AL EP 35: Jacob Wagner – Building Strong Relationships

Show Notes

Connect with Jacob Wagner and The 4FP Agency here:
Web – https://4fp.co
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobbwagner/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/DigitalMarketing4FP/

Episode Transcript

00:00:04:03 – 00:00:32:14

Everybody is adjusting to your agency. Transformation coach and founder of Mission Control Greater of Leverage for Growth. And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist I am which scaled from 0 to $200000 a month with my own agency. We are the host of Leverage for Growth Podcast Agency Leverage Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets and leadership styles.

00:00:32:23 – 00:01:03:14

We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money in order for you to get your agency to the next level. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, Study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control Icon slash Key Study at Niche in Control Icon and slash kingdom, you are now listening to Leverage for Growth.

00:01:03:24 – 00:01:29:11

Hey everybody, This is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of Leverage for Growth. Welcome to the Agency Leverage edition. And today I am here with Jacob Wagner, the founder of the four FTE Agency, a growth marketing agency dedicated to building healthy growth systems, client traction systems and referral marketing funnels for financial planners. Thanks for coming to our show today.

00:01:29:12 – 00:01:47:26

So glad to be here. Great to be with you, Jesse. Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? Yeah, absolutely. So it’s definitely taken some different forms over the years as well. Really. So I started the company in 2013, but that was being more of like a tech advisor to people.

00:01:48:04 – 00:02:14:18

And in 2017, really, it seemed like, Oh, this advice that I’m doing now, this is really easier to talk about as digital marketing. And, and that was a great way for us to host and proffer our services for a long time. And then also what we ended up finding was the best way to really apply what it is that we know and are best at isn’t necessarily to be like making a funnel for somebody or making a website for somebody.

00:02:14:18 – 00:02:44:16

All those things are very important and you need to have them. But also, since our clients are financial planners, one of our mottos is you’re a planner, what’s your marketing plan? You know, and you’ll have that said, I’ll have, you know, your budgets, understand what you want, your expect your results to be all those different things. And if you just go in and just without any thought, set up a funnel, spend thousands of dollars to drive people to you, maybe it’ll have a result.

00:02:44:16 – 00:03:00:17

And maybe also that result could be that you attract a whole bunch of people who are not who you want to work with. And so having a good strategy, understanding how you want to speak to your ideal client and what they want to hear at each stage of the journey is really one of where we focus and help our clients.

00:03:00:28 – 00:03:27:07

Mm hmm. That’s awesome. And what made you decide on financial planners as kind of the focus or the niche? Well, for that of a situation, that’s probably not going to apply to most listeners. I am second generation into the financial planning profession, and so really how I actually found marketing was that I wanted marketing to be I wanted to be of as much service to the financial planning firms as absolutely possible.

00:03:27:16 – 00:04:00:12

And I want people to get the financial advice that they need. And the marketers, the financial planners tend not to be the best at marketing. And so basically, I want to go and I want to help people with this problem of dealing with the finances in their lives as much as possible. And I felt like the best way to do that was to support the same way they support my father’s and his friends, things I’ve done throughout my career, you know, from after leaving college and frankly, before how to actually help them build their their firms and understand what it was that they really wanted to get out of their firm.

00:04:01:01 – 00:04:21:14

Mm hmm. That’s awesome. And being a second generation financial planner, you’ve obviously have, like, a passion for, you know, who you serve. And and I could hear that base around what you were just describing. Yeah, I do. Well, the thing is, is that there are. There’s some good guys in the financial planning world and there’s some bad guys in the financial planning world.

