Transcript

Wiser Financial Advisor – Being an Entrepreneur with Trey Robinson
Hi Everyone, welcome to the Wiser Financial Advisor with Josh Nelson where we get real, we get honest and we get clear about the financial world and your money. This is Josh Nelson, founder and CEO of Keystone Financial Services. Let the financial fun begin!
Today my guest is Trey Robinson, who is the founder of Story Amplify. He is also a serial entrepreneur, and we have a lot of connections in the financial services industry. So welcome, Trey.
Trey: Thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh: We’re going to talk about entrepreneurship, your journey in the business world and supporting business owners, and your journey from the corporate world into being an entrepreneur. So tell us your background a little bit and how did you end up where you are, being the founder of Story Amplify?
Trey: Happy to do so. I’m the son of an entrepreneur. My dad has done a thousand things, lived a thousand lives. He started out when I was a kid running an 8000 acre cattle ranch in South Texas. Then the oil boom hit in the 80s and we moved to Houston. He ran tugboats, he flipped houses. He’s done a little bit of everything. And so I got that bug growing up. I didn’t mind the freedom that comes with that.
When I graduated college, I started a computer company that became a software company. We were bought by Charles Schwab in 2000. I had good success early and I was 25 years old at that point. I ended up running that division of Schwab. Went to USAA because I wanted to learn about their magic brand and why everybody loved it so much. I left there and consulted. Then Schwab asked me back. I did that and now since 2018 I’ve run my own marketing agency. We’ve got about 12 full-time employees and we service financial advisors like yourself and also a lot of startups, helping them get off the ground for everything from pitch check and funding to initial brand positioning to good market strategy.
Josh: Yeah, that’s great. The startup culture is completely different, but a lot of our clients have worked in the corporate world for most of their career. A lot of people in the tech sector, a lot of engineers, people that are very good at what they do, they’re kind of the artists in their areas, but within a company. So, making that journey out of a major tech company or other large corporation and picking up those entrepreneurial skills in the midst of that—what kind of mindset does somebody need when they’ve got the skillset to do the work and operate, but are switching into being the business owner?
Trey: There are a couple of different ways to make that jump. You can start your own idea and grow something from scratch. That’s a really varied job. I mean, you’re doing accounting, you’re making payroll, you’re setting up an LLC, you’re doing the code, you’re taking out the trash. That’s a solo entrepreneur. With that comes ultimate freedom because you’re the boss. But you go from this deep subject matter expert in corporate America to more of a Jack-of-all-trades because you’re fulfilling so many roles.
Now if you jump from corporate America into a place that employs maybe 15 or 20 people and you’re joining as a CTO to bring some discipline and some rigor around an idea, then you’re coming into a place with some resources. That’s a different role, closer to corporate America. I’s still broader for sure, but you’re not having to do it all. I think one of the things to think about as an entrepreneur or as you leave corporate America is to ask, “What’s the environment I’m looking for? Do I want to wear a bunch of hats or do I want to bring a level of expertise to a startup that needs it?” You want to find your fit.
Josh: We’ve seen that as well with clients that get recruited away to a startup when they may have been in a division of a big company. But coming back to the entrepreneurship side of things, if somebody’s exploring that, what would you start pointing them towards as far as resources to help them get their mindset right and start figuring out what they need to know to make this work.
Trey: The first thing I would say before I even get to resources is risk. If you are doing your complete own thing from scratch, there’s a lot more risk than if you’re showing up as a CTO and you can see some traction. Traction is a buzzword in the startup world, but it’s something I think goes a long way. If you’re getting recruited out of a division and you work to become a CTO or something, what successes has the company had? If they’re at the point where they’re hiring a CTO, are they showing some wins? Do you see where they’ve actually got some product market fit and some customer adoption? I think at that level if you can see those things and you’re really a scaling mechanism, your likelihood of failing goes way down compared to that “angel” idea, which is to see if you can make it from scratch. There’s a different set of things to look at and a different set of risks based on those two profiles.
