting clients. And so I got technically competent enough that eventually I started getting involved in some local study groups and at some point in like 2004 maybe, you know, someone said, "Hey, a lot more of my clients are getting hit by the alternative minimum taxes.

Anybody know much about this?" I was like, "Well, actually, I've done some stuff with this. I'm working on a master screen taxation." I was, I had moved on to it at that point. So like, I'll talk about that. So I went home, made a little like PowerPoint presentation, went in, taught my peers.

It was basically like my first public speaking event in front of, I think there were six other people in the room. I mean, it's like my little study group, peer group. But it went well and I kind of liked it. I was like, you know, all right, in general, I'm basically terrified to be in front of audiences and people.

But you know, when I'm just talking about something that I really, really know well, like it just, it wasn't a big deal. I'm fine. Like as long as I, as long as it's something I've got technical mastery on, not a big deal. I actually was sort of surprised to find I felt quite comfortable.

So I'm like, I'm going to try this a little bit more. So I did it for my local study group and then like I did it for a local chapter meeting. So then there were 30 or 40 people in the room and it turned out a lot of them thought I did a pretty good job because I clearly knew my stuff technically.

I kind of liked explaining things. And so it just grew from there. So I did that and then someone referred me to another chapter and then I did a few chapters and then I actually managed to slip into a breakout session on a national conference. You know, they did a call for speakers.

I'm like, I got this technical session on AMT and Lord knows nobody else wanted to talk about something that esoteric. So they were like, oh my gosh, there's one person actually put their name in for this topic. We should grab them. Yeah. The one guy who actually cares about AMT planning.

Yes. So like, and like, and that became sort of my first little niche within a niche topic area. I started doing all these sessions on the alternative minimum tax. And so, you know, I did like a handful of these and then the next year, you know, a few people suggest me to some other people and I did a few more.

And then like by the third year I got a couple more requests and, and, you know, basically all of these were just like, yes, if you fly me to your, you know, wherever it is, then I'll show up and speak. And so then like, I think it was literally not until about the third year of this and I'd probably done 15 or 20 or something over the span of, of two and a half years.

And I was like, you know what, if I really like want to make this into something, I should charge money for it. And it was terrifying. Like the first time I did it, like my voice was catching. It was like, and you know, I also charge a hundred dollars to be on site for the, for the event.

I remember like the first one I did, it was like, I said, it's my travel expenses plus a hundred bucks. And like, they, they didn't even think twice about it. Probably not the least of which I wasn't even thinking about like the hotel room they have to put me in probably cost more than a hundred bucks.

Like they're, they're going to drop three to $500 on a plane ticket just to get me there. It's like the last hundred bucks is nothing. Right. But like, I was so terrified to ask and, but I did. And so I charged a hundred bucks and then like people kept asking me, like, I'm going to ask 250 and see if they still say yes.

And they did. And I'm like, it's still like, I wasn't even thinking about it. I'm like, cause you haven't even gotten your plane ticket yet. Like the small dollars compared to what they were already budgeting just for me to travel to get there. But they kept saying yes. And, and so like this entire speaking career that I built has really been nothing more than, um, you know, find something I can learn about and be really expert about, share it with my, uh, share it with my peers.

I know my peers cause I know my audience cause they are my peers. So I just, that's all I talked to. I talked to financial advisors cause I'm a financial advisor and I know what they're thinking cause it's what I'm thinking. Uh, and the more that requests came in every time a whole bunch of questions came in, I'm like, well, apparently people still like what I'm doing.

So I'm going to ask for a little bit more and you know, eight, 10 years later worth of doing it now it's like, like, holy crap. I actually, like I can really live off of just being a speaker. Right. And you know, and, and take care of my family and do good things.

And then there's like even time left on the side to be involved in other businesses as well. And, and all this other stuff that's, uh, that's grown from it. But like all of it, um, basically tracks back to like showing at a, showing up at a conference and being in, so really two things, showing up at a conference and being involved and joining a professional membership association.

Cause that was how I actually found the study group and the first chapter meeting and the things that kicked off the, uh, the speaking on that end. And, and again, like I give full credit to my, uh, to my firm and the, and the, and the partners there while I'm a partner now, but I, I came in as a staff member then, uh, you know, they sent me to the first conference.

They put me in the membership association, sent me off for the first chapter meeting. Like I was just not aware, not cognizant, nothing on my radar screen of like how meaningful it is to be engaged with the community. Right. Of, you know, what you do or what you're involved with, what your career is, what your vocation is.

And it like, it's just so powerful. Uh, I was clueless. Like I just, I just had no idea until they said you're doing it and they wrote the check and I just had to show up, which they basically told me I had to show up. And then I started doing things like, oh, okay.

Like this is kind of cool. I'm making connections to people. Okay. I'm like, I'm starting to like this. And today I would guess, I mean, you're certainly one of the, you are one of the leaders of the industry. You are one of the more well-connected and influential leaders of the industry.

And it happened because of exposure, education, consistency, marketing. I mean, you don't hurt for business opportunities, right? No, no. And, uh, I mean, like I, so I forget who it is. Whoever had the famous quote of like, you know, the, the overwhelming majority of success is just bothering to show up.

Like, yeah, a whole, whole lot of my success, like it's because I showed up and I kept showing up places and I showed up places and I met people and I talked to people and if I could be helpful, I was helpful to them. And then at some point down the road, karma came back.

And if you're show up enough and help enough people, like there's a lot of karmic balance that seems to build in your favor. And like, not that I'm like literally spiritual in this direction, but, but like, just there, there really is an effect. And it's actually well studied in the world of, um, of, of influence and persuasion that, you know, just like as human beings, part of how we're hardwired around, you know, basically being able to like exist and function in the herd.

So our, our, our brains just are kind of hardwired around, um, these effects of reciprocity. Someone does something good for us. We want to do something in return. Like we, we feel like we have this ingrained debt to them that must be righted in the cosmic world. Um, and, and now I'm like, I'm going to sell Machiavellian to say this, but, but like, so what that means is if you just try to go out there and try to be as helpful to as many people as possible, you end up with this giant number of people that all feel that they owe a debt for you and just want to help you in any way that they can in return.

And if you, you know, seed that much goodwill out there, a lot of good things just start coming back to you. And I, I like definitely feel like a huge portion of how I've been able to grow and succeed in building, uh, businesses and a career is, is, is just driven off of that.

The number of people that I have just helped for no reason than they contact me and asked a question and I felt like I had something that I could contribute to them. And then years later, you know, something good happens. So I, you know, worked with someone, helped them out early in their career.