00:04:21:14 – 00:04:58:09

And unfortunately, the bad guys are the ones you see on TV and they have an immensely bigger budget than the small companies. So but through the thing, the thing is, is that through the nature of digital advertising, that a smaller business has been given a lot of opportunity that they hadn’t before. You know, John Hancock can go and buy the back of the baseball stadium so that, you know, when that homerun happens, you get a brand imprint as it goes over the fence, you know, But the thing is, is that with good advertising, using the algorithms of Facebook and Google in effective ways, you can get in front of the people who could really be

00:04:58:09 – 00:05:16:24

best to work with. And so that’s a big part of is knowing what to do to to get in front of those people and then also the right thing to say. You know, a lot of our clients that the people they want to find is someone who has 1000000 to $10 million. You know, it’s the same as that, like beautiful woman who gets hit on everywhere that they go.

00:05:17:02 – 00:05:54:16

If you use a hard sales approach, it’s going to be really alienating and it’s not going to work. You know, what you need to do is you need to come from a perspective of when someone realizes that they have a problem, you know, and that they are starting to look for that and you starting to provide the solutions to those problems through your lead magnets or your social content where everything that you put out on media and in the content of your ads and your and providing that answer and what are the reason why it’s really good to go into the niche is that it allows you to speak more specifically to the needs, the

00:05:54:16 – 00:06:19:07

wants, the concerns, because the thing is, is that every every business has their own growth needs. But some of them, like as you start to niche down that you start to be able to go towards certain types of problems that your clients have time and time again. And that gives you that specificity, you know, that gives you that ability to really be like, okay, now this is the start of when they come in.

00:06:19:15 – 00:06:55:08

A lot of my clients that they say that they’re their main way of marketing is to do referral marketing and there’s a place that’s really powerful and there’s a place for that also means that you didn’t actually start to try. And so even when it comes to referral marketing, a lot of the times those guys don’t even have anything that makes sense and you want to have some way that you actually are romancing those people, stuff like that that all suggest everything from there is a cute local business here in Portland called PDX Cookies or Cookie PDX, and these cookies are a meal.

00:06:55:28 – 00:07:15:17

They’re not. They’re like, if you’re watching the video, they’re like this thick and like huge that my my fiance and I, we split one of those cookies twice. And if you can go and you can put a good flavor in the mouth of your prospect that that’s that’s a good taste in their mouth. Literally, you know you’re starting to create some of those incentives.

00:07:15:17 – 00:07:38:08

And, you know, if you’re going to be getting thousands, tens of thousands of dollars from a client, they’re going and spending 40 bucks to send half a dozen cookies to them is really a good way to just like keep that relationship growing, you know? And also, it’s not you didn’t give them something to collect, to recycle, to collect dust on the corner.

00:07:38:16 – 00:08:11:18

You know, any of those sorts of things. What you did is give them something that maybe it goes their kids doesn’t matter. You know, maybe they give it away. But at least you gave some of them something that makes the relationship richer. And so that’s really rather than just like, oh, hey, do you have another friend who has 5 million bucks, you know, Oh, when do they have you know, and they’re having these concerns and problems, Like, it’s a way to actually put a better taste in their mouth and make it so that they’re not feeling like they’re being put in some sort of product context, that they’re not being over sold to.

00:08:11:18 – 00:08:47:27

You know, because when a financial planning relationship is done right, they have the best lifetime value of a client relationship. But really, anything I’ve seen, you know, in a good financial planning relationship, it could be 30 years lifetime value. It can be that when someone goes to the hospital, these are stories I’ve all heard from clients and from my colleagues in the financial planning industry that the initial planner was the first non-family member to get called to come to the hospital, and some of it was about the like legal stuff and having the papers right, because all of that is immensely confusing, especially if you’re in an emergency situation, you know, But it’s also it’s

00:08:47:27 – 00:09:16:01

for the emotional part, you know, when you do marketing, right, when you do, you know, your service delivery, right. That you’re developing friendships with these people, that it’s rich, that you know, you like, you know, cry with them when they have the sad things in their life that you’re there to celebrate the wins with them. And that type of relationship is so much deeper than just like building a funnel for somebody you know, and understanding what your return on ad spend is, which all those things are essential.

