Episode 68: Rewind | Marketing Expert Samantha Russell of FMG on the Founder’s Journey from Bootstrap to Exit | Why Specialization is Powerful for Start-ups
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99% of fund managers are doing social media wrong. Stale and stagnate. Nobody wants that. How do you get to the 1% that stops the scroll? Put some fun back in your fund game.
Today, Samantha Russell is coming on the show to teach you how to do just that.
Not only has Samantha been named an investment news 40 under 40, a Think Advisor Luminary, and one of the top 10 individuals to watch in wealth management but she’s also holds the role of chief evangelist in a highly successful marketing agency serving a whopping 40,000 clients.
In this episode, Samantha and Stacy discuss:
Her backstory, from bootstrapping with a nonexistent marketing budget to exit
Tips for leveraging stories in your marketing to ramp up sales
The key to mastering feel-good authenticity online, in sales conversations, and beyond
…and so much more!
Authenticity isn’t always easy in a performance obsessed industry, but Samantha’s got you covered. Grab your headphones and get ready to learn from the best.
More About Samantha Russell:
Samantha Russell is the Chief Evangelist at FMG, an all-in-one marketing platform that helps more than 40,000 financial advisors and insurance agents attract new leads, stay connected with clients and grow their businesses.
In her role at FMG, Samantha teaches financial advisors how to utilize digital marketing strategies to produce exponential growth through website development, content marketing, SEO, social media and video.
Want More Help With Storytelling?
+ Subscribe to my newsletter to get a weekly email that helps you use your words to power your growth: https://www.stacyhavener.com/subscribe
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Book: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen, Samantha’s communication bible that’s actually a parenting book!
Song: U2 – A Beautiful Day
TRANSCRIPT
Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors.
Samantha Russell: [00:00:00] No matter what industry we're talking about today, the internet has given us just so many choices. What makes somebody, you know, kind of edge ahead in the race? And it usually comes down to the person if, if I'm the buyer. Or the person choose making the choice. It comes down to who do I want to work with?
Samantha Russell: Who do I wanna be emailing with? Who do I wanna have phone calls with? Who do I wanna run into at a conference? Who do I want to come to my office? And honestly, I will say, you know, it almost becomes the numbers and the performance becomes sort of table stakes. Like, okay, can you do this? Yes. Now it's Will I like you, will I like interacting with you.
Samantha Russell: And that can be really hard to demonstrate if you wait until the time you have the meeting to put your full personality on display.
Stacy Havener: Hey, my name is Stacey Haner. I'm obsessed with startups, stories, and sales. Storytelling has fueled my success as a female founder in the Toughest Boys Club, wall Street.
Stacy Havener: I've raised over 8 billion that has led to 30 billion in [00:01:00] follow-on assets for investment boutique. You could say against the odds. Yeah. Understatement. I share stories of the people behind the portfolios while teaching you how to use story to shape outcomes. It's real talk here, money, authenticity, growth, setbacks, sales and marketing are all topics we discuss.
Stacy Havener: I. Think of this as the capital raising class you wish you had in college mixed with happy hour. Pull up a seat, grab your notebook, and get ready to be inspired and challenged while you learn. This is the Billion dollar Backstory podcast.
Stacy Havener: People do business with people they know, like, and trust. Apparently that's true for podcast hosts as well because today's guest is someone I not only know, like and trust. She's someone I adore. Samantha Russell was employee number [00:02:00] one alongside her founder husband Ryan, where their team built a successful marketing agency serving financial advisors called 20 Over.
Stacy Havener: 10 in 2020. 20. Over 10 was acquired by F M G, where Samantha now serves as chief evangelist for an agency serving over 40,000 financial advisors and insurance agents with an all-in-one marketing platform. Samantha knows what it's like to bootstrap a company to do sales and marketing with no budget. She knows what it's like to build a business with her husband and also a life.
Stacy Havener: She knows what it's like to do all of that and be a parent and a caregiver. She embodies the idea that we are and not ORs. Her cutting edge thought leadership is recognized throughout the financial services industry and has led to her [00:03:00] being named an investment news 40 under 40 a Think Advisor, luminary, and a Wealth Management Top 10 to watch.
Stacy Havener: I. All of that awesome sauce, and she's got an incredibly kind heart. Pull up a chair as Sam takes us to school on how we can show up authentically to market and sell. Yes, but most importantly, to serve our clients and serve them well. Without further ado, meet my dear friend Samantha Russell. Samantha, thank you so much for being here.
Stacy Havener: This is a true joy for me. As I was saying to you in the podcast, kind of green room. I actually don't know a ton of your backstory. We've known each other forever working on stuff though, like presentations or webinars, and so I wish I had my popcorn because I know this is gonna be good. Thank you for being here.[00:04:00]
Samantha Russell: You're so, so, so sweet, and popcorn is one of my favorite snacks, so I would share the bowl with you and I'm so happy to be here too.
Stacy Havener: Good. That is great. Um, so let's start at the beginning. Let's start with some backstory. Tell us about your journey to get where you are. Is it what you always envision? Like this is where you, you know, you, what you dreamed you'd be?
Samantha Russell: You know, it's funny, I was real, like even as a kid, I've always been very go with the flow. I have not been, my dad used to joke around with me, like my, some of my siblings, I have five brothers and sisters and some of them are just so passionate about everything and he would always be like, Sam's not passionate about anything.
Samantha Russell: And after a while I was like, that's sort of hurtful. You know, like I, I have passions but I think, you know, it's funny 'cause I was just always the go with the flow kid. I never got upset. Set about most of anything. And when it came to my career as a kid, I knew grades were important to me. Pleasing the teacher was [00:05:00] important to me, doing a good job.
Samantha Russell: Like I've always wanted to be the best at what I'm doing for me, not because I'm in competition with someone else, if that makes sense. And so when I thought about what I wanted to do, I always knew I wanted to do something in business and specifically in marketing and like pr, like I loved combining the creative side with the business side.
Samantha Russell: So when I was in college, I studied organizational communication, which is a pretty boring term, which kind of encompassed all of that. And then I left there not having any clue what I would do, and I applied for a million different jobs. And my school was in southern Ohio. So a, a ton of kids that I went with were going to cities like St.
