At Twenty Over Ten, we feel lucky to work with so many amazing financial advisors to help them develop a site they love. When sites go live, we jump at the opportunity to sit down and hear about how each step of the process was for our clients! Recently, we caught up with Les Watson, Managing Director of YellowWood Wealth Management. Want to hear what he has to say about the web development process? Keep reading to find out!
Tell us about your journey in starting YellowWood Wealth Solutions.
I’ve been in the business 17 years and quite honestly, the big banks feel like they own the clients – we disagree. Big institutions were not allowing us to brand and market ourselves individually, and so we felt like we had to break away. I had an IT background, so I saw a lot of cool things going on with digital marketing and felt it would be great for our clients. We didn’t have those tools at a bigger bank, and we felt like they didn’t see what was coming or that they would embrace it. We broke away and started YellowWood and Twenty Over Ten helped us get started with it all.
We love how you’ve incorporated Robert Frost’s YellowWood poem across your site. How does this poem reflect your company’s mission and how did you decide on the name of your company?
Initially, my business partner, Jason, was excited about the idea of a tree in our branding and logo because it was a good representation of the financial services industry. He started googling and stumbled upon the Robert Frost poem and instantly felt that it spoke to what we do for clients. Clients are faced with non-stop choices. The idea of facing two paths in a yellow wood and taking the path least taken will make all the difference. We make all the difference for our clients because we help them choose the right path. It also spoke to us professionally because the road less traveled is going out on your own rather than working for one of the big shops. We try to think out of the box and work individually, which has made all of the difference for us.
Purchasing our starter kit, you collaborated with many members of our team to develop your tailored website, site copy, logo design, and SEO. What was this experience like and what would you say has been the most helpful piece as part of the kit?
For us, since we were starting out, there were a lot of moving pieces. It felt disjointed going to three or four people trying to pull it all together. It was frustrating, and we thought it wouldn’t come together. To our surprise, it did! At 52 years old, I learned that things are moving much more digitally and people don’t pick up the phone and talk anymore. Working with Twenty Over Ten was a different experience for us. We ended up with a website that is a great place to start and now we just need to leverage it to drive clients our way.
Online meeting schedulers have grown in popularity in our industry. We see your leveraging acuity’s online scheduling platform for meeting with clients. How has this tool helped your business processes and your clients?
We haven’t even used it too much yet since it’s brand new and we’ve only been in business for six weeks. It’s really new right now, but our first client came on through it!
Launching a new website is just the first step in a digital presence. What do you look forward to in working towards a new marketing strategy? What marketing plans do you have for the future? Any with Twenty Over Ten?
I have a background in marketing that goes even further than my background in financial services, so it’s something we’re definitely focusing on. Now that we’re independent, there are a lot of things we can do that we weren’t able to do before. The first was a website that is a place and destination that clients want to come to on a regular basis. At big banks, there were a lot of handed materials that made it evident that it wasn’t us speaking to our clients, it was some ghostwriter. Now, we look forward to personalizing our digital marketing to make our services relatable and individualized. We are attending webinar events for Snappy Kraken and looking to professionals to expand our marketing capabilities.
If you could give one piece of advice to advisors looking to build a new website, what would it be?
I think the obvious is don’t do it yourself. Leverage experts. Other than just creating it, you need to keep it alive to bring clients to it and keep them engaged. From digital marketing campaigns to website design, you should look for experts.
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