About this discussion on AI for Independent Financial Advisors.
In this episode, we dive into the future of the advisory world with Eden Ovadia, co-founder of Finny, a revolutionary platform that’s transforming how independent financial advisors grow their businesses.
With traditional client acquisition methods eating up to 70 hours per lead, the financial advisory space is overdue for innovation. How can advisors break free from the inefficiencies of manual prospecting and scale their growth sustainably?
💡 What You’ll Learn:
- How AI is reshaping organic growth strategies for advisors.
- Why identifying a niche is no longer optional—it’s essential.
- The inside story of Finny, from its Y Combinator roots to becoming the “Hinge” for financial advisors.
- Tactical insights into making meaningful, personalized connections with prospects.
Whether you’re an advisor struggling to define your niche, or simply curious about how AI can simplify your business, this conversation will equip you with actionable strategies and a peek into the game-changing tools shaping the future of advising.
Links
| Eden Ovadia |
| Finny AI |
| Y Combinator |
| Theodore Janson |
| Victoria Toli |
| Morningstar |
| Boston Consulting Group (BCG) |
| McGill University |
| Ecole Polytechnique |
| Uber |
| Stripe |
| Airbnb |
| SEC |
| General Catalyst |
| Catalytic Wealth Management |
Transcript:
This episode is all about the future of the advisory world. this is an episode with Eden Ovadia. She is the co founder of Finny. In this episode, we talk about how advisors will connect in the future, how personalized those connections can be, and why it’s important to identify a niche.
if you haven’t heard of Finney, this episode will provide an origin story. and if you have heard of Finny, this episode will enrich your understanding of how advisors will use AI in the future in new ways.
So enjoy this conversation with Eden Ovadia
Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here in New York City at your guys office at the Finney office. Yes. So. Brand new Finney office. It’s very exciting. When did you guys move in here? Early October. So it’s been just about a month. Yeah. And it’s been fun. Before that we were in San Francisco.
So we just come back here. And why were you in San Francisco? Uh, we’re completing this program accelerator called Y Combinator. It’s a three month program set in San Francisco. It’s a startup accelerator program for, it’s kind of like the Harvard of startups. They give you the same deal. And then some of the biggest startups in the world have come out of that, like Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, Coinbase, they’ve all come out of this program.
And so it’s, It was very exciting to be surrounded by that innovation. Tell me, I want to hear about what that experience was like. How did you guys apply? Or was the idea for Phinney there before you got in? Or how did that work? It’s actually a great question. So the way that I thought about the idea for Phinney and the idea has been So I was pretty much remain constant ever since our inception was actually my old job at BCG.
So I was working at Boston Consulting Group as an associate. I was first on the private equity team and then uh, started working more with their asset and wealth management division under their financial institutions practice. And as I was working more and more in wealth, I became almost obsessed with the space.
I thought it was very, very interesting. Lots of interesting disruptors and drivers that you really don’t see in any other industry. And I felt that I had a real appreciation for it, having done diligences in private equity for Literally dozens of different industries, and you really don’t see anything like quite this interesting and quite opportunistic with, you know, there’s the wealth transfer, there’s private equity rolling up, you know, RIAs, really interesting market dynamics.
But the way this idea actually came to be about was when I was at BCT, one of the largest RIAs in the country type tried to hire me as their chief of staff. And it was through that recruiting process. So I realized that they were really just hiring me to solve their organic growth problem. It was really that simple.
And so instead of taking that job offer, I realized that I combined my newfound passion and love for the wealth space with my background in machine learning and software engineering, which is what I had studied originally in college. And I could actually build something with this new technology that was available.
this organic growth problem and at least make the process less painful for independent financial advisors and not just as one firm. And so I decided not to take down the job offer, and then left my job and start Finney. This was in January of this past year. And so the idea has always been help independent financial advisors grow organically.
And so the way that that’s manifested itself, the product, it’s obviously gone through many iterations, but ultimately that’s really the genesis of it. I just wanna. Digest what you said, right? You were at BCG. You were working with a variety of industries. You discovered that there were unique eccentricities maybe of the wealth space, wealth management space.
And you, maybe one of your clients, they like, come on, we need some, we want you to work with us. Right. And you discover, They need growth and then you probably discovered all the other RIAs are in the same bucket, right? Yeah, all right. There’s a technology play here, right? Was AI at the core of that? Yeah, very much so.
What I had realized when I was interviewing for this role, their industry or their Average across that point was 1200 advisors. They had earned their umbrella. They were doing something like 60 or 70 hours of business development for every one new client converted. So just this like absurd, absurd amount of time and money spent to convert one new client.
And if you double clicked into that, there was just a lot of manual repetitive tasks. Being done process was anything along the lines of download and manually put together these really long prospect lists through multiple different channels like LinkedIn, sales Navigator, look at PitchBook, you know, or ZoomInfo.