Samantha Russell: Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati. It was very like Midwest focused. Not a lot of people were going more mid-Atlantic, interestingly enough. But I had started dating my now husband at the time, and he had just taken a job at Penn State, a tenure track position, and he was like, why don't you, you [00:06:00] know, just for the heck of it.
Samantha Russell: Apply to some positions in marketing at Penn State. And so I got a job at the university doing alumni relations, which was sort of my first job there, and then quickly went into development and fundraising. And so when I used to always joke around, when I eventually then moved more into sales and you know, later.
Samantha Russell: Parts of my career was that it was the best training ever because if you can sell somebody on the idea of donating their money really for nothing, you could sell them very easily on a good product, um, that's gonna help their business. And it's so true. I learned so, so much, but no, I did not envision at all, um, having the career
Stacy Havener: path that I have now.
Stacy Havener: That's amazing. And I mean, fundraising, capital raising, hi. We are so aligned. I didn't even know we shared that in our career trajectories. Okay. So you're doing that, you and Ryan are both at Penn State. What gets you to the place of launching 20 over 10? [00:07:00] Yes. Great
Samantha Russell: question. So Ryan, my husband is a professor of graphic design at the university and he.
Samantha Russell: And another one of his business partners had, you know, a lot of other companies they would do consulting work for, and one of them was a large financial institution and they reached out to my husband and his partner to redesign their firm, like whole identity, their logo, their all their branding, their website, everything.
Samantha Russell: And at the end of the project, one of the last steps, Was to take all the individual advisors that were affiliated with this mega organization and link to their websites. And this was back in like who? 2012 maybe. I mean, it was real, it was, you know, over a decade ago, and at the time when they started doing this, Every single advisor basically had the exact same website.
Samantha Russell: It even actually would say something like, welcome to our website, where you'll find, you know, a calculator on how to do this or it. It was very generic, very, very like almost identical. [00:08:00] And so my husband asked the question to the firm, you know, well, why is this? And they said, oh, well, because of compliance it's a lot easier for us to just have everybody be the same.
Samantha Russell: And yet they were each running their own businesses. So he and his. A partner at the time thought, oh, they didn't know anything about financial services, really. They thought, easy peasy. We can create something that will, you know, allow advisors to market individually and we'll just build like a compliance portal in the background.
Samantha Russell: So, you know, they're. Naivete really benefited us because if they would've known how complicated it was going to be, they never would've done it. But, um, that's where he, they got the idea from. So I was not part of that original idea. It was just the wife listening to this at the dinner table. And for probably two or three years they worked on like a prototype.
Samantha Russell: They were beta testing it with some people working out all the different co. The kinks of what the compliance part would look like. And then when they were finally ready to launch it, [00:09:00] my husband said, well, we need somebody to run. You know, he's still teaching at Penn State. We need a point person to get this thing off the ground.
Samantha Russell: Would you consider coming on board and doing that? And I was like, yeah, I'm up for the challenge. So I came over as employee number one and I was in charge. Of everything. I was in charge of sales, marketing, actually helping advisors design their pages, write their copy. There's a million stories within there of like how to bootstrap.
Samantha Russell: 'cause we were self-funded, so I.
Stacy Havener: We'll be back in a moment after a word from our premier brand partner Ultimas Fund Solutions.
Samantha Russell: Since our founding in 1989, we believe that alternative investments are integral part of client portfolios. Unfortunately, delivering high quality hedge funds and private market exposures has always been a challenge for the wealth management industry. These type of alternative investments introduce unique [00:10:00] challenges related to taxes, qualifications, paperwork, and reporting.
Samantha Russell: As a result, high net worth investors tend to be significantly under allocated to both hedge funds and private markets relative to institutional investors.
Stacy Havener: That's Stephanie Lang, chief Investment Officer from Homrich Berg, an $11 billion R I a, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. That serves over 2,700 clients in 46 states.
Stacy Havener: You can tell they believe in helping high net worth clients, access hedge funds and other alternative investments. They're equally as passionate about broadening that access. For all their clients, not just qualified purchasers or a select group of accredited investors. Meet Nick Darsh from Ultimas with some backstory.
Stacy Havener: Berg
Samantha Russell: created a three C one fund in January, 1999 to provide their high net worth and institutional investors with ready access to a [00:11:00] diversified portfolio of hedge funds. As interest in the fund grew and the constraint of the a hundred investor rule loomed. HB began exploring ways to continue expanding the investor pool without negatively affecting existing shareholders.
Stacy Havener: We'll hear more about the creative fund conversion work that made it possible later in the show. Now, back to the program.
Stacy Havener: So I was just gonna say, as you're talking, there are so many founders who are nodding their head like me, who are like, yes, wearing all the hats, employee number one and 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Right. And I think that's super interesting. So yeah, let's talk about that because there are a lot of us who've done it and certainly, even though it's probably seems crazy like.
Stacy Havener: Fund managers do it as well, right? I mean, if you're setting up a financial advisory firm or if you're setting up a fund, if you're an investment [00:12:00] boutique, They might actually seed the fund with their own capital, cover the operating costs with their own capital, just so they can control a hundred percent of the equity.
Stacy Havener: So talk about that a little bit. What was that like for
Samantha Russell: you? You know, my husband is the smartest person I've ever met. It's one of like my favorite things about him and what I was so drawn to him when we started dating. And I will say I had so much faith in him and he's very frugal and very, very good at the business side of things.
Samantha Russell: So he took care of all of the books and making sure we would never run outta money and making good business decisions. And he basically said to me, your job is to sell this. You have no money to do it. So come up with ways to be creative. And figure it out. Budget zero. Yeah. Budget is zero for year one.
Samantha Russell: Actually, I think that's a lie. I think the very first year, maybe like the budget was $25,000 and I was like, oh, how hard this can be. I'm gonna run some [00:13:00] Google ads because when we first launched it, I should have mentioned this, it was a do it yourself website builder. We thought, oh, okay. The way people use Squarespace or Wix or any of those to make their own site.
Samantha Russell: We thought, well, advisors will wanna do this 'cause it'll save them a bunch of money. Well, obviously not many financial advisors are building their own website, so we did not know our market that well. And so the first three months we were just running Google ads, inviting people to come and build a site, and the ads were really great and we were getting a ton of clicks, but we were paying crazy amounts of money to compete.