They had a great thing going, you know, give them a little nudge along the way. And then like, Oh, five years later, they're in charge of an entire national conference team. Right. And they're like, Hey, I remember you helped me that time. Well, you know, we need a keynote speaker now and I've always remembered you.

I'm like, okay, so I spent like 10 minutes on the phone once for you helping out a business problem and you're going to give me a national conference keynote session with a five year delay lag on it. So like just those sorts of things and like, yeah, a whole bunch of stuff that I do never comes back and you know, nothing ever happens, but just you, you, you seed the world with a lot of goodwill and goodwill just starts to come back.

I've been on exactly the other opposite side of that. And you know, I've sent you a couple of desperate emails when I didn't know who to ask and I just said, I got to talk to somebody. And we've had some phone calls at points of desperation and you just took a few minutes and it was incredibly helpful.

And it certainly does. I have, I owe you a debt of gratitude for that. And you never know where the future goes. And it's true. Yeah. And again, like I mean, I feel like I've, maybe I'm self-conscious about it. Like I feel like I've made this Machiavellian thing of like, you go out there and get as many people indebted to you as possible, and then you can call in all of your debts and be rich.

Like, it's nothing like that. And I'm, I'm not that well coordinated. But like, it's just recognizing that that reality of, of you know, there's both sort of a, just, it's nice to do good in the world and pay it forward and things like that. But just recognize like there really is sort of a human psychology around it that when, when, when you help people, they want to help you.

And that does, that can do some very good things for you in the long run. When did you start writing and publishing your writing? At what stage in your career? So it was a little bit late, it was a little bit later than all of the, the conference and speaking stuff went underway.

So I showed up on my first conference and speaking gig about four years into my career. Probably started doing a little bit of writing about five to six years into my career. So I'll admit, like, I always had a little bit of a writing bent. I, you know, I, I graduated from college 15 years ago, 2000.

So like right, right at the market peak and, and the high end of the tech bubble and sort of, you know, upward rise of, of the internet. And so I'd gotten very active on like, message forums and, and writing and forums and just engaging there. And, you know, lucky me, I, two parents who were computer scientists.

So I learned to type very young, like, you know, maybe speak and teach us typing, right? My 10 finger typing skill. So I type very, very quickly, which, which makes it easier to do a lot of writing. So like, I, I suppose in retrospect, like I was already exercising a little bit of my writing skill, learning it as a skill, just on things like message forums, you know, getting involved with like, you know, there was a message forum back then called financialplanning.com.

The site's actually still there. It's a magazine, but the message forums aren't as active as they used to be. But yes, I start showing up there and like answering people's questions and just, you know, typing, interacting with people, but, you know, doing it in reasonable prose and typing and writing style.

And the first article I ever did was actually an article called the other side of financial planning. And it was a discussion of how I was kind of going down this new career track that not very many people were doing at the time where I wanted to basically be a technical geek working in a firm and not just going out there and getting clients, which was sort of the industry standard of what everybody did.

And so the editor of one of the trade publications heard about my story through the association, found me online through my writing in the message forums, saw that like I actually could write in complete sentences with proper punctuation and grammar and such, and got in touch with me and said, like, I've heard you have an interesting story.

It looks like you can actually write. Would you be interested in basically writing an article just about your story, your experience, the path you've been on, what you've done? And I was like, oh, cool. Like a magazine wants me to write an article about like the things I've been doing.

Okay, cool. We'll try it out. And so that became the first article that I wrote. And I liked it. Like it was neat. I sort of enjoyed writing. I felt like I had something to share. I got a couple of emails in response. People were like, that was a neat story.

I was like, all right, this is kind of cool. You write something, you get it out there and people respond to you. And like I kind of like this engagement. And so it just started building from there. So then I now had a relationship with an editor. So I would contact him from time to time like, hey, I'm working on something about this.

Would you be interested in an article on it? And because I was sort of blending this with my presentation, so I was doing lots of like technical geeky style things. Not a lot of other people actually like to do fairly technical writing. So the editor virtually always said yes.

So I suddenly had this like contout to publish. So I started publishing there. Then I started sending things to a couple of other places. And after about three or four years of that, I was actually getting so into writing that I was getting frustrated because now suddenly I felt like I had so much to say and so many things to say and share.

I kept smacking into column length limitations in trade publications. You know, the standard columns would be like 1,500 words, even like a journal article would be 5,000 words. And like if I did some really in-depth research thing, I'm like, if it takes me longer than that to write it, I want the room to write it.

Right. And so I got so frustrated with content length limits of basically physical print magazines because that's how most of this was distributed then. I decided I would just make my own electronic newsletter. And then if I wanted to write some insane like 20-page treatise on something, I could write it.

And if there were a couple other human beings out there who liked some insane 20-page treatise, they could pay me a couple of bucks for it. And that would be cool. And so I launched a newsletter service that I'm still running seven years later in early 2008. Where basically it said, hey, if you're like one of the one or two percent of advisors that just really likes actual deep technical stuff, like you're tired of the fluff and you want something deep, I'm your guy.

I'm actually going to write that. And a couple of people started showing up and they actually wanted to pay me to write it. So I started getting subscribers and that began this sort of writing business. Now the way that end evolved. So I started writing this newsletter on basically really dense technical topics.

They were eligible for continuing education credits for financial planners. Now our CFP board organization that oversees the continuing education only allows you to get continuing education credit for like actual technical topics. So if you want to write about the business of practice planning, that's off limits. You have to actually write about like the subject matter expertise areas, taxes, retirement insurance, system planning, things like that.

But I sort of felt like I had a couple of things to say from time to time about the business of financial planning as well as I was getting more immersed in that side of things. So I decided like, hey, I'm going to make a blog and try this out.

Like I've heard of blogs. Other people do blogs. Like our industry had no blogs, like nothing. It's like, I'm going to try this out. And so I sort of had this vision in my head, like the newsletter would be the technical topics and then I would use the blog to sort of voice my own like practice management industry comments of just stuff that I wanted to put out there, right?

Because that's what you do on a blog. You just sort of like say things that are on your mind. So hey, let's try this out. So I launched that sort of in tandem with the newsletter in 2008. So the newsletter got some really good early traction. I was lucky in part I got some really nice support from a guy who'd actually been writing a newsletter business in the industry for many, many years named Bob Veras.

Writes a very well-known practice management newsletter in the industry. And he was really supportive of telling me like, you should go do this. And he said, you know what, if you do it, I'll send a thing out to my, you know, I've seen your writing. I know you do good stuff for advisors who want it.

