In an era defined by tweets, does writing a white paper make sense for a small RIA firm? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’! White papers remain effective because they persuade like an article, display information like a marketing brochure, educate, plus offer a powerful way to promote your services.
On this Elementality, Carl explains how to write a white paper that builds your reputation, your brand, and an excellent library of other marketing content. Going step-by-step through a white paper’s framework, Carl and Abby teach you how to come up with a thesis; where to go to begin your research; and finally how to construct the paper itself. Follow these valuable tips to create an engaging white paper that captures the interest of your target audience.
Podcast Transcript
Carl Richards:
Instead of thinking about it as a marketing brochure, right. Calling it, well, and actually it is structurally different. So it’s not just like a marketing brochure called a white paper. But I, when I think of white paper, I think of like an academic paper that is designed to solve a problem. Right? I’ve identified a challenge and I’m going to lay out a thesis on how to solve that problem. And there’s an element, and maybe that’s why it appealed to me, was there’s an element of credibility. And I’ve always, you know, struggled growing up on the wrong side of town. You know, not… I’ve always struggled with, like, having credibility. So I remember early on…
Abby Morton:
We all do, Carl. We all do.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. It’s fine. It’s the imposter syndrome problem, which is great. But the idea of a white paper was really helpful.
Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use elements to grow their business and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementally everyone. I’m your host today, Abby, here with Carl, talking about marketing. Our favorite thing.
Carl Richards:
Always the favorite thing. [laughter] Thanks for having me, Abby.
Abby Morton:
Don’t we always love to talk about marketing?
Carl Richards:
For sure.
Abby Morton:
It’s the best. So I’ve heard you mention this thing in the past, like writing a white paper. You talk about dentists feeling, chained to the chair. I’m gonna give some of the, you know, key things that I know you’re gonna talk about. [laughter]
Carl Richards:
Yeah, for sure.
Abby Morton:
But I, let’s like, I kind of want to get more into the nitty gritty about that. And the reason we’re talking about this is, again, this is another way that you as an advisor can power up your marketing efforts, right? Another thing that you can add to the tool and your toolbox of something you can try to do. So, where did this idea come of like, writing a white paper and when I think of a white paper, I’m like, what client is even gonna read that? Like, what’s the point of doing it? Like, is anyone really gonna read that?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. So that’s, yes. The answer is yes, people are gonna read it. But, the idea came, I believe I was probably introduced to the idea by John Bowen first. So John runs a great consulting company and years and years ago I went through his program and I believe the idea of writing a white paper was probably, I think I heard it from a couple of different sources, but probably from John first. So the concept…
Abby Morton:
A couple other people then it sounds like, also say this is a good idea.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. I don’t think it’s a unique, I don’t think… I don’t know, I might be wrong about this, but I don’t know that anybody claims like they invented the white paper. You know, so white paper is almost like, instead of thinking about it as a marketing brochure, right? Calling it, well, and actually it is structurally different. So it’s not just like a marketing brochure called a white paper. But I, when I think of white paper, I think of like an academic paper that is designed to solve a problem. Right? I’ve identified a challenge and I’m going to lay out a thesis on how to solve that problem. And there’s an element, and maybe this is why it appealed to me was there’s an element of credibility. And I’ve always, you know, struggled growing up on the wrong side of town. You know, not… I’ve always struggled with like, having credibility. So I remember early on…
Abby Morton:
We all do, Carl. We all do.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. It’s fine. It’s the imposter syndrome problem, which is great but the idea of a white paper was really helpful. So that’s where the idea came from.
Abby Morton:
So what even is a white paper for those of us? I’m actually feel like the term white paper is a… At least not a term that I used in college and, you know, growing up. I’ve only come into that term recently and maybe that’s just me, but what does that even mean?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. So here’s the way I structured. So yeah, let’s just walk through the structure of it. I think the goal of a white paper, and these are, these white papers are particularly useful when you’re marketing to a niche.
Abby Morton:
Okay. That word again, that’s, we talk a lot about it, right? Having a niche and…
Carl Richards:
To be honest, I don’t really know how to talk about marketing without a niche. And that look, again, I will reference Seth’s work, Seth Godin’s work a lot, but he talks about like, who is it for and what does it do? Right? With the amount of noise, your work isn’t for everyone. It can’t be because everyone doesn’t exist. Right? In the old days, maybe everyone existed when there was… There was a time when there was three channels plus that fourth educational one. But there was three channels on the thing. Like, you could run a Super Bowl ad maybe everyone would see it. But now everyone doesn’t exist anywhere. So getting clear about who is your work for is the only way I think about niche. And the favorite thing around, my favorite way to think about a niche is a, find a problem you’re interested in solving and then find a population of people who have that problem, which leads you to the shortcut of occupation.
