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#94 - Revolutionizing Financial Advising: Insights from Shane Sideris on Building a Niche Marketplace · Only Fee-Only

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: How's it going everybody?
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Only Fee Only podcast and, as always, thanks for being here.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Today we're talking to Shane Sedaris, who is the co-founder at Nectarine, and it was so cool to learn about this marketplace of advice-only financial advisors who offer their services by the hour.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: So this is phenomenal for somebody that's not ready to engage on an annual basis or doesn't want to do AUM or doesn't want to pay somebody continuously throughout the year, year after year, and they're able to talk to these people about hey, am I going to be able to retire?
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: What should my strategy be?
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: What are the types of insurance that I should be buying for my age?
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: And they do a great job and it's growing like crazy and you're going to hear a lot about that in this episode.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: So enjoy this episode with Shane Sedaris on the Only Fee Only podcast.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: What's up everyone?
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: I'm Peter Travalo.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: How's it going today, brock?
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Feeling good man, Happy to be here with you, buddy.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Likewise and today really excited to have on Shane Sedaris.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: He's the co-founder of Nectarine and also has his own RIA Synchronous Wealth Advisors.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: So, shane, welcome to the show man.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: I feel like I've listened to this show a bunch of times, so it feels epic to be a guest on it.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Yes, love to hear it.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: And as we continue to have more and more people on, it's cool to see how some advisors this is what made them take the leap of faith to maybe start their own RIA.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: So it's been cool.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: We're coming up on 100 episodes now actually.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: So Brock's talked to people when they were in college still, and now you know they're out and about, so it's really cool and thank you so much for saying that.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: That's awesome.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: So for those who don't know who Shane is, just you want to give a quick kind of elevator pitch of who you are and what you're currently doing at Nectarine and at Synchronous.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: Yep, absolutely All right.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: So who am I?
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: I spent eight years at BlackRock.
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: I started there straight out of college, lived in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: I left BlackRock in 2021.
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: And, with an old college roommate of mine, we started a tax-focused financial planning firm, and that's Synchronous.
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: He's a CPA, so very much everything we do is centered around tax.
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: We primarily serve business owners and real estate investors pretty much the people that have the most tax complexity in their life.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: Outside of that, when I left BlackRock, I also joined an organization called Personal Finance Club.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: It's an Instagram account that creates daily infographics on the basics of index investing.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: And the last thing that I did also that you touched on Nectarine is probably the thing I'm most excited about right now, but with the two others at Personal Finance Club, we launched an REA called Nectarine.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: It's an advice-only marketplace that helps people find a financial advisor to get all their questions answered.
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: What we found through Personal Finance Club is we would always get questions all day long from the followers.
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: We didn't have a great place to send them to, so we thought why not just build this thing?
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: And we launched Nectarine officially about six months ago.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: I love it.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: That's exciting, exciting man yeah, that's.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: That's super cool arms gosh, go ahead, pete, we're doing.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: We're doing the thing where we talk over each other every day yeah, we love it.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: Um, so let's talk about, like you're at blackrock, like what were you, what was the day-to-day there, and then when did you kind of find this fee-only landscape?
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: So I spent a while at BlackRock and it was in a number of different gigs there, but at the end I was a product strategist.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: I would talk primarily with retirement clients so think 401k type plans and help them understand all the different solutions that BlackRock offered Everything from target date funds to active funds to everything in between.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: I loved BlackRock and I had no intention of leaving.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: With that said, the college roommate that I ultimately started my firm with.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: He was running a large, successful CPA practice in LA and a lot of his clients would come to him and say can you also help me with my investments and can you also help me with financial planning?
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: And he would say, no, I just don't know that stuff that well.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: So he would refer them out to other financial advisors and he would always talk to me and say, at some point, do you want to join me and actually build out a financial planning firm in-house so we can have tax and financial planning sitting right next to each other, and I love the idea.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: I just didn't want to leave BlackRock.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: But then one thing led to another.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: It was during the pandemic and I was like you know what, now is as good of a time as any, so I left there.