Put all these things together and then step two, qualify, and then try to enrich that data or those lists. And then step three, manually reach out to every single one. Or add them to some like spray and pray campaign, like that they were getting almost no responses to. And so I realized that with AI, with LLMs, um, it’s obviously around that time, chat GBT was rising to prominence.
There was a lot, a lot more use of these like large language models. You could automate and a lot of the tasks that historically have been manual, like data aggregation, like, um, manual outreach, all of these things can now be automated. And so process that took 60 or 70 hours of human time can now take one or two hours using this new technology.
That’s what I’ve noticed. It, it takes the time to do things. It’s a fraction of the time. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You, you guys bring me through, like, so you had the idea and at that point, How do you guys form the company with your co founders? How did, how did that, how did they come about? Yeah. So I guess the story that I just told you goes till about January 1st of this past year, January 1st, I quit my job, January 2nd, and he was incorporated.
Happy new year. Yeah, exactly. Start of the new year, hit the ground running. I had recruited Vittoria and Theo very soon after that. And so Theo, who’s our chief technology officer, he and I went to college together. Uh, we studied software engineering at McGill together. And then post college, he went on to do his master’s in machine learning in France at École Polytechnique, and by the time I had called him with this idea, he was actually leading a team of, um, machine learning researchers.
For applications in fintech. So just, you know, very, very applicable. I called him with this idea and he was just so excited. Think like the idea right away at that point was already looking to start his own company. And it was very serendipitous. And basically within the week was on a flight back from Paris to New York to start this with me.
So it worked out really well. And then, uh, As we were starting up, ramping up, starting to build the MVP, we realized that neither of us had any product experience. And we had, I started reaching out to my friend Victoria, who at the time was actually leading growth and market expansion for Uber One, like Uber subscription service.
When she had been a product manager at Uber for over four years, and obviously was like, in my mind, the go to person for all product questions. And so she started helping us out, really on the side of her desk, answering her product questions, giving us advice. And then she joined one customer call. I thought it would be a good idea.
I’ll give her some context as to what she’s helping us with. She joined one customer call, always remember this, and they were based in Phoenix, Arizona. And on the call, the customer says, I’ve been in this industry for over 30 years. I’ve been waiting for someone to build something like this. If I could code, I would have built this a while ago.
How can I get started? Like sign me up. I’ll pay literally whatever it is, but like, how do I get early access to this? After we hung up the call, she looked at us and she like, in my years of product experience, I’ve never heard any customer react like this to, to a product. Like I want to enjoy. And so she had left her job at Uber and, yeah, and that’s Victoria.
She left her job at Uber. And joined as our third co founder, um, and her, and our chief product officer. Yeah. Ah, so that’s how the founding team came to be about. The epiphany, honestly, from both sides, right? Customer was like, I need this to happen. Yeah. Sign me up right now. She was like, this is, this never happens.
I don’t think I appreciated that because this was. Like the incredibly lucky that this idea kind of fell in my lap, right? Like I was basically offering a job to solve this problem. And I was like, wait, I can actually build something to help this for her as a product person she had gone through, or she she’s gone through many iterations of launching from products and trying to find, you know, the right product for the right customer and had never in her years.
And I think that for her was like a light bulb moment. She’s like, you guys are onto something. And I think at that time, neither Theo or I had appreciated how lucky we were to have came across this idea. At that point. You hadn’t even considered going to YC. No. What, how did that happen? Yeah, so, this is, in the timeline, this was around February, March time.
March by the time they both were fully on board, um, and she had left Uber. At that point, I had already raised about a million dollars of venture capital funding. I actually wasn’t sure that YC was the best fit for us. I, at the time, wasn’t sure. You know, it was like, we have money in the bank. We have a lot of runway.
We have some initial customers. We’re launching a product. Like we actually, do we even need this startup accelerator program? And Victoria was the one that was pushing for it. She, a lot of her friends had done it in the past and, you know, had said like very, very amazing things about the program. Coming from Stanford.
I think she was much more in that like West coast startup ecosystem that I wasn’t. And so I wasn’t as excited as she was, but she convinced us to apply. We said, if we apply and we get in, we’ll talk about it. Right. Um, we applied in April, I want to say, and, and we got in. Um, and when you get in to a program that has less than a 1 percent acceptance rate, they’re basically offering to write to you.
The standard YC deals like half a million dollars, and they offer that check and offer you to come to San Francisco and be part of that community. We’ve given access to mentors that have literally built some of the companies that have shaped our world. You don’t say no to that. So, uh, we decided to all move to San Francisco and we started the program in July.
What’s the program like just briefly? Yeah. So it’s three months. It’s a standard program. So every company goes through the exact same three month program. They go through cohorts. And so there’s, uh, the batch is around at the time it was around 200 companies per batch, so 200 of the companies of approximately the same stage as us, um, to think of anywhere from like very early inception idea.