Carl Richards:
Which is why I always think we talk about niches as occupations. But you could have a niche like, Ron Carson famously was like Nebraska football, private pilots and wine, that has nothing to do with occupations. No. There’s some challenges and we’re not gonna spend our time here on niches. But if you do agree that the idea is like, I wanna find a problem I’m interested in solving, that’s where the white paper comes in. So to me, and we, if you didn’t plan on it, don’t forget to ask me about like, how to write it. But if once we’ve gone through the steps of how to write it, to me, the first question is, the first paragraph, the first sentence is nail the problem.
Abby Morton:
So let me pause you there. Do you mind?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yep.
Abby Morton:
I’m a financial advisor and let’s say I’m talking to architects, or that’s who I hope my niche is going to be. Like, I don’t… I’m not an architect. Like, how do I know what problem that they’re even gonna care about? Like, how do I find the purpose? ‘Cause you’re saying, who do I serve and what do they do?
Carl Richards:
What does it do with my thing? What service?
Abby Morton:
What does it do, right? Yes. And what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve? ‘Cause that’s the whole point. Like, how do I know that.
Carl Richards:
This is such a great question and this is exact, I don’t know if I’m just kind of not very smart, but when I was facing that question, I was like, I always was thinking, and Dan Sullivan has now popularized this term, but I was always thinking, who knows the answer? Not, how do I figure out the answer? But who knows the answer? Well, who’s knows the answer to that?
Abby Morton:
Like, again, I don’t have to know everything.
Carl Richards:
Who knows the answer to…
Abby Morton:
Let’s go talk to them.
Carl Richards:
If you work with architects that have their own firm with 10 or less employees and you’re trying to figure out what are the problems they have so you can solve them, I wanna be valuable in their lives. They have a set of problems, I want to solve those problems. Who would know what those problems are?
Abby Morton:
Well, you need to go talk to the architect, right?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. It’s really simple. Like not…
Abby Morton:
But I don’t know an architect.
Carl Richards:
Not to be confused with easy, but it’s really simple. This isn’t complicated. So here’s how you start and we’ll back into what’s in the white paper. The way you start is you make a list of everybody you know, and you shouldn’t pick a niche that you know no one in.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Carl Richards:
So the first thing you do is like, look at your existing client base. If you have any clients, look at your existing client base. Do you have any clients where you’re like, man, I really enjoyed working with them. I enjoyed the problem. So if I were to do that now, I would see if I were to do that… If I were to do that when I had clients and I built a couple different niches over the years, we had a business. We sold it and we built another one.
Carl Richards:
And I, right before I sold my business the last time, I was like, I love entrepreneurs who have had a successful exit. So I was like, okay, how many entrepreneurs do I know that have had a successful exit? I made a list of them. So you make a list, right? If you are like, I really wanna serve graduates of Navy SEAL platoons and you’ve never met one, maybe that might be a little hard. Right? So let’s go with architects. You love, maybe you wanted to be an architect, maybe your mom was an architect. For some reason you have an affinity to that group. You want to, so you’re picking a problem that you are interested in solving. I think that’s the place to start. Because you’re gonna do it a while. It’d be a good idea to be interested. Like if you don’t like hanging out with librarians, don’t pick that as a niche.
Abby Morton:
Right, definitely.
Carl Richards:
So that was partially the entrepreneurs. Like I love those people. I consider myself one of those people. I like the problem. I’m interested in solving it. So find one. Architects with 10 or less employees. We did dentists, we also did, anesthesia, radiology and NDR because they’re all lunchbox doctors. No plant equipment, shift work, had their own LLC. Anybody who works with them knows that’s some unique planning opportunities. They all share that. So let’s just pretend like it was architects that own their own firm ’cause I never did this. I’ve got, let’s say I know two people. And then let’s also say that I have a friend who is one, but they’re not a client. Well, that’s three. That’s amazing. So what do we do? We send an email. This is pretty simple. You call them on the phone or send an email.
