When somebody hits a pain point that they need an advisor that I'm the name that pops in their head, that's all I you're trying to do in social media. If I become the top 1%, I'm going to earn like the top 1%. want to be successful, become amazing at one thing. What was that first kind of domino where you felt like, "Oh, wow, I really have something here." From Sellersburg to Evansville and everywhere in between, this is Get In, the show focused on the Hoosier state and the incredible stories happening here today. I'm Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana, and I will be your host for today's conversation.
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Be there. Today, I'm joined by Thomas Kopelman, the founder of All Street Wealth, a financial planning firm based here in Indianapolis. His firm serves equity-compensated millennials and entrepreneurs, and his passion lies in helping individuals in their 30s, 40s, and 50s make informed financial decisions that fit their unique lifestyles. Thanks to a savvy social media strategy, Thomas has attracted over 170 new prospects in the last year, proving that financial guidance doesn't have to be stuffy. It can be simple, accessible, and impactful. So, today we're going to be talking about the past 3 years in his journey with All Street, uh how creating content can turbocharge your business, and forecasting the future for Indiana finance.
Thomas, welcome to Get In. Hey, thanks for having me, man. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Dude, I am pumped about this one. I feel like we've known each other for the last five or six, maybe four, five, six years, something like that. And I think the last time that you and I got together was I was a guest on your podcast.
You had not started All Street yet, but you were kind of like getting things going. It was in the the early days. Yeah, we got introduced from my wife, who she was always like, "This Nate guy, really good guy, super hard worker, like you should meet him." And we met that way, and then I know we had hung out at Peter Travolo. I never say his last name right. Travolo, Travolo.
I love Yeah, Brock and Pete. I I love those guys, and yeah, we hung out there, but that's how we got introduced. And I always told Colleen, I was like, "You should You should work with Nate." Like, she doesn't want to work with me. We We did it for a little period of time, and we were like, "All right, like this is One of my admin, I had a part-time admin, and she basically had to go take another job to be full-time because of family issues, health issues, whatever. And so, I was like, "Oh, shoot."
And Colleen stepped in and helped me, and it worked pretty well, but we were like, "Oh, we we work from home, we live together, we work together, like maybe that I don't want to You maybe we don't need that." But I was like, "You You'd love working with Nate." Dude, I'm Yeah, that's good cuz she's she's kind of in the market, like she was just working with the crew at the Planwell. Yeah. And it's been fun to see their journey. I mean, they're just some young I feel like for a minute there Indie had maybe a lull in like the young next generation of entrepreneurs and founders, but they're starting to like rise to the surface, which is fun to follow.
the world we live in now, where like anybody can start a business, and you don't need like a big fancy office, and you don't need like a ton of expenses, right? And you can you can market on social media. I mean, we just live in the world where like the outsourced any role, right? Marketer, CFO, like event planner, like businesses are growing, and they don't want to bring it in full-time, and so somebody else can be like, "Why would I do this for one company when I can do it for a bunch and control my time?" Like, we live in a pretty good age where that is a pretty awesome freedom, and you can just become amazing at one thing. Well, I think that segues us perfectly into talking about the story of All Street Wealth, right?
Because a lot of times financial planners are business owners, you know, you own your book of business, you get to create your schedule, you know, you get up to 50, 75, $100,000 coming in in salary and you're pretty comfortable. But you didn't want to necessarily go that route. You decided to go build this company all around serving millennial equity compensation and it's like interesting strategy, but that kind of came through a few iterations, right? So take us back to the beginning. How did you get in and what was the founding story of All Street? I didn't actually choose this necessarily.
So I out of college I started at a broker dealer, which means like places that can sell insurances. And if you're if you're in the industry, you start to realize that like there's good advisors there, but there's bad incentives. And I realized really quick like one, you know, millennials or you know, people around my age, 20s, 30s, 40s, they need help with finances, right? They go from student loans to the job and what do I do with my 401k and then I get married and then how do I plan for a house and kids education and just how do I do all the right things financially and there isn't a good way to learn that. And so I was like, well, people aren't trying to just buy life insurance or people aren't just trying to buy disability insurance. What people want is somebody to sit across the table from them and understand them really well and and help educate them what they need to do with their money, but that's still like a new idea, which is crazy.
You think that's what a financial advisor does and it's still a very small part of the industry that that actually does that. And so I basically told my company, I'm like, one, I believe that I should be educating people through social media and that should be my way to grow and they're basically like nope, you know, this how it's always done. Yeah, you call people you know, you go to local events, volunteer opportunities and you kind of pitch people there. And I was like, that's just that doesn't make any sense. I love what you said about the incentives. The incentives for the majority it feels like uh uh financial industry is life insurance premiums, health insurance, whatever those things are.
Like, get them to buy more so you get more commission. Totally. And you need that every year. So, it's not like I could never have been there, built up a business, and been like, well, nobody needs life insurance cuz you have to hit minimums. And so, like the incentive was was wrong, and I was just like, hey, if if so many people need financial help, shouldn't I be able to attract them versus sell to them? And what once I kind of came up with that core belief, I was like, okay, what's the best way to do that?
And you look at social media and and in every industry that's about education, right? There's great people to follow who can educate you, and then eventually you'd want to work with them. And so, I was like, I think that this is the right way to do it. I follow lawyers, you know, I follow real estate agents, I follow people in all these industries, and I learn from them. Like, why would financial advice be different? It's actually probably even better because finance touches everybody's life, right?
And and they need to be able to figure it out. And so, I told my company that, and they were like, nope, like that's just not how it's going to be. And I was like, well, I'm going to do it anyways. So, I basically post on social media, they tell me to take it down. I'd post on social media, they tell me to take it down. I was like, they're not going to fire me for this.
Like, I'm doing really well here. And I was like, we need to change. Like, I I need to be able to have the structure this way. And they were like, it's not going to be like that. So, I was like, I'm going to leave. And so, I basically went across and and tried to find a really good job local to here, and I got a bunch of really cool job offers, but all of them I was going to be like a junior advisor, right?
And have like kind of the corporate path. And I was like, I'm already working with people. I don't want to take that step back. I just want to be at a better firm that people pay for advice, that I can market the way that I want. I can work with people the way that I want. And so, a local advisor here, Justin Castelli, super great guy.
He uh he's up in Fishers, and, you know, he runs a community for advisors, and I got connected to him through Russ Ford, who's a fellow Butler grad. And I basically begged Justin for a job, and he was like, sorry, dude, like I have no interest in hiring anybody. Like, I don't want to be a boss. Um we met like three or four times. I begged him every every And I was like, dude, pay me two grand a month. I really don't care.
Like, I'll come, I'll help, I'll learn from you. Like, you won't need to do that much for me. I just need kind of that person to to follow and have the freedom to do it." And eventually, he was like, you know, when good people come into your life, like, we'll go with it. You know, I think this will be really good for you. He's like, "But I think you're you should be a business owner.
Um and I see it in you." And I was like, "I have zero interest. I've never thought about it. I don't want to do it. I just want to help people with money and not have to worry about running a business cuz it is a full other job, right? Like, you know, there's a lot of financial advisors that say they're business owners, but they really just work at a bigger company and they just like get to put their their name around them.
Like, you're not truly having to worry about your compliance and your billing and every piece of software and hiring and payroll and all that kind of stuff. And I was with Justin for a while and, you know, eventually, he kind of gave me the path but let me be my own person. And like, if I needed him, he was there. And he was eventually just like, "Dude, you should start your own company. Like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, you're trying to work with higher-level clients than what we were with.
Um you know, you you have your own brand. Go do it." And so, I was like, "Oh, like, are you Are you telling me like to that I need to go do this?" He's like, "This is going to be the best thing for you. You need to go start your own company." And I was like, "Whoo, okay.
Like, I'm almost 26. Like, I'm not old at this point. Like, that sounds scary." He's like, "I'll serve in the same role. You ever need my help, reach out. I'll help you."
And I really believed him because he's a he's an awesome dude. Luckily, it was the best thing because when I worked with him, like, we basically had a couple models and it was like a $200 a month model for single people, $300 a month model for um families. And I was typically working with like, you know, 100 to 200,000 in income. And through social media, things just started to change. I started to get like higher-level people. And like, you know, if you work with somebody who makes a million dollars and they're 10 million net worth, like, 300 bucks a month isn't a lot because that might require 40 hours of time a year helping them on financial planning.
And so, it allowed me to kind of go in my own lane, you know, further build the brand, and then allow me to like create the fees that I wanted that fit the clients that I had because he more so specialized in like retired teachers and some other groups like that. And then, you know, the local, you know, families that are are similar to here. And so, like then, if your company needs like 10 price models, like things get really confusing. But I really never planned to be a business owner. It kind of was thrown on me. And I look back of that's like one of the most pivotal times in my life is that like he believed in me when maybe I didn't necessarily think that I could do it.