To, you know, just launched a product has some revenue, but like still very early stage, it’s honestly incredibly light touch. So the actual requirements, quote unquote, or the curriculum is one hour a week of office hours. So it’s one hour a week with office hours with your group partner, and then one hour a week of group office hours with companies who are similar to yours.
And so your group partner is typically someone who has been. built and exited a very successful company already. Our group partner is Michael Seibel, one of the founders of Twitch, and he’s been a group partner at YC for years and years and has coached some of the, you know, he was actually working with Airbnb at the time and he’s coached some of the most incredible companies.
So just to be able to have one hour of his time every week of his undivided attention to get his, you know, input, feedback. Guidance was invaluable. Um, and so that’s about, it’s about 12 weeks of that. You’re also obviously in this very intense environment where there’s 200 other companies who are building at the same time as you, and then you get speakers come in of other founders to tell their story.
And so we had Brian Chesky from Airbnb come in. We had the founder of DoorDash. We had Sam Altman come in, who was also a YC founder at one point and just share their stories and all, all of it is off the record. And so you just get. really, really incredible insights as to like the early days of their company, when they were at your stage.
Really awesome. And then at the end of the batch, there’s this thing called demo day and demo day is a time when the top investors of the world essentially come out and hear your pitch. Every company gets one minute and yeah, that’s right. That’s really quick. The pressure’s on. You get one minute to put your best foot forward, pitch to the world of investors, and then investors can get your contact information, can follow up if they want to invest.
That’s typically when you would raise your seed round. What’s the one minute pitch? Yeah. For Finney. Yeah. Oh my God, you’re putting me on the spot. But I think it’s just something like Finney is going to be the future operating system for independent financial advisors. We’re starting with organic growth and lead gen, but our mission is really to give and empower independent financial advisors with the tools they need to compete at the same level as the wire house and national, you know, institutional type advisors.
And we fundamentally believe that. It’s the way to get Americans, all Americans who wanted good financial advice through the independent channel. And so our mission is really just to empower that channel. That’s cool. I think it’s a really good idea to do that one minute thing because it makes you really focused and figure out like what’s the core of the value that we provide.
Oh yeah. If we went through many iterations. Yes. I bet. Cause you got to like hook their attention. You got to make them, you got to tell a story in a minute. Yeah. Exactly. And then you’ve got to resolve it with like, this is that solution, right? This is the market. This is the opportunity. Yeah. I think that’s a good idea.
Yeah. Victoria has said that Finney is like hinge for IFAs. Yeah. Is that the right way to categorize it? So that’s, that’s a funny story. Yes. And no, in many ways, but the context there is we had sat for an interview with wealthmanagement. com in July referee, we won the morning star best and show, um, FinTech competition.
And then after that, we had done an interview, um, with Davis Janowski at wealthmanagement. com. And we did. Let’s just say we spent multiple hours with him, you know, give, so to answer and even questions saying different points of view of the story. And I think at the end of like one of our two hour sessions, Victoria said something like, Oh yeah, like it’s kind of like a hinge for financial advisors.
And it was an offhand like joke. The article comes out next week. First line. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s like, I think it provides a good heuristic. Right. It makes it really simplified. When I was a bright talk, I would say it’s YouTube for business. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. It’s. It makes people immediately understand it without you having to explain it a lot more.
Right. There’s obviously nuances to the business, but it makes it really, it’s easy to digest. People generally get it or it makes them want to learn more. Exactly. Okay. It does a good job of doing that. At least I liken us to a dating app in the sense that. Uh, the basis of FINI is really to match people with people we think they’ll fundamentally get along with.
What that actually means is we have, we’ve built this machine learning model called an F score. It’s short for FINI score. And what it does is it uses literally thousands of data points to predict a match between an advisor and a prospect. And it looks at things like interests and hobbies and where you went to school and where you grew up and your behaviors on social media, your political affiliation, your property, you know, value and your mortgage.
All these data points about the prospect and then similar about the advisor. And then we’ll say, do we think they’ll get along? Is there a match there? Can the advisor actually help them? You know, can the, does the advisor’s value proposition resonate with this person? And so in that sense, the F score, the way that I explain it in most simplest form is very much like a dating score.
It’s like a match score. Like, well, you guys date, you know, we’ll like finding an advisor. I’m sure as you know, is one of those. Deeply personal decisions and relationships you’ll have. They’re gonna be with you, you know, through all your best moments in life. Like when you marriage, I have your first kid, but also the worst moments in life when you lose someone’s close to you.
And so, um, you need someone that you can trust and you’ll actually get along with and who you’ll feel comfortable opening up to in those moments. So that’s, we really put a lot of emphasis on this match score. I think it’s also like. It helps you streamline the chemistry meeting because you might businesses today, they might have five meetings before they figure out.
