Financial Mastery Across Generations: Insights from Gen-Z Advisor Mando Sallavanti, III, CFP®

Josh: Welcome to The Wealth and Yourself Podcast, where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money.

I’m your host, Josh St. Laurent. Today we’re joined by Mando Sallavanti, Gen Z’s Financial Planner. He’s a Certified Financial Planner and owner of Sallavanti Financial Services. Mando, so glad you’re here. I’ve been looking forward to this. we’ve only spoken once but I’ve been following your journey on LinkedIn and love what you’re doing to help Gen Z with their finances and look forward to a fun conversation about what we can all be doing to help our financial game.

Mando: Yeah. Thank you Josh. I appreciate you having me, and from our first conversation, man, I think we were on the phone for over an hour, so I’m excited to dive in today.

Josh: Yeah, for sure. So Mando, for the listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with what you do, can you tell us who you are and, and what you do?

Mando: Yeah, so I’m from Old Forge, Pennsylvania, currently living in West Pitton, Pennsylvania. I just got my CFP a few months back. I’ve been a financial planner for three years now, and I run a financial planning practice. Man, I really like to focus on a subscription based model with my clients. Now all of them aren’t on that, I sort of cater the fee structure to how I’m working with them. But we work on a subscription based model for the most part. Majority of my clients are 25 to 35 in tech sales making 150 to 300 equity comp, that type of deal. So that’s what I’m dealing with a lot of my time working with clients.

Josh: I love that. I love that, and I love that you’re Gen Z’s financial advisor. You know, there’s a gap in that space. Like from what I’ve seen, there’s so many older advisors who are focusing on retirees and not alot of people are doing what you’re doing. So can you tell us a little bit about, how’d you decide on that niche and how did that come to be?

Mando: It’s funny, back when I started my career, I was working with a lot of pre-retirees actually because for perspective, my parents are 53 and 54. So when I got in business I said, mom, dad, like, who do you know that I could reach out to and use your name to potentially help them? And, this is where I grew my clients and referrals spawn from there.

And I was growing my business, growing my business, that well ran out. So, I get to the point where I’m like, I need to generate business somewhere else. LinkedIn was the natural next steps for me figuring that out, and I’m thinking about where do I niche down. Meanwhile, I take a course from Justin Welsh, who, for those of you who don’t know Justin Welsh, he’s a huge LinkedIn creator, big influencer, and he focuses on growing online businesses.

So I take his course. He upsells a coaching call to me, which he doesn’t do them anymore, so I’m glad I did that. And going through where should I niche down, what should I do to differentiate myself? Gen Z was the idea I had because I’m Gen Z, so I’m 25. Gen Z I think goes up to about 27 or 28 years old, roughly.

And Justin says, “man, that’s it. Like go with it because all the advisors in your game are going for the 50, 60, 70 year olds.” Because they have all the money, they’ve accumulated all the assets. But if you can cater your fee schedule to still make money, provide value for the people you’re working with over that, that’s a home run in my book.

So what I came back to was, all right, subscription based model, how do we pay for Netflix? How do we pay for Amazon? Subscription. So I said, why should this be any different? It shouldn’t. It’s a service based model. Same thing. So, I go on a subscription model. I started marketing myself as Gen Z’s financial planner, and now this was, this was 11 months ago, and it’s really contributed to a lot of growth with LinkedIn and with my business.

Josh: Yeah, I love that story and kind of that evolution of how you landed on Gen Z. And I think one thing I really like about you is how differently you’re doing things from other advisors. I don’t think a lot of listeners know, but you and I got our start at the same company actually. And you know, I remember thinking back to those days, some of the older advisors that were first mentoring me, you know, it was, “go to B and I go to Chamber of Commerce.” You know, you kind of flip that and you said, well, hey, let me look at LinkedIn. That’s where a lot of these Gen Z, you know, eyeballs are, and that’s kind of worked for you, you know, to build up your clientele. And then, aum model, sort of this old way of pricing things.

You said, no, let me go subscription, and so you’re sort of catering to that Gen Z niche and how they want to be talked to, how they want to work with a financial advisor. Maybe you can speak to some of the unique challenges that that group of people face and like what you’re doing in that space to help ’em solve those problems.

