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I like to say that I'm like one of the few financial advisors, planners, that I want my clients to spend money. I want them to live the life they want to live. And so I found that deeply problematic. Well, and just kind of as an aside to that, at what point in time in the military did we ever take statistical probabilities of future unknowable events and then build plans off them? No planner actually does that. That's ridiculous. Honestly, what I found it to be was more of a compliance function. It was something advisors could point to and say, hey, I put this person in a portfolio. Sometimes when I stop the recordings, it asks for you to stay logged in or in the room. But that way it gets the whole upload to the video part. Because what I'll do, I'll take this, I'll edit it. I'll send you some clips that you can post on your behalf if you want. I usually post one or two when I post the episode. Just getting into it and trying to be better about content creation. But Grant Vermeer connected, mentioned you and is like somebody whose content he really likes. And so. I was like, well, Grant is great. And that's kind of a great segue into some of the podcasts because meeting somebody like Grant, that's not possible without LinkedIn, right? Yeah. It's crazy how even for me, like, you know, Grant and I both went to the Naval Academy, but I didn't meet him until I met him on LinkedIn. I think there was somebody who was like, oh, you should, you're on LinkedIn, you should talk to Grant. And so. No, it's the power of LinkedIn, man. It's an amazing platform. When you really use it thoughtfully, it can create all sorts of opportunities. It really can. I get so many people. I get so many people who ask me like, what are you doing on LinkedIn? Literally somebody this morning texted me and was like. You just have to put yourself out there. Like, no one knows what they're doing. That's the funny thing about this whole thing is like, you know, I think a lot of people get in their heads about it because they think maybe somebody like you or me and they've seen us now and they see a finished product, but they didn't see the two years before that where we had no idea what we're doing and we're just trying things and seeing what resonates with people and experimenting and trying to build a business. And, you know, you just got to get started. The person who texted me, I'd noticed just started posting on LinkedIn recently and I was like, oh, like, cool. So I commented on her posts and everything. And she was like, hey, can we talk? Like, what are you doing on LinkedIn? What is all this? And so hopefully I can get her, see the impact, you know, on her career and maybe opportunities for her that I've seen it had for me and for others. It's really, really fascinating. Very cool. Okay. Well, we kind of already started, but let me do the intro. Yeah. Welcome everybody to the show. The Connection Economy Podcast. I'm your host, Mark. And this is the show where we sit down with actual humans who are leveraging LinkedIn to create real opportunities. I say that because, you know, you are not an amalgamation of Claude or ChatGPT. I am an actual human that uses LinkedIn for his business. Today's guest is Kyle Packard. And we're going to talk about how he got started on LinkedIn, when things actually started to click and take off, what he's doing right now, what's working. And before we wrap up, he's going to give you. Two things that you can go and do right now to level up your LinkedIn. Kyle, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here and talk about one of my favorite topics, which is how you put yourself out there and how, you know, particularly veterans can build a business around what they feel comfortable doing, what their skill set is, and then create that independence. It's the same type of independence that I try to create for my clients as their financial planner. I love that the idea of independence and especially you calling out veterans and there's with a lot of veterans that I talked to hesitance around like we've so much there's OPSEC and there's secrecy and there's putting the team before the self and right shift to LinkedIn is difficult for a lot of veterans. I've been lucky to interview a mutual friend, Grant Vermeer, and then a few other veterans that I think are doing it really well. And I love telling their story and being able to share that with active duty. Service members, but then also veterans have gotten out and are having to do an adult job, as I call it. Yeah. And finding a way on LinkedIn to do that. And an important caveat to all of this. I'm not a social media guy. Yeah. I have an Instagram and I guess it's X now. I can pre-show. I do a little bit of high school coaching football, high school football coach. And so I'm on it to talk to kids, right, about practice times. But I've been off Facebook since like 2010 when Facebook started to get really weird. Yeah. Won't enjoy social media. And I run my business exclusively off of it. That's wild. And LinkedIn is one of those platforms that I think is really accessible because I consider it the serious social media. People are on there for a reason. You're there to network. You're there to find a job. You're there to market. It's something people are looking. They're on the platform for a reason. Your market is there. And so I would encourage. I would encourage anyone that maybe isn't even a social media person to just think about LinkedIn seriously because there's a serious benefit to it. You know, you tied in two things there. One, it's a serious social media platform, but it's still a social media platform. And it's just because you're not fighting grandma's political posts or cat memes or people dancing. But it's still an attention space because it is social media. But make that attention about what you do in your business and how you help. If it's a service or a product that you're selling. How are you helping people? And your buyer is most likely on LinkedIn. Absolutely. Or that next opportunity, that next job. Let's back up before you start on LinkedIn. Spend some time in the army. Started like private all the way to lieutenant colonel. A few deployments under your belt. How did you go from that to financial planning? No, it's a great question because one