Josh: Yeah, you’re right. There is a lot of risk there. The statistic I’ve seen is that only 4% of companies start from newborn and end up making it 10 years. There’s a big drop-off rate.
Trey: Absolutely. And matter of fact, I’ve heard that there’s a cliff at 2% and a cliff at 5%. And what’s interesting in my own world is that once we made it to two years, people started calling me back and asking for additional work and referring people and all of a sudden, every step we moved forward. I had to create the momentum myself, and that momentum started to roll. That’s big when you think about an established firm versus a new firm. A large brand has its own momentum. People are coming to it, they know it. It’s going to create its own momentum, its own sales.
When you’re starting off with something brand new, you have to push every sale. Every win is out of your own effort. And the middle firm is in between. They’re different environments and different risks. And if you join a place at two years, three years old, it’s really started to roll. To your point, Josh, the likelihood of failure goes down exponentially then.
Josh: You have direct experience because you left the corporate world. You had the entrepreneurship bug in you, and you made that leap. And then you’ve worked with a lot of businesses as well. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of examples of success and failure.
Trey: Well, like I said, I got lucky enough that the first place I was part of a team got bought by Schwab and there we found product market fit. There was a technology shift in the late 2000s where people could start to trade on their own. The Internet was getting big enough to handle all the data. And we happened to be in the right place, right time to be right ahead of that bubble. So timing is a big part of that.
At the same time, a good friend of mine who’d already sold to Goldman once was starting a solo 401K business. And just with the traction it was taking and what happened recently with the interest rate market, all of a sudden he was running out of funds. He sold. I don’t know how good the conditions were that he sold in, but it was a totally different market environment. So, some of it is what you do on your own. Ask yourself, “Am I hitting a new tech? Is the market pushing me?” Some of it’s about external environmental factors that may be helping you have wind at your back.
Josh: Can you share a standout success story from your career? Maybe when you worked with a startup and saw that there’d be some significant benefit from certain action—and then maybe one that didn’t go that way.
Trey: Yeah. So I was at a company called Realize and I was their fractional CMO. We started out trying to figure out how cheaply and efficiently we could get web traffic to the site. We started writing blogs. We did a lot of organic work and all of a sudden the first quarter of last year, we had 300,000 visitors to the site. You can imagine that type of traffic, that type of momentum, really helps to drive sales. They had a really good 2022 and really good first half of 2023. So, we saw some real success with that strategy there.
They’re a real estate startup, though. Then markets started to tighten, interest rates started to go up. Now, no matter how much traffic we’re getting, do we have the right products to contend with the overarching pressure of what’s happening in the market?
That’s a story of one startup that’s feeling it on both sides. Parts of the business are working really well and parts of it are feeling some real headwind with what’s happening in the interest rates. I don’t think we’ve ever seen interest rates go up as fast as they did over the last 12 to 18 months.
Josh: Yeah, it was such an extraordinary period of low interest rates, too, right before that. We’ve also never seen that before, with rates so low for so long, which created a great business environment for so many industries. And now those numbers are reversed, so the math is a lot tougher.
Trey: Yeah, I wish I happened to have some rental houses. Now I’m looking back at it wishing I would have been smarter with how to spend that low cost money.
Josh: Yeah. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people make in that initial growth phase? I know that’s your bread and butter, doing marketing growth strategies. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen people make, and how can we learn from that and avoid them?
Trey: There are a couple that really stand out to me. One is finding product market fit and really understanding the consumer needs. Unfortunately, I’ve seen startups spend a lot of money, millions of dollars in development and still be trying to get a product to market, still be trying to be different, still be trying to stand out and reach their target. So, the first thing I would say is: Go fast, fail fast. Talk to a lot of customers. Learn. And really understand, “Are we getting traction, are they liking the features? Are people buying the solution?” Because what you don’t want to do is burn through all your capital and still not have something that people love, something that works for people. The best way to figure that out is to really talk to them and listen. Understand your competition and how to be different.