And like it felt like I was being fired at the time. When in reality, he was like it wasn't. He was like, "Do this." And then like everything came full circle. The director of operations at his company, she ended up leaving to go do like a bigger role. Now she works with me and runs ops at All Street Wealth.
And so, it's just been this really cool journey that I'd never predicted. Sometimes you just need that like the nudge out of the nest, right? Where it's like, "Dude, you can do this." And then you start to I don't know if you're like like I am where you think in worst-case scenarios. And it's like, "Worst case, well, I don't know about like the financial, you know, compliance and all that." But like worst-case scenario, like you figured it out and you and you go get a job doing whatever, you know, go And you're more employable, right?
You've you've you've got tried to do it yourself. You've had to run a bunch of different hats. And for some people, they realize I wasn't meant to be a business owner. I'm better as doing this job. And for other people, like what I'm realizing is I like being a business owner. I really like growing the business.
I like working on the business. But I also really like helping people with money. So, I have this hard part now of like you know, going through the do I really grow this or do I keep it my team? Cuz right now it's everybody is around me and my clients. So, it's me, we have a tax professional on our team who's been one of my best friends my whole life. Um he's amazing.
And then my director of ops, and then my co-founder kind of helps on running my so doing some of my social media stuff. But, you know, you have this whole like enough conversation, right? You either have the like and I can build this and have a lot of value but like what's that workload like or do I keep it around me and my team? You know, you can make really really good money doing this, enjoy your life. It's hard to decide, right? Cuz you know, one thing that about my life is like my my parents were very very present, very great parents and that meant a lot honestly and like I want to be that as a parent and so it's like this hard thing of, you know, do you grow this business because you can?
Like you we could grow All Street to be really big when you have social media. We've solved the problem that financial advisors have of how do you get people in the door? That's the hardest part of the industry. The statistic is 80% of people fail in our industry within 4 years because they can't solve that problem. So it's like well if I can solve that problem I can create really great life for other advisors, they don't have to worry about that but like what does that do to my life and do I do that now? Do I wait and as your kids get older then you expand and do that but then what if social media is different and now your clients are different?
Like there's a lot to there's so much to think about as a business owner. But these are the problems that I love talking about and solving which is why we basically specialize in business owners. Like until you've been in this situation, you haven't thought about those things. You don't know how to help somebody else think about them and so now I work with business owners and they're trying to solve these problems and I can help think about them with them which I think makes us you know, a more attractive person to work with. Oh, yeah. Because you're not just talking about something you read in a book.
Like you're living the life. If you're a business owner coming to you is like, oh man, I'm thinking about hiring my first employee or whatever you're like, oh, I remember when I was going through that. Yeah. Remember when you were in business school, right? Like maybe I know you've always kind of been an entrepreneur but like I when I was in business school never thought like what you do right now is a is a reality as like that's possible, right? Like I never thought it was for me either.
Like I always tell people like where I grew up, you know, I didn't know any business owners. Like my grandma was a was a kind of a a business owner. She she did she had a cool jewelry business in the background but like I didn't really think that much of it but I didn't know business owners so I never thought about that as reality. It was like the high paying people in my town were doctors or lawyers or whatever. And so like you either take that path or you're an employee in in business, right? But now that I've done this and I sit back, you know, one from working business owners to being a business owner, I'm like, I feel like I could start a lot of different businesses and make it work.
Cuz once you learn what it is to run a business, it's really do you believe in yourself and do you have the commitment and discipline to do what needs to get done? And a lot of it, I think it's conviction, too, right? Where it started with your passion to help people and educate them in finance, you know, and help them, you know, make their money work and all the fun things like that. And you have a conviction there. So like when you sit across that, I left my company to start this and and you're no longer, I have to put 40 hours a week and I have to hit my minimums. It's like, no, we want to put food on the table.
Like you have to go out there and and the conviction shows. So you leave your company, you start All Street. Like what does the first year look like? So we started All Street. We had 3 months left in in the calendar year and we did it. And you know, it was basically like Justin was like, hey, bring bring over, you know, the clients that make sense for you.
And so like I got a decent start where I maybe had like 4,000 a month in revenue. So enough where like you do that, you pay your expenses, like you're not going to go negative. I mean, especially cuz I was super young. So like my living expenses were very very low at the time. And so we launched, we started. And when we started, we just did like the 200 a month, $300 a month model.
And then the next year like things started to grow. So like, you know, maybe I went from like 150,000 of average income to like 300,000 of average income, dual income households, you know, some people at like an Amazon or you know, they have equity comp. And then like if you look for us like every 6 months, the type of client we worked with is drastically changing. So like then that year we probably average 300, the next year we probably average like 500,000 is our average income. Now our average income over our client base is like 900,000, but our average client coming in is well above that. So, we have some clients, you know, our top client made 7.
2 million in income. Like, that's not from selling a business. That's just like the the salaries from the company. It's crazy cuz I never thought that like people like that existed. And now what I've realized is that a lot of people like that exist. They don't let other people know that, and they don't have anybody else to talk to cuz it's not relatable.
So, like if you're the the business owner, I mean, there's plenty of good ones in Indiana, right? You You live in Indianapolis, you have a business, you know, you're making well over a million dollars a year. Your family can't relate. Most Most people I work with are first gen wealth. So, their family barely got by growing up. And maybe some of them even came over to the US.
Like, I have a good amount of clients like that. They don't have any friends that make the same kind of money as them. Their family doesn't make the same amount of money as them. So, their friends and families' financial advisors know nothing about this. And so, they're just like, "I need somebody who understands what I'm going through." And it's it sounds weird, but like for the people who are wealthy, they have, especially first gen wealth, they have a lot of guilt around the money they make and how to spend it, right?
So, when you grew up without money, what you learned is that every every dollar was extremely valuable, and it has to be spent and used in what was the most optimal way. And then as you become wealthy, that sticks with you, but that's a really unhealthy way to to manage your money if you make a million dollars, right? The goal isn't to spend 50K if you make a million dollars, cuz what's the point, right? Like, generational wealth, you want to pass away with as much money as possible. But, you can still do both, right? What's probably more valuable is figure out how do you spend with your kids?
Like, how do you go on vacations? How do you help them when they're younger? Like, you know, imagine you have a kid and they want to start a business like you right out of college. Could you help support them? Could you give them the freedom to be able to pursue something they never could have done if they had to pay for their school, and you know, afterwards they, for the first year, they wouldn't have been able to pay their rent, right? So, like there's a lot of shifts that happen financially for people as they become wealthier.
And so, like, I think the value of, well, one, us specializing in this group is like we can help on the the actual financial side, but we can also help on the the like what's going through your brain. Because people just think as you have money, your issues are solved, but it's just different issues. Yeah, right. Like what is that there there's like some type of where it's like you make up to so much money in your life gets like exponentially better and then it just like plateaus off where it's like it cuts off, right? Yeah, I mean the numbers they probably haven't done in a long time. It was like a 100k before and now with inflation it's obviously higher and it's like a different in LA than it would be here obviously, but there's this kind of threshold where you have you have a solid house, like you have a car that works, you get to like go out for food, you get to do all the things that add the most value to your life.
And then after it like the bigger house, the nicer car, the nicer vacations, like they do add some value, but what research shows is that well, spending your money on making your life better is where you actually find happiness. So that doesn't mean a nicer car, that means potentially having cleaning people come, right? That potentially just means like how do you outsource the things that you don't like so you can spend time doing the things that you do like, right? Like that's where money actually brings happiness and that's what I found with a lot of my clients is they're they're going through this path where they're like, now how do we spend, right? What are the things that we want to spend and they've never gone through the exercise of what actually makes you happy, what actually makes your life better, right? And so some people might go from my clients might go from a $2 million to a $3 million house and actually it just adds more stress, right?
Like there's more space, you know, there's more cleaning, whatever, but maybe they get to hire, they have young kids and they get to hire a chef. And the chef gets to basically come in once a week and make the meals for them. Or they get to have, you know, one of my clients, they have they're having twins. So night nurse was the most valuable thing that they've ever spent their money on, right? So there's these things that like you never thought were a reality, but are things that you can incorporate your life and they're cheaper than you thought. So like the private chef, they basically spend like 800 bucks a week above groceries for somebody to come in one time.
And for somebody who makes 100k, that sounds crazy. It sounds like a huge waste of money. But to somebody who makes a million dollars, that's the difference of like, "Hey, I leave work and I just get to spend time with my kids because I have a really heavy workload, so I need to free up time somewhere else." And so like that's where, you know, I feel like financial planning and being a financial advisor, I think most people think is about investments. And investments are a very small part of it. Like the financial planning is where the value is added, but helping people understand how to use their money to make their life better is where the biggest amount of value is captured.
a big hurdle to get over with, let's say, first generation, you know, they're making a million dollars? I feel like when you get there, you're kind of looking around like, "Okay, someone's going to come and take this from me." Like there are some bad actors out there. They're trying to get me to invest in this. So they end up putting the majority of it in a savings account, you know, you're making half a percent or you know, high yield, you're making 3%. And really you could your money could be doing more, uh but they're they're just so cautious because it's such a new revelation for them.
