EP 35 | Kirk Lowe on Building Your Authority with Content Marketing

03.03.21 | 0 Market Scale

Kirk Lowe is the Founder and CEO of ProudMouth, an influence accelerator on a mission to “free the world’s experts from sales.” For over 20 years, Kirk and his business partner, Matt Halloran, have helped financial experts and advisors produce, publish, multiply, share, and boost their thought leadership. Kirk and his team are shifting the way experts approach marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Nasdaq, the featured expert on the Top Advisor Marketing Podcast, and the co-host of the BeYourOwnLoud podcast. Kirk regularly speaks and writes on topics related to building authority, becoming a micro-influencer, marketing, and podcasting.

Kirk joins me today to discuss how to effectively create a content marketing strategy that builds your credibility and authority as an expert. We discuss the concept of ‘brand depth,’ what it means, and how you can use your content to prove your deep understanding and expertise of the industry you serve. We discuss Kirk’s journey into the world of podcasting and what inspired him and his business partner to launch the ProudMouth brand. We discuss how you can use your content to attract new clients and the importance of staying consistent with your content marketing efforts. We also discuss organic strategies you can use to accelerate your content marketing results, why a small podcast audience can be just as powerful and rewarding as a large one, and how you can determine when your business is ready to hire a PR firm.

“Be patient, do the work that you know is going to make a difference, and when the time comes, that’ll all pay off.” – Kirk Lowe

This week on The Model FA Podcast:

  • How to use content marketing strategies to build your credibility and authority
  • The evolution of Kirk’s career and the inspiration behind building the ProudMouth brand
  • Turning skeptics into fans and prospects
  • What the “expertise economy” is and why it’s important
  • Creating a system and staying consistent with your content marketing strategy
  • How Kirk’s clients have benefited from content marketing and podcasting
  • Why you need to tell your audience the steps you want them to take
  • Creating a “give to get” offer and the value of smaller audiences
  • Creating the customer journey and advancing relationships through your content 
  • Navigating compliance hurdles when developing a content marketing or podcasting strategy
  • How the intimacy level between blogging and podcasting differ
  • Organic strategies to accelerate your content marketing results
  • Identifying when you’re ready to partner with a PR firm
  • Kirk’s top 3 favorite business books

Resources Mentioned:

Our Favorite Quotes:

  • “The more specificity that most experts can have when they’re marketing their business, the more you can clearly target and win-over those people,” – Kirk Lowe
  • “Find a way to enjoy what you’re talking about because your audience will probably enjoy it more, too.” – Kirk Lowe

Connect with Kirk Lowe:

About the Model FA Podcast

The Model FA podcast is a show for fiduciary financial advisors. In each episode, our host David DeCelle sits down with industry experts, strategic thinkers, and advisors to explore what it takes  to build a successful practice — and have an abundant life in the process. We believe in continuous learning, tactical advice, and strategies that work — no “gotchas” or BS. Join us to hear stories from successful financial advisors, get actionable ideas from experts, and re-discover your drive to build the practice of your dreams. 

Did you like this conversation? Then leave us a rating and a review in whatever podcast player you use. We would love your feedback, and your ratings help us reach more advisors with ideas for growing their practices, attracting great clients, and achieving a better quality of life. While you are there, feel free to share your ideas about future podcast guests or topics you’d love to see covered. 


Our Team:

President of Model FA, David DeCelle

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

David DeCelle  0:28  

Welcome Model FA, appreciate you tuning in to today's episode. My name is David DeCelle, president of Model FA. In this podcast and all of our podcasts moving forward, as well as the ones that we've done up to this point, really the goal is to add as much value as possible to you. And making sure that we're helping you grow your business, we're coming with great ideas, inspirational stories, learning about people's journeys, and their zone of genius, what their gifts are; and we're starting to have a little bit of fun towards the end as well with our after hours section. So when I close out the show, don't leave; we're going to have a section at the end where we’re asking some fun questions to Kirk and really giving all of you an opportunity to get to know our guests and allow them to be humanized so that you can start to build a relationship with them from afar. So without further ado and with this intro, if you're watching the video, I'm going to toss on my new hat. I haven't worn a hat since my baseball days, so this is very nice. So Kirk is the CEO and founder of Proud Mouth. Their purpose is to free the world's experts from sales, which I'm interested in unpacking that saying. Kirk Lowe and his business partner Matt Halloran help experts produce, publish, multiply, share and boost their thought leadership. And I truly believe that this is where the industry is headed, if you haven't already jumped on the bandwagon with your influence. We're going to talk a lot about that today. They are influence accelerators, and Kirk has worked with experts such as advisors for just over 20 years now. And usually I'm the one that’s sending out gifts for our guests on the show. However, Kirk sent me this cool hat with his logo so I very much appreciate it. I wore it yesterday for the first time. So Kirk, welcome to the show, man.

 

Kirk Lowe  2:20  

Model FA. You guys are always trying to kill it with value. And I love hanging around with people who want to do as much as they can. You know, what's interesting is, generosity, sharing everything you know with people, is the key to content marketing. So you guys are doing that and I'm happy to be here, and I'm going to share everything I can with your audience.

 

David DeCelle  2:40  

I appreciate that. And just so everyone knows, if you go to our website, ModelFA.com, we have a ton of content that you can get better as a result of consuming. So you know, our blog, our podcasts, and our video series. Kirk eats his own cooking too, so he does all of those content pieces. So at the end, Kirk, you can share where people can find you and get that value. And also in the show notes, there'll be links to all the things that we discussed today in terms of websites and social links and whatnot. So I guess to kick us off, Kirk, I would love for you to just tell us a little bit about where you got started. So you mentioned that you've been serving professionals such as advisors for the past 20 years or so. So where did it all begin and what led you to where you are now? I also know that you went through a little bit of a rebrand, so I'm curious to unpack that a little bit, too.

 

Kirk Lowe  3:30  

Absolutely. So I've been doing financial marketing since 2000. And there's a really quick evolution story here, which is when I started, I was focused on websites back in 2000. So advisors hadn't bought in en masse to that. And so I quickly realized that a website was they were all sounding the same. I realized, man, everybody needs a different message, like, what do you stand for? Who do you work with? So we started getting deeper with advisors, who are my clients, and trying to figure out, you know, what's your brand? What's your story? How are you different? How are you better? And I realized everybody thought how they were different or better was exactly the same. And it was worse when everybody wanted to go do some research, you know, some client research. I’ll just ask my clients what they think of me and they always come back with five things: trust, same side of the table, feel like he knows and cares about me, has integrity. It was always the same thing. I was like, okay, we can't really build around that, but what is your story? So we became more of a brand focused company. And I believe we have built over 100 brands, that's for sure, and built a lot of websites. And then when I started thinking about the branding, okay, now we found a way through marketing copy. It's like writing how to make you sound better. Then I started thinking, well, how do we prove it because all of a sudden now everybody's starting to, more and more people in my world anyway, with the people that I was helping. So how do I actually prove that you actually know how to work with this audience and this is your actual expertise. So I said, well, the next evolution is how do we show some depth to your brand? So I said, well, we’ve got to write a white paper, you’ve got to have a blog, got to start producing content. So this was when I started introducing the concept of brand depth; was probably 2008. 

 

David DeCelle

And when you say brand depth, you're referring to beyond the brand, making sure that there's more ongoing content that's being produced. Is that what you mean? 

