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This is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On this episode:
Vendor name:
Azella Advisor
Vendor category:
Marketing
Episode host:
Brad Wales
Episode guest:
David Roberson
Vendor contact info:
Full Transcript:
Brad Wales – Hi, I’m Brad Wales with Transition To RIA, and this is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On today’s episode, we’re answering the question, “What is Azella Advisor?” And no better person to help us with that than the founder of Azella Advisor, David Roberson. David, thank you for joining us.
David Roberson – Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Brad – Indeed, well we will jump right into the question. So at a macro level, if someone says “What is Azella Advisor?”, how do you typically answer that?
David – Azella Advisor is a full-service marketing platform specifically for financial advisors. So whether you own your own RIA, you’re breaking away to start a firm, or you’re an existing firm, we help define your brand, your website, create your digital marketing assets, and we help you drive growth through SEO, social media, and lead generation strategies.
Our goal is basically to simplify all the complexities of all the marketing technologies and make it a lot easier for you with one place to go.
Brad – So how do you, easier said than done, if you had to put that in a bucket, is it fair to call it a marketing solution? Because there’s, as you know, some solutions out there that are solely website creation, and there’s others that are lead generation. Did you just try to capture that with marketing, or what do you call that?
David – Yes, I like to say we sit at the intersection of a marketing platform, brand development, and web experience. You could think of us as your outsourced CMO or your creative agency because you do have a personal touch, right? It’s not just a piece of software where you don’t engage with real people.
Brad – There are other players in the space. I am a big believer that advisors should look at industry-specific solution providers. We’re very fortunate in this industry that, whether it’s for marketing or technology or whatever, you can get providers that focus solely on this industry.
But even at that, there are obviously others in the space as well. So how would you describe or set yourself apart if an advisor team is looking at a couple different solutions? How do you differentiate amongst the options?
David – Unlike other template solutions, there’s your FMG’s; your Snappy Krakens out there of the world, Azella offers something that’s highly personalized. It is more of a boutique approach, but it’s a lot more efficient than a boutique because we’ve been doing this for a while.
We figured out a way to make this a lot more scalable. We like to combine deep marketing expertise with financial industry insights. I’ve been in the industry for a very long time, specifically in marketing, helping a ton of advisors for one of the largest RIAs in the country. So we’ve taken that to help build customized brand strategies, design, everything is custom.
So it’s not that cookie-cutter template or content that you may see out there. So that’s one thing that really separates us and the efficiency, really how quickly we can do it. Recently, we helped an advisor break away in less than 45 days from start to finish.
Brad – Terrific. I plan on asking you about timeline to give those kind of expectations. Certainly there are multiple parts to it. So I talked to advisors that are thinking they only need a website and perhaps at launch they only need a website, but it’s like hey, what’s that long-term plan? What’s the long-term strategy and just because someone can help you with the website doesn’t necessarily mean they can help you with that longer-term piece of it.
What is the minimum-size advisor team before it really hits your sweet spot? So every advisor team, no matter how small or large, needs at least a basic website. But when you start being able to utilize a service like yours, where does that start to make sense? And I don’t know how you quantify that. Do you quantify that kind of size of the practice or how would you answer?
David – Yeah, I mean, really for us, it’s more based off what their goals are, what they’re trying to accomplish, kind of to what you were alluding to, right? Think about the guy who was just breaking away versus somebody who’s thinking a lot more long-term. So the way that I would kind of sum that up is we help support solo advisors launching a new firm all the way up to the multi-location RIA and even aggregators.
We’ve built a system that really helps support, like if you’re trying to have advisors tuck in under you, and they have their own DBA, we’re able to support both. So that’s where it makes us a little unique is that we can support you no matter where you are in your journey.
Brad – I think that’s a good point. I often talk to advisors about when they’re going through a transition, thinking of it in phases, right? So perhaps the long-term roadmap is to maybe try to attract advisors and tuck in. That’s not gonna be part of the initial transition. They need to first get their practice over.
And so the challenge is if you pick a provider in whatever category that can only support you with your immediate need, but your long-term plan is phase two and phase three or something else, then you’re going to have to reset and find someone new as well at that point.
So I think that’s good that you can accommodate it, and people don’t necessarily have to do it on the immediate front end, but it’s there when the time comes.
David – Yeah, and one thing I would add to that would be more so like the team or the advisor that’s really serious about their brand. Reflecting their values, really trying to grow that business and grow that practice. That’s really where our sweet spot is.