Abby Morton:
Back to that email, right? We talked about earlier.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yeah. You could use your big list. But let’s say we have the email address of these three people, or we call them on the phone. So first of all, don’t ask anyone this question I’m about to give you. Don’t ask anybody that would say no. So in other words, everybody you ask is gonna say yes. [laughter] And here’s the question you ask them. Right? Hey Sally, I am trying to understand the unique, and I used wealth management back in the day, but you could say financial planning, you could say financial, the unique wealth management challenges that architects that own their own firm with less than 10 employees face. And I know you’re one of them. My goal is to write a white paper about what I find. Is there any chance we could just meet? And I always used, I didn’t even drink coffee, but I always used coffee. Could we just meet for coffee? Now the reason, look, the reason for coffee is how long is the appropriate amount of time for a coffee meeting?
Abby Morton:
Yeah. I mean, it could be 10, 15 minutes, but you could definitely sit there an hour, right?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. How long is lunch at a decent restaurant?
Abby Morton:
Oh, you’re there at least an hour.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yeah. And man, if you run out of things to say and the food hasn’t even come yet… So we’re trying to lower the pressure on you, the advisor. So you got like 15 minutes, right? So could we meet for coffee and I could just ask you a series of questions? And then you can say, my goal is to write a white paper and I’ll make sure you get a pre-publication copy.
Abby Morton:
But I like the way you’re phrasing this question. It’s about them. Like, I wanna solve problems for architects, and you are one of them. And like, can you help me solve this problem? Can I pick your brain a little bit? Right? Anyone’s gonna be like flattered to be the one being asked.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. And Abby, I’m gonna, only ’cause I’ve… I’m like, I’ve self-appointed myself. I’m trying to eradicate pick your brain from the world. So we’re not allowed to use that ’cause it sounds like it would hurt. [laughter] You know what I mean? So we’re gonna say, can I ask you a couple of questions?
Abby Morton:
Okay. I like that.
Carl Richards:
: Can I get your advice?
Abby Morton:
Use chatGPT. It will help give you lots of ideas besides pick your brain.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Give me five alternates to tell. So, all I would say is, “Sally, hey, I’m trying to understand the unique challenges that architects that own their own firm face. And I know you’re one of them. So I’m just wondering if we could meet for coffee for 15 minutes. I could just ask you a series of questions. My goal is to write up a summary of my findings. I’ll make sure I get it to you.” Now, she would find that valuable. You’d find that valuable. You go, you go meet, you write a list of questions. These questions are like, what’s the biggest mistake? Always the mistake questions you ask about the other architects. Yeah, never Sally.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, never Sally, right? Sally’s never made the mistake.
Carl Richards:
So you say, “Sally, what’s the biggest mistake you see other architects making? What’s the big, what’s the best thing you did? So the best thing Sally did, what do you wish you would’ve learned in school? Did you learn anything in school? Was there a class? If there was a class, what do you wish they would’ve taught you? If, this is my favorite question, if you could design a relationship with the perfect financial advisor for you, what would it look like? I mean, we’re just literally, like, you go into these, you have to go into this conversation as either an investigative journalist or an academic. You have to take the marketing hat off. It’s gone. You can’t trick. There’s no pretending here. You literally put on the curiosity hat. That’s all you have to do is be curious.
Carl Richards:
Sally says something and you’re like, oh, I never thought, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that. Right? So you’ve got a list, a written list of 10 questions. You have it sitting in front of you on the table. Sally doesn’t care. This does not make you look unprofessional. In fact, it makes you look prepared. You ask the questions, but you’re open after the first one, ’cause the first one you’re so nervous you won’t do this. But on the second one, you’re like, you are looking for the crunchy bits is what I call it. Like, just the, like, anytime you were like, I don’t understand what she just said, ask. Hey, I’m not sure I understood what you just said. Could you back up? Explain that to me. And all you’re asking…
Abby Morton:
And there’s not any bit about feeling awkward saying like, I don’t understand that. ‘Cause you’re talking about an industry you don’t know anything about. Right?
Carl Richards:
We got over that 20 years ago, like in junior high. And I know we all still feel that way. But you know, when somebody says that to me, and I’ve had lots of people say that to me lately. Like, I don’t understand what you just said. What was that word? Or why do you say that? I mean, you kind of do that in this podcast. And I don’t feel like, oh, Abby doesn’t know, I feel like, oh my gosh, thanks for asking. Like, I care about this subject. It’s nice of you that you asked. Nobody. They feel better about you. So, you get all these questions and here’s a couple of last questions. Really, really important. Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that would be important? It’s one of my favorite questions.
