The firm
Atlantis Financial is based in Barrie, Ontario, about an hour north of Toronto. Allan Norman works with clients who are close to retirement or recently retired, along with corporate business owners.
He also writes for a national newspaper, the Financial Post, and for MoneySense — which generated a steady stream of readers who wanted to know more about him.
Two false starts
Allan is unusually blunt about where he began. "I was never a believer in websites. I just thought it was something you had to have and didn't do much for you."
The original site reflected that. "I got it ten years ago. I told somebody, here's $1,000, build me a website. And they did. And it looked like a $1,000 website." The problem was the mismatch: people would read a byline in a national paper, look him up, and land somewhere that undercut it. "There was a disconnect between people reading my articles and then coming and looking at a cheap site."
About three years ago he tried to fix it. He hired someone who seemed strong, and got roughly $25,000 into the project before pulling the plug. "It just wasn't going anywhere. The whole process just kept dragging out. I just couldn't see the end of it." He fell back to the cheap route, and that did not get any traction either.
“I got into it for about $25,000 and it just wasn't going anywhere. So I had to pull the plug on that one.”
The moment it became urgent
What changed his mind was not a marketing pitch. It was prospects telling him how they had found him.
"A couple of people had told me they were looking for a financial adviser, and they asked AI, who's a reputable financial planner — and they were given my name," he says. "So that started me thinking, okay, I've got to pay attention to this stuff and do something about it."
He found WealthReach through a Canadian newsletter writer who covers AI, followed the link, and later listened to a podcast episode with one of the founders. "I just want to be on the leading edge of AI, because I think it's here and I don't want to be catching up."
“They asked AI, who's a reputable financial planner — and they were given my name.”
Live in about a month
Given the previous experience, Allan over-prepared. Before sending anything over, he worked through his own thinking with AI to organize what he wanted the site to say, then passed that along as the brief.
"The onboarding actually, it was good. I would say probably within a month I had the site up and running." Against a redesign that consumed $25,000 and never shipped, that is the comparison that matters.
The reception has been its own signal. Another advisor, struggling with his own site and planning to defer it to next year, saw Allan's and emailed to ask who built it.
The numbers, two months in
Allan came to the interview having done his own homework. He pulled his Google Analytics back to March — before he was even considering a change — and compared it with the most recent 30 days.
"Everything's up 100%," he says. Across the board, on a site that had been live for only a couple of months. "This is why I've got the site, and this is only after a couple of months."
“Almost 100% improvement, if not more, on everything.”
The blogging changed how he works
The part Allan volunteers most enthusiastically is the content workflow, and it starts in client meetings. When a client raises something, he goes into the dashboard and asks whether it would make a good post. Sometimes the answer is no. "It'll tell me, yeah, that's a good idea — or no, there's not that many people searching, don't bother doing that blog."
When it is worth writing, the system drafts it and then finds his own back catalogue. "It searches out the other articles that I've written in the past and it says, I can link that article to this blog. So it's making use of all the past work that I've done." Publishing is one click once compliance has approved.
He is also alert to the thing most advisors worry about. "When you put it into AI and you get something back, you can almost tell — it reads like AI. I found when I put it into your system, it doesn't read like it was written by AI. It reads well."
What actually shifted
The most interesting outcome is behavioural. Allan now keeps Google Analytics on his phone and checks it. He has started asking clients for Google reviews, something he never used to do. He cleaned up his Google Business profile.
"What I found is it's more than just a website that I'm getting," he says. "It's kind of belief that it works. Because I believe it's working and I'm excited about it, I'm putting effort into it. But I want to put the effort in, because it's good."