I will send something out to my subscribers, my mailing list that just says, hey, folks, if you like this, you should check it out. And so he did. I got like a really nice initial subscriber bump basically at launch from his support. So, you know, so that got started.

So the newsletter was off to a great start. And then I was doing the blogging thing on the side and the blogging was basically going nowhere. Like I wasn't getting comments. I didn't really feel like I was getting any interaction of feedback. So I'm like, I should install Google Analytics and like figure out what's going on.

So I went and installed Google Analytics. And now I had like definitive proof that basically no one was coming to read my blog. So like it wasn't just that it felt like I was releasing content to an echo chamber. I pretty much had proof that no one was coming to read my blog.

So I actually shut it down. Like I let it go completely after, you know, six to nine months and basically stopped posting. I would do like one article every three months because something struck me and I wanted to rant. But I basically stopped. And I stopped for almost two years until like the middle of 2010 and watching what frankly was not new at all, but like the rise of social media.

So really, really watching. So at that point, LinkedIn was gaining momentum. Facebook was really gaining momentum. This Twitter thing had been around for a year or two and was starting to happen more. And so, you know, another friend of the industry, another person I met through conferences and associations and all the rest named Bill Winterberg.

So he does technology consulting for advisors in the industry. Said, you know, Mike, you got to look at this Twitter thing. Like I think you'd really like it. You'd really be into it. I'm like, all right, what the hell? I'll try out Twitter. So I joined Twitter and I just started watching a little of what's going on on Twitter and was like, oh, I kind of see like people do a little chit chat and discussion, but then also just like they read things and they share them out there.

And I had one of those like eureka moments, light bulb goes off above head, sorts of things. I was like, okay, wait, I get it now. You create the content on your site and then you can share and distribute it out through social media and other people will share it on social media and then it gets shared and gets out there.

So like my mystery had always been, right, I know how to create content. Like I've been writing and speaking and doing this stuff for a while now and getting practiced at it. But I have no idea how you get it out there. And so watching social media taking off, it's like, oh, I get it.

You write it, you share it on social media, but other people share it on social media and then it begins to grow. And so I kind of re-immersed back in the blog and did that and like, damn, it just started working. And like now the Google Analytics said actually people are showing up and every month more people show up than the people in the prior month and off it went.

And so now four or five years later doing that, it's like basically, I guess, four and a half years or so since I sort of reinvested into that launch. All of a sudden now I have, I guess, basically the leading blog site around the industry. I've kind of come into my own little niche here and just the amount of business opportunities and things that have spawned off of that are like just blow me away.

Just all the opportunities and things that come in by just making a presence for yourself and getting it out there and letting people find their way to you. How much time do you spend reading every week and in the past how much? And that can be technical reading or just personal reading?

Oh, man. I spend a good amount of time reading every week, many, many hours worth between just industry and trade publications and like really keeping up on the beat of everything that's happening in our world. Somewhere around book reading as well, I've actually been trying to pair my articles, websites, blogs, trade publication reading down a tiny bit and dial up just the book reading a little bit more because if you're going to search the web for content, you pretty much never reach the bottom of that web.

Absolutely. So that becomes tough. But I mean hours a week. In fact, I got to the point where I realized I spent so many hours every week reading all these articles and stuff and there's a bunch of junky stuff and then every now and then it's like, "Wow, this article had a great idea or a great insight." Then one of the things I ended up launching on the blog was like, "I'm just going to make the summary of the half dozen or a dozen best articles I read that week, write a little summary of them and send them out to my readers." And that's actually become one of my most popular anchor posts to the blog.

Every Friday I post weekend reading for financial planners. Here's the dozen best articles about our world of financial planning that I read this week. And just leveraging like, "Hey, I do all this reading already. I can be an effective filter for other people who have even less time than I do to read." But yeah, if you're not in a continuous learning mode, change passes you by pretty quickly.

So I've led you into a trap here. Have you ever heard Brian Tracy's little speech on the 1000% formula of increasing your income by 1000% over 10 years? I don't think I have. So in summary, what he says is that you can increase your income by 1000% every 10 years by increasing your effectiveness and skill by one tenth of one percent each day.

So you make a tiny incremental improvement each day and it compounds over the course of 10 years to be about 1000%. Because you're 10 times more effective, then now you're going to have an increase in your income of probably around 10 times. And he gives a number of steps to it that were super helpful to me.

It changed my life when I heard it as a teenager. Step one was reading every day, 30 to 60 minutes. You read about 50 books a year. You read 500 books in your field over 10 years. You're a world-class expert. Step two was going to at least four conferences a year.

By going to conferences, you become a world-class expert because you hear what's going on at those conferences. Step three, and he had other steps, I've added to that writing and disseminating information, learning to speak and speaking at conferences and just basically building your knowledge and your impact. And over time, that happens.

So I've tried to do it intentionally, although it fits and starts. But I'm curious, would you guess if you look back 10 or so years ago, would you guess that your income is a higher multiple than what it was 10 or so years ago? Actually, if I really try to project back and do the math of about where I was, that 10x multiple is actually probably really close to dead on of how much income in businesses has grown for me.

And that's particularly stunning for me. Again, my career track of what had taken me up to that point almost exactly 10 years ago was I basically had done a very purposeful effort of making sure that I was never actually in a position where I had to prospect, find business or sell anything because I was terrified of prospecting.

You and me both. And so now, when I look at it, it was sort of like wearing my business hat, a huge portion of what I do to make income is basically come down to creating businesses where I see need in our industry, which I see a lot of because, as you said, I read a huge amount of stuff and I go to a zillion conferences.

So I see need and opportunity all over the place. And then using my platform to help drive business to those businesses of just people that read my stuff because it's helpful, I hope. And hey, if you think this is helpful, I have some other businesses that can help you solve other problems.

And I just hope you'll check them out. And large numbers become amazing things. Like I need one hundredth of one percent of all the people who come to my site to do business with me every month. And I'm making more money than I ever dreamed of. So yeah, I would definitely fully validate that.

And particularly, those underpinnings of reading actively, going out to conferences, I'd probably blend that a little bit to say going out to conferences and or being involved in a membership association, like whatever the group is for your industry. For me, it was very much a blend of both that created some of the meaningful impact.

But yeah, that's what drives to craft expertise in your industry, in your space, in your niche, in whatever it is that you do. And because so few people do that, it's kind of amazing, sort of like the rarefied error that you can move up to just by persistently trying to read and take in information and then share it back out to people.

