Carl Richards

For a decade, Carl Richards wrote a weekly column for the New York Times. He published a bestselling book, built a thriving advisory practice, which he later turned into a productized offering, and he became peers with people like Seth Godin and Dan Heath. He did so through unique simple visuals that simplified complex financial concepts. But here's the thing, Carl Richards wasn't a doodler. Right? He had no art background and yet he became one of the original voices in online visual communication, paving the way for creators like Jack Butcher and Liz Fosseline.

So how did a financial advisor with no artistic ability become the sketch guy?

That's what we're answering in three chapters, starting with chapter one.

Chapter one, a problem you're interested in solving.

Carl married Corey in nineteen ninety five, still at university as an undeclared major. He fell into finance by accident.

So I thought I was applying to be like a mall cop or a bouncer or something.

And I got halfway through the interview and they hadn't asked me about kung fu skills or self defense. And they were asking me about stuff that I I had, like, heard of, but I couldn't tell you what they were, stocks, bond. And I I went back and reread the ad. It said security. Sorry. It said securities, not security.

He subsequently majors in finance, but that hadn't been the plan. Up to this point, finance hadn't really been his focal point of interest. Psychology was. He was a fan of Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey was a professor at BYU in Utah, a college local to Carl, and he was heavily involved in establishing the master of organizational behavior program.

Like, don't even know if I would have used the words of organizational. So I was just like, whatever Stephen Covey does. You know, like, that seems like a good door to meaning.

Carl has this interest in behavioral psychology, but he needs a job. So he takes that job I mentioned before working in securities for a company called Fidelity Investments.

So like I was on a call center, so not really giving much advice, but just answering phone calls from people who were self directed investors asking for information or transactions.

How long was that one for?

About two years.

Finance though wasn't what he thought it was.

Back then, the value add of the financial services industry was access to information and transactions. Like, you literally couldn't buy a stock unless you called us. There were no quotes. There was no Internet.

Carl was working at Fidelity on the ninth of August nineteen ninety five, the day Netscape went public. At this point, there are only about twenty million people online compared to the five billion or so today. Netscape going public, kick started the dot com bubble, and sent an already bullish market to unsustainable levels.

It wasn't the first Internet based company on the market.

It wasn't even the first browser. Mosaic came before. But Netscape was the first to capture a wave of media attention ahead of an IPO.

That morning, trading was delayed for two hours because demand was so overwhelming. When Netscape finally opened at seventy one dollars, more than double the twenty eight dollar offering price, the buying frenzy intensified. Carl, answering phones that day, realized this wasn't about access to information. It was about human psychology at scale.

When I walked out of the training room that day that Netscape went public and realized this is not about math and spreadsheets. Right? I didn't know what it was about. I didn't have any grand conclusion back then. I just remember thinking, woah. There's feelings flying everywhere.

For the next six years, Carl climbed the corporate ladder. Fidelity, then a bigger brokerage firm, then a bigger brokerage firm.

The plan was always to leave the industry and go get his MBA in organizational psychology.

But three or four years into working in the finance industry, it dawns on him.

For the first three or four years in the finance industry, I was always like, I need to leave, go get my MBA. I need to leave, go get in the organization. And then one day, it dawned on me that money was a great entry point into the same conversation, maybe even better than work.

Money was a better route into working in behavioral psychology than workplace.

Carl subsequently leaves Merrill Lynch to start his own advisory firm. And at this stage, he's no longer a stockbroker.

I slowly started moving from transactions and information and like stock trading and what you would have called in the old days stockbroker to financial planner.

What happens next completely changes the trajectory of Carl's career and life. During one of those early client interactions as a financial planner, Carl stumbles.

I was in a meeting with two clients. I can remember who they were, Dave and Diane. Dave was a highly skilled specialized doctor. Diane was a highly technical, like, technology sales engineer slash yeah, sales engineer.

Both incredibly smart, really successful. I was trying to explain a concept to them. I was getting blank stares. I thought I was really good at this and I was like, oh, no.

And then I realized, wait, they're really smart. They're really successful. This must be my problem.