Mando: A big reason that I focus on helping these people. As I mentioned, I relate to them. I’m in that age group, but a big reason as I talk to people around my parents’ age, 53, 54, even some of their younger friends that are in their forties, I saw people that they’ve built up credit card debt or they didn’t have savings, or they’re very behind on investing because they never started because they figured I only had a little bit to invest.

Why should I invest anything? I saw those and thought, man, if I could have got to them when they were my age. If I could have sat down with them 10, 15, 20 years ago, what would this effect be? So now with Gen Z, a lot of the challenges they face aren’t necessarily the most complex things in the world.

Most of them wanna get started investing. They wanna buy a house, maybe they wanna get started, real estate investing, simple things like that. But even, hey, I, I need to buy a car and I never did this on my own. I never had someone to really help me with, with something like that. All of these things that are just every life financial decisions that we all make.

These are the things that I’m helping a lot of my clients with on a general level because if they can make good decisions there, then moving forward, it’s gonna set them up to have success no matter what direction they go in, just by avoiding mistakes on these decisions throughout their life.

Josh: Yeah, that’s so important and overlooked too. You know, a lot of the advisors that I used to mentor with, you know, who have this percentage based model they’re not able to help people with those sort of things cuz they can’t make a living doing it. Right. So I think the subscription model kind of solves for that.

What is a typical glide path of someone who comes to you and says, Hey, these are kind of the host of problems that I’m having.

And then a year later you can say, Hey, look how far we’ve come, and where do you get these people to? Or, you know, what’s the ideal situation?

Mando: I would tell you, Josh, a majority of my clients, there’s a few common goals I see consistently. They wanna buy their first house or a new house to upsize from their starter home, number one. Number two, they wanna start investing. but to elaborate on that, they’re probably investing in some capacity, whether it’s Robinhood or their 401k, but they’re like, I have more money, but I just don’t know if these are the right places for it to go.

And the third thing, maybe they have a side hustle that they wanna turn into a main gig. Maybe they wanna get into real estate investing. Maybe they wanna start a business, but they wanna be in the financial position to get there. So with a lot of my clients, In addition to that, a lot of the everyday choices come up of like, do I buy a car?

Do I spend this much money here? What’s my budget? And with my clients, I’m going through all of these things with them to make sure they’re making a sound decision, which I know sounds pretty simple, but at the same time, I remember looking back at my parents’ friends who were 34, 35, 45, 55 years old, and.

They were in positions where I’m looking at them like, man, if I could have talked to you 20 years ago, if I could have talked to you 30 years ago, the difference that would’ve been made. So helping my clients avoid the big mistake is what I see the biggest value to them, because they’re gonna save money just by not making a mistake with their money.

Josh: Yeah, it’s such a good point. I think like a common theme I keep hearing from you is the time that the folks have, you know, the younger folks, I mean, I can only speak for myself, but there’s nothing more frustrating as a planner. You know, when someone comes to you at 67 years old and says, you know, Hey, I’m ready to start saving for retirement.

Or, you know, Hey, I’ve been hearing about investing, you know, and it’s like, man, you don’t have the time. There’s this huge element missing. And so I think that’s so important. Like, if you can lay the foundation, you know, early on, get the savings habits. Get debt free, buy the house.

You know, you set yourself up for success in your thirties and forties. Is there a, success story you can share with us, like a, great client story, you know, where someone came in and maybe they’re in a tough spot and you know, maybe you’re still working with them today, but they’re in a completely different spot from when you, you, you first met them.

Mando: All my clients that work with me, it’s, well, majority of them, I won’t say all majority of my clients that work with me. It’s an ongoing relationship. It’s never a one time plan. We do some things and see you later. So for all my clients it, there’s always this evolution of like, what are we working towards?

What’s top of mind? What’s most important? If any of my clients are listening to this, they’re probably laughing when they hear me say, what’s top of mind? Cause I come into every single meeting and ask them that question. but a couple success stories. I don’t want to use one specific example, but I think this theme is really helpful.

I’ve had people who are Gen Z, who are 25, who are 27, who are 30 years old, that they have some credit card debt or they have some bad debt and they hire me and we have a very specific action plan to check in every so often. Some of them I’m talking to monthly, some of them I’m talking to bimonthly or.