Abby Morton:
I like that one.
Carl Richards:
And then I love, who else do you know that might have insight into this problem? That’s like, so all you really need is one, because if you ask that question, they’ll probably have a name or two. When they say that person’s name, oh man, John is my attorney and he works with 20 accountants, or sorry, architects. Oh man. That’d be, and you, this is always the way, like it’s like something you’ve never thought of. Like, oh gosh, that’d be really interesting. Do you, would you mind introducing me to John because I bet he’d have some unique insights into the work I’m doing. You don’t have to be bashful either about like, well, why are you writing a white paper? Well, geez, to be honest, Sally, like we’re writing a white paper ’cause I’m interested in solving the problem and based on what I find, I may be interested in building a firm to actually solve the problem. There’s no…
Abby Morton:
Exactly. What’s wrong with saying that? Right? You don’t have to be like, oh, I’m looking to just find these people.
Carl Richards:
I’m just an academic that will… Yeah, no.
Abby Morton:
To serve and pay me money. Right?
Carl Richards:
No, it’s none of that. Like, I’m interested in solving these problems. In fact, we might change the way we do things at our firm based on what we find. But the first thing is, I wanna get this paper written. I’ll make sure that you get a copy now. So we’re looking for Sally, the actual architect. We’re looking for people who serve the architect and I’ll just tell you one more quick story. We did this with dentists in southern Nevada, and I remember, we went to the Southern Nevada Dental Association. So we asked a dentist, oh yeah. What trade magazines do you read? Do you belong to any associations? What podcast do you listen to? Right? Super good information. And then because the podcast person, you should interview. The trade person, you could interview the person who writes for the journal.
Carl Richards:
So we find out Southern Nevada Dental Association. So we go meet with the southern, hey, do you know anybody over there? Oh yeah, I know the editor of the journal. Oh, hey, could you, I bet he would’ve some really good insight into this paper we’re writing. Could you introduce us? Yes. We get introduced, we go and we meet with the journal. This was when I was at a big brokerage firm. We go in and meet with the head of the journal of the Southern Nevada Dental Association. And he was like, hand on his wallet, like, I know what you’re here for. And we’re like, no, no, no, no, no. We just honestly wanna understand the problems. Can we just ask you some questions? John sent us like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We get through like a half an hour of the questions and the guy, I can’t remember his name, yells to his, the office mate. He’s like, “Hey John, come over here.” John’s the president of the association. John’s like, “These two guys are from,” names the firm. And he is like, “Oh, okay, I understand you guys probably wanna buy a booth at our trade show.” And the guy was like, “No, no, no, no. They don’t wanna buy a booth. We should have them speak.” And I was like, how?
Abby Morton:
You didn’t ask to speak.
Carl Richards:
We didn’t ask. This is just playing in traffic. Right? And so that’s how you get all your information. We got a lot more to cover. So I’ll move a little quicker. As soon as you leave, one thing real quick, you ask those questions. As soon as Sally leaves, you get to your car, you either, you take some notes. But as soon as Sally leaves, just pull out another complicated device, your iPhone, hit voice memo and record what you noticed, what you heard. What were the… You’re looking for things like dentists. I was two interviews in with dentists and I heard, I feel trapped, I feel chained to the chair. Three interviews in I already knew what the title was. Right? Chained to the chair. So that’s what you’re, so you do eight of those and you will notice what you’re looking for is the words they used to describe the problem. Dentists used, I know I’m not making any money unless I’m at work. Well, we can describe that as the present value. Your number one asset is the present value of your future earnings. Right? Okay. Well, that’s the biggest problem. You think your practice is worth a bunch. Well, we talked to the valuation people. Most dentist practices weren’t unless they built it correctly. Right? So anyway, those are the sort of things that come up in those interviews.
