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This episode is sponsored by Calibrate iq. First, a disclaimer. In the interest of being transparent, I created Calibrate iq. It's my app and I built it because I wasn't satisfied with any of the other risk tolerance tools on the market. I found that other tools didn't work the way I wanted them to. They focus too much on risk preference rather than time horizon. They're clunky and overcomplicated, and they're too expensive for what they do. And they aren't user friendly for clients. I designed Calibrate IQ to be simple, easy to use and low cost. It lets you send a single magic link to any client you want to survey. Clients fill out a simple survey that takes less than two minutes. Once that's done, you can automatically generate an investment policy statement instantly and deliver a beautiful branded report to the client. It lets you customize reports with your logo and brand colors, and you can even add your own custom investment preferences to the questionnaire. If you're tired of expensive risk tolerance tools that overthink the process, try CalibrateIQ. It's $9 a month with a seven day free trial. Give it a try at CalibrateIQ app again. That's CalibrateIQ app. Hey everyone. Welcome to Ops and Impact, where we talk operations and marketing for independent financial advisors building a lifestyle practice. I'm your host, Michael Reynolds, and today's topic is the truth about custom websites for financial advisors. So this came up because, full disclosure, I've got a little bit of a bias here with today's topic because I own another business called Zephyr that builds websites for financial advisors. So I just kind of want to be transparent about that. And that is a potential conflict of interest or a bias I want to just disclose. But this comes from the experience I've had recently in building websites for advisors and advisors reaching out to get some help with their websites. And in one case recently, actually just today, an advisor reached out and was like, hey, let's book a meeting. And we booked a meeting and I always send a preview video in advance. The preview video says, hey, here's how it works, here's how Zephyr builds sites, we use themes, et cetera. And the advisor responded and canceled the meeting and said, hey, I'm looking for something more custom. And so I gave a response and said, no problem, totally fine, totally respect that, no big deal. But here is just some some perspective on what custom websites really mean. And I just want to share those thoughts as we canceled the Meeting just so they had that perspective. So I thought it was a good topic today to talk about on the podcast because there's a misconception, I think, when it comes to custom websites and what that means and what the differences are between, quote, custom websites and template or theme based websites. And I'm putting custom in quotes because of the. You'll see in the topic as I talk about this more what I mean by that, because custom doesn't always mean custom. So here's kind of a summarization of what I shared with this advisor who was looking for custom website design. There's lots of options for building websites. As a financial advisor, you probably know this. You can work with any different number of firms. You can build one using AI. You can, in full disclosure, you can go to Claude or ChatGPT or some tool or lovable and give it literally one command and say, hey, build me a website based on this criteria and it'll build it in about a minute or two. That's fine. You can do that. You can certainly do that. And there are some pros and cons to that. Some of the pros are it's very fast, very easy, and it's about as simple and fast and cheap as you can get. And it looks pretty good. The con would be a little less control. Once you want to get into fine tuning it and making it a little more customized to your brand, it can get a little difficult and challenging. Getting to that first draft website up and running is super quick, but then tweaking and fine tuning it is often a little bit less quick. So again, there are some pros and cons. It's right for some advisors and not right for others. But there are other options where you work with a firm like the one I own called Zephyr or with other firms. There are firms that are specific to financial advisors that I think we all know about, that they build websites. There's platforms like WordPress or Webflow and other platforms. WordPress is open source. Platforms like Webflow or Wix or Weebly or Squarespace are commercial products. Tons of stuff out there, tons of options. So what I want to land on is this concept of a custom website. Based on the interaction with this particular advisor I referenced earlier on, there are some financial advisors that are looking for what they feel would be a custom website design. They don't want something that they would consider a template or a theme. They want it to be unique and custom. So here's the thing I want to clarify. When it comes to custom websites, so first, when you are working with a firm or a designer who builds a website and they say they're building a custom website for you, it's likely still starting from a theme. Let's say they're building on a WordPress, for example. They're likely starting with a WordPress theme and then they're customizing that theme. That's pretty common. I'm not saying all the time, but it's pretty common to do that. And so if you're looking for a custom design and you actively say, I don't want a theme, you're probably still getting a theme behind the scenes, and the designer is just customizing it so it looks unique. And, and that is perfectly fine. And that keeps the cost low because you're not starting from scratch. You're having, you're starting with a building block or a foundation that is predefined. And then you can customize that and you can still get a custom, unique design, but you're still starting from a theme. In Zephyr, we do the same thing. I'm saying we, because I'm putting on my Zephyr hat for a minute here. We start with themes and then we customize those themes. If you're working with a designer that uses Squarespace or webflow, probably starting with a theme and then customizing that theme. So there is a misconception that if you're working with a designer that uses templates or themes, that you're getting a cookie cutter product or it's going to look the same as everyone else, or it's not customizable. That's really not true. I'm using template and theme interchangeable because I think they're, they kind of mean the same thing to advisors. They're not always the same thing, but I'll just practically use them as the same thing. So a theme is a predefined framework, a finished site, so to speak, that's put together that you can spin up and then customize. And so my point is, I would not be, I would not