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RECORDING COMMENCES:

Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor your clients want to tell their friends about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we’ll be talking with Ted Jenkin, who’s Social Media Ninja and co-CEO of oXYGen Financial. We’ll talk a little bit about Ted’s background running a large network of financial advisors and how he left that to start oXYGen with a partner. We’ll talk about how they created a special niche to attract X/Y gen clients. It got to the point where people were calling them because of the unique experience they had put together.

We’ll also talk about how that experience began attracting people outside of that target market and talk a little bit about how that niche can transcend target market. We’ll talk about the role of social media and how being yourself can help attract clients. We’ll talk about how oXYGen’s breadth of financial advice is a core part of their offering and how that helps separate them from other firms as well. There’s a lot of really good advice. Ted has thought really hard about this and come up with a lot of really creative strategies that have worked very well, sometimes through trial and error. I think you’ll really enjoy our conversation. And now, Ted Jenkin.

Steve Wershing:
Ted Jenkin, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

Ted Jenkin:
Well, thanks for having me on today.

Steve Wershing:
You know, we were really excited to talk with you because oXYGen is a brand that I mention a lot to people as a great example of a niche, a great example of how to do something different. Your tagline is, breathe easier. Can you tell is a little bit about what’s different about your experience, and what’s unique about working with oXYGen?

Ted Jenkin:
Well, we certainly don’t like to be called financial advisors.  oXYGen Financial, the last five letters are XYGen, I wrapped an O to it and this how the name oXYGen actually came to be. And, we tagged our slogan basically, on breathe easier. Our financial advisors are actually called private CFOs, and what we do is really position ourselves so that our clients are the CEO of their family finances and we’re that CFO that’s by their side.

Julie Littlechild:
Your niche that you work with, obviously, XY Gen is in your tagline. But, is that your exclusive focus? Or, how would you describe your target audience?

Ted Jenkin:
I would say that’s our target audience but it’s been the most bizarre thing because as gen Xers are aging, what’s interesting is, your mid-age gen Xer is 45 years old. We’re actually getting referred to a lot of 70-year-olds because the kids who carry the strength in the family now are actually telling their parents to get away from the big wirehouses and come with an independent firm like ours. We would have never said that we would deal with a lot of 70-year-olds but we’re getting a lot more of them de facto as the kids are sort of taking over mom and dad’s finances.

Steve Wershing:
What I love about that is, it’s a great example – one of the things that I’ve been working on lately is helping advisors understand the difference between a target market and a niche, and that the niche is the experience. The niche is all of that stuff that helps clients breathe easier, and the uniqueness of your locations that we’ll talk about in a little bit, and all of those things. While you aimed it at that XY gen target market, there are people who are attracted to that niche who don’t necessarily fit that target market, and that’s one of the wonderful things about niche being different than target. Can you tell us a little bit about what your experience was in starting to attract people to that niche that were outside of the X/Y gen target?

Ted Jenkin:
You know, what’s so interesting to me, and I would have never said this but a lot of 70-year-olds need a place to go. [Laughter] What’s really funny about it is that our offices, several of them are retail offices. It looks like a Starbucks. They have a window bar in it and we have the espresso machine and we serve Yoo-hoo and Sunkist and TAB and there’s TV and there are rooms where people can get some work done. There are a lot of the older clients that just like the idea – many years ago, they used to drop by the bank because they had nothing else to do. But, banks are all stuffy today.

I think a lot of those older clients – I would never had said this by the way, when we started – they just like the idea of coming in and saying hi to our staff, shaking our hand and sort of shooting the breeze for a few minutes and going on their way. It’s interesting how that neighborhood model, much like Starbucks has done in the coffee business, actually is impactful and meaningful for those older clients.

Steve Wershing:
It’s interesting that you mention that because I’ve had the experience of going into one of the branches of my local bank a few times over the past year and it’s like a ghost town. I can’t imagine going there, sitting there and hoping to interact with anybody because it’s empty. Everybody’s doing it over the Internet I suppose, or through the ATM. Just like Starbucks went from vending coffee into making an experience built around coffee, it sounds like you’re making an experience that’s built around the financial advice, but as a separate thing unto itself.