Do I really want to be working with this person on a regular basis? Right? But by knowing all of those parameters ahead of time and using that to proactively go out and feel like this is the people that I want to target. It sidesteps that chemistry process. You still got to build the rapport, but it helps you do that.
It sounds like exactly. It helps you narrow down the funnel a lot more, right? I think like a lot of what was driving the 60 to 70 hours was the qualification prioritization piece. And so we basically, the F score takes care of all of that. It says, Hey, this person is pre qualified in terms of has the minimum net worth or any other requirements you’re looking for.
But also it goes beyond that to say, we. We should, you actually should prioritize this person because beyond just the on paper requirements, we actually think you guys will get along and have a high likelihood of converting, like a propensity almost to convert. It’s, uh, intent, intent, intent based. Intent based.
Intent without intent, right? Because unlike the other lead gen tools of the world, we’re not Selling the lead to like multiple high spitters, the lead never filled in a form or anything like that. So the advisor is actually the first, the first contact, the first point of contact to that prospect. How does that happen?
Can you bring me through like that? Just the process that an advisor would go through when you guys work with them? Yeah, that’s a great question. So when an advisor were to onboard, uh, we spend about an hour. And what that onboarding session looks like is honestly very similar to an interview with like a dating coach.
And so it’s, we’re asking them and we record the whole session. We ask them questions like, what inspired you to become a financial advisor? What do you do for fun on the weekends? What are you uniquely best at? If you were to ask your existing clients, why they come to you? Oh, they say we record this one hour meeting and then we feed that transcript of the meeting into our machine learning model.
And so it analyzes this transcript and predicts their behaviors. Notes down their interests, notes down everything that they had mentioned about themselves and what they’re looking for in a prospect. And that is what trains our ML model on, off on the advisor side, aside from actually creating, like filling in, answering our questions, we then give them access to Finney.
The way that you would interact with Finney as an advisor is really just, it’s an app on your computer and you can either search for prospects in natural language. So you could say something like, Hey, Finney, it helped me find recently divorced woman aged 55 to 65 in the zip code. You know, or say something like help me find a recently promoted CEOs of companies with more than 10 million in assets or 10 million in revenue.
Sorry. Um, so that’s the one way through the search. The second way, Um, and page we created called a for you page and the for you page. Sound familiar? Yeah, exactly. You know, you’re the only person that’s ever gotten that. Oh, great. I’m the marketing guy. I swear. No, ever. And I used to have to say, that’s a for you page cause it’s built for you.
I get it. Think of it as like a feed of just prospects we think you might like. And so we’ll, they’ll fall into different categories. We track money in motion events. And so it’ll say, Hey, you told us that platinum retire or recently bought a property or, you know, we track about a dozen of these money in motion events.
That’s awesome. We’ll track them on the, on the dashboard and then we’ll just show like high F score prospects in going through these events. Those are two different ways you can actually find the prospects. Once you find them, depending on how much autonomy or how much you want Finney to do, you can actually add these prospects to outreach campaigns.
And so then that’ll allow Finney to actually add them to outbound email campaigns on your behalf. And so that’s like, that’s Typically like six, seven touches and a full, a full blown email campaign, hyper customized to that prospect. And so there’s nothing like templated, nothing like cookie cutter about these, or you can do it yourself.
And so we give you the tools to reach out to them via phone number, email, LinkedIn, or any other social media that we’re able to find. Um, we give you all the information we have on the prospect. And so a lot of advisors, especially the more old school ones just want to call. And so they spend their days finding and saving prospects and then just calling them and they’ll have their.
card in front of them when they call and they say, Hey, congrats on X, Y, and Z, if that’s applicable, or Hey, you know, from a fellow ex alum, whatever it is. Um, or hey, you know, catch the soccer game this week, things like that. So you guys have found a way to speed up the rapport building process too, because when I hear these things, Oh, you, you went to this school or, Oh, I did triathlons, right?
Oh, you didn’t Ironman Maryland, right? I did that too. Right. That’s great. You, you can develop rapport that. A hundred percent that’s, that’s exactly it. Or, Hey, you know, we track with language as you speak. So even just like, you know, they both are Greek opening up, you know, with like something in Greek, like it’s something silly like that, but it really disarms the person on the other side of the call or on getting that email.
That’s a good job at establishing that basis of trust. That’s around like outreach. And as a last step, we offer pipeline tracking. And if you log into Finney again, you would see, we fully integrate with your email and so you would see who’s responded, what’s the next best action. What do you have to say?
Um, who wants more information? Just a snapshot of your entire pipeline, um, and where they are in the pipeline. So I’d like to say that Finney almost replaces the need for a junior business development analyst, because anything that you would give an analyst to do, like generate lead lists, prioritize those lists.
Do the initial outrage and book that meeting. We basically do all of that. Have you guys run into any problems with like compliance? Because often like you got to make sure the emails are approved or something like that. Any, any bumps there? Yeah. I mean, we go through for all of our customers, we go through pretty rigorous, like compliance process.