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: I launched it With that said, like 99.9% of people, I had no real understanding of what fee only was Like In the BlackRock world when I first started there in 2013,.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: A lot of the advisors we served were either commission-based or slowly transferring away from commission-based and moving to fee-based, and these are all the broker-dealers and the wirehouses out there.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: So I loosely knew what fee-only was, but I didn't understand it nearly enough.
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: So we launched our firm.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: I wish I found this podcast about four years ago, even though I don't even think it was around back then, but we launched it and we went through a number of transitions early on, from AUM-based pricing to flat fee about four months later, and that's where we ultimately settled on.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: That's awesome, man.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's so many things that go into it.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: And we all kind of find our introduction to the fee-only space.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: I remember when I thought I was going to get out of the industry completely and Peter came to me and he's like I have this idea, I think we can work with these fee-only planners, and I'm like, oh, awesome man, what is that?
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: I had no idea.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: So it's, it was like funny when you kind of come to the realization that this is a thing which, back for me, it was, you know, 2019 or whatever it was, but that's really cool.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: So did synchronous, you know, doing really well with that.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: But now we've got this new, this new baby, this awesome thing, nectarine.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: So tell us, tell us a little bit more about that, because that's super cool what you have going on there.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I love Nectarine it's.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: I think it is.
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: It's super exciting to see how far we can take it, but if we take a step back.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: So we found people would ask us these questions all the time.
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: They'd come to us and they'd say can you help us figure out how we can invest for our daughter or how we can look at these insurance policies we have?
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: Should we keep them, should we not keep them?
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: And if you take a step back, we thought about where we could send these people.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: And, generally speaking, if you think about the financial advisory world, the two of you and all of your listeners know it very well.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: On one end of the spectrum they're the strip mall financial advisors where, if you go to any of them, like guaranteed, you're going to walk out of there with some sort of a product you don't need, whether it's an insurance policy, whether it's an A-share mutual fund or anything like that.
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: So that's not a great place for these people to go.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: The biggest part of the industry by far are all the wire houses, so that's where they want to gather your assets and provide you with financial advice.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: Maybe that works for some.
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: For most people, the wire houses won't even talk with them, because they probably don't have a million dollars in liquid net worth.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: So that's out completely.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: And even if they had that, probably not the best solution either.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: Then there's the world that we all know very well, the RIA world.
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: The problem with this world is it's incredibly fragmented.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: It's really hard for the consumer to know what's a good rea, what the service model they should look for, what pricing model they should look for, and on top of all that, there are some incredibly good reas and there's some really bad reas, and it's really hard for the end consumer to differentiate what's what.
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: So our whole goal, like when we first set out with nectarine, we were trying to answer the question very simply of how do we help a consumer find a good financial advisor, and that's it.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: What we did is, when we launched nectarine, we decided to decided to make it as simple as possible and only launch one service model.
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: So the only service model that we offered initially was a one-hour consultation no strings attached, no commissions, no selling, no managing money, no, anything, just putting the consumer in the driver's seat to ask their questions and have an expert give them advice, and that's it.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: As we've gone on, what we found is that one hour session.
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: It actually goes a lot farther than we initially thought and you can get a lot done in one hour when the expectations are set on both sides that you have one hour together.
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: There's still about probably about a third of the people we serve that we can't get everything they need done in an hour and there are two solutions to that.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: One the people will book another session, so we see that happening fairly common now.
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: And two, for the people that need something more in-depth, like they need to understand a full Roth conversion ladder analysis when to do it, how to do it.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: We just launched a more in-depth financial planning option, so a more traditional one-time financial plan, but at the end of the day, we're trying to make it so it's easy for a consumer to know who to work with.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: All the advisors have reviews, so when you go on Nectarine's website, you can see right away.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: You see that person, brock, who has five stars.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: He specializes in insurance and he works with millennials and Gen Z.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: So if that is who you are, you know that you can book a meeting with him.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: You know the price, you know the service and you know what other people are saying about him too.