Samantha Russell: And then once people got there, they were like, wait. I have to build this myself, forget it. And we would get inquiries all the time. You know, will we love your platform? We love the look of the websites, we love that it's compliance friendly, but will you build it for me? And we had to say no. So after three months of me draining those Google ads, that's when my husband cut me off and said, you need to figure out a different strategy and maybe we should bring on some people to do these sites.
Samantha Russell: 'cause we originally were gonna be [00:14:00] strictly SaaS, so then we had to pivot there very, very quickly. So let's
Stacy Havener: talk about that. 'cause that's super interesting to me. So, because we talk a lot about like knowing your market and beta testing, and then I also know that sometimes you just have to, like, sometimes the best beta test is just get out there and do it and let your customers tell you what they need.
Stacy Havener: So here they're, they're saying, I need you to do this for me. And that was not your original business model, but you pivoted. So that was obviously the first pivot.
Samantha Russell: Right? And I think a crucial mistake we made was that we were in our twenties, so everyone we asked in our quote unquote beta test or focus group, we asked every financial advisor or people akin to the industry that we knew, which were our peers.
Samantha Russell: So of course, young people who are in their twenties who are in this PLA marketplace, were like, sure, I'll build a site. And they had no problem doing it. But a lot of them were an associate advisor or they didn't have their own website 'cause they, you know, were part of a firm. So when it came [00:15:00] time to sell, they weren't the decision makers and their bosses or the people we were selling to.
Samantha Russell: The industry as a whole was not the type of person that was going to build it themselves. So we did not. Do a good job figuring that out, but we were able to pivot very quickly, and that's where I think it gets really interesting because I sort of had this revelation then it was about 2015 and I said, wow, if all of these folks need to market, they need to have a unique value proposition, but they're struggling with how to do any of this.
Samantha Russell: We're kind of going through the same journey. We're trying to figure out who our target market is, who our niche is, what do they look like, what are gonna be the best strategies to get in front of them. I'm just gonna document all of this while I'm doing it and figuring it out and sort of quote unquote, build it in public and take them along for the ride and be honest about what works, what doesn't work.
Samantha Russell: So that's what we started to do. I created a blog. I would, you know, write very organically. You know, I stayed up all last night [00:16:00] looking at the top trends right now in X, and here's what you should know about what kind of content is getting the most shares on social media. And then I'd post it to our blog and we would share it on our pages.
Samantha Russell: But no one was following our pages yet. So I started sort of stalking on social media. Who was everybody else paying attention to in our space? You know, who are the advisors paying attention to? And then I would. Start liking and commenting on all their posts. So then pretty quickly, you know, they're like, who is this Samantha Russell person who comments on everything that I post?
Samantha Russell: And then once I would build up a rapport with them, you know, I'd say I just, you know, published this blog post not that long ago, looking at some of these trends on X. Again, I'm not selling them anything. Uh, just adding to the conversation and. So it was very, very organic and tedious and everybody on our team, I think for a while thought I was crazy 'cause was not translating to a ton of sales at first.
Stacy Havener: Wait, can we just say that that was just like a [00:17:00] masterclass in social media that just got embedded in this story session here, because that's exactly like, it's funny how sometimes we fall into it without maybe all the intention. Around it because what you did was so brilliant. Well, thank you. You invited them into this story with you.
Stacy Havener: You went onto social media and instead of just saying, look at me, look at me, look at this post, look at what I did. You went to where they were and engaged with them, and we both know being creators, how that feels when someone comments on your post or likes something or just starts a conversation with you when you're sitting there.
Stacy Havener: Writing into the void and wondering if anyone other than crickets is paying attention. You know? So it's just so, I love everything you said, and I'm sort of putting a little pin in this part of the call because it truly is how social media should be done. Which leads me to the question at that [00:18:00] point, so when you started, you were doing websites, were you also doing social media for people?
Samantha Russell: No, we would get asked all the time, and actually again, my husband, I always say he's such a savvy businessman because he is the founder, said, we're not gonna spread ourselves too thin. We're gonna do one thing and we're gonna do it really well, but this is gonna give us a great opportunity because we have all these adjacent things people need.
Samantha Russell: To partner with the best in the industry, like we are gonna be known to be the best website provider, and let's partner with all the other consultants and industry boutique marketing firms out there. They're gonna love our websites and want to send people to us. And we actually ended up building a whole product line where it was specific to industry consultants, marketing agencies, where they could work directly with our design team.
Samantha Russell: It wasn't us talking to the client, the client talking to the agency, you know, it brought them in and we had special section of our website where they could easily get into the code via the C s s or the H T M L. [00:19:00] So my husband thought of all that and he said, but still talk about these things. 'cause this all goes together.
Samantha Russell: But then when someone asks, you know, okay. So, you just talked about this with social media. Can you do my social media for you? I could say we're gonna build you the best website possible. That's gonna pull people back in, convert the leads, get the traffic, be, you know, ready for s e o. However, when it comes to promoting it on social, we have a whole library of great content, webinars, all this stuff.
Samantha Russell: But if you really wanna hire somebody, Here's our top five partners we suggest, and then I'd make warm introductions and then they did the same for us. So that really helped us initially, you know, very much so. And a lot of the content I was doing was very specific to websites at first, because my husband is a professor of this.
Samantha Russell: He has such great knowledge and, and insights, and he was a public speaker, and so I would record some of his lectures or talks to his students and then repurpose it into content.
Stacy Havener: I mean, seriously, let's [00:20:00] pause again. I feel like I'm just like, everyone needs to pay attention to what Samantha is saying here.
Stacy Havener: The first thing you said that is so good and a lesson that I think fund managers and financial advisors need to hear loud and clear is specialized in something. One thing, like be really good at one thing before you start expanding. And I know every fund manager is probably cringing what I'm about to say here, which is can you imagine what would happen if you were like a small cap value specialist and you recommended a peer who offered.
Stacy Havener: I don't know, small cap growth, something else. Someone who you like really trusted and believed in, but like it's not what you do. I mean, that doesn't happen. I sort of question, but why? Why there's enough money. There are enough investors, there's enough ways, you know, to help these, you know, your [00:21:00] target market.
