Read the Transcript Below:

Amber Kuhn  

My good friend, Micah Shilanski has build his practice with ugly graphics, typos, misspelled words and bad grammar. Well, welcome to this episode of the podcast. TPR Nation. We’ve got some incredible news. TPR LIVE just got bigger and better. Thanks to overwhelming demand, we now have a larger space and more seats available. Imagine being in the room with two industry rock stars who cracked the code on running wildly successful practices. This is your chance to learn directly from Matt and Micah in person as they dive into value adds and fees and connect with other advisors who are ready to deliver massive value and transform the industry. And if you’re looking for how you can help your clients through tax planning, stick around for the Retirement Tax Services Tax Summit. TPR Nation, I want to see you there, so don’t let this life changing event pass you by. Join us this September in Arizona for an experience that will redefine your career. Visit theperfectria.com/live and save your seat today.

Matthew Jarvis  

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I am your co-host Matthew Jarvis, and with me, as usual, the man, the myth, the legend, and as quoted in the book, delivering massive value. Micah Shilanski, Micah, how are you? My friend?

Micah Shilanski  

Well Jarvis, I’m doing well. I know your book, delivering massive value has been out for a little bit, but recently came back up and had a little bit of an excerpt of how you’re just, I don’t know, but basically, like, what kind of bashing my website might be a fun thing to talk about. 

Matthew Jarvis  

I was highlighting your strengths and natural ability, right? Some people, they say, like, Oh, he’s got natural charm. That’s, that’s what is like. That’s not the case for you. Micah, well, and it’s also, we’ll talk about this throughout this episode. But Tom Gower’s the same way people would say, Hey, Tom, we looked at your website. It’s garbage. You don’t have a fancy brochure, you haven’t done the Peter Montoya package. Like, whatever that is. He’s like, I don’t know. I’m gonna laugh all the way to the bank, like, that’s not what I’m solving for. And you know, Jess, we’re not saying the stuff isn’t important. We’re not saying, hey, ask somebody spell check your stuff and proofread. We’re not, not, we’re not. But if graphics, if fancy graphics, we’re going to get you all the clients in the world. Fidelity and Schwab and Vanguard would already have all the clients in the world. 

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, it really comes down to a lot more the intentionality behind it, right? Are you answering your prospects questions? This is what it comes down to. At the end of the day, sometimes fancy graphics do that most of the time they do not, and why they don’t? Right? I can pontificate on it for a quick second. I think it’s because all you’re doing is playing office, and you’re getting so neat and fancy, you’re missing the core essence of the prospects questions so often when I hire graphics people and they change things that I’ve done into something that looks prettier, it absolutely looks prettier, but it doesn’t solve the question that this was designed to solve? Yeah.

Matthew Jarvis  

I mean, I’m thinking of an example, Micah, when we talk about tax buckets, which is an episode that we’ve done, and you, you draw it out, right? And we’ve done training on that inside the message passers, videos on this. And then the graphics people, which we have a great graphics team, they said, great news. We didn’t we visualize this thing. It looks so much better. But because they hadn’t been in the meeting, because they hadn’t been across from the client, they didn’t realize that the core of the illustration was not the font that was used. It was how it was articulated to clients. Micah, I think the other reason why these fancy graphics don’t help is the fancier your graphics, the thinner your message. It’s kind of this, all sizzle, no stake. And so if you’re a consumer and you’re looking at 10 Advisor Websites, and they all have lighthouses on them, or rocks or or, you know, whatever, same color scheme. It’s making it really, really hard for a consumer to tell these apart.

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, it really does. So why are we talking about this again? Just highlight how my best friend bashes me in a public edition in his book. That’s one benefit that to bring up and to talk about right now. To be fair, Jarvis the rest of that quote was, was really nice and talking about, okay. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, I feel like there was more to that quote. 