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: So that's Nectarine in a nutshell.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: We launched officially in February of this year.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: We've done about 1,500 client meetings in the past.
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: Call it five months, and it seems to only be increasing from here.
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: So I'm excited to see how far we can take it.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: And that's awesome.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: So how do you find your people?
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: How do you get your traffic?
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Um, I'm just so curious to hear yeah, great question.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: Um, so, like nectarines model, it only works at scale right like you can't be a nectarine and serve 50 clients a year.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: It has to be scaled way up.
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: So the entire business was started by and I think I think I told you this, uh, before we started but business was started by and I think I told you this before we started but it was started by the personal finance crew.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: So three of us.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: Personal Finance Club Instagram account has 600,000 plus very engaged followers and initially that's the only way we marketed and still to this day, I would say probably about 70% of all people are coming from Personal Finance Club, but over the last handful of months it's broadened out a bunch.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: I'd say probably about 70% of all people are coming from personal finance club, but over the last handful of months it's broadened out a bunch.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: So a lot of people are finding us through a podcast they listen to and I would say the most common way recently, which is super exciting to see, is since we have served a thousand plus clients.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: All of those clients are very vocally supportive of Nectarine too, and if you go on different facebook groups, on twitter, on reddit, on any place like that, it seems like almost every time someone asks a question like I need to find a good advisor that can help me with xyz, there's a former nectarene client that will jump in the comments right away and say make sure you check out nectarene.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: So when people sign up for Nectarine in the intake form, we ask at the bottom how did you hear from us?
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: And we see a lot more things that say Facebook, group, reddit, twitter, a friend, a family member.
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: And I love that because I think to sustain this model, it has to broaden out a bunch and, more than anything, it shows that we're doing right by the consumers and they tend to like what we're offering shows that we're doing right by the consumers and they tend to like what we're offering.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the amazing part about that, shane, is that, like, say that you've had 1500 meetings right now, right, say that literally only 500 of those people go out and are like, shout you guys out, right, but then each one of those people three or four people book a meeting.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Now you're already back to that 1500 number again, right, and that's just speaking of like the 1500 that you guys have already had since February, which is incredible that you've already had that much traction.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's just in.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Like, the people that you're really looking for are kind of people that are getting introduced to personal finance, right, they might not need an ongoing advisor, but they definitely do need to figure out some things about what they have going on for the unique situation, and this is a great introduction into that.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: So, when it comes to the advisors that you guys are working with, like, can people sign up to be a part of Nectarine and work with Nectarine, or like, what does that look like on that side for people that might be interested, if you're even doing that?
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so on the Nectarine website any advisor can go and submit an application to be part of Nectarine.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: We have had a ton of interest, which I love We've had.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: I think at this point about 250 advisor applications and every advisor goes through the same process.
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: So first we vet all applications and we see if they would be a good fit, and then all the advisors go through an hour-long interview.
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: We have again 20 advisors today, so we don't need a huge volume.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: We try to balance out the supply of advisors with the demand that we have, so to create a liquid marketplace.
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: And when we first started we had five advisors for a few months.
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: Then we scaled it up to I think it was 11 advisors for a few months and now we're at 20.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: So I think we'll stay at 20 for probably about the next few months and if we continue growing at the pace we are growing at, we'll bring on another call it 10 or so, but we interview all of them.
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: It's an hour long interview and then at this point we're in a very fortunate position because we can be fairly picky with who we bring on and we have a long wait list too of advisors we interviewed that we will bring on in the next wave.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: So any advisor that wants to be part of Nectarine reach out to me or submit an application on our website.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: It might be at least a few months before you can join, but I think it's a great place for any of the advisors, because all of them almost all of them run their own firms today too and they're doing nectarean meetings in their spare capacity.