 

Kirk Lowe

Early on it wasn't the ongoing nature, like it is now. It was more, how do we prove that you actually have this expertise, and that you actually understand your audience that you're claiming you're an expert to? So write a white paper that says, here's my expertise and who should care. Or create a blog that's focused on those people. And so the white paper was like pulling teeth, and getting people to blog on a regular basis was ten times worse than that. So pulling limbs off of bodies, maybe. So I'll be honest, in the 20 years, I guess we look back to 2008. Everybody who I said needs to do this; I only have two people that actually do it, who were doing it all those years, and who still actually do it. Nobody else could stick with it.

 

David DeCelle  6:02  

Now what are their businesses like? 

 

Kirk Lowe  6:05  

Nice businesses. They get a lot of the people they want to work with, and they always want more, but I think they both have nice businesses. I think they need to probably evolve a little better. They're not as great on the social side, but they're very good at writing. And they've been at it for, now, the second one has been blogging probably for eight years, and the other one probably for four. But the first one that came to me, they were already doing it. The second one I inspired, I guess I inspired them, and they took it on themselves. And they've been doing a great job. But the other thing too, is you can do content for years and not really be good at content marketing. And there's a whole bunch of ways to unpack that.

David DeCelle  6:43  

So you started off in, you know, 20 years ago, where you focused on websites, making sure that people had some sort of content. Maybe not ongoing on a daily or weekly basis, but at least they had some static stuff on their websites or any other profiles they had so that people could get a better look at who they serve and where their expertise lies. And those were used to hopefully edify their knowledge in the industry. So then my next question is, how'd you get from that point to where you are now with Proud Mouth and your own personal evolution, your own personal journey?

 

Kirk Lowe  7:21  

So I guess, in 2016-17, I met Matt Halloran, who's now my business partner, and he was a business coach, but he was Matt has a lot of energy, if you ever listened to our podcast. He loves talking, and he has a lot of energy, and he had some broadcast experience. And after having met for four to six months, we were thinking, we seem to really hit it off friendship wise; and also our ideas about what advisors should focus on or business owners should focus on to be successful. I don't know how it came up, but I think it was Matt's idea for us to start a podcast and that ended up being a huge epiphany; which was, if I can show up and talk for half an hour to forty minutes, which is typically how long our podcast is and our clients’. All I had to do is provide an outline, and then talk about what I already know. And it's very convenient to do, and it's not live. Even if you make a mistake, it's no big deal. It kind of adds to the character of it. That this may be the perfect medium for busy professionals. And it hit me, Matt and I, so wonderfully, this epiphany, that basically I shut down my branding company, and we started podcasting. I think I'm doing three times more revenue than I ever did in my other company, and it's a lot of fun. I think we're doing probably the most influential work we've ever done for advisors, because the impact we're making on their businesses, in even how they grow as advisors, I think that's really important to note. To podcast, you're constantly in the zone of thinking about what you do and why you do it. And that has a wonderful outcome just for how professional you are, and what you know; challenges you constantly in a really good way. So I think, for the last four years we’ve been really a podcast-only company. And it's been a wonderful ride and I'm really excited about what the future holds, because I think we can make a huge impact for a lot more advisors. And then that kind of segues into, you know, we're not just working with advisors anymore.

 

David DeCelle  9:15  

Yeah. What's interesting is you went from branding, which I think can be somewhat of a wide net, right? Because there's so many different aspects to branding. So I would equate that to, if I asked an advisor, oh, what do you do? And they say financial planning, it's super general; whereas now, a portion of branding and the aspect of that can be the podcasting strategy. So you went super, super niche focused. So how that equates to the advising world, from my perspective anyways, is I do financial planning for [insert the niche here], where it's much more specific. And then what it seems like you've done at this point is you realize that this works and you've been able to generate revenue. You've been able to have an impact, and you're just widening your niche a little bit more. So the way that I would interpret that for advisors is if you're working with, say, you're doing financial planning for physicians, maybe you start off with physicians in your local area, and then you expand geographically to serve more people. It seems like you're doing something similar from an expansion standpoint, since you've finally figured out a great niche to go all in on.

 

Kirk Lowe  10:25  

I think it is really important. The more specificity that most experts can have when they're marketing their business, the more you can clearly target and win over those people, and you can have it more successful. I see it all the time, and the people who are the most specific know exactly where to go to find their people and it can be a lot easier. Having said that, some businesses do well by catering to a lot more people and having their specialty be more of the niche, speak more loudly about the niche than who they actually target. So for us, we realize that experts is who we're really helping. It's not just advisors, but people who have expertise, who want to share it, who are tired of grabbing leads, and then being a lead shows up for a meeting if they even show up after you chase them around. And then you got to sit there and sell for an hour. And maybe you're selling for weeks, maybe you're selling for months, and you're chasing for months, maybe you're chasing for years. The flip for us was when people started calling and saying, I've listened to 25 of your episodes, I love what you guys do. I know it, I love it, I'm ready to go, what does this look like? How do we work together? And Matt and I were just like, this is nuts. Like, we spend a lot of money on marketing, pushing out our content, and that's where we spend. And then creating content and pushing it out. But we don't have to run ads and we don't do other things, because what we're doing is, we're turning skeptics into fans, and then the fans come to talk to us. And I hear and I see this all the time, in the financial industry especially, is how many advisors are so tired, because they haven't done the work to turn anybody into a fan before they meet with them. And it's a lot of work. And honestly, I don't think most people want to sit there and sell all day. It's just the cost of doing business, right?

 

David DeCelle

I agree.

 

Kirk Lowe

But if you don't have to, it's a wonderful place to be. Now I'm not saying everybody that ever reaches out because sometimes they hear about you quickly, and they don't want to listen to 20 podcasts, so they come to you more quickly. But I can push them back to the podcast and save a bunch of credibility building. And so I'm still in a better place, if that makes sense, than I ever would be without it.

 

David DeCelle  12:11  

It does. And I think this next question will start to lead more towards questions around the podcasts strategies, specifically. But one thing I want to hit on is, as I was going through your website, one of the phrases that I came across quite a bit is a phrase called the “expertise economy.” And I want to know, what is that exactly? You know, from your perspective, helped me understand what that is, why it's important.

 

Kirk Lowe  12:37  

I know I made that up myself, but I don't know if it existed anywhere else; I haven't come across it. For about a year, I thought I'd come up with this other term and I realized everybody was using it differently. I was so bummed out. But I'm not worried about this one. How I envision the expertise economy is, if you're competing for business on the fact that you provide better or different or specific expertise that somebody needs, and that's a motivation or a cost or a table stakes for getting either getting their attention, or them deciding to do business or them deciding to stay in business with you, that means you're competing in that economy. And if you're competing in that economy, there is no other marketing for you to do but content marketing. Which is interesting, because back in 2008, Seth Godin, who's one of the world's most renowned marketers, he's brilliant, said this (and I quote him all the time, because it's brilliant): content marketing is the only marketing left. And he said that in 2008. And the financial industry lags behind partially because of who's in it, and partially because of the compliance, the legal concerns, that slows down. But there's a couple of reasons. So, you don't have to freak out that in 2008, you weren't doing content marketing. But if you're not doing it now, in 2021, it's starting to get to a place where that's a risk in your business of being stagnant because I'm seeing some pretty special stuff. And I got some pretty special stories about people doing neat stuff with content marketing, who've set their business up for success for a lot of years. And they don't have to work like dogs to get there or to keep it going, because they've got a system that they've invested in for three, four years. And that system is a competitive advantage. It's a huge barrier to entry for other advisors who were four or five or eventually further behind than that.