Stacy Havener: And I think what you did there was just, again, another lesson that
Samantha Russell: transcends. Yeah, and I think for sure as you get bigger, you know, there becomes a real business case for expanding and you know, absorbing more wallet share. But when you are first starting out, you don't have a big budget and you have to be scrappy.
Samantha Russell: There's so many reasons to do it, and it just makes intuitive sense and also, You have so much to prove when you're the new kid on the block because nobody knows you from Adam. And why should they trust you? So when someone's in a call with you, a sales call, and you can say, you know, I don't know the answer to that 'cause that's not my expertise, but I'm gonna tell you the best person I know to go to.
Samantha Russell: You're building trust because you're not lying to them. You're being honest. You're not taking their money in that instance. And that yes, creates trust and it's really hard. To get people to trust you when you're new. So I think that really went a long way for our early success. [00:22:00]
Stacy Havener: Okay. So you're building, you're building, so now it's like, I think you said 2015 and it's working, like you're growing.
Stacy Havener: Talk about that growth because I wanna eventually, you know, weave into sort of where you are now, but we're not gonna get there yet. I just wanna still stay with 20 over 10. So, You're doing the websites, you're gonna, as you said, as you grow, you start expanding service offering. So how many financial advisors were you helping and was there a niche for you or did it kind of just become that space was the
Samantha Russell: niche?
Samantha Russell: Yeah, so I guess too, for people who aren't familiar with 20 over 10, I should say, we were specifically a website design platform. Four financial advisors by this point. Now we had a team of designers, copywriters, a logo, designers, so soup to nuts. You could come to us and say, I want you to help me create my brand, my identity, my website online.
Samantha Russell: So this was from 2015 to 2017. Okay? We were in what we called V one, version one of our product, and. At that point, we were [00:23:00] only serving RIAs because we did not yet have a product that would come to be known as Compliance Core, which played the go between the conduit, between a broker dealer and an advisor.
Samantha Russell: So at that point, you had to have self-managed compliance. We still archived everything. We had everything you needed, but there wasn't that. Backend connection. In 2017, we launched version two of our product, which went to what we call a visual editor, where you could just point anywhere on the page and inline click.
Samantha Russell: And then we launched Compliance Core. And that's when things really took off because now we could serve any advisor with any broker dealer. And what happened was a lot of the really younger advisors who were design savvy, who were. Sort of paying attention to what was out there, would take our product to their team, their or their broker dealer, and say, we should use this.
Samantha Russell: Look at how the work really did speak for itself. It was beautifully designed websites, amazing messaging, just different than what was out there. And so it wasn't hard to sell [00:24:00] once we did get it in front of people, which was great. And one of the strategies actually that worked really well for us, that I came up with was we would get lists of advisors.
Samantha Russell: And I would send them a cold email that would say, I know what you, I just checked out your current website and saw what it looks like if I had any connection at all. So let's say they were with. You know, l p l I could say there's another L P L advisor that we recently worked with and we just, you know, took their website from this to this and I would show them through, I dunno if anybody's heard of the way back machine.
Samantha Russell: Yeah. You can look at any page of the internet at any time, a screenshot of what the website used to look like versus what it looks like now. And I'd say, you know, if you're interested in, in talking about this, let me know. That actually got a ton of meetings on the calendar 'cause it was really like a proof point, um, for folks.
Samantha Russell: So we just started building up more and more of a client base and getting those conversations, you know, with these broker dealers and bringing them on and having [00:25:00] resell agreements and all of that. And so then we quickly went from just a handful of team members to about almost 40, um, in just a few years.
Stacy Havener: That's crazy. And again, I think that example you gave about, especially with a cold email, 'cause that's super challenging. Again, all salespeople working for fund companies, financial advisors are all nodding here because they know how challenging that is. But what you did was so brilliant because you invited them into a.
Stacy Havener: Story. So you told them a story. We call these impact stories, basically like little mini case studies where you said, let me show you what the journey looks like at the end. Let me show you the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Rainbow being the story arc of how you're gonna help this hero get there.
Stacy Havener: Let me show you, let me invite you in, let me let you see yourself in this story. And then when they do that, that just. Like jumps the shark on the whole sales process because they know you've [00:26:00] made them the hero. You've shown that you're the guide and you're showing them what success looks like for them, and that is super
Samantha Russell: powerful.
Samantha Russell: You're making me think of one of my favorite quotes, which is nobody caress what you can do, but people do care what you can do for them. Yes, and I utilize that all of the time because when I was in my fundraising days at the university, Sending an email about, you know, how many students come there and have financial need and then the great need for scholarships and all of that.
Samantha Russell: Did nothing ever. It did nothing. The numbers, the stats, the facts, the figures. But the minute you just hone in on one child or student, I should say, and you know, this is Jeremy and he is trying to come to Penn State and he's, you know, been here for two years. He wants to come back a third year. He's now, unfortunately, because his father lost his job.
Samantha Russell: He is not gonna be able to attend unless he gets a scholarship. These are the types of students scholarship support. That right [00:27:00] there makes a huge difference and we wanna see, we wanna visualize the person we're helping. It's why all of those campaigns, if you remember? I feel like they, I don't know if they do it anymore 'cause I don't have cable, but I remember as a kid we would watch cable TV and on P B s.
Samantha Russell: They would have these advertisements for, for 30 cents a day, you can help this child and it would show you the kid. It wasn't just stats and figures about the need and the amount of staggering hunger. It was honing in on one person. And that always stuck with me and it stuck with me during the fundraising days.
Samantha Russell: And it really translated when I was trying to get this business, you know, off the ground and, and sell this, because I knew, if I honed into your point on. You as the buyer, what we can do for you, how we help people like you, that's going to motivate you.
Stacy Havener: Brilliant and such a good dovetail into one of my other favorite topics besides storytelling related topic, which is qualitative versus quantitative due diligence.
Stacy Havener: And I think you just hit the [00:28:00] nail on the head, you know? In our industry, because it's a numbers industry, because you know, it's sort of like math wins. We as a group tend to go towards stats and dollar signs and performance figures and all of those things, and what you're sharing with us is, Something that's not specific to marketing sales.