Abby Morton:
So you do all these interviews, and again, the whole purpose of this is to think of questions and problems that they’re having and how can you expose that in this white paper? So you do all the interviews. How, like what are you compiling? How do you do that?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. So to me, you walk out, you’ve done 10, I would just set the bar at 10. You do 10 interviews, you’ve got 10. If you’re not a writer, you’ve got 10 voice memos that are 10 to 20 minutes long of you in the car after Sally drove away. And you’re saying things like, “Hey, I noticed this. I noticed this. Oh, I love that language she used there. Hey, that story was really great.” You’re just noting all that stuff. And then by the third one, you’re starting to be like, “Hey, there’s that common theme. Oh, that’s really interesting.” You got 10 of those, 10 at 10 minutes. Right? It’s whatever that is. And over an hour, an hour and 40 minutes. And then you literally, now you’ve got either A, you sit down and you already know. Right? Like it’s this problem, present value of my future earnings.
Carl Richards:
My practice isn’t worth what I thought it was. I’m chained to the chair. And so you identify the problem or you hand that 140 minutes of audio, which is what I would do now, hand the 140 minutes of audio along with your summary to somebody called an editor or a writer. Not a, this isn’t a ghost writer. You’ve got all the research and you say, “Here, write a white paper.” The white paper starts with nail the problem. Like in the first… It’s really like, this is only like seven or eight pages. These don’t have to be super long. The first page or two, and especially the first paragraph, we want people nodding their heads. That’s the test. So you hand this to an architect.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. That’s resonating with me. That’s the problem.
Carl Richards:
You hand this to an architect and the architect reads the first paragraph and is like, and they look up at you and say, “How did you know that?”
Carl Richards:
And you sarcastically can say, “Crazy, we asked you.” Right? You’re using their language, the words you heard and you’re just outlining the problem for a page and a half or so. Then there’s a transition, I call it the turns out, turns out the traditional financial services industry is ill-equipped to handle these problems. Then what you do is just describe what it’s like to work with you without ever saying you. Here’s what it looks like to work with a real financial advisor. Right? And you just describe it. We meet with this and we understand the problem. And you have a statement of financial purpose and you have a one page plan and you understand where your… You understand all your elements and where your scores are. And you, you know, you just outline it without ever saying, this is what we do. And then you end with about the author and about the firm.
Carl Richards:
And people are smart enough to make how, like every book I read like three or four pages in, if I like it, I’m like, who is this? Who wrote this? Where do I get more? How do I get more of this person? Oh, they have an email. Cool. I’ll sign up for the email. Right? If it’s a service I need for work, I just read a book that’s about subscription services. As soon as I read, I’ve already contacted the author and had an hour consultant consulting. She didn’t say, you know, there was no Zig Ziglar trying to sign me up. It was just, oh, I flipped to about where do I get ahold of the author. Right? So that’s the power of those.
Abby Morton:
And then how like, so the paper’s done. Am I emailing this out to my whole client base? Like, what am I doing with this thing? How does anyone even see it?
Abby Morton:
So, so good. So first you send it to all the people you interviewed, the people that have the problem, and you say some. Yeah. You say, “Hey, thanks we wrote this. By the way, if you know any other architects that own their own firms that would find this valuable, don’t hesitate.” And I literally always described it in the email, don’t hesitate to hit the forward button right now and send it to them. So just make it super easy. Then the other thing you do remember, part of, some of the people you interview, you want to be deliberately thinking about them as distribution channels. So the CPA of the architects, right? The consultants. And I’ve had the CPAs in their office, hey, I wanted to stop by and deliver this white paper to you. Hand it to them.
Carl Richards:
They read, they look up, how did you know this? We asked you, that whole thing. Geez. Can I, you know what? I’d love to have a couple of those out in the foyer. Right? So you’re, and then the Southern Nevada Dental associate, could you speak? Like that’s how you do it. Now, you can’t just write it and let it sit in your office and nobody will ever see it. And then the other thing you could do is set up a landing page, super simple landing page that nails the problem. To learn more, download my white paper here. Right? And then of course, if anybody went to the trouble of building an email list, you could send it out to your whole email list and say, you may not be an architect, but if you know any, you know, please, here’s our landing page. They can go download the paper here.
Abby Morton:
Send it to someone you know that’s…
Carl Richards:
Tweet, LinkedIn. Hey, you take little snippets. You’ve just now written 50 LinkedIn posts, little snippets. Think how many tweets you could load the whole thing. And this is actually isn’t a joke. Load the whole thing into chatGPT and say, please pull 20 quotes that I could use that are under 250 characters.
Abby Morton:
Right. That’s, I mean, you’re, you could even pull the transcripts from all your other audio recordings and say, chatGPT, you write my paper. And so then…
Carl Richards:
And that’s actually true.
