Starting from scratch
Austin Hunt had spent about eight years in the industry before launching his own firm, but he did not bring a book of business with him. At the time of the interview he had just marked one year since approval for registration.
His clients span three groups: retirees making sure their assets last through a tax-efficient retirement, pre-retirees in their peak earning years, and HENRYs (high earners, not rich yet) in their late 20s and early 30s, building relationships early ahead of weddings, home purchases, and the rest.
A digital business card
As a one-person shop, Austin built his first website himself in Squarespace. "It was good. It was serviceable," he says. People who looked him up could see he was real. But website design is not his forte, and he realized he knew "0% about SEO."
It also did nothing for the business. "That's what my old website was, was just a digital business card. It wasn't doing anything for me. I never got a single appointment booked from it."
Lead generation services did not fit either. Many send the same lead to several advisors at once, so you have to call immediately, and with a full-time job to pay the bills, he did not have that time.
“I never got a single appointment booked from it.”
What he needed
The goal is to go full-time with his RIA as quickly as possible. Networking is part of that, but he wanted the website to carry its share. "I needed something that could be kind of a lead generation tool for me that would just work 24/7 in the background that I didn't have to be really that actively involved with."
WealthReach offered a professional site optimized for SEO, with AI working in the background to draw visitors toward booking a meeting.
“A lead generation tool for me that would just work 24/7 in the background.”
About a month and a half to launch
"I think total time start to finish was like maybe a month and a half," Austin says, and he is quick to add that some of that was him being slow to reply. The first meeting covered what he wanted from the site and his design ideas. One or two weeks later the first mockup arrived, and it is close to the site he has today.
He spent a couple of weeks showing it to his wife and friends before sending tweaks. "Whenever I sent those tweaks back, you guys had them updated on the website within a day or so."
The design is personal. The hero image is a photo he took in Death Valley, and the topographic theme running through the site is his metaphor for planning: a winding path, with no straight line, more about the journey than the destination.
Easy to keep moving
When Austin first logged into the platform he found six suggested posts and site changes waiting. He reviewed them and pushed them live in about 10 to 15 minutes. He has since fed in LinkedIn posts that performed well and had them turned into blog posts. "It feels like magic to watch it do its work."
His advice to a new advisor in the same position: unless website design is a passion, outsource it. "If you're a one-man shop, you need that ability to seem bigger than you actually are by using technology."