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, there was, I selectively grabbed that lips, this in there. But no, the real important part about this is, this is now August. We’re rolling out you should have done by now your mid year review and jars. One of the things we’re talking to advisors is that we we miss in the media review, in my opinion, is the lag that it takes to go from prospective marketing to new clients onboarded, right? We, in our mind, we like to say it’s like instant. This is what happens in my world, is 18 months. It’s 18 months from when we’re really doing that prospecting and starting that prospecting push to where there’s new clients that are coming in. Maybe you have a shorter time period than that, right? But I don’t want to hold any excuses that are out there as to why you’re doing or not doing marketing. So let’s really kind of dive into this. Again. It’s all about that growth metric, right? I should say all about one of the aspects that we need to focus on is our growth metric. And how are we growing our practice is, that’s how we transform people’s lives.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, my kind of Pullman 18 month thread a little bit further right, and maybe some channels are a few months shorter, maybe some are a few months longer, whatever the case may be, but this stresses again, why one of the drums We just beat endlessly is do what works. If you’re going to do a marketing or prospecting channel, you have to commit to doing it for at least a year. Let’s use seminars. For example. Micah, you and I both done a lot of seminars. You still do them to the day today, we coach a lot of advisors on this. If you’re going to do seminars, you’ve got to do several of them, like six to 10 of them over the course of several years to even get dialed in so and the reason why it’s so important to do what works is if you’re just like, and I’ve done this, I bought a seminar off the shelf years ago. Oh, this is going to be great. No one shows up for the first one. One person shows up for the second one, and then I quit. Now it could have been a bad seminar, but it more likely was that I just didn’t have confidence. I do it enough times and again. Our friend Benjamin Brandt that we’ve coached for years, he says the same thing the podcast, don’t start a podcast unless you’re gonna do 20 episodes. And by the way, don’t do 20 episodes unless you’re gonna do 200 like we actually look this morning. This is our 690th episode of this, 690 episodes, that’s the level of commitment it takes to a marketing channel,

Micah Shilanski  

And one day we’ll get traction with this. All right? So I’m just kidding, right? It’s taken off like wildfire, but, but it wasn’t on episode one. It took a lot of that that’s going there. Now I do want to talk a little more about live events in just a little what I’d love to dive into is, and I know we’re all about this, right? Let’s get into the reality of it. Let’s jump into our marketing channels that we have in how they work, how we’re working them, and what we’re seeing from them. Is that going to be okay? Yeah, let’s do that. That’d be great. Okay, fantastic. So the first one I want to talk about is social, because everybody likes to talk about social, and it’s just, boy, it’s a triggering word for me, but let’s talk about it, because everybody likes to chat about it. This is a do, what works question, right? It is very simple. There’s a difference in marketing and advertising. Advertising is when I just want to get my name out there, because I believe in some cause that’s out there, and I’m not expecting a direct return on my dollar. I put that in an advertising camp. Example, we’re sponsoring a shooting event Alaska. I’m pro to a I think it’s going to be fantastic. I want to help sponsor this. I am not expecting direct clients from it. Now, we have got clients from which is a separate conversation, but I’m not expecting that. Then we go to a marketing event. A marketing event is going to be like a seminar. It’s an event I’m doing. I am expecting $1 for dollar or multiple of my dollar for dollar return on that investment directly. And that’s where social needs to come into. The category. You’re not supporting a cause of Facebook and YouTube and Instagram, right? That’s That’s not helping anything. This needs to be a marketing event. So if they’re going to do social, it has to be like, how much you going to spend and direct return for dollars, not likes? Are you going to have in your bank account? And I think Jarvis for me this, you know, I’ve tried all the different platforms really, believe it or not, YouTube has been pretty fantastic. I didn’t think it would work, so props to my team. Social was blowing up across the board on us, and I was tired of spending money on it, and they want to do YouTube. And I said, Absolutely not. And they said, Okay, well, what could we do? We know what metrics we have to get to in order to start you channel. Fine, we came up with these marketing metrics. They crushed them, they then started YouTube channel, and it’s actually taking off and working, which I find very interesting, because who wants to watch me on YouTube?