I’ll say that. We ourselves are registered as an RA, um, with the SEC as an internet advisor. We have our own chief compliance officer. And so every step of our development has been informed with our chief compliance officer in the room, basically helping us, giving us input and what, what the right regulations, what the right guidelines are for the AI.
How do we actually set that up? It’s, we’ve never not been able to work with a customer because of compliance. Um, it’s never been like the deciding factor. We have enough flexibility in the outreach campaigns where if They’re, they are more strict. You can literally just have templated messages, you know, and we send out for you with like fill in the blanks, right?
Like that’s probably the most extreme version, but because we’re integrated with your Outlook or with your Gmail, any compliance tools that you already have built in any archiving tools would already be applied. I see. How are you guys? You’re an RIA, but you’re working with advisors or possibly other RIAs.
How does that relationship work? Right, only in the sense that we’re able to take success views. That’s, and I can show more about our pricing model, but we don’t have any customers that we serve ourselves. We don’t actually work with any investors. We don’t have any assets in our management. It was just a compliance regulatory.
Ah. Yeah. I see. So it’s, yeah, you’re, you’re actually serving the advisors and you don’t have any customers. So there wouldn’t be any conflicts there anyways. Never. Yeah. I see. Because then you can be like advisors. Okay. Yeah. We’re never, we don’t serve any customers. We actually, Um, have no interaction ever with the end investor or client.
So you give advisors kind of like a, if we’re thinking about this in like early 2000s terms, right? You’re giving them a list of names to go after, right? These are the right people, right? Message them as you will, as you would like, here’s some tech. If you want to go through Gmail or whatever outlook to do that, you just guys give them, you guys give them a, a very simple list.
Of people that are primed or, uh, they have high intent of they’re likely to match. Exactly. Right? Okay. That’s exactly right. Hmm. Some of your early customers, how did you find them and how have you been working with them? Yeah. It’s funny because all of our customers to date have found us. We’ve, which is ironic cause we’re like a marketing company who’s never done any marketing.
Okay. Um, or any outbound. So I joke, like, I, we literally built a company that sends cold emails, we never had to send one ourselves. Yeah. But I, I think it’s just, we’ve been really lucky, we’ve, from day one, we’ve gotten a lot of inbound interest. People have just heard about us, they want, you know, they were interested, they went to our website to find more information.
Next thing you know, we had to put up a wait list on our website, and our wait list currently has about 260 RIs waiting to get access, like vetted RAs waiting. It just kind of snowballed, I think. We had conversations with, I’ll give a shout out to Joe Moss, the Joe Mosses, the Josh Browns, all of, they had picked up Finney early on, they’d written about us on their blogs.
And they had driven like really just great organic, you know, traffic to us. And from there, you know, Morningstar invited us to come present their annual conference. We won that showcase had led to us headlining future proof of their demo drop. And so just one thing led to another, led to another. And we have just had like just really, really incredible organic demand.
Wow. That’s great. How are you kind of. You have a list of 260 clients that want to work with you guys, right? What’s your process for like triage, like how do you, how do you choose who to work with or what, how do you onboard them? Yeah. We kind of triage against two key metrics, I would say. One is importance of organic growth, right?
The advisors have to have organic growth as a strategic priority for them and really want it, which I feel like to anyone outside of industry, it’s like obvious, like, okay, they want to have to grow, but I’m sure you’ve come across with people say, oh yeah, I want to grow. And then they don’t actually do anything and don’t put it in the work.
Right. Because ultimately this is cold outreach. You’re ultimately still need to put in the work and, you know, have to be willing to put in the time. And so that’s like criteria number one. And then criteria number two is actually a little bit more interesting. It’s do you have a niche or how, how likely do we think you’ll be?
If we put a client in front of you or potential prospect in front of you, how likely are you to convert? Because Finney can only help so much. We can help you basically everything until the first meeting. Like we can really, really basically make it as painless as possible to get a first meeting booked, but then you’re on your own.
And if you can’t close that prospect meeting, we end up losing out, right? Because we’re not going to then give that prospect to another person. Uh, and we ended up losing out and because we’re priced with all of our incentives to be aligned, it actually makes sense for us to be more selective with who we bring on if we think they could close clients and have a really specific niche or strong value proposition.
We’ll bring them on and let them quote unquote, skip the line at the top of the list of advisor tactics, right? Kitsie’s puts out this great resource, like marketing research, right? You might’ve read it. And the top of the list is like, we’re a bit where advisors get their businesses referral. Yes. That’s number one.
And that’s always going to be like that, right? Because it’s, you know, it’s a referral based business, but also you got to supplement that with digital strategies like this, right? Or you might be doing webinars, a podcast, radio shows, going to events, hosting your own events, whatever. Right. SEO. I don’t know.