 

David DeCelle  14:20  

I think that's part of the issue, is you just mentioned that they've spent three or four years doing the things, creating the content and trusting the process, and they're starting to reap the benefits of that now more consistently than they did over the first three or four years. Because over the first three or four years, I'm sure there were a handful of wins along the way. But now it's probably much more predictable. And I find with our advisors, some of which that we coach, they give up too soon. They do it for six months or they do it for a year and they're like, man, I didn't get anything from this; and then they just stop and it leads me back to, I’m pretty sure it's a Napoleon Hill book, Three Feet from Gold, where they're so close and they give up. And then they lose all that momentum. And quite frankly, anyone that was following them, that then sees them stop, people notice that. So if you start back up again, it's kind of telling them you didn't think it was important during that point in time. So I think my biggest recommendation would be whatever content you're putting out, whether it be blogs, podcasts, etc, just commit to it, trust the process, and do that forever, quite frankly, moving forward.

 

Kirk Lowe  15:33  

So that's a wonderful analogy. I think it's diamonds, not gold, but I can't remember.

 

David DeCelle  15:38  

I know it's gold. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it’s Napoleon Hill, but I'm standing my ground on the title. 

 

Kirk Lowe  15:47  

It is, just it's been a while since I've talked about that one. It doesn't matter, but the analogy there, which I'm going to break down a little bit, is I'm guessing when that story took place, the best practices for mining, there were probably some whether or not that person actually listened to them or not. There's a lot of best practices around content marketing and finding the gold. And as we go as a company, we're finding more and more. It’s funny because the people who said yes to us right away, there are about five or six of our branding clients who said “yes” right away to podcasting and who have evolved with us. And some of the stories are wonderful stories of success. And we're learning more and more as we go; newer clients are having wins quicker, and how are they getting those wins, how are some people getting wins more frequently, more quickly, or bigger wins but longer. We're learning all this stuff and we're getting better and better at what we do. And I think that's probably one of the most exciting things is, when you're searching for gold, if you can follow a bunch of best practices, and you understand where you're looking for gold might be a little different than somebody else, or you have different equipment or tools, or a different starting point, maybe. The more you look to somebody who's been through it and understands that, the more you can learn and gain from that. And so that's really neat. But I think if you're looking for gold, you got to pay attention to listening to people who already have been through this and have all kinds of best practices, better tools, so that you can get there quickly. And that's really the biggest part of rebranding was getting a couple of messages across. There were two really important ones. The first one was free yourself from the torment of sales. So our vision, I guess, is free the world's experts from sales. The second one is, we're what we call an influence accelerator. If it takes a normal or average, like consistent content producer probably is in the 10 to 12 years before this thing is like a money tree, if you will, you still have to grind it when you're there. But it gets a lot easier as you go. If we can expedite that down to three years and get more wins in three years then those people, that's a huge win. And that's what our focus is, is how do we accelerate that so that it doesn't take as long, because not a lot of advisors are going to stick out like Josh Brown, The Reformed Broker. I mean, that guy's, he's got a money tree now, because of how many people, how much press he gets. He's just a known commodity, but it took him, if you read his story, it took him a lot of years to be good at it.

 

David DeCelle  18:11  

If you happen to know him personally, he is on my list for future guests. I’ve emailed him once or twice so if you happen to know him, I would appreciate it. If anyone's listening right now and knows Josh Brown from The Reformed Broker, let us know; we'd be more than willing to receive some help there.

 

Kirk Lowe  18:21  

Well, I interviewed a guy yesterday who's an advisor who's just entering his — I think he's four years in. And if you want, I'll tell that story, because it's a great story. There's a couple of really wonderful lessons in it. I actually was writing them down as we started here to make sure I told them today. So this guy is an advisor in the San Diego area. And he started a podcast just because he wanted to communicate; he hadn't set any expectations. And as he was learning, as he was going through this, I recall times where he wanted to quit, but he stayed true to what his original intentions were. But he said he really struggled with admitting that what he really wanted to do it for was to make more money for revenue. And he said he came to the realization that he needed to just be honest with himself that that was the expectation. And so now he has 20,000 listens a month of his, should say downloads. We can break that down later, if you want; probably don't need to, stats is quite an interesting thing in podcasting. But anyway, he hadn't, up to the three year point, had any business from it. He said he couldn't say that there wasn’t some indirect stuff like maybe shortened sales cycle, client retention, things like that, although he did say not a lot of his clients were listening. He wasn’t even talking about it, which is a problem. He wasn't talking about it with his clients every time he met with them, or on the phone, or even in communication. He said eventually started putting it in his email newsletter, but he wasn't putting a lot of focus on it with his clients, which is an issue because you want to do that stuff. But when he got to the three year mark, he started picking up the intensity, and he decided he was going to have a call to action. And his call to action was really specific with exactly who he wanted to work with. And then he told them how they could learn more about if they had questions, that they could reach out to him, he would be more than happy to just sit there and answer questions for them. And he ended up getting 10 million in AUM in a very short period of time; and he hadn't gotten anything. So immediately it just clicked like that and all the effort for those years paid off. And now he's got a huge audience, he's got a consistent call to action, and he said he was really surprised that people didn't figure out that he was a financial adviser doing a financial podcast and work backwards. It’s funny because you have to tell them, you have to tell people or suggest to people how you want them to act or take the steps that you want them to take. So if you're doing any kind of marketing, content marketing, and you're not clear about those steps. Now, if you go on your social media site, and you find somebody and say, first thing you say is, hey, do you want to meet with me, you're gonna get ignored, 99.9% of the time. Unfortunately, the point-one percent inspires enough people just to mass blast, and hope they get that point one. But for most people, you never want to make an offer. But this person is a wonderful story of sticking with it, and being honest with himself what he needed to get out of it, and then adjusting so that he could get out of it what he wanted. And he said, it's been an incredible journey. And it was great interviewing him, and to me, that's a great story of sticking with it. We have clients who get stuff earlier and I know exactly why. And we have clients who've done strategies that have taken longer, but they've had huge wins, too. Everybody's path to success with content marketing is a little bit different.

 

(This following paragraph is not in the audio.)

Unknown Speaker  21:21  

I know you're enjoying this conversation. But I wanted to take a quick break to talk to you about the Model FA accelerator. This is a unique collaboration between us and you, where we help you build a financial advising practice that you can be proud of, we focus on the foundational concepts around how to pick a niche or a specialization, how to price your services, how to construct an offer that people are going to buy, and then how to market it and sell it in a way that will get people to sign on the dotted line and become clients of your firm; all while giving you the information to scale, and set up workflows and operational processes, that will allow you to reclaim your time and build a practice that doesn't run you. So if you'd like to hear more about that, go to www.ModelFA.com/accelerator or www.ModelFA.com. Hover over “Work With Us” and click on “Accelerator.” Hope to see you in the program.