And I tried a couple other explanations, didn't work. So I finally was like, no, like this. And I stood up and just the first time ever. I wasn't a doodler. I'd no art background is is obvious. And I drew I it was probably like circles and squares and an arrow to show like the cash flow or something. And I remember Dave going, oh, I get it now.

Carl realizes that when he simplifies advice through visuals or as he calls them doodles, clients suddenly get the complex point he's trying to make and those visuals are resonating.

At some point, I started sending those out to like, a client would call afterwards and say, hey, that thing you drew on the whiteboard, could you send it to me so I could share it with my spouse? And when I saw it go out electronically, you know, like scanned it or whatever we did back then, faxed it, I thought, oh, I could send it to more people.

So then I was like, oh. So then I started anytime anybody asked me a question twice, I would write the response and I would send it to a collection of friends and family and some clients.

And then when I left the big brokerage firms and started my own firm, I put up a website called behavior gap.

That name, behavior gap, wasn't an accident. It came from an observation Carl had made earlier in his career.

A consistent gap between investment returns and investor returns. Meaning, the fund might return ten percent, but the average investor in that fund only made seven percent because they bought high and sold low. It was the gap between what we think we should do with money versus what we actually do with money, the behavior gap.

I started writing something every week. I think that was two thousand three, two thousand four, somewhere in there, two thousand five ish. Started writing something every week and really, I mean, I joke about it, but really it was like my mom and my sister. You know, I always joke that my sister was lying. It was just my mom. Right?

It didn't really matter. I didn't have a choice at this point and I still don't. So I remember going home and having my wife and other people say and they were right, like, why don't you focus just on building the business that this outside thing is not? And they were right.

They were totally right except that I had no choice. I had to take complex things, simplify them, I had to share it with the world. It was a little bit like an adventure journal. I was like because I'm still this way, like, I'll go on a mountain bike ride later today.

I'm sure I'll see people standing at the map out on the trail system and I'll want desperately to stop and say, what are you guys trying to do? Let me let me like, I consider myself the mayor of the local trails, like the unofficial mayor because I wanna stop. Like, I go to a great restaurant, I can't not tell everyone.

Cole starts sending these emails in two thousand and three, and his audience is growing through nothing other than word-of-mouth.

People are reading and sharing his email all because of one factor.

It's relevant. And how do you create something that's relevant? Here he is speaking on the Diamond podcast.

I think the measurement device should be relevance. Another way to think about this is, can you figure out how to be the signal amid all the noise? And one way to frame that would be relevance. So I still open emails that are relevant to me.

Typically, I can make that judgment call by either a, the source, the to line the from line in my inbox, or the subject line. If I open it, I can make it quickly within a sentence. Is it relevant? And so I think that really narrows you down to understanding everyone doesn't exist.

In other words, Carl was making something relevant because he's focused on solving one problem as experienced by a particular group of people delivered in a way that's interesting and useful to that group.

When those three factors align, you make something that resonates. Cole continues sending a weekly email, growing his list until a major turning point occurs.

I think a couple years went by and a guy named Kent, he forwarded it to the editor at the New York Times. Now the editor now is a really good friend of mine. I've asked him a bunch about this experience for whatever reason because he got hundreds of those a day. Like, I've been to his office, there's stacks of books that he didn't ask to have mailed to him.

You know, he's never had a chance to read I mean, he tries because he's such a good guy but he he's never had a chance he can't open all these emails. So for whatever reason that day he opened an email from a guy he didn't really know about a guy he had never heard of. So Kent's email, he opens and for some reason he decides to check it out and he sent me a note and I still have it. Says, hey, we love these.

Would you consider doing something with us? Now, I'm a kid from the hills in Utah.

I don't know anything about this stuff. I just knew to say yes and figure it out later. So I was like, sure. What do have in mind?

In two thousand and ten, Carl began writing The Sketch Guy, a weekly column for The New York Times.

Every week, he'd share his simple sketches and short thoughts on one idea around money. That column would run for the next decade, and this became the platform for the next stage of his business. And as I wrap up chapter one, I wanna leave you with this thought.

What Karl had been doing all these years was incredibly simple. He was pursuing his curiosity by solving one big problem as experienced by one group of people.