Stacy Havener: It's specific to human nature, which is that's not what sells. People do business with people, and qualitative is as important as quantitative, and I appreciate you bringing that in. Let's pull that thread a little because I'm sitting here looking at you with these awesome, bright blue headphones on.
Samantha Russell: They're the new style. You know, I'm influencing you all. If you want my like to Knowit link, just let me know.
Stacy Havener: And so here's what's so great about it. Well, why don't you tell everybody why do you have on these bright blue [00:29:00] headphones? Are they your faves?
Samantha Russell: Yes. Stacy, come on. I bought these intentionally for all the podcasts.
Samantha Russell: Not on, um, no, these are my five-year-old daughters. She luckily left leaves her things like all five-year-olds everywhere, so they're. Easy for me to spot because I, for all the preaching I do to my own children about not misplacing their things, misplaced my own headphones. So this is God's way of teaching me a lesson today.
Samantha Russell: And so I just had to show up with these beauties on my head.
Stacy Havener: See, but that's authenticity and everyone listening to that, especially if they have kids, can relate to the story you just told. Right? I mean, it makes us. Feel connected to you because we got a little glimpse of like the stuff, the messy middle of Samantha Russell's life.
Samantha Russell: Yeah, there's a really great marketing guru. I dunno if you've ever heard of the company Drift. You can add like a chat bot to your website with them. Yeah, his name's Dave Gerhart. I love him. [00:30:00] Okay, so he had this recommendation, especially for founders and early stage companies where you're just building and you're really trying to build connections.
Samantha Russell: Whenever he would write an email to the email list, rather than making it sound corporate, he would write it from himself and his own voice, and he would always give you a little bit of a mental picture, help you create a mental picture of what he was doing in that moment. So he might say, you know, greetings from Mexico.
Samantha Russell: I'm here with my wife on vacation, but I couldn't. You know, and she might kill me for writing this email, but I couldn't let this go by without letting you guys know about this. Or, Hey, I don't know how your day went, but I fought with my daughter about eating too much Halloween candy, you know, right. The couple days after Halloween.
Samantha Russell: But he always would add something in that helps you create a, a mental picture of who he was as a person beyond his company or his product, and. He said, you know, try it and you will be astounded by the number of replies that come back, having nothing to do with what you talked about, but just your [00:31:00] personal antidote or story.
Samantha Russell: And so I did adopt that. It really made a massive difference and so it's advice I give to the folks I work with all of the time. I. We'll be
Stacy Havener: back in a moment after a word from our premier brand partner Ultimas Fund Solutions.
Samantha Russell: When we first launched our internal fund to funds as a limited partnership, it was a great option for us to be able to provide a hundred of our accredited and qualified purchaser clients with access to a diversified portfolio of hedge fund strategies.
Samantha Russell: However, Fast forward to 2016, our firm had grown to manage over 4 billion and serve over a thousand clients of various sizes, accreditations, and tax situations. We still firmly believe that high quality hedge fund exposure is important to client portfolios. It provides stability. To client portfolios and generates a return stream that was not available in public and equity and fixed income markets.
Samantha Russell: Unfortunately, the three C [00:32:00] one structure with its slot limitations high minimums and K one reporting was no longer ideal solution for our growing and complex client base. We looked at various alternative options with third party hedge fund managers, liquid hedge mutual funds. But also discovered that we had an opportunity to register our fund with the S E C Preserve its extensive track record, and solve all of the issues that the three C one structure was creating for our business and clients.
Samantha Russell: That's when we teamed up with Ultimas to begin the process of registering our legacy fund with the S E C and converting it to a tender offer fund.
Stacy Havener: We'll hear more later in the show now. Back to the program.
Stacy Havener: I love it. And now I feel like we're flashing back to our webinar that we did on, on LinkedIn and social media. 'cause I've got another example of that that's like so underutilized and has [00:33:00] worked great, which is when you're traveling. You know, you do your away message instead of just like making it so blah boring corporate, like I am currently away from the office and da, da, da.
Stacy Havener: Like say something about where you are or what you're doing, or just something fun. Absolutely. I get so many people responding to my out of office. Like just saying, oh, like, you know, I went skiing and they're like, oh my gosh, I just got back from skiing, or whatever It is like you, the personal touch, the human element goes so far in establishing that connection of, you know, knowing, liking, and trusting someone.
Stacy Havener: And there's so many little opportunities to do it.
Samantha Russell: And when people have so many choice, which consumers do, no matter what industry we're talking about today, the internet has given us just so many choices. What makes somebody, you know, kind of edge ahead in the race? And it usually comes down to the person if, if I'm the buyer, I.
Samantha Russell: Or the person choose making [00:34:00] the choice. It comes down to who do I want to work with? Who do I wanna be emailing with? Who do I wanna have phone calls with? Who do I wanna run into at a conference? Who do I want to come to my office? And honestly, I will say, you know, it almost becomes the numbers and the performance becomes sort of table stakes.
Samantha Russell: Like, okay, can you do this? Yes. And now it's will I like you, will I like interacting with you? And that can be really hard to demonstrate if you wait until the time you have the meeting to put your full personality on display. You can do that in all these little instances through your auto office message.
Samantha Russell: Besides, I mean, that whole line, I don't have access to email. I mean, where on this planet can you go and not have access to email? Anymore. I would love to know because send me there. Go there. You can bother me.
Stacy Havener: I'm crying. Wait, now I'm laughing. So hard. I forgot what I was gonna say. That was so good,
Samantha Russell: right?
Samantha Russell: Because that's what everyone
Stacy Havener: says. Oh my gosh. It's so funny. I was chatting with a friend on LinkedIn today. She [00:35:00] had a post. Do you know Amy Vollis? No, I don't. You should follow her. You would love her. She's like a sales guru now. She helps SaaS companies hire. Salespeople. But needless to say, she did a post and it was like, where's the fun in the meetings?
Stacy Havener: Like where's the fun in your sales meetings? And I was, I had that exact thought that you said, which is nobody comes to a sales meeting, listens to like with a pitch, right. And then leaves and goes, wow. Those people were so boring and so dry, and so cold. I definitely wanna do business with them like that.