Brad – How do you answer “So this all sounds great. Wow, we could do fancy stuff and big plans. Well, what’s this sort of thing cost?” I’m sure that’s not a quick, easy answer. So if someone comes to you and they say, what does this cost? Obviously, I assume the first response is, well, let’s dig into what you’re looking to accomplish. But generally, how do you build a price for something like this?
David – It really depends on the scope of work, the number of services that you’re needing. So whether it’s a brand, a website, content or ongoing marketing and really the level of customization that’s involved in that because there’s different levels of customization.
We can create something that’s super streamlined for you, but we can really sit down and dive in and make it very customized to you, to your audience, and what you’re trying to communicate. So when I think about pricing, it ranges from a one-time project to monthly retainers of ongoing marketing and ongoing support services.
Brad – Okay, obviously it just takes a conversation to try to build out what that’s going to look like.
David – That’s exactly right.
Brad – For folks that are breaking away, particularly a captive environment like a wirehouse environment, they basically don’t have any website or marketing now. They might have some like rudimentary template thing. So they are starting from scratch and kind of everything needs to be built or considered.
But there are some scenarios of advisors maybe watching this that they are using some provider that maybe was a very basic solution and at the time it served its purpose but maybe wants to kind of ramp up their brand building and their marketing and they’re looking at something like Azella.
How do you help those folks that they’re not coming in with a blank slate, they already have something? Is that as simple as, okay, we’ll work with you and build everything over here and then when the time comes we can just flip a switch from whatever you have now or what does that typically look like if they already have something, but maybe they’d prefer you instead going forward?
David – I’ll talk about that in a couple of different ways. Because our solution is holistic, right? So when you come to us, we think about your end goals compared to where you are today. You’re going to go through our full onboarding experience, which includes our discovery process. This is where we get to know you. We get to know your business. We get to understand your audience and your mission, your value, the thing that you’re going after.
You’re going to take our proprietary brain quiz that basically breaks you into these different archetypes of advisors that we’ve defined over the years and narrowed down. Then we’re going to dictate the type of project and at each phase where we come in and where you come in at.
Such as in the example you gave, if you’re a breakaway advisor, you’re probably super busy with a bunch of other things. We want to make sure that you’re only coming in at those parts that make the most sense, making sure that you are spending your time focused on the things that are super important to you.
Brad – How does that conversation play out? I’m a big believer in trying to set expectations to try to lower how intimidating reaching out can be, particularly when you’ve got 10 different things you have to solve for and you’re reaching out to some vendor.
We’ll get into how best to reach out to you guys here in a moment, but if an advisor team reaches out to you and your team, literally what is that first conversation like? So you reach out, probably schedule something. How does that unfold initially on that first call?
David – Most of our very first conversations start with a phone call where they’re booking a meeting. Typically, you know, I’m having that conversation with them and one of our team members, and it’s really to get to understand your situation, to really get to know you and really to dive in and to understand your team.
That’s really the biggest piece because the more that we can understand that, that’s how we can then put together a strategy. Because now we know you, now we understand some of the complexities you may be dealing with.
Whether you’re coming from a different platform that you were using. Whether it’s a FMG, a Wix, a WordPress type of platform, or you didn’t have anything to begin with. That discovery call is the most important piece to understand where you are in that stage of the journey, like you were referring to earlier.
It is a journey, and it’s important for us to know where you are in that stage, because sometimes there are people who may have already had some things that they started getting into place that we do as a service. So it’s important for us to know some of those things upfront so that we’re not pricing you out on things and work that may have already been done.
Brad – So how does that typically end? Is that obviously a kind of a discovery call and then, hey, the next step is we’d love to show you some examples of what we’ve done or how does that first call typically end as far as next steps?
David – So a lot of times what’s happening during that call is I’m walking you through our presentation where you’re actually getting to see some examples. A lot of times clients may say, hey, can you send us couple of links of some websites you’ve done? So we’re happy to always send over a couple of links. You can go to our website to look at some of the case studies that exist on there, some of the work that we’ve already done.
Then we will end with a proposal. So after we’ve had that conversation, we’ll say, hey, let’s schedule our next call to go over the proposal of what we think makes the most sense to you based off of this conversation.