And it feels so slow in the beginning, but over time it gains momentum and it gains momentum. And my guess is I would we'll see it. We'll check back in 10 years, but there's no reason why it can't increase by another 10x in the next 10 years. Yeah, I was very lucky coming into it that I got to do a lot of that building process from a stable base, which was having an ongoing job at an advisory firm.

So I guess the blend, having a stable base, being a little bit of a workaholic. So I put in my time at the firm. I put in more than my time at the firm. I was the first one in and the last one to leave most days. And then I went home and read and studied and analyzed and educated myself, got my degrees and designations and such.

But what that meant, the fact that I was doing my work and my time on top of that meant when the time came for things like going to my firm and saying, "Hey, I got an invitation for this speaking engagement." We were doing financial planning for consumers. I was going to speak at an industry event.

So no one was under any illusions that I was going to go to this event and bring clients home. This was not business development for the firm. The firm was not making money off the fact that I was going to go vanish and go to a speaking engagement. They're like, "You know what?

You work your ass off around here. We can't even make you take all your vacation days. It probably would be healthy for you if you would just not come into the office for a day or two. So go for it. Knock yourself out." So the firm was very supportive of me letting me go out and starting to do my speaking and my other stuff because I was putting in my time.

I was putting my dues with the firm as well. So I created the opportunity for myself to have the flexibility. And then the flexibility gave me what at the end of the day was like, I mean, it was a really slow build. It was probably two years before I've ever charged anything.

And even when I started charging things, I was charging $100 and $250 for what was basically a day and a half of travel. You're not going to build a giant career off of $100 a day and eight hours of travel. But having that base of both job and frankly salary and doing all of this in addition to it for a period of time, it gave me the base that I could ease into this slowly and take the time that it takes to really build an expertise, a niche, a presence, all those words that we throw around, which I can vouch really actually have impact after a while.

Right. But it is. It's a slow building process. It takes a while to get there. And I was fortunate that I had a way to kind of bridge that gap from when you're trying to get started from scratch, from nothing until you get to that point where it's at least a livable wage, a livable dollar amount for me.

And I guess basically if I look back at that, the livable gap for me was three and a half years or so from when I first did the first conference speaking engagement, which was free, but the first conference speaking engagement, the first article until I was like, "I've got this newsletter service and I've got this speaking thing.

And if I actually mix all that together, I could live off of this money." Right. I could, like, I don't even have to do the full-time job anymore. I could go change things. And I did. And that was what kind of started down the next freeing path. But it was three and a half years.

And actually having launched several different niche businesses in our industry now, I've been fascinated by this phenomenon that almost all of them find an inflection point in the third year. Wow. Like just the first year you work your ass off. We're not on television, right? I can say ass.

You work your ass off for the first year for basically like nothing. Like nothing's coming in. You're just building, like you're making connections. You're meeting people. They don't know who the hell you are, what you do, why they would trust you, anything. Then you do it the second year.

So like year one, you get like this tiny handful of clients or engagements or events or serve people who buy your service, whatever it is that you're offering. And then year two basically feels not very different from year one. Like you're continuing to grind. A slightly smaller handful of people come in because now you get a few people who buy your service and a few people who kind of kicked your tire last year but didn't really do anything.

Like, well, you're still around. It's been another year. I guess maybe you're legit now. All right. Well, like we'll try something. And then all of a sudden year three, like this transition moment, it's like year one, they just get to know you. Year two, they begin to like you.

Year three, they actually trust you. And when you get through no like and trust and the trust part picks up, all of a sudden business just starts flowing in. And so it'd be like year one, you're doing all this grinding. Year two, you're doing all this grinding and getting maybe a little bit of spillover effect from year one.

And then suddenly year three, it's like all these people who've been talking to for two years show up, a whole bunch of new people you see have actually heard of you and are like, "Oh, yeah, you're legit. I've heard of you. You've been around for a couple of years and they want to do business with you very quickly." And then all of those people in that pipeline start referring you because now like you're the guy or the girl, you're the go-to person.

You've been doing this for years. People know who you are. And they start referring business in and it just starts exponentially jumping. And so, you know, like people think of building businesses of like, you know, my growth patterns can be one, two, three, four. Like I keep building one layer every year and I find like just one niche business after another.

They almost all follow what's basically a one, two, five, ten pattern. - Interesting. - So, you know, year one, you just do X. Year two, you basically just do 2X, much of which is last year's X plus just a little bit that you add on. But then suddenly in year three, you don't just go one, two, three.

You go like one, two, five. - Right. - And then all of a sudden the five doubles to ten because now the thing's getting momentum. And then now it's just a question of how big is this thing going to start growing and where is it going to land and can you execute on that well?

- It's fascinating because when I started as a financial advisor, it was exactly that. I did not have fun until my third year. And then after my third year, it was like something changed. And all of a sudden it was people actually said, "Oh, Josh was going to do this for a while.

He might actually know what he's talking about." And the fourth year was a radically different experience than the second year. And now with new business, with radical personal finance, I'm grinding it out for year one. But we'll see. I'll report back. - And I think it's just, I mean, having been through so many of these now, even having been through them and knowing what the pattern is, it still feels kind of despairing sometimes in year one for how slow it's growing.

And it still feels despairing in year two for like, "God, I've been working like a year and a half." You're halfway through year two of trying to do something like this. Like a year and a half, like I've been working really hard a really long time and I really don't feel like there's a lot of momentum yet.

Like this kind of sucks. - Right. - Like it's really a grind just like mentally to get yourself into year three. - Right. - But you get there and stuff starts showing up. And now like having a bunch of these that I've been doing even more years, like, and that like the exponential growth rate doesn't stop after year four either.

Like I can say, having been on the other end of a bunch of these like, and the damn thing just keeps going. - It's awesome. - And you get to your like Brian Tracy thousand percent numbers. - Right. - It's amazing. You know, all those, basically it's compounding effects, right?

- Right. - It's like, you know, finance world, we love to talk about compound interest, but like the compounding effects happen in most businesses of that nature. - And the thing I think we should teach people, so we always use the example to teach compound interest of the magic penny.

And that's nice. You do it for 31 days, the double penny is 10 million bucks. - Yeah. - It's a massive number. But what I started teaching clients, I said, go back and look when you're five days in and when you're 10 days in and this magic penny, you have a grand total of 72 cents.

- Yeah. - And as most people, they quit or they spend the money or they quit or they spend the money. And the point is go back and look at how slow it is for the first 15, 20, 25 days. It's in those last five days that in that example where it makes up the difference.

