Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
Mastering the Market: The Resilience and Innovation of William Huston's Investment Strategies
Embark on a journey with us and our esteemed guest, William Huston, the visionary behind Bay Street Capital Holdings, as we uncover the intricate dance of investment management in a world where adaptability is king. From the seeds of entrepreneurship planted at 19 due to a family upheaval to the cultivation of a firm that thrives on the pulse of market sentiment, William's narrative is a testament to the resilience and innovation that fuels success in the financial sector. He peels back the curtain on the transformative power of SEO and online branding, while recounting the trials and triumphs that have sculpted the landscape of his business.
As the conversation unfolds, William Huston maps out the frontier of financial marketing with strategies that are as bold as they are brilliant. Step into a future where the art of thought leadership becomes the cornerstone of a brand's legacy, and where blogging, TV cameos, and conference spotlights act as the catalysts for industry influence. Bay Street Capital Holdings is on a quest to etch its brand into the collective consciousness, akin to the ubiquity of the Nike swoosh—and it all begins with an organic allure that inbound marketing uniquely provides. Through a tapestry of partnerships and the thoughtful alignment with industry forerunners, we explore what it takes to build a brand that not only stands the test of time but also sets the gold standard for credibility and recognition.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deige. I'm happy to be here with William Houston, founder and CIO at Bay Street Capital Holdings. Welcome, william.
Speaker 2:Hey bro, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:All good, all good. Thanks for being here today. To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your history and background and how you ended up doing what you do today?
Speaker 2:Sure man, it's kind of a sad story meets almost happy ending. We'll see the story still being written. I started my business when I was 19. I did that because in Georgia if you take a year off and work for a year you get instinct tuition. You know. So my freshman year my father was sick. He got on disability. I had a younger brother and sister who hadn't gone to school yet and decided to start a business in order to get instinct tuition. So first 14 years in my career was kind of a result of you know my father's situation and as a result of that I got into what I'm doing now, which is investment management. We were supporting investment firms. My first business was a call center that did branding and marketing for investment firms in the space.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing I mean not amazing. It sounds like it's been tough, but I'm glad you're working through it and making your way. That's awesome. And for Bay Street capital holdings, can you tell me a little bit more about this business and maybe go over your strategy?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:So Bay Street is an RIA, so that means that we are investment advisors to individuals, to families, to 401ks, to nonprofits, and what we do is the whole portfolio right.
Speaker 2:So we look at a portfolio of assets and we determine what is the most appropriate way to allocate that portfolio for the needs of our clients. A big part of what we do that's a bit different than the average, I will say, or the typical RIA or investment firm, is that we, from the beginning, sort of focused on just online and like comprehensive branding and marketing, and that was a result of the call center experience. So all of our client base is inbound, so it's people who are finding us through various mediums and I think that our advisors like it that way because it's a lot of. It's a different sort of cycle than the typical sales cycle when you're reaching out trying to convince someone to switch. Our business is much more. People have done their research and they decided that they want to have a conversation with us, so we're kind of meeting at a closer to the middle, I guess you could say.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. That cuts out like saves a lot of time. You basically don't need top of funnel marketing, which is pretty cool. That's awesome. And how have you adapted to changes in the industry over the years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I started the business again I was 19. So this was back when Facebook had just become available. You know, netflix was just sending DVDs, ebay was a brand new thing, you know, and the internet was a lot different. So the way Google search used to work, you could buy a whole bunch of domain names, say you wanted to market for fill in the blank. You would just buy that domain name and several iterations thereof. And someone typed in you know, best financial advisor San Jose, you'd own that website. Best financial advisor San Francisco, you'd own that website. Right, so you just kind of.
Speaker 2:So there was a lot of this like wild wild West of SEO and just like optimization going on as the internet was growing up with, with, like our business getting started, you know, and so a lot of that was a trial and error that we, that we sort of like iterate it through as the internet was maturing, you know. And so now a lot of what we picked up in terms of trial and error we are able to like efficiently apply. And I think a big difference with a lot of organizations from marketing standpoint is their marketing budget isn't necessarily very efficient, you know, and so us being able to know from an ROI, at ROAS standpoint, how should we be applying and how should we be deploying our marketing budget in order to get sort of the best outcomes. I think is a is a meaningful sort of competitive edge that we have. That's the results of, you know, the previous years of doing this for a bunch of other investment firms.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, 100%. I think one of the best I want to say feelings I'm not sure if it's the right word, but best experiences is when you realize like things are changing and you Put in a new system in place and things start working better again.