 

David DeCelle  22:10  

I agree and I want to riff back and forth on a different strategy. So, this person that you're referencing, you know, 20,000 listens on a monthly basis; I was just doing some quick math on my phone and just say, half a percent of them do business in some way, shape, or form. That's 100 folks that will do business. I think that's a realistic number, over a couple year periods worth of time. And if each of those folks are generating, call it a minimum of $4,000 in yearly revenue, assuming that they have right around a half a million dollar account, you're looking at some good recurring revenue on an ongoing basis; about 400,000 or more. So I guess that's one strategy, which is called building up an audience, and converting that audience into clients. Where we've helped strategize for some folks is specifically around the business owner niche. And quite frankly, this is what we do a lot of times with our podcast, which is reaching out to other business owners that they want to work with, on both the business side, the individual side, there's a lot of cross selling opportunity, right? The lifetime value of a business and a business owner is much higher than the individual, generally speaking. So it is an important person to have in your book of business, especially if you're solely focused on those people. The challenge is that business owners are busy; it’s tough to catch their attention. And, if you reach out to them, and say, hey, we'd love to meet with you in regards to your financial planning; unless it's a super strong referral, they're probably not going to meet with you because you're not the only person calling and again, they have plenty of other stuff to do. So where we've helped folks, and I have a client out of Arizona who, he is just the first one that comes to mind, he started this right when the pandemic started. And what he does is he invites them on the show similar to what we're doing right now, Kirk, and interviews them. Learns about their story, their area of expertise, and the way that we position it to our clients from a strategic standpoint is, listen, this is all about getting someone's attention and this is a creative and ethical way to trick someone to hang out with you for a little bit. And when you ask them a bunch of questions and give them an opportunity to share their story, they don't know what it is but at the end of that hour long segment or however long it is, they just really like you. Then you deliver a media kit to them afterwards, maybe take them out to lunch or a zoom call depending on when COVID is not a thing anymore, and now you have a relationship. Then you can, in what we call a “give to get” offer, where we say something to the effect of, we do a lot of work with X, Y and Z, and as a thank you for being on the show, we'd love the opportunity to help you out in that regard, on the house. So it's usually something that is a lot of value to them, but light work on you, and you now get them into your financial planning process to where you can identify other opportunities to actually exchange dollars for advice and management. So what we say to those folks is, listen, I don't care if there's four people listening to your show and that's it. You're not doing it for the listenership, you're doing it to creatively trick someone to hang out with you so that you can start to ultimately build a relationship in a non-aggressive way, in a non-salesy way. And this advisor that I'm referencing, I forget the exact number, but I want to say that him and his business partner, since COVID hit back in March or April when they launched it, they've done like $35,000 in recurring revenue in just a year. To me that's worth it, and to me, that's gonna continue to grow. And from what they've shared with me, most of the I shouldn't say most, but some of the business owners that have been on their show they're the ones raising their hand saying, hey, you guys are advisors, we actually need this. And they're just self-selecting themselves into the process. So I'd like to get your take, Kirk, on how does an advisor decide, and maybe it's based on niche, but how does an advisor decide, should I go based on trying to increase the reach of the podcast and the size of the audience? Or should I use it as an interview style podcast where I don't care how many listeners there are?

 

Kirk Lowe  26:19  

I can't believe how in sync we are. Because I wrote down, as soon as I finished telling that story, I wrote down “smaller downloads are fine.” I just find they can be incredible. So I gave an example that is probably going to be hard for a lot of people to get to. And the more competition there is, the more difficult it'll be to get to the high numbers. But the high numbers like you said, they're not important. And there's a lot of different ways you can grow a podcast. So what you're talking about, we have on our first podcast or the first person to say yes to us, first 18 months, what he was doing was, he was going to CPAs and attorneys, and he was using it as a way to meet new ones or to strengthen relationship or renew relationships with people that he thought would be wonderful sources of leads or introductions, I should say. And what he did was he rekindled some of those by inviting them on the podcast. He said the value, the quality, the podcast, he wishes, that was a little bit better. But the relationships he built and how he started them and ignited them ended up growing. And it took about 18 months of nothing, no revenue coming in. But between 18 and 30 months, he attracted 30 million in assets. One of them was a $10 million client, and he's just through the moon excited. I wish he had done a little bit more organic stuff to get results a little quicker. But he put the time in and he's had a tremendous run; we’ve had other ones who have had equal runs, but different paths. And that's the thing, he doesn't have big numbers; I don't think he usually gets more than 100 to 200 downloads now. He had one where he had a local sports announcer, who I think had recently retired, and he connected to him. And he said that was actually a turning point because he had so much fun in that podcast, that it seemed to change his approach in the future, which is always a really important thing. Find a way to enjoy what you're talking about, because your audience will probably enjoy it more, too. But yeah, the answer is, you can use this in all kinds of neat ways. So that way was, establish relationships with centers of influence. What you're talking about, you can also bring in clients to talk about their businesses, or stories in their life. There's all kinds of neat ways to go with this. You do not, do what kind of seem to fit what you'll feel good about and what you think you can turn into building an audience of people that really care about you. Another great story is another client we have in San Diego. The first story wasn't a client of ours, by the way; we brought them on as, tell us how you had success in your podcast. We had no idea what their story was, by the way. When we do content, we bring on people in our podcast, and I'm sure you do the same thing. You don't always know exactly how it's gonna go. But you know that if you're doing the right things, you just kind of work through it. And it's funny as everybody who's having success, a lot of times, their stories almost bang on with the story that we're telling. And that's always a great thing. We don't set that up, it just happens. But another story is some of our podcasters, what they do is, they'll have very specific topics where they'll actually say, there's 20 people I know that I want to work with and they'd probably really love this topic. So they actually do a topic on that and then they share it with them. So it's like a mini campaign strategy. That's a really interesting one. Another one is they already have a way to get introductions, but they want to shorten the sales cycle. This is usually with bigger fish, like landing 10, 20, 30, 50 million dollar clients. But, we had a wonderful success story with the San Diego client that I started telling about three minutes ago and got sidetracked. They had a huge client and their clients, they typically do, in their words, about ten different things that they end up doing for them. And they get them through large charities. So they are people who are about to make massive donations to, I think it's typically hospitals and things like that. And what they do is they work back, the charities work back, and they come up with these plans, these strategies on how to most efficiently do that so everybody gets the most out of it. And these are all customized strategies. But when they get a client, they're usually really big, but usually it takes them, they said, a couple years before they do all the ten things that they asked them, they want to do for them. But because they had talked about a lot of these things in their podcast, when this person came, they said it was the first time ever in their career and these guys have been in business for over 20 years that somebody said, I want all ten things right now. And they were floored because they'd never seen anything like it. And that was because of the comfort level that they had listening to them through their podcast. So you know, you can talk about topics and create campaigns. Another way you can use it is, if you’re with a client or a prospect or a center of influence, and they're talking about certain things, say hey, look, I talked about that on my podcast a couple weeks ago, why don't I send you that episode. I don't wanna take 45 minutes talking about it right now. But when you have time, listen to that. That's been really effective, too. So the idea that I said earlier, the journey, and how you use it, there's so many ways that you can think of; the more you're doing together, the more success you’ll have.

 

David DeCelle  31:22  

Well, I'd like to because we're big on with our clients, and just any one that has a business development portion of their job or career, is to intentionally, proactively, methodically, and systematically advance relationships. And I mean, I love to share audio books and podcasts all the time, because what ends up happening is even if it's not my own podcast, but it's someone else's podcast, I'm going to share that with someone. They're gonna get value, most likely, from that episode that I shared, but they're gonna associate that value with me, because I'm the one who shared it. And I'm just immediately in a different category in their mind, because I'm not always just spinning about financial planning to them. It's, like, we have a client who's really grown over a billion dollar RIA through fly fishing. I guess a bunch of rich people like to fly fish. So that's been his niche, quite frankly. So you know, he'll take them out, I'm sure he'll get them certain gear and share certain resources. And because he's coming at them with fly fishing, and not “let me manage all your money,” he ends up ultimately managing all their money.