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: What we found is they tend to like nectarean a lot, so they want more client meetings.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: They want more demand because it's their fun meetings and it's probably a relatively simple way to make a little side income too.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'd say, just thinking off the top of my head, brock, right, I mean, we hear advisors all the time content marketing Twitter.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: We see some advisors doing YouTube, but I haven't really heard people getting leads off Instagram and it makes so much sense.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: It's just you know, I just haven't seen it really come to fruition.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, like we a BC Brokerage Instagram, but nothing is going on over there.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: So I'd say props to you for being kind of like the first one.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: We've heard that and it makes great sense because you look at other products that are being drop shipped off Instagram.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: And now that I'm saying that I'm probably going to get a bunch of ads once when I get off this podcast, but yeah, that's so interesting.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: So, like your marketing is very cool and I see on your website for the financial planning that you use Thomas Coleman's one pager and that you've used Trayton for the website and stuff.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: But like you've got really good style and branding.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: Like, just like, what are your general thoughts with marketing?
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: And like knowing what you know now, like you know you've built an RIA.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: You're helping other RIAs with their lead gen right and matching it.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Like, what are your general thoughts?
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: And advisor marketing?
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: And like what are your biggest tips and where do you see it going?
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: Well, first shout out to Trayton.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: So you're right, trayton built the synchronous website.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: I think he's probably the best at building advisor websites by a mile, so I got.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: I was fortunate to meet him a few years ago and he was the first person that built our site, and we've kept it ever since.
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: When I think about marketing in general and to address your comment, too, about Instagram, first off, it sounds relatively simple, like, oh, we're getting a bunch of leads from Instagram.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: That's amazing.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: What you don't see is Jeremy Schneider, who started Personal Finance Club.
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: He launched this thing about four years ago and he's literally created an infographic almost every single day about investing, and each one of those infographics takes somewhere between three and eight hours to make.
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: So by no means was this a snap your fingers, create a couple of cool reels and get thousands of clients coming your way.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: It's four years of hard work.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: 90% of it was him, so it definitely was a grind to get here, but I think at the end of the day, if you enjoy this stuff, it's not that hard to do.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: As far as what to do with marketing, I think it's the same stuff that everyone always says, but you need to first figure out who you serve and how you serve them and speak very specifically to them.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: I think it's hard to grow from zero unless you know exactly who you're targeting.
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: And once you know who you're targeting, you just keep speaking directly to them and be very, very consistent with it.
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: What I see all the time happen is people will say, like I really want to grow on YouTube, like I really want a YouTube channel.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: And then you ask them like, oh, what are you doing so far on YouTube?
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: And they're like, oh, I don't know, I haven't started yet, but it seems like something I need to do.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: So I think the biggest thing is just start.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: Throw the spaghetti on the wall.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Be really, really bad in the beginning.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: Like you must be in a place where you look back at your early posts and be totally embarrassed by it.
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: If you're not, you waited way too long and you should have started a long time ago.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: So I think like my only advice to anyone would be start now, be bad at it and keep doing it every single day and learn from your mistakes.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean that's.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: I started laughing because that rings way too true.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: I like, if I have the audacity to scroll back to what we were doing when we first started creating content, I'm like, oh, that's cringy.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's even more cringy, okay, the further I go back.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: But you know what?
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: There's something to building that muscle and practicing and getting in the habit.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Now, like, if I don't post something one day, I'm like this feels weird.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: I have to throw something out there, like it has to happen.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: So that's part of it too, right.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: But no, I mean, like even the website's incredible is incredible.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: In Nectarine you guys have over 1500 people that you've met with.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: You have over 4.95 stars.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: You can do the one hour engagement, which is fantastic, but you guys also have this eight week program for the 2,500 bucks.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: So talk to us about the eight week program.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: And then I guess maybe, how that contrasts to if someone likes, if someone has a one hour session with one of the advisors at Nectarine and wants to work with their personal practice, versus the eight week solution.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Like how are you guys all balancing that over there and how is that dynamic working with with the 20 advisors that you guys have so far?