Ted Jenkin:
I think that’s true. The fact is, and I would say this openly on this broadcast today, I don’t believe anybody has such a better money management solution anymore and we really all have access to the same products out there. If you don’t differentiate on service or advice or experience, how is your business going to be better? I have a bank account with one of my companies at Chase. I walked into a Chase branch because they’ve built a lot of them. This is not a knock on Chase at all, but when I went in there, all I was thinking to myself is, I wonder if they have a bowl with some Dum Dums lollipops in there. [Laughter] That’s all I was thinking to myself is, I wonder if I can get one of those little Dum Dums lollipops because that’s what I felt like it was. It didn’t feel comfortable to me and those kinds of branch experiences, I think, are going to get worse and worse. Not what clients are looking for.

Julie Littlechild:
You mentioned the whole physical space and being Starbucks-esque. What are some of the other components of the experience that you would say are particularly tailored to your target, or part of that niche?

Ted Jenkin:
Well, I think for sure that you can’t underestimate several things. One is, you want to have a high-touch, high-tech relationship. We’re a big e-money user and whether the people use e-money or not, if you aren’t really the central aggregator of a client’s life I think it’s problematic. I don’t know how you can advise if you’re not aggregating everything. By that, I don’t just mean giving advice on 401K and IRAs. We give advice on frequent flyer miles, and that’s important. People can acquire five or six programs and they don’t know what they’re doing. Having that kind of experience is important. Speed-to-response is really important. I demand 24-hour turnaround time via email for everybody in my company. I could care less if it’s the weekend.

That may be a reason not to work for oXYGen Financial, but I’m going to tell you for a gen X, gen Y person, speed-to-response is actually just as important as the quality of the advice. I kid you not on this. If it’s 8:00 on a Sunday night and you respond at 9:00 that could be more valuable than better advice that was delivered 12 hours later. I’m serious about that.

Steve Wershing:
And, that of course could backfire on you. How do you manage that? If my son, who’s 24, were dealing with a company he figures he can text them and get a text five minutes later. But, obviously, that would put a really unreasonable demand on your staff. How do you manage those expectations with clients?

Ted Jenkin:
Obviously with things like text, we’ve got certain compliance issues around what we can and can’t do. You’ve got to share the guidelines, the regulatory compliance guidelines, with clients. But, as far as my staff is concerned, we’ve got multiple people on every client relationship. This speaks to your question around experience. We’re one of the few companies that sends out a comprehensive welcome kit when you become a client. Nobody gets that stuff anymore, along with a handwritten thank you note, and it clearly says who’s on the staff and how to get in touch with people. And, if you can’t get in touch with one person here’s another person.

I’ve never asked my staff to work 20 hours a day. What I asked my staff to be is available. And, I’m telling you that I think this is going to become a wider expectation, not just among X generation but definitely a 24-year-old, they expect speedy response and that’s just as important as you being able to deliver comprehensive advice, it is. So, it is what it is. You grow your company how you want. I’m demanding of that, and that’s why we got 188 referral clients last year.

Steve Wershing:
How many households to start with?

Ted Jenkin:
What’s that?

Steve Wershing:
Like, 188 based on how many households you had just before that, what’s the proportion there?

Ted Jenkin:
It’s about 1,200 households.

Ted Jenkin:
Okay.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s amazing.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, that’s great.

Ted Jenkin:
It’s only going to get better this year. We’re off to a great start this year already. The clients refer, not over return, okay? It’s the wrong way to go about doing it, and certainly advice is paramount. You have to be good at it. But, their sentimental attachment to the brand is really what’s important. Once people get stuck with brand, look at what happens with companies like Amazon. People don’t even know why they click the button anymore, they just know they got Happy Ville with the package coming in the mail every day. We demand – the way that we present the brand is always presented in that experienced fashion.

Julie Littlechild:
I’m interested in, we do research every year with investors. I began to notice that when we asked investors if they had referred, that younger investors seem to be referring more. Is that your experience and do you think it’s for the reason that you just said, because of the brand connection? Or, do you think they just refer differently?

Ted Jenkin:
What I notice now is that there’s a paradigm shift in how the referral comes to you. Because we’re in that younger generation, the reason they refer more is that they’re much more willing to make virtual referrals. The older referral process is, you ask value questions, you give clients some cards or maybe they go home and they talk to somebody. With the way that social media is and just electronic communication, those younger clients are much more willing, and it’s much easier to make a virtual introduction, no harm and no foul. We see a lot of that.

Steve Wershing:
Tell us what one of those looks like. How does somebody make an electronic referral?

