Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 383rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Troy Sharpe. Troy is the Founder and CEO of Oak Harvest Financial Group, an RIA based in Houston, Texas, that oversees approximately $750 million in assets under management for about 1,000 client households.
What’s unique about Troy, though, is how his firm’s emphasis on driving organic growth through a multi-pronged marketing strategy, including a radio show, in-person seminars, and most substantively and scalably, a YouTube channel, that has allowed the firm to grow its AUM from $85 million to $750 million during just the past 5 years.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Troy’s approach to marketing, from how his firm has built a strong prospect pipeline in part by taking educational topics he covered in his seminars and turning them into YouTube videos aimed at his firm’s target client of pre-retirees and retirees, why Troy typically does not issue immediate calls to action during these videos to get prospects, instead preferring to build trust with viewers over time and providing them a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back to the advisory firm when they’re ready, and how Troy structures his marketing efforts into what he characterizes as short, medium, and long-term marketing initiatives, for which he targets an overall ROI of generating 3 times the dollars in new revenue for every marketing dollar spent.
We also talk about how Troy’s firm has hired a number of marketing professionals to improve the performance of its marketing campaigns, how Troy has also grown his advisor staff to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding client base, and adopted a 3-advisor pods approach to ensure clients have touchpoints with multiple advisors (and that advisors can focus their work on what they do best), and how Troy created a system for his firm called the “Retirement Success Plan” that encompasses their approach to dynamic retirement income planning, incorporating both a client’s willingness and capacity to take risk, and then generating a spending plan that adapts (and that the firm monitors) over time.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Troy explains why he believes that his firm’s ability to communicate in a jargon-free way that prospects can relate to is what’s really driving his firm’s growth (across all the in-person, radio, and video channels it markets towards), how Troy learned patience and the need to be more measured when committing to a new marketing strategy that sometimes takes 6-12 months to really start to pan out, and how Troy’s constant growth focus has often led to a lot of self-doubt over whether he was over-investing and still not getting to where he wanted to be, and how the book “The Gap and the Gain” helped to build more appreciation for how far the firm has already come.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about leveraging YouTube videos to drive client growth, how to measure marketing efficiency and set goals for the output of marketing spend or how to manage a rapidly growing firm, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Troy Sharpe.
