Writing Your Own Success Story with Wade Slome

00:01
Charlie van Derven
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of RIA Collective. I'm your host, Charlie Van Derven. I've got a special guest today, and we're going to talk about, I think, a topic that we haven't really covered in the 20 or so episodes that we've run so far. We're going to talk about marketing. I've got a guest today that, interestingly enough, started his RIA right after about ten years, I think. Wade I was a portfolio manager and wrote a couple of books, really jumping into that RIA that was instrumental in helping to grow. So, Wade Sloan, welcome to my podcast RIA collective. Wade is out of Newport Beach. His RA is Capital Management. Wade, did I get that right? 

00:45
Wade Slome
He nailed it. 

00:47
Charlie van Derven
Awesome, man. I kept calling it so doxxis because it's a word I've never seen before. 

00:51
Wade Slome
Wade yeah, sooxia is a strange one. It's Greek for optimism. 

00:57
Charlie van Derven
Awesome. I love it, man. I love it. Advisors struggle so much with naming their race. You get a chance to get creative. I see a lot of brands out there, frankly, that don't stand out a whole lot. I'll tell you what, something that's got a V or an X, like Sadoxya is a cool name, man. I dig it. 

01:20
Wade Slome
Yeah, I know. I mean, there's so much doom and gloom out there every day. Our clients deal with fear, uncertainty, and doubt every day. That's part of my job, is to put a little water in that half glass full. 

01:39
Charlie van Derven
That's awesome, man. I love the root of it, the meaning of it. I trust, actually, that your brand with your clients is actually Wade and Kevin, right? 

01:51
Wade Slome
Yeah. For the most part, as Charlie, it's a very trust based business. So, yeah, getting to know me and Kevin really builds confidence and trust, and that's how you retain clients for the long term. That's what we've been trying to do for the whole 15 years I've been running Sadoxia. 

02:13
Charlie van Derven
Yeah, that's it. When advisors are making that transition, so often, they're hung up on the name so much, and I'm like, really, guys? You're the brand, right? 

02:23
Wade Slome
Yeah. A lot of RIAs that I run into, they're using the principal's name. One of the ideas in the back of my mind is for any business, you may want to monetize it at some point and calling final. Wade Slome management just doesn't not that Sadoxia rolls off the tongue, but I think you kind of limit potential sale. That's not something I'm looking to do, per se, and also adding professionals to the company if you want to give ownership to other partners. So that indirectly went into it. But, yeah, part of it is just my disposition, as we talked about, and us equity stock managers kind of have those rose colored glasses anyways. When the stock markets up 70% of the time, you can afford to be a little more cheerful than the bond guys are always doom and gloom, and almost half my assets are fixed income, so I'm agnostic when it comes to all that stuff. 

03:37
Wade Slome
I have been around long enough over 30 years to be through a lot of bull and bear markets. For the long run it's generally up to the right. 

03:48
Charlie van Derven
Yeah. This year being of an exception, but no doubt let's start with that, 30 years, right. The RIA founded 2007 2008, but for the decade prior to that you managed portfolios with American Century. 

04:07
Wade Slome
Yeah, I started my career out of UCLA as an economics major and started at a company called William O'Neill. He was the brains behind Investors Business Daily. From there I wanted to manage large pools of money and figured out I needed to get my CFA Chartered Financial Analyst designation. It's a three year program, I think a lot of your advisers are aware of it and also needed to get my MBA. And so that's what I did. I went back east to Cornell and got my MBA, and then after that I was throwing spaghetti up against the wall, applied to businesses all over the country and ended up in American Century in Kansas City. Started as analyst for five years on their flagship ultra fund. It was 35 billion when I started and then at the peak of the tech bubble, it got up to 43 billion before it cratered. 

05:02
Wade Slome
They handed the keys to me. At that point I was kind of the junior guy, low man on the totem pole, and then managed it for five years when it was a $20 billion fund. It's kind of a meat grinder and a lot of entrepreneurs and I'm sure some of the RIAs listening work for larger firms. You gain great experience, but after a while you figure out you can go on your own and just have a lot more flexibility in all aspects of your life and can really grow something from the ground floor. I got the experience at the big company and like a lot of entrepreneurs, eventually kind of burned out on that and went out on my own. 

