Building in the Dark While Goliath Buys Commercials
The businesses with every resource in the world are still running generic ads. Here's what that means for you.
I was sitting at my desk last week, lamp on, first thing in the morning. I ran a search — nothing exciting — and a Fisher Investments ad popped up.
I sat back and stared at it for a second.
Ken Fisher has built one of the most recognized wealth management brands in the country. Paid search. Television commercials. National presence. You have seen the ads.
Generic couple walking on a beach. Some variation of “the fees you pay could be costing you more than you think.” He has been running some version of that for longer than I have been in this business.
You have to give credit where it is due. Fisher figured out paid advertising before almost anyone in financial services. They scaled it nationally. The machine works.
And sitting there, looking at that ad appearing in a generic search result, I felt something unexpected.
Relief.
Nine Years Building Someone Else’s Name
Here is something I do not say often enough.
For the first nine years of my business, I did not have a real brand. Not one that belonged to me.
I was building my reputation, yes. I was earning relationships. I was sitting across from clients during some of the hardest financial conversations of their lives — retirement decisions, business exits, planning after losing a spouse — and I was doing good work. Honest work. The kind of work that actually matters.
But the name on the building belonged to someone else. The institution I was affiliated with got the brand equity. I got the experience.
That is the deal most advisors make at the start. You align with a larger firm because it gives you instant credibility while you are still establishing yourself. It is a reasonable trade early on.
The problem is that a reasonable trade at year one is a losing trade at year nine. I was building their brand. Not mine.
The day I decided to stop doing that is the day everything got easier and more interesting at the same time.
We built Revolutionary Wealth as our financial planning and wealth management division.
Then Blueprint Business and Tax Advisors to handle tax and estate planning, business consulting, and the work I do with business owners who are trying to buy, sell, or grow.
Two firms. One mission. We wanted to build a brand that other people could fit themselves into. Not “Scott Financial” or “Flores Partners.”
Something that someone could wake up and feel the same sense of pride that we do, revolutionizing the way we think and do business.
What It Actually Looks Like
Most people imagine entrepreneurs building their brand in some well-lit studio. Ring light, microphone, everything dialed in.
That is not what it looks like.
It looks like a tv light shining on me with a computer in my lap after the kids go to bed. A Claude subscription. A ChatGPT account. A few other tools. Somewhere between $700 and $1,000 a month in software, if that.
That is my entire production stack.
I go to industry conferences sometimes. I walk into rooms full of people from firms with national reach, compliance departments, and marketing budgets with real numbers behind them. Someone will look at me and ask, “Who are you with?”
And I say our firm name. Revolutionary Wealth.
There is a pause. Sometimes a polite nod. Sometimes I can see the calculation happening behind their eyes — the quick scan to figure out if I am worth taking seriously.
I used to let that bother me. I have spent enough time in those pauses to understand something now. The pause is the gap between the world they built and the world they are about to be late to.
The 800-Pound Gorilla is Still Advertising on Google
Here is what I noticed about that Fisher Investments ad.
It showed up in a generic search result. A paid placement. The same format that has been running for a decade and a half.
The message was identical to what they have always run. Older couple. Fees. Call us.
And I thought: they are fighting the last war.
Fisher is a company managing hundreds of billions in assets. Their marketing budget is a number I cannot actually picture. They have entire teams whose job is to get in front of new clients.
And in 2026, they are buying Yahoo-style placements in Google results.
That is not a comment on their financial advice, which I will leave to others to evaluate. That is an observation about where they are competing.
They mastered the broadcast era. They scaled paid search. They built a machine that was very good at reaching people who were already looking.
They do not have a real playbook for what comes next. Not because they are stupid.
Because their entire organization is optimized for a version of client acquisition that is quietly becoming the past.
What Comes Next is Not Like What Came Before
The next five to ten years in financial services will be built by people who understand something the big firms are still figuring out.
Trust is not bought. It is accumulated.
The way trust accumulates now is different from when Fisher was running his first television spot. A 30-second ad during the evening news does not carry what it used to.
A generic Google placement does not either. People have become remarkably good at scrolling past both.
What builds trust now is showing up consistently, saying something real, and letting people watch how you think over time.
That is what this newsletter does. That is what Notes do. That is what I am building with every post.
I am not writing Coffee and Compounding to chase a subscriber number. I am writing it because I believe the advisors and business owners who are willing to show their actual thinking are going to inherit the clients that big firms lose.
And they will lose clients. Not necessarily because they give bad advice. Because they will never feel like a person to the people they serve.
You cannot buy that feeling. You can only earn it by showing up.
The Tools Changed the Math
Six or seven years ago, building a brand the way we are building it would have required infrastructure I could not afford. A content team. A marketing director. A social media strategy.
The whole machine of a real media company scaled down to fit a mid-size advisory firm.
Most of us could not afford that. Most of the people reading this still cannot.
What I have now is different. A few hundred dollars a month in AI tools and the specific knowledge I have built over nearly a decade of real client work. That combination does something the big firms cannot easily replicate.
They can buy reach. They cannot easily buy a perspective built on thousands of client conversations and a genuine point of view about how wealth actually gets built.
The 800-pound gorilla has more resources. That is still true. Resources that were built to win a specific game, in a specific era, are not the advantage they used to be when the game starts to change.
I am not building what they built. I am building something different. Something that has equity in it, and purpose behind it, and a reason to exist beyond just placing first in a paid search result.
This is For You
If you are still reading, I want to say something directly.
If you are the person with the lamp on at night, building something the established players in your industry do not take seriously yet, I see you.
If you walked into a room recently and someone gave you the polite nod after you said your own business’ name, I have been there. More times than I can count. I’m still there.
If you have spent years being the most prepared person in the meeting and still getting underestimated because your business is newer, your brand is younger, or you do not have a national television presence, I know what that feels like. And I want you to hear something clearly.
The generic couple walking on the beach is not competing in the next decade. The firm running the same paid search campaign they have run for fifteen years is not building the kind of trust that survives what is coming.
The owner who has never shown anyone how they actually think is not building a brand. They are buying one, one impression at a time, and impressions are getting more expensive and less effective every year.
You are building differently. You have the audacity to believe you can change the way brands are grown and the way trust is earned in your industry.
That is not arrogance. That is a structural advantage. The kind that compounds quietly until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Maybe that is humility. More likely it is just what it looks like when someone is willing to do the work that the big guys are too comfortable to try.
Keep the lamp on, take a sip of coffee, and enjoy being small while it lasts.
Cheers!
Disclosures:
This blog contains general information that may not be suitable for everyone. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized investment advice. There is no guarantee that the views and opinions expressed in this blog will come to pass. Investing in the stock market involves gains and losses and may not be suitable for all investors. Information presented herein is subject to change without notice and should not be considered as a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Revolutionary Wealth LLC does not offer legal or tax advice. Please consult the appropriate professional regarding your individual circumstance. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.