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: So we so Nectarine is.
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: It's specifically not a lead generation platform, and we don't allow the advisors on the Nectarine platform to like backdoor clients into their own firm.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: And the main reason we wanted to do that is there are a number of lead gen platforms out there today, some of which are great, some of which are not so great, and the problem with all of those is it's one big sales cycle for the consumer.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: So, from start to finish, the consumer is getting sold on something.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: We want to strip all that away and say that we sell nothing, and the easiest way to make sure that happens is to not allow the advisors to try to sell the consumers on their own firm, whether it's managing their money, whether it's upselling them on a service that they offer.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: So all engagements have to be done through Nectarine.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: With that said, we have made exceptions.
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: If we ever think a consumer can be better served by an advisor, by all means we never try to get in the way of that relationship.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: The eight-week program that was launched mostly just by consumer demand.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: There are a lot of consumers that said we love this, but we need help with retirement planning.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: We actually need someone to analyze our situation and tell us what we can and can't do, and it's really hard to do that in just one hour.
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: And we just launched that about two days ago, so that's fresh on the website very, very recently and we're just soft launching it right now to see how it goes and we'll iterate a bunch from here.
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: But we think we'll have a lot of demand for that and we might end up launching other similar type of services for people that maybe are more complex or less complex.
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: But for now we're just trying to keep it simple and have some sort of an offering to make sure we address the people that have a little bit more complexities than what we can do in one hour.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Well, it's really nice because one of the things that I like is if you would have asked Peter and I a few years ago like now we work when I have a financial planner and we have a financial planner, we have somebody that we work with with taxes, like all of that's on an ongoing basis.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: But if you would have asked us, you know, a few years ago, that eight week service would have been like perfect for us because we could get everything up and running.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: We're in a right spot.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: So I think that that thing's going to go really far.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: So I think that's a beautiful idea, because for people that are just beyond kind of the regular one hour and need a little bit more than that, that eight hour is going to be a no brainer, or that eight weeks is going to be a no brainer.
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: And we always try to put the consumer in the driver's seat so they can self-select whatever they want to do.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: If they have a couple of quick questions, by all means book the hour.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: We'll never sell you on the eight-week program, but if they know that they need a little bit more than eight weeks is perfect, very cool.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Um, and I also see on the bottom of the website you guys have an adb.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: So what's, what's actually like the setup of nectarine?
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: And I mean, are you like?
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: I mean I guess you guys are an ria right.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: We are an SEC registered REA.
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: So when we first launched, we launched as and this is probably more stuff that your advisors will appreciate a ton, but most people have no idea what any of this means.
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: But when we first launched, we launched as an SEC registered firm under the internet only exemption.
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: So with that said, we didn't take on any clients ourselves.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: All we served as is a marketplace where we matched clients with advisors, so the actual client was a client of the advisory firm.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: We moved away from that fairly early on for a couple of reasons.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: The biggest reason was the advisors are mostly state registered.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: So we ran up against a lot of state limitations with the de minimis exemption and a lot of the good advisors that were in high demand tapped out of states like California, New York, florida right away.
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: So what we did a handful of months ago is we went through the exercise of actually moving away from being just internet only and being fully SEC registered and then registering all of the advisors under Nectarine.
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: So they no longer are doing the engagements under their own firm but they're doing advisors under Nectarine.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: So they no longer are doing the engagements under their own firm but they're doing them through Nectarine.
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: That allowed us to do.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: I guess it was really two main things.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: One no more state limitations, so any advisor can serve unlimited clients in every state, which is great.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: And the second thing too, which is a big driver of why we moved away.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: But the second thing was some is a big driver of why we moved away.
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: But the second thing was some states don't allow advisors to show reviews.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: The sec does allow it, as long as you follow the sec marketing rule.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: So now all the advisors on nectarine are able to show their reviews, which we've learned from consumers.