The way I think about niche marketing is I want to find a problem that I'm interested in solving and all of those words are purposeful. When I say problem, I mean it like a math problem, not like a there's no judgment.

I don't mean it like a negative thing. I just mean it like it's a it's like a math problem. It needs to be solved. Another word for that could be a challenge if you prefer. Right? But a problem I'm interested in solving. Interested is on purpose.

If you're going to build a business intentionally, why not build one around things that you're interested in doing? I want to find a problem that I'm interested in solving and then I want to find a group of people who have that problem. Now I'm never sure that I've got that order right. It could be that you say, look, I wanna there's a group of people that I'm interested in helping, and now I wanna find and articulate the problem they have. Those common challenges allow me some scale and pattern recognition in my marketing efforts. And then once I have a business built, customer service becomes a lot easier because of the just the pattern matching that we get to do. That's the power of niche.

Chapter two, playing in traffic.

By two thousand and ten, Carl is flying high. A contributor to the New York Times, a popular blog attracting genuine fans, and a thriving advisory practice.

Let's break this down though. What is Carl actually doing that's leading to this success? The first part we covered. He's obsessively pursuing the answer to an interesting problem. In his case, why is there a gap between what we know we should do with money and what we actually do?

But there's another element to this formula. He's not working on this problem in private.

The goal is to give people a chance to stalk you, to window shop. People want to know how you think.

This is what Carl calls playing in traffic.

Doing your work, all the work you do in private in your head and with clients, do it in public. Share that work, take people through the process. I have some beliefs about the best way to do that but that's not important.

Often those are places to hide like, don't like YouTube or I don't like video or I don't like podcast. I'm artifact agnostic. What I'm I'm suggesting by playing in traffic is leaving a breadcrumb trail of the work you do.

Carl is regularly taking swings And in his words, anybody could do this. Here he is with Aaron McHugh.

You go gather every email address you have of everybody you've ever met, and you do that drawing, and you put it up on your website or on Instagram, and you say, you send out an email to everybody you've ever met and you say, hey, you're getting this because at one point or another we met and I made an assumption here and please forgive me if I was wrong.

Okay.

But I made I made an assumption that you might like this.

That's the magic here. Solve a problem in public. Because if you solve a problem that people pay to solve, that's proof that there's interest in the solution. And if you solve it piece by piece in public in an interesting way, the right people will follow along. That's what happens with every authority. When Carl got the opportunity to start a column with the New York Times, you might call it luck. But Carl had increased his surface area of receiving that luck by playing in traffic every week for years, slowly building a community of like minded clients and financial advisers that wanted answers to the questions he was asking.

There are no hacks. There is only curiosity and your dedication and discipline of following that curiosity around one particular problem as experienced by a particular group of people in public.

Here's Carl on the Breakthrough Advisor Podcast.

The only thing I've really learned about marketing is, like, I need to just lay in traffic and and give myself a chance to get hit.

Right? And we've all been trained to not do that for good reason. Another way to think about this is like increase your luck surface area. I love that idea that there there's still a big piece of this that is unknowable. It's a mystery. And I kinda get a little frustrated sometimes by I call it the success porn. You'll see like people with like, here's eleven steps to supercharge your marketing, or here's seven steps to be a New York Times bestseller like James Clear or something.

And then when you go talk to somebody that's done it, like James Clear or Morgan Housel, and they'll tell you, I caught lightning in a bottle. You know I mean? Like, oh boy, my writing's good. I worked really **** ** my craft.

I did tons of research. And then at the end, and that was all of them increasing their luck surface area. Really good writing, tons of research, keep doing the work, increasing luck surface area, and then something happened. And so I think playing in traffic is just my way of saying like, get out there and have conversations.

Carl has been at this for decades now, and his content has expanded beyond visuals and emails. He now has two podcasts, one of which is a daily, but the process of creation hasn't changed a great deal.

Here's Carl speaking on the Diamond Podcast.

When I'm reading something, I will just pull up a note and I will dictate now, because the dictation's so great, the transcription's so great. I'll just dictate my thought a thought or two. And at the end of the week, and I could tell you right now, I could tell you in ten seconds, notes, folders. I have this crazy folder.