Abby Morton:
You’re not even paying another writer to do it and then’s you’re just editing it, right?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. That’s actually true and…
Abby Morton:
Using AI to be smarter today.
Carl Richards:
We do a lot of that now. Like, and it gets to the point where it’s an 85% draft. And then the person I hand that to is no longer called a writer. They’re called an editor. And they can finish it up. Right? And it’s your words, right? Like it’s, it pull quotes. Like it’s, there’s a lot you can do there.
Abby Morton:
Totally works. So I think, again, the point of this episode was to write the white paper and definitely do that for all of the many. Like, think of all those extra valuable things that you’re gonna be able to do in your practice because you did this one thing. If for whatever reason you can’t even get there. The research, the 10 meetings, what you’re gonna glean just from that alone…
Carl Richards:
Yeah, yeah. I got addicted to that.
Abby Morton:
Feels worth it. To do it, to make yourself “write a white paper” and never, maybe you never produce it at the end of the day. But the amount of things you’re gonna learn by talking to 10 architects is going to be invaluable as well.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. I’ve never had anybody who’s done this and I’ve never done, I’ve probably done it like six times. I’ve never gotten through 10 without having somebody say, you know, gosh, it’s such good. You should talk to John. Like, my buddy’s an architect. He was just mentioning to me how much he doesn’t like his guy at the bank. You know, like I’ve never had that not happen. Not one time have I not had that happen. So I didn’t, I got addicted to this process ’cause you learn so much. I mean, I still remember the entrepreneurs one. Like we were gonna call it the over the wall portfolio. And one thing to mention too is like, the nice thing about the work we’re doing at Elements is the idea now, like we, you can just drop breadcrumbs of like, hey, the average… You know, one of the interviews I had with an architect when I was preparing this paper, we talked about the importance of their LT score. And you don’t have to say, using Elements, we got to, you could just say their liquid term score of 0.75 made them, you know, whatever. You’re just dropping small little breadcrumbs that people are like, what? What’s that? Right?
Abby Morton:
Yeah. I wanna know more about that. Right?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. So I, it gives, and it just having, like if you have, the last thing I’ll mention about this, doctors, we kept writing the white papers, right? So we’d solved one problem, we solved another problem.
Abby Morton:
Well, like you said, you’re gonna interview 10 people and the one problem will likely be mentioned by all, but you’re gonna find a number of different problems. Right?
Carl Richards:
You know what’s so interesting about that is now I’ve got blog posts, I’ve got email newsletters. Like I never, it drives me crazy to do something that only gets used once. We don’t, like, we repurpose everything all the time.
Abby Morton:
Well, and that’s being smart, right? Like how can you do that?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. And then you wake up, you wanna write a book about how architects that own their own firms should manage their money? Just write seven white papers.
Abby Morton:
And there, there’s your book right there.
Carl Richards:
And then all the blog posts will lead to a landing page. And then guess what? When you have the book, you’ve got a thousand people who wanna buy it. Right?
Abby Morton:
Totally. I think, you know, again, all of these value adds that just a white paper is going to do is like just a reason enough to go and do it. And I think this conversation today made me feel like it’s not so overwhelming as much as it seems to be at the beginning.
Carl Richards:
It’s not. Especially if you’re like what you pointed out, which is really smart. Like the process itself has value.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Totally.
Carl Richards:
So if you never even actually get to the artifact itself… I make a lot of promises. I promise if you do 10 interviews, good things will happen. That’s all I know.
Abby Morton:
Let’s start a promise Carl jar. And every time you say that, I’ll be a rich woman.
Carl Richards:
It’s like a swear job. Swear jar. Yeah.
Abby Morton:
Exactly. Alright, everyone go out and write a white paper. There’s a million reasons why right here.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Amen. Thanks Abby.
Abby Morton:
Thank you. Next time on Elementality.
Reese Harper:
My point is like, knowing the projection 25 years in advance of what is gonna happen in 25 years and the choice you’re gonna make, it’s like an absolute waste of time. Like it’s just a waste of time. Like what matters right now is like, well you make this much money. What percentage can you save? Let’s work on improving that. You have this much debt, these interest rates are at this level. How can we reduce those? You have this much personal spending. How can we cut that by 10%? You have this much practice profitability. How can we increase it by this percent? Like these are the things that are going to improve the probability that your future self is happy.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality’s executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.