And that's what you're expressing. - Yeah, I like that. That's actually a really good analogy of a way to frame it up. Like it's so true. I mean, the challenge of trying to sort of compound your growth, getting something started for yourself. I mean, whatever it is, it's your career trajectory.

It's building a business. It's building some brand platform, writing, blogging, speaking, podcast, like whatever it is, whatever your endeavor is. It gets so true that I'm a math geek. So like I always have to think of it in math terms. But like when you start compounding growth rates on a really small number.

- Right. - The growth of a really small number is still a really small number. - Yeah. - And it takes a while before the compounding gets to the point where it starts adding up to material dollars. But the back end of compounding growth is just extraordinary growth numbers that come on extraordinary growth numbers.

Like, holy crap. - It's amazing. - Where did all this come from? How did all this happen? And like truly, I mean, there's the old saying of like, what got you here won't get you there, which won't move you forward from here. Which I've certainly like found, lived, experienced.

Like truly, and I really don't mean this in some like self-aggrandizing manner at all, but like my greatest challenge right now that I've really been struggling with over the past year and I'm considering to struggle with this year. Now my problem is that the growth has created so much opportunity.

It's very difficult to choose amongst the opportunities. And like it just, it leads me to struggle with all sorts of decisions that I never thought about before of like, I have to care more about how I spend my time because otherwise, like there are literally a never ending stream of emails of people who contact me, of people who want help.

And like, it feels bad in many ways. Like I have to carve up like who I'm going to help and who I'm not. But like, I can just only help so many people. And you know, it's led me in the direction now of like trying to create more in different businesses because I'm so at a personal capacity constraint that I need to create things where I can shepherd people to a place where they can get the help because I can't do the help.

And I'm even already hitting the next level of it, which is, and I can only manage so many businesses doing this. So I need business partners. I need other people that can drive these businesses so that I can make sure people get to a place where they get helped and then basically get the hell out of the way.

And like having been a very hands-on person around all the work that I've done for years, I, you know, to accept over the past year that in virtually everything that we do for all of our different clients and businesses now, I am the bottleneck in all processes. I am the one that...

And the problem is you know that, you know, you're supposed to get yourself out. It's so challenging. It is so challenging. So like, I'm, you know, I'm learning the skill of getting the hell out of my own way now. But like, particularly, I've been someone that's, that was so hands-on everything.

I mean, I'm not very much like roll up my sleeves and dive into my things. That's how I build all these businesses and kind of this platform for myself that, you know, just being ready to get out of my own way when it used to like, I mean, literally, like I go back years ago, like I made a lot of the early point steps in my career because I was the guy that got this stuff done.

Whenever, when other people would let things fall through the cracks, I was the get stuff done guy. And now I'm the one that hinders the get stuff done guy. So like, just even having that whole realization like, oh, now I understand why a lot of our partners would dump the things on me the way that they did and why all these problems would crop up the way that they did.

Now I'm on the other side of that, that like productivity line of what it's like building businesses and like, okay, I'm understanding now why things flow down the way that they do because when businesses really start gaining momentum for growth, like just the sheer like capacity limits you hit on your own personal bandwidth and what you can do, like become very, very noticeable very quickly.

So are you addressing that? Are you changing your learning and shifting from focusing on technical financial planning to learning some new management skills? Or how are you addressing that problem? Yeah, so it's shifting a few ways. I'm trying to be a little bit more selective about my time. And I know, I mean, I've always viewed it this way to some extent, like really starting to view my time as a resource that is a precious thing to allocate that I really have to sometimes make hard decisions about allocating.

It's certainly been a driver of reinvesting into my businesses as businesses into people. So I've been hiring much more of a support and infrastructure around myself of, I started with a virtual assistant, I started like 10 hours a month or something a few years ago. And then I started figuring out how to delegate stuff to her.

And I was like, all right, well, this is kind of working. I'm going to try you five hours a week. And I was just so used to being hands on everything. Like, what the heck would I give someone else to do for five hours a week? I do everything myself.

It's got to be right done my way to be done right. And frankly, I think the breakthrough even for me on that end is you start viewing time as this precious resource, you just start converting like the value of your time into some dollar amounts. Like if I want to grow myself and my business and do like a Brian Tracy 1000% thing, if that's your goal, so the rough math, divide what you make in a year by 2000, that's roughly your hourly rate of what you do for the year.

So 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year of working, you're at about 2000 hours. So you take what you make for the year divided by 2000, you've got some estimate around your rate. So I went through a process of doing that about a year and a half ago.

And then basically said, okay, look, anything, I can hire people for a lower number than this because my time, you know, value of my time was elevating as the business was going up. So hire someone at a lower rate, anything I can find that that person can do, I instantly make more money in my business by letting it go and letting the other person do it so that I can spend my time on higher value tasks.

And kind of the secondary breakthrough that came through to me mentally is, you know what, as you grow your career and your time and your business enough, you get to the point where like, you know what, even if they don't do it as well as you, I'm like, I'm making air quotes as though, okay, I mean, when I said not doing as well, for those of you who are listening, I'm making air quotes right now.

So like, for those of you who don't do as well as you can, because you know, only you can do everything that you need done perfectly right. You know, even if they, someone else has to do it and it takes them twice as long, there's actually enough gap in how you value your time.

That's okay. And that was sort of the let go moment for me was I had this realization like, you know what, if I give this prototype to someone else and it takes them twice as long to do it as it would have taken me to just do it myself, I'm actually still more successful with that.

And you know what, eventually they do enough times that they learn how to do it, right? Like we, I think it's certainly me, like I get stuck and like the first time they do this, they're not going to be nearly as good as me. So I should just do it.

It's like, you know what, it takes them twice as long, still more successful for me. And eventually they'll be efficient at it as well. Like I learned, there was a point where I didn't know what I was doing and I figured it out and got better. So they will too.

And so as that's grown, like that's really been, so I've taken a lot of focus around that over the past year or two of, you know, hire people, I pay them well. Like I try to make sure that the people that are supporting me are paid well, but still recognize like if I'm going to keep growing the way that I want to be growing, I need to set a certain price point on my time and anything where I can pay someone less than that to support me, I need to let go of that and send it down to them.

So I've been doing a lot of that to try to build out my time and have hired a number of outsourcing partners and virtual assistant folk for various pieces of what I do. So some web design, some editing work, some basically like a personal assistant style person. So a piece of it has been that just letting go of things and sort of do the whole, you know, make sure you're spending as much time as possible on your highest, best uses, not all of which are dollars.