I do a daily podcast. I just recorded episode one thousand one hundred and fifty seven. The podcast ideas, my podcast idea folder, I do one every day. I've been doing it for one thousand one hundred and fifty seven episodes.

My podcast idea folder has a hundred and eighty four notes in it.

Then when he's writing, he only writes around one idea.

So I would write a an essay. And I always like to say as short as possible, but no shorter. And the essays and this is what I'm excited to refine here is, like, the essays had a couple characteristics. One, they were about a single idea.

If another idea showed up, I always just thought, okay. New essay. Like, so part of the editing process for me has always been like, okay. What's the idea?

And then getting really, really clear about that. So they were about a single idea.

Writing one piece, a relatively small piece, only a few hundred words long, had two consequences. One, it's really quick and easy for the reader to consume. Two, it's easy for the writer to build and maintain momentum.

Keep it simple when you're thinking about this. Like, all I have to do is sit down and type two hundred words or all I have to do is open up my open up my voice memo file on my phone and speak for three minutes about the experience I had. Keep it simple. And one thing I find incredibly helpful when we talk about doing the job is to start with micro actions.

One of the reasons we avoid this and we find a million ways to procrastinate, we have to go do research, we have to think about whether or not the logo should be red or blue or which font we want to use. One of the reasons we do that is simply because we're scared and the antidote to fear at least for me is often micro actions because micro actions are micro scary. It's just a little thing, it's not a big deal, right? I know nobody's gonna die, Right? Like, actions tend to spread and compound.

And not only would he do this in private. Again, here's Carl on the Diamond Podcast.

Here's what I did, and I think you can still do this.

I used to set aside, and I would set aside like a half an hour a day. I would read, and then I would stare at the list of my favorite clients and or prospective clients.

And I would think about, was there something I read today that would help Jill?

And then I would just send an individual email. Hey, Jill. Thinking about you today. Thought you might enjoy this article.

They would say, hey, can I send it to my friend? And I was like and so I went, and I don't know what the rules are now, but I was able to do that in in a more bulk form. But it wasn't using some email list. It wasn't some form.

It was just, Jill, I was thinking about you. Again, if you just did how many clients do you need? Right? If if you did ten of those a day for the next five years of your life, you would never have to work again.

Yeah. In terms of marketing. Like, because you just don't understand the power of we all heard those stories. Like, I remember hearing these stories of guys that would send three handwritten notes a day.

If you just thoughtfully sent five emails a day, thoughtfully, that added value to people's lives, the compounding downstream of that effect of that, of them sending it to somebody, and them sending it to somebody, and then somebody, and even if they don't share it.

And all of this is a byproduct of doing the work of being an adviser or consultant. The act of creating the material is delivering additional value to clients and making you better at your job. If Carl hadn't become an authority beyond his network, if he hadn't gone on to become a New York Times columnist and best selling author, the act of creating those micro essays and visuals would have still had a profound impact on his business and craft.

But, of course, the work did catapult him to authority. The blog led to the New York Times column, which led to a book deal with Penguin Random House. The way he wrote that book and all these books was fascinating, and it's a pattern for creating signature content that I notice again and again with undisputed authorities.

I remember every week that column in The New York Times, I wrote it every week for ten years. So every week, I got to send something in. And almost every week, I felt nervous about it for ten years. Right?

And some days, would send them in and I'd be like, this is the best thing I've ever written. And it would just be crickets. Right? Like, my editor wouldn't say anything.

The social media team at the New York Times wouldn't do anything with it. Nobody would say a word. And then there were other days, and I couldn't ever find any rhyme or reason behind this, but there are other days where I was like, oh my gosh. I can't even believe I'm sending this.

You know, this is it. Like, Carla, this been a great run, but you're done. And my editor would reply like, this is great. And the social media team would pick it up and the times they get and it would go great.

In fact, the ones that did the best are the ones I thought I had nothing that day. And so that's when I fired myself.

So that's how I deal with failure is I just decided it's not my job and and it still really hurts.