05:46
Charlie van Derven
Yeah, listen, I could liken it to my early involvement, always on the vendor side of the industry, right. But same thing, 15 years. Get to build relationships, build knowledge, gain skills. Nine years ago, I wouldn't change it for the world, but you took a bit of a unique path. A lot of the RA leadership that we interview for RIA Collective came out of that wirehouse model. Right. Got heavy sales training and really cut their teeth in the wirehouse before. It seems like that sweet spot is usually about your 70 year ten making the jump into that independent space. 

06:31
Wade Slome
Yeah, there's pluses and minuses to going that route. At that point, a lot of those wirehouse advisors might have a book of business. I'm sure not all the transfers but some of the clients eventually falling over and they have a foundation to start with. For me, that wasn't the case. I had no foundation to start with. Having said that, I think on the wirehouse side, you kind of probably get complacent having a lot of the marketing done for you. You have compliance done for you and there's a lot of trepidation to make the switch. Whereas someone like myself who had no connection there was no second guessing or anything, it's like I'm going to do the marketing and I'm going to do the compliance. As we found out, it wasn't as challenging the marketing for sure, the compliance less so. Yeah, for any entrepreneur, marketing is always a challenge to find new clients and prospects. 

07:40
Charlie van Derven
For me that's the fun part, right? I get a kick out of that with social advisors and even our a collective is six months old at this point, maybe so growing the listenership and the viewership on YouTube and I don't know, that's my biggest kick in the business. I think I enjoyed that the most. I was excited about our conversation because we're really going to focus on marketing. A good segue is you don't have to move over 50 clients, you didn't have to repaper. Now you did it. Wait at a time that probably was a little more difficult and a little more well, I don't know if difficult is the word, but the path has been paved so many more times since you started in 2008. 

08:24
Wade Slome
Yeah, when I was going through the financial crisis in 2008, right. Before then I was very optimistic, hey, I got all this experience. Friends and family said, hey, let me know when you open up. I got money I want to invest. Once the floor fell out, it's like, what the heck did I just do? I was making good money at my old job. Yeah, in hindsight, fast forward, the stock market from the 2009 low is up 67 fold and had a massive tailwind and a lot of money was switching around. You have those points in the market where things are going down, there's a lot more movement, there's a lot more opportunity to gain new clients. Because, let's face it, clients don't need help when the market's going up every day, when they are looking for help and advice when things are going down and they question whether they're getting the service and advice properly from their current advisors, So it turned out to be a great time. 

09:33
Wade Slome
I got to meet and work with people that might not have even given me a second look had there not been all that volatility. 

09:42
Charlie van Derven
Yeah, I preached that today too. Right. We're recording this November 29 of 2022. We all know what the last eight months has looked like and certainly it creates more opportunity. Even advisors that have had clients for 810. Twelve years. Those clients are clearly more emotional about the money than they are the advisor relationship. It does create a lot of opportunity and a lot of movement in the industry, which we haven't seen since 809. So, interesting time that you get started. To your point, probably an ideal time, right? Because then performance for the next twelve to 13 years, that's pretty great. 

10:24
Wade Slome
Yeah, we've definitely hit some air pockets in between, but COVID being one of them. That was very short lived and everybody was kind of a deer in headlights. People were figuring out looking after their friends and loved ones and families and looking for am I going to have a job? Investments were up there on the concerns, but there were a lot of other more immediate concerns and then the market just came roaring back. This has been more of like a death by paper cuts because we're down 15, 20% now and were down 35%. For many people this has been more painful. I've studied a lot of behavioral finance in my background, and they say the pain of losses are two and a half times the pleasure of gains. It rings through whether I'm talking about my mother or your neighbor or even professional investors. It's like people just really hate losses and it sticks with them. 

11:35
Wade Slome
That's when there's blood in the street, that's when you want to take advantage of it. 

11:41
Charlie van Derven
Yeah, that's the truth. In 2008, you mentioned prior to me hitting the record button. Right. I had a little time on my hands. So I asked you've written two books. Right? I talk to advisers all the time. We've got clients who ask me often. Right. Is it worth it? Should I write a book if I'm building a brand? Wait, you've written two of them, both kind of around the same time. I love the title, especially of the first one, because it's catchy like crazy. As a marketer, I love the title. How I manage 20 billion by age 32. I mean, that's something I'm going to turn to that right away. I love it, man. Investing Caffeine right on the heels of that, right? 