of the few things I always get is how did you go financial planning from the military? That doesn't seem like there's a lot of connective tissue there. And I push back pretty hard. Because it's one of the fundamental things that I really got serious about when I started thinking about, okay, what is next? What is the second chapter? I'm going to retire from the army when I'm 43 or 44 years old. There's a whole second career there. And so like most veterans, I started from the position of I know my experience is valuable. I've developed all of these very unique skills and experiences that I know. Translate, you know, in my deepest core, I knew what I could provide was valuable. I just needed to find a thing that I could express my creativity and channel all of my experiences into. And when I started to think about what was next, I took stock of what those skills were. And so the first 10, 15 years of my career was very typical. I was an infantry officer that spent time in special operations. And I did. Back-to-back deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The second half was much more specialized. So about that field grade time, I ended up going to grad school and changing my career field to an army strategist. And army strategists, they don't have defined career paths. Effectively, they send us to graduate school. And they put us out in the army at kind of the two-star level command and above. And they say, go solve problems and plan things. And so my career was a little bit of a choose-your-own-adventure. And it coalesced around working at three- and four-star headquarters, helping commanding officers make decisions. And so in practice, what that looked like was I would get a very ambiguous problem, told to go solve it, given a team to go do that, define the decision space and the problem, and then present decisions and opportunity costs to whoever was making the decision. And over a period of years, my own expertise ended up kind of centering around the intersection between army strategy and the budget and Congress and institutional policy. So it was a lot of money decisions. Simultaneous to that, I had gone to grad school for economics. My financial life was getting more complex. And so I started to really get interested in personal finance. And I always had considered being a financial advisor, but I really didn't understand what that meant. And so the more I learned about it and the more I learned about what a financial planner was and looked at the certified financial planner curriculum, I started looking at their planning process. I started to look at MDMP, military decision-making process, army design methodology, and how I was approaching decisions for senior officers. I was like, this looks really similar. I thought, well, look, if I can get this technical knowledge, and that's somewhat table stakes, and, you know, go back to school to a certain extent and really educate myself, I have a really unique opportunity to show up with veterans and do financial planning in a way that feels familiar and accessible and is unique to our community because a lot of the financial implications of being a retired senior officer, service member are something that most other financial advisors don't understand. I could offer a really unique service offering that allowed me to take 10, 15 years of experience and apply it to something new in a novel way. There's a lot that I love about that, but there's two things that stood out to me. First, you describing being in this situation, not being given all the resources to solve that problem. I laugh because I immediately thought of like a scenario. Every venture's experience. My story is not unique. You could say the same thing if you were a battalion operations officer or a commander of a ship in the Navy. You're always given these problem sets where you're under-resourced. You have way more assumptions than you have facts, and you have to go figure it out. That's a translatable skill. It's hard to translate. And I think that's why veterans struggle. I seriously think that entrepreneurship is such a great path for veterans because I never had to explain that to somebody who wanted to hire me. I just went on my own and said, hey, I'm going to figure this out just like I figured out how to be a company commander or how to be an aide-de-camp or how to be a SIG officer because no one gives you a book in the military on how to do any of your jobs. You've got to go out and figure it out. And so I kind of took that same entrepreneurship. I think all really good officers have in common in the military. And then just apply that to my second chapter. Yeah, I love that because like I said, everybody has that. Like I immediately thought of a story. I'm like, when I was on the carrier, we had this problem. We had to solve it. It was like, we stared at it the first time. We were like, there's no way we can figure this out. And by the next like 24 hour later, we had 12 helos moving in and out of the carrier. It was madness. And you just, you learn to figure it out. And yeah, I think it's interesting because your clientele understands. Understanding that is an experience. And one of the things I struggled with when I got out was translating the story of what I did in the military to trying to get a sales job. At first, no one would even hire me. They're like, you don't have any experience. It's like everything in sales. Yeah. Maybe taught me how I'm pretty sure you can teach me how to sell software. Like we'll figure this out. Like it's going to be all right. So one of the things I love and why Grant connected us is you do such a great job of telling stories. And making it very clear for the audience, like you're writing to them and what their experience is. How much of that before you got started and picked up those customer stories, how much of that was your own experience? Like when you got out of the military, what was going on in your financial life? I don't need numbers, but like, what did your picture look like? And how did that inform how you help your clients? Oh, absolutely. Because I've always been a planner, whether it was professionally or in my personal life. And one of the things that I think I've done well. Yeah. Is I've always been the type to look 10 or 15 years out. And how that showed up in my personal life was it gave