How does this fit into that as, as like a strategic way to find clients? Yeah, I love that question because I was actually on a panel with the founder and CEO of Zoe Financial recently, and the general message that we wanted to broadcast out there was No one is doing enough. It’s not a us versus them versus referrals versus COIs versus website.
It should be an all of the above, right? Like in many other industries, they’re not just like putting all their money in one horse. You have to have like multiple different ways of bringing in business, right? I was actually at Future Proof recently, and I was sitting in on a talk, and they were saying that the future of referrals is looking bleak, because next generation don’t rely on referrals.
As much as, you know, the, let’s just say boomers, you know, or the gen X does. And so the next generations are not relying on referrals as much. And so you have to start really proactive and supplementing that stream with other streams. And so digital marketing is going to be one of them. Cold outbound is going to be one of them, you know, making sure your websites going through doing webinars, hosting seminars, direct mail, like.
Um, then they’re like, everything is an option. And you should at least explore these at all, at least once. Like for some of our advisors, they host radio ads and it’s by far the most lucrative right for some. They’re hosting webinars and they’re there really, it’s a really viable lead Gen way for them.
And for some it’s not. And so I think not everything will work for everyone, but it’s least worth exploring all these avenues to really figure out what works best for you. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting you say this because So I, I talked with a lot of advisors and they, they might focus on one channel itself, but for example, one advisor, he’s like, Oh, I was using another lead gen system, we’ll just put it that way.
And he got a lead that came in and the lead, they set up a meeting, but the lead, what does the lead do when, when you, after you set up a meeting, you’re probably going to do some more research. Right? Yes. Yes. And like I’m working with him to make his website better. Right? And make sure his content is looking good.
The Malid canceled the meeting because this guy was not showing up at all. Right? Didn’t have his Google business profile filled out. He wasn’t running anywhere because he thought, Oh, I need to make sure that I, I, I show up. Right? Well, I get meetings, then that’s totally reasonable because when business has been referral based for so long, you’re not really focusing on that, but it needs to be an omnipresent approach.
You’ve got to be everywhere that people are looking because this is where people are expecting you to be. And when I say people, I mean like the next generation because eventually that’s, that’s who your market’s going to be. Yeah. Yeah. That exact anecdote has actually happened to one of our advisors before also where they’ll Yeah.
Yeah. Um, where they will book a meeting or, you know, a Finney for them. The person will then do online research about this person, find like a subpar or no online presence and say, I’m not taking this meeting. It’s very common. Yeah. I think the, uh, the ability to personalize now for whomever you’re targeting, your niche, it’s so much easier than it has been.
Yes. It’s like difficult to do, but it’s much more easier than it’s ever been in the past. Because we have all the tools, right? You just gotta know which tools to use correctly. And you gotta be able to tell your story. Personalize everything you have. They’re focused on being advisors, right? They don’t want me to create content, but they gotta have something that helps them do that.
Which leads me into my next question, which is, are, how often do advisors have trouble deciding on a niche? All the time. Yeah. Very often to the point where we started working with a couple external consultants who can help our customers narrow down their niche and really double down on it because like that’s all we do but it’s important enough to like using Finney Wright that will actually help if you’re one of our customers will actually help you double Get set up with one of these coaches, um, to help you like really, really double down your niche.
Because I think I said this earlier, by far the most successful uses of Finney has been from advisors who have such a specific niche, niche and value proposition. And they’ve brought in by far the most business on Finney, but it’s really when you can reach out and your email stands out. You’re not just a generalist serving everyone.
You’re saying, Hey, can wrap on selling this property. And let’s just say, Florida, you know, I work with a bunch of others in your area who have recently sold property. This is how I can help you do X, Y, and Z. Let’s grab coffee at this local coffee shop. Done. Right? Like that’s not going to be put into the trash versus, uh, Hey, thinking about retiring?
Like here are some things you should be thinking about. Great. Right. Like, and they’re across the country from each other. Like, from your perspective of the clients that are using Finney right now, what are some examples of really good niches that you’ve seen? Oh, I love that question. Oh, okay. One guy, one advisor, his quick, quick story is that he, his whole life was in finance, was the CFO of this company, and then had triplets.
And when he had triplets, he was like, Oh shoot, what do I do? Like, what are some best practices to save for college three X? How do I start thinking about what’s the right framework? What are the best resources? And couldn’t find any like credible sources of authority. So he became. And so he quit his job, became an advisor to help others with twins and triplets, plan, you know, for that, their financial future and to, you know, set the right financial goals.
And you better believe when we put him in front of someone who recently had twins or triplets, they’re closing that business. Like he’s like, I’ve been where you are. I know what you got to do. Do this. They could have met with a hundred other advisors, but like, no one is going to resonate more with him being like, I’m was literally in your shoes.
