Niche advisers should demonstrate their expertise

Jeff Benjamin [00:00:03] Hey, folks, welcome to another episode of Triple Play, I’m Jeff Benjamin. We’re talking about niche advisors and we’ve got David Foster, the founder of Gateway Wealth Management in St. Louis. He he works with clients who want to donate their money. Let’s hear about it. 

David Foster [00:00:20] All right, hey, Jeff, thanks for having me today. I’ve come here to give you three tips on opening and starting and managing a niche advisory practice. I’m going to cheat a little bit, though. First is tip zero, which is choose something you’re passionate about that seems like it ought to be pretty self-evident. But if you choose a niche that you are not personally passionate about something you don’t enjoy, something you’re not going to want to get out of bed and go to the office to do every day. You’re probably not going to stick with it, and it’s probably going to show up in your meetings with your clients and prospective clients. So that’s probably not going to work. So in my case, philanthropy was something that I really cared about. And so I wanted to spend all my days talking about giving away money, right? And so that was it was an easy niche for me to choose. So under the three official tips, number one is whatever niche you choose. Become an expert in that niche you might already be an expert. A lot of people choose niches with which they’ve had experience in the past. For example, somebody might work with executives who deal with a lot of stock based compensation because that was their background. But in my case, I sought out a designation. I got the chartered advisory and philanthropy designation because I knew not only would I learn something from seeking out that designation, but it would also signal to the people that I wanted to work with that I had taken this very seriously and had actually engaged in some academic pursuits to know what the heck it is that I’m talking about, right? So that’s number one. Become an expert, whatever that means for your niche. Number two, it’s great if you have all this knowledge, but if you if nobody knows that you have this knowledge, it’s not going to do much good. So make sure to demonstrate your expertize that could be in the form of blogging or doing seminars, public speaking gigs, podcasting, like what I do, or offering videos where you demonstrate your knowledge of the topic at hand. The third tip is be patient if you’re going to try to demonstrate your expertize in a particular niche. Nobody’s going to know that you’re an expert in that niche overnight, even if you’re doing all this work to promote your expertize via your blogging or podcasting or social media or what have you. It’s just going to take time for you to become known in your niche. But if you stick with it, the results will eventually snowball. Hey, thanks for having me. I hope that all that information was helpful. 

Jeff Benjamin [00:02:45] OK, folks, thanks for watching. That was Triple Play. And I’m Jeff Benjamin. If you want to talk to me about your niche practice, find me on Twitter @BenjiWriter.