I always use the saying that you would not go to a cardiologist and tell him or her that you are experiencing knee or hip pain. You were sent to that cardiologist by a general doctor for a specific reason to diagnose a specific problem. We want our clients, our prospects and those who refer us to understand that we are here for one specific thing as a specialist, and this is what we do, and this is what we’re great at, and this is how we get referrals.

If we are going to become experts, we have to let the world know. We have to create marketing around whom we serve, why we serve that person, why we are the best firm or person to solve that specific problem and to be the expert in the marketplace. Branding has to be focused exactly on that one piece that you choose to specialize in.

We want to be intentional and narrow our messaging. I’ve seen many websites and advisors over the years that have marketed to business owners, young professionals, women, physicians, and when you put all those markets together, you are really telling the world that you will work with anybody. The narrower you can get, the less competition you will find.

I had my firm look at something that was very complex, and we loved doing it, and we packaged it into simplicity. We streamlined these solutions and expertise, and this really came from experience, from working on these problems in repetition. That’s how we all have learned.

Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, took an idea that said, “No one’s doing this this way, and if I could create something this way, well, I might be in this little narrow area. But if the market proves it, I have something that I can package and give to the world and find that place that no one is swimming in.” We call that the Blue Ocean Strategy, which many of us have heard of.

We developed into a situational specialist. Our clients have a specific mold, problem, profile, and we became a specialist to that problem. Because of that, we started to attract referrals across the country. Most of our meetings were virtual in the past, pre-pandemic, and the pandemic kind of sped everything up for everyone, and the referrals really started ramping up even more. You know that you can use your generalist advisor to take care of certain things, but when the specialist needs to be involved, you start to attract problems or clients with these issues. Our referrals derived from CPAs whom we have built a relationship with. It’s the second largest source of referrals that we get. The other is generalist advisors. Just like going to a doctor who does an exam, finds a problem and says, “You really need to go to a specialist to take care of this specific issue,” that’s what we have become in this industry.

Our clients have a specific demographic in need. They are business owners who are profitable and paying taxes on money from the business that they would rather put away for themselves. They might be doing a 401(k), a retirement plan or something else. Most business owners are, but they still want to be able to pull more profits out. They still have large profits, so they do have a lot of good cash flow. They are spending more than they need on business expenses at the end of the year or pushing revenue into the following year. Why are they doing that? Because they want to reduce their tax liability, and they are looking for some way of doing it. They have some type of retirement plan they are funding. They aren’t getting the largest benefit of that, and they are often unhappy with the amount that they are giving to employees in their benefits, whether it’s their health insurance or any kind of other cost that they might have. They are comfortable with the amount of income that they are already taking out of the business, and they don’t have a desire to buy more toys. They do not need to spend more money. They are happy with what they have. The business is paying for a lot of things.

Our businesses are generally under 50 employees, and our sweet spot is really under 20 employees. We show business owners how to pull more profits out of their business. That’s our tag line, elevator speech, whatever you might call it. But that’s what we do. We are intentional about that client. They have profits, and they’re paying taxes on these. And we often, because of this, are appealing to CPAs who are seeing their clients with the same issues.         

For me, my firm, I said, “What are we doing here that somebody else is not doing that we really enjoy and are good at?” That led us into the realm of the pension market, pension-type planning and combination plans using different retirement plans and all these different actuarial designs that we were coming across in this market. We determined that we were going to specialize in vetting and doing due diligence on multiple plan designs and combinations that are available in the marketplace.

Years ago, we were coming across cases in the pension side where we determined that actuaries were doing very different things in very different ways. I said, “If we could figure out this puzzle, we can really become the person and team to decipher what best fits our company. Because these are custom-designed, we have something here. We can package this, and it can be very beneficial for anyone who’s out there.” Because I personally was not seeing at the time, and I still am not seeing, anyone else doing it. It still becomes a mystery where I’ve seen some advisors kind of dabble in it or have some experience or some bad experiences. But if we could really become that expert to understand, know, implement and really be the thought leader in this, then we would have a huge future ahead of us.

So, we took a path toward a very complex area and transformed it into an elementary understanding for our clients. Our goal is to add value by doing the following: We’re going to show the owner how to pull more profits out of the business on a pretax basis, give the ability to reduce the amount of taxes that they are currently paying on their income and possibly even reduce the tax bracket. We work very closely with CPAs. They get involved with all the tax numbers and planning of this, where we are helping to determine cash flow and bring that together on what fits the client.

Of course, it boosts the amount of money that you are saving for retirement. You are pushing yourself way ahead of the game in being able to put away very large contributions into plans. So, we focus on helping these small businesses acquire the proper resources, and we have the knowledge and wisdom through experience of all the resources that are out there to help put this thing together, this piece, this puzzle to become a huge value for the owner.

David Podell is a 17-year MDRT member with five Court of the Table and six Top of the Table honors. His company, Podell Financial Group, specializes in unique and specific tax-strategies for business owners. He has sat on multiple boards and is very active in his community.