The Power of Podcasting to a Niche

Editor’s note: In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Ryan Inman, who has had great success with a podcast aimed at new physicians.

The following article includes edited excerpts of Ryan’s story and advice. Or you can listen to the full interview by clicking the audio file below.

When I started out as an advisor, I quickly realized that the sales aspect was a huge turnoff for me. I actually kind of ran away from the industry for a few years until I found a fee-only financial planner and learned about that side of the business. I worked with them for several years. It was a traditional firm run on an AUM model with a million-dollar minimum, working with preretirees and retirees.

I’m married to a pediatric pulmonologist, and we had to move quite a few times for her training. Our latest move was down to San Diego and I decided that with the move I wanted to do something that excited me. The work I was doing was fine, but it didn’t excite me.

I wanted to work with a very specific population that was like my wife and me, the ones going through the same joys and struggles that we were going through. So I decided to open up my own fee-only financial planning firm called Physician Wealth Services. That was about three years ago. We work only with physicians in a similar situation to me and my wife—new physicians who are earning a high salary but also may be carrying high debt from their education. And that’s how this all got started.

The power of a niche

Just a little bit about our business model. We work on a subscription model with a flat fee. If you go on our website you can see all of our pricing laid out clearly. It’s $999 to start working with us, then $300 a month if you have assets of $300,000 or lower, and $500 a month if your assets are higher.

This payment model works well when you have defined a niche. We have two segments of clients, those who are one to five years out and those who are more like 15 years out. So let’s look at physicians who come to us in their first five years out of training. They all think that they have special situations, but the truth is that 80% of the cases are the exact same issues we see with all the clients we work with.

So when we understand and do this all day, we’ve seen it 100 times, why do we need to charge significantly more? We’ve actually become way more efficient with our time and we know how to handle these issues quickly. We know what the issues are going to be before they arise.

One, I’ve lived through these situations by being married to a doctor. But being able to really drill down into a niche is why the flat fee model truly works. We’re not having to recreate the wheel to understand what the problems are. We know what they are ahead of time. I know the six, seven problems they are going to have when they have just finished training. Especially if they tell me they have student debts and haven’t done much with it. So we can charge a flat fee because we know what we’re getting into.

Expertise other advisors do not offer

I advise more on debt than I do assets, currently. Our average client has $283,000 of student debt. Of course, you have to factor in that there are a few who have no debt and some who have well over half a million in student loans. There are a whole slew of issues that come with student debt, and I find that most advisors don’t truly understand it.

As one example, we signed a couple who had refinanced their debt and gotten quite a good rate. Their advisor—and probably most advisors would have said the same—“Oh, that’s good. They refinanced out of it. The debt was almost 7% weighted average.”

The problem was that they were six years into the public service loan forgiveness program. And the advisor had no idea what that was or what they were doing. By refinancing, yes, they’re going to pay it off in seven years. But they could have gotten government forgiveness for working at a nonprofit and probably saved $150,000 in payments. That’s a six-figure mistake you can’t go back and fix.

Which is one of the reasons why I created software called LoanBuddy&v=wrwqhbssddza30ljyp5esqa0 that allows advisors to plug in the debt of their new physician clients and understand what repayment options they have.

The software was created to make sure that other advisors were giving good, accurate information. Because I’ve seen that a lot of physicians have gotten bad info. So LoanBuddy allows advisors to input all the data and see everything in one easy, clean dashboard. In the previous example, it would have told the advisor that loan forgiveness was an option. The software walks you through a series of questions and it breaks it down to tell you, what repayment options you have, or whether you should really refinance.

‘Giving it all away’ on the podcast

My first and most successful podcast is called “Financial Residency.” It’s geared for early career physicians, helping them arm themselves with the financial knowledge they need in order to take control over their finances. Some advisors who have listened to the show think it’s crazy that I give out so much information that people may feel they don’t need to hire me. But actually the opposite happens. People always reach out and say, “I’ve got this question. You mentioned this on the show and it really helped me with XYZ.”

I love the emails I get. I get probably one a week that says, “You changed our lives doing this. We never talked about money before, but when you said this and this, it hit home. I had my spouse listen to this and it got us talking and now we’re way better off than we were before we listened.” That alone is worth its weight in gold to me.

I launched this podcast in October of 2017. We just hit 100,000 downloads, which is mind-blowing to me, since I’m only talking to doctors. We’ve got about 55 episodes now. It’s still growing rapidly and it’s still super fun.

Content of the shows

The main chunk of Financial Residency is an interview with a guest that I think can bring something different to the table. Someone who has a bit of a different perspective or is an expert in their field. For example, a couple of months ago I brought on Sarah Fallaw, who wrote The Next Millionaire Next Door, kind of a follow up to her dad’s book. We chatted about the mindset of a physician millionaire, what that looks like and what their data shows. It’s something I thought was relevant and fascinating.

Besides the main interview I also do a quick intro and a “journal club” where I give a quick summary and thoughts on an article I’ve read that I found relevant. The shows are about 45 minutes long, and 30 minutes of that is the interview with a guest that I think the audience should get to know or at least hear their message.