Speaker 2:It's like it just feels so good when that happens and it's terrifying when it doesn't right yeah exactly a couple months ago Our traffic dropped like precipitously, like dropped off a cliff, you know, and we were like scrambling for two weeks to figure out like what's going on. We literally were like this whole business model doesn't work if we have to Rely or like immediately shift from, you know, the inbound sort of requests. We have to like more of an outbound approach. We just weren't, we're not really properly positioned for that, you know. It turned out like Google was like updating some stuff and a couple weeks later Just like cranked back up and we're like, well, that was terrifying, you know.
Speaker 1:I couldn't imagine. That's crazy. Um and more recently, how did you adapt to the pandemic, for example? Because that obviously shocked most businesses worldwide?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a big part of how you position yourself has to do with market sentiment. Right, it's the same with investing as well. So a lot of times I try not to swim against the current like, and what I mean by that is like, if there's a general Consensus in the marketplace, I found that the best thing that I can do from a branding and positioning standpoint is not to be Contrarian like at the current size of our business right. And so, for example, if you look at the market last couple of years, pre-covid, a renewable energy and technology was on a tear right. So we positioned ourselves as this new young firm that was really focused on renewable energy and technology that was on a tear right, and so people sort of kind of got that view and we had to kind of tweak when, when, when COVID came, because, although the whole market sort of fell out and technology still sort of rocketed up right, there was also this like changing climate in terms of why am I gonna work with the firm you know and who am I gonna work with as an advisor? And so we we said, okay, yeah, sure, we can have a portfolio and we can have a team of young folks and next generation advisors and all that who are Digital first. But first and foremost, let's fine-tune our messaging and be more focused on advocating for the next generation of the Investors because, like, we're one of the few firms that have such a young sort of like Advisor pool to work with.
Speaker 2:You know, so 75% of the staff there women. Half the staff were under the age of 30 when we started out on this. You know Half the team have founded former businesses. So it's kind of a unique mix that you that you get when you work with our team, as opposed to if you were to walk into just like a Retail bank off the store or off the street. And so we've kind of, I would say, tailored our messaging to focus more on that. Why Post COVID? Then we have trying to be just another commodity of there's tons of investment firms. We hope you choose ours, you follow, and that's kind of attracted a certain sort of Mission-aligned client base that says I'm doing this because I'm in alignment with your worldview, not necessarily because you're into Technology. You get my point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, 100%. So did you not have? Did you not slow down during the pandemic? Like, have you guys always worked remote? Or how did that work logistically?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so during the pandemic the business was very small to start, so 2020, I only had one or two employees right, and so now we're a team of 12. So we didn't benefit from COVID pandemic, all that stuff that was going on, and we weren't really Hindered by it either. You could argue we were benefited because we had really strong performance, but again, I think, from a branding positioning standpoint, there was a lot of investment firms that had just outstanding performance in 2020 because the market was hot right. So, yeah, I don't think that's the real sort of answer to to the question. I think the underlying point is that we we tweaked how we were gonna present ourselves to the market and we focused on the why not necessarily like what are we doing?
Speaker 1:you see, Okay, under present 100% and more recently with the this fast evolution of technology, with AI coming like becoming mainstream, have you taken advantage of the tools that are available?
Speaker 2:It's neat. We've looked at some of the voice modeling stuff, where, you know, we've got a lot of blogs that are long form content. We've looked at turning that into short form content because YouTube is second largest search engine in the world. You know. We don't have a very meaningful YouTube presence though, so we've sort of been pushing into again that younger demographic that's absorbing a lot of their financial literacy from places like YouTube, with individuals who may or may not be licensed or qualified to provide said advice, you know. So trying to figure out how can we hit that demographic with, you know, a first grade reading level, not using words like profit, but defining what profit is.