12:28
Wade Slome
Yeah. 

12:29
Charlie van Derven
I love to learn about that experience in writing the books and great foundation for whatever marketing came after. 

12:36
Wade Slome
Yeah. In almost every industry is getting commoditized and it's very difficult to differentiate yourself. No matter what type of advisor you have, I think it's important to somehow distinguish yourselves from everybody else. I never considered myself much of a writer. I mean, I took Bonehead English when I started at UCLA, but I've always kind of been creative and had an interest in that kind of thing. Before I left to start my RA, I took a 5000 miles RV trip and I started blogging. Actually, if you look for it on the internet, you could probably find slow adventure with the RV and all that. I got some feedback and they said, oh wow, you can write. So I just started writing. I think from the advisors perspective, it's what you're trying to do is build credibility. I built on top of those books the ability to do speaking events locally. 

13:48
Wade Slome
I talked to a lot of the professional groups that, hey, do you have any professional speakers? I did toastmasters. You mentioned how much you love marketing. I don't actually love marketing. I love my job and being kind of a stock nerd. I have gotten better at it, and it is important to build a new business. It's kind of an end to the mean, and I don't mind talking and meeting new people. As far as the blog, one of the things I've done is really focused on recycling through all these social media avenues. I do a blog post, I'll recycle that into my newsletter, I send that out to a few thousand people, I'll send it out on LinkedIn, I'll send it out on Twitter. That just that idea of when you do make content to use it through as many channels as you can. That's what we've done with our blog and our newsletter and books and all that, but it's all building credibility. 

14:53
Wade Slome
Potential prospects or clients type in your name through Google or any search engine, they'll say, wow, this Wave Sloan guy looks like he has some experience and credibility and they're more likely to give you a call and sit down and talk with you. 

15:10
Charlie van Derven
And that's a great point, right? You bring it back to SEO, and I've got a pretty unique name, right, as do you, but I don't think there's another Charlie Van Derven on the planet that I'm aware of. Anyway, if you Google me, just having done what I've done for the last couple of decades, I've got ten pages of whatever, maybe it's a five K I ran, but it is me for ten or twelve pages. Do what the first thing that shows up is not my website, it's my LinkedIn profile. I mean, it is just by pushing video, and we post three times a week. To your point, it's usually something, maybe from one of the previous podcasts, maybe it's a video I did two years ago that we're still pulling content from, but LinkedIn shows up above anything else I've done throughout my professional career and recreation and whatever else. 

16:02
Wade Slome
Yeah, I mean, you and I and everybody that have run across dozens, if not hundreds of scams. Typically when you do a search engine query and you go to a website and there's no person or there's no name, or when you do the search, you don't find much information. I mean, that's like one of the biggest red flags that I have. But for what we do. Like I said, with building upon Trust, I think being open and transparent and people able to kind of touch feel see here is really important. 

16:42
Charlie van Derven
I agree. I want to dig more into the books because I do get the question often right, as whether that's worth the investment of time and our money. Because, of course, there's plenty of professionals that you can dictate and they'll clean it up, or they can ghost, right. You'll approve it on the back end, whatever that is. There are ways to make it happen. Now, the issue I've got with the ghostwriting piece of it is the inauthenticity of it, right. They aren't your words. You may approve those words as your thoughts, but they aren't your words. You want to bought it organically. You sat down and started typing it out. 

17:19
Wade Slome
Yeah. As I mentioned to you when I started and given the market environment, I did have more free time. I didn't have a big book of clients. With that said, yeah, I think you just have to carve out time. It's just like anything else. I've taken tests my whole life, whether it was the CFA, CFP, the entrance exams for my MBA, it's just constant. People got family, they got friends, they got interests. If you're really serious about growing your business, you just got to carve out time. What I would recommend and urge is that, yeah, you don't have to be a professional writer. I'm not a professional writer. To your point of authenticity, you kind of have to have a point of view. And that's what I try to do. I try to call a spade. I really call out some of the, I guess the underbelly of the industry and just some of the practices that go on and just try to be honest and call things out. 