Yep, totally. And like for us, we know that our average client comes in that's a business owner is like, "Okay, I've been around for a couple years. Last year I made a stupid amount of money. I have a really, really big tax bill. I need somebody to help me because now I know this thing's really, you know, legit." And so most people come in our door at that point.
And yes, they've been very protective of their money for some and some have been the opposite. Some have like, "Oh, now I make cool money. Like my friend comes and tells me I need to invest in this business." And then hey, somebody approaches me with a private and I need to invest in that because now I'm wealthy and I get the ability to do it. And so there's really two sides. That one side is, you know, I've had clients come in with over five million dollars in cash.
And it's not because they just sold their business, it's because they've been hoarding it for a long period of time because they're so worried about what could happen to that. And it's always a, "My dad lost it all in 2008." Right? And I'm like, that's a little exaggerated. Like your it was a recession, you know, the market has come back. Like if your if your family sold it all, it was because the market went down and they got really scared and they sold all of it and now they've been sitting in cash and they did the worst thing that could have ever been done from them that a financial advisor would have helped them and they would be in a way better spot.
If you look at what the market is today versus 2008 or 2010 is Yeah, you just got to like look away and just say, "Oh, cool. We're going to live below our means and it'll all go back." Totally. Totally. So, they either have like that horror story and you know, the research shows that a lot of how we view money is was developed as a kid as early as the age of four. And so, most of how we view and manage money was learned through our parents.
And that is a hard thing to get away from. So, when they see, "My parents were really risk averse." or "My parents went through some event that was really terrible." that is rooted in them now to make sure that doesn't happen. And so, that there there is a lot of education that needs to that we have to do with every single person to be able to get them up to speed to be like, "Here's how we become better allocators of our money." because both sides of that are bad, right?
If you are a business owner and you make a million dollars, you spend and you have few hundred thousand dollars to invest a year, if you throw that in a savings account, right? 4% savings account, you're in the 37% tax bracket federally plus another state. I I work with tons of California clients, New York clients. So, they basically lose 50%. So, if you get 4%, you really got 2%. You're not even keeping up with inflation.
So, all these hard earned dollars that you're making are actually becoming less valuable. So, that's a huge mistake, right? Like you're Why work so hard to lose money? And and so, we have to get that invested. But the same way as other people who do bad things with their money, whether that's investing in everything that comes to them, whether it's, you know, lock for business owners with private equity can be good, right? Like that can amount to good money, but you're giving up control and you're giving up liquidity.
So, for somebody like you, let's say you had a good year, you have a private equity deal, you're like, "Great. I'll put in 100K." Now, you also have like future capital calls and things like that. And you want to launch another business. And you're like, "I have this great idea. I need that money back."
You don't get that choice, right? You don't get to choose to exit just whenever you want in a lot of these deals. We we help people think through this because you just kind of go through and you and you have this shiny object syndrome, right? Like now that I'm wealthy, wealthy people do this. And a lot of times we have to help dispel from people's like you got this advice from somebody else who's wealthy, who's been successful, but they also aren't good with money, right? Like people who just think if you make good money, you own a good business, you're ultimately good at money.
And honestly, I found them to almost be the opposite. Like you're you're a good earner, you're terrible with money. So, it's dangerous, right? When you go get advice from people who you think are more successful, whether it's the newer the nicer car, they might actually make money. It might not be that they're that they bought too much car or bought too much house, but just cuz they have nice things does not mean they know anything good about money. All right, folks.
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You'll see what I'm talking about. Good vibes, amazing food, and amazing hospitality. Now, let's get back into it. I think being financially savvy and being a good earner do very different things, right? Uh wow. Okay, so what are what are three of the most common mistakes you see business owners make when it comes to finance?
I think the first one is is really just not managing their business like a business. So, you know, I think it's really easy. You start a business, you know, money comes in and you just randomly pull it out, right? But eventually, this issue comes where uh you know, the business is is growing and you're just not planning your cash flow well. So, it's like income comes in. So, let's say you make $10,000 in January and you know you need 3,000 a month to live off of.
The average business owner takes 10,000 out, they end up overspending, and then the next month where they make zero, they're scrambling, they go into credit card debt, they have these issues. And so, basically, what you want to do is say, "Hey, I have 10. I just pay myself my expense. I pay myself three. I send 7,000 over to like a pay account, right? So, then when next month rolls around and you have zero, you take 3,000 from that seven and you pay yourself, right?
And then the next month you have 15 and you send the extra back to there." So, like in kind of set up like a salary for yourself. Yes. Yes, you want to set it up like a salary for yourself. And then, basically, what happens is then eventually you become a lot more successful than that. You have way more revenue coming in.
And so, now we're like, "Great. We're going to have an emergency fund in the business." That could be like for a business like mine, reoccurring revenue, you know, we have a huge surplus after what I pay my employees. I don't need to keep a lot in the business cuz I would have to lose like 60% of my clients to not be able to pay everybody and me. I don't need to. But then I have a business who they make 90% of their revenue in November and December.
They might need like a year's worth of expenses built up. So, you really need to understand your business. Is it cyclical? Is it not? Do you have risk of losing clients versus less for somebody else. So, basically, you get going, um you know, you have your emergency fund built, and whatever other savings you need, and then you should can start to become this profit machine, right?
Like now that I've hit all those baselines, now if I make 20K and I only need three, I can actually send myself $20,000. But now this is when we have to actually get on the set schedule of like, "Okay, what do you pay quarterly taxes wise?" And then, what do we save for above that? Because if you owe, you know, 10,000 a quarter, 40,000 total, but your actual liability is going to be 80, we need to make sure that you're saving that extra 40,000 because what we found is business owners really suck at that. So, planning for taxes is something they're really, really bad at and so they do one of two things. One of them is they hoard cash.
So, you just hoard cash in the business all year, very, very fearful of what you're going to owe in April, and so you can never make any good business decisions of should I spend on this, should I do this, or should I distribute to myself and allocate somewhere else because you truly have no idea what your tax liability is. April rolls around and then you go you're like, "Shoot, I got to pay this." Then you go back to being scared. Or the opposite is true and you allocate way too much money out of your business. April rolls around and you're like, "Oh my gosh, where am I coming up with all this money? Like, I have to sell investments.
I have to, you know, get on a payment plan to the IRS." And so, basically, every business owner I've worked with has one of those two issues and so they have to solve that problem and understand how to run your business well. And so, that all starts with we make this much, we spend this much, this goes to taxes, then where does that go based on our goals? But, people just don't do that, right? You get so caught up in running the business and growing the business that you forget how to like work in the business and make sure it's run efficiently. Wow.
So, that's I know that's a lot to talk about, but that's like how I believe is like core problem number one that we've built our business to help them solve that issue because most business owners you talk to are very bogged down on taxes, right? Like, what do I owe? And you don't know, right? Like, that's not if you that's not your specialty and like where you, you know, I'm I run a social media like media company, right? So, in the tax law is not really where I like get energy from and it's very draining and daunting and I don't even want to like I was like, "Okay, pay someone to just handle this for you, right?" Right.
And so, if you're a good earner, why would you waste your time doing that versus offloading to somebody else so you can spend more time growing your business? And so, right? Like, that's what people hire us to do. So, we're going to help them solve that issue, but that's probably, you know, number one mistake for business owners. I think another mistake for business owners are, you know, investing in anything that comes their way. Like this is I just see tons of wealthy people with balance sheets full of all of these random companies that they were told to invest in from friends.
Not private stock or not public stocks, private, right? Smaller companies cuz, you know, that's what wealthy people do. And you know, we've talked about this before, but the issue one is lack of liquidity, right? Like as a business owner, like your risk on bet is your business, right? If you didn't think that this was going to be valuable and you were going to be able to grow it, you wouldn't you wouldn't do it, right? But because you did that, you need to with your investments and your finances be one liquid cuz you never know what could happen.
If you have a bad year in your business, you need to be able to sustain that, right? If you don't have any liquidity, you can't sustain that and your business can fail, right? We know businesses fail because of a lack of cash flow. And so sometimes you need to sustain that business personally and by giving up liquidity, you basically can can ruin that for yourself, right? And we just want to survive as a business cuz we know there's going to be down years. That's just how it works.
If you don't have down years, you're one of the lucky rare businesses that just, you know, you either got lucky or you're just an A+ operator, which there isn't a ton of those. So I think, you know, it comes back to that. Just being smart because the other side of it is when I sit down with people, I'm like, they're listing off these private investments that they have and they're like, "Yeah, but I don't count on them amounting to anything." And I'm like, "What? Like why are we investing in something if your viewpoint is I don't think this is going to turn into anything, right? Cuz now you're just wasting harder and dollars in your business somewhere else, right?
