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 Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 189th episode of the Financial Advisor's Success Podcast. My guest of today's

podcast is Taylor Schulte. Taylor is the founder of Defying Financial,

an independent R.A. based in San Diego that oversees 76 million of assets under management

for 60 families in or approaching retirement. What's unique about Taylor, though, is the way he's

grown his practice by proactively spending on marketing, from hiring a branding and website

design agency to a PR firm to running ongoing advisor marketing experiments and everything from

local SEO to email marketing automation. In this episode, we talk in depth about both the hits

and the misses in marketing that Taylor has experienced along the way. From the

initial $12,000 spend he invested into his original website that in retrospect wasn't focused

enough to succeed, to the $24,000 he spent on a PR firm that was deemed valuable, but not something

he continued. How Taylor figured out how to turn podcast listeners into clients, but only after

three years of trying. And the way all his marketing results accelerated, once he decided to narrow

to a more focused target clientele to pursue, even though it meant firing his mother and his grandfather

from being clients, such that today, 75% of all of Taylor's new clients first reach out to him through his well-targeted

website that speaks to his niche clientele. We also talk about Taylor's own evolution within the

business, how he hit the wall at $250,000 of revenue and got stuck and able to grow further,

not because of his marketing, but his operations

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