18:30
Wade Slome
That's kind of my point of view. Once you have a point of view, you just have to have an outline of what you want to get across in your book and then just start writing. Yeah, can you work? I hired an editor. They'll clean up. They'll cross all the T's and dot the I's and get all the grammar correct. But, yeah, you think you want to figure out what you want to talk about, what are you passionate about, what differentiates you? A prospect picks this up, this can serve as your business card, and they'll get to know you better, and they're going to trust you and all of that. So, yeah, it's been a good tool. You're not going to make a lot of money. 98% of people that write books don't make money, myself included. When I tell people I'm an author, and their eyes kind of open up like, oh, wow, okay, well, yeah, maybe we can set up a meeting, I'd be interested in learning more. 

19:39
Wade Slome
It's one of many boxes that prospective clients are looking at, but it served me well. 

19:47
Charlie van Derven
I think you mentioned credibility earlier, certainly. It's like anything, right, if you invest the time and what the finish line looks like, you can get there. But the credibility that brings. For the clients we work with that have a book or it doesn't even have to be like it doesn't even have to be a full length book, but even a couple of dozen page ebook, right? The ammunition it gives us as a marketing company to not only attract people to the topics of that book or that ebook, but again the credibility and conversion tools that are built into something like that, it really is a huge difference maker. 

20:31
Wade Slome
Yeah, you mentioned the ebook, so yeah, we did that. We sent out excerpts from the book so people could download excerpts. We had a press release. When I started, I hired a PR company and actually did a bunch of interviews. I actually got on ABC TV, so I did a video interview and then the blog earlier got me on to CNBC. I wrote an article and they just called me out of the blue and I came on. So these things do work. They do take time and effort. Sure, you're not going to get immediate gratification with people burning up your phone, but you have a marketing budget not only in dollars, but in time. You want to figure out how you want to market and prioritize and then like I said, you want to recycle and build upon the content that you do create. 

21:37
Charlie van Derven
I love it. You brought up PR too, and if there's anybody you want to plug, if you had a good relationship, certainly this is a good format for that, but I'll leave that open right there. Certainly it sounds like they did their job, got your exposure. I've had the same thing happen, right? Where financial Planning article or something like article in Financial Planning magazine? Like I invited you, I get invited to podcast fairly frequently. To your point, that's all about consistency, right? It's not something you can turn on and turn off. I hear people say often this marketing or that marketing doesn't work. I truly believe the reality is all marketing works. But you've got to be consistent. Paying for a service for two months and deciding it doesn't work is not giving a fair shake. 

22:35
Wade Slome
Yeah, I agree. I think whatever marketing you choose, you do have to be committed to it. You see, you go on to some of these advisors sites and it says blog across the title. You're like, oh, wow, this guy writes a blog too. You click on it's like, oh, pending blog. Pending. Like, stay tuned. 

22:58
Charlie van Derven
Or maybe worse yet, recycled like canned content. That's being shared on 10,000 websites out there. 

23:05
Wade Slome
Yes, you certainly could do that. That's probably better than not doing anything. Again, you're sending out reminders, but getting back to your authenticity point and having a point of view. People can read between the lines, what's real content and what's not. If you figure out the type of marketing that you enjoy yeah, you just have to show up and do it. I've decreased my frequency. I used to do it like five times a week. Yeah, as my practice grew and grew larger, you have other time constraints. I just continue to write, but just do less of it. I think that's a logical way of doing it. 

23:59
Charlie van Derven
Over time, you build such a library that it actually becomes easier and easier the more you do it. So love that. Now you're active on LinkedIn. That's where you and I got to know each other. What are they using? Other social media platforms. You mentioned your newsletter, thinking about a podcast. What goes into your marketing mix, Wade? There one channel that you really like? I tend to think it all kind of works together. Right? I've got a really integrated approach, but yeah, talk to me about the Holistic view of it. 

24:37
Wade Slome
Yeah, I know. It's constantly evolving. I mean, Charlie, you're at the cutting edge of all this stuff. Google makes changes to their search and one platform becomes more popular. I think that Holistic approach is right there's no question from a conversion standpoint for me, has been speaking events. That's cool. Different advisors out there may have different type of minimums, but let's just say someone wants to invest a half a million or a million dollars, well, they're not just going to hand it over until I can touch and feel that person. So, yeah, I think a lot of this content can turn out useful in doing speaking events. That has the biggest, most immediate impact. I've gained clients immediately after doing event, they just walk up to me and say, hey, wait, I'd be interested in setting up a meeting. Beyond that, yeah, I think video and audio, I just need to invest more time and energy. 