Whatever timeline we come up with, and I’ve had this group of people that are clients of mine that I’m seeing real progress in the savings every month is going up, the debt every month is going down and. it’s easy to get caught up from our chair, Josh, because in our chair it’s like the investments excite us making a big complex tax strategy, like that’s excites us and, and those are really tangible things that you see instant value and you could tell the client, Hey, I just saved you $45,000 with this one recommendation.

But with these types of clients I’m describing in particular, I. I’m looking at the compounding effect of changing this behavior now when they’re in their first few years in their career, getting them out of this position and then they’re gonna be able to start investing probably by 2024. It’s just, you can’t even put a number on that when you factor in how much credit card debt they might have gotten into without talking to me, how much savings they might have never had without talking to me.

Josh: Yeah, it’s so true. Building those good habits, getting those patterns early on, it’s hard to put a price on that. Like you said, you know, hey, a lot of credit card debt, you know, how bad would this have snowballed if we didn’t step in and kind of make a plan for it? Thinking through that, let’s say, you know, someone’s a Gen Z and they’re listening to this right now, are there foundational tips, that, you know, everybody who comes to you, you say, Hey, let’s knock these three things out, you know, before we get started like getting free of debt, or is there something foundational that you try to start everyone off on?

Mando: So my first year working, I lived with my parents still, which I think most people do. If you’re a Gen Z and you’re living at home still and you just took your first job, you probably don’t have bills more than a thousand dollars a month. You might have a car payment, you might have car insurance.

You’ll buy food every month and you’ll go out on weekends. If all that combined is, much more than a thousand bucks a month, if that, I’d be very surprised. So I prelude with that to say this, my first year working at home, that was me. I saved a quarter of every single paycheck that I got, and I invested half of every paycheck I got.

This set me up to be in position to be only two and a half, three years working, and I was able to purchase a multifamily home with my fiance just off that first principle alone by the head start I gave myself in my first year. So now we have our first house. We’re living in one unit. We have two rental units plus a garage on the back of the property that we also rent on.

So we really have three rental units. So I use my example to say, if you’re at home and you start working, save as much money as you possibly could. You’re gonna be happy you did it and, and it’s not a forever thing. Do it for one year. You don’t have to do it for two years. You don’t have to do it for three years.

Do it for one year and you’ll probably be moving out faster than you, faster than you thought you could. Anyways, beyond that though, I’ll say this, not everyone’s in that position, so if you aren’t, these are the things that you wanna make sure you prioritize. Number one, just make a budget. It’s the most simple thing in the world.

Probably every advisor you talk to is gonna tell you, make a budget when you first start working. But seriously do it. Go through all your expenses, be realistic with yourself and understand, here’s my net income, here’s my expenses, what should be left over, and then that leftover money. Decide how much you wanna spend of that and decide how much you wanna save of that, of that leftover money.

I would probably say spend half of it, save slash invest. The other half, that’s just like a general rule of thumb. Your personal situation might vary, so don’t take that as personal advice, but if you really don’t know where to go and you don’t work with an advisor, that could be a decent strategy.

Beyond that, you’re gonna wanna build to six months of your expenses sitting in a savings account. This is quite frankly to avoid credit card debt. Credit card debt will be a detriment to your wealth. Having an emergency fund helps you avoid that. Those are the two major points I’d say, man, and like the last one, just to hammer it home. 401k match. If your company offers a 401k, contribute to the match. 401K match is not free money. Your 401K match is taking advantage of your full compensation and I want you to remember this with that point. If you don’t think your company factors in your 401k match to the salary they’re paying you, I don’t know what to tell you cuz I promise you they are.

So, make sure you take care of your 401k match. Build the six months of expenses in savings and make sure you make a budget.

Josh: Man. I love that. I love those three. I love the hustle kind of the grind of your story of getting that multifamily. I’m thinking back, you know, when I was doing something similar, you know, just saving as much as I could, working two jobs, just grinding, trying to get that first multifamily.

But I remember I was an anomaly among my peers. You know, you mentioned earlier, like on this seat, you know, sometimes it’s easier to take things for granted. We have all this education, you know, and we’re surrounded by other people doing these things. I know mindset is big in what you do. Is it a challenge sometimes for younger people to say, Hey, put that money in the retirement account.

