Building Industry Cred by Saying Yes to Every Opportunity with Domenick D'Andrea

Speaker A: When you have an opportunity to speak, uh, at conferences, speak on podcasts, speak on webinars, as long as you understand what you're talking about, say yes. I've got clients that when they Google me and they see all the variety of conferences I've spoken at, webinars, podcasts, their answer is not, well, what could you do for me? Their answer is, well, if the industry thinks you're expert, I want to work with you. And they're already sold on being my client before I've even sat down in their house. So they came to my office.

Speaker B: Yeah, you've been elevated to, uh, there's other people have bought into you. Right. So it's a bit of, it's not an endorsement necessarily, but you've got some bestowed some sort of street cred or whatever industry cred that people recognize and it makes a huge amount of sense. I love it. Hey, there's Mike Larford. Welcome to another episode of the Modern m Financial Advisor podcast. On this episode of the show, Dominic d', Andrea, co founder and financial financial advisor at Dan Darragh Wealth Management, is with me for an impromptu conversation recorded live at the Nitrogen Fearless Investing Summit in Denver, Colorado. Dominic is the guy that Ali Zendrian mentioned in a recent episode who has a special knack for hustling and being in the right place to gain high quality media attention for his financial advisory business. And, uh, as you're about to see, this conversation shows just how impactful that can be. Key takeaway. Take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. Now, before we get to the conversation with Dominic, please do make sure you take a moment to subscribe to the Modern Financial Advisor podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon, the YouTubes, or wherever you like to podcast, jam on. And if you have a question or a suggestion for a topic or a guest, hit me up. I'm basically at Mike Langford everywhere on the Internet. Or shoot us an email podcastinsermarketing.com okay, let's get to the conversation with Dominic D'. Andrea. Dominic D', Andrea, wonderful to see you by the way. Props to you, dude. We're sitting here recording podcasts at the Nitrogen Fearless Investing Summit and you just pop on over, introduce yourself. We start shooting the breeze on tech gear, which is behind us here, and, uh, turns out we're doing a show together. So welcome to the Modern Financial Advisor podcast.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me, Mike, and

Speaker B: great to meet you today also. Awesome, awesome, great to meet you. You come m. Uh, highly recommended in terms of energy level, fun to be around by our good friend Ali. He's Andrea. Yeah, she's great. Yeah. So, man, one of the fun things when I get to talk to somebody who is running a wealth management firm is kind of get their take on what's actually happening here. Right. This is a Modern Financial Advisor podcast. We're all about helping advisors modernize their business, take their business to the next level. Um, what have you seen so far here that's been interesting and impressive for you?

Speaker A: Well, the Nitrogen Fearless Investing Summit. This is my fourth one in person, fifth one attending. Um, the first one was right after Covid, so I didn't feel comfortable traveling yet. But every one of you that I come to, they build a great group of breakout sessions, main platform speakers that it's almost impossible not to come out of this conference with 10 actionable ideas. Now, I do not suggest anybody trying to do 10 ideas from any conference because you're never going to implement them.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So, you know, um, I will always try to find the three best ideas, and I will have no trouble doing that when this conference is over and seeing what I'm going to implement in my practice. Help the team out, help our clients out, help our prospects out. Um, it's even such a great conference that there was a few time slots that I had to, like, I had to go back and forth between two or three breakout sessions on what I was going to pick and want to attend to get the most or maximum value out of this conference.

Speaker B: Uh, you know, I really. That's a great wisdom there, because it's really easy to get overwhelmed and a little overexcited about all the new shiny stuff, all the things you could implement. You do have to focus, though. You have to pick and choose. You know, famously, Steve Jobs said, like, the hardest part about being a CEO is what to say no to. You can't say yes to everything. So, you know, every advisor's business is different and unique in a different stage. Where you are now, what are the things that you're kind of that are. You're more dialed in on the things that you're more interested in in order to take your business to the next level where you want to go?