Some of the guests are physicians, but most aren’t. It just needs to be relevant for physicians or something that I want to talk about. I’ve had people on talking about real estate and budgeting and cash flow. I had another advisor, Steve Crawford, on the show to talk about budgeting. He has a course for advisors that I’ve taken and loved. So I think, “How can we relate this back to physicians? How can they benefit from this?” Even though Steve markets to advisors, he still has a great message. My primary concern is providing value to the listener.

Nuts and bolts of doing the podcast

We release Financial Residency episodes every Monday or Tuesday, depending on my client workload and if I can get it out on time. At the beginning it took a lot more time than I would have preferred. That’s my advice for other advisors—hire someone to edit for you. Now I outsource a lot and it’s much better. I have an amazing editor, Steve Stewart. He has edited some huge shows that even won podcast of the year. He’s done an excellent job with Financial Residency and making me sound intelligent. He’s well worth the money because doing the editing myself was very difficult and time intensive, and honestly, I hated it.

I also outsource the transcriptions. I hire a woman to take care of all that and she is the glue that keeps it all together now. Google doesn’t love transcripts as I learned from various friends who are very good at understanding search engine optimization (SEO). Google loves long form content. So I get the transcript and then I have my assistant turn it into a huge (3,000 word) blog post—connecting the dots, making it flow, maybe adding transition sentences so it reads well. And we’ve been rewarded quite a bit from Google for doing that.

The most time-intensive piece for me now is researching the guests to make sure they are a good fit for the podcast. If I was to do this all over again, I would do a show that doesn’t require interviews. Fully half the amount of time I put into this show is researching the guests and making sure they’ve got a good story. I figure out what I can craft out of that story to be relevant for the show and to provide maximum value. I don’t just ask someone and hope it works out. I do a lot of research. If they have a book, I read their book. I go into a lot of detail to understand who they are and what story I can pull to have a great podcast. I would say, between research and outsourcing many of the jobs, I spend a couple of hours a week on this show.

Adding more audio outreach

In 2019 I’m tripling down on the audio—adding another podcast and also getting on Alexa Skills Kit (more on that below). So, in addition to Financial Residency, I’ve teamed up with a buddy of mine, Tim Baker of “Your Financial Pharmacist” podcast. He’s also a fee-only planner, who works with pharmacists (as you can probably guess from the title).

We have a new podcast called “Money Care Specialist.” We take fictional clients and run down all their goals, income, expenses, insurances, all that. Then we say, “Hey Tim, if this person walked into your office today with this explanation on a one-page financial assessment, what are the things that stick out to you? How would you start planning for this client?”

There are no shows out there that actually detail how to make the financial plan. There are plenty of blogs, books, and articles on, say, Roth IRAs and why you should open one up. But there’s no one actually explaining how you can get this in relation to your life. So we give some examples of a pharmacist or physician or dentist or veterinarian. What we’re trying to do is say, “You’ve learned all of these great things, now let’s put it in practical knowledge. Let’s put it into use and how this could actually be applicable to your real life.” We target all kinds of health care with this, to have more reach.

Creating a Facebook community

We’ve tried some marketing for the podcast, but not everything works. I tried posting on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s really slow to build an audience from that. What has worked spectacularly for us is a Facebook group called the Financial Residency Community. This is again about giving away information and not expecting anything in return—the more you give, the bigger it gets. At least that’s my experience. I created this group and said that if you’re a doctor or married to one, and you’d like to have a safe space to talk about financial stuff, here’s the link to join this community.

To join, they have to prove to me that they are a doctor or married to one, by providing the physician’s NPI number, and give me their email address. I also ask, “What’s the number one thing you want to learn?” I ask that because they essentially create the content for me.

If I get enough people who say, “I really just want to understand how I could actually put a budget together and implement it,” then I have Steve Crawford on the show and we talk all about it. I’ll say, “Here you go, five people said this was what they wanted to learn when they joined the group.”

Providing that kind of white-glove service for free has really built the community, which now is over 1,000 people. And they’re all doctors or married to a doctor. And I don’t pitch myself or ask for business, not there and not on the pocast.

I’m not kidding when I say I sometimes get emails that say, “Ryan, I really love what you’re doing and I wish you were taking on clients right now. Can you refer me to an advisor that works just like you?” And I say, “Well, I am taking on clients. If you’re interested, I’m more than happy to talk with you. If not, I’ll give you a referral. Or I’d love for us to talk. How can we start this?”

It shows you how little I actually say, “I’m Ryan Inman of Physician Wealth Services.” No. I’m coming at it as the host of the Financial Residency podcast and I’m giving you a ton of great info, which you can also share with other physician friends or spouses. This is a community for all of us and people do tend to reach out if they need help. There’s no hard pitch, ever. It’s just “give.”

Adding Alexa Skills Kit

The third part of my “tripling down” on audio this year is adding an Alexa Skill—these will be very short, one-a-day tips for physicians about financial planning. Amazon just released data that they have sold 100 million Alexa devices. That’s mind-blowing how many there are. If you look at Alexa content, it’s mostly NPR, the weather, and a few other big players.