You’ll be glad later on down the road. Like how do you frame that and get people in the mindset of building wealth

Mando: A question that I’ve framed before really helps with this. Josh, let’s say you, don’t follow through and you don’t start investing today, and now you wake up 10 years from now and you never did. How would you feel about the money you’ve put away so far in that case? And the answer to that question is really simple.

Well, I wouldn’t feel good about it. I’d be behind, I’d be nervous. And any 25, 30 year old, 35 year old, they’re gonna say that to you flat out, and it sounds stupid when I ask that question, but asking that in the form of a question is better. Saying, you’re gonna regret this in 10 years, you’re gonna regret this in five years.

So when I could ask questions like that to my clients, it really helps them to reframe of like, Oh, I feel what this would be if I don’t do this, I don’t wanna end up in that position. So I think just through guiding my clients to their own realizations of like, what really is the impact of not starting and, and what’s my issue with that?

That’s huge. Also, like I’ve done it analytically, so I’ve showed them if you start at 25 compared to 35 and you put X amount of dollars away, You literally would not have the same at 65 even if you doubled it. So you need to put somewhere around like 2.5x, 3x away if you wait 10 years just based on market returns.

That alone to me is like, I wanna start right now because I wanna live my life and put money away.

Josh: I love that perspective. Looking for the long term. Get in that mindset, right. To building wealth early on. Is there anything else you can share with us as far as, you know, how you’re partnering with these people? I know technology has become you know, there’s been this wave of new technology advisors are using.

And I know a lot of people are gravitating to it as well, whether it’s something to help with visuals or to explain concepts or maybe just. To illustrate their wealth, you know, across the spectrum of all the accounts they have. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of technology you’re using and how clients partner with you on that?

Mando: Yeah, I don’t go too crazy. I use emo and I think E-Money does a good job. With their decision center and some of their reports to just conceptualize like, here’s where you are, here’s a picture. laying out a balance sheet in front of someone, I don’t think is the best thing in the world, but it’s better than anything they’ve seen before.

Cause they’ve never done it for themselves. I tell you, Josh, probably 99% of the people I’ve talked to have not seen a balance sheet of them. That alone is worth the fee that someone pays me, because that could tell you a million different things to do. So with any money. A lot of those, those reports, other than that, I’m old fashioned, like I’m on a whiteboard on Zoom.

I’m drawing stuff out. Like it’s just how I visualize and learn things. And I think many people are visual learners in that way. So I try to draw things out and simplify them as much as I could. Cause I think people understand it and people won’t take action unless they understand something

Josh: Yeah, that’s a great point. I’m a big fan of the whiteboard too. I’d consider myself old school in kind of a similar way. So. Let’s say someone listening wants to work with Mando, what does that look like? You said there’s different touch points.

Some people maybe monthly, quarterly, like what does that look like? You know, they give you a call and they say, Hey, I’m having, you know, these three kind of things and here’s where I want to get to in a year. What could they expect when working with you?

Mando: If someone wants to work with me, I have a really simple process that I go through every single time. First we do a phone call and I understand what your situation is, why you wanted to even schedule with me in the first place, and I gotta ask some financial questions cause I need to understand if you’re someone that I can even help.

So I’m gauging if you’re a fit, you’re sort of gauging if I’m a fit. I’m getting a really good idea of, what is the problem we’re solving? Why haven’t you solved it so far, and what’s stopping you? So beyond that, if I think that I can’t help them and they wanna have another call, we’ll do a second call. In that second call, I go through my process.

I tell them how much I charge and the ball is in their court. If they wanna work together, great. If they don’t wanna work together, also great. And I’m here to be a resource for them should they ever want to work together beyond that for the clients to move forward, and we do work together. We go through a pretty extensive process.

In the beginning, it’s usually about two to three months. We probably meet eight times in those two to three months, give or take, and we’re going through a financial plan. I’m helping them reorganize their finances to be optimal for what they’re trying to do. And after that, it’s pretty much all right, we’re gonna have quarterly check-ins.

So every client we meet at least quarterly, the people that I meet with monthly, we don’t meet as long. It’s more so like every other, every quarter will have a Zoom meeting or in person if they’re local. But most of my clients are on Zoom. And every month we might do a phone call, check-in, but I tell my clients, you have access to me.