Speaker A: That's a great question. I mean, we were talking earlier. You know, one of the things is, uh, in my 31 years in the business, I've just watched how tech has made efficiencies in our practices so much better. My first CRM, I had to dial in to update the data. So if I didn't dial in to update the Data and I saw a client. It could be a day old, it could be a few days old, it could be a week old. I had to remind myself every morning to dial in to update the data. So I'd, uh, have an updated CRM for the clients I was seeing that day. Now everything is integrated. The financial planning softwares, we have estate planning softwares. Nitrogen keeps adding stuff to make our job better and easier to help our clients out. So it's just. But when you're picking tech, you have to pick tech that works for your client base and your practice. And don't just pick 10 pieces of tech, because that's going to overwhelm a client.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, pick a financial planning software you're comfortable with. Learn it. Pick an estate planning software. Be comfortable in a tax planning software, whatever it might be. Pick one you're comfortable with and work with it. You know, when we're going back to what you said about being overwhelmed at a conference, well, right now I'm missing a session to be here, but that's okay. Yeah, Uh, I have Otter AI taking the notes, so I'm going to get a transcript of the session. And that's really what I do when a conference is over. I'm not, I, I. If you ask me on Friday, at the end of this conference, what am I going to implement? I have no idea. But on my flight home, I'll go through all the notes. It gives me key points, and I'll pick out the three ideas from that. So do not try to figure out what you're going to do here. Enjoy the moment here. Figure that out afterwards. If you looking at your notes, I like that.

Speaker B: Uh, and it's getting easier. You mentioned you can you have an AI note taker taking some notes. Uh, now you have AI tools to go, okay, here's all the notes I took. Let's do some summarization. You can also tell it. Here are some priorities for me and my business. Now, based on what we heard, what are the most important things that fit in with those priorities? Right. Help you kind of like sift through all the stuff you saw. Because at the end of the day, you hit on this. I think it was really, uh, a smart point that I want to make sure the audience takes away is

Speaker A: the

Speaker B: best tech, is the tech that you use. You can have a, oh, look at the tech we're using right here. You could tell me that, well, I've got better cameras, I've got better microphones, I got better whatever. The thing is, we're using this stuff, and this stuff gets used regularly and I know how to use it. It doesn't have more features than I need. It might have something that I'm not using yet. Right. That's the same true for like a financial planning software. Right. There can be stuff that might be way more powerful than what you're using. But you figured out that this is what works for me and my business.

Speaker A: Right. And the way more powerful software, if it doesn't integrate with the other tech,

Speaker B: I'm using that too.

Speaker A: It doesn't matter to me. I want stuff that I want as much integration between the different techs I'm using, because then I'm not doubly implementing the same information in this platform and in this platform and in the next platform. I want it to just translate everything into one simple way which the clients appreciate also, because when you can hand them one report from one piece of tech, they're much happier than saying, well, here's 10 different documents I printed for you. Read through them, figure out what you're doing, and it can fuse the living daylights out of the cloud.

Speaker B: Now, you talked a little bit about tech, and tech is obviously helping to move everything forward. And some of the things that an advisor does today, frankly, wasn't really possible 30 years ago. You mentioned in the business for 30 years. Um, but the role of an advisor has changed dramatically. I say almost in every single episode of the show that many advisors got their start when they were called stockbrokers and they evolved into financial advisors as we know them today. How have you seen your business evolve over that 30 years? And where do you see it going probably in the next five to 10 years? What are you looking forward to most? I guess, I don't know. Get real quick.

