SmartAsset, Inc.

If you don't have that, you'll never make it to the other side.

And that, you'll see people who use like a firm like Smart Asset, "Well, I'll just pay for the leads," or the custodial program.

That's a dangerous position to be in, as we've seen from news headlines in the past.

Oh, yeah.

The custodial thing, yeah, de- definitely.

But, but even with organic, you're working with a Zoe or a Smart Asset, if you don't have the discipline and rigor internally, you won't get there.

You need somebody who's gonna vet the leads.

Otherwise, the advisors who are really expensive are not gonna wanna talk to 20 strangers, none of whom end up being a good client, right?

"New study ranks Houston as America's number two least safe city.

A new study contains bad news for Houston from personal finance website Smart Asset ranks the Bayou City as the second least safe big city in the US among cities with at least 250,000 residents.

Only Memphis ranked worse than Houston.

2026 study looked at 83 US cities, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic deaths, and disaster risks." Now, I will allow that our, our traffic issues are probably adding to this, but that doesn't get us all the way to second place.

... a $500,000 minimum to a two million to a five million w- in what seemed like overnight, like, the firms who were reliant on those Schwab referrals that didn't have systems and processes around growth in place, they are getting exposed big time.

Uh, firms that rely on companies like, uh, Smart Asset or other lead generation companies, like, who knows how those will change.

Um, and when you strip out M&A market growth, um, those rented platforms, let's call it, you're either negative or you're at, like, two or 3%.

And one of the things that, you know, we're passionate about, uh, on our end, and I'm sure you are too, is ensuring that companies are actually growing organically.

Right.

We're also looking at data from Stampley, Abrigo, and Smart Asset to understand how modern prospects actually, you know, consume information.

So the mission today is to extract the exact mechanisms these top-tier professionals use.

We wanna help you stop waiting for the phone to ring and start systematically attracting and retaining your ideal clients.

Spot on.

It also demands the courage to constrain your audience.

Cornering a specific niche so that platforms like Smart Asset and AEO algorithms can deliver high intent leads directly to you.

You have to specialize.

Well, even often at this stage, this is, for a lot of people, the beginning of the messy middle where your family starts growing, and you start adding children in.

According to Smart Asset, in 2025, the average annual cost of raising a child under age five in the United States reached about- $28,000, that's combined across d- daycare, and costs, and diapers, and all that kind of stuff.

It gets expensive.

And so what happens is, is it's naturally there is this tendency for the increased cost of life to crowd out the desire to save.

And in my mind, like if the AUM goes up and the revenue is going up, does it truly matter where you're getting it from? Like we, I know advisors locally, all they do all day long is just buy ads.

So they're using tools like Smart Asset.

They're using the AI marketing tools and they're just paying for basis points or whatever it might be just to get a name that they can try to call and slam to, you know, I'm going to talk to 900 people this month and I'll close 10 of them.

I would rather talk to five people that we close four of them in a month because the people that have already come with us have already gone through the process.