Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner,

speaker and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors

navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from

leading industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsas. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 160th episode of the Financial Advisor's Success Podcast. My guest on today's

podcast is Gabriel Shaheen. Gabriel is the founder of Falcon Wealth,

an independent RIA based in the greater Los Angeles area that oversees nearly 200 million of

assets under management for 370 clients. What's unique about Gabriel, though, is the way he's

built his firm to 200 million of AUM from scratch in barely five years by spending proactively on marketing as much as 10% to 20% of

his annual revenue amounting to almost $30,000 per month in marketing spending this year,

on which he's typically able to make back nearly double the revenue of his marketing spent

in the first 12 months alone. And of course, may have a client for life for all the years thereafter.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Gabriel allocates his proactive marketing

dollars, from spending on outsourced SEO experts in Google AdWords to various paid

web listings like NAFFA, the CFP Board and Smart Asset, paying for a weekly radio show,

and spending as much as $8,000 per mailing for an

outside firm to help him market educational classes that he uses to teach personal finance

and establish a relationship with the students, some of whom eventually decide to become

clients as well. We also talk about how Gabriel handles the sales process, given the amount

of leads he's able to

generate with his proactive marketing. Why he ultimately decided to hire a standalone business development

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