Speaker A: Well, like I said, already the tech has evolved to the point where it makes our job easier on appointments because we're able to be repeatable. We're able to give the clients a repeatable process, repeatable data, so we become more confident with it. And just as I'm seeing, just in the time I've been a nitrogen customer, I've looked at all the things they've added and changed to the product. When I first signed up, it was a risk questionnaire, right? Yeah, they got, uh, retirement maps, report builders, uh, income policy statements, tax planning, AI. So the companies are evolving more and more to make our jobs easier and give the clients a more repeatable, understandable thing. So I can only imagine what these companies are going to do moving forward. And the best ones Listen to us? Yeah, you know, if I've got an idea, I can call one of these tech companies and say, can we work something like this? Because this is what the clients are looking for. You know, I know what you guys want, but when I'm talking to the clients, they'd like it to look like this. And the better tech companies, if we present it properly, they listen to us because they want a better product for us to use to make the clients happy. And most of the tech companies I work with are open to hearing those ideas because again, they want to get better, they want to be more valuable to us. So the sky's the limit. I mean if you would have told me AI could do some of the stuff it's doing now, I'm shocked every time I get a call from somebody that put in, you know, best financial advisor near me or best retirement specialist near me, I get appointments from that. If you would have told me I was going to get appointments from an AI search engine five years ago, I would have told you crazy. So if you're asking what the future holds, I think it's as bright. I think uh, they're just going to keep, we're going to just keep growing, keep having enhancements and keep doing things that are going to make the client experience with us and our experience with them better and better.

Speaker B: So now, fun question and maybe you don't even want to answer this question because you mentioned that you've had clients discover you via AI. Uh, and so we have SEO, uh, but we have the. Was it au ao, Right. Uh, have you done any of that? Have you tinkered around with any of that to make sure you're discoverable on AI?

Speaker A: Not as much in AI. I'm working on that process. But the biggest thing that's gotten me clients. Cause when you put in the search best financial advisor near wherever you live, it's gonna pull up five to ten advisors, uh, in your area. The best thing you can do is look at if you're not ranked, why are those people ranked? What do they have? The biggest thing I've seen is Google reviews. So I work very hard at uh, asking clients to give us reviews because that's what put me at the top. That were highly reviewed 5 star Google reviews and that puts us at the top. And then it pulls stuff off our website, pulls up off our social media. So you have to have a digital presence. You're not. If you don't post on social media, you don't use a Google. My business, you don't get testimonials, you're not going to be plugged in, you're not going to be found, and you don't know where your next client's coming from. I love when I get a, an email saying, oh, I found you. Can we meet or even get. The craziest thing is when I get a calendly appointment and somebody scheduled me and I never even spoke to them.

Speaker B: That's awesome. You know what's so funny is we, before we click record, I was telling you about the origins of the show. The modern financial advisor was we really started talking about the need for advisors to stop thinking of their business as a practice and start thinking of themselves as having a business. And if you're in a business, business has certain functions, business. One of them is marketing. Right. In order to generate new sales leads, I need to have a marketing engine of some kind. So it sounds like you've really invested in that, which is really smart. Cause not every advisor's doing that right now.

Speaker A: And when you have an opportunity to speak at ah, conferences, speak on podcasts, speak on webinars, as long as you understand what you're talking about, say yes. I've got clients that when they Google me and they see all the variety of conferences I've spoken at, webinars, podcasts, their answer is not, well, what could you do for me? Their answer is well, if the industry thinks you're expert, I want to work with you. And they're already sold on being my client before I've even sat down in their house or they came to my office.

Speaker B: Yeah, you've been elevated to uh, other people have bought into you. Right. So it's not an endorsement necessarily, but you've got some bestowed some sort of street cred or whatever industry cred that people recognize and it's, it makes a huge amount of sense. I love it. Um, no, you're 100% right in terms of uh, taking advantage of other opportunities to get on shows, to speak at conferences or whatever. I got a client, a new client this past year who saw a video that I did nine years ago. I don't know how they found the video, a nine year old video. They just put like, get this email, hey Mike, can you work with us and help us with our stuff? Right. And that happens for financial advisors too because you don't know what somebody's googled, where if they're sitting on YouTube, if they're cruising the uh, podcasts and they happen to find somebody's answering the one question we had one of our clients who landed a client for their business. We were on episode like 60 for this podcast, and somebody found episode five. And we just happened to be talking about one of the problems their software solves. And they're like, we need that.

