In The House With ... Jackie Yoder of Wilde Wealth Management

Adrian McIntyre: 00:04

We all communicate every day at home, at work, at school, at play. And some of our communications are more significant than others, when it's our job to communicate in a professional setting. And especially when those communications are happening in a highly regulated industry, a lot is on the line. And you still need to connect with an audience, make sure that the right message gets to the right person at the right time. But the stakes are high. In today's episode of Copper State of Mind, we're going to meet someone who deals with those kind of complex issues. And our host of course is Abbie Fink, vice president and general manager of HMA Public Relations here in Phoenix, Arizona. Abbie, what's on your mind?

Abbie Fink: 00:44

Well, I got a lot on my mind today. Seems like there's been so much going on in terms of communicating and discussing and debating and arguing and such. And so, we've been really having some interesting conversations with our colleagues and our clients about when to communicate with so much news happening around. So certainly here in the state, around the country. Things are happening on a regular basis and yet we have to operate as normally as we can, but pay attention to things that are happening around us. And so, in typical fashion, there's always some new challenges that we're all faced with. But there are certain industries and certain businesses that not only have to pay attention to what's happening in our communities and in the business world, but they are within an in industry that is regulated and has a lot of rules and guidelines in terms of what they can and can't do and what they can and can't say. So I thought it would be really interesting in our series of, In The House With, to have a conversation with someone that is involved in an industry like that and oversees marketing and communications for that organization. So I've invited Jackie Yoder to join us today. She is the chief operating officer with Wilde Wealth Management. And really has, I think, a real interesting background in that she comes from the financial services business. That's where her knowledge and expertise is, but she also oversees the operations of the organization and it's communications and marketing and new business development and such. So thought we'd have a conversation today about what that looks like. So Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. And before we get started, if you could just do a little bit more of an introduction and share a little bit about your background and how you came to this role as chief operating officer and what that looks like within Wilde Wealth Management.

Jackie Yoder: 02:50

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me today. It's obviously such a pleasure to speak with you and we love working with you all the time. Definitely my background started in accounting and then I transitioned over into the financial industry's world. I was an advisor at one point, and then I was presented with the amazing opportunity to work here at Wilde Wealth. When Trevor was introduced to him he had a need for filling his COO position and it has been a very fun little whirlwind ever since then.

Abbie Fink: 03:28

So the financial services business, I think for most of us is that, it's our investments, it's our retirement planning. And at least for me personally, I think of it as it's very much a relationship business, but you tend to know someone or someone recommends someone or makes a referral, but there really is a lot to have to do in order to position yourself as a knowledge expert, as a leader, in order to attract a particular type of clientele and certainly your advisors are good at what they do in that realm. But marketing may not be their first passion. And so that's really left up to the administrative team to be able to do that. So what does it look like to go out and raise your hand and say, "Hey, look at us. Come bring your money over here."

Jackie Yoder: 04:18

Well, I think it's kind of twofold for us. The business model we have built has really been that holistic approach, right, where you don't just come here thinking you're going to invest your money. We partner with people that are right here in the office with us which includes a CPA and a state attorney, college planning and health insurance. At the end of the day, those all kind of intertwine with your finances. And so that's really important for us to give our clients that top service, I guess you would say. And with that, that is a lot around of what we market and put out there of when you come to see us and you have all these questions, if we can't help you, we're going to have someone that can help you. And so really getting that messaging out to people, they really like that approach that we have. It makes them feel comfortable and safe, obviously when they come and meet with Trevor and he says, "Hey, you really need to do your estate plan. And we have the estate attorney right here," that makes them feel comfortable and safe and they don't have to go anywhere else.

Adrian McIntyre: 05:32

Jackie, all those various disciplines and topics that you mentioned have within them, at least to the untrained client, so much complexity, so much confusion, so much concern. There's college planning for example, is a topic that can really be overwhelming for families, let alone estate planning. And what do I do with my 401k as I'm approaching? Should I take the early retirement offer or should I stay... All of these things and that relationship that you are speaking to is so important. Once you have it, it's very easy to guide your clients to your advisors and your trusted partners, that holistic team. How do you get to the point of having that relationship. Take us from, someone's out there who needs six of the 30 things that your team can offer. How do they get to know Wilde Wealth Management? Do you rely on personalities? Do you rely on content marketing on these topics? Kind of walk us through that mix.