Ted Jenkin:
Well, the way that we would do it proactively is, if you use something like LinkedIn, in every profile there’s something called a share button and it’s very easy for somebody to share your profile, put somebody else’s name at the top and basically say, hey Ted, get to know Rebecca. Rebecca, get to know Ted. Ted’s my financial advisor. I don’t know if you guys will have a reason to do business or not, but I think the two of you would get to like each other. It’s just a simple email like that and younger people are willing to do that all day long.

Steve Wershing:
And, is that something that you have a strategy for encouraging, or is it something that just organically happens?

Ted Jenkin:
No, we have a strategy of how we encourage it in the firm. But, on a natural basis a lot of the referrals we get at oXYGen don’t happen via a call-in. They happen from either people hitting the website and it says referred by Joe so-and-so. Or, it basically has a referral and they’ll say, Ted, get to know Duncan. Duncan, get to know Ted. We used to both work together at CNN. I think you guys would like each other. So, it doesn’t say we have to do business but, I’ll forward you guys a whole bunch of these and you’ll be blown away by what people write about. Right after we finish the broadcast I’ll forward you a bunch that just black out the names. You can publish them, it’s amazing.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s great, yeah. We can put that in the show notes if we can black those out.

Ted Jenkin:
Amazing.

Steve Wershing:
Let’s back up a little bit. Can you tell us how you and Kyle came up with this idea in the first place?

Ted Jenkin:
I was at IDS Financial Services turned American Express. My last job at American Express, I was managing 800 financial advisors. American Express came to be Ameriprise. It’s all a fine institution, but most of the large institutions were interested and contained to manufacture products, and then distribute them through their sales people. And, they were interested in focusing in on the baby boomers. I had read a book called Blue Ocean Strategies and I thought, gosh if everybody’s going to go after this golden age of financial planning of retirees and baby boomers – yeah, I know everyone says that people at my age and younger don’t have any money, but if I just work with them for the next 20 years they will have a lot of money.

I was actually at a Chick-Fil-A, and I have XY Gen scratched on the back of a napkin. I start doodling on it and the doodle turned into an O, and I was like, hey, I wonder if Oprah owns Oxygen Financial. Then I’m like, all right, turns out Oprah didn’t own it and we were able to trademark it. At the time, back in 2007, everybody said, you guys are stupid. Why do you want to work with people that have no money?

Most of the good advisors in this business that you talk to, they didn’t start out with million-dollar clients. They started out with a bunch of younger clients that didn’t have as much money and they’ve grown with them. They weren’t bringing in million-dollar accounts when they started in the business. What’s happening to us now is that the average age of our client is probably 45, in that nature. We’re starting to run into some heavy-duty money because these people in their late 40’s and early 50’s, they’ve got money. They’re not broke.

Steve Wershing:
Right, and it recalls Wayne Gretzky’s great advice of skating to where the puck is going to be as opposed to skating at it where it is now.

Ted Jenkin:
Right, and as you guys know, it’s evolved. You’ve got big organizations like the XPYN Network now that I think all evolved out of what we originally created.

Julie Littlechild:
I was wondering if I could ask you a bit more about the social media. You talked about virtual introductions and it seems clear that as you were evolving this brand, social media would be an important component of it. I think on your site, it says you’re the Social Media Ninja, have I got that right? Yeah, oh yeah.

Ted Jenkin:
That’s right.

Julie Littlechild:
So Ninja, tell me about that role. I’d love to know more about, really, the strategy around social media.

Ted Jenkin:
Let’s talk about the 10,000-foot view. I’ll give you three pieces of this because I built all this from scratch, I never hired a PR firm, and I never had a social media coach. I basically did it the good old fashioned way, banged my head up against a wall until I figured out what I was doing. I was convinced 10 years ago, and I’m still convinced today, especially after this recent election, that the media is so impactful in how consumers make decisions that your absence in the media will eventually make your firm absent. So, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get quoted in newspapers and magazines.

Ultimately by doing the social media, I’m able to write a column now for The Wall Street Journal. I go on every Saturday or Sunday to CNN Headline News as their personal finance expert, and when you go on these programs it’s not like your phone rings off with 20 people. But over time it has a material effect on how clients view your firm because no matter what people want to say, clients want to be with people who are successful. Or, at least in their mind, they perceive them to be successful. And, they want to refer people to companies they believe to be successful. So, having a media presence on that part of social media is very important. People are very influenced on what they see. When you repurpose those TV shows on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, they’re very influenced by what they see.