Speaker A: You know, and that's the truest thing that's. You gotta be like, when I said, build a presence. Yeah, build a presence that's true to you, and defend and keep the topics that aren't pertinent, like no politics, no nothing bad, nothing that you can get. And, you know, I make sure that anything I post is personal. Like, my daughter's a dancer, and I. Every time she dances, I posted that. I'm, uh, at a dance competition. Do you know how many conversations I've had with couples with young daughters that ask me about dance? 15, 20 minutes about dance. Before we get into financial advice, guess how many of those people become clients? 100%. Yeah. Because they already know me. They're comfortable with me. I'm relatable. So you post things that show you as a human being. And because again, people are searching you, they are looking you up, and they want to know who they're going to invite in their house or they're going to go meet in their office.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, 100%, if somebody is, you know, already has a connection with you, they're following you. Right. They already know what you do. Right. So at some point in time, when they have the need for a financial advisor, you're in the consideration set there. If they're coming onto your social media presence and you're new to them, this is all confirming, like, is this the type of person I want to interact with? Have I seen this person talk before on video? Right. Do I know what he looks like? Sounds like, how he approaches ideas, relationships, interacting with other people. It's really valuable stuff.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, this is really interesting. What sessions have you experienced so far here at the conference that have really stood out to you or ones that you're looking forward to the most?

Speaker A: There's a couple on marketing, which I always want to learn more about how I can get better at marketing. This morning, the women's conference was on, and, you know, I always want to hear what's going on there because I want to build my knowledge, you know, because females are going to inherit everything, you know, the money, for the most part. You know, I'm a weird person when it comes to this because all three of the senior men in my family outlived their wives.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker A: Which is not. Which I know is an anomaly, but I know that that's going to be what's happening. So going to that conference, I got some more insights on working with my female clients and understanding how they think. You know, I think I do a pretty good job already, but I always want to learn. So that was a great session. Michael Kitcet is always phenomenal, you know. So we're early in the conference, but there's numerous sessions that I can't wait to see what I get out of them.

Speaker B: That's awesome. So you mentioned women, female clients. I've seen so much data on. This is really fascinating. Something like 50% of women might even be higher than that will change advisors post divorce, which is really interesting when you consider. Actually I think I might have butchered that number. I think it's like 75% of women change advisors after a divorce. But 50% of marriages end in divorce. So you know that if you have married couples in your client roster, half of them are uh, likely going to dissolve at some point in time. And that means a huge chunk of your assets could be at risk. Right. What are you and your team doing so far? You've already invested in there, so I'm just curious about it. What are you and your team doing to make sure that the women who you're serving, even if they're in a, in a, in a, in a family setting, a, ah, couple setting, know that you're their advisor too and that you're there for them no matter what?

Speaker A: 100%. Great question. So to give a story, a few years ago we, we met a gentleman who was interviewing three advisors us, his father's advisor because he inherited an inheritance and another advisor they just referred to. And the reason they picked us is we were the only ones that acknowledged the wife throughout the whole conversation. And we make sure that the wife is extremely important in the conversation because we don't know who the decision maker is. When we're sitting down, somebody might be just sitting back and not asking questions, but they might be registering everything we say. And when we leave, the person that's making the decision might not be who we thought it was. The person we were giving all the attention to might not be the one that makes the decision. And they'll say, yeah, they talked to you, they acknowledged you. We're never inviting that person back in our house ever again. So it's very important to care and understand and speak to both parties that are involved in the conversation so they know that their best interest is at our. We make sure that they know if they refers to people that were priest, doctor, lawyer, everything's confidential, everything stays the same. So they're going to leave us because they're, they want to leave us. But I've had divorce clients. We haven't lost one as of yet.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, because we treat them both equal, fair and give them a seat at the table in the conversation.