Elon Musk is probably one of the most polarizing people, but when it comes to product market fit and being a marketer, he’s brilliant. Tesla is still a car, right? You know what it is, but it’s very different. It’s electric, it’s autonomous, and he listens to the consumer and then quickly builds those features into the cars to drive that quick adoption. He basically set the pace in the electric car market because he’s listening to the consumer. He knows what they care about and he’s delivering that in the product. So I would say #1 is product market fit—and do it quickly.
The second thing is your team, and trusting your team. Surrounding yourself with good people and having a team of experts and letting the experts in their own areas do their own thing. One of my favorite books came out in ‘97. It was Howard Schultz’s book, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time. Starbucks was a small startup for a while. He talks about hiring good managers, giving away control, having to change his job because he had hired experts. And now we all know Starbucks. But that’s the second thing I would say: hire good people, experts in your field, delegate down to them, set them up for success, give them measures that they have to hit, but then trust those people.
So, find product market fit and then build a team of experts and let experts be expert. I think between a product that people want and having a team that can execute, that’s what brings about consistent success across startups.
Josh: There are a lot of companies that have some success but hit a plateau for many of those same reasons—such as senior leadership not being willing to give up control, and not putting good measures into place that would be holding people accountable and or even measuring the right things. They are missing those entrepreneurial skills, especially if it’s a startup and people don’t have that background or maybe don’t have it in their DNA.
Trey: That’s right. And a lot of times the visionary entrepreneurs, the ones that have really good ideas, aren’t necessarily the operators. So at some point you’ve got to get people, and process technology, and scale up. That’s a bit of a different skillset. I saw it at Schwab with Chuck himself. Charles Schwab was a visionary who came out with the discount trades. And they had grown to a certain point, but this last run of growth has been under Walt Bettinger, and he’s an operator, right? He figured out how to take prices to zero and how to buy his biggest competition. He figured out how to squeeze every piece of efficiency out of that organization. He didn’t invent anything new; he just figured out how to operationalize it. I mean, Tim Cook and Steve Jobs is a similar conversation. Jobs was an Einstein visionary. Cook has grown the thing like crazy because he’s an operator. They’re different skillsets and you’ve got to value them both, depending on where the startup is.
Josh: Yeah. Now, how does a failure or an apparent failure set you up for later success in your life?
Trey: Yeah. How many times have I failed? One of the things that I saw at a startup is they felt like they needed a lot of infrastructure because they were worried about taking on an enterprise client. And they put a lot of their money into infrastructure processes. So, account management features, enterprise controls and those things are really great, but nobody buys on those. They buy on “Hey, how does this thing tell me what my risk is? How can this thing build folios? What’s the customer interface of this?” But the company spent so much time building the foundation that, to use a building analogy, by the time it got to putting in the nice features and faucets and granite countertops, they were out of cash.
I think that having something sexy to show and being able to demo it to a customer, making sure that you can deliver in the sales process and get that feedback loop would have allowed them to move much faster to build features that they knew people wanted. Instead, what they got was a rock solid platform. That’s hard to sell.
On my side, I’ll be honest, some of my biggest failures were on the people side of growing up. Early in my career, I felt like I had to control how people did everything and not just the results they got. I was lucky enough to go to a class taught by a guy named Marshall Goldsmith. The name of his book is What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. He talked a lot about people’s motivation and how if they’re getting results, you don’t have to micromanage every step in the process. If you try to do that, you’re going to rob them of their motivation.
For me, a lot of my failures early on in my career were trying to expect everybody to be exactly like me—to do things my way. I didn’t really give them the space to learn to fail fast in their own career, to be different, to hire a team that had different cogs and put together different personnel with different strengths. So a lot of my learning along the way was how to manage people. What makes a good individual contributor does not necessarily make a good people manager. So you’ve gotta learn through that curve. And now if you go to the people page of our website, you’ll see a very balanced team with a lot of different backgrounds. But it took me a long time to get to that point, and like I said, I think I messed up a number of projects because I just didn’t allow people to do their job the right way.