15 years ago. So I know exactly what you’re thinking of and now I’ve helped multiple others in your shoes And so that’s just like a great obviously doesn’t apply to everyone Like not everyone has triplets but like such a great example of like Taking the lemons that life gave you and making lemonade like instead of being like oh shit Like what do I do now?
Actually making it like into like a career where you can help others exactly in your situation Do you know who Duff McKagan is? No. Duff McKagan? He’s a financial wealth manager. I don’t know him. He has a very specific niche as well Okay, and the niche tends to play guitar or drums or vocalists because Duff McKagan was the guitar player for Guns N Roses And then he’s like wait after he stopped playing.
Maybe he’s still playing. I don’t know But he’s like, these are people that have a lot of money in some cases, maybe not a lot in other cases, but I know this niche, right? I know the challenges that they go through. He has that rapport. He’d be a great Finney client. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent would actually.
Cause we actually could search for things like interests and hobbies and, or if they’re full time musicians, we could like search. Filter for that as well. Yeah, so I think it’s the the odd eccentricities about a person. Yeah, if you have a Specific interest yourself. I met a guy the other day. He’s like likes beekeeping and ants right ant farms Yeah, if he was a financial advisor go after those enthusiasts.
Yeah, maybe that’s a bad example Or maybe I don’t know how much money they’re in the TV. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, this is it like Find what your enthusiasm is at Enthusiasm Based Marketing. That’s a great one. I love that. I love that. That’s right. It’s whatever you get too excited to talk about all day and then you find people that you want to talk about.
That makes it a lot more fun too. How do people find you if, if, uh, if they want to learn more? Well, they would go to our website. It’s cineai. com, although I’ll shout out Victoria. Who has been working tirelessly to get us the phinney. com domain. So depending on when this comes out, hopefully we’ll be at phinney.
com by now. Well, by the sounds of it, you guys are moving so fast. It’s probably going to be like next week or something. I hope so. It’s owned by this Norwegian fishing company. That’s another story. So we’re working on that. Um, so you could go to phinney. ai. So that’s F I N N Y A I dot com, um, on that website you have, there’s this very simple like intake form to just find out more information that’ll get you a meeting booked with me.
And then we would just chat about what you need and if you would make it a fit for Vinny. There is a 260 person wait list. How do they get to the top of the wait list? Is there a way to do that? Just say you came from Ryan Ross. Okay. I like that. I could probably get a lot more advisors on this too. Yeah.
Cause I think it’s a really cool idea because you got to. This is what my book is about, right? Not to like, show the book, right? But like, find out who that market is, right? 150, 000 people, that’s the book. Find out who the market is, identify what their needs are, their pain points, their frustrations, things like that, where they are in life.
How can you Empathize with that and develop your product around it. And you guys help, help get in that door with those people, because there’s probably a lot more people out there than you might expect, but it all comes down to like, are they in the scope of buying? Because of a hundred people, three people are within scope.
Exactly. That really boils down to our main hypothesis here, which is each advisor. And I would love your thoughts on this. Each advisor probably has a set of a thousand people they could uniquely serve better than anyone else, like probably a thousand. And then every year, I don’t know, 1 percent of those come up and say, I need an advisor at this point in my life.
And so our job, I think we say is just to help you find that group of a thousand and be there at the right time with the right message when they come up, when they come up and say, Hey, I’m ready. I would say that’s the way to do it because. And I think the challenges in so many cases is that you’re trying to dig for gold, right?
And you’re like, is today the day? And after three days, you’re like, nothing, nothing, nothing. And it’s just really just passing. You just got to keep going. It’s a persistence game, right? Got to make sure that the offering is correct. You got to make sure you’re speaking the right language to them because if you’re not speaking right, like my, my toddler tells stories and I’m like, I have no idea what you’re saying.
If I had any clue, it’d be a lot different. But if it was English, I would know exactly what you’re talking about. I don’t know. It’s like a translation game every time. But if you have a thousand people, this you’re exactly right. Finding out what’s the conversation to have and having that on a consistent basis day after day.
Yeah. Yeah. Then you can eventually you’re, you’re going to hit pay dirt and you’re going to find something that that turns into a lead a hundred percent, but it’s not trivial finding that a thousand like those that set of a thousand people are like, and I think where this is where a lot of advisors, but others get it wrong too, is you don’t have to reach out to a hundred thousand to find that a thousand, just spend the time figuring out who those a thousand are.
It would take so long to reach out to a hundred thousand people, but if you could spend 90 percent of that time. Yeah. And it’s gotta be like, do they have enough net worth that it, that it’s worth my time, right? Qualifying them. Yeah. This is what the, the, uh, your, your client at BCG, they were trying to figure out like, Oh, 60 hours behind the scenes.
Right. That’s what they were doing. Right. They were trying to figure out like, What is that? 100 people. This just speeds it up. Right? You’re, you’re developing the propensity to find it. This person is in the, uh, the scope of purchase, right? And it might actually not be the scope of purchase right now because it might be six months from now, but just staying in the market and showing your face.