Speaker B: I love that. It's just so important. Like you said, yes, you're a couple, but you're also individuals. Right. You know, you think about your children. It's kind of a weird way. It's because. But like, hey, yeah, I see you as my kids, we're a family. But I see my son as an individual person and I see my daughter as an individual person too. When you're dealing with clients. Right. Sometimes it does feel like it's a family style situation. You care about these people. Right. That caring doesn't stop because you happen to, I don't know, you've golfed with the, uh, husband. Right. You've never gone golfing with the wife. You should still feel like you're strongly connected.

Speaker A: If we have a client event, we make sure we invite both.

Speaker B: That's really important.

Speaker A: Uh, because we want them. It's not. We're inviting you where you, you know, if, if one can't come for a reason, that's, that's on them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But we don't ever see, you know, you know, because breadwinners, especially in this day and age.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: There are many families that the woman makes more than the man for sure. And that can change at any given point in time.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So that's why you, again, you don't, you can't assume what's going to happen in the future in that couple.

Speaker B: By the way, that is almost likely going to accelerate because the recent stats are like 2/3 of enrolled college students are women now. So it's no longer a 5050 split. A lot of young men are for some reason opting to not go to college. And I think there's some economic repercussions for that in the future. Right. And so advisors really need to be, uh, thinking that way. I want to switch gears to something that. Yeah. You said something a while back and I think it's related. We can build on it with what we were just talking about. You were talking about there's certain things that clients are asking for and you're bringing it to the tech. How much of what you see is push versus pull. Right. Obviously the tech companies are creating all sorts of really awesome stuff. AI is moving at a blistering pace. We all see it. We're all like, wow, there's a new thing I can do and making my life easier. But I'm sure it's coming from the other side too, where clients are like, oh, you know what? I'd really like to be able to do this type of stuff. Right. Are you, are you getting like more nuanced questions or more informed questions from your clients than you used to because of things like AI, where they're starting to be able to.

Speaker A: Absolutely, 100% clients are, uh, looking at like, we met with a woman that chatgpt everything this week before I came here, and she was like, everything was great things, but you have to understand when you do a ChatGPT question, it's giving general advice. It might not be specific to you. So it's really understanding what's going to benefit you and then learning how to converse that back to the client. Yeah, you know, tech, it's fine. You know, again, using the right amount of tech for those clients because if you over inundate them, they're going to think that everything is generated by tech and you're not a person. You know, I want, you know, I want them to know I'm still here for them. I, uh, got a client earlier this year and tech is why I got the client. He met with numerous financial advisors over the years. He was a do it yourselfer. Never thought he needed a financial advisor. Adamantly told me, I don't need one. But somebody at the event that I was at said, talk to Dominic, give him a chance. Yeah, I used one of my financial planning softwares and I showed him Roth conversions because he was a great saver young guy and doing a Roth 401k in his, you know, even though he's gonna lose the tax deduction now, it was over $10 million in tax savings later on in life by starting that now. And he's like, wow, this was so intuitive. This was so beneficial. When can I sign up? And so it went from not wanting to work with a financial advisor to like, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's fantastic. I love it. And I love the fact that you brought up that clients are. You assume now that anything you present to a client and they're likely going to run it through a chatgpt, a cloud or whatever, just to understand it a little better, because I don't know if that's one of your use cases, but a lot of times, especially when I get A dense amount of information. Right. Can you summarize this for me? Right, Tell me a little bit, like, what are some key points in here that you picked up on that I can go evaluate? Hey, we just did a contract actually, and, uh, the other party of the contract came back and said, hey, I ran this contract through ChatGPT and it recommends we add this clause and this clause. And then we had it helped us, actually. Okay, you know what? That is a smart one. That's, uh, maybe not on this one, but whatever. This one's irrelevant. But it was kind of a cool back and forth. It opened up a better dialogue and

Speaker A: it's going to help educate. Yeah. And the more I want educated clients, I want clients that research me. I want clients that do research because once they see who I am and learn about it, they're more apt to want to work with me and stay with me as opposed to just trusting.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's great. So do you have. That's one of my fun questions. Do you have a niche that you focus on? Are you more just broad based on your client base? Is there certain types of segments you're looking to serve? I mean, than others? We.