Josh: Interesting. So, shifting gears a little more to digital marketing, which is your bread and butter—that’s evolved of course, and I’m sure you get this question every day or ask yourself every day about artificial intelligence and how that’s going to be impacting digital marketing in the future. Talk about that a little and how you’ve seen it evolve and where you think things are going?
Trey: You know, I was lucky enough to start my career right as the Internet was taking off and I was young enough that I was still pliable. And I look at this AI train and say, “Well, how much of this am I going to have to master before I ride off into the sunset?” So, early in my career, everything was moving into digital—and digital is about measurement is about transparency. It was about control. That’s a really nice part of it. You can understand what you paid per impression, what you paid for each click and how many people are converting to a sale. You can start to optimize along the way. Our agency specializes in digital marketing, and one thing I love about digital is that it gives you a lot of tests and a lot of small use cases. It gives you a lot of control over the customer journey.
To your point, AI is coming in like a wrecking ball now. You have to be careful how you use it. I would say AI is a great way to help you brainstorm, come up with outlines, look for new ideas, but ultimately the decision on the final product needs to be reviewed by an expert—someone who really understands the depth. They’re the ones that can know if AI has done it right or not. And so I frequently read outlines from younger writers and I’m like, “Hey guys, you are missing this, this isn’t how it works, this product functions a little bit different.” That’s because they just don’t have the experience. And AI doesn’t either. So I think you gotta have somebody at the helm. Now, that’s going to change. AI’s going to get better and faster and quicker, and I think we’ll use it more and more. But ultimately, I still think, at least for the foreseeable future, we’ve got to have a human in the loop making sure the outputs are right and accurate, and also making sure that we understand where AI stops and starts. I mean, I wouldn’t want to give it control of my bank account just yet.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s like an airliner. Most modern airliners can fly themselves, can land themselves. But there aren’t many people that would actually get on that aircraft if there was no human pilot in the cockpit.
Trey: That’s right. Funny use case for you: I’ve got college age kids, and college age kids write papers for school. So my kids are always going to AI to say, “Hey, help me write this paragraph. How do I do this outline?” They’re using it as a tool. One of my friends’ kids is a straight A student. She’s putting her papers in ChatGPT and saying, “How would you grade this thing? Where would you give me bad scores and what would you tell me to do to improve?” To me, that is fascinating because she’s doing the work. She’s the human.
That’s just one of those use cases. To me, that is the right way. She’s now making straight A’s at A&M because she’s getting it graded before she has to turn it in. She can make changes and optimize it.
Josh: That’s my tutoring aspect. It’s amazing, especially with things like math. I was helping my middle school daughter this week. There were some math problems and she got stuck and I said, “Well, let’s put it in the ChatGPT.” It walks you all the way through. It doesn’t just give you the answer, which wouldn’t be useful at all, but it walks you through the whole thing. And so she’s able to get better as opposed to just being stuck or having to wait to talk to a teacher or something like that. So it’s a pretty powerful tool, and you’re right, it is going to get better and better.
Trey: When Google first came out, it was like having an encyclopedia. You could look it up, you could read it. You could teach yourself. ChatGPT is like having an assistant. “Hey, show me how to figure out that math problem. Show me where I messed up.” It’s definitely come a long way. And we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.
Josh: Speaking of that, if you were talking to younger pliable people that are just getting into the business world, what emerging trends should they be aware of to position themselves for growth? Especially in the midst of AI, some people see it as a threat and think it’s going to replace us all. But what would you say about that?
Trey: Well, we have this conversation a lot and we’ve got a lot of young folks at the agency. We do a lot of mentoring and coaching at the level of college and early career. So, you’ve got some choices to either embrace AI or not. One of my good buddies has a son in computer science and data science, and he’s figuring out, “How do I feed this machine and how do I use it; how do I train it; how do I be part of the AI revolution?”