Jackie Yoder: 06:36

I mean, I would say it's both, I mean, at this point in the game, there's a lot of referrals that we get, right. But also that marketing. So like you stated just we do a lot of events where people can come and just meet us and meet the advisors, meet who they're comfortable with, get that one on one kind of approach to it. But the overall just marketing of it as well. We have advisors that specialize in different areas, right? There're some advisors that they know more about the 401k side and that's the side they love, right? And so we have those different areas, those different advisors. And at the end of the day, what makes it really nice too, is being able to you know some of the different approaches is we have different advisors that will do media opportunities and all of that. And when people see them on TV, you naturally gravitate to certain people, right? You're like, "Wow, I really like how that guy spoke." Or so there's something to be said about being able to keep your face out there and have that that people see them and really hear how they talk and speak. And if that rings true to them in how they feel.

Abbie Fink: 07:52

So much of what you do and you've used the word a couple times, advisor, right? It's a lot about counseling and advising and making recommendations and understanding what the individual's needs are and what their needs are today, what they're capable of now and what their future looks like. But there are also guidelines in terms of what you can and can't do from a public perspective, right? You can't hear in this platform say, "I need you to buy this or sell that," but which you do when you have a contractual relationship with your clients. And we mentioned this highly regulated industry. And so there are guidelines that come that you must work within when you talk about your marketing strategy. It's not just about standing up there and talking about particular stocks and bonds. You have to talk about generally speaking, those types of things, but what goes into thinking about not so much the who that's going to deliver that message, but how you develop what those messages are that allows you to say what you need to say, bring the personality of the firm forward, but still fall within the guidelines that your industry has set for you?

Jackie Yoder: 09:10

I know for me, whenever we have those opportunities to be able to speak on a certain subject, I'm always looking for the advisor that I feel would be most comfortable even speaking on that subject. And then kind of like you said, we do have to be very careful about what we say. And so I would say we go on the line sometimes because you do want to get that messaging across to people, but we've kind of come down with a science of being able to really touch on the subjects. But like you said, not really give a specific, which way you should go, type of situation. So we give enough so that they can get the information they need. And then a lot of times that peaks their interests and they want to learn more and then they reach out and end up setting up a meeting. So it is a fine line, but that is a lot of times whenever people, they want to talk to you, because they want to know more.

Abbie Fink: 10:16

Do you have goals for your team or are they required to participate in the marketing efforts? Is that a personal choice? Is it a company function or an individual advisor function? How is it structured?

Jackie Yoder: 10:31

I definitely cannot get all of my advisors to go on camera. There are some that that is not their thing and that's okay. And so there are others that absolutely love it and they're comfortable with it and they really want to help people. And so they're definitely fine with anytime I reach out and say, "Hey, do you want to do this opportunity?" And they're like, "Absolutely."

Abbie Fink: 10:58

And how is it structured within your organization? Do you have a team in house? Do you outsource all of your marketing functions? And then by, I guess by definition, what do you think about, what is marketing within your structure and you talk about events and other news articles and interviews and things, but there're other things that are more direct business to business or business communication that you might be also doing.

Jackie Yoder: 11:23

Yeah. So we obviously have different avenues regarding our marketing. Obviously the PR side of everything is a big piece that we do. And then we have our marketing team that's in house and their focus a lot is about making sure that we're getting those communications out to clients. So we send weekly emails so they have market updates on that. And when the market is extremely volatile, we're communicating with our clients even more to help keep that at bay. And then obviously we do just regular webinars that are informational for our clients. And then we also, we're huge on working with different charities. And so we're always sending out stuff to get clients involved, even if they want to donate goods to the charity we're working with, whatever that looks like. And then some of it's also very, I guess you would say maybe more organic in the sense of, Trevor has been on the Forbes and the Barons list as number one, number two in the last couple years. And people will literally call in wanting to have meetings with him strictly because they saw him on those lists for winning those awards. So those are our bigger approaches, I would say in how we market overall.