 

Kirk Lowe  32:30  

So a podcast where you integrate fly fishing, like great fly fishing spots, your podcast, just think of that. I don't know if that's what they're doing, but that's an absolute easy decision as far as what are you going to do in your podcasts. You don't have to talk about financial planning all the time. You can have a lifestyle podcast, and say you're a financial advisor. If you give them a call to action, eventually you'll get opportunities.

 

David DeCelle  32:52  

That's a good point, too. And I do want to rewind a little bit, but the point that you just mentioned in terms of it can be more of a lifestyle podcast depending on where you're an advisor, right, depending on the firm, if you're on your own, or what that looks like. There's different compliance hurdles that you need to go through. And sometimes companies will just put the kibosh on it altogether. And it's mainly because they've never been asked the question about a podcast, so it's just easier to say no, then figure it out. So just know that that happens to you, be persistent in your ask and continue to push forward. But a way around that is, hey, I'm not talking about financial planning at all. I'm talking about this topic, whatever that may be. And that's a way around that scenario. And for folks that we've helped, I'm sure you've helped with the idea of a podcast. If they've hit a roadblock initially, if we come back with a lifestyle-oriented version of it, then that tends to be improved.

 

Kirk Lowe  33:47  

Yes. And the fly fishing example, you really have to do what you like talking about so you're excited when you show up for your podcast. I mean, you don't want to dread it, that's for sure. So you got to figure that out. But there's so many opportunities to make it work and to leverage it. And you could do the same thing. I know, we're talking about podcasts because we're on a podcast and that's what I do. But you can do a blog; the intimacy level of a blog compared to a podcast doesn't really they're way different. This is just, there's just something about listening to a podcast. This is very difficult to get that out in writing, because you have to be really talented, but you can be a competent-to-decent podcaster; it's not that hard.

 

David DeCelle  34:27  

I agree. Going back to the person who was using the podcast for COIs, and I think you said something to the effect of, you know, didn't really see anything for the first 18 months. But then, the 18 to the 30th month brought over like 30 million bucks, one of which was a $10 million client, if I remember that correctly. But you had also mentioned something, Kirk, something to the effect of, I wish he had done some more organic stuff to speed that process up. What are you referring to? Like, what can people do to accelerate their results?

 

Kirk Lowe  35:01  

So we're actually later on today, which is not when this podcast is going to go, doing a podcast called “25 Plus Organic Marketing Tactics to Move Your Content Marketing Forward.” So yeah, but I'll give you some highlights here. I've actually got a document, like a checklist, like a little scoring system for people, but I'll give you the categories and a couple things here. So niche audience, the more clear you are about who you work with, right? The fact that the first example I gave said this is exactly who we work with, and what we do; you're way more likely to get a response. And you can also tell that story to everybody you know, because those are the people you want to listen to the podcast. So just being part of organic marketing is knowing who the heck you want to work with, and talking about it all the time. And I can't believe how many advisors are terrified to be more specific with who they want to work with. It doesn't mean everybody you already work with is gonna run away if you don't want to lose some of them, right. So let's say you got 100 clients and 20 of them are ideal. And if you said that they'd be like, yeah, yeah, that’s me, and the other 80 aren't? Well, it's probably more than likely that 50 of them wouldn't be the worst if they left as far as them being ideal for you, and you ideal for them. But the other 30, you know, if you want to keep them, they're not going to run unless you move them away, for the most part. So I wouldn't be so scared. But the upside of being more clear is going to far outweigh the downside of a couple people leaving. And I see it over and over and over again.

 

David DeCelle  36:21  

Real quick, if anything, because I get that objection a lot when working with advisors trying to get them to niche down. And you know, it's one of those things where your simple responses, you kind of laugh it off and say, oh no, don't worry, nothing's changing with us; I've just refined my marketing strategy moving forward. And you know, those are the types of folks that I think I can help serve, and maybe they're an underserved market, and then they're like, oh, okay, cool. Like no one ever leaves because you decide that you work with a different niche, assuming that you're still giving them the love and attention that they deserve and were used to prior.

 

Kirk Lowe  36:56  

That's exactly right. So another little tip, there is, I think a lot of advisors focus on a call to action that is like a really big ask, which is come meet with me, and they don't have anything in between. So that's where a podcast can be great. Instead of me saying, do you know anybody who can come and meet with me? How about saying, do you know anybody who would benefit from listening to my podcast? And by the way, are there any topics that you really love that you'd like me to do more of, or stuff that I haven't talked about that you'd like me to talk about? Think how amazing it is when you're doing a podcast and say, hey, my friend, David DeCelle gave me this topic and I want to talk about today. Just wanted to thank him for making a contribution to our thought leadership here, what we talk about; hopefully everybody likes it, but here's what we're gonna answer. Right? I think if I remember correctly, when we started talking today you said there's a question that somebody has. Now you've engaged and I think you did that through Instagram? 

 

David DeCelle 

Yeah. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. 

 

Kirk Lowe

So somebody, you know, said, hey, I've got this question. And now they're gonna, I presume we're gonna name them and they're gonna feel good. And we feel good, because we want to help people at where they're at. So engage people, have a better clear call to action, make sure that you're emailing everything you're doing at least once a month to your clients, and make it as valuable as you can. Don't talk about all the little things going on in your practice, talk about things that matter to them. If you're doing something neat in the community, absolutely mention that. But your newsletter should be educational, have a lot of value, move them forward in their life and their business and their wealth. So things like that, make sure you have a process to inspire people. So if you want to inspire referrals, I should say, make sure that you have something that they're inspired to talk about. And I can't tell you how many times our clients, it's one of the first things they say is, I can't believe how many people are in love with the fact that as a financial advisor, I have my own podcast, it's just instant credibility. They love it. And it's such a great way such a great conversation, a talking point with people. So if you are a financial advisor, one of the ways that you're going to be successful as you create processes, and habits that you follow; make it a habit to talk about it all the time. And that's one of the things I wish that our advisors in podcasts would do a lot more of is building hype for what they're doing. They're kind of modest and humble sometimes where they're so focused on other things, right?

 

David DeCelle  39:11  

Yeah, it's hype to promote listenership and to create awareness around what they're doing. And they also should be, we haven't mentioned this yet, they also should be splicing up their podcast to a number of mini clips and quote cards and things like that, to be able to blast out on the social media platforms and add additional value from a micro content standpoint. Because a lot of times, people may not have 30 or 60 minutes, but if they listen to a two or three minute clip and it's super enticing, then they may invest the time. But the other thing with mentioning it all the time is it’s so much easier now for other people to refer you when they say, oh, why don't you listen to their podcast, listen to one of their episodes. Let me know if based on how they were talking and how they ran the show, if you would like an introduction. It's way easier to refer someone to a piece of content than it is to a person. And if they decide, at that point in time that they want an introduction, they're already halfway there to becoming a client and you got to really mess up or they got to be unqualified for you to not make that happen, because they're making the conscious decision after already doing some due diligence and getting a sense of who you are to ultimately meet with you. So it's a great tool to make you and your business a hell of a lot more referable.

