Helping advisors build their businesses

You could say a crisis led William Huston to become an entrepreneur. At 19, he decided to open online telemarketing centers in the Philippines after reading The 4-Hour Work Week. His father had just been admitted for a fourth major surgery, and it just so happened that in Georgia, students who took a year off to work could qualify for in-state tuition. Being from Alabama and knowing full well that his brother and sister would be going to college right after him, Huston figured it was worth the year’s break to save on the tuition.

Turns out the federal government’s retirement benefits were managed out of the state, and Huston found himself calling for major insurance companies like New York Life, MetLife, and Mass Mutual.

In 2017, New York Life asked him to support one of the investments it had made into a startup that provided “robo-advice.” Huston assigned eight telemarketers to help the startup scale, only to find the following year that the startup had reached $500 million in AUM and raised more than $20 million in funding. 

Huston couldn’t believe it. Up to that point, he had no idea how effective his team was for clients. 

“I got paid about a hundred grand on that deal. They likely walked away with $3 million or so in annually recurring revenue,” he says. “The very next question I asked myself was, ‘How much does it cost to start an investment firm?’ And that’s how Bay Street [Capital Holdings] was born.

“I thought we’d scale around the same pace as some of the clients our team supported back in the day, but we tried a whole bunch of stuff that just didn't work.”

“I would say more than anything, compared to our peers, Bay Street is more like a sophisticated marketing company that just so happens to be in financial services,” Huston adds. “For every one million impressions, we get about 25,000 clicks a month, and about 100 meeting requests. From there, our call center qualifies the leads and schedules them for our advisors. For us, we’re just relying on the law of large numbers to build our business. We know for every one million impressions, we can expect $1 to $2 million in new AUM.”

It’s at this intersection between financial planning and market advertising that Bay Street found its niche. Most of its marketing and branding is done out of Africa, El Salvador, and the Philippines, and Huston says those teams are perfectly poised to help investors in the current environment.

“There are tons of roll-ups happening,” he says. “I think that’s the way the industry will continue to trend because it’s super competitive, and most small firms just can’t compete or scale. Running an RIA requires a different skill set than being a good investor. Often, those two skill sets don’t overlap. And when they do, it is even more rare to find someone who is also an excellent marketer.”

Huston stopped short of providing blanket advice to all advisors, but did suggest that Black-owned RIAs trust the data. Black founders got only 0.48 percent of all venture dollars in 2023, about $661 million out of $136 billion, the lowest portion in recent years.

“My controversial advice, based on 20 years of building businesses, to both Black entrepreneurs and Black fund managers, is to stop relying on money from VCs and institutions based in or biased to the US,” Huston says. “Ignoring the harsh reality around these statistics or having a bit of hubris and attempting to be the exception will likely be a big waste of your time. Most importantly, don’t give up.”