So like that might be getting paid for writing or speaking something, or that might be reading for which I don't literally get paid, but that's what fuels the whole engine, the knowledge, the continuous learning and let go as much as possible. So like that, that's been the starting point that's been helping a little, I'm finding I'm still like business and opportunities and things are growing faster than that.

And so, you know, now I'm even going through the second round of, you know, I've got some businesses and things that I do that I feel very personally attached to because I've helped to build them, but you know, I can only build and be involved in so many things.

Maybe some of these things I just have to let go of entire change, entire business lines and recognize, you know, maybe this is something my partner can just run with on their own, or maybe this is a service that I do that, you know, is good dollars for what it is, but I can't get to the next level by continuing to do it because it's just not going to grow or scale or build in the way that the other things are.

And again, I found like I can kind of convert this to a, all right, what's really the value of my time by continuing to do this. If that number isn't good, then either I need to figure out how can I make the value higher? How can I, you know, delegate it or shift it to someone else?

And if I can't figure out how to do either of those two things, maybe it's something that I just need to let go. Right. And I suck at letting go. So this will be my challenge over the next six months is figuring out how to let go of a thing or two.

You and me both. I'd like to wrap up by talking for a couple of minutes about financial advisor marketing. In my years as a financial advisor, I've often heard experienced, successful financial advisors say, "Marketing doesn't work. Only prospecting works." And I'm interested in your take on that comment. And I'm interested in trends that you see in the industry as comparing marketing and prospecting.

Oh, man. Marketing doesn't work. Only prospecting works. So, and just as a corollary to that, because I'm going to bash in a moment, so I need to set it up as a framing point. So the other version that we hear is like, "Marketing doesn't work. I just get all my business from referrals." Sort of the similar version of it.

So like, you know, and financial advisor in my world, I love financial advisors. I love my peers. But... We suck at marketing. We are terrible marketers. I know an extraordinary number of very, very successful financial advisors. And like, I'm sorry, but they succeeded despite themselves. Not because of themselves and their great ability to build businesses and market and the rest.

They succeeded by an unbelievable amount of perseverance and grit and chutzpah and all that stuff that they basically drove through the sheer failings that they were doing along the way and managed to attract enough people that they got to a viable business. Their, what should have been a three-year building cycle was a seven-year building cycle.

But hey, they got to it. It's great on the back end. And the compounding still works later, even if you compound more slowly early on. It's like, there's just an extraordinary number of people to me that like, they got there in spite of themselves and marketing, not because marketing does or does not work.

And I find like we, I think certainly in our advisory world, we put ourselves in this trap. Marketing work, marketing doesn't work. Therefore, I won't spend anything on marketing. And at the end of the year, when I don't get any clients off of the almost nothing I spent on marketing, it's definitive proof that marketing doesn't work.

So like there's this, we do all these studies in the industry of like, where do advisors get clients and pick your survey, but like 80% of advisors drive the majority of their new business off of getting referrals. I'm like, okay, but if you also look at the industry and benchmarking studies, the average advisor spends less than 2% of their revenues on marketing.

So if you basically, and if you drill down to that, most of that revenue is like, I did an appreciation event for my clients, which is basically another opportunity to get referrals off of them. So like, if the only money you ever spend on marketing is a combination of nothing or events specifically designed just to drive referrals, and then you say the dominating portion of all new business comes off of referrals, it may actually simply be because you've been so horrifically bad at ever executing any form of marketing.

Like referrals is not a best practice because marketing doesn't work. Referrals is all you have left when you do no marketing. Right. Right. Like, and I think, I think that's very much the trap that we've gotten into certainly for the huge majority of our industry. You know, referrals are the referrals are the result of what happens when you don't have a marketing process, not proof that marketing is, doesn't work for our industry.

Now, that being said, marketing is hard. Marketing takes sustained effort. Marketing takes a targeted focus. We're, we're really not execute. We're not well educated and trained about how to execute marketing effectively in the first place. I think that actually the biggest challenge for advisors, not with saying how much I just like ranted about the fact that we don't spend anything on marketing and do anything on marketing.

Frankly, most advisors, they did start spending money on marketing, it wouldn't work. And the reason it wouldn't work is so many advisors, the end of the day are basically generalists. I do anything for everyone who comes in my door who can afford to pay my fees or willing to pay my fees.

Like you can't, you can't market that. Like, what are you going to do? Hey, if you can fog mirrors and have money, I can work with you. Like nobody resonates with that marketing, right? Right. Like, oh, I fog a mirror and have money. I should work with this guy.

That'd be brilliant. He has years of experience. So like until advisors get more targeted in who they try to serve, I don't know that they can necessarily be effective in marketing anyways. Cause when you're a generalist, basically you're going to compete against other generalist marketing, which basically means you're going to compete with either large national brands that actually can spend, you know, extraordinary seven, eight, nine figure dollar amounts on marketing, you know, national insurance companies, wire houses, major financial services firms.

And you're going to compete against, uh, basically consumer publications who say, oh, and if you don't want one of those large national brands, we'll show you how to do it yourself. So, you know, money magazine and Kipler magazine and Yahoo finance and CNN and all that. So between massive publications that try to give people information about how to do it themselves and massive financial services companies that do general broad-based marketing.

Yeah. Like you basically have no chance to stand out as an affidavitual advisor doing marketing by just trying to be a generalist and spending money on marketing. Right. So, so then you get back to what really is a crossroads of two choices. Either you can just not do marketing and try to succeed by the sheer perseverance of finding how many hands you can shake and prospecting until you get enough clients, which frankly is what most people have done historically.

Or you acknowledge that if you really want to be successful, you actually have to have some kind of specialization, some kind of niche, some sort of target market where you can actually try to communicate with a group in a much more targeted manner, reach them effectively and actually have a differentiated message.

And I think that's where we're starting to see certainly the advisory world going forward now. It's still slow, but I think there's this growing recognition of like being a general, being an undifferentiated generalist is really becoming a problem. You got to find some way to specialize, niche, be different.

And frankly, the problem I see for a lot of people, even in trying to do that transition, going back all the way to what we were talking about earlier, if you're going to go down that road, we're right back into the three years it takes to be known, liked and trusted.

And that's a really long time. And especially if you get like the quick hits off of not that they're that quick, like the quick hits off of prospecting. So you're like, "Hey, I can do all this niche thing and feel like I'm going nowhere for three years, or I can go work my ass off in prospect, but at least I found a client or two." We get addicted to the faster feedback of what still is rather ineffective prospecting, but we get addicted to the feedback of the prospecting that we don't want to do the slow build, even though the slow build is the one that has the big payoff on the back end.