 

Kirk Lowe  40:28  

Yes, one of the best and worst things about podcasting. So best, is it's anonymous, so people can listen to your podcast and you won't ever know they listened. And that's a problem that a lot of people are trying to [50:30 who or mark] or businesses want to know, well, who was it so I can follow them. The anonymity of it is actually really wonderful for marketing, you just gotta be prepared to earn it. And what it does is it forces you to earn it and the people that don't want to earn it, are the ones who are going to start it, in six months they're gone, because they didn't get anything out of it, because they didn't understand the process and the grind. And the grind, people get scared about the idea of the grind. But I was talking to the founder of one of the most prolific podcast channels, hosting channels; they host 85,000 podcasts. And I, the CEO, we were just on a call talking about some stuff that we're working on. But he said his podcast is quite successful, he's earned seven figures off of his podcast, monetizing it, which is not something that I have experienced in doing. But anyway, monetizing from ads, sponsors, and stuff like that. We're not in that world yet. But I know it's inevitable that we’ll evolve into that stuff. But he was saying that the biggest thing about having a successful podcast is the grinders make it happen. So when I talk about organic marketing, that's grinding it; that's doing all the little things. And a lot of times, they're not a big deal; they're stuff you're already doing. It’s just taking the time to remember the things you're supposed to do, building the hype, talking about it, making sure it's in your email, sending a note to an existing center of influence, or an old one or new ones; and leveraging your podcast or topics in it, would your clients like this, there's just so many little things that you can do to leverage it that a company can't do on your behalf like mine, that are gonna make a huge difference. And over time, that grind is how you get ahead. And that's you have to, hashtag, embrace the grind.

 

David DeCelle  42:15  

I agree. It's a commitment to the process. And there's a great book called The Compound Effect. Maybe it's Darren Hardy, if I'm not mistaken, is the author of The Compound Effect, where it just talks about the daily disciplines and the little stuff that you do every single day; it compounds on each other, and it turns into something special. So let's transition over to Natalia’s question. Natalia, and I know that you had just recently hired some branding consultants for your rebrand, so I'm not sure how in alignment this is or how much experience you have in this space, but Natalia’s question was, how do you know when you and your company is ready to partner with a PR firm? So a lot of what we've talked about so far is producing content with your own efforts and having a lot of organic activities involved with gaining that additional reach. And there becomes a point in time where it could make sense to hire a firm to help amplify your voice even more. So how would you answer that question? When do you think it's appropriate to partner with a PR firm based on how long you've been doing content?

 

Kirk Lowe  43:22  

I think it's an amazing question. And I've been thinking about this more and more. In fact, I just talked with Matt, my business partner, this morning; some of the organic stuff could actually be outsourced to a PR firm. I mean, it's a little different, you still want to be doing that stuff. But you could outsource some of that grind. Certainly the production, the promotion on the multiplication, all the stuff we do, it's not something you want to, most advisors want to deal with. We're actually going to start teaching people through our academy, our Influence Accelerator Academy, how to do all this for themselves. But if you're going to do this, and you don't want to disrupt your, what you called your zone of genius, earlier today (I wrote that down), you want to be able to outsource. So outsourcing PR at the right time. If you do it too soon, you don't have the credibility, so you can't leverage it. So I would say definitely not before a year; maybe I would say more like you’re two years in and you got some real content on the shelf, I guess. For me, starting with PR too soon to help you when you just started, it’s not as leverageable, so you're gonna waste a little bit of time and money. Having said that, it's kind of one of those things where the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, right? So I think you got to get a feel for how dialed in you are to your podcast. It's kind of nice when you get over some of the issues that you have not been as good at podcasting when you start, which is the reality. If you go listen, I’m much better at it now than I used to be. I mean, there may be some people who have some thoughts on that but I'd say that probably two years, maybe six months on one side, six months on the other side. I can tell you that the story I was telling you about the “didn't get anything until 18 months” case study point. One of the things that started happening a lot between 18 and 30 months, I think he got seven media appearances. And that ended up being helpful too.

 

David DeCelle  45:07  

It edifies you, as soon as you have that logo by, like, the Forbes or whatever logo is there.

 

Kirk Lowe  45:14  

But that was organic; he did not go find a PR person, but I think it's better to probably go find somebody to own it than it is to hope it happens. But it doesn't happen if you don't have the content. The PR firm can't do a lot for you without content. In fact, one of our big strategies is trying to work with agencies to be content providers, because a lot of agencies I talked to, their clients struggle like crazy to produce content. It's unbelievable. Or they produce content that's really boxy, you know what I mean? It's rigid, it's boring. It's got no personality. It's got no life. You're not creating fans. It's just like, okay, these guys are smart, but everybody's got articles and paper, especially if you're bigger.

 

David DeCelle  45:51  

You gotta have lifestyle, you got to, this is Gary Vee is, for those of you who know Gary Vee, but it's about like, there's certain pieces that you want to spend some time creating. But there's also pieces that you just got to document the process of what you're doing. And, you know, give people an inside look at your life so that they feel like they know you.

 

Kirk Lowe  46:10  

So I quoted Seth Godin earlier. I'm going to quote Gary Vee now. My favorite, or one of my favorite Gary Vee quotes is, that patience is grossly undervalued in business. And I see it all the time. It's

 

David DeCelle  46:21  

patience combined with massive action. I would say you can't obviously just sit around hoping for something but patience on the results of your relentless input.

 

Kirk Lowe  46:30  

Yes. Don't mistake patience for indolence [David: Laziness]. Just not doing anything or, or not caring. Yeah, absolutely. You hear it all the time in sports and business, stick to the process, stick to the process. All my kids I try to teach this to, but one of them in particular is a good hockey player, young. And you know, right now with COVID, in this country, we're not playing hockey and haven't been for a while. And it's really tiring. And this is the year that they get drafted into the next level, which is Junior, and then they draft from Junior into the NHL. So he's working out like crazy and he's not getting the satisfaction of getting to play games. He's not getting to hang out with his friends, because we're in a lockdown for five weeks now and there's two more coming. And it's really been tough, but you have to keep saying, this is the grind. This is unprecedented for a young athlete; it's tough time, but you got to stick on the process, keep getting stronger. So he's getting stronger and stronger and stronger, and I know when he gets back, the reward is going to be wonderful for him. And that's a wonderful lesson for anybody in life is, be patient, do the work that you know is going to make a difference. And when the time comes, that will all pay off. If you're doing the right work, it always pays off. I guess the big thing is make sure you're doing the right work. That's why you look to outsource for people who have already established all those best practices. You don't have to always hire them forever, but lean on them to make sure you're doing the right things. I answered the question of the time for Natalia, which was, probably six months before or after the two year mark; so somewhere between 18 and 30 months. But I would say it's also based on how you feel about the kind of content you're producing, the quality, the valuable, how specific it is, so that PR can get you in the right places. Because they get you in the wrong places, you end up having the wrong listeners and that's not really moving you forward.

 

David DeCelle  48:11  

Right. Or if it's too general, it's you know, it just gets lost in the noise.

