How lucky are we to get to work with such great clients every day? We just get so excited that we can’t wait to showcase new sites that go live! Recently, we caught up with Tracy Gale, Co-Founder, Principal & Managing Director of Gold Canyon Financial Planning. Interested in finding out about how the process went? Keep reading to find out more!
We’d love to kick this off by learning more about the story behind Gold Canyon Financial Planning. How did you get your start?
Diane and I met in 1995 while working for AT&T. Our twenty plus years in corporate America (Diane 23 years and Tracy 20 years) convinced us of how women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community are marginalized.
In 2001 we were both given the opportunity to retire early. For us, this was an exciting time because we felt it was an opportunity to do something that would make a difference in people’s lives. The process of evaluating our talents, what type of work we each enjoyed, and research into industries that would improve people’s lives led us to start our Financial Planning business. The financial services industry lacks empathy and leaves many behind – typically serving the highest net worth clients with a focus on sales and investments and does not involve all aspects of a person’s situation and personal life. This is especially true for people in minority groups. Women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community have been left out of or underrepresented in traditional financial planning advice. In fact, today, only about 23% of advisors are women. We started our business in September 2001.
We know that previously you struggled with making changes on your website, so you wanted a platform that was more intuitive to use. How has working with Twenty Over Ten helped to make things easier?
Our new website recently went live. Two days after we were live, I noticed I needed to change the file name of our white paper and replace it. Since I’m on a learning curve with working on your platform I sent an email to support to ask how I could quickly replace our white paper, and Kristin replied with a detailed message giving me step by step instructions. I found that not only was working on your platform very intuitive, but support (Kristin) was awesome.
A strong call-to-action (CTA) is everything on an advisor site. How do you go about choosing your CTAs and how have they helped with your lead generation?
It is important that our website generates leads for us – which our last website did not do – and since many websites offer an eBook or a white paper, we wanted to test the use of a CTA with our own white paper. Using Calendly is new to us too, which we hope will be a tool that appeals to potential clients.
Catering to a niche is such a great way to do your best work and dedicate yourself to a certain group. As females in the financial services industry, you cater specifically to the LGBTQ community. What has been the most rewarding part of working with this particular niche and how did you get started working with this group?
Diane and I have been a couple for 23 years now, so catering to our niche clientele was organic, and our business has grown primarily through referrals. Currently, 80% of our clients are Lesbians – we would like to tap into others in the LGBTQ community, 10% of our clients are non-LGBTQ women – we would like to increase that, and 10% of our clients are traditional couples and families. We strongly believe that women and the LGBTQ community are greatly underserved in the financial services space. Since we share common challenges, our clients are very comfortable with us and in sharing their lives and unique financial situations. Many of our clients have turned into rewarding friendships, and it is equally rewarding helping our clients achieve their financial goals. We love all our clients, regardless of what demographics they fall in.
We love your love for dogs and that you’ve shared that passion on your website! Animals always tug on the heartstrings. How did you go about deciding to put your furry friends on your new website?
We wanted our website to really convey who we are – our pets and our love of animals is a large part of who we are, additionally, we enjoy landing on websites that have pictures and stories of pets/animals.
We see you’re integrating a lot of helpful tools on your new site such as TD Ameritrade and Calendly. How have these tools made things easier for your business as a whole?
These are new tools for us, so that is yet to be seen.
We love hearing feedback from our clients so we can work to improve ourselves. If you could have changed anything about the website design process, what would it be?
The website design process was great. I wanted a one-time pop-up CTA offering our white paper and was told that Twenty Over Ten no longer offered it, that I would have to go to a third party – that was my only disappointment.
If you could give one piece of advice to other advisors looking to redesign their website, what would it be?
We spent a tremendous amount of time thoughtfully considering the image and message we wanted to convey that would resonate with our niche market. The advice I would offer is, to be honest with who you are and the value you offer to your clients – know your niche market.
How has the redesign of your website made working with your clients and prospects simpler? Is this something you would recommend to others?
Well, we haven’t seen the impact yet, but we are optimistic that we will generate leads with our new website. I would definitely recommend other to Twenty Over Ten.
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