Jan 1, 2021
As we move into 2021, we’ll look to feature more advisors on the show in order to provide a first-hand account of the business and strategies that are working across the country.
Let’s kick off the year with someone we’ve known for many years, Brie Reyes. Her and her father, Tim Estes, run Estes Financial in Fort Worth, Texas, but she also founded Smart Financial Divorce in 2019 when she saw a need. She’s a great guest for a number of reasons, but today we’ll focus on a few key areas.
The first area we’ll go through is target marketing, which has been an on-going discussion on this show. Reyes works with two primary clients and they require completely different focuses. At Estes Financial, federal employees make up a significant portion of the business and it’s a specialty they’ve really homed in on. The second business works exclusively with people going through a divorce.
It’s always interesting to hear how advisors decide on a niche because it helps inspire and spark ideas for other advisors. With her father’s background in the military, he got a first-hand look at the lack of financial guidance and advice that was given to federal employees. It became a clear need that they wanted to help with and it also fell in line with the principals of the military of service and giving back.
Divorce isn’t necessarily a specialty that you’d think about immediate when it comes to financial planning but it makes a lot of sense. For Reyes, she saw it in her family as a child when her parents split. Seeing how assets were split then didn’t seem equal. Later in her career, she had clients that came to her after their divorce produced less than equitable distributions, and she could clearly see the need to help people going through this difficult life event. So she created a business to provide a solution to that specific problem.
The next area we want to spend time on is the marketing side of the business. How do you find clients for those specific niches? Being a specialist rather than a generalist is very important, as Reyes explains, which is why she’s built a tax-free retirement toolkit that’s customized for federal employees and one that is more broad that anyone can benefit from.
Like many other advisors, her pre-COVID marketing strategies included seminars and workshops. The past year has forced many people to put these things on hold and redirect the energy and resources elsewhere, and that’s been difficult.
Time management is a challenge for just about every business owner, and that’s no different for Reyes. With multiple businesses and small child, she gets pulled in a number of different directions. One solution she’s implemented is designating appointment blocks for specific days to give her more control over her calendar.
One last thing that we really want to dive into during this episode is growth during the age of COVID. We’ve talked previously about the strategy of taking seminar materials and turning that into courses that people can access. The challenge, as is typically the case, is where to start. So Dan will provide feedback specific to Reyes’ business and help her get a better grasp on the first steps to take to accomplish this, which will hopefully jumpstart ideas for you.
So as you go through the episode today, keep an ear out for some of these topics that we cover:
- How they’ve come to specialize in federal employees
- Pre-COVID vs post-COVID marketing
- Finding the need for financial help during a divorce
- Target marketing for people going through divorce
- Collaborative divorce
- Outside the box marketing
- Repurposing seminars into other market solutions
- Improving time management
- Why multitasking isn’t always effective
- Going from a large company to an independent business
For more on this topic and other strategies to growing your business, join us over at RenegadeAdvisor.net.
What we discuss on this episode:
1:41 – Welcome on Brie Reyes
2:41 – Why target federal employees?
5:52 – How they marketed pre-COVID
7:51 – List-building with federal employees
9:51 – How she got into the business of divorce
13:25 – How do you target people going through divorce?
16:39 – What she hopes to focus on with marketing in 2021
18:54 – Collaborative divorce
23:03 – Working with men versus women
24:30 – Outside the box marketing strategies
30:56 – Make seminar materials and make them a course
33:06 – Time management is a big challenge
37:01 – Trying to multitask
41:05 – Being a part of a larger company versus going independent
43:50 – If you aren’t happy doing what you do every day
45:43 – Growing in the time of COVID