Like any other creative, Carl didn't know what would resonate. He didn't know what the market wanted. He needed the market to tell him.

Dan Reynolds, singer songwriter for Imagine Dragons says something similar in an interview with Lex Friedman. For context, this is a guy who's written songs for a band that has sold more than seventy four million albums.

The majority of the songs I write for the record are never heard. I write over a hundred songs a year. I release twenty songs every three years. So I don't know what's that percent, twenty out of three hundred.

Come on, Lex. I it's less than No. It's less than ten percent. Less than ten percent.

Yeah. Eight, seven or something? Yeah.

Anyway, so it's it's And then like getting together with the band and like getting them selected down is really what the process of so you're really writing a song per one to three days, kinda may maybe a song that you can't quite figure out the puzzle of that's gonna last a little little longer. Is it where's this every idea. Yeah. You finish every idea.

I do. I finish every idea.

So it's not just like laying completely unfinished.

I could open my computer for you right now and I would show you hundreds and hundreds of songs that you would listen to and think, that sounds like a song. It's like there's rhythm, there's melody, there's multiple instruments, there's lyrics.

Reynolds then goes on to say, I certainly don't know the right answer to what songs are, you know, beloved or good to the masses.

Like, I try to genuinely to release the songs that move me the most. That's my only gauge. Because it's so subjective of, like, what is good. Nobody knows the song the masses are gonna like. Nobody knows that formula. Nobody knows it.

Where Reynolds and Imagine Dragons have a team of people and peers around them to bounce ideas and figure out what's good and what isn't, Carl has his readers. He posts something each week, curates what resonates, and in time, he not only has enough essays to weave together into a book, but he has a collection of essays that he knows the reader will love because sections of the audience have already told him so. Here's Carl talking on the Lex Writers series about the writing process for his latest book that follows this same pattern, This time curating from his daily podcast.

I've got twelve hundred and fifty transcriptions. Right? Most of them are garbage. Right? Just like that's just the nature of work. Some of them seem to be valuable to people.

So I went through and collected ninety seven of the ones that are valuable. There's a huge chunk of I mean, I don't know, a couple hundred that are I was like, man, these are seem to be resonating with people. I'd get comments on the podcast. People would email in on the podcast. I used to share my telephone number. People would send me text messages.

So I, like, refine refine sort of a filter. Like, here's an idea. Okay. Great. Comment.

Then I would write it, take the transcription, let it bounce around, get down. So you can sort of see the funnel there. Like, creative ideas, they bounce around, I get some feedback, I work on the drafts, I make the drafts better, I take the drafts through the editorial process, and I finally publish a book, and I say, here to the world.

Carl has written several books. But that first book, that was big. And it all came from years of playing in traffic.

The book comes out, Behavior Gap in two thousand twelve, and it becomes a success beyond what I had even ever considered, for me relative to what I was thinking about. And suddenly, I'm getting booked at all these speaking engagements mainly in the financial industry, but also interestingly in, like, design and consulting and, like, anybody who wanted to take a complex subject to make it simpler.

And I'm I'm kind of at this point getting a lot of offers to buy my firm, and it it was largely like, we wanna buy your firm and then have you involved at our our, you know, like, national spokesman or chief creative officer or anything like that. And I kept saying no. No. No. No. No. And I went home.

You know, first, the the the book turned out to be incredibly lucrative right off the bat. Like, what I got paid to write the book was incredibly lucrative. And I know that's very unusual, and and I all I can point to is, like, playing in traffic and getting lucky. You know? So there's nothing replicatable about it except, like, playing in traffic.

Chapter three, consulting at scale.

The success of the book gives Carl the margin and space to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do next.

I came home one day and my wife was like, you know, we've been thinking of the businesses as a security blanket.

Maybe it's become an anchor. I was like, oh, that's fascinating. So I I started pursuing a couple of these inquiries and ended up selling the business to a big firm who wanted me to come sort of help be, like, chief education officer or something. I can't remember what my title was. But then at that point speaking was making up a large source of revenue.

On top of the speaking, he starts selling art.