Samantha Russell: Uh, I mean, and what's interesting too is that I think whether you're a salesperson, you're a marketing person, You're an advisor. Whatever. You get focused on yourself. We're so focused on ourselves and our products, you know, let me prove to you why this is going to be the best choice for you. So I'm gonna talk all about me.
Samantha Russell: We do this, [00:36:00] we've done that. This is our performance. It's gotta be flipped. You gotta flip it, stop. The we, the i, the me and it's you, you, you. And the more it's you focused. The better. The person's gonna walk away from that meeting thinking, man, I really like that person because unfortunately that is human nature.
Samantha Russell: We like it when people are interested in us. We all wanna know that we matter and that someone caress. I'll never forget the first time I had that experience, it was when HubSpot was a brand new platform and we as a company at 20 over 10, we're going to use them on the backend to, you know, power some C R M and marketing and sales stuff.
Samantha Russell: And the woman who I worked with, I met with her seven times. And she was amazing. She asked me so many questions that about our business and in every meeting she would say things that I would've had to pay, you know, hundreds of dollars to a consultant to learn. But she was sharing it freely in the calls and I would be writing it all down.
Samantha Russell: And, you know, we were so sold because she was so incredibly helpful and [00:37:00] interesting and would make jokes in her follow-up emails she'd mention little things we talked about. And it was a masterclass in how to sell in a way that isn't
Stacy Havener: salesy. Totally. And it makes you feel like you're together on the journey.
Stacy Havener: Yes. That's a great example. And HubSpot is awesome.
Samantha Russell: They're already in your corner, like before you hire them. Yes.
Stacy Havener: So, okay, we, I think we deep dive tangent over somewhere else. I wanna come back to authenticity though, because this is a real challenge for people. Especially in our space. You know, we started with the blue headphones, but just showing up as yourself and sort of figuring out like what's the right balance of what to share and not to share, and how do you help advisors think that through?
Samantha Russell: Yeah, it definitely is a fine line and you as a person need to. Decide what you're gonna be comfortable with. I think one of the best exercises to start is to go [00:38:00] through your own social feeds and think about where do you pause and actually read or pay attention? What's getting your attention? Is it, you know, something that's super informational?
Samantha Russell: Is it a certain kind of image? Is it a personal story? And then, Save them. I'm a big proponent of a swipe file. You can actually use the hashtag and LinkedIn sam swipe file and see a ton of examples that I have, um, that I will share and save.
Stacy Havener: Oh my gosh, I didn't know
Samantha Russell: that. But create your own little swipe file.
Samantha Russell: You know, take a screenshot of it, copy and paste it into a Google Doc, even if you, you want to, and then that if, whether you're working with a marketing consultant or people on your team, you'll start to get a sense of this is what the style that we like and what I think you'll find. No matter what you end up doing is that you're going to naturally be drawn to stories, and you're going to be naturally drawn to people talking like real humans and cutting out the jargon.
Samantha Russell: And I always say write like a sixth grader could understand it because in our [00:39:00] scroll and scan society, nobody pays that much attention to every little detail. So the more you can, you know, just write. So it's easy to absorb, easy to understand. Again, don't start your social posts with I, my, or we start with you.
Samantha Russell: Uh, I can't harp on that enough. All of those things will really make you so much more relatable and if you are sharing a personal story, there are always connections in everything in life to business or what you're trying to do. And so you can bring it back in some way and make, make that connection for people.
Stacy Havener: That's great advice. Wait, I have a super silly question and I'm gonna ask it because I don't know if anyone else, because you're authentic. Yeah. And also I really need to know the answer to this, by the way. So I love the swipe file idea. I use LinkedIn not just to connect with my friends and kind of, but I use it almost like.
Stacy Havener: It's not like Google. It's different than that. Almost like Pinterest, like I save a ridiculous amount of [00:40:00] stuff on LinkedIn and I think they're that portal for them. You can't organize it. You can't do anything with it. Do you have a hack for that? Like what do you do when you see a LinkedIn post that you like?
Stacy Havener: Like how does that get put in the swipe
Samantha Russell: file? I don't, so I don't try to save it on LinkedIn. Like I said, I will screenshot it, put it in a Google Doc, and then. You know, right click and add the hyperlink so I could go back to the original post if I want, and that's how I save them. And that has worked well for me.
Samantha Russell: My team has access to it. And then I will share them on social media ones that I think would help my followers with that. Hashtag Sam swipe file. I do it on Twitter and and LinkedIn actually. Okay,
Stacy Havener: that's good. And that's the other thing, my phone is filled with screenshots and then I'm like, oh my gosh, this is just getting like unmanageable and I don't, yeah,
Samantha Russell: you need a folder.
Samantha Russell: Folder in the phone.
Stacy Havener: Okay, perfect. Sam's hacks. Okay, so I wanna come back to your story a little bit, your journey with 2010, because a few years [00:41:00] ago you actually went through an acquisition, so F M G Suite. Came in and acquired 20 over 10. And that's something that a lot of financial advisors are thinking about, finding a partner, maybe selling their business.
Stacy Havener: Certainly a lot of fund managers go through this process as well, and I was hoping you could share a little bit about that process
Samantha Russell: with us. Yeah, and I think an important thing to think about is are you building to be sold or are you building. 150 year company that you want to be at the head of forever and really, you know, that obviously might change, but for us, from day one, my husband and his other two co-founders really knew.
Samantha Russell: That they didn't wanna become the c e o of a 400 person company someday. They both have very entrepreneurial spirits and so they knew that they always wanted to build the the business to be scalable and attractive to buyers. They did that from day one when that was gonna happen though, I think it happened much earlier than any of us would've anticipated.
Samantha Russell: And [00:42:00] really what just put rocket fuel on the whole thing was the pandemic. So, We ended up going through the acquisition at the end of 2020, in March of 2020. So, you know, just nine months previous. So we talked before about, you know, being able to upsell. We launched lead Pilot, which was our version of a lead generation tool and magnet for advisors.
Samantha Russell: And so now we were going outside of just websites to providing content, lead gen, many other things, and. We obviously there's not that many competitors in the space in terms of SaaS and so we were very well aware of F M G and their capabilities and they were aware of ours. And one of the best tips I can just give to people, I mean obviously it's business, but for I.