And if you know you're a good allocator and good business owner, well then shouldn't we be allocating to a business you own or allocating to somewhere like, you know, just ETFs, some stocks, different things like that that are liquid, accessible, and there for you if you need it. I feel like sometimes business owners get that point and they're like, "I'll just invest I'll put a little bit into these younger this next generation of founders to give them the opportunity for entrepreneurship." And it becomes, yeah, more like philanthropy almost. Yeah, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You just have to do it well, right? Like you just can't over allocate.
It can't be half your portfolio. And you know, it depends what the rest of your money is. If all of your money's in your business, a 401k, and you know, retirement accounts, well, then you got to be smart because you don't actually have liquidity. Yes, you could take it out, you could pay income taxes, you could pay penalties, but you don't truly have liquidity in the same way as if you have a bunch of money in savings and in taxable investment accounts. So, you do need to think about that. And so, business owners, they might prioritize different investment accounts than employee does because liquidity might be more valuable to them.
Also, on the opposite side of that coin, what are the a few of the biggest successes you see business owners that come into New Wealth Deal? It's It's all about a bet on yourself, right? Like that's where like I think my mindset has changed because the average client of mine basically they they left a job. So, like I do have plenty of business owners that have like a SaaS product or they have some like actually consumer-facing product, but a lot of my wealthiest clients are I'm a marketer and I started a marketing business. And I basically work and I help businesses on marketing and I get paid 5x what I did as an employee because I just do only social media marketing for financial advisors, right? Like that that's the perfect example.
And so, you went from like, "Hey, I'm an employee, you know, maybe they could replace me." to "Now I've built this place to be like one of the best marketers for financial advisors." And so, like I basically replicated that in my business, right? I want to work with high-income business owners. And so, now we just live in this world where like niching down is really valuable and specializing is really valuable. If you can do those two things well, you can make really, really good money.
And so, I have somebody who they basically do PR for major like makeup and you know, women's type products, right? And so, she basically did that somewhere else, started her own, and she makes millions of dollars a year doing it now. I have another person who did marketing before, and now they go end up in doing marketing for SaaS companies, and it's him and one person, and he makes millions of dollars a year. So, it was just all this I think I could go do this by myself. I think I could do this better and I'm going to take this bet on myself and maybe I have 1 year, 2 years of lower revenue and then all of a sudden it switches and now I'm making more money than I ever thought was possible, but it came on the belief of myself that I can solve a problem and the the other thing that they did is they just always got better at it, right? Like if you are somebody that is like I know that I can always get better if I put in the actions, you have a really good chance to make a lot of money because the average person doesn't do that, right?
Like the average person is here's the job, I'm going to just do that, right? But if you're the person who's like here's the job, how am I every single time I do that same thing am I going to be better than the last time? You're going to be pretty successful cuz that's just that's rare, right? And I know that's something that you have and I know it's something that a lot of athletes have and I think for me I look back and like being an athlete was the best thing for me because it showed me as a kid that if I just put in the actions, I can get significantly better at something. Once I stopped playing basketball, like I just needed to find that next thing and almost everybody I work with that's wealthy had that that same thing that they went through cuz I did internships at Eli Lilly, I did consulting, etc. And I felt like I was pretty bad at those jobs.
Like I'll be honest, I felt like I was just very okay at it and it was because I just wasn't in the lane of something that I believed in and you talked about this earlier, right? The conviction. I just need to find something that I felt I could add a lot of value, I could be better at and that was interesting to me and that's basically how all my clients found success, too. I totally agree. A lot of people open the laptop, put their 40 hours in. It's like you don't need to be in the top 1% like you're going to get the paycheck regardless, right?
Whereas when you go out on your own and start your own business, like oh, if I become the top 1%, I'm going to earn like the top 1% and I'm going to make a business that impacts the lives of so much so many more people. Cuz you make every extra dollar, right? So, like as a financial advisor, every client I can add is more to our bottom line, right? If I was an employee and you know, they're were like, "Hey, we're going to help find you clients, whatever. You get paid a salary." The incentive isn't necessarily there to push you to do more.
And so, I think as a business owner, you have this unique advantage that like if you put in the actions, you can make as much money as you want to make. You can stop there. You can go past it. But, I also think as a business owner, what I've learned and what I've helped a lot of my clients learn is how do you replicate that for your employees? Because it is really hard to keep good employees, but it's the most important thing for your business. Like I look at across my business, my two other employees, losing either one of them would be devastating to my business.
And so, figuring out how how do you make them want to stay there is a problem all businesses are trying to solve. And I think paying them better than anywhere else and equity are the two ways to solve that issue. And so, that's one thing that I'm incorporating into my business that I think is very valuable for owners to think of cuz even if you like let's say you lost your editor for your podcast, okay, like how devastating is that? Well, it depends. Like if you haven't done it in 4 years, it's really dev- astating and you have to train somebody new. And so, if you're this high-growth business owner, every time somebody leaves, I have to go backwards to bring them up to speed versus pull the business forward.
And so, like I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that business owners make is they don't value their employees and they don't realize how much of a loss it is to lose one of those key people. What was that light bulb moment for you where you got out of the $200, $300 price structure and started to niche down and did people in the industry look at you like you were crazy? In the industry, it's still kind of crazy to charge the way that we charge through cash flow because like the thing is is that like if you're let's say you're business owner, let's say next year your business takes off, you make a million dollars, but you have like a 401k with 50k in it, right? Like an advisor is going to say, "I wouldn't work with you. I can't charge you on your 401k. Even if I could, I'd make 500 bucks a year.
You need a lot of time and help. That's not worth my time." And so, it still is new and kind of like we're maybe part of the 1% of the industry that's like, "You can pay us a yearly fee to work with us and we'll help you on everything that has to do with money. I like that for a couple reasons. One of them is you feel that, right? Like you're feeling that cash flow come out of your bank account.
If we're not doing a good job, you leave. Like it's that simple, right? Versus if an advisor's managing your investments and you don't hear from them, but like your investments are doing fine, well then you're probably just going to be like, well I guess I'll stick with them because like you don't feel the money coming out in the same way. Um I think the other thing too is it lets people vet us. So before, you know, if you have $10 million a client wants to come to an advisor, they have to move that $10 million over. You're going to make those changes.
They don't even know if they like you. For us, they can start in a cash flow model and they could be 3 months in and be like, you suck, we're out. But it's our job to provide so much value that after 3 months they're like, this is where I want to be for as long as a period of time as possible. So it creates this awesome sales pitch for us of just like, hey, you know, it's very different than anywhere else. You really get to test us out. We have to prove value.
If you don't like it, you get to leave. And so people are like, why wouldn't I try it? I make $10 million. I'm going to pay you. You know, now our minimum for that person is about 1,500 a month, so 18k a year. They could be out for 4 months and get a financial plan, but that allows us to be like, let us show that we're worth the money that you want to stick with us.
So I think that's a it's a cool differentiator because it puts us on the same side of the table, right? All we want is to help you on what you need help on. And if we do that well, you'll stick with us. If we don't do that well, you'll leave. I think a lot of people there's some mis- misconceptions around finance and where your financial advisor gets paid and trades or this or that the other thing, commissions. Versus like, no, like this is the fee we take, this is what we provide.
Come try it out and and then you're going to be a lifelong customer, right? Yeah, cuz it's crazy to me cuz I remember hearing about a girl, her name was like Sophia Bush, and she was like one of the first people doing this and I heard on a podcast and she was charging like 450 a month to families for financial planning and I was blown away. I was like, that is insane. Who would pay that? I don't know. Like there's just no way people would do it.
And that really had me start with really, really low fees. And then over time, I've just been like, the market is telling me people want this. So, like, you know, we we get a ton of prospects. We're always booked out. So, we basically we brought on like 20 clients in the last in the last 4 months of last year. Way too many.
That's more than we should have. But we made it work. We worked a lot. So, now we're going we we take on four households a month. We're booked January, February, March. And we'll have April booked by the end of this week.
Which is basically 3 months early. And so, my what that's telling me is we're priced too low. Right? Like, if people want that, our attention is high, we're priced too low. So, like, since I started All Street, I went from, you know, 200 and 300 a month to then I raised to 300 and 450 to then 450 and 600 to 600 and 750. And then I went from 750 to 1,000 a month.
And then I went from 1,000 to now I have a 1,500 a month model. And then we have a $2,000 a month model. And I'm getting more yeses than I've ever got. What was the hardest jump from the price structure to make? I actually don't think any of them. Because we haven't got any pushback.
And so, like, if I if I raised and all of a sudden people started saying no, that would be the market telling me that we're charging too much. And some people say no. I'm assuming like every night but it's like, you know, maybe they're just not the right fit. And I think that for business owners, not selling everything to everyone is good. It is. Because for us what happens is you you can't book time on my calendar.
You have to apply to work with All Street. So, basically, almost everybody we know comes in from Twitter. They follow me a very long time. They probably listen to my podcast. And then they apply and we vet them. If they're not a good fit for us, we send them referrals to other advisors.