00:09:16:01 – 00:09:41:10

But if you can do that and have a deep relationship, that’s going to give you so much more, that happens with your clients. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be too, too much, you know, it just needs to be what’s going on with their life, knowing where their kids are in the process of everything, you know, like, oh, there’s the dog coming in or, you know, the dogs love to interrupt your Zoom meetings, you know, So at least having a way to turn that into a fun joke or something like that.

00:09:42:01 – 00:10:06:06

And same with any like three year olds that want to come on to the screen for, you know, 30 seconds. There’s how do you deal with that gracefully and still stay on topic with work, too, and have that really be something that enriches relationship and not something that distracts? Mm hmm. And what I’m getting from this is you talk about like, client attraction and well, there was one thing that I learned in my journey.

00:10:06:06 – 00:10:26:11

It was the difference between like the desperation of selling and then the patience of seduction and being able to do that effectively. Is that something that if you were to either go back to a previous version of yourself or tell the audience kind of something to leverage, would that be something that you would kind of pass on to them or.

00:10:26:12 – 00:10:52:03

Absolutely. Well, yeah. I mean, if you are in that, you know, if you sound desperate when you’re on the phone, you know, then basically someone they’re not going to like it. That conversation isn’t going to be resonant. It’s not going to jive. And, you know, there’s a lot of different ways to do sales conversations and sales strategies. And just if you bring that in, you’re probably not winning.

00:10:52:12 – 00:11:23:21

And if you, you know, use some of those overt sales and closing strategies, some of it would work, you know, some good. But you can also be bringing in people who don’t want to be working with. And so, you know, part of what both we do with our financial planning clients and what the financial planners are doing with their clients is it’s it’s a bit like dating and that it’s you want to make sure that they’re a good fit for you and the thing is, is as you start to go deeper into your niche, then you can be that greater fit.

00:11:24:21 – 00:11:58:20

Just for an interesting example, this is not one of our clients, but there’s a person who they only work with trophy winning bass fishermen. That’s the only client that they have, the only type of client that they have, and they have over $1,000,000,000 under management. That’s a big, big number and they don’t need to go anywhere else but they do get to go and have that bass, you know, contest be a business expense, and then they can go and go there, be with these people, do the stuff that they also, frankly, like to do.

00:11:58:29 – 00:12:14:03

And that authenticity shows up every step of the way. And, you know, since they’re there and, you know, when someone comes into a sudden money situation, you know, all of a sudden you get that million dollars in prize money or whatever, how do you use it? How do you leverage it? How do you have it last you for the rest of your life?

00:12:14:16 – 00:12:47:23

You know, that might be half the money you earn in the next ten years or in your life or something like that. And how do you avoid taxes? You know, how do you spread that out? How do you have that really like last year as much as possible? Because it’s, it’s a big deal. MM Yeah, Yeah. Conversion for one, if someone’s an NFL lineman, you know, they might be I’m not a sports guy but like I’m not talking about, you know, Tom Brady or someone who can’t retire, but that guy who gets beat up for three years, you know, and maybe earrings and, you know, 900,000 for that entire time.

00:12:47:23 – 00:13:08:16

But like, how is he is all these managers is taught all these different things that are pulling away at that money and he needs that money when he’s 80. You know, how are you going to actually manage that and make that work and those those needs? That’s really what made me establish this firm and made it so that I want to help people in this way and help financial planners get the marketing help that they need.

00:13:08:27 – 00:13:27:09

Because everybody who’s listening to this podcast is going to want to retire. And if you plan right, then you’re going to be able to, you know, you don’t want to be that old guy working in McDonald’s unless you want to be that or a guy working in McDonald’s or Wal Mart or whatever. You know, if you want to be able to pick the life that you want to have for yourself.

00:13:27:15 – 00:13:46:01

And, you know, that’s really the end result that I want for my clients and for their clients. Mm hmm. That’s awesome. I love the passion, both from a marketing perspective, but also the financial planning perspective. So what are you working on right now? What are you excited for? What’s success for you in the next 1 to 3 years?