Brad – Thinking of how much time that all takes and again, that’s just on the front end. You still must build all this out and I’m sure there’s a lot of back and forth. We could probably talk about that for an hour, just kind of how that comes together.
There’s different scenarios here so I’ll pick just one. We’ll say a scenario where it is a breakaway team. So they for better or worse don’t have anything currently, not even a logo perhaps, and maybe they haven’t even decided on the name just yet.
For that team, and part of what I advise is mapping a timeline out and all the things they need to get done in place, for that team, on average, from the time they’re first reaching out, if things progress through this kind of discovery process, they decide to work with you, you gotta do all your work, there’s the back and forth, and then by the time it’s ready to go live, in that scenario, I get there’s other scenarios, but ballpark, what is your preferred timeline for that sort of thing?
David – Typically that’s happening within a 60-day period. We have advisors that we’ve done in much less time, from around 45 days and that’s including compliance review and compliance revisions. But typically what we spot for a breakaway advisor is 60 days or less.
Brad – Okay, and you alluded in a worst-case scenario, you even did one 45 days. I assume in a very expedited thing, you could probably stand up some basic thing pretty quickly, but it is better to do this at a measured pace. And so 60 days is quite reasonable because there’s a lot of things the advisors and teams can be working through anyways on that page.
David – That’s right.
Brad – So if an advisor wants to have that first call and start learning more, this is just part of the discovery process. A phone call doesn’t commit you to have to do anything, but you do need to start that process somewhere and see if Azella might be the right solution provider. So for advisors and teams that want to have that conversation, what’s the best way for them to reach you guys?
David – Yes, so the best way to reach us is to go to azella.io. That’s our website. You can find any information that you’re looking for from the services that we offer to the type of advisors we help and that we’ve helped in the past. We have tons of resources on our website as well for you to get more information.
And then on our website, if you hit the contact button, that’s where you can go to schedule a meeting. Or you also can take our brand quiz and we’ll send you over some of the results to kind of kick off that first conversation.
Brad – That’s something you’d be sending them or is that directly on the website as well?
David – That is directly on the website as well.
Brad – Okay, perfect. Well, to wrap up, I’ve known David several years now and two things unique about him I think, well there’s a lot of great stuff he just talked about and the great solutions he’d provide for advisors and teams, but here’s two unique things. One, if you catch him without the bow tie, then maybe he’s having an off day. I was gonna be disappointed, David, if you came on this without the bow tie. I probably would have told you we have to reschedule till you’re more prepared. So that is likely to be the case, advisors, if you connect with David. And then because I think it’s just a great story, I would love to have you to end this by explaining the origin of the name of the firm.
David – Financial services ultimately was an industry that I actually never planned to be in. I’d been in marketing for a very long time and I happened to find a really good opportunity working for a large financial firm. And it was just something that really caught my attention. The longer that I worked for the firm and the more I got involved in the marketing and understanding actual financial services, I started to see that there was a gap and a need that needs to be met.
My mom when I was growing up, she actually made decent money and she never thought that she could work with an advisor. I would always encourage her to consider talking to an advisor. But she didn’t. And so my goal and my objective is to help people out there like my mom to find a financial advisor. And that’s where the name of the company comes from, Azella. That’s my mom’s name. So that’s where the dots kind of tie is really trying to help people who may think they can figure it out or they can’t afford an advisor to go sit down and talk to an advisor as your first step to get that initial guidance because I guarantee you probably can work with an advisor in some way, in some capacity.
Brad – I love the story. I would say David’s a glutton for punishment because starting a business, any business is a challenge. As an entrepreneur, it’s not easy. And then to give yourself the added pressure of naming the company after your mother. So this thing can’t possibly fail at that point. So I don’t know if that was part of your calculus or not, but either way, I’m sure she’s proud of what all you’ve accomplished.
David and I were chatting right before we hit record here. Both of our respective firms are about at the five-year mark. So it’s never a sure thing in life. But glad to know, and I’m sure your mom’s glad to know, her namesake is doing quite well. So great job with that, David. I appreciate you coming on and helping us dig into what the Azella Advisor offering is.
David – Yes, thank you for having me. I really appreciate your time. And both our anniversaries are coming up and congrats to you as well for starting a company during COVID just like I did and being so successful.
Brad – Yeah, a glutton for punishment. We’ll throw that in the mix, too. The COVID startup as well. We’re glad that’s in the rear view. But again, David, thank you for coming on and I appreciate everyone tuning in.
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