Guest: Josh Self, CLU, ChFC, CFP®, Managing Partner of Ridgeline Wealth Advisors in Raleigh, NC.
In a Nutshell: Do you serve your business or does it serve you? Josh Self decided to do a complete rebrand and design his business around his personal passion of being an everyday explorer. He wanted to attract other like-minded outdoor enthusiasts so his website and podcast are 100% geared toward that specific demographic. If you share your passions with your audience and tie them into a holistic approach to Life-Centered Planning, you’re going to grow something more valuable and durable than a client base. You’re going to create a real community around your practice.
On today’s show, Josh Self explains how “Financial life planning for the explorer living out their bucket list” became the organizing principle of his firm, especially on the branding and marketing side of the business.
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Josh Self and I discuss:
- How Josh collaborated with a third-party marketing company to rebrand his firm in a personal way.
- What a good website homepage communicates about a firm to both prospects and clients.
- Why Josh started an “adventure” podcast rather than a “money” podcast.
- How Josh’s podcast has improved his ability to capture stories and communicate with his audience.
- The Five Elements of Adventure Josh learned from a mountain guide and trained psychologist.
- What drives us to seek out adventure, escape our comfort zones, and pursue mastery at various stages of our lives.
Quotes:
Josh Self on renaming and rebranding to attract “his kind of people”:
“Everything that you see on my website, the marketing company drew out of me. This was not something that I just threw on a piece of paper one day. It took months. But it started with renaming the company. Once I committed to renaming it, what do I want to name it? Do I name it after me? Do I make up some word? And through conversation, it really came down to making it something that is meaningful and aspirational. And that’s where I came up with ‘Ridgeline.’ Part of that comes from anytime I’ve stood on a ridgeline, it’s never been a bad day. It’s never been a bad view. So it has this aspirational tone to it. I wanted the website to continue with that from the pictures to the phrasing and ultimately trying to speak to a certain group of people that I come across, or spend time in the outdoors with, because I find that those are my kind of people. And if somebody finds me through the website and this resonates with them, then they’re probably my kind of people.”
Josh Self on the value of challenging yourself — and your audience — to seek adventure at every stage of life:
“I think we’ve all heard the stories of the people that retire and within three months they’re dead. They were tired of the rocking chair and spent their whole life getting to a point of when they don’t have to do anything. My clients that are still doing this in their eighties and early nineties, they’re defying that. When it’s not challenged, the body just goes, ‘Okay, I think we’re done here.’ I love being in those conversations. Whether it’s hearing the stories of the way folks that are older and still finding ways to appropriately challenge themselves or being the one to bring up the conversation in a client meeting to say, ‘What else are you going to do with this money that you spent your whole life saving?’ The only value of money is in its use, really. So how are you going to use this to be in line with the things that are most important to you? It’s a permission slip sometimes to go, ‘Yeah, I can go do this thing.’ And sometimes it’s a cruise for somebody that has stayed their whole life in this tiny little radius, and taking a cruise may feel like a huge adventure. Or the person that is going to go find a mountain to climb or trail to hike. All different ways.”
Josh Self on self-selection and narrowing your brand’s focus:
“I’ve never been told that the website was a turnoff. I’ve had people compliment it and say, the pictures are cool, or the site had a really neat vibe to it. But I’m also at a point where I don’t want to just mass market to, and be a generalist to, everyone. I do want our firm to grow, but I want to be very strategic about how we’re doing that and who we bring in. And I want to enjoy working with the people that we bring in. And so part of this branding approach is hopefully the people that find us, that there’s some commonality. I hear this over and over in the podcast conversations, where I’ll finish and go, ‘Man, if I lived closer to that guy, we’d be really good friends.’ There’s just this element of — and it’s especially true in the outdoor world — that it is a smaller group. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a group that all seems to be cut from a similar cloth. And if those are the kinds of people that find us through our website, that’s a great start. And I hope that we can continue to build off of it.”