I had somebody who gives advice for a living say to me, hey, can I hang one of those on my wall? I was like, yeah, what like, I was literally like, whatever. I mean, what are you talk I don't even know what you're talking about. And he's like, would you sign it?

And I was like, dude, come on. Like, just it's a squiggle. Like, that that's literally how I felt about it. I was like, alright.

What? And then I was like he said to me, I'll give you and I can't remember what the number was. Let's say, I'll give you a hundred dollars for a signed one, or I can just print one hanging on my wall. And I was like, where's the pen?

You know what mean? I was like, well, of course. Like and again, another one of these things where I like, I didn't have a plan.

But like before, Carl was sensitive to feedback. It's what legendary music producer Rick Rubin calls antennae for picking up signals, paying attention, and listening, looking for connections and relationships in the outside world. Here's more on that from Rick Rubin speaking with Christa Tippett.

And it's not intellectual. It's not based on looking at any charts or or any analysis. It's only based on a feeling in me of what are the things that make me lean forward? What are the things that make me laugh? What are the things that make me excited? What do I find beautiful today that I didn't notice yesterday?

Here's Carl on what happened next.

I'm good at noticing tailwind after it hits me on the head a couple of times. To be honest, I don't think any of us are. But I know I'm not good at strategically deciding where to go, but I'm pretty good at noticing I'm getting pushed a certain direction.

So then the art sale started to make a little bit like, I got asked to do a couple art shows that were just again, was like, what are you talking about? Like, the first show was here in Park City at the start of Sundance. It was gonna be an eight week solo show with fifty pieces. That was the email.

Would you ever consider doing a eight week solo show with fifty pieces? And I was like, I don't even know what a piece is. Like, I called my friend. I'm like, what's a piece?

He came over and he's like, so we we decided to do old weathered chalkboards, you know, like pragmatic, like weathered chalkboards, framed yellow pad pages, you know, napkin. We framed a bunch of napkins. It all sold out. And I was just like, what happened?

Like so art show, did one in London at the Mansion House, did one in Amsterdam, did one in California. So the art business started to grow, which I was just like, this is I don't even understand. This is amazing. So I started leaning into that.

That art side of the business matures and now contributes to fifteen percent of Carl's revenue. There's a visual in each weekly email. And at the end of the email, there's an opportunity to buy a digital license to use that visual. Many financial advisors buy the visual to either put up on their wall or share during client engagements. So art makes up fifteen percent of revenue. Speaking currently makes up twenty five percent. There's a small amount from books.

But then the majority of revenue comes from a source Karl has developed in the past few years.

The product is called the Society of Advice. It's what he now considers the consulting arm of the business.

The model is fascinating, as is his story of how he landed on it. And that's what I wanna share with you now.

Carl and his family are now living in this incredibly free environment in the sense that Carl doesn't have a boss. He has a lucrative book deal and lucrative speaking opportunities around the world. He can do that work from anywhere. So with little notice, Carl and Corrie decide to move to New Zealand for a year in two thousand and sixteen, which ends up being two years. They subsequently moved to London for a couple of years after.

So when we moved to New Zealand, I still had all these speaking engagements because it was a I mean, we made that decision in six weeks. Right? Like, thought had not occurred to us, land in New Zealand six weeks later. So I still had all these speaking engagements all over the world.

So I had to do a lot of flying that first year and I was like, this is not sustainable. So that's when we shifted to online courses. So about two years of doing that, I realized I didn't wanna be an online course. Particularly, I did not wanna be a tactics guy.

Seven steps, hacks, tricks. Now, I was like, look because I started noticing that we would give people tactics and then they wouldn't do anything.

The courses produce income, but like the majority of online courses, they don't produce outcomes for the customer.

We're selling all these online courses and I noticed nobody was doing anything. And I even noticed like we had better completion rates than the industry average, which is like three percent industry average, like online courses. But I noticed people would even like buy them and not even open them. And I saw myself do that. Like, would be like, oh, I have to that course, I would maybe open it, start it, and get three to five percent in and stop. So I was like, scrap it.

And this was like eighty percent of the revenue. I was like, scrap it.

Around that same time, he gets struck by an idea.