Samantha Russell: My husband, me, and all of the people that were on the founding team of our company, the, the clients that we had developed relationships with, we were so close to, and we would've felt wrong and icky selling to somebody that we didn't think was gonna A, take good care of them, and B, take great care of our people.
Samantha Russell: [00:43:00] And so finding a good. Fit where we knew everyone would still have a job. They weren't gonna say, oh, we have all these redundancies we have to do. Cost cutting was super important to us. So those nine months from when we launched until the acquisition happened, you know, advisors everywhere. So many people who had done only seminars or they never did anything online 'cause they just had a very locally based business.
Samantha Russell: Now they can't meet with anyone in person. There is no in person anything. And they're flocking to digital solutions. So, It was just crazy for us, you know, um, straight up into the right. And so it was an attractive time to sell. It was attractive time for F M G to buy, and we had such great synergies. They have had such a long, great history in the broker dealer space.
Samantha Russell: We were really strong and heavy in the R I A space, so it just was a great, great partnership. And my favorite part was that. While I've learned so many things along the way about growing a business, my heart is [00:44:00] in teaching these strategies to other people and, you know, giving talks and speaking at events and writing op-ed pieces.
Samantha Russell: And I was able to, you know, join the team and really craft my own role, which is now the title Chief Evangelist. I think it's becoming more popular at the time. So many people were like, what the heck does. But so it was just a win-win overall, and we all left with a great feeling, which I know is not always the case with
Stacy Havener: acquisitions.
Stacy Havener: Yes, very true. And I think it speaks a little bit to that authenticity piece. Again, the idea that every business needs to have faces, hearts, souls on the company. And so I think, you know, The sort of persona and personal brand you had built at 2010 to see it continue to grow and expand. Now that you're at F M G has been awesome for all of us who know you and for all the people you serve.
Stacy Havener: Oh, [00:45:00] thank you. Yeah. Because you have been able to teach more, and I know it comes from a very true place in your heart. That is perfect. Let's segue into, now that we're talking about face and. And heart and soul here. I have some questions I wanna ask you. Okay. So this is based on Proust's questionnaire, which is a philosophical thing that says there are certain questions you can ask someone that like get you to know them.
Stacy Havener: So I've pulled some stuff from James Lipton inside the actor's studio, and I pulled some of the original questions from Pro and kind of came up with these.
Samantha Russell: Are you ready? I'm Isn't this, wasn't this always in Vanity Fair?
Stacy Havener: Yes. I think that they did a version of Pro's questionnaire too. Yes.
Samantha Russell: With celebrities.
Samantha Russell: I was a longtime Vanity Fair reader. Well, I
Stacy Havener: mean, so that's what we're doing here. It's our own, you know, celeb questionnaire with with Samantha Russell. Okay. We're gonna start with hopefully an easy one. What book inspires
Samantha Russell: you? I am such an avid reader, but [00:46:00] this is, so, this is a really hard question for me, but I would have to say, and you're gonna don't laugh.
Samantha Russell: There's a book, it's actually a, a parenting book, but it's called How to Talk. So Kids will listen and listen, so kids will talk and it is the bible for communication. It not just for parent-child relationships, but for every relationship and their every page is just like little. Pictures of a mom or a dad talking to their kid and the kid talking back like the right way and then, or how to handle the situation that would maybe go bad and then how to handle it.
Samantha Russell: That would go right. And it just teaches you so much about not being judgmental in the way you pose a question. Not giving too much information to lead someone in a certain direction, how to be a good listener. I think it is like the Bible for all communication. Yeah, so I reference it all the time.
Stacy Havener: I am ordering that.
Stacy Havener: As a mom of a six year old, I'm getting it, but also I think you're right, like those, going back to that whole idea of, you know, Tell it to me [00:47:00] like I'm in fifth grade. Like there's a lot of lessons to be learned. That's a fabulous inspirational book. Okay, let's take it from book to place. So what place inspires you?
Samantha Russell: So it's so sad 'cause right now they're going through some rebuilding, but our families like special spot is, um, Sandoval Island down in Florida, off the coast of Fort Myers. So they got hit with a really bad hurricane. So this was the first year. Over a decade that we didn't get to go. Um, but during the pandemic we had a condo right on the beach and we just, actually, the acquisition of our company happened while we were down there living in this condo, brought all of our kids, had their first dipping their toes in the sand there.
Samantha Russell: And it's actually one of the best places in the world to collect seashells because of the way the island kind of kicks out like a foot. So the shells get stuck. So if you ever want the best meditative, you know, moment of your life, Go there and just look for shells. 'cause you'll lose all track of time and just be so focused on the [00:48:00] present.
Samantha Russell: It's my husband and i's favorite place. I
Stacy Havener: love that. As an avid beach walker, I am adding this to my to-do list. That's amazing. I knew you would love it. Yes, I love that. Okay, so now. This totally works too because you give presentations. So now let's pretend you're walking out onto the stage big stadium.
Stacy Havener: You're gonna teach cheer hearts like content. You are just going to kill it on this stage, and you need to get your mind in the right place. You gotta have a walkout anthem. So what
Samantha Russell: is it? Uh, this is like super generic, but I feel like mine would be you. Two's a beautiful day. That's a great one. I think I really, really believe that if you just have gratitude, it makes life so much easier.
Samantha Russell: And so in the morning my kids and I have this little prayer that we say and it references a beautiful day. And so I try to wake up every day, think of that, and that would definitely be my walkout song.
Stacy Havener: That's so [00:49:00] inspiring. Gosh, you're making me really question my like hip hop choices here with this beautifully inspiring.
Samantha Russell: Well, Stacy, if you really wanna know the truth is all the songs that I know are either. Oldies that my parents introduced me to things from college or like the wheels on the bus, Coco Melon, because I like in music is such an important thing to so many people. It is one thing that I really, I, it's terrible to say, I am just not a music person.
Samantha Russell: I don't pay attention to what's popular. I know nothing about. What's hip or who the artists are. And so my only answers can be like oldies, unless you want me to, you know, name a Coco Melon song. But
Stacy Havener: here's the thing. I don't think that makes music any less important to you, by the way. Maybe not. No, because I know you listen to a lot of music and just because it's not like the current staff, I mean, I love music.