Like, True Heights is a local advisor here. I send him into a lot of people who don't quite meet where our minimum would be. But then I can vet out and say, this is a good fit. And because our marketing is good, about 90% of the people who apply are good fits. And we clearly our fees are on our website and on our application it says our minimum fee is this. So, we we're trying to weed out the price the people who are think that price is a barrier.
Then we sit down with people and well over 50% say yes of of that. So, we're like, "Great. I know in that meeting who's going to say yes about of the people that say yes, 50% say yes in that meeting." They don't even need time to think about it. The other 50% that say yes do it within about a week. And then the other people were in the call and we're realizing it's not a good fit typically because somehow they glossed over what our fee level was and they're like, uh "That doesn't really make sense."
50% saying yes and if that was 50% of two people applying, that would be an issue. But if it's 50% of 15 people applying a month, that's going to generate more than our business needs. So, then we just keep kind of raising fees because now we say, "Okay, 50% of our client base is full. We need to raise fees because now we're down to 50 and then we're down to our last 25. Great. We should raise fees cuz we should be getting the best clients we can to fill those remaining spots."
And like raising fees is scary. I never raised on existing clients until this year. It was something I was scared of because we're basically at about close to 100,000 a month in revenue, but I had 30 clients that amounted for 3,500 a month. So, of our client base, we had about 100 clients, 35 of them accounted for about 3% of the revenue. That's that's a big business issue, right? And it's hard because you really like the people.
But you can't Right, you said you can't be the the business to everybody. I basically have been pushing that off year after year after year really out of a scarcity mindset like to be honest, right? Like what if I do that and then all of a sudden a ton of other clients leave and now like your business is in the back. Were there some hard conversations with long tenured clients that gave you your start at the beginning? Yes. Yes.
And so, what was hard All of them but two. So, what I did is I was really debating this and advisors always are debating how to do this. I was like, "I think the best way to do this is offer a menu for next year." And say, "To work with All Street next year, here's our menu of options." So, when I talk about our minimum fee of being 12,000 for employees or 18,000 to business owners, that is to do basically a ton of work in year one and then every other year it's three to four big annual big seasons of meeting with meetings in between as things come up. But I wanted to offer my older clients who are more simple like a one meeting a year model or a two meeting a year model or three meeting a year model and I basically gave them a menu of here's your options.
And what I knew is, you know, we had a bunch of people still at that 150 a month model. I knew I would say I would my guess was 75% of them would leave cuz the new minimum would be a 450. So three x the cost. That's a big difference for people. But it was better than you're fired, right? Cuz I didn't want to fire them and if they wanted to pay 450 a month, we could do the one meeting a year and then like, you know, you email me throughout the year with questions etc.
We can still add a ton of value. And what ended up happening is we lost 20 clients and we had more revenue than that than losing those 20 clients. So it was an amazing business decision. We went from basically 110 clients and now we have, you know, just about 90 clients and we have more revenue. And so that's a great business decision. And it frees up more time, you know, like if a third of your customer base which takes up a third of your time relatively is only accounting for 3% of your revenue, you're in trouble there.
right? And because like our our higher level clients, we know in year one we spend 40 hours per higher level client and about 30 if you're in the 12,000 a year model. And then the years after that it's about 20, 20 to 30. That's a lot of time to have to spend on people cuz we're not just like manage your portfolio, call it a day, right? We're doing all their tax planning, all the tax awareness. We're doing that we go through their cash flow.
We organize what they make minus what they spend is their surplus. Where does the surplus go? How do they change their investments? Do they do the right insurances? Is their estate planning done? Like everything that touches a dollar sign, we help our clients do.
We help them build their team. We help make sure everything gets done. And so like there's no way to do that without a lot of time and we don't want to not be able to serve those clients well because we have too many clients that are not a good fit for us. The anxiety or like just the stress that would come with, you know I I did it at a terrible time. We were it was basically I did it at the very end of December, like very very start of December actually, like hey this this new fee would go into effect February 1st would be your first new payment. And basically everybody but two was pretty receptive.
They were but they were like, how? I paid 150 I've been paying 150 a month. I've been a long time client. I'm like, it's hard cuz you're paying 10% of what another client is paying and you're not 10% of the work. You're You're more like a third of the work as somebody else. And so they were upset and I was like, there's nobody in the market charging this.
Like I I can't keep it that way. I'm sorry. Like we have a model where you can come back every couple years and pay us for like a 90-minute meeting and we'll get you a financial plan. If you do that every 2 years, it's actually going to be cheaper than what you pay now and that would be a good option. But there was just a couple people who would just like were mad about this and I was like, you would do the same. If you were in my shoes, like it is the same thing I was telling somebody else about this today.
It's like Butler fans got mad when Holtmann went to Ohio State and made 4x the money. You would have done that, too. How are you going to be mad, right? Like it's just you have to do the best thing for your life at periods of time because you end up resenting those people for that, right? If I don't try to make it at par where it's a good business decision and good for both of us, if it's just good for you or just good for me, there's going to that's going to create issues. Hey everyone, quick pause in the action to introduce you to Fluttermann Von Riese, a true hidden gem in Indiana, especially for all you watch aficionados out there.
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One thing I want to touch before we wrap up here is how social media just changed the trajectory of your business. What was that first kind of domino where you felt like oh wow, I really have something here? There's a lot of myths in social media and and how it works. And so for me like the the beginning was all about like the actions. Like I just knew for one not many people are going to be watching you early on. Two, you're not going to be good at it, right?
I think a lot of people are like oh great I'm a business owner or whatever I'm going to start on social media and they're like I'm just not good at it. And I'm like well if you picked up a basketball today and you tried to get in the NBA you wouldn't get in, right? Like there's a lot of actions that need to take to get there. But for some people for some reason people believe that like you're either good at social media or you're not. I was not. I was I'm a bad writer.
I've always been a bad writer. And so it was really really scary to me. And so like what I did is I started with very actionable steps but very little amount of of things to do. So I was like I'm going to write one blog post a week cuz I'd rather write and then three social media posts a week. That took me like 10 hours when I started because I wanted to be perfect. I did so many edits whatever.
And then eventually I reduced that down to like five hours. And I was like okay great now I can add something else in. Okay a newsletter seems manageable, right? I'm already writing a blog that's similar. Got good at that I added a podcast, right? That took a lot of time to learn how to edit it, how to cut it, how to do it.
You know I did that for a while. Basically cut that down on time added the next thing. So I basically was like I have 10 hours a week that I can allocate to this. As I free up more time I'll add the next thing. And then now I'm I'm the point where like I have one YouTube long a week, I have three YouTube shorts a week, I have a podcast a week. I basically have anywhere from three to seven Twitter posts a day.
I write three threads a week. a day? I schedule three every day and then if as I think of things I do it. So like right now my next social media post I would schedule would be like July. I'm typically 6 to 12 months ahead at all times. And then I have three threads a week.
July? You are you are making your content to go out on Twitter for July? Yeah, I was at one point last year I had 2,100 posts scheduled ahead. Because what what I realized, right, is like when I started that year one I had like 200 followers and I got to 800. I have 33,000 now. So I went to 800, I went to 75, I went 75 to 15, 15 to 30, and now at the start of this year I'm at 33.
So that means all of my old good content has never been seen, right? And so Justin Welsh, one of the greatest creators I follow, he's like he has this quote that says, "Don't show me your new content, show me your best content." And so when I think about that, I'm like why would I create everything brand new when when people don't remember anything from 6 months ago or 12 months ago? So I can take what's done really well and make it better. And so I those threads that have done really well I have 15,000 people who haven't seen it cuz it was a year ago that need to see that because it's some of my best content. So I'll basically do that and I'll just edit a new hook, right?
Or I'll go back and I'll go through January of last year and be like, "I like that post. I can make that better and slightly edit it or I can make it longer now and I can make those changes." So I basically realized that like repurposing and reusing your content is the way to build a machine that works cuz there's just if you you won't remember my content, but if you did if you if you said, "I remember that thread from a year ago." that's not a loss, that's a win. That means my content was that good that you remembered it from a year ago. Damn.
And think about it, right? Like how much do we need to get hit with personal finance, health and fitness, all these things before it actually hits us at the time that we can actually take it in and implement it, right? So like just because I've written about this a year ago doesn't mean that I shouldn't now because that person maybe was not at the space where, you know, doing a solo 401k made sense to them but now it is. Wow. Holy smokes. That's such a good idea.
I'm like now my wheels are turning and like how could I go back because the typical social media thing, you make some form of artwork and it's gone in 7 days, right? Like it's like, oh man, this reel that I put out and I'm like how could I bring back some of those old ones? should, right? Like you go back and you might say 2 years ago I had this reel that got a million views and it was on like five hidden gems of Indiana. Maybe you have one new one that didn't get added and now you can remake it with a slightly better hook cuz you're better at social media 2 years later into that video. There's really no reason not to do that because like almost nobody saw that because you had a quarter of the followers at that period of time.