I saw Seth go and speak at two conferences in one week. One conference was a marketing conference, so a bunch of marketing professionals.

And then the next conference was a financial planning conference event.

So two conferences, same talk, which is what you'd expect from a keynote. Same with a comedian or musician. Different venues, different audiences, same show.

After that second keynote, Carl and Seth are having breakfast together. They're friends. Have the same publisher. And Carl is asking him questions around the keynote, but specifically how it might apply to financial advisers.

And I was asking him questions about his work just because I'm so curious about, like, how his work applies to what we do. And the whole time I was listening to him talk, I was thinking, gosh. I wish this was recorded.

Like, that's what what the answers I was getting was what I thought we would like to hear. Instead of I mean, the keynote was great. I'm not in any way disparaging the keynote. But instead of the keynote, I thought that the answers he was giving because they were specific to us.

Right? So I I kept thinking, like, I wish this was recorded.

Shortly after, Carl heads to China to deliver his own keynote at an event. Dan Heath, best selling co author of Made to Stick and Switch, is speaking at the same event. Again, they're friends who share a publisher and agent. Carl and Dan have dinner together.

I was asking about questions about Made to Stick and Switch and his work and how it applies, how a financial adviser could apply it not only in our work, but in our marketing and all of that stuff. And I had the same experience. I was like, oh my gosh. I wish I could record this. Not not because I was adding much, but because the answers were specific.

So that was, like, the genesis of this idea of the society was, like, could we get I started internally referring to to it as Carl talks to smart people. Right? Like, could I go find smart people, talk to them, and draw out their work as it applies to us? So that's really what we wanted to do. And we wanted to do it better than anybody else because I didn't see anybody else doing it.

That is exactly what Carl did.

Then we created the Society of Advice, which again was largely an accident, happened in London. We're in the middle of COVID. All the financial advisors asked me a million questions, so I decided to host an online call for sixty minutes with Jerry Colonna of Reboot and two thousand people sign up. And this is early days of Zoom. I didn't realize that that was gonna be, like, four grand. But I was like, I don't care. People need this so bad.

He has validation that financial advisors want this place where Carl talks to smart people about how their ideas can be applied specifically to financial advisors.

So then we started doing that monthly and we called it the Society of Advice. So at first it was just a monthly call.

We launched ninety seven founding member seats at ninety seven dollars a month. Those sold in three minutes. We moved it up to one zero seven, those sold in three days. We moved it up to one seventeen, Those sold in three weeks, and then we ended up settling out about five hundred and fifty people.

The price is now at one hundred and forty nine dollars per month, and membership numbers sit around that five hundred mark. The iterative process to hone down on a product that customers want was an interesting one.

At first we had an archive. So like twenty four months in you'd log in and you'd see all the shows. And we were like, how do we make this even simpler? How do we make this even cleaner? How do we make this like I realized at this point somebody told me, Carl, you used to get paid for solutions, now you're getting paid for presents. She said, well, that's because you're if you're lucky, you get paid for solutions the first half of your career.

And if you're lucky, you get the last half of your career is getting paid for presence. That's why I say our marketing strategy now is deep a deep presence practice. Like, how can I be deeply present for this conversation?

So that's when we trimmed the society. We're like, the only thing that matter the only thing I could do uniquely like, everybody can have guests and workshops and archives. And and we also noticed people were leaving some of the churn data from the societies. People if people would leave, we didn't lose very many, as people would leave, they'd say sometimes like I'm a bit overwhelmed.

This is like twenty four, ten page show notes, twenty four episodes. So I dug into the community research. You know, there was a bunch of good research mainly from Venture around SaaS community products. And the two number one reasons for churn is confusion and the second one is overwhelm.

Because your tendency when you see that churn is to add more. And this. And this. And this.

We were like, how could we strip it down to its essence? Make it the most important ninety minutes of your month. And if you don't come live and I was like, I wanted to have no recording. And the team talked me into like they like, look, you've lived in New Zealand before.

You know what it's like to have a time zone not work. I was like, okay. Fair enough. And then they're like, and we want people to have lives.