So if we have a quarterly meeting set for three months out and you need me a month from now, reach out to me. We’ll set a meeting. I don’t charge you for every breath that I take. So, They have that luxury. So that’s why I say like some clients we end up meeting monthly because they just need higher frequency touch points based on their situation.

It comes back to finance being personal. Other clients, we might have quarterly meetings set up and the quarterly meeting comes and they’re like, you know what man? Like, we’re good. Like we could wait till the next one. And that happens sometimes and sometimes I’m not, I don’t let them off the hook because there might be something on my mind that I gotta talk to them about.

But yeah, man, so it looks different for every client, but from a general level, it’s a guaranteed four meetings a year at least. It usually ends up being more than that for some people. Some people it could be less. It’s just what the client wants.

Josh: Fair enough, and you’re not restricted as far as where you can meet with people. You said a lot of clients are on Zoom, so I’d imagine you work, you know, nationwide it sounds like.

Mando: Yeah. Right now I believe Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, Florida. New York, New Jersey, PA, Maryland, Delaware, 13 different states right now. I don’t know them memorized off the top of my head, but I could work with anyone in, in any 50 states. All I need to do is purchase the state license. And as you know, in our industry, if you’re a licensed financial planner, for those of you that don’t know, if you wanna work with somebody, all you need to do is purchase the license in the state that the client lives in. If you don’t have it already, and you’re able to work together by the law.

Josh: Great, just wanted to make sure to cover that. I wanna switch gears a little bit. You know, we’ve got kind of two different groups of people listening. We’ve got the wealth builders and we’ve got the business owners. So I wanted to switch gears, talk a little bit about your business.

If you can talk to us about the kind of trials and tribulations, you know, the journey, if you will, how it started, and maybe start in the past, get us up to today, and then we can look you know, over the next year. What are you looking forward to?

Mando: Yeah, so going back to my, like start I started in 2020 and my first three months were pretty dark, man. I made like 300 some dollars. I had barely any clients. I realized that I didn’t know everything. I needed to ask for help from other people. So I’d go to mentors, I’d go to other advisors.

I went to my parents, like I mentioned earlier. I literally asked them, who can I reach out to? And username, like, who can I, that was the turning point for me because I started to learn more. I started to realize it’s okay to tell a client, Hey, I don’t know that, but I’ll get back to you with the answer from someone who does know that And really it taught me more than anything, resourcefulness is more important than knowing everything flat out. With that, I grew through referrals. Had an awesome first year. It went from horrible to awesome. My second year was awesome. I sort of started my LinkedIn journey in my second year and now in my third year closing it out. LinkedIn has really generated a ton of business for me. Some of the things I’m excited about, I started on Twitter, I, I’m starting some email marketing, so I’m hoping that those could help facilitate growth in my business, my business along with LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn is awesome. I have some speaking opportunities coming up I’m really excited about later this year.

So, yeah, man, just, just trying to grow the business and get on, get on as many opportunities as I can.

Josh: I love that. I love that journey. And I know we talked about this on our call maybe a couple weeks back. I want to get to that kind of, that LinkedIn journey. I think that’s really cool how you built that. But before you do, I wanted to just ask, is there a big mistake you’ve made as an entrepreneur? 

I’ve realized like a lot of my biggest learnings are from the big mistakes I’ve made, and you say, well, geez, I gotta pivot and do something different. Was there a moment or an event that happened that you’re like, man, I gotta do something different and learn from this.

Mando: It’s a really good question. I don’t think there was necessarily one specific mistake, but something that I struggled with a lot early in my career too was letting other people influence what was most important to me too much. And I think it’s okay to have influence in that aspect, but I was letting other people dictate what my goals should be and why they should be my goals and how I should go about them.

And I look back and it led to burnout quite frankly. In my second year, I really had a period of time there where I was burnt out, man. I flat out was, and I looked at my business and, and I repositioned it. And this is when I started. Going back to LinkedIn and, and targeting Gen Z. And the biggest shift for me was I’m gonna set goals based on what I want in life and what’s gonna make me happy.

And the step that I took to do that was defining my vision and really writing things out in terms of where do I want my life to be? What’s it gonna look like, who’s it gonna be with? How’s it gonna be and what’s it gonna feel like? So the big mistake you talk about, I think, is just letting other people dictate what your goals should or shouldn’t be.