And so I wrote, you know, Michael Kitces is in the financial advisory industry is like the biggest name. He has like a blog and everything. I have like a 25-minute long blog. It's so long. They had me write all about this idea of like how to be active on social, how to repurpose, and how to create a strategy around that. So, people could definitely go check that out cuz I think it's really helpful.
But ever have any people like, oh, he just recycles the same content over and over? Never. Never. Because I I'll have a completely different hook, right? So, it doesn't even feel like the same tweet. I've never had somebody say that.
And also like my thought is if I'm growing a business, when you just have a following and your job is just to monetize your following through views, some people view that you like I have a commitment to my oldest followers to always be new. I think I don't have that. I think I have a commitment to always add value and educate people. But like if somebody's followed me for 4 years and they're not my client, they're probably not going to be. What I know is most people follow me about 1 to 6 months before they reach out to become a client. So, I'm actually really trying to talk to my new audience.
Mhm. And it's like even if you're the your old audience from the very, very beginning, maybe they weren't thinking about tax planning or estate planning or inheritance or something like that. They maybe didn't have a business at that point. Yeah, and you bring that back up 4 years later and they're like, oh, this is super applicable. I was wondering where that was. I was having I had this question and you resurfaced it and Totally.
And think about how many people are like I don't want to write like you know, Zach who we were talking about before, like one big thing I talked to him and other people about is like just because somebody else wrote about this doesn't mean you shouldn't, right? Because a lot of people are like, "Oh, somebody already wrote about solo 401ks, why would I write about it?" Well, your audience doesn't follow that person. They didn't hear it from your voice. And so like I just don't see any reason why I wouldn't keep talking about everything that's important. Like Morgan Housel is one of the best writers of our time, best financial writers.
He writes about five to 10 things over and over and over and over in different ways and in different stories. Personal finance when it really comes down to it is manage your cash flow, spend less than you make, invest, do good tax planning, and protect your assets. That's really all financial planning is. There's your five buckets. But under under that there's a hundred points to go make and talk about. My job is to keep talking to people and educating them and you know, you you've talked about this, there's misaligned incentives in the financial advisory industry, there's not a lot of people doing true financial planning, and most people are selling to their friends, right?
You've had the friends that call you about working with them. People are put off by that. So there either So when somebody needs to hire a financial advisor, they're going to think, "Do I go to my friend who's been calling me telling me I need to work with him, or am I going to go to Thomas who's educated me for three years about every topic? I know he's an expert in my space." It's a no-brainer. They're going to reach out to the person they know they can solve their problem and has never asked for anything from them, which is why social media works.
Yeah, and it's almost like showing your work. Like you're trying to be the best. And like all that content is, right? It's like showing that oh, we know what to do in this situation. We know what to do in this situation. We know what to do in this situation.
Cuz if you see your friend like I I see Zach and I'm like, "Man, he just like the way I love Indiana, that man loves finance, all right?" So like he gets he's super pumped up about a new tax strategy or whatever, right? And that's people want to work with people like that. Like if they sit down and they can tell you have a passion and you love what you're doing, that is a huge attraction because they're like, "I got somebody who's so excited about doing this and helping me on it versus like if you sit down with somebody who's like, this is my job and like, it's fine, I guess. Like really I want to be I want want to be a business owner. Somebody took my job to work with you.
yeah, and the best financial advisors you know, and like it's easy to say like, oh well, they have a lot of energy, they make a lot of money, they're really successful, but that energy started before that. They had that energy and that energy is what got them there. Yes. So I truly love running around and like exploring random things in Indiana. It's really fun to me. And I I did it when I had 2,000 followers or whatever.
it through your voice. When you go over on all your videos, you can hear just like the speed and the energy, right? And like I think those two things really show how much somebody loves that. I appreciate that, man. And and it's like there the idea of hidden gems or restaurants, what you can make content about is all relatively the same. I could make the same reel about St.
Elmo downtown as some other creator that's like a lifestyle creator. Where you win is how do you get people to look at it and then the creativity you can bring, the art form of of putting all the pieces together. Like writing the best trip thread has to have a great hook and then it has to continue to be good to keep people reading it. Like I see other people do hidden gems in Indiana. They're like, cool, like do it cuz you won't beat me at it. Like truthfully, like no one's going to do this series better than I am.
No one's going to do interviews, no one's going to do all this. Like the the pool of what you can make content about, it's all the same. I'm just going to win by making the most creative, energetic, and I'll say best content, right? That's what you're doing. that's what I mean, that's that's my goal, right? How am I I think I I win in two ways.
One of them is like, how do I put out the best content better than anybody else? And that's winning on knowledge. Like it's not only how do I write the best hooks, but like, how am I talking about things that other advisors don't talk about and help on? Um I think that one's really important. Two, how am I the most active? And I think a lot of times I always got the feedback of like quality over quantity.
My quality was 100, but I got five posts out a month. That is worse than if my quality was 90 and I got 50 posts out. Right? Because the statistic is like 20% of your audience sees each post. So, if I post like the average advisor and I post, you know, twice a week, eight posts. So, that means they're going to see about two of them.
And if both of them don't apply to them, I really hit them zero times a month. But if I'm posting 100 times a month and, you know, 80% are educational, they see 20% and then maybe half of those apply to them, I educated them at like five to 10 times a month. Every single month over and over and over. And so, that's all I've been figuring out is how do I continue to up quantity without losing quality? So, I'm in somebody's mind, right? Because all I'm trying to do is be when somebody hits a pain point that they needed advisor that I'm the name that pops in their head.
That's all I you're trying to do in social media. Yeah, and it was like when long-form of like long-tail like search when they are in there looking for inheritance tax or whatever the thing is, you know, those posts that have the credibility of like, "Oh, this is actually helping people." I love it. I love it. Yeah. Uh well, so it's been three years of rapid growth thus far.
What's on the horizon for 2025 for All Street Wealth? We were We've been really lucky after three years we've earned over a million in revenue, which is super cool. In our industry it takes five years to cross six figures in your first revenue year. Because it's hard to get clients. Like that's the problem that people can't solve. This year is going to be, you know, our goal is to do well over a million in revenue this year, which I think is a cool goal because I don't I never thought we would I'd be able to own a financial planning business that did that amount.
But I think we'll probably do like 1. 2 to 1. 5 this year in revenue. I don't think I need to grow my team yet. I mean, I've two full-time people around me. So, I have Ryan.
He's an enrolled agent, so we can do tax planning and give tax advice, which advisors like barely even say like, "Consider this with taxes." But they can't actually go in that lane. And I was like, "This is an important lane that we need to be able to go down." Then I have a full-time director of ops who makes sure everything gets done. You know, she's She's amazing. I'll probably hire one more person at some point.
I don't know if that'll need to be this year just do some more background work and then it's just continuing to think if I grow the business beyond us, right? And like one conversation I have with a lot of owners and we're talking about this before is like what's your enough? And so you really have to balance this like you can make really amazing money helping a lot of people and right now like because we grow at four clients a month, the workload's heavy. Eventually we'll be at you know that more of almost full 90 95% full and we'll only take one or two a month. My work-life balance would be amazing, right? I could probably work 30 hours a week, you know, be very available or I can go replicate and hire the exact framework I built, I could replicate across teams, right?
So I would hire an advisor I already know, we would launch an ultra high net worth wing for like 25 million and above clients. And then I'd hire one for doctors. And then I would hire one for lawyers. And I would hire one for solo business owners. And basically just replicate the team of, you know, ops person probably across two, EA probably across two, head of financial planner. It's just I don't know if I want to do that yet.
And so my thought is don't rush into that because it's harder to go backwards. The even way the best thing to do would have a really good business that's really well built up and now hey, you take 30 of my clients that would be your niche. I'll then continue to grow mine. I'll continue to grow yours as well. I would trust people in segment your client list off into like smaller pools, right? Of doctors or business owners.
Yeah, I'd go Equity Comp. I'd basically hand Equity Comp off to somebody else. I would stay in the business owner lane. And then like the path one of my mentors, his name's Jason Wenk, he's the CEO of Altruist, which is a the third largest custodian like to manage assets. He owned two companies like mine. His last one he sold for $120 million and he basically just replicated these teams and work and then he kept like 30 clients.
So he's like, I kept 30 clients. That was a million a year in revenue from those 30 clients. Just basically all the highest complexity, you know, highest net worth. And then just basically help build everybody else's team because if you can solve the inbound part, how do we get people in the door? Well, the financial planning's textbook, right? You Anybody can learn financial planning.
Most people can't learn that. So, it's like if I'm an A+ in in growing the business, should I spend more time there? But again, it just comes down to like is that what I want my life to look like or not? And I just haven't made the decision, but 4 years ago before I launched All Street, I never wanted to be a business owner. And then now I'm a business owner, and do I want to be advisor business owner or do I want to be more so business owner? Well, talk to us then then I have some fun questions here at the end.