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, I suppose that YouTube is social media, and in my mind, this thing, right? Because podcast channel. What I worry about with social comes up is most advisors I see that say social media is my marketing channel. They sit on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever the case may be, for hours, and they kid themselves. I mean, I see advisors posting this. I do four hours of LinkedIn every day, and I’ve got seven followers, I don’t really care. I want to say, show me the last 20 clients you brought in. If you can show me that some portion of those came from social media efforts, then by all means, keep turning that thing up. Otherwise, 99 times out of 100 times spent on social media is strictly playing office. And if you want to spend time on that channel, and I spent time I was a guilty pleasure of mine, it has to be confined. So most marketing activities, we say, hey, what’s the minimum number? Each week, I’m going to call five centers of influence. Each week I’m going to record two podcasts. Social media has to have a time cap. So you say, Great, each week I’ll spend one hour in a designated block, but me sitting at home, scrolling on my phone that is playing office, that is not marketing, it’s not marketing. It’s just playing office 100%.

Micah Shilanski  

All of these channels, Jarvis, I can pull out a little bit more lovely channels, have to have a time cap with them, right? You can play office in every single one of these. So we got to start up there with what the goal is. So one of our primary goal, right? Our goal across the board, is we want to deliver massive value. We want to transform the lives of the people we come in contact with, right? That’s our goal of our podcast, not only this one, but also on the plane to fight a retirement the secondary goal, after transforming their lives, is to drive them to the website. Right? We don’t get anything by them being on YouTube, et cetera. Now, if it gives them a good tip, they help grow and change their life. That’s amazing. Goal number one. Goal number two is drive them towards the website. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Everything has to have a path. This is where advisors get stuck. This Micah, where you and I have gotten stuck, you can have a phenomenal let’s use this podcast as an example. This podcast gets 10s of 1000s of downloads, but if that was the end of it, yeah, we’re helping the industry. It’s not helping drive our cause forward. Same with the pyfr podcast. So we need to have a call to action, and then ultimately, what we’re trying to do is get people off of someone else’s platform and onto our platform. So whatever device you’re listening to this podcast on, we don’t own this platform. I know you thought we owned Apple podcasts and Spotify and Amazon. We don’t. We need to capture email addresses so that now it’s not someone else’s platform, it’s our platform.

Micah Shilanski  

Yep, and that’s going to bring me into the pod too, right? So that’s my other kind of big mass marketing channel that we have is our podcast with plan your federal retirement. We have a bi weekly podcast a little over two a month go out. And again, we’re getting really good traction on that, several 100 episodes into it, right? This isn’t just a one time and oh my gosh, I got traction. This took a long time as a as content plays do. And I’m a big content guy, you guys know the podcast content plays take a long time to build, but then they key. It’s a snowball effect, right? It just keeps rolling and building and growing. And that’s the same thing we’re seeing with the podcast. It took a long time to get to where we’re at, but now it’s growing. We’re having people contact our office directly saying, Hey, I listen to Micah podcast, and I want to sit down and meet with him, right? So that’s the end goal that we want. Course, number one is transforming their lives and those in the podcast and then bring them to the website. It’s everything on the mass marketing channels are pushing people to the website. Jersey, echoing again just what you said. I want to put them on our platform where we can start capturing their email address, right? I got to give them a lead magnet, which we can talk about as well, something so valuable. They would be crazy not to give me their email address. And now, all of a sudden, we’re not going to spam stuff. We’re going to provide them with excellent content and showcasing why we in this field. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah. I mean, if we boiled down a content play at the end of the day, you’re you’re trying to establish that you’re smarter than or you have more expertise in what they need than anyone else they’ve run into right now. Again, this is why a niche is so important. If you’re trying to say, Hey, I’m trying to compete with Vanguard and have more information on retirement, oh, that’s that’s going to be a tough content play to win. You’re going to drown in this ocean. But when you go super narrow and you say, Hey, listen, I only develop content for this audience, and I speak exclusively to them. That stands out. An example I heard years ago, Micah, was, let’s say you were getting audited by the SEC, not just a normal audit, but like, they’re really coming in. They’re angry. Are you going to call your estate planning attorney? No, I’m not. I mean, they’re an attorney to practice law. Same thing if I got testicular cancer, like I’m not going to go to my general doctor. Be like, Hey, listen, you think you can take care of this? Like, I want of this. Like, I want to find the guy or the gal that’s the person for this. So on a content play, you’re trying to speak to a very narrow audience and say, Hey, I know more about your situation than anyone you’ve ever met. But Mike, again, to your point, that takes time. It takes time to establish that credibility. One article, one post, even 100 100 posts that alone is not going to do it insurance. 