I definitely think that is a path to go. And another path is those skills that AI won’t be able to replace. Sure, it’s going to help you with some investing algorithms, but the coaching and the interpersonal aspect of the job is something a computer is never going to replace. There are a bunch of jobs that are always going to go on a human in the loop. Those jobs are ones to be cognizant of as you’re planning your career. And for those of us that are caught in the middle, I’m a marketer, right? And AI is clearly already writing for us. I think you just have to embrace it and use it and learn with it to help it make you better.
Josh: This is a broad question, but for a smart, driven college student who isn’t that far off from going into the real world, what advice would you give them and what advice should they ignore?
Trey: A lot of it is coaching them on how to act in the business world and what people value. My partner has a great saying: “We want to hire motorboats, not sailboats.” I love the idea that there are still hardworking kids in the world and those kids bring a lot to the table. The idea of being proactive; the idea of leaning forward and trying to learn; the idea of always trying to help; the idea of putting yourself in your boss’s shoes and figuring out what it is you do that can make their job easier and what is it you do that makes your job harder. Many of those interpersonal skills and work ethic skills are good no matter where you transfer. With my kids and our young employees, I try to help them think about how they can add value to every situation. I read an article where Travis Kelce was interviewed in the Wall Street Journal and he said that he had a coach tell him: “Be a fountain, not a drain.” That’s a great analogy. So, try to carry a version of that forward with the young folks to challenge them to add value in every situation they’re in.
Josh: Well said. Any particular book recommendations, any podcast recommendations, things that you would point them towards as far as going down that path and starting to think about startups and being in situations where things are going to be rapidly changing? What are some of your favorite resources?
Trey: I get a newsletter every morning. I think it’s called TLD. It summarizes what’s happening in the world of AI and marketing every day. So I’m reading five or six articles every morning just to understand what’s happening in my craft and how AI is impacting it. I think that always being sharp, always finding something that can help you understand what the latest trends are is a great tool. I also listen to a lot of leadership books. You get different perspectives on leadership. And so I try to lean into something that’s leadership related, and think about where I’m at in my career, something that keeps me sharp in my specific craft every day. Maybe it’s 15 or 20 minutes. And then I try to center myself and spend a little time thinking about others and how I can do better things in the world. That’s my own personal journey there.
Josh: You’re right. You’re always learning and growing, and your aim is how to add value in any situation that you’re in. If you do that, it’s going to be hard for you not to be successful.
Trey: At the agency, we tell our teams that there’s an old proverb: To be the best, you have to put yourself last. And so I try to live that through every part of my life. But to your point, it’s about, “How do I show up to make this situation better? How do I show up and improve this for my client? How do I show up and help someone along the way?” I feel like, if you’ve got that posture, you’re making the world a better place.
Josh: Absolutely. Well then, tell us a little bit about Story Amplify, about what your company does and how people find you. What’s the best way to learn more?
Trey: I live on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn, Trey Robinson , and at www.storyamplify.com . We are a digital marketing agency. We focus on financial services fintech startups. So if you’re in those areas in the startup world, we spend a lot of time helping clients figure out their go-to-market strategy. We do a lot of brand and web work. This year we’ll talk to thousands of financial advisors on helping them improve the digital aspect of their practice and grow to the next level. And a lot of that’s just using our expertise. But yeah, if you’re a startup and you’re trying to think about what’s your go-to market strategy or how to differentiate your brand, those are places we love to help people.
Josh: Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for the conversation. It’s very interesting. And I think it’s gonna be really helpful for people that are going into the business world for the first time or maybe they’ve been in the business world, but now making that leap into startup entrepreneur phase. That’s going to be a helpful mindset for them. So thank you.
Trey: Just a great conversation.
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The opinions voiced in the Wiser Financial Advisor show with host Josh Nelson are for general information only, and are not intended to provide specific information or recommendations for any individual. To determine what may be appropriate for you, consult your attorney, accountant, financial or tax advisor prior to investing. Investment advisory services offered through Keystone Financial Services, an SEC registered investment advisory service.