Speaker A: The most fun and the most work I can do for most clients is the pre retirees. Retirees. Because most clients, they do a great job saving. They do a great job building their 401k or 403b or whatever it is they have at work. But what they don't understand is how can they distribute it comfortably in retirement and not outlive their money. Because I'll sit down to me, oh, well, I should leave my plan, you know, at my union, it's great. I'll just take money out. I'm like, yeah, that works great. If the market's going up. Yeah, if the market's constantly going up, you're fine. But if we get a 30% correction and you're taking money out, well, you're going to get less and less to take out and you're going to be in danger of running money. Uh, so we can create fantastic, innovative plans that can now show them. Okay, you're not going to leave your money. You're going to be able to leave money for charity or for your children or whatever it might be. And they see why having an advisor can do that. Years ago, where I didn't have the tech, they had to trust that what I was saying was true. But now that there's more and more financial planning software where I can plug in the numbers and show them how it's going to work for their plan and they can see it in, you know, paper or on the computer. Uh, it makes our life easier. It makes their life easier and they know they're going to be comfortable.

Speaker B: That's awesome. That's fantastic. And at the end of the day, that's really the goal. Right. I always jokingly say, like, it's a sleep at night factor.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That's what your client wants from you. It's like they don't. They're not all expecting you to hit these rockstar home runs with, you know, the investment returns.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Obviously they don't want to grossly underperform markets, but they really want to go to bed every night going, all right, Dominic's got me. We talked. I'm comfortable no matter what's going on in the markets, you know, what's happening, geopolitical stuff. I feel like I'm in good hands, steady hand at the wheel type of thing. And I can sleep at night and I'm on track for future. Awesome stuff. Well, Dominic d', Andrea, this has been fantastic. I'm so glad you sought me out. Last question. People are going to want to follow up with you, I would imagine.

Speaker A: Where can they find you, Dominic DeAndrea? Uh, M. I'm LinkedIn. So if you do DominicDeAndrea on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: D O M E N I C K the apostrophe, A N D R E A. You'll find me on LinkedIn and everything is connected there.

Speaker B: Perfect. This has been fantastic, sir. I'm looking forward to the beers tonight. There's a big function today. You're going out?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Look, I get my. That's another thing. Conference attendees. Some of my best ideas I get at conferences are chatting with other advisors at the conference and the fear is going away. Other advisors, the likelihood of me talking to an advisor tonight or at any conference and them sitting down with the same person or me sitting down with the same person they're sitting down is so minuscule that I share numerous ideas and they share numerous ideas and I get some great ideas from that. So I can't wait for tonight to see what I might come away with.

Speaker B: That's great. Rising tide lifts all boats.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: All right. Great stuff, buddy. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for listening to and or watching this episode of the Modern Financial Advisor podcast. It's always fantastic to have you with us. Huge props to Dominic d' Andrea for swinging on by and saying, hey, this looks great. Uh, I'd love to be on your podcast. And I said, what do you want to talk about? So I can talk about anything. And then we talked about the things we talked about, which is really interesting because, as you know, we don't have that many financial advisors on, uh, the Modern Financial Advisor podcast. And that's kind of by design, right? Where this is a podcast for financial advisors, not necessarily for financial advisors to talk to a retail audience, but. But every once in a while, there's the opportunity to share learnings and lessons with the wider community. And, uh, Dominic delivered there, so I hope you got a lot out of this show. Uh, hey, make sure you reach out and connect with Dominic. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. Okay, that's all I have for you today. Uh, make sure you be nice to each other. We'll see you next time on the Modern Financial Advisor podcast.

Speaker A: See ya.

Speaker B: Bye.

Speaker A: M.