So people that I see build their business off prospecting, it's a one, two, three, four growth rate. When I see people that build it off niches and specialization, it's a one, two, five, 10 growth rate. And so it doesn't feel like it's doing any better to do the niche thing.

In fact, frankly, it might even be slightly slower on the front end. The payoff is much bigger on the back end, but it's hard to remove ourselves from the addiction of like, "I just feel like I've got control. If I go out there, beat the streets, I know I'm doing some activity, I'm prospecting, and then I got a client, so here's proof that it worked." Right.

Right. Do you see in here in 2015, what do you see as some effective ideas that people can implement to how to just get started with a marketing plan for themselves or their firm? I mean, to me, for advisors or really anybody who wants to do anything in building a business, particularly like a service business, a personal brand style business for yourself, you got to decide who you're going to work with and who you're not going to work with.

Right. Until there's a strategy about who you want to reach, your marketing dollars, efforts, time, all the rest of that just aren't going to do anything. Because if you don't know who you're going to reach, you're not going to do something that moves you in the direction of reaching them, so you're not making progress.

I mean, it really starts with that end, which means...and most advisors don't want to do that and don't want to go there. And again, this is even really specific to advisors. I see this across clients we have in the industry. I see this across small businesses. It's a mentality shift around just recognizing that while it feels good to be able to do business with absolutely anybody you meet, I'm a generalist, I can work with anyone, therefore I can do business with anyone that I meet.

The people you meet don't really want to do business with you because it doesn't feel like you're someone who's specialized in solving their problems and issues. And when you take a narrower focus, yes, strictly speaking, you will turn away a lot of people who don't fit your niche, but you will be able to do business and be much more likely to do business with everybody you find that does hit your niche.

And so, to put it in sort of our industry terms, you can go out there and meet 10 people and have a 10% close rate and get one client, or you can go out there and meet a bunch of people and have a 10% close rate and get one client.

And you can go out there with a focused niche where you can only work with 20% of the people, but you close them all. And so, you only meet two people, but you close them both. And so, it feels scary because you went from 10 prospects to two, but you went from one client to two.

So, you're going to have fewer prospects, but you actually double your growth rate. And it's that phenomenon of the virtue of the niche and the focus and the specialization that you have, and you're going to drastically reduce the number of prospects that you have, but you will drastically increase the number of clients that you have because, in essence, if you go into the math to it, your close rates go up dramatically more than your prospecting rate goes down, and you end out ahead.

And I can speak to it having done a whole bunch of niche businesses over the years. It's really true. You close people so much more when they feel like you're special to them and unique to you. And you get way more business. And frankly, you get way more business for less work because you don't have to spend as much time on the nine prospects that don't do business with you.

I spend a whole lot of time on people who do business with me and remarkably little time on people who don't. Because if you're not into my thing, by the time you read my blog and my website and all the other stuff that I do, I view those as screening tools.

Self-pruning. If you're looking self-slept, self-not-to-be-a-client. I'm going to make my stuff as dense as possible for you because if you don't like that, you won't like me. But if you keep reading that and you like that, then you're going to love the rest of the stuff that I provide.

And I really view much of my website and my tools like they're not magnets to bring people in per se. They're like pruning opportunities to screen people out. So the only people who really come all the way through the pipeline are people who really feel a connection to me and want to do business with me, in which case I would love to do business with them in any way that I can.

Are advisors waking up to this change? I'm not sure that they are. I think advisors are waking up to the fact that the generalist thing, I can work with anyone and do anything so I've got to cast my net as wide as possible. I think they're waking up to the fact that that's a problem.

They're seeing more people. They're not necessarily getting more business. I know lots and lots of advisors that'll say, "I work so much harder than I used to even to try to get clients, find clients, prospect, find a way to prospect for them. No more do not call lists. Everybody's more closed off." All the challenges, prospecting's clearly gotten harder than it used to be and getting results from it is harder than it used to be.

So I think there's this growing recognition that the way we've done things is not as effective as it used to be. And I hear that everywhere. "I used to seminar market. It doesn't work as well anymore. I used to cold call. It doesn't work. I don't know how people have built their business off cold calling.

It doesn't work as well anymore." There's all these things that we know used to work that didn't really work anymore, all of which I think are expressions of this problem of the denser and the more crowded the marketplace gets, the less it works to just be a generalist. You'll get prospects but they won't be clients and it's hard to even get good prospects.

But I'm not sure. I don't think very many advisors at all have really gotten to what you have to do with the next step, which really I think is kind of a leap of faith. It's one I've done. I can vouch that it works, but really kind of this leap of faith of if you take a greater focus and you accept that you're going to have far fewer prospects, you can do business with so many more of them that you still end up with more business in the end.

And it's that transition I don't think we've gotten there yet. And the reality is no advisor can serve 5,000 clients. You can serve 150, 150 somewhere. If that, I mean, that's always to me been one of the comic things about how many advisors fear casting a narrower target net of like, but if I narrow it down, will I be able to get enough people to work with?

You can't work with them all. You can't work with the close. I mean, I know a huge number of advisors that have fantastic careers and make as much money as they need to support themselves, their family, their kids, their retirement, everything else with like 50 to 100 of their top quality clients.

That's all they don't even need more than that. Right. Like you're like there's 300 plus million people in this country and you only need 50 of them to have a good business and you're worried about being too narrow? Like seriously? I mean, I like I met a guy out there.

He specializes with bass fishermen because you know, all fishermen would be too broad. Okay. Bass fishermen. He grew up on a lake. He used to be involved in bass fishing tournaments when he was young. He got involved in that community. I had no idea, but apparently bass fishing has like million dollar prize purses.

Like they're big tournaments in bass fishing. And when people win prizes in tournaments, he's the guy. Right. He's the guy. He's the guy that everybody calls. He's the guy everybody knows in that community. And so, you know, he's like 30 something years old and manages something like a hundred million dollars and 90% of his clients are bass fishermen.

It's amazing. So like, I'm like, you know, if you can build a wonderfully successful practice with bass fishermen, I'm sorry, but like, you know, good luck coming up with a narrower niche than that. That that wouldn't work. Right. Like it's it's because we need so few people. You know, like if I was trying to build a business and I'm some large national firm and like I need something that gets at least 10,000 new clients a year or a hundred thousand or millions if I'm a tech company, right, like the whole all the equation, the math changes and everything looks different.