Speaker 2:So you hit the algorithm right. You know these sorts of things. We're looking into all that sort of stuff and, from an AI standpoint, I think how we'll implement it as a team will be taking content that we've already produced, distilling it down to short form content and then figuring out a replicable process to take the long form content that we use to get sort of our institutional client base and then transition that to the individual retail investor who's you know, Gen Z and say, oh, I'm going to just figure out how to trade options, but I need to figure out how to do that without that term being used. You follow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, okay, awesome. We also do that with our content, with these podcasts, with the videos. We cut them down into 10, like couple second clips and run those on the short form, tick tock Instagram, youtube and we get like tons of views on those. So short form is the way, especially with the young generation now, with the attention span of like 10 seconds, I think that is probably the right way to go. I wanted to also ask, in terms of metrics of success for your business, how do you measure it? Do you have specific API's that you follow?
Speaker 2:We do. For every million impressions we get about 25,000 clicks. So it's not an amazing click Thursdays, you can call it below average and for those 25,000 clicks we typically get about 100 or so appointments that are scheduled with the team and that gets split across our advisors. So we're constantly trying to improve the quality of those 100 appointments. You know, so we can see a dip in appointments if we realize, for example, that we're showing up for a term like life insurance and we found that that particular search term doesn't convert well but we're getting a lot of it. You know, so we can push that sort of out and maybe we drop to 60, 65 appointments and then say we're doing a pretty good conversion on a term like inheritance. You get my point. And then but that's a harder keyword to get more traffic into.
Speaker 2:So, being creative in terms of how do we express our views when someone is receiving an inheritance and make sure that, like you mentioned earlier, top of funnel all the way down to influencing purchase behavior, how do we get them at each point of search and at each point of intent, to keep coming across this Bay Street brand and finding things that are adding value from a like. I'm learning more about this particular phase of my life that I'm in point 1.2.3, search term 1, 2 and 3, I'm now ready to reach out to Bay Street and say, hey, you know, I read a couple of your blogs. Let me get some time for your advisors you follow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that sounds good. And where do you do your marketing? Is it on Google or Meta? Where does most of that come from?
Speaker 2:Most of our stuff is Google base. It's a lot of blogs, it's a lot of interviews like this is a lot of like TV interviews just because, again, like from a market sentiment standpoint, being seen as a subject matter, expertise matters in this industry, you know. So we spend a lot of time speaking at conferences, speaking on panels, moderating panels, just being sort of present, you know, in at panels and showing up for events where there'll be other founders, other investors, that sort of thing. But our main sort of driver that we look at is basically Google impressions and how that's translating to appointments that are scheduled.
Speaker 1:You follow 100%, 100% and in the next, like five years or so, where do you see your industry heading? Because it's so like, with all the technology available and the data analytics tools and everything that's going on. What do you see changing in the next five years?
Speaker 2:There was a lot of consolidation going on. A lot of firms are joining together. They call these rollups. You have a firm, I have a firm, we combine our firms with bigger deal. I think a lot more of that is going to happen because of how fast things are moving digitally and because you really need a efficient marketing approach, because it's a monopolistic competition, low barrier of entry to get into this industry, lots of choice and lots of noise. So the only thing that differentiates you is the why, and so I think there's going to be a lot more of that where smaller firms are teaming up together with larger firms or with one another, you see, and then coming up with a more cohesive brand that is going to attract a particular client to them, as opposed to how I think, how it was before the internet age, which was referral base.
Speaker 2:Hey, I work with Will. I met this guy. He's cool. Let me make an introduction for him. Or just outbound, cold outreach I don't think that's as effective anymore. We still do outbound. We do outbound every day actually, but it's primarily, again, through mediums like LinkedIn, and LinkedIn works, don't get me wrong. I mean, that's actually how you and I met. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:But I don't think it's as effective as when someone finds you themself multiple times during their search journey and then they reach out and there's just sort of a different sort of motivation that's being triggered. When someone decides that I'm gonna reach out to you, not I'm going to respond to something you've sent me, receiving information, you're, typically your first thought is no, because I get like a gazillion of these Like inbound requests. I think it's much more effective to have a very clear like draw them in sort of marketing approach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. That's actually. It's great. So you just try to get yourself in front of them without being like too pushy, if that's the right term, and then they like come across your name more often and eventually they reach out to you. That's great. If we were to sit down in 12 months and had this conversation again and everything within your business has gone unbelievably right, what would have changed from now until then?