try to avoid a designer that uses themes or templates because again, they can still be highly customized. And it doesn't mean they're going to be locked into some framework that can't be changed. Now, there are some providers out there I know that are a little more locked in. There are some providers I know of for financial advisors that build websites, and their platform does seem to be a little more locked in with not a lot of customization. I'm not going to name any names but there are some out there I'm aware of that are like that. So you might find that some providers are a little more rigid and don't give a high level of customization. But for the most part, ask this question. If you're working with a designer who's building a website and you actively want a custom design, it's okay if they start with a theme because again, those can be customized. Now let's say you truly are getting a from scratch custom design. That means the designer is likely using something like figma. Figma is a tool that lets you mock up prototypes and build something kind of from scratch. In the olden days we used Photoshop for this and really that's not so much used anymore. I think some people might still use Photoshop, but nowadays it's really about prototyping something in Figma or something similar. And you truly are building from scratch and that's okay, but that tends to be more expensive. If you're truly starting from scratch and building something totally unique, then it's likely going to be a little more expensive. You're going to have more time spent on building it out. You're going to be. You spend more time on planning out the blueprint of the site. It will probably take longer because again, you're kind of building everything from scratch and it's going to be more expensive. So nothing wrong with that. But I would argue that you're not necessarily going to get a better end product if you're starting from scratch. If you have a website built from scratch using Figma or something like that, yeah, you might get something a little more unique. You might get something that's exactly what you specify based on where you want things put on the layout and how you want things done. But like I said, it's likely going to be more expensive, possibly significantly more expensive, and it's probably going to take longer. So if you have a budget for that and you have the patience and the time to spend on that, perfectly fine, you can customize something from scratch. But what I found, and again, I'm biased, I'll admit I'm biased because of my business interest in this other firm that builds websites. My opinion is that most advisors don't need to spend a lot of time or money on a custom website. Most advisor websites are fairly simple. They have a homepage that has some basic elements on it. They have the about page, they have other stuff, they have FAQs, they have contact online schedule scheduling, they've got a blog, they've got the Basic stuff that we need to get out there to communicate to our prospective audience who we are and what we do. And I'm a big fan of not overthinking it. And so I don't encourage advisors to spend tons of money and tons of time on a website that might turn out to be unique and customized and very different, when in reality it's not necessarily going to give them that much more benefit. I encourage advisors to spend a reasonable amount of money and time on a website that is theme based and built on a foundation that's already preset and then customized to match their brand and their firm and what they want it to look like, which can be done very easily. Again, I'm biased because of my other business, so very clear about that. But. But that's my take on it. I don't think advisors need to overthink this. I don't think we need to overthink building a website. Additionally, one other little caveat is sometimes I've seen advisor websites that are a little bit too customized in my opinion. They have the navigation menu somewhere totally different. They're using very, I don't know, innovative language and things that are meant to be very artistic and meant to make them look really different and interesting. And in reality, sometimes, and often I would say that just confuses the prospective client. We're used to website navigation being in a certain place and acting a certain way. And we're used to being able to find things in a certain place and we're used to just a website clearly saying what it does and what we're supposed to do there. And if we deviate too much from that, we often risk confusing the prospective client. And consumers who are confused don't really take the next step if they're confused about where to go to find information, if they're confused about how to get around on your site, if it looks so foreign and strange and different from websites they're used to that they just don't quite know what to do with it, that's an obstacle and they're not going to be able to take that next step of reaching out or booking a meeting. So that's a side effect sometimes of being too custom and too unique. So I guess that sounds a little boring. I don't mind being a little bit boring about websites. They need to look great, they need to be beautiful, they need to be very aesthetically pleasing and very professional and great on mobile and all that stuff. Yes. But all those boxes are checked pretty much with just a basic nice theme based website. So whether you go with my firm, Zephyr or something else not meant to be a commercial, but any provider you go with, don't be afraid to have your website built on a theme and then that theme will be customized to match your brand and that's okay. Are there cases where maybe you have a large budget and plenty of time and you really want this truly custom crafted website that is exactly what you're looking for and your vision is really carried out that way? Yeah, there are cases where that can make sense, but most of the time it's overkill, it's overthinking it and is spending too much money and time. So to recap, theme based websites can be highly customized in the same way that a custom website could. So don't be afraid of themes, don't spend too much, don't overthink it, and don't deviate too much from the norms that people are used to when navigating a website because that can be confusing for consumers. All right, hope that's helpful. As always, you can find my consulting website for advisors@michaelreynolds.com Again, that's michaelreynolds.com I have all sorts of stuff there for advisors, some free, some paid. Most of it's free. So feel free to go there if you want to reach out, ask questions. You can do free consulting via voice memo with me as well. So if you want some feedback and support, send me voice memos. I'm happy to chat back and forth with that as well. All right, thanks for joining me today. Have a great day. See you next time.