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: That means a ton to them and that tends to be how they pick who they want to work with.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: So we are an an REA and all the advisors have now are registered or registering under us.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's insane how, for the longest time, advisors couldn't have reviews.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: You know, I mean I feel like if any profession should have it, it should definitely be.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: You know, financial advisors.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: I mean like I don't know if there's a Yelp section for it, but I mean it's just kind of crazy, but it's cool to see that nectarines being a solution there for it.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: So I mean, you guys just started right.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: You said February of this year.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: So four months, Like I know it's very early, but what's like the 510 year goal witharine?
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, where are you trying to become Like?
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: Are you trying to just continue to grow organically?
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Are you trying to do partnerships?
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Like?
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: What are you guys thinking going forward?
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: We soft launched in 2023.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: So we first like we're quietly marketing, very quietly promoting Nectarine the end of last year.
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: Then we officially launched it February of this year.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: Where we go from here, I think it's very much TBD, like the only thing we want to do is scale this thing up and always listen to what the consumer wants.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: So every time we feel the consumer needs something we don't offer, we will build that thing out.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: Like the biggest thing that we don't offer right now is any form of ongoing relationship.
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: It's like we very explicitly put the consumer in the driver's seat and they come to us when they need us.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: If we get enough feedback from consumers that they actually want someone always at their disposal, they want a membership model, they want something like that, we probably will launch that.
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: We, I think we're always asking like we were always always asking the consumers and doing what we call market validation interviews to make sure we figure out what they want and we can build it when we go.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: I have no idea, because I think if you asked me four months ago, would we be in this exact position today?
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: I would say, heck, no, like no chance we can grow this fast.
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: So, I think, like the only thing we want to do is market this thing, scale this thing and serve every consumer, every advisor, at the best we possibly can.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: So consumers love it and advisors love it.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: I think if we can get those things right, we'll be amazing, and I think if we don't do those things right, you'll never hear of us again in a few years from now.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the thing that I like about it is I'm trying to think back and obviously I've known different people that have launched different things and that have reached out to us.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: That kind of have the find your advisor type thing going on.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: But the thing that I like about you guys is that one hour engagement is really setting you apart and as you scroll through the website and you see the reviews, every advisor has nearly five stars.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: You're always going to have one person or two people that are maybe like I don't know if I got something, but for the vast majority of people, you scroll through and you can see the impact that this is already having, which is absolutely fantastic.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: I was looking through some.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: I recognize some of the advisors Max Pashman, some other people but it's really cool kind of the way that you guys are doing this and I think it even takes that fiduciary word or the F word, whatever you want to call it to the next level, because it's really like there's no strings attached.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: This is not a shortcut to try to get you to become our client.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: We're going to get you here on the front end and then pull you back and have you pay for an ongoing service.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: This is really a what you see is what you get platform, and the evidence and the proof is in the pudding, because you guys are seriously getting some traction here, so it's, it's so cool, man, like I haven't seen anything like this, and that that's one of the things.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: That's so neat is is, in a way, it really seems like you guys have struck some gold here.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: Thank you, I appreciate that.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: That was a beautiful nectarine pitch.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: I think the the the five star thing is interesting because most of the advisors have five stars or right around five stars.
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: The thing I'll say is it's probably partially because we interviewed all of them, we handpicked them, we made sure they were very, very good.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: At some point we might think about how we can differentiate that even more, because right now it's the majority are clustered right around there.
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: It's good because most consumers, I think they look at that, they say, all right, all these advisors are clearly great at what they do, so now I can figure out who can serve me the best.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: So we have the ability for you to filter and figure out what the advisor's expertise is and who they work with the best, and then select that way.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: So I think right now most consumers are actually like figuring out who knows what they need help with the best and working like that, and at some point down the road we might think about how we can differentiate the all the five stars a little bit better.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Narrow it down in a different way right.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like what would be some other filters you would potentially use in the future, like to make it more robust.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: What are clients looking for?