Like what is your top priority in life right now? Oh man, that's hard. I mean, I think there's like one in kind of every lane, right? Like the business is just continuing to get better. Like I look back of like what a financial plan looked like 1 year ago every year, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, our knowledge base and what we do is significantly better. Our process is better."
So, like I'm just always looking at like what added pain point can we solve to make our value larger for businesses? And you know, we're really still working on that because we're still 3 years in, right? And in the financial advisory space, there isn't a model to work with very high-income business owners. There Nobody is doing that because it's hard, right? And so, we're still learning. How do we even get better and solve more problems for them different than the traditional financial advisor you meet twice a year, you look at investments both times, blah blah blah.
Like that's not really what they need help on. So, I think in business it's just continuing to grow the business, continue to add more families that we enjoy working with. Like there's nothing worse than knowing you have a meeting with somebody today and you're resenting it, right? Like it's not worth owning your business and having to do that. You want to work with people that value you and and you value them. You know, outside of that, it's just continuing to you know, we're we're not even a year married yet.
So, continue to improve our marriage, improve our communication is obviously really important. I know we plan to have kids in the next, you know, a couple years. So, getting ready for that Yeah, buddy. a big one. And then for me, health and fitness is always a really big part of my life. I think from basketball that was integrated.
And like when I left basketball, I still needed that. And so like last year I had, you know, my wife tore ACL, I herniated disc in my back, I strained a pec tendon playing basketball. So this year is the year of make it through the year without an injury. Cuz you know, you obviously work out a ton. Like if you can't run for 3 months, getting back into running sucks. And you know, you can get there, but it's just like it's not the same and like your life feels different when you don't have that.
So Yeah, when you lose it, even if you have like a slight injury and you're out for 2-3 weeks, it's like, dude, it's it's hard. It's brutal. So and I think along with that is becoming even better at stepping away from the job. Like I think one thing that's made me really good at my job is I'm always on. So like clients email me at night, I'm like, I might as well email them back. Like I'm thinking about it.
It's better or whatever and chilling. Totally. And I think there's good and bad in that. I think if I'm like not like if you have a kid or something and you're like you're distracted, that's bad, right? You need to be present, you need to have the time. But also like just finding that balance and this will probably be the first year we're going to Hawaii in a couple weeks for a couple weeks.
It's probably the first time I'm going on a vacation and not have to work some. Because I have my team is really built up, they're very educated, they know what to do. And so like continuing to get it to be like that. Totally. And like we're just getting to that point where somebody could have a question and they can answer it. And that's a huge relief cuz before I'd be like in Mexico, I'd be whatever and I'd be like, okay, emails in the morning.
Again, there's good and bad to that. Like if I'm going to go on a 3-week long vacation, great, let's spend 30 minutes a day keeping the business moving. But if I'm only taking, you know, 7 to 10 days, like I should be able to step away from my business. And so that's obviously an important one. And then yeah, health and fitness, just staying healthy, staying active, just always doing something I enjoy in that lane. What's the biggest money mistake you see millennials making?
I think it's a not focusing on their investment rate. So I think it's really easy and like we we are kind of came up in the age of like high school college where people talked about investing, right? Like you could use Robinhood. And so I think people get so bogged down in the idea that their investments are what's going to build their wealth, but really their investment rate is what's going to build their wealth, right? Because if you make $100,000 this year and you have a 5% investment rate and you invest $5,000 and that grows by 20%, it's not really that impactful, right? Like you you you got a little bit, but if you made 100,000 and your investment rate was 20%, you invested significantly more than the previous one plus the growth was.
And so I think people forget that like really your first 10 to 15 years is all about contributions. How much can we invest and how can we get it invested for the longest period of time? Not did we buy Nvidia which beat Apple, which is great, right? I want you to do that, but they just spend so much time in this investment in picking the investment lane when they should be spending time in growing income and in keeping their investment rate as a good percentage of their income. Cuz when you set that right and then now you're at a 120, keep 20%. Like now you're investing more.
Then you go to 150, keep 20%. And so when you build that habit, you set yourself up really well for life cuz a lot of people are like all of a sudden when I make X amount of dollars, I will, but all they've done is their life got more expensive and busier. They had kids, now they have a house, and then they just never save and you fall behind really fast. about time in the market, not timing the market, right? Exactly. If you had $10,000 right now and you couldn't save it, what would you do with it?
always say a vacation. Like I just think like Dude. Like That but that is just from the perspective of working with very high net worth individuals, right? Where it's like if someone who has let's say 30 years old, the average 30-year-old gets 10 Gs, go on a vacation? That's the recommendation? Well, I mean it's like okay, what are the other options?
So if you can't save it or invest it, right? You you could go pay down debt. So if you have any high interest debt, right? I I was looking at the lens of you can't do anything to benefit you financially. Ah, okay, yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's actually it'd be like, oh great, like start a side business.
But then it's like if you think about most side businesses, they don't really need capital, right? Like you you did the the baseball hats and some like maybe you needed to buy this equipment, but a lot of people's side business is like, you know, I can help you build a website or I can help you on some social media or I can do things that it doesn't actually require The side hustles always starts with a service, I feel like. Like something where you just trade your time for more money than working in a job. risk, right? The thing you lose is time. You didn't really lose money.
Um and so like they're also the easiest businesses to run. Like if you can run a service business and make a million dollars or you can run, you know, a product-based business and make a million dollars, this will always be easier, right? Like it it it's just the truth of it. So I was thinking about it in the lane of like, what could I help make my life better? And for most people it's like, you know, go when you're in your 20s and 30s like it's easy to pass up on experiences to save. And I just talked about your investment rate.
But it's also the time where experiences actually matter and are are the most impactful. And like maybe you're 30 and you have, you know, you have your first 4-year-old or something. Like go to Disney, right? Like maybe that's going to be a lifelong memory. And so like my mind has changed on money as I've started to work with higher income people and just be like, I see the happiest wealthy people and they do a lot of really, really fun things. It's not the people that have the nicest things.
Yeah, right. Where it's like you get $10,000, maybe it's not necessarily buy a new car or whatever it is or put a down payment, but it's maybe you get a chef for once once one once a week for a a year, right? Or for a month, once a month for a year, you know, come Or or it'd be cool is like you maybe you get the 10,000 you're like, okay, great. I'm going to go to the final four for the next 3 years with my kid, right? Like my my family growing up we went to March Madness every year and that's one of my core memories of like, this was so fun. We all love basketball.
We all got to go together. We got to see some cool games. So I'm like, I know when I have a kid, I'm like, maybe we'll go every year to somewhere different for that. Or like, hey, maybe I'm a big Duke fan. Maybe every year we're going to go to an away ACC game. Like something that's just like cool core memory because I think a lot of parents get in this mindset of my goal is to accumulate the most wealth and give the most wealth.
But if you ask most people who are at at mildly successful, that's not what they want. They don't want their parents to leave them the most money possible. They want to their parents have the best life and for them to do the coolest things with their parents while they're still around, right? And so that has changed my mindset to think of like, let's not be hoarders of money. Let's use that money and create experiences where when you're 50, you look back and be like, "Man, my dad and I had the coolest thing. Like every year, you know, this is what I did.
Like we went at Duke UNC and then we went and saw them at Virginia and then we went and saw them at Miami." And like there was a weekend where we got to explore a new city and we also got to go to a game. Like that is the thing where when you pass away or you're like about to, you're going to look back and be like, "That was the best money I ever spent." And so to me when I look at 10 grand, if I could do things like that, I wouldn't regret it. Yeah, maybe it's 10 grand and it's not blow all 10 grand on Cabo San Lucas or whatever, you know, and one extravagant Like yes, you know, you can go drink on the beach and have fun and do whatever there. But if you stretch it out, like go visit 10 new national parks, right?
Spend $1,000 per trip. love hiking and that's your core thing. You just think about like your family. That's really cool. And like making it almost uh like a recurring core memory. I like that.
That one cuz I'm not really a vacation guy. Like the idea of like taking a going on vacation spending a week on the beach, I get like a little itchy. Like, "Ah, no, I got to go." Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like when you but when but I like going and exploring new cities and learning new things and like the history or whatever of the place. Like that would be really cool.
And when you when when you think of that as a trip or a vacation, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that would be really like going to do, you know, Thursday, Friday of March Madness every year. Going to the Monon Bell game in Greencastle, right?" Yeah, but like for your like that's a core memory to you. You have a child and let's say you're not going to move out of Indiana. We we thought of We understand that, but you do. Let's say you do for some reason and you're like, "Every year, me and my family, we go back to that You get to see where I went to college.
You get to see the experiences I had. You kind of get them a little nudge to go there cuz obviously you want that." But like those are the things that you're going to look back on and be like, "If that was the difference of your child getting $200,000 at the age of 60, right? Because that's life expectancy 60 or 70. First of all, they should be financially in a good spot by then. But, your whole family is going to look back on and be like, we would have would take all those core memories over the extra 200 grand inheritance.