Abbie Fink: 12:58

And how big is your team?

Jackie Yoder: 13:00

So we are up to what, around 38 advisors at this point. So we currently have six locations in Arizona. We're in New Mexico, California, and then the state of Indiana.

Abbie Fink: 13:15

And your marketing team is how big?

Jackie Yoder: 13:17

Oh, sorry, my marketing team, I now have three of the girls that are on my marketing team right now.

Abbie Fink: 13:24

And they are responsible then for doing the work for all the locations that you're... And are they all in office individuals or do you have a remote workplace or they all reside within the four walls of Wilde Wealth?

Jackie Yoder: 13:39

We are all in office. I would say I'm definitely a fan of having everyone in office. It was a very weird experience during COVID when no one was here. So they are all here. And those three are all here in the Scottsdale location with me.

Abbie Fink: 13:57

Yeah. We've talked a few episodes of Copper State of Mind around the remote workplace and the pros and the cons of doing that. And I think depending on the day, you could probably find reason for it and reasons against it, depending on what was happening. But I think when the creativity, a lot of times is benefits from having everyone in one place or at least connected in whether it's through technology or such. So I'd like to move that from that idea of having your team in house, then thinking about the types of things that you do. What makes sense then for you to bring in others to assist you on your communications and marketing efforts and things, graphic designers, photographers, things like that, video production. Maybe the other things that you're doing certainly are, as a consumer of online webinars and things our expectation now is experiential. If we're going to be interacting in an online space, it's no longer just a static PowerPoint that we're willing to work with. We want to have some more creativity. So what kinds of things do you bring in outside sources for?

Jackie Yoder: 15:14

So a lot of like the webinars and stuff like that, we keep in house right now, like we spoke about earlier. We have a lot of restrictions, compliance and it's really hard for us to outsource that. At one point I do hope we can get there, but then when it comes to any PR work, anything like that, we're going to outsource that. Obviously, there's going to be people that know a lot more than we know and have a lot more experience to help us through that. And so it's kind of a mixed bag, I guess you would say in, regarding marketing on that.

Adrian McIntyre: 15:51

Jackie, if you had what no one in your position ever has, which is an unlimited budget with all the time and the resources that you need, which of the different work areas for marketing communications, business development, would you double, triple, quadruple down on? In other words, what are the areas that... I mean, because look, a lot of the things that we all do are more like hygiene. Maybe we have to have a social media presence, so we do put some minimal attention to it, unless that is the primary driver of new business, in which case we would go all in on it. So I know that there's different areas between email marketing and events and charity work and webinars and podcasts and video production, all those things, right. Which are the ones that if you could run with them, you would?

Jackie Yoder: 16:40

I think for me, I would put more into the PR side on a more national level, just because of the growth that we want to kind of do the next couple years. That would be a big one for us. And then another one I would love to just put all the money into is doing more -- I feel maybe I'm wrong, I don't know -- more video type marketing. I feel like that's the way the world is going. Everyone wants to watch a video. They don't even want to read our emails if I had to guess. It's just the makeup of it. And this sounds maybe kind of cheesy, I don't know, but we are currently because of our compliance, we're not even allowed to use TikTok. And I feel like our industry is always looked at as so boring and I would just love to do so much more creative, fun things in that kind of space, I guess you would say.