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: right now is variable pricing.
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: So right now every engagement is $150 for one hour.
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: But what happens if we actually have the advisor set the price and some advisors have told us they would go lower, they want more meetings, they would go a little bit lower.
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: Other advisors that have a lot of demand they might go higher.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: So that would help advisors differentiate themselves a little bit better too.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: The other thing, which I don't think we're going to do there are a lot of metrics behind the scenes that you can track.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: You can track how many reviews an advisor is getting per number of meetings they do, how many rebookings an advisor is getting, and things along those lines, and that gives very rich data too to show how much consumers like an advisor, and that might give an opportunity to differentiate the advisors a bit too and actually somehow forming that into an overall rating.
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: I don't think we'll do that anytime soon, but those are the things that we talk about if they need to happen at some point.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: But I feel like consumers right now we don't get the feedback too often that we don't know who to pick.
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: It seems like they generally narrow it down right away to a few people that can serve their niche the best, and then they pick one of them and go for it.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: When you were saying that you know, the website actually came to mind when you start talking about filtering.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: Things is like an Upwork or a Fiverr.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Like because instead of just, yeah, the one hour now you can, okay, I want a financial professional one hour consultation with someone based in California that works on equity comp for technology companies, right, and like, as you guys go, you can kind of do that and and you know, if somebody wants to charge X amount or someone can charge lower because they want that more demand, it's.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: It's really neat because there's so many different ways that you can go with this.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: And you know one of the things that I think, peter I'm speaking for Peter as well but that we've learned from building BC brokerages if you listen to the people that you're serving, good things will happen.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Right, and we've always told advisors tear us apart, like, respectfully, please build us back up after you tear us apart, but tell us the things that you're not liking that we're doing and tell us the things that you think are great that we're doing.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: So I don't think there's any way that this is going to fail and, based on the evidence that you guys have so far, I see this thing going to the moon.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Anything else that you want to share about it, shane, that we're not asking you.
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: I think we covered all the main points.
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: I am like I'm super excited about nectarine.
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: I think that when I think about, like, the end consumer, my hope is they have a lot more choices like nectarine in the future.
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: Like we've talked about some words on this podcast already, but, like the word fiduciary was mentioned, like I don't even know what that means.
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: No consumer knows what it means.
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: I was just thinking about it because one person came to us the other day and they had a whole life insurance policy they didn't need.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: They had a bunch of structured notes they definitely didn't need.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: They had an annuity they didn't need.
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: And then I was like what is even happening right now?
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: And they said, but our fiduciary sold it to us and I was like, all right, that sums up everything.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: So my hope is that Nectarine is the start and we're not a one-off firm but there are a lot of others that do something similar to us, because, at the end of the day, the more things like Nectarine that exist, the better for the consumer and this entire industry.
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: It needs to move far away from where it has been.
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: A lot of REAs are doing an incredible job, but they don't have nearly the brand presence that they should have.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: So as more firms like Nectarine and others can start to make a lot more headlines, I think it'll help lift all those others up too, and a lot more consumers will know what words to search for when they're looking for whoever they want to work with.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: So I hope it's the beginning.
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: I'm excited for it, and we'll see how far we can get.
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: Well, we will definitely be keeping an eye on you, but but then others know where to follow along too.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: What's the best place to follow you, shane, but also Nectarine to follow me.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: I am my full name, shane Sedaris, on most platforms.
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: On Instagram, I'm moneywithshane, personal finance club at personal finance club on Instagram and Nectarine is hello Nectarine on Instagram.
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: Check us out anywhere.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: I think the best place to find me would be probably Instagram and send me a DM anytime.
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: If you want to talk Advisors, we would love to work with you.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: Let us know and consumers, you know where to go.
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: Check out Nectarine.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: Love it, man.
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for your time.
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: Thank you, Peter.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Thank.