Micah Shilanski  

I think of the content play a lot of times, people like, yeah, yeah, I get it, but I don’t want to exclude everybody else, right? And as soon as you do that, but in there, you’re sabotaging your entire marketing plan, because it’s not about excluding everyone else. It’s about focusing the mass valued, mass benefits to them. Now someone else who’s not a federal boy comes across my website, comes across my podcast, they’re going to be turned off by it. And guess what? That’s 99.9 and 99% of not only people the world, but but retirees. That’s not who I’m going for. I am just going for this, and it’s a healthy way that I can help transform now, could I say and cut it? Just fine. Well, look, my information is about 90% could apply to everybody. Is only 10% of this is really unique to that. I could argue that all day long. But does that help? If I talk to everyone, I talk to no one. So on these podcasts, on YouTube, on the podcast, on our website, I want to talk to my audience. I want to talk to my avatar. Sometimes I can have a little two avatars going on. Example, this is a normal federal employee and a federal employee and a federal employee with special provisions, right? So they’re a little different. And so on those unique pages and topics, I can talk about that, but I want to be talking to my avatar.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, it’s pretty rare. I’m just trying to think Mike, of all the advisors we’ve coached since, it’s lots now training them. Who’s gone too narrow? It’s it’s tough to go too narrow, as long as it’s a profitable niche. I guess I saw one advisor and his his niche was super narrow, and it was super narrow with a demographic that had no money. And I said, Dude, this is a great example for your pro bono work, like, again, I know you’re passionate about this. You cannot run a business around that market was less than a couple of 1000 people that that’s how that’s how targeted was.  Yeah, real, real narrow, right? You don’t have, like, a 50% market saturation, some crazy things. So short of that, this, again, where it’s good to have a sounding board, especially in marketing, we start drinking our own Kool Aid. Oh, man, if I run this Facebook ad campaign, I’m gonna get so many clients coming in that the money I borrowed to pay for it will pay for it. Somebody like you need to have someone who can be the reason when you’re doing any kind of marketing channel. And that person, by the way, is not the company trying to sell you these ads.