00:13:46:13 – 00:14:26:21

Yeah, well, I am working on a new program right now that is taking what we have been doing as a one on one piece that’s for a three month accelerator and actually not taking all of it, but really taking the first part of it, slowing it down a little bit because it’s an immense amount of work when we do this with people and making it so that when someone comes through our process, not only do they have identified who their ideal client is, the transformation that they provide, they also actually have a system using numbers to measure what’s working well and isn’t, and a path to know how they’re going to get to you.

00:14:27:02 – 00:14:49:21

And not just that adding in the system, you know, the technology, that’s one of the things that’s out there and that there’s stuff, there’s various pros and cons to all of these softwares. But having the right thing to support you is a big deal. So actually giving people the the software, setting up the software and then coaching through the process at the same time, and that’s going to probably be an 8 to 10 week course.

00:14:50:06 – 00:15:23:02

And I’m really excited for it. I don’t have a name yet, but it’s looking at the different transformations that they provide and and also how to have a true client acquisition system so that it’s not this one and done, you know, maybe, you know, maybe this one thing works for a little while and it doesn’t or whatever. But actually having a system that when something starts to not work as well, you can tell from the numbers and he use us, we go in and we fix that part of the system and we don’t work on what’s already working.

00:15:23:15 – 00:15:41:26

That’s something I see that happens a lot is that people try to make something that is working better and didn’t notice the thing that was the actual weak link in the chain that that’s where someone people are actually falling off in the process. So that that’s the next thing that we’re working on and that really relates to our bigger consulting process.

00:15:41:26 – 00:16:04:00

You know, like when our favorite clients are working with us, they go through this first system and then we’re also working with them based on like the CMO level every quarter that we’re doing 48 hours work with them. And then if they need these other pieces built, we have the PPC. You know, we have the SEO team and it’s even you don’t even pay anything until you’re on the first page of Google.

00:16:04:00 – 00:16:21:28

With that, you know, we have the web resources, all of those things. So that way we can make those decisions when it’s the right choice, you know, when it’s the right time to develop that for a firm, then we can go and start to develop and push that out. But that way we’re helping people be on that long term road map for success.

00:16:22:09 – 00:16:42:09

It’s not just this framework and then you’re off into the wilds again without any support, because I think that it’s really important to have that advisor and that guy, especially if you are an advisor. You know, it’s like the psychotherapist around psychotherapist kind of thing. You know, you can some of this stuff, you just need someone else to do the same thing to you that you do for the for your people.

00:16:42:23 – 00:17:04:22

Mm hmm. Absolutely. So what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you or do you have any offers for them that they could take advantage of? Yeah, absolutely. So the easiest way to find us is to go to for f Pico, not for a ecom. That one one was wasn’t available. Three letter domain names are rare these days, so the number four has been P is in planning duco.

00:17:05:02 – 00:17:26:27

And then when folks come to the site I encourage them to download our digital Marketing Essential Guide for financial planners and it is good for other people if you’re not a financial planner, but it has what you want on your website, what to look for in your email marketing, the basic pieces to go there, directions and links to set up your Google business and your Facebook business so that that way you can have those basics.

00:17:26:27 – 00:17:45:24

Dot And I want all of those pieces done ideally before someone even comes in the first conversation with me because it just makes it So we started off running, you know, hit the ground right goal and I’ll leave that URL in the show notes for anybody that’s listening. And that’s why I thank you very much for being on the show today.

00:17:46:06 – 00:18:16:00

Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Jesse. And thank you everybody who’s listening to this. I hope that you’ve learned something and maybe a thing or two agency owners. If you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day.

00:18:16:00 – 00:18:33:16

Go to niche in control dot com slash case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth, you can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems, understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year to live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always dreamed about.

00:18:34:03 – 00:18:54:24

Go to niche in controlled dot com slash key city that is niche in control dot com slash case we now.

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