Stacy Havener: I have no idea who's cool. [00:50:00]
Samantha Russell: Okay, well that makes me feel better.
Stacy Havener: Yeah, no, I think you can love music and not like be up on like who's, I was gonna say top 40, but that's totally dating myself. I mean, I don't even know if the top 40 is still going. Like, we don't know. Don't call us for like what's resonating in music right now.
Stacy Havener: We don't know. Okay, here we go. What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt?
Samantha Russell: Sorry, I, I don't know the answer to this. This is difficult. I think I'm really like tempted to say teacher and teaching.
Stacy Havener: Yes. I
Samantha Russell: could see that. Just teaching in general. I think maybe it'd have to be a little bit of older kids because I think teaching, like my next door neighbor's, a kindergarten teacher, and I'm imagining myself in a room full of kindergartners all day and then coming home and still being a good parent, and I feel like.
Samantha Russell: That would be impossible. So teach our But for older children,
Stacy Havener: well, university.
Samantha Russell: Yeah. Yeah. Actually I have done university. I've given university lectures before too, so maybe it will happen.
Stacy Havener: Cool. Okay. Love it. [00:51:00] And it's kind of what you get to do today. I very much relate to that. That's super fun. Okay, flip side, what profession would you not
Samantha Russell: like to do?
Samantha Russell: I would not wanna do anything where you are. Super in the public eye, which sounds funny 'cause I know like, but I look at like true celebrities and how much people just pick them apart, you know? So an actor, a singer, you know, anything like that. Being on tv, I think that would be my worst nightmare.
Stacy Havener: I relate to that.
Stacy Havener: And I'm also, which is why, you know, we've talked about this, which is why I think you're such a brave soul for being on Twitter. Like, I'm so scared of Twitter for that exact reason. It's my own bias.
Samantha Russell: I've had some trolls, and I don't know if I told you this before, but when I was a kid I had a terrible speech impediment, a lisp, worse than ever.
Samantha Russell: And it sometimes comes out if I drink too much wine. Um, and sometimes my husband says he can still hear it, but I quit speech therapy in third [00:52:00] grade. I just was like, I can't do it anymore. What about, I'm never gonna be a public speaker, so who cares? And then, you know, now I speak at conferences all of the time and.
Samantha Russell: I think even though I'm very confident and I know myself, there's been every once in a while a video I'll post or something and someone will leave. Sort of a hurtful comment, no, you talk too fast or you slurred your words. I couldn't catch what you said. And that's just a taste of it. And of course you try to tune it out, but can you imagine being a true celebrity and having that just be your all day?
Samantha Russell: I feel like it would just be really hard.
Stacy Havener: Thank you for sharing that. So you quit speech therapy, but did you feel like you had already like accomplished it? Did you or did you just sort of self,
Samantha Russell: I just said to my mom, I don't wanna do this anymore. I felt it was making me feel bad about myself every time I went.
Samantha Russell: And she was very understanding and said, I don't think you sound that bad. You know, probably as you get older it'll get less and less prominent. And she was
Stacy Havener: right. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, [00:53:00] so you're not gonna be on TV or a singer. All right, last one. What do you want people to say about you after you've retired or left the industry?
Stacy Havener: That's a
Samantha Russell: good one. I would say, well, the thing I want anyone to say about me, ever, number one, first thing always is she was kind. I always just wanna be kind. I don't ever want anyone to have a hurtful thing to say about me. And the second thing would be that, Whether it was me personally working with them or something I shared, helped them feel like they could market their business
Stacy Havener: better.
Stacy Havener: Well, I can tell you definite on the ladder and also on the former, you are very kind. Your personal brand, just. Is kindness. Oh, you're so sweet. And to that end, thank you for taking the time to spend with with me today. I know everybody listening to this hopefully had a pen and a notebook because there are so many [00:54:00] practical tips, but also so much inspiration.
Stacy Havener: Sam, you are truly one of the great ones. Thank you so
Samantha Russell: much. I just am so happy that you asked me to be here. I could talk to you all day every day. I know, and we have so much in common, so thank you so much for having me. It was a real treat. Okay,
Stacy Havener: thank you. If you know a fund manager or a founder in the investment world with a great story, drop a note to stacy@stacyhavenor.com and tell me about it.
Stacy Havener: Till next time, I'm Stacy Haer. Thanks for listening. And now a final word from our premier brand partner, Ultimas Fund Solutions.
Samantha Russell: The conversion of Armer Berg's LP into an integral fund empowered them to grow the fund from 90 million to over 200 million and expand the reach from 100 investors to nearly 700 new investors.
Samantha Russell: And continues to grow today. By pursuing the conversion, a Hoer Berg was able to lower minimums to [00:55:00] 25,000 welcome accredited investors in addition to qualified purchasers. The entire conversion process was highly efficient 'cause Hoer Berg chose to partner with Ultimas and other partners with a proven track record in this type of structure to structure product transition.
Samantha Russell: The headlines are often too focused on new interval funds from pedigree providers, this new fund from this cool big firm, et cetera. Maximizing a fund's potential through a conversion can be a powerful too, as we see in the story of Berg. Traditional investment management and alternative investment management are conversion.
Samantha Russell: More retail investors are demanding access to non-correlated strategies in illiquid asset classes to compliment or supplement public markets exposure. Interval and tender offer funds, offer managers a flexible wrapper. That combines many of the benefits of both 1940 ACT and private fund structures.
Samantha Russell: Interest in these products has increased significantly in the past decade, and we anticipate the volume of both new launches and structure conversions to continue [00:56:00] well into the future.
Stacy Havener: This
Samantha Russell: podcast is for informational purposes
Stacy Havener: only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. The information is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any of the funds, services, or products, or to adopt any investment strategy. Investment values may fluctuate and past performance is not a guide to future performance.
Stacy Havener: All opinions
Samantha Russell: expressed by guests on the show are solely their own opinion and do not necessarily reflect those at
Stacy Havener: thier firm. Manager's appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement by
Samantha Russell: Stacey Haven or Haven or Capital Partners.
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