“Should” is an illusion. There’s no such thing as “should.” Make your goals what you want them to be.

Josh: I like that. I think there’s a lesson in there too about just perseverance, right? Like a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, they failed a million times, right? And kept going, got back up. So I think that’s huge that you stuck with it and obviously you’re making it work.

I think it’ll be interesting for people listening, you know, maybe one big financial decision that you made that led to success. Maybe that was something that you’re doing on LinkedIn to lead to the business growth, or maybe that’s the multifamily you bought. Does something come to mind for you?

Mando: The multifamily house is probably the best financial decision I’ve made. I’ve only been in here two months and I just see with the rents that I’m getting, cause we do short term rentals in our units and I’m just seeing it already, the effect it’s gonna have on me. So that is it. But I’ll use something else just to give another point here. When I started the turnaround, my first year in business, I made really good money that year like I never expected. And I’m sitting there and I have all this cash and I’m like, I don’t know what to do with this cash. Like what do I do? Like do I invest in the market? Do I do something else? 

And people around me had always said, oh, business coaches, they’re awesome. That’ll help you. And I never had a coach for anything before besides when I played football. So I coincidentally get cold pitched by a coach. His name’s Simon Granor. And Simon focuses with financial advisors, honing in their offer for their clients and putting them in a position to provide more value to their clients.

I’m like, all right, this seems like the guy that could help me. So I paid Simon 4,500 bucks for three month engagement. We ended up working together in the future for even longer, and working with Simon man, I mean, it really did set my career on a different trajectory than it would’ve been, and it’s one of the best investments I’ve made in myself for sure.

Josh: Yeah, mentorship is huge and I think it gets undervalued a lot. You know, a lot of people say, well, you know, when I get to this point, maybe then I’ll hire the coach. Do you have any tips for anybody? I know it’s kind a crazy story how you guys met. You said you kind of got cold pitch by ’em. Do you have any tips for anyone out there looking for a mentor who they should seek out?

Like what kind of qualities this great coach would have?

Mando: People naturally want to help. So I wouldn’t be too hung up in like, scurrying for a coach or scurrying for a mentor don’t come into your life naturally. I think putting yourself out there and just hanging around the rim, so to speak, like be around successful people. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations.

Also, realize this. There’s never gonna feel like the perfect time to pay a coach or a consultant or buy a course or go to an event. Insert anything. There’s never a perfect time. The perfect time is when you take action. Use that information, use that application, and implement it into your life flat out when everyone else is retreating, you just putting your foot on the gas and going for something and taking that risk, that’s how you’re gonna get ahead of life.

Josh: I love that advice. I love the journey of the practice. I love everything that you’re doing on LinkedIn. Can you talk about what you’ve done on LinkedIn? I think a lot of people are really impressed with your journey there. Your following, you know, the content you put out is excellent.

Can you say a little bit about that and how that evolved?

Mando: So my first two years as an advisor, I used it how I think 99% of financial advisors use it. I cold pitched as many people on my service as I could because I was always told it’s a numbers game you gotta talk to a million people. So I’m like, Hey, I’m Mando. You don’t know me, but how about I show you what I do and how I can help you?

Who’s gonna say yes to that? Nobody, no one’s gonna say yes to that. And honestly, I did get meetings with some people, but for the amount of effort I was putting in, it was minimal last year when I got to that point that I bought the Justin Welsh course, I did the coaching, which Justin Welsh, I sort of got to that point cause I realized like, okay, there has to be a better way.

And Justin just happened to be the guy that I came across with a course at the time that I’m like, all right. I’ll take this guy’s course, I’m gonna act like I know nothing and I’m gonna just do what he says. So I did that and then we move on. I start getting clients like the next week after I’m implementing things from the course and I’m like, this is crazy.