Heck, yeah. Man, that's that's special. Okay, this is our younger years segment. It's brought to you by our friends at Our Fellowship. They're a great organization here in Indiana helping develop young business leaders across the state. Thomas, what advice would you give to your 22-year-old self?
Become an expert at something. So, I think we grow up and we're always told like you want to be the most well-rounded you can be. And I think as a person, that's true. But, I think in your professional life, you want to be an expert in one single problem. Right? If you look at the most successful highest paying people, it's because they are the best at solving X thing.
Right? And so, my thought is and this is what I did. I said, I want to be the best person and know the most about personal finance for the average 30-year-old. And what does it take to know that, right? I had to study everything about cash, everything about debt, everything about investing, everything about retirement planning. And so, I would spend one whole month on one topic.
I would learn as much as I could, I would write about it, and then I would teach about it a podcast. And I basically just did that over and over and over and over again. And now I've been creating content for 6 years and like now I'm the go-to expert in that space. But, it's all because all I did was focus on being the best at that specific thing. And so, I think that's applicable. Like you go into you're going to be a lawyer or you're going to be, you know, even in marketing, right?
Like the best marketer isn't the one that can do social media and paid and do all and blah blah blah. The best is actually going to be somebody who starts a business and I just help product-based business on paid ads on Facebook. Right? And because of that, you can be so much better at the person who just knows how to do pretty good marketing in every platform. Right? So, I think that's the biggest piece of advice I have is if you want to be successful, become amazing at one thing.
I couldn't agree more. I want to be the foremost expert on the state of Indiana, right? And like the social media piece, like making the videos, that's that's all the you know what I want to be the best, but I my goal isn't to teach people how to gain a bunch of followers. My goal is to teach people about Indiana. Yeah. And like when I go in and I'll research a small town, I research a business, I research a thing that's going on in the state, and it's like learn everything about that, then share that with other people.
So, being an expert at one thing, that is like that and then be a well-rounded person. Yeah, I think if you compare that with something that interests you, too, you just have like this this amazing combo, right? Cuz like it's easy to say become an expert at something, but like talk to a lot of lawyers who are miserable doing their job. Like it's not very fun to do that. But if you find like I feel very lucky, I'm sure you feel very lucky that like I found the thing that I'm very very passionate about and the thing that I could become an expert in. And so like it doesn't feel like work.
Like to me it almost feels more like a video game. Like I literally feel like here's the actions, I you know, my goals are the end result, you know, like more clients and more revenue is the the currency of how you know you're being successful. It's almost like harder to step away from it because it's constant stimulation and interest, right? Like in a That's probably why vacations feel hard to you is because your work doesn't feel like work. Yeah, it's that stimulating. Like sitting on a beach and drinking beer, fun for like a day.
But if you're in investment banking and you hated your every day and you just like I just want to get away and like not think about things, like that sounds way better. That's true. All right, these are the same three questions we ask everyone that comes on the show. First one, what's something the world needs to know about Indiana? I think that it's like if you were going to pick a suburb, like any like think about all the people who go to Chicago suburbs or whatever. Like I think if you were looking for like suburban life, this is the best place in the country to live.
Like I look my sister lives in Chicago suburbs, I have clients who live in suburbs all the country and I'm like you pay significantly more for an older run-down suburb, etc. And you could live here and if you don't want to live in the city, even you still have like Meridian Kessler, you have Carmel, you have Fishers, you have Noblesville. Like I think it's like one of the best places to live based on affordability. There's so much to do, right? We have good restaurants, there's a lot to go do downtown. You have a slow-paced lifestyle.
We have the Monon, which is like maybe the coolest thing of any city I've been to. I just can't see why you'd pick any other Midwest area to live. Like you could pay double the property taxes and double double the price for the same house in Chicago, and you know you're not going to the city. Everybody's excuse is like, "Well, I love Chicago." It's like, "We don't live that far. If we want to go to Chicago for a weekend, we're going to go."
And same thing, like you live in the suburbs, how often are you really going? Yeah, exactly. That's That's my point. So I'm like, you know, everything is brand new here. Like it's If If you talk to somebody who hasn't been here in 10 years and they go down and they're like, "Let's check out Carmel" or something, they're like, "This is amazing. Like this is the nicest spot ever."
You're down Carmel. Is that where you live? I live like just one like one stop up the Monon and off. We We live right there. And so like we're there all the time. And every time we have family or friends come in, they're like, "Should we move to Carmel?
Like this place is so nice." I'm like I tell people it's like one of the It's like the number one rated suburb in the country like almost every year. And people are like, "Yeah, okay, Indiana. Like it's probably on the list of best suburbs for anybody under like 20K people." You're like, "You just don't know. It's It's pretty good life up here."
Hey, there we go. What is a hidden gem in Indiana? So I'm actually going to go with my gym, which is In-Fitness. Um it's a newer gym. It's where um Lifetime used to be on Meridian. There's where that new Swig is, right off Meridian.
I think it'd be 96th. Okay. Just the most amazing gym. Like I And I'm a big fitness person. it What gym is it? It's called In-Fitness.
So it's got the Indiana in the name, so super good. It's very, very nice gym, like very, very spaced out. They have cold plunges and infrared sauna and regular sauna and they have personal training and they have classes and they have turf. I am a sucker for a good gym. I will always spend unlimited money to belong to the gym that gives me the the best benefits. And so once I checked it out, I I went there.
It's amazing. Dang, there we go. And it's newer. That looks sweet. Local local business owner. A lot of local business owners actually go there.
In Fitness Club. Yeah. Wow. I kind of thought you were going to say the Azwell cuz you're a Carmel guy. Have you seen that place? the Azwell.
It's It's just so much smaller. Like it looks cool because I just like it's a way bigger gym. There's every type of equipment you could possibly need. I'm not the like, you know, like Equinox for example. Like most Equinoxes are like very bougie, but they're not the best weightlifting equipment. Like you're not going to get the best workout, but you're going to It's going to be like mix of what feels like a spa and a and a gym.
And this is just overall like you never wait for anything. It's never too busy. And like I think a lot of being successful health and fitness wise is you're excited to go to your gym. Yeah, that is true. If you're not excited to go, you're doomed. And I'm a big sauna and cold plunge guy.
So like Yeah, like I I mean I sauna every single day. I cold I cold plunged a lot more until they've been down for a couple weeks. Now they're back up. The combination of those makes me think the best and a lot of my job is like I'm on 20 like at least 8:00 to 5:00 every day. Like I need my brain to be working well. Dude, In Fitness Club.
I love it. Yeah, it felt like it was a good change. Yeah, that is a really good change. Who's a Hoosier that we need to keep on our radar? Someone who's doing big things. I'm going to give a shout-out to Justin Castelli, the advisor I worked with before.
I think he's just one of the best people, like best mentor. And he's He's kind of pivoted his business. He still does financial planning, but he does financial planning mixed with life planning, helping people, you know, be happier, live more fulfilling lives. And he's like very into like the health side of things, the meditation side of things, like all of that. And so he's doing a bunch of speeches actually locally. He did it last year.
I think it's like four or five part series, just, you know, helping people understand cuz I think the one thing he found is that like, you know, for a for a long time of your life, your your core thing is like how do I become successful working? And then you find the success, and then a lot of people are really unhappy. And so another shout-out is the Money Wise podcast. It's a podcast for like It's basically like all these people who've have their businesses. And the common theme you're going to find is people are lost. Well, once you've kind of reached success, you you become lost because you have the destination, you reach the destination, and now you're like, "Where do I go next?"
And so, a lot of it's like figuring out like who you are as a person, how do you become happy, what is meaningful in life, like how do you find purposeful work and things after that. And I think it's pretty cool that, you know, he's focused his attention on that. That's probably the best one that I can think of for right now. Dude, those are great. Uh Thomas, I appreciate you coming on the show, sharing the journey of All Street Wealth the past 3 years, and for the big plans for 2025. Excited to keep following along the journey.
If people want to connect with you, learn more about finance, learn more about All Street Wealth, where can they find you at? Yeah, I would say Twitter is the best place, so I'm just @TKoopmann. We obviously have a website, allstreetwealth. com, that people can apply to work with us and check things out, but I tell everybody, where wherever you follow me, go to Twitter, all my best content's there. Heck, yeah. Well, I appreciate you, and we'll have to bring you on next year and see how how 2025 wraps up.
Yeah, man, I'm done. Thank you for listening to this episode of Get In. If you like what you heard, make sure you leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. This show is made possible by our friends up at Sweetwater. Whether you're looking to start a podcast or take your content to the next level, click the link in the description to see all of my gear recommendations at sweetwater. com.
If you want a behind-the-scenes look at everything we're doing across the state, make sure you follow me on Instagram and TikTok @NateSpangle. Thank you so much for listening and being part of what makes the Hoosier state great. We'll see you next time here on Get In.