Micah Shilanski  

And I like to set these rules up in advance, right? Yeah, so great. What are my KPI you guys know me on the podcast so far, I like ranges. What is my range of success? What’s the minimum viable? Okay, this is a good idea, and was absolutely amazing. Oh my gosh, I would. I’d be crazy not to keep doing this kind of thing. I want to see these ranges on each one of these activities. Trevor said, point you said earlier, I want to bring it back. I want to put a ton put a time period with this as well. This is how much money and how much time I’m going to spend, and this is the range of results I expect from this if I’m working company. And this is, Well, Mike, it’s really not about bringing a client’s spot, adding more likes unlike them, and go find somebody else, right? Because likes aren’t going to pay the bills and and I keep beating on this because I find so many advisors have fallen into that truck here, right raising my hand right here, super guilty of hiring these companies and they do these interesting things which boost your traffic and like, but it’s not your ideal clients, it’s not your target markets. You’re not actually transforming people’s lives, and you’re not bringing on clients.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, totally, totally. Mike, one of the thing you’ve got to commit to on this is, how much time are you going to invest being the best there possibly is at whatever channel you’re going through, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, whatever the case may be, the people who excel at this and Micah, you and I have been coached by most of them, because we always seek out the people that are best, right when we’re coached by Evan Carmichael, who’s one of the top YouTubers. This guy is relentless, relentless on the amount of content he creates. When we talk to John Lee Dumas, right? John Lee Dumas podcast, God, his sort of like persona is like, Hey, I just sit by the beach in Puerto Rico. And magic, those money flows in. But then you talk to him, and you realize he’s done five episodes a week, every week for 10 years. He’s done like, five or 6000 episodes. So whatever the channel you’ve got to come and say, Hey, I’m going to be the best there ever was at this, not dreaming like here’s literally what I’m going to do to make this happen. 

Micah Shilanski  

So that also brings us kind of to the in person events that we do as well, right? So after again, we that broad marketing that we’ve done on the social pause drive by the website. Now we have a good list, and now I’m going to start kind of calling that list with you master person events. This is just how we do it, right? So whatever’s gonna work, and we do two to three in person events a year. They’re one day all day. Seminars are about seven to eight hours in length, so it’s pretty intense that we go through and then Jarvis when we’re doing this. This is one of the things that the seasons change. Sometimes I can send out an email and the entire seminar is gonna be full, send out that email blast, and I’ll get like, 10% full, right? Sometimes you don’t want to sit on a podcast, and sometimes I don’t drive in traffic. Sometimes it won’t we’ve gone back to the mailers, which I know you love, because we were like, Hey, we weren’t getting as we once with the emails and podcasts, and so we started mailers. Mailers didn’t work during covid. Online worked, and everybody got that. Now, mailers are working again. Got to have these things in your bag, and you have to try them. But the reason we know what we’re what doesn’t work is because we have, I know how many mail sent out. We know what the return was. I know how many phone calls we had to make to agencies in order to talk to them about the training. We know how many events, right? So we’re building all of this at us, right? I want to do this event. I know how much work goes into it. You might be thinking, holy crap, this is a lot of work. Yes, it is. We should be 100% clear with this, and we haven’t even got to preparing for the presentation yet, right? This is just the marketing side of it, and this requires a ton of work, but jars again. Your point? You know, do you want to commit to being successful or not? 

Matthew Jarvis  

It’s a ton of work. And let’s be really honest, if you’re doing it right, it’s super boring, pedious work. So recently, I saw the headlines that Ken Fisher, that we joked about a minute ago, he sold 20% of Fisher Investments for $2.5 billion $2.5 billion Wow. Everyone seen Ken’s ads. They’re the same ones. I hate annuities. They run them again and again and again and again. Just embassy. And why is the boringest ads in the world? And yet, he just sold 20% of his firm for $2.5 billion the best firms do the boringest work now again, I even Ken Fisher. He’s got $2.5 billion in his pocket. He could do some fun, sexy ads at this point, and he’s still doing the same boring stuff.

Micah Shilanski  

I’m going to push back on that. I’m going to say Tesla firms do what works. Now, you may think it’s boring, but you know, I’m going to say it’s the do what works aspect of it totally and we have to keep doing the thing that continues to work, and we choose not to do a thing that works, then we’re choosing to do something that doesn’t work, just by definition, right? So we really got to be intentional about that. I agree. 100%

Matthew Jarvis  

Settled joke, right? It works so well I quit doing it. So 100% we’re all guilty of that. Least I am, yeah, for sure. For sure. Of course, Mike, as you mentioned, we could do an entire episode, dozens of episodes, on how the seminar works, how the meetings work. We’ve done these before. You go back through the archives again, 690 episodes deep at this point. Of course, we’ll be talking about this at TPR, live at great length. It’s work. 