Two, you’ve got to be able to deliver free content out there to prove your worth. I knew nothing about blogging. I don’t remember if it was six or seven years ago. I went to the first, what’s called the FinCon Conference. This is like the financial bloggers conference. The thing’s really blown up the last couple of years. The first one that I went to, I’m asking all sorts of people, hey, what firm do you work for? Someone was like, what firm? I run a blog called Mr. Money Moustache. I’m like, what the hell are you talking about?

Julie Littlechild:
I just heard about that in the last couple of weeks.

Ted Jenkin:
Well, I met Mr. Money Moustache.

Julie Littlechild:
I thought somebody was punking me on a survey.

Ted Jenkin:
I realized that what happened was, people were actually making a career blogging and I said, I’m not the best writer in the world but I’m just going to start writing articles. I committed to writing three articles a week and basically for five years in a row, I wrote three articles a week. It got me 25,000 subscribers to my blog and when people would look at my name on the Internet they could find all these articles. It increases your organic rank with Google. You’ve got to have content out there because you know when people get referred to you, they are going to Google you. If what’s up there between images and videos and news is not highly visibly to quickly influence them to think you’re actually good, they might not even ever call you. They just may never call you.

The last piece of this now is that I’ve created some automated software because it was too time-consuming to do it by hand to constantly post at a high, rapid pace on all platforms. This is not a different strategy than marketing has been for 50 years. It’s all about repetition and frequency. It’s the same thing with social media. If you have lots of repetition and frequency you’re going to be in front of people when they’re at a buying decision. If you post once a month nobody cares. That’s what we’re doing right now.

Steve Wershing:
That all keeps you in-front of people. One of the things I was struck by, and you can tell me whether this has changed with oXYGen. At least early on, one of the things that separated you from other advisors is the character of your firm. I got the distinct impression looking at your site and looking at the stuff that was out there about you, you projected a fundamentally different personality that, this is not your dad’s private bank, kind of thing, you and Kyle in funny costumes and doing funny things. What role did that play in helping create that niche and attract people to the firm?

Ted Jenkin:
Well, it hasn’t changed much. A few weeks ago, we did the mannequin challenge, which I think we got 2,000 or 3,000 views on there. Unfortunately, I think there were bottles of whisky and I think when we played the mannequin song, they forgot to delete the profanity in it. Here’s the thing, my attitude is this. The universe is large and not everybody wants to do business with us, and we don’t want to do business with everybody. We are the way that we are. I’m an off-color, odd personality and so is Kyle and we say what we say. If you really don’t like that, you don’t like our humor and you think that makes us too jokester-ish to invest $1 million with us, then we’re the wrong company and that’s okay.

We put ourselves out there to be who we are. We’re serious about our business but we do like to clown around, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think that’s ever going to change about us. I’m building a $22,000 studio right now in our new location, and 100% I’m going to carry on that same way.

Julie Littlechild:
So, a video studio you’re creating?

Ted Jenkin:
I’m using something called a Tricaster Studio and I’m going to build out, like a two-shot studio so I can do more interviews with CNBC and stuff like that. But, as I create sets and other types of programming, I’ve got a podcast I’m starting soon called The Money Ref. That’s going to be a lot of fun where I’m going to let two, like husband and wives come on and duke out their financial concerns in-front of me.

Julie Littlechild:
Can I sign up for that?

Ted Jenkin:
You know, because no one wants to say it. In the X and Y generation, we’re like part financial advisor, part therapist. That’s kind of what it is. I have no doubt in my mind that we’ll create content like that.

Julie Littlechild:
You’ve touched on this, but maybe I can just ask it a bit more explicitly. When you look forward and you look at gen Z or whatever we’re going to call this next cohort coming up, what do you see is going to be fundamentally different? Or, what do you assume or think will be different about the way that we build this experience?

Ted Jenkin:
Well, I think advice and experience are going to be the two ace cards. Certainly, service matters. Products are going to mean nothing. I don’t think a client can make any distinction anymore between one fund and another. And, I think you’re going to have to learn how to market successfully through the phone. The last couple of years, I’ve been using a one-way texting solution.

I actually own a code and basically, you can text keywords to that number and I have different responses that I give back to you, and I can drip text you. I think the marketing is going to get even larger through the phone. It’s funny, if you ask somebody who their best friend is they’ll give you a name, but the truth is it’s their phone. Nobody wants to say it but you almost sleep with that baby every night. It’s there in the morning, it’s in your pocket, it’s next to you in the car. So, that’s where all of this in my mind, the next five to ten years, all going to head into the phone.

Julie Littlechild:
I’ve done that with Lead Pages. Is that who you use or someone else?