25:57
Wade Slome
We haven't really figured we have a YouTube channel and we have content on there, but that's really where I would like to spend more time and just recycle things that I enjoy talking about. I like talking about the financial market. So it's not marketing for me. It's just me being a geek talking about and people feed off that. My prospects and clients, they may not understand everything I'm talking about, but they go, wow, this guy's really passionate about what he does. Okay, yeah, I give myself maybe a BB plus on my marketing. I'm probably doing better than the average adviser. You are there's just so much more room for us to improve and be more efficient and targeted. That's why we have been spending more time on LinkedIn. To be honest with you, we're just kind of scratching the surface and getting introduced to it and hopefully we'll evolve. 

26:59
Wade Slome
Yeah, the only other thing I'll mention we haven't talked about previously is we also do like webinars and we might be doing more of those. As we build up our LinkedIn network, I think we're going to be doing that because we've been signed up with Meetup and we literally have hundreds and hundreds of members, but we just haven't seen a pay off from that. I think as the network grows larger, I think we will start to see a return off of that. 

27:31
Charlie van Derven
I would say that is probably the number one thing that advisors complain isn't the word, but that's the number one issue. Great. I can get in front of a whole bunch of people. How do you convert and you've got to measure, right. The beauty of the technology that's in front of us is you can talk to 10,000 people at the same time as you can talk to ten. 

27:53
Wade Slome
Right. 

27:54
Charlie van Derven
That's your haystack. Right. The difficulty is finding the needle in the haystack that is ready to go deeper. Right? 

28:01
Wade Slome
Yeah. 

28:02
Charlie van Derven
Webinars are a great conversion tool. I love the education that you provide. What it does is if you send 1000 invites out on LinkedIn events and you're emailing 2000 people and you get 50 people there or 50 people to register, maybe 20 people show up. Those 20 people are the needles in your haystack. They're there for a reason. Some of them are clients, but the prospects that are there for a reason. What do you guys use for CRM? 

28:32
Wade Slome
Big Zilch. Yeah, I mean, we've done everything manually. I call it the hot list. And these are prospects and clients. It could be people I bump into, people that email, people that call, and we keep it updating that way. Yeah, I think in our prior informal conversation you mentioned some powerful tools and yeah, I think there are, like I said, a lot of areas that I can be educated on and improve in our marketing as well. 

29:08
Charlie van Derven
How do you send your newsletter out? Does that go directly out of your Outlook or Gmail? 

29:14
Wade Slome
Yeah, it's constant contact. We do use that as a platform. Again, every time I hand out a business card, every time I do a meeting, hey, I have a newsletter. You want to be added? Oh yeah, sure. Add me to the list. Doing my annual Client Prospect dinner in a few weeks and we'll have the opportunity for people to sign up to that. Yeah, the way that I view it is a big funnel and you just keep stuffing as many people into the top of that funnel. You don't know when they're going to come out of the bottom of the funnel. It may not be in a consistent stream, but if you just keep stuffing things into the funnel, eventually something is going to break and come out. That's kind of how we look at it. We just need to keep expanding the top of that funnel and getting more people in LinkedIn and marketing and all this stuff. 

30:15
Wade Slome
It does work. Takes patience, time and consistency, like you said. But yeah, we're a believer. Like I said, we have a lot of learning improvement to do, but it does work over time. I mean, just the newsletter alone, I had a meeting just a couple of months ago, someone called me and said, hey Wade, remember me? It's Joe. I'm like Joe. Exactly. I signed up for your newsletter like twelve years ago and we met in a networking event. I go, oh yeah. 

30:54
Charlie van Derven
Joe. 

30:56
Wade Slome
Just never know. You just keep expanding your network. 

31:01
Charlie van Derven
Yeah, that's the truth. You don't. Many of our clients are people that I met five, six years ago. Right. That things change, whatever the case may be. To your point, out of the blue, you get an email or phone call one day and it happens frequently enough. Of course, the more people you're nurturing along CRM and then we'll switch gears Wayne, because I got a couple of questions I want to ask you before we wrap. So we love SharpSpring. Sharp Spring is a lead scoring machine. It creates really predictable revenues, being able to see where your opportunities are 30, 60, 90 days out. Love it. Anybody listening if you're struggling for a good prospecting. CRM sharp Spring is absolutely awesome. Now, they are owned by Constant Contact, which is cool, but even Constant Contact, just as an email delivery platform, has some scoring capability to it. 