Like, they go on vacations and stuff. Fair enough. So that's why we went to thirty day recording until the next episode, the next meeting dropped and then it got replaced. And people we did a lot of, like, stated preference versus revealed preferences.

So we do this a lot. We, like, we'll take something away because I push really **** ** what could you delete.

Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away. And so we'll take things away and then see if we broke anything. So we we took away the archive and without saying much and waited to see how many people said things. And look, there are some very vocal people who are upset about that, but it was like ten. And we had some people say, always check the archive and we'd go look, no, you don't. You haven't logged into there for like so we went and looked at the login data and nobody was looking at it.

So we were like, let's focus on the and as AI tools, I was like, let's get more human. AI is not scary. It's actually allowing me to be more human. What's the connection?

What's the so it turns out the society is a monthly call ninety minutes. Currently, we're about to change this. Monthly call ninety minutes. The recording's available for thirty days and access to six retreats a year at my house.

Like, you can attend a retreat if you're a member of the society at my house. And we do those are for twelve people and they sell out.

Carl has since added new offers and engagements to people within the society. Mastermind type products where you get more time with Carl and a small group of advisers to work on the one thing you want to get out into the world.

This now makes up more than half of his revenue split. And largely speaking, it consists of one call per month and the preparation leading into that call.

Carl is a master at asking great questions, listening deeply to his guest, and directing the conversation down non obvious paths. But he also has this incredible network of friends and peers that he can introduce to the conversation.

He's welcomed the likes of James Clear, Morgan Housel, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Liz Ann Saunders, Michael Easter, and Seth Godin.

I asked Carl a dumb question.

How did you build such an incredible network?

I mean, I could be really cute about it and make up a narrative and then sell it to you as three shortcuts.

But the truth is I can now see how it happened but I don't know how to replicate it. It could have simply been that I got really fortunate to write for some pretty blue chip places and that those names got me into conversations that I would have not otherwise had. And I'm sure there's a piece of that that's a hundred percent true.

So the only thing I have to share that's of any value is an adventure journal.

Prescriptive. It's it's like I was walking down this path and I noticed there was some water here and I was thirsty. If you happen to be on this path and you happen to be thirsty, this might be useful.

But I don't know if you're gonna be on the path and I don't know if you'll be thirsty. I don't even know if the spring will still be running. So the only thing I have in answer to that is play in traffic.

The thing I wish I had been better at and I feel like I'm really getting better at now, I still got a long ways, is getting far more in tune with who I really am and what's the unique thing that I wanna see in the world and attending that practice more. And then noticing when I get off track, and I just got off track for two or three years recently, so I'm still not very good at it. But a great Buddhist teacher said, the bad news is you're falling through the air. Nothing to hang on to. No parachute. The good news is there's no ground.

And Pepin Children's says treat chaos as extremely good news.

So I I I wish I could have gotten more aligned with that earlier of just like, I don't know what this is gonna look like, but I'm gonna be who I really am. And then I'm gonna make that easy to spread.

My observation is that whilst Carl does play in traffic, he also has the courage to pursue his curiosity to answer that one overarching interesting question that frames the problem he's trying to solve. That question was, why is there a gap between what people know they should do with money and what they actually do?

Very few people have the discipline to do that.

They look for shortcuts. They follow trends and advice, sometimes from well meaning people, other times not so, on how to execute tactics that fast track exposure and access to fame and attention. In other words, they're trying to put ground beneath their feet.

Anytime I'm trying to put ground beneath my feet, I now recognize that as like, woah. Woah.

Carl did a lot of things people advised him against. But he pursued them anyway because he was so fixated on solving this problem and doing so in public, he didn't stray from that. He didn't sacrifice that curiosity in place of social media hacks or tactics.

As a consequence, the right people, the people he wanted to attract, followed along.

That is how Carl Richards became the undisputed authority.

Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, consider subscribing. In each episode, I share the story of how one invisible expert became an undisputed authority in their niche.

And one other thing, I've created a free email series called the ten patterns of disruptive wisdom. In my research of undisputed authorities, these are the consistent behavioral patterns I noticed amongst those who rise to the top. To get the email series, head to Liam Curley dot co dot u k. Link is in the description.