You have to tackle in a different way. But in a world where like I just need 50 to 100 top quality clients to have an amazing life and business and career, you like you can't go to too narrow. Right. Right. Like you don't even have to say you're in the I mean, I know people who have made niche businesses like I just work with expatriates who are being repositioned from the US to a particular country in Germany, in Europe or something.

And like that's their niche, just cross national expatriates between the US and Germany. And you know, there may not be a ton of them, but there are a few. They do tend to be in rather high paying positions. They're often executives at companies. They have very unique specialized problems.

How do you navigate like German tax law and US tax law? Amazing niche. And like, I mean, I know one guy that does this like he hardly sees any of his clients. They're a quarter of the way around the world. So like you need 50 to 100 people, not even just out of the 300 million Americans, you need 50 to 100 people out of the what are we at like 7 billion on the planet?

Exactly. And that's the shift that just it seems people don't see. Yes, in the old days when you only could maybe work in your geographic area face to face, how would you find 50 people that were bass fishermen in one town? There's one guy and he's the one who doesn't win the tournament.

But in a world where you can instantly connect with anyone across the world, it's game changing. Yeah. And to me, like the, you know, I guess like it's come at the right time for us, you know, the good fortune of the world and how it evolves. Like to me, the the rise of the Internet and just sort of everything around how we can find and connect with people online and just find information and find service providers and find experts and all these different things.

You know, the Internet is the enabler for niche and specialization of work for advisors or really any industry or business going forward that like that's what makes it feasible to find the 50 human beings on the planet that fit your target clientele. And you can actually get all 50 of them.

In a way that you just couldn't before when you had you had to do it one to one face to face prospecting because there was no other way that people were going to find you. Right. Well, Michael, thank you for making the time and thank you for all you do for the advisor community.

My pleasure. One young advisor to someone who's living a few more years down. I've really benefited from your work and I know you work a lot and I thank you for it because it's been very helpful to me. Happy to help. Hope it's food for thought. Now, here's the takeaway that I'd like you to take from this interview.

What do you need to be doing to set up the circumstances so that your career can be advanced in ways similar to Michael's? Because what he did, maybe by accident, maybe not, who knows if that was almost a false humility. What happens is in our society, if, for example, if I came on here and said, "Every action that I've taken over the course of the last decade of my life was very carefully calculated to provide the maximum effect," that would sound a little bit strange to you.

So it would sound a little bit scheming to many people. So often we don't do that. And by the way, I'm not accusing Michael or anybody of shading the truth. We just have a more positive memory of ourselves usually in our past successives and we try to downplay them.

So I did well in school, but it came easy for me instead of saying, "Yeah, I worked these 18 hours to study for every test," or whatever the example is in your situation. So I'm sure that it was probably a little bit accidental, but I'm also sure that it was probably also just that Michael has put in a lot of hours of hard work.

So the key is the things that have been effective for him, can you take some lessons from those and apply them to your life? Can you apply some of his work ethic to your own situation? Maybe make some time to go and learn who the leaders are in your industry and attend those conferences and develop a subject matter expertise in a specific area that's useful in your world and then share that with others.

You might share it in the form of written content in blogs or writing on industry magazines. You need to develop your writing skills, so it might be good to start with a blog. You don't have to get permission there and that's what might get you broader distribution down the road.

You might want to develop it with podcasting or with speaking or with a YouTube channel or with whatever other new technology comes down the pike. Whatever you choose, though, just know that you don't have to sit around and wait for things to happen by accident. You can put the work in that makes it more likely that you'll be able to achieve the results that you're looking for.

Other thing I would just say, notice of Michael's story. I'll tell him and I will tell you about him and you would find this if you study his work. Michael is one of the most diligent, hardest working people I know of. He is consistent, he is prolific, he works hard.

To me that's comforting because I'm not sure that I can ever be really confident in talent. Some people seem to have a built in talent. Some people seem to have innate ability. But personally for me, I've never really been all that confident in my built in talent or in my innate ability.

I've always taken comfort from watching how hard some other people work and recognize that though I might not have natural skill, though I might not have natural ability, I can choose to work as hard as I am able to work. And then in time I might get some results.

I don't have to compare my results to someone else after all. Somebody else might have had a 10 year head start on me. Michael is certainly more influential in the financial advisor space than I am, but that's okay. He's been working at it for 15 years and I don't need to worry about that.

I can only just focus on controlling the things that I can control and ignore those things that I can't control. But I can choose how hard I work. I can choose to show up. I can choose to be consistent. I can choose to work hard to create interesting thoughts and useful information to share with other people.

And then I can just simply do my bit. And then I can just simply choose to apply that over enough time for hopefully for me to get results. That's it. That's the primary things I wanted to share with you today. I hope that you enjoyed this interview. I hope it was helpful to you.

I certainly enjoyed having a chance to talk with Michael and I encourage you to check out the body of his work at Kitsis.com. If you have a chance to see him speak or read any of his books or read any of his work, I would encourage you to check it out.

For those of you who are interested in the very technical side of financial planning, it's the best online resource that I know of to help you answer some of your more technical questions. If all you did was read through the archives of his blog, you would really have an excellent foundation for your knowledge.

Thank you to those of you who are patrons of the show. The Patreon campaign is going well as of today as I record this, February 17, 2015. We currently have 37 patrons total of the show and $378 per month of monthly pledges. Our first goal is $2,000 per month and when we get to $2,000 a month, we will replace the intro music.

Yes, that intro music. Although this is kind of the outro music. I might just replace the intro music and keep this as the outro music because I like to get dancing in the middle of the day whenever I do this and music is generally good for that. But that's our initial goal.

We're almost 25% of the way there. I'd say we're about 20% of the way there. So if you want to get there quickly, basically, let's see. If one third of the audience contributed a buck a month, we would be at $2,000 a month. So you can do the math from there.

But if every member of the audience contributed, well, my math is messed up. If you contributed a couple bucks a month or three bucks a month, we'd be done and we'd be at $6,000 a month. It's kind of sad when a financial advisor can't do live math. Thank you also to those of you who have been leaving reviews on the new apps.

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I appreciate that. Thank you for spreading the word about the show. If you find the content to be helpful, I just appreciate that so much. I know many of you will suggest the content in a forum or suggest it in an email to a friend and that type of information is so helpful.

Those are the referrals that really matter. Tell a friend. Just tell them, "Check the App Store," and they can learn how to get rich and stay rich and how to do it in an efficient way. That's it. I'm out. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com.

You can also connect with the show on Twitter @RadicalPF and at Facebook.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education and financial enlightenment, but your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent and trustworthy and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals and provide specific answers to your questions.

I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please help me by coming to the show page and commenting so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.