 

Kirk Lowe  48:16  

Yeah, I think, get really comfortable with the content. And another thing about a podcast too is your podcast doesn't have to end with the only thing that, you as valuable. We use a video company sometimes to do some video; you can write blogs; some of our advisors, we turn their podcast, we transcribe it for compliance, we actually turned their transcription into a blog post to add a little bit more. So there's other things you can do, it doesn't have to be podcasting. And sometimes if you're talking about a subject, and you've got a checklist and internal checklists, or you can create one based on the outline and create a little checklist. There's a great design tool called canva.com, which is free or really inexpensive. Anybody can be a graphic designer in that thing; grab a template, have somebody. And if your marketing assistant doesn't know how to do that stuff, show up to our Influence Accelerator Academy because we actually teach marketing assistants how to do way better. We're working for experts and advisors.

 

David DeCelle  49:03  

Love that. So before we wrap up this segment of the show, one thing that I'm including in all of our episodes moving forward is what our guest’s, so in this case Kirk, what our guest’s favorite book is and why. And the purpose of this I guess selfishly is I love to consume books. I just think it's amazing that in three to five or ten hours depending on the length of the book, you can consume someone's 10, 20, 40 years of experience. So part of my goal with this part of the show is to promote learning outside of this podcast, outside of your licensing exams, outside of the industry related stuff that we tend to really dive deep on, and this is to broaden our horizons and maintain an open mind because there's a lot of other people that are not in our industry that have plenty of great nuggets that can serve you in both your personal and your professional life. So Kirk, I'm gonna put you on the spot, what is your favorite book and why?

 

Kirk Lowe  50:03  

Can I give you my top three? Is that allowed or no?

 

David DeCelle  50:06  

You can, but we're gonna dive deep on one of them.

 

Kirk Lowe  50:10  

I think the most influential book on the business and where I've been at in my career has been The E Myth by Michael Gerber. And the main reason is the whole idea that you either own a job or you own a business. And to me, I think that's one of the most important things to understand as far as what you want to build and grow, and then attribute everything you're doing, whether it's on the path to one or the other. And for me, that's been the most influential and my favorite book. I haven't read it for a long time, but it's always on my mind. And it's just so sticky.

 

David DeCelle  50:41  

Well, it's got over 11,000 views on Amazon so it shows me that it's popular. Oh, yeah, over a million copies sold. I actually haven't read that one so I just added that to my wish list. What are the other two?

 

Kirk Lowe  50:52  

The other two would be my favorite, I think, and one of the reasons, I don't know if I answered this well enough, but that we switched to Proud Mouth as our new brand and freeing experts from, the world's experts from, the [1:03:40 tournament] to sales and influence accelerators, all those terms and names were a part of us trying to start to establish what I would call a cult brand. And I learned those ideas from a book that I just came across a year ago, and I went to their conference for marketing people in Banff, Alberta, which is a beautiful ski hill. Stayed in the Bamp springs, which is a wonderful, iconic hotel in Canada. And the book is called Fix. And the three authors are Rob Howard, who I actually hired to build our Proud Mouth brand for us, even though I know branding, it's very difficult to do for yourself, and he was better at it. He's brilliant. The other authors are Chris Kneeland and Ryan Gill, and Chris Kneeland and Ryan Gill started that cult gathering, cult as in cult brands. And that event I went to just pre-COVID was 1200 people from around the world, marketing people talking about cult brands. And the great thing about a cult brand is that a cult brand doesn't have to advertise. A cult brand spends about 10 to 15% of their marketing budget on advertising, the rest is spent on creating an incredible client experience. So think Harley Davidson, GoDaddy, although GoDaddy used to advertise more, but they do less.

 

David DeCelle  52:13  

You're already implementing it with the hat and the coasters and the nice note that you sent me. So you're practicing what you're learning. 

 

Kirk Lowe  52:19  

So the idea, that hat, we have a hat and all it has. So if you go to Proud Mouth.com, you'll see that we have a megaphone, a megaphone that is shouting with teeth and a tongue at the bottom, so it’s the idea that your voice is being projected. So another key line of ours is be your own loud, we want to help people be their own loud, we're inspired to do that. But I don't send a hat with my logo, which is that with the word Proud Mouth and influence accelerator; I just have a hat with the megaphone on it. And the reason is that I want people to, what is that? I want people to remember and feel comfortable wearing it, instead of like they're promoting me, but I want to be about the story. I want it to be a feel. I want people to know how much our company cares about them on our path to success. And so we just implemented this for January, but all of our new podcast clients get a kit. And it's a special box with our branding all over it. And when they open it up, it's got all the podcast equipment plus it's got some goodies in there. I don't think we send a hat, but I think we have t-shirts and some other stuff. T-shirts that say “Be your own loud” and a mug. And we just want people to fall in love with what we do. We have an incredible staff and the people, they're just kind and they're workers and they're trying to do their best all the time. And the book that helped me move along there was Fix and the other one is Little Black Stretchy Pants.

 

David DeCelle  53:37  

Yep. The little lemon one. I listened to that one. Yeah, that was really good. Really cool, actually.

 

Kirk Lowe  53:42  

Actually Chip Wilson is at that event talking. So, that was one of the reasons and they were handing out his book. He was giving his book out for free at that conference, which was cool.

 

David DeCelle  53:51  

Nice. Yeah, it was good to listen to it. Because I mean, I'm literally wearing that right now. It's my daily choice of clothing, both for the gym and around the house. So I enjoyed hearing the backstory. Anytime you listen to an entrepreneur's backstory, there's so many different things along the way that you can pick up and apply to your own life. So I would highly recommend that folks do that. So as we wrap up this part of the segment, Kirk, let our listeners know where they can find you. Where are the best places to take a look for you? 

 

Kirk Lowe  54:21  

The best place to look for us is at proudmouth.com, so p-r-o-u-d m-o-u-t-h, in case somebody doesn't get that from what I'm saying. So proudmouth.com.

 

David DeCelle  54:30  

And for anyone who's maybe driving right now or whatever, all these links will be in our show notes as well.

 

Kirk Lowe  54:36  

Yeah, and the other one is InfluenceAcceleratorAcademy.com. And that's our academy where you can go in, there's a free membership and two levels of paid. And the idea there is we're going to teach you and help you establish a better mindset for marketing. If you want to do this yourself, you can do that. If you want to just learn what it is so you can figure out when you're going to do it or if it's applicable or what parts of it you want to do. And eventually we're gonna have lots of other professionals in there contributing which is going to be really fun. There's some exclusive there's exclusive content, there's events, exercises to help you if you're trying to get just tons of stuff on marketing there. And I think we're going to keep growing that thing; we're looking forward to it. But we just launched that so we haven't actually marketed it hard, but by the time this comes out, maybe we'll have done that.

 

David DeCelle  55:16  

Awesome. Well, Kirk, I appreciate you joining; for our listeners, thank you for spending your valuable time. In listening to this episode, I hope you got a lot of good nuggets. I think one of the biggest things that I would suggest to you is, whatever it is that you learn, that you got excited about, write it down immediately and put together a plan of action as to how you're going to see whatever vision came in your mind, see it into fruition. So be sure to take action, don't just be consuming information. And before we head into our after hours segment, I will say one thing that would be really helpful is if you did find value in this episode, feel free to share it with other people that you know, in the industry. Or outside the industry, if you think it would be helpful; I don't think that this was too advisor focused, and it can also be applicable to other business models as well. So please share it; if you go on iTunes and shoot us a review, that would certainly help as well. So if you did get value from it, and you want to leave a review, I'd appreciate that. And then what I will offer is for those of you who do leave a review, and you take a screenshot of that for proof, and shoot me a text at 978-228-2338. Again, 978-228-2338, and just send me a screenshot of that, you'll be entered into drawing to get a free coaching session from us. So that'll be our thank you to you for those of you who spend the time and write a review. And aside from that, appreciate you listening in and we're now headed to the after hours segment.