Micah Shilanski  

It just is really work. You know, one thing I want to bring up, we talk about the in person seminars, right? So we have other advisors which are doing fantastic with onboarding the team. They’re learning the presentation, they’re presenting it, etc. And one of the things we talked about, whether it’s meeting with a client, doing a presentation, you have to know the presentation so well you can give it at a subconscious level. The thought here is you can only one conscious activity, well, at a time. And so if I’m up front for presenting in front of a group or sitting down with a client, and all I’m thinking about is what I’m going to say next. I am not paying attention to anything else going on in the room. I’m not paying attention the dynamics. Where did I lose somebody? Where do I need to engage? What do I need? Like, the presentation? Where do I need to walk to who has a question? I can’t pay attention to any of that because I’m just focused on what I need to say, because that’s my soul conscious activity. But once you’ve mastered the content, you can now push this to a subconscious activity. Jervis, you tease me all the time. I’m like, What am I going to talk about? And you’re like, Mike, it’s okay. You’re like, this little monkey. I’ll wind you up. I’ll pull the string, and then all of a sudden, you’ll start going right, and that’s it’s 100% the case, because there’s built in 10,000 hours in this into subconscious activity. Why do I stress this? Because in order to deliver value, we have to be able to connect with people, whether it’s in person, a seminar, et cetera, and you have to have it presented so well, you could, again, just pull the string of the monkey the exercise we’re going to do on that Jarvis, we have a big hike coming up with the advisors in the office. It’s about 22 miles. We’re going to knock it out in a day. And JT spoiled the fun for me just a little bit. So we did one last year as well. While he’s going uphill, we’re six, seven miles into it. Last year. I’m like, JT, go through the presentation with me real quick. And he’s like, You have got to be kidding me. I was like, No, that was a great time, very exhausted, you don’t want to think about it. So we did let the cat out of the bag for the other advisors, but that’s what we’re going to do here soon. Like to get out of your environment and practice this stuff as well, because that’s going to really help you master your craft.

Matthew Jarvis  

Speaking of mastering your craft, this podcast is about taking action, right? Because the things that you know, and they’re really not worth anything, right? Like you could, you could be 100 times smarter than Micah on federal employees. But if you’re not taking action like you’re not going to get anywhere, right? So it’s only the things that you do that count. So actually, number one, your calendar for the rest of the year. Again, we’re only in August. We have a lot of year left, but boy, it’ll slip by fast each week, each week, you need to have designated the activities that you will do, and for some of us not do that, will move your advertising and marketing forward. So it’s got to be blocked out as a given time. That’s got to be your sole focus during that time, both the time you’re going to spend and the reps you’re going to create. I love it so important. 

Micah Shilanski  

I’m going to say, measure what matters. This is one of the things as marketing activities. So few people do write down and document what are you doing? What’s your time period and what’s your expectation? Now, it could be a lot of guessing at five. Of guessing at first, because you don’t know that’s fine. That’s where we all started. Measure it every single activity, whether it’s a mailer, it’s an email, it’s phone calls, etc. You can see what the success rate is and how to improve.

Matthew Jarvis  

You totally can totally count, of course, last but certainly not least, vote, early. Vote often. Be sure to get this podcast five stars. Like and Subscribe, share with your other advisor friends, we are, like I said, 690 episodes in I think Micha, we probably got other, I don’t know, 690 episodes in us. You know, when we get to that side of it, appreciate all of the listeners. If you’ve got a question or something you’d like to see us cover on the podcast, send an email to lifestyle@theperfectria.com and until next time, happy planning.

Amber Kuhn  

TPR Nation. You know that it’s a competitive market out there. So how are you standing out as an advisor while still having a streamlined process? If you’re looking for a way to provide value and help your clients with estate planning, then it’s time for you to download our Estate Planning Guide help your clients document their final wishes to ensure peace of mind, visit theperfectria.com/estateguide to get your access today.