Ted Jenkin:
No, I built my own solution off of Text Wire. If you take 89800, 8-9-8-0-0 and you text the word Ted to it, you’ll see an example of the mobile business card. And then, I built a piece of software. I’ve done this in a compliant way now where you can do one-way texting, and then I can shoot out e-books or messages. I think that if you think about where email was 20 years ago, everybody wanted to check their email. Now, everybody is fighting to the death to open their email. Texting is at the beginning stage of that right now, for marketing.

Julie Littlechild:
You do some work with advisors as well. Aren’t you training advisors on some of the work that they need to be doing?

Ted Jenkin:
I was never planning to get into this, and I had a few advisors that had seen oXYGen stuff and asked me if I would do some coaching and I thought, god I got back into practice to get out of management, not into management. I ended up creating a program called The Social Media Black Book and yeah, I’ve probably had 3,000 advisors go through the program now. I’ve created a whole training course on what to do. It’s not very expensive, it’s kind of something that’s been fun.

Steve Wershing:
And, what kind of things do advisors learn on there?

Ted Jenkin:
Well, I’ve tried to teach them the nuts and bolts about how to use LinkedIn and Facebook, and if they’re doing Twitter or blogging to basically generate more leads. I’m showing them the simple things, from how to optimize their profile, to how to use query searches to get more in-service distributions, to figuring out how to make the Facebook page effective to generate more leads. What’s amazing, I really feel for advisors, I have to tell you, because they’re always being approached by these SEO people and people that build websites. Advisors don’t really know the lingo, so more often than not, they get ripped off and pay $10,000 for a website that doesn’t do anything. People are like, “Oh, you’ve have a great website and you’re getting tons of people to come” but you’re not getting any leads. Yeah, I feel for advisors, that’s partly why I do it. Because we’re getting hit up by people all the time and a lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Steve Wershing:       
What do you think are the top couple of things that advisors should know about what their website needs to do to be effective for them? If they’re getting these websites done, they spend a lot of money and they’re not working, what kinds of things should be on that website to make it effective?

Ted Jenkin:  
I think there are probably three or four things, but I would highlight it like this: at least once every advisor that’s listening to this should try and have somebody explain their Google Analytics to them. One of the first questions I would ask myself is what’s my bounce rate. The bounce rate for advisors that are listening just says if ten people came to your Home page, how many people leave your website without going to any other pages? If people are just coming to the Home page and leaving, then maybe your website didn’t do what it was supposed to do.

Two, I would be asking myself how many leads did I get. Even if you got 10,000 people that came to your website, obviously, the website may aesthetically look beautiful, but I would rather have a lousy looking website that generates leads than an aesthetically beautiful website that generates nothing. If your web people say, you’ve got a great website, what does that really mean? Does it look great or do you want a website that actually does something. I think you’re going to see advisors start to matriculate to, yeah, I know this looks real pretty and I have colors and the images look good, but what does my website do if it doesn’t generate leads.

Page views are important and learning what I call to be your Tree Maps. It won’t take you long if you have a decent web person to actually walk you through that if people are looking at three or four pages, what are the pages that people are looking at the most. Maybe you want to shuffle how your pages are presented on your website because you have some pages you thought looked really good, but nobody looks at them. And, you have some pages that you thought nobody would look at, but people look at a lot. I think if you look at those kinds of things, you’ll start thinking more about conversion than you just do around pure beauty of your website.

Steve Wershing:       
What are some of the things that an advisor would put on a Home page that would get a visitor to go deeper into the site?

Ted Jenkin:
I’m glad you asked that. My number one thing for advisors is I would say, just look at Amazon. Amazon’s a really horribly awful looking website, but it’s actually the best website I’ve ever seen to get you to buy crap. What I would be telling most advisors, is think picture and buttons and forget about words. Think pictures and buttons and forget about words. Nobody reads anymore. I’m serious. If people read more than a paragraph, that’s a lot.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Interesting. Buttons that might do things like what?

Ted Jenkin:
Get a free eBook. Download the complimentary budget sheet. Get your ten-page free estate planning guide. Those kinds of buttons that say, “Demo This” “Learn More” “Look Now.” I don’t know what the word is called, so I’m just going to make it up and say it’s clicky-itis because this is the way it is today. The good sites get people to start clicking button and it basically lulls people into a trance and then they just buy stuff.

Julie Littlechild:
What you’re talking about here would apply no matter what the niche, right? I mean whether somebody was targeting young people or dentists, these same things apply more and more to all users, right?