 

Kirk Lowe  56:54  

After hours, what does that mean? We just go crazy?

 

David DeCelle  56:58  

Yeah, take our shirts off and no, just kidding.

 

Kirk Lowe  57:02  

Wave them in the air? One of my favorite parts about going to hockey games and stuff was when the kids started whipping their shirts around because they were having so much fun. I don't know why that came into my mind. I'm missing hockey so much. 

 

David DeCelle  57:15  

I gotcha. That's the Canadian in you. For me, I'm looking forward to the Super Bowl here in Florida; followed Tom Brady down here from Massachusetts. And lo and behold, get another Super Bowl to watch so that's what I'm excited for. But I got some questions for you. So I got a question, I’ve got a couple of “Would you rather’s.” So this one is totally random and I'm so curious to see what you're going to say, but would you rather be four foot five or seven foot seven?

 

Kirk Lowe  57:43  

Four foot five. [David: Why?] I'm gonna say health. I'm guessing being seven foot seven is a lot harder on your body than being four foot five. And I think living a long life is a wonderful gift. Although I do know that, isn't there a stat that 10% of the people who are over seven feet tall play in the NBA? Some ridiculous thing like that? Or is it one percent?

 

David DeCelle  58:02  

I think 73% of statistics are made up so we can go with that.

 

Kirk Lowe  58:08  

Either one of them is fine. They're both BS.

 

David DeCelle  58:11  

I think I want to be four-five, because it's fun sized. And if you ever need to hide from something, it's way easier to hide when you're four-five than seven-seven.

 

Kirk Lowe  58:21  

It's a lot easier to be powerful. And you know, I think you were seven-seven, you're hurting your back every time you lean over to pick something up; it just feels strong and healthy and yeah. I think either way people are looking at you like you're [an outlier] unfortunately. 

 

David DeCelle  58:36  

Now this could go a couple different ways. Would you rather have the best house in a bad neighborhood or the worst house in a good neighborhood? And why?

 

Kirk Lowe  58:46  

Oh my goodness. As long as I'm living in a house that's loving and has stuff for my family to be, I don't think I would really care. I probably have a nicer house in a mediocre neighborhood. 

 

David DeCelle  59:01  

Well that wasn't a part of it. You can't make up your own questions, Kirk. So I think, just to give perspective, I'd like to have the worst house in a good neighborhood because I feel like that would do two things. One, it surrounds me by people who are doing well enough to have really nice houses, right? So you have like the mastermind effect that takes over. And then second to that is it's inspiring to see those around you every single day and use that as fuel to light your fire to ultimately work your ass off and build something special for yourself.

 

Kirk Lowe  59:39  

I'm gonna say the opposite now that I’ve thought about it. Not to be contrarian. [David: But please do.] I guess I would never have the nicest house in a less nice neighborhood for the sake of having the nicest house, just to be clear. But I think my kids learning to appreciate, feeling grateful that they're able to live in a nice house, but also understanding that not everybody, not to take it for granted, and be able to appreciate that we're all just people living in houses and it doesn't really matter. Trust me, I'm not suggesting that this isn't important to you, by the way I'm phrasing it, but I'm trying to give it, I think, as far as any legacy I leave my kids or what I just being a good person. And not that you can't be the other way, but as a focal point might be a little bit more important, but I don't know. It's a tough question. It’s a great one, though. Tough questions are good to ask.

 

David DeCelle  1:00:30  

Well, I like too, that we both gave each other different answers and different reasons why. So I think part of this segment is to have some fun, but also share different perspectives. And then the final question before we wrap up; I'd imagine that you’ve obviously shot a lot of podcasts, you've probably worked with a ton of people in their podcasts. And you've probably either experienced for yourself, or heard from others, some embarrassing moments as they were doing their episodes. I'm curious to know, what's an embarrassing moment that sticks the most that you can share with us.

 

Kirk Lowe  1:01:04  

Well, my team edited out the most embarrassing. I don't know if I was really embarrassed, I’m just not sure the audience, my audience, was ready for it. But if I share it now, then it's not going to have been edited out. So how dark you want to go here?

 

David DeCelle  1:01:17  

I mean, this is the after hour segment, man, this is what it's for.

 

Kirk Lowe  1:01:22  

Okay, I'll tee it up. And I'll try to be so we were interviewing the guy who wrote the book Fix, Rob Howard, for our new podcast which is called Be Your Own Loud. So our older podcast is Top Advisor Marketing, which we're still doing. We’re on episode, at this point, like around 290, but in Be Your Own Loud, we're just starting. We're about five or ten in. Anyway, but this episode number two, I think, we were talking about this new brand called Manscaped. Do you know that brand?

 

David DeCelle  1:01:47  

The one where they have trimmers for your balls that don't cut them?

 

Kirk Lowe  1:01:54  

That’s the one. So he brings up this brand, and it happens that in my house, I've got two teenagers and my wife bought us all Manscape razors. And so I was telling the story about my teenager who thought he was punking me one day by shaving his armpits in front of me with it. And I looked at him and I said, where do you think I was using it? He was like, his face just dropping. He's like, oh, man, I thought I was getting you and you just got me. He didn’t know what to do so he just kept shaving but he was doing it right in front of me, and it was like, oh my gosh. Anyway, so I was worried about some certain, you know, the team just thinking, oh, Kirk, why'd you have to just TMI man. I was thinking, I was comfortable with it going out, but I said, you guys decide what you want to do. I’m pretty sure they cut it.

 

David DeCelle  1:02:36  

You should have told your son, you should have said, you got a little bit of mustache coming in. You should get that too while you’re at it.

 

Kirk Lowe  1:02:44  

Dude, my 17 year old started shaving at 11. So.

 

David DeCelle  1:02:47  

Oh my goodness. 

 

Kirk Lowe  1:02:50  

He’s got the Greek in him from my lovely wife's family. So yeah, you look like you probably grew facial hair early too.

 

David DeCelle  1:02:57  

Well, I'd say in college is when it really started to come in, but shortly thereafter is why I've kind of started on the beard here and there; and fortunate that it’s actually filled in as opposed to some people, it's like bald over here and they’ve got to color it in if they want a beard. 

 

Kirk Lowe  1:03:13  

Well, you got a good beard. That seems to be a really important thing these days. So a lot of people wearing beards; which I do a lot of the time, but mine started to turn white as I head over 50.

 

David DeCelle  1:03:25  

I got a couple whites here. But before I was plucking them out and then I'm just like, screw it. I'm owning it, I am who I am; I’m not gonna keep up with this. It's only gonna get more and more gray and white over time. But you can't really notice it from afar unless you're looking for it. 

 

Kirk Lowe  1:03:39  

No, I don't see anything.

 

David DeCelle  1:03:41  

Well, appreciate, I appreciate the time. For those of you who stayed tuned for the after hours portion, thank you so much for that. Don't forget to leave us a review, shoot me a text 978-228-2338, and then follow us on social. Feel free to just type in Model FA on Google or David DeCelle on Google and you'll see all of our social links and thanks for tuning in to the after hour segment. Take care.