But there are very few normal people like us creating content. It’s hard because Amazon says, “If you create content for us, it needs to be new. If you don’t have new content every seven days, we’re going to remove you. We don’t like you and we’re not going to push your content. The more you create, the more we’re going to push it.”

Which, at least as I understand it, means that you need to create something daily for Amazon. People think, “Oh my gosh. Daily. That sounds insane.” It’s not really that bad, because you can record everything in batches. I spent maybe a month just writing down financial tips, by myself.

I’m calling these tips the “Physician Finance Minute” and I wrote down 90-something tips. Then I record myself reading the tip out loud and listen to see if it needs a redo. Finally I upload it to Libsyn, which is the service that pushes to Alexa. It’s really a simple process. If I can figure it out, you can too. From me turning on the recorder to finishing the upload is probably 10 minutes.

It’s a quick one-minute tape. It’s a flash briefing, and you can store 12 in your collection at a time. What happens is someone will look through the Alexa content (or “skills”) and enable the ones they like—in this case Physician Finance Minute. Then all they have to do is say, “Alexa, play my flash briefing.” And I’ll now be part of their daily routine.

The idea is that they can have this financial tip playing in the background as part of their morning routine. How powerful is that, if you are part of people’s daily routine? Now when they think, “I should look for a financial advisor,” are they going to look to the person who’s talking to them daily?

I don’t know if prospective clients will find this. But I can look at the numbers and say there’s only a dozen people creating content for personal finance, and literally zero producing something specific for physicians. If a physician is clicking through and all they type in is the word “physician,” I’m going to pop up.

It’s even more powerful than podcasting, because Amazon is spending a ton of money trying to build out daily routines for people using their products and services. I’d rather be with Amazon than against them at this point. So I’m trying it out, seeing how it works, and maybe in 90 days I’ll say, “That was a horrible idea. You should tell people not to do that.” But for the amount of time and effort, and only $5 a month for Libsyn, it’s worth the gamble to me.

We got 17 people to follow us in our first 24 hours of launching the skill. I have no idea who they are or how they can communicate. But we’ll see.

I’m also going to release those brief one-minute tips in podcast format for those who, like me, don’t have an Alexa device. It’s already created, and very simple to just repurpose elsewhere. So technically I’ll have three podcast shows, but the third show will require literally no extra effort at all.

Advice for advisors

Make sure a podcast is right for your target market

The first step for advisors looking to get into podcasting is to back up and look at whether your target market is even interested. I’m targeting people who are between 30 and 40. But if you’re like my old employer, targeting preretirees and retirees, you’ll be trying to coach them to find the podcast and that’s an uphill battle.

I’m just thinking of my parents and how hard it was to get my mom to see that there was a button on her iPhone that’s called podcasts and that’s what I’m actually making. She had no idea that button even existed. Now I’m sure there are advisors out there reacting to this saying, “Wait, there’s an app already on my phone that’s for podcasts?” Yes, 70% of podcasts are played through iTunes. So your audience has to be able to actually find the podcast and know what it is.

Just jump in!

My first 50 or so podcasts, I feel, were terrible. Remember, I’m only 60 or so podcasts in. I feel like I’m improving as I go. If I’d have waited until I felt they were good enough for publishing, I would never have published them. Part of it is to just get it going and do the work and publish it, and you’ll get better over time. If you’re doing something daily, I would definitely have a lot in reserve before you do something. In terms of podcasting, I would record three or four shows, delete them, rerecord three or four shows, and publish those.

Make it easy on yourself

Then, like I said earlier, if I did this again I would create a format without special guests all the time, maybe only once a month. The other three times a month would be easier because I could control my schedule and maybe record several at once. And, again, I would hire an editor from the get-go. I highly recommend Steve Stewart. If he’s full I’m sure he’ll have recommendations if you need them.

Final thoughts

It’s hard for advisors to narrow themselves into a true niche as we have done. When you’re just starting a firm, you want to work with anyone who will pay. And trust me, it’s very hard to say no to dozens and dozens of people who don’t fit your niche.

I look at my time and decide it’s worth more to wait and get a physician client than to work with an architect or an attorney or whatever. Because I’ll have to recreate the wheel for all of those. Instead of 80% of it being the exact same stuff that I see all day every day, it’d be flipped and only 20% would be repeats. I’d have to spend a lot more time on those plans. But when I can scale things because we only work with this segment of the population and I know all of the issues and how to resolve them, I can charge a flat fee and feel good about it.

A hyper niche also makes marketing easy. I know what the problems are and where prospects are at. I know what they’re reading and who they follow. I create content in a way that makes it easiest for them to understand and to find. It just kind of works on itself and works for itself.

My philosophy is to give away everything that you know, just give it away. People will respect it, they’ll understand it, and they will come to know you. Some people are always going to DIY. It’s hard for advisors to admit, but some people will never become your client. They don’t need your services. But there are plenty of people who do need your services. They will understand what you said and say, “I’m in that situation. I need to reach out to Ryan because he gets it.”