31:57
Charlie van Derven
It's rudimentary when you compare it to a big behemoth like SharpSpring, but you can even find some of the needles in the haystack through Constant Contact as well. You and I will no doubt have an offline conversation about this stuff. Wait, a couple of questions I like to ask, because while we bring marketing as a topic for discussion, I think there are some things that you've gone through that our listeners can learn from. Wade, first question is, what have you done since starting your RA in 2008 that you look back, is there anything that you go, I wish I'd have done that a little differently? 

32:35
Wade Slome
Differently? Well, I mean, it's hard to second guess because things have turned out pretty well. 

32:44
Charlie van Derven
Yeah. Right? Yeah. 

32:47
Wade Slome
Wait, you're going to be at 100 million in assets, and you get to travel and do things that you love your writing. You have your own hedge fund. I wouldn't really second guess anything because when I started out, the resources were just really tight. I swear. A lot of money. I was highly compensated in my previous job, but I knew that the first few years starting my own business, things were going to be lean. I can't really second guess any of that stuff starting out because it was just blood, sweat and tears and I don't think I would have done anything differently than that. I can't honestly say I would have done anything. 

33:38
Charlie van Derven
You're a lucky man that way. Now, the flip side question is there anything that you did particularly well that as our listeners are trying to figure out how they're going from a captive environment to an independent environment, anything you did particularly well, wisdom you can pass on to those listeners with? 

33:56
Wade Slome
Yeah, well, I think it's really important for anybody, especially when you're going to the RIA route, because you do just have a better independent platform to speak from. You do have the fiduciary duty. It's not the suitability difference. I think it is important if you're going tout the above board platform that you're speaking from, that you do get your compliance. The thing that I did do best, I believe, was I did spend some money and hire a compliance company to basically set up a blueprint of what I need to do. Every adviser has different compliance regulations in their state, and that wasn't my specialty, starting my own RIA. It wasn't super expensive, maybe a few thousand dollars, but for peace of mind to set everything up. Starting there, I think that really allowed me to focus on what I need to do, is focus on investment and focus on marketing. 

35:12
Charlie van Derven
I love that. And there's plenty of platforms out there. I'll tell you, just from personal experience, I'll butcher his name . Blake Jordan. It's a BJ. So I don't know. BJ O-R-D-A-H-L-I think So his company is RA Compliance technology and the investment is less than what you think it's going to be, right. He's archiving and anyway, so he takes care of you on that side. So we love Blake in that space. Just a good dude and a good piece of technology. So I'm plugging people straight. So, Wade, listen, as our listenership grows, no doubt there's going to be some interest in maybe digging a little deeper with you. Are you okay being a resource to our listeners when that comes up? 

36:00
Wade Slome
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Check out my website, Sadoxia.com Sidoxia.com, or just type in my final Wade Slome. Give me a call at my office. Yeah, I may not get back to you the next day, but yeah, if you leave a message, I'll get back to you. 

36:18
Charlie van Derven
You're a heck of a nice guy, Wade. I appreciate knowing you and great to meet you on LinkedIn and a couple of conversations. Listen, I'll push people your way when they've got some questions and maybe that next person that says hey, Charlie. How do I write a book? 

36:33
Wade Slome
Yeah, that would be great. It's been a pleasure meeting you, Charlie, and I'm sure we'll be in touch in the future. 

36:39
Charlie van Derven
Awesome. Well, and for everybody who's taking the time out of their day to listen to another episode of RIA Collective, I appreciate that like crazy. We do not have big sponsorship. It's not something we've really pushed. In order to get the word out, we'd love for you to share it on your favorite listening platform, give us a little review. If you think this would benefit somebody, by all means, pass it on. Thanks for spending time with me and Wade Lome at Sadoxia Capital Management, newport Beach, California. Wait. A pleasure to talk to you today. And thanks for joining me. 

37:12
Wade Slome
My pleasure. Thank you, Charlie.