Ted Jenkin:
Yeah. If your website has the long paragraph that’s just like, “We at Johnson and Smith, since 1862. . .” Nobody’s readying that and nobody wants to see you and your cronies in front of a glass cabinet and a big mahogany board room. Nobody wants to see that stuff, nobody cares. What you want to do is get people there. And, by the way, if you notice the really good technology websites today that sell software, they’re all very storyboard driven. Low words, high pictures, lots of buttons for call to action. Advisors do not think that way.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. It’s a good point. Whether it be smartphones or responsive websites or clicky-itis, or whatever it is.

Ted Jenkin:
Do I get credit for that word?

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. I’ll submit it to Webster’s myself. What do you think is going to be the next big thing in the next few years? What do you think the big things are that advisors should keep their eyes on in terms of attracting clients?

Ted Jenkin:
I’m glad you asked that. Again, this is just my opinion, I’m just one marketer that’s out there. But the reason I’m building I’m $22,000 studio, is I’m 100% convinced that text is here and it’s coming, then after that, everything is going to stream and short-form mobile content. I really believe what you’re going to see me do a lot more next year is live streams, I wouldn’t even call them TV shows, they’ll just be live streams of stuff. Then, I’m going to create short-form, mobile videos that people would see in places like Facebook. It’s like, how do you explain a 401k rollover in 28 seconds and do it with pictures? You see what I’m saying? It’s got to be that way, like, okay, I don’t really have time for all this stuff and you asked that question about Gen Z, it’s like my attention span is worse than ADHD, so explain it to me in 20 seconds. I think if you can’t do that in the future, it’s going to be difficult to compete. It’s is. It’s going to be tough.

Steve Wershing:
We’re coming up on time here and there’s a lot of really great stuff. But first, before I ask where people can find you, is there anything else that we should be asking you? Obviously, you’ve got a really good sense of what’s going on out there and how to effectively market. What kinds of things did we not ask that advisors should know?

Ted Jenkin:
I just think that for an advisor that’s got a very mature practice, that has clients that are 65 to 70, there’s no shame in building a division two. If you aren’t proactively building something for your younger clients that’s cost affordable, I think that you’re going to have jeopardy in selling your practice and keeping those clients. I think you’ll ultimately hurt the value of your business. Don’t assume that they all don’t have any money. It’s a good segment.

Steve Wershing:
Let me ask you this too, you’ve been addressing some of the things that established firms should do differently if they want to keep up with things, what about the people who are just starting firms? What are the big lessons to get a practice off the ground before you burn through all of your savings?

Ted Jenkins:
It’s tough. The commission world is going away today. I think it’s going to be tougher to start a practice. I would go very low cost on my overhead. I would recognize the fact that you can market anywhere in the United States now and that a lot of these younger clients don’t even care if they meet face-to-face. I think it’s about the model, like I said. It’s about the experience and if you can provide that, you could do okay. But, I think it’s going to be tougher. I think younger advisors might want to try to apprentice in with a firm for a couple of years before they do it. Because I think starting one solo from scratch when you’re young, it’s going to be tough.

Steve Wershing:
Sure. What is the one thing you would recommend to advisors that they do to get their clients talking more about them.

Ted Jenkin:
I would say for most people, hopefully you like who you are. If you do, then that’s exactly what you should allow to shine through your social media. We’ve been taught for many years that you never discuss politics with clients, you never discuss religion. What social media is all about is being social, it’s not being financial, it’s about being social. You’ve got to be who you are and be good with that because they’re going to find out one way or another. The quicker you get at it, I think the quicker you’ll have success.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, great point. Look, I know we’re just coming up on time, where can folks find you Ted?

Ted Jenkin:
If you go to Oxygenfinancial.net and click on my face in the About Us section that’s an easy way to do it. Or, you can go to Ditchthenametag.com if you just want to talk social media stuff. It’s called Ditchthenametag.com. Either way it’s not hard to find me on the internet.

Steve Wershing:
Ted, thanks so much for joining us, there’s a lot of great stuff here and you’ve been so creative in developing and promoting oXYGen. We really appreciate you sharing some of your wisdom with us. I would encourage all the listeners to go to Ditch the Name Tag or to oXYGen Financial because you guys have a lot of really interesting stuff going on, a lot of things that advisors could learn from. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Ted Jenkin:
Thank you, guys.

Julie Littlechild:
Thank you.

Steve Wershing:
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really helps. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths that Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. Until next time, so long.