Abbie Fink: 17:44

Well, I think that's an evolution, right? I can remember working in with other industries, financial services being one of them in the early days of my career. And it was pretty much sending out a news release or there would be an ad in the business journal and it would have so many disclaimers in it that there was very little information about the organization itself by the time you got through all the small print. And of course that's evolved and as the industry has changed or just recognizing that that's not going to cut it any longer. And I think there're other industries have seen similar changes. The legal industry certainly has also evolved in terms of what it allows itself to do. And I think you're right. And it's a lot of changing culture to get to that as well. It's recognizing, there's certainly the industry standards, but your workplace, the people that are part of your advisory team are using these things as part of their daily life and they are engaged in it personally and comfortable with it. The clientele that you are working with are going to very soon all be digital natives, right? That age group is slowly becoming the dominant. And so if as marketing professionals, we don't adjust to where our audiences are, we won't break through that clutter and they will find other ways to do it. And I think to your point about video, we don't have the patience anymore to read lengthy articles or, I mean, I don't even think we use instruction sheets anymore when we have to put something together. We go on to YouTube and we find the three minutes to tell us how to build an engine in our car. But we just don't have the patience anymore to do that. And we know that at our fingertips, we can find this information in a different way. And so as communications folks, we have to be able to adjust ourselves and make those changes our clients and our customers are going to demand that they do that, right. So in that counseling role, we have to counsel ourselves to make sure that we're adjusting to doing that. So on that lines, what does the future look like in your industry? What kinds of things might we expect to see, or how do we force the change to happen so we start to see a little bit more of that?

Jackie Yoder: 20:28

Well, I will say, I literally just had a meeting last week with some people in our marketing compliance or with our broker dealer. And I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that there's... I don't know if you've ever heard it. It's called BombBomb but basically you can make a video and send it. It's like an email video, right?

Adrian McIntyre: 20:51

Personalized video.

Jackie Yoder: 20:52

Yeah. And so I was really happy to hear that we are actually allowed to use that. And so I think for me, I'm going to definitely be implementing in our 2023 schedule with marketing, using things like that more. I get very excited when they tell me I'm allowed to use these new gadgets. And so I really am hoping to move us more into that newer platform of the videos and whatever that looks like and, hopefully, be able to spruce things up a little bit in this industry. Obviously, I'll use my disclosure still. Don't worry, so.

Adrian McIntyre: 21:30

Well and you hinted at this, so I want to say this because I think I can. I'm not in your industry and I'm not even specifically talking about your firm, but having worked with a lot of different firms, there really is a tension in many cases, not in any one specific case, between the firm's leadership and what they're comfortable with, what they feel would be well within the guidelines and then upstream decision makers, whether they're in marketing compliance or with a broker dealer, or with other folks who have found for decades, it's simply easier to say "no" than to work through the specific details as these things evolve. So I really am hopeful that as those upstream gatekeepers, that really are the ones enforcing this, "we can't say anything, we can't do anything, we can't TikTok talk anything," that's a grossly unfair generalization, and I take full responsibility for it, personally. But they will start to realize that all of the advisors who are using them for specific aspects of their financial services are really feeling limited in doing that. I really do think there is a lot of ways to stay compliant, but again, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what Adrian thinks. That's really where this has to get worked out is in those internal conversations with folks who have until now, had the last word on it.

Jackie Yoder: 22:50

Yeah, no, I'm excited. I'm hoping we can incorporate some of this newer stuff and not make finance so stuffy going forward.

Abbie Fink: 22:59

If this conversation was taking place even five years ago, and maybe we wouldn't have been doing it as a podcast, but we would've probably been talking about some things then that we're doing now that seemed very avant-garde and very progressive. And now it's routine types of things. And so to me, the real bottom line in this is that as those that are responsible for marketing and raising awareness and enhancing and maintaining our reputation, we have to be looking at the future and paying attention to what's happening and really evaluating what is available to us and figuring out what makes the best sense for our business and the businesses and individuals that we're trying to attract. And not everything will work for all of us, but there are certainly some new and innovative, by our definition, new and innovative things that we can be doing that change the way that our industries are being perceived in the way that people come into our particular businesses and that only serves to benefit all of us, when we think differently a little bit about what we're doing. So to me, the bottom line in this is that the role continues to evolve for communications and marketing folks, and that we have to be knowledgeable about the business that we're in, but also about the work that we do and from within the clientele that we serve and recognizing that and moving those types of conversations forward is how we will evolve and eventually change the way our industries are looked at and the way that people come to find our particular businesses.

Jackie Yoder: 24:40

Yeah, I agree.