Like I talk about a lot being omnipresent, right? Making sure your face is seen all the time, all the time. So that way you’re like the go to person for whatever it is. Exactly. And I think. I’ve, I’ve seen advisors doing a better job, but it just comes down to consistency. One foot after the other every day, making sure that you’re keeping it a very simple message.
So I think this is very cool. Yeah. I’ve taken up a lot of your time, so people know they can go to finny. ai right now, finny. ai. com. Yeah. finny. ai. com. For now. Okay. Okay. I’ll make sure that that link is in the show notes. Um, so Eden, thank you very much for coming on the show. Yeah. Ryan, I’m so excited. You have to still sign my book.
All right. I will. I will send the book. Oh, by the way. What are some books that you’ve read recently that you really enjoyed? Or I like to ask these questions, like, or documentaries, pieces of media that you’re like, that is awesome. Yeah. It’s such a good question. Um, let me think, or maybe you listen to a podcast.
Well, I listen to a couple of podcasts that I like. I know Victoria has been listening to some like really great, like insurance sales podcasts. She’s just trying to, which is so, so specific, um, the books that I probably refer to the most. Um, and then there’s two of them. One is the hard thing about hard things, and it’s Ben Horowitz, I don’t know, you’ve probably read it.
And then the other one is never split the difference. Ah. Very classic, but I literally have those like bookmarked, highlighted, I’m always referring back to it. I would say like, never split the difference, fundamentally rewired my brain. Why? Have you read it? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So. Um, Chris Voss. Exactly. Chris Voss.
He was like a hostage FBI negotiator, right? Who says like, gives tips on how to negotiate. And he has a funny idea. It’s like, either with your toddler or, you know, in like high stakes situations, you can use these tips. And I feel like I’ve internalized so much as a book that in my day to day conversations or my day to day interactions with, with people.
Anyone from my parents to potential customers to investors, I feel like I’m internalizing and implementing his tips and I’ve seen such a difference. And it’s funny cause some, a lot of it was intuitive already, which I feel like was probably true for most people, but just, Like, being able to call that out and say, Oh, this is what I’m doing and this is why it’s working, was just really, really cool.
One of the things he talks about in that book is like, I think it’s called the late night DJ for us. Yes. I use this on my toddler. When I’m, it was like, it’s time to go to bed. Okay. Oh, I do it the whisper voice. I’m like, all right, it’s time to go to bed. She’s like, I’m okay, we’ll go to bed. I was like, this is genius.
The hit response. I’m Okay. Now’s the time. So it’s like you setting the tone. I think if we can, uh, if we can set the tone for the conversation, then we are in control of that conversation. Right. So great book, great recommendation. The one I liked his tip, um, it’s mirroring and it takes a while to get right, but it’s basically like repeating the last two words back to someone when you want them to open up and at first you could feel stupid just doing it and you’re like.
Oh, did you say you wanted tuna for lunch? And then tuna for lunch. Yeah, exactly. Cod for lunch. Yeah. Cod for lunch. But it’s one of those things that I felt, especially when I was fundraising, actually, this is my first time around. It really helped just, you know, keep them talking more. I think one tip around sales is always, you want to be transparent.
Do the least amount of talking and you want to get them talking and that mirroring tip really helped doing that. Hmm. That’s good. I hope doing that. Well, what I like about these things is that well, there’s another book. Is it persuasion or influence called Cialdini, right? Oh, yes. He talks about even if people know that these things exist, they can’t counteract.
They can’t stop it. Yeah, that’s what I like about it too because Now that I’ve read the books, I’m like, this person is trying to sell me. Okay. Yes, it’s working. Have you read, um, how to make friends and influence people? Yes. Okay. Dale Carnegie, right? Yes. That’s next. I just got it. It’s next on my list.
Actually, my husband has read it and he loved it. It’s a great book. It’s like one of the core books. Oh my gosh. I can do book recommendations. All day. Okay. Give me another one. Well, what do you want to learn about? I liked Bill Browder, Red Notice. Yeah. Have you read that one? Yeah. Okay. Here’s another one.
Okay. Well, I don’t know if this is like action adventure stuff, but it does have to do with like kind of weird market stuff. There’s a book called, um, Octopus by Guy Lawson, G U Y Lawson. And it’s about, um, Sam Israel, who ran a hedge fund, and then he got involved in some like underground bond market in, in London.
That was awesome. It’s, it’s crazy. It goes like three levels down. I’m so excited. So if you like Red Notice, very good book. Yeah. Um, The Octopus by Guy Larson. I’m gonna order it. I’ll add that. It’s about a guy named Sam Israel. So strange. Uh, I, I could go on for days, but I want to make sure you guys can get back to work helping out people.
So thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. so much, Ryan. This was so fun.