Now, it was sort of a coincidence because over my first six months really having a strategy, I probably got like three clients off of LinkedIn, which is still pretty good. Honestly, if I’m, if I’m being real and maybe leads like 5x that maybe like 15, 20 leads or so. now the next six months after that, which are these past six months, I’ve literally gotten 70 plus conversations with potential with prospects inquiring about my business from LinkedIn directly, which is just insane for me to even say out loud cuz I think about the days where I was like, Scrounging for one prospect, So off of that, I’ve signed 19 clients this year. I’m anticipating that to be even higher. I’ve sort of had a backlog here cuz I had a lot of people inquire in April and it’s just led up to now. I plan to at least double that for the rest of the year. That’s the goal. And with that man, like it’s really come from, I post content every day.

I make the content once a week and schedule it out because if I had to sit down and write it every day, it’s just not feasible. And I think for many people it’s not. Second, I’m putting myself in the circles with people who I want to be around, whether it’s successful financial advisors, people in my niche, which primarily is 25 to 35 year olds in tech sales.

And other than that, influencers, Justin Welsh. You have other people that have a ton of followers that you can go add value and comment on their posts, and this is gonna significantly contribute to your growth on the platform because people see you, they view your profile, and they’re gonna wanna follow you.

So through doing all of that, my strategy became how do I have conversations at scale with people? How do I spark up any conversation for any reason I can, whether it’s viewed my profile, like my post, we follow somebody, or I just saw a post of theirs that they liked and funny things happen where? You just have these conversations.

People see that you’re an advisor and they have this financial question on their mind, and you’re there right there, right. That second they ask you. So whenever I get asked, that’s an open door for me to pitch because this person clearly has a need and they need help. It’s like if you’re out and you’re talking to a dentist, then you need a root canal.

Is the dentist gonna tell you, oh, you, you know, just let that go. We’ll talk later. Like, I don’t need to help you with that. No, they’re not gonna say that. They’re gonna say, all right, we could schedule something. You can come in if you really need help with that root canal. Same thing with us. That’s essentially the strategy that I’ve taken.

And it’s served me very well.

Josh: I love that. Such good points. I’ve been surprised too. I bought the Justin Walsh course as well. Shout out to Justin. Some Welsh it’s amazing when you start putting value out there, you know, how good people will find you, you know, and people with questions will sort of trust you as a source of information that they can rely on.

Sounds like you’ve got some really ambitious goals.

Mando: I’m doing my first keynote speech this October in Portland, Maine. It’s gonna be with the International Disability Insurance Society, so I’m really excited for that. The topic is how to build a financial services practice through LinkedIn. shout out to Maxwell Schmitz. He was the man that asked me to speak at the conference.

So that’s gotta be what’s most exciting for me right now, man, in the next year.

Josh: I love that. That is exciting. if someone wants to track you down online, where would they find you?

Mando: You can go on LinkedIn, Mando Sallavanti III. You can go on Facebook. Mando, Sallavanti III, Twitter, same thing. Pretty much the easiest place to find me.

Josh: Cool. I love it. And I’ll put it in the show notes for everybody listening. You know, he’s easy to track down. Definitely give Mando a follow. we’re gonna transition into the big three here. So first question, what does living a wealthy life look like for you?

Mando: Really simple. We have to live the life of like: Am I putting money away and making good financial decisions? Of course, which I talked about before, this ties back to why you should start focusing on your finances earlier when you are in your twenties rather than waiting till your thirties or forties.

Because if you can start earlier, you don’t need to put as much money away on a per paycheck basis later. Then you have this excess cash that you can now use to travel, you can use to buy the material things, whatever your goals are, that aren’t necessarily financial things. Living a wealthy life to me is being able to do it as a career I love, which is financial planning.

I love talking to my clients. I love having Zoom meetings with them. I love the interactions of solving their problems and, and seeing that pain leave their body. But while doing that, I have the freedom and flexibility that I can go on a cruise next month with my family and my fiance. I could go to the beach for a few days for my fiance’s birthday later this year, like things like that, that I could enjoy my life as much as I want to. And money isn’t a problem. That’s a wealthy life. It isn’t a number. It isn’t a million dollars. It isn’t a hundred million dollars. It’s, are you living, doing the things you want to do with the people you want to do them with without stress flat out.

Josh: Couldn’t agree more. I love that. Second question, let’s say you at a thousand dollars, you’re starting over, what would be the first thing you do with that money?

Mando: $1,000. I’m starting over. What would I do with that money? Take all the, if you’re taking all the knowledge and all the skills away from me that I have starting over… I would say that a thousand dollars would go to a course that I have, an actual course I would buy. Cause I know it’s less than a thousand dollars.