Speaker 2:I think one thing that we're still working on as a team is credibility, right? So, for example, when you say Nike, that brand stands for something. When you say Bay Street, nobody knows what that brand stands for, right? So I think what you would say what could go perfect over a 12-month period of time is where, when you say that it stands for something and it stands for what we want it to stand for, you follow and there's a certain guarantee that comes with that word. The same way, there's a guarantee that comes with the Nike swoosh. You have a certain level of expectation that you sort of just impulsively go to when you see that.
Speaker 2:And I think that's one thing that we're looking to do as a firm to make sure that the guarantee and the brand that we're building and what that stands for is immediately recognizable and it immediately evokes this sense of I understand what that means, what that brand stands for, you follow. So kind of maybe an awkward answer to your question, but I think that would be 12. If we could do that in 12 months, that'd be ridiculous. You could have asked in the next 10 years and I could have given that same answer. I was like, well, good luck, that's good. It takes time.
Speaker 1:No, I love the ambition and the passion. I'm rooting for you. I know you can do it and have you? Have you had any partnerships or collaborations that have been effective in helping you grow to where you are today?
Speaker 2:Yes, we've had a lot of early supporters. Again, brand recognition wise. They might not be household names but they are influential individuals and organizations. We've also had a lot of organizations who might not have publicly gone on record and said, hey, we've got some big partnership or something like that, but they are organizations that are household names. So, for example, we've done some work for Waymo. We've done some work for Shale Sandberg, the previous CEO at Facebook. She's got a nonprofit. She wrote those books.
Speaker 2:Lean In Option B. We've worked with ConFluent, which is a startup that just IPOed last year. We've worked with Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. He has a nonprofit, or he established a nonprofit Allen Institute of AI. They just became one of our clients.
Speaker 2:So, you know, we're starting to kind of build this roster of really solid relationships and, again, what I'm looking to make sure we do is serve those relationships appropriately so that you know, kind of to your point around, the right sort of collaboration at the right time at the right place sort of leads to like this, you know, moment of like virility that I think we haven't experienced quite yet. We're still seeing incremental growth. We haven't hit this like explosion yet. That I know is, and I would say, yeah, sure it's available, but we got to make sure we can handle it too, you know. So we're not. We're not trying to go from 100 meetings to like 1000 tomorrow. It's more like let's make sure that we have the infrastructure that we need to make sure that we again are building a brand that stands for something and that people can say I know what I'm getting when I sign up for that you follow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love it, I love it and we are unfortunately running out of time. But before we go, what advice would you give to other business owners looking to succeed in your industry?
Speaker 2:Whether my industry or anyone else's, I would say the best advice that I received was to be informed before I get into any business.
Speaker 2:You know, and how I go about becoming informed on a topic is pretty programmatic.
Speaker 2:It's read the top 10 books, find the top 10 experts, find the top 10 conferences and then spend the time that it takes to get through that material, because if you do that, you're going to know more than 95% of the other people that are pursuing that same sort of path, even if you haven't spent your whole you know career doing it.
Speaker 2:And I think a big life hack again, age of the internet is audible. I can buy 10 audible books right now. I can put them on two X speed and, if I really want to, I can know about anything a week from today. Like you know, at least first time hearing it, not even if I haven't applied it yet, but just kind of building that foundational knowledge so that when I go to make my first decision whether, regardless of what business I'm making that decision in, I've had the best of the best, sort of pour into me and say this is what worked for me. Take the advice. You know there's a, there's a Bible verse says you can learn from instruction or you can learn from experience, and so taking the instruction approach, I think, is a lot faster than trying to see what's around the corner by walking over and looking, you know yeah or 100%.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more on that and I really appreciate your, your insights and your time today, William. So thank you for being on the show. What is the best way for people to get in touch with William Houston, If you have any offers for them to take advantage of or if they're looking to follow your journey?
Speaker 2:Awesome man. Yeah, bay Street Capital Holdingscom is our website. I'm on LinkedIn. I don't do all the other social media stuff. I'm probably like four or five years. I missed the window. Man, I'm a little. I'm older than most people think I am, so I'm on LinkedIn just William Lloyd Houston, jr, william Houston. But yeah, bay Street Capital Holdings will pop up. We got the. We got the. We at least show up first for our, for our, for our domain name, right? So that's the. That's the easiest way to get to me.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. Well, thank you so much again for your time today. You too, bro, it's great to meet you.