James Pollard, he has the advisorcoach.com. Awesome guy. Total side note, look him up. If you’re an advisor, he will change your practice. He has a product called your first year as a financial advisor, and I think it’s a couple hundred bucks. That’d be the first thing I buy. I would take that course and then I would implement that and see what I need to do with the leftover money afterwards.

Josh: Cool. I love it. Personal development. That’s a good answer. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made financially?

Mando: Biggest mistake that I made financially. Was getting too enamored in like stock picking. I think naturally when you get into this career, like I remember like I just passed my series 66. I can manage my own money I’m like, oh, I’m gonna buy this stock and I’m gonna buy that stock and, and I’m just like, Why It’s just stupid.

So I had a couple losers in there before, but if anything it’s taught me like individual stock picking for long-term investing is fine. Day trading is, it’s just the odds are against you. So I haven’t like lost real money. It was always play money, so to speak, but. It’s just not worth the time that you’re putting into it, and also the likelihood that you’ll succeed.

So if you are investing in individual stocks, like make sure you do all your research and I, I wouldn’t factor in selling it in a couple month time span or something.

Josh: I love that message because I know you see this stuff, I see it every day. You know, the people on YouTube, TikTok, wherever, you know, kind of touting the day trading get rich quick, you know, and typically it backfires. I’m sure you, you have these clients who come to you who lost their shirt, you know, in the market and in a couple weeks time trying to day trade it from a newsletter or read it or something that they read.

So that’s, I think that’s really good advice.

Mando: And actually I’ll add to that. This is funny. So before I was an advisor, I was flipping sneakers and I had a pretty good business. I made like 15 grand over the course of a few months as a college kid. And I invested a bunch in crypto and I had made like 20 grand in crypto. Well, not made, cause I didn’t sell, but I literally made like 20 grand.

And this was over the course of like 2020 to 2021. And. I never took any chips off the table and it pretty much just wrote it down to like, be broken even essentially. So I don’t know if I call that a mistake cuz like, who knows what the top of any market is, but it’s just funny to bring up, you know.

Josh: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. that’s a tough one. I have a similar story with crypto. Maybe that’s, you know, next time you come back we can talk about that. I want to revisit systems and processes with you too. it’s been good talking with you. I feel like we covered a ton.

One last final question for you. If you had one message to give anyone out there who’s struggling to find financial freedom, what would that message be?

Mando: It’d be similar to another point I made today. You gotta come back to your vision. If you’ve never focused on what your vision is and what you want in life, do that. Take 20 minutes, grab a pen and a paper. Don’t use your phone, don’t use your laptop. A physical pen and a piece of paper. Write down what you want your life to look like in five years.

Just write everything down, anything that comes to mind. Don’t judge yourself. Don’t hold back. Write that down. When you have that, I want you to look at what you’re doing today. What does your life look like? What are your habits? What are the things you’re doing with your money? And it’ll become very clear that those actions you’re taking today, if you are struggling, there’s probably things in there that you can take out or they aren’t serving you to get to what that vision is.

Once you see that and you subtract those things, figure out what the actions are that are what’s gonna get you to those things. So when you could, you could get on that path and it’s not gonna be easy. You might need help from other people. You could consult an advisor, you could consult a money coach.

Whoever that person to help you is, if you do need help, it’s gonna set you so much further ahead to be able to say, now I know what path I’m trying to go to. These are the actions I take. This is the person that’s gonna help me get there.

Josh: I love that message. But anything, any last words you wanna say to the people listening?

Mando: Just thanks for having me, Josh. I mean, I appreciate you bringing me on, letting me have the platform with your audience and, you know, awesome conversation man.

Josh: Likewise, man. Well, best of luck over the next year. You got an incredible practice. A lot of big stuff coming up, so eager to see what you do and I’m sure we’ll talk again soon.

Mando: Thanks, man. 

Josh: Well, perfect man. Thanks for coming on. Hope you have you on again down the road. Thank you to everybody listening. 

This has been Mando Sallavanti III. Don’t forget to follow him. Thanks for listening to The Wealth and Yourself Podcast. I’m Josh St. Laurent, signing off.