me the option to be an entrepreneur. So very lucky and grateful in the fact my wife has always worked in corporate America. She worked remotely way before COVID. And being thoughtful of our finances, we never really used much of her salary. And so when it came time to retire, I had the option to do a broader array of things. And I could take more risk than I would have been able to do otherwise, because I didn't necessarily need to replace my income. And so I was always very mindful of making sure that when I hit that 20 year mark, I was going to have the options available to me to do what I wanted to do. Whether that was going into coaching football full time and making $15,000 a year, or putting a bunch of personal capital into a business and trying to create something for myself, maybe doing both, which is what I've been able to do, because I didn't have to chase a paycheck. Yeah. And I think the military doesn't do a great job of preparing us for what you just described, like the thought process of what you went through. Thinking about that next step, preparing for it even before you got out. And I think that's one of the beautiful things of your content is like, so much of those people you're targeting are at that transition point, or you know, just after. But like, hey, this is these are things you can think about. These are things you can do very actionable. When did you start? How did you stumble into LinkedIn? How did you decide on that as like an avenue that you're going to use to, you know, share helpful content or drive business for your for you? It was right at the beginning. So whenever. Whenever you sit down and start to think about building a business, you have to start with the end goal in mind, which is, fundamentally, how do I convince people that the service I'm providing is of value, so that you can get clients? That's what everything comes down to. Yep. And when I sat down and thought about, okay, how am I going to do that? I had to answer the question, well, where are these clients? And so I started to think about how do financial advisors get clients? Well, they either do it in person, or they're working for a big firm, which I wasn't going to do. And social media marketing, I think, was really coming into its own. And I wanted to think of a way that was comfortable for me. And I don't like in-person events that much. It's not like I'm antisocial. But there's just something a little. Uncomfortable about putting yourself out there in personal meeting and saying, hey, I'm a financial advisor. I want to manage your money. That's just. You know, there's so many people that do that. And to me, it kind of comes off across as a little desperate. And when you start a business, the wonderful thing about it, you get to make all these choices yourself. Right. And so, to me, I want someone to become a client because they like the way that I think. And they kind of understand me. And how I show up for clients before they ever sit down with me in a meeting. Yeah. And that was kind of the impetus behind LinkedIn. In addition to that, that's where my clients are. Right. So, I'm focused on retired military, I classify it more senior leaders, between ages 40 and 65. And they're all on LinkedIn. So, it's a very natural way for me to talk to those people without it feeling salesy. And what I mean by salesy is I don't want my relationships with my clients to be transactional. What I do is very in-depth. It's very personal. And it's not something where I want to convince someone in a meeting. So, it's very in-depth. It's very personal. I would much rather them, over a period of time, get comfortable with how I think about things and them to think, hey, this is a good fit before they even reach out. I just think that there's lots of different ways to do social media marketing. It works for me because I'm a writer and I like to write. And I'm an analyst and I like to do analysis. And so, my posts are just a reflection of me. I like to write. And doing deep analysis really interests me. And so, it's really easy for me to do. You could do the same thing with a podcast or a YouTube video when there's other people in small business that do the exact same things. It just is that LinkedIn is kind of a very natural fit for me and how I like to do my marketing. And when you like to do your marketing, it gets done. And when you like your marketing, it tends to resonate with people because you continue to iterate until you get that groundswell of support and your people find you. Yeah, I think interesting point on the financial planning piece. It's a hard space to be in from a sales perspective. I think you touched on a little bit in terms of the in-person and how that kind of feels forced. But one of the things I think good content does is it builds, even if it's just in the smallest way, it builds trust. I know who Kyle is. I understand his approach. I see how he works. Maybe I see a little bit of his value. You know, we're not reading. We need to see from Kyle the human who would be my financial planner. And it creates a little bit of that bond so that at some point that one piece of content resonates and then there's an outreach or there's a connection there that leads to that relationship, right? It's a relationship. It's not a sale. It's a relationship. It really is. I'm asking for a pretty serious commitment and structure of my business to give people kind of off ramps as well. I want every relationship to be 25, 30 years. But I'm also not expecting people to make that commitment right away because that's just not an ask that I think is prudent. And it would be unserious of me to move people along at a faster speed than they're willing to go. So it all kind of fits very nicely in together. I like that. When did you notice that your content was starting to resonate? When did you first see that switch of like, oh, this is working? Did it lead to a connection or a relationship? What was that kind of pivot moment for you? It was pretty quick. It really took off earlier in this year. But even in the beginning, I actually started, I would call it like soft marketing about six months before I started my business. It was just posting on LinkedIn. I called them planning thoughts and it was very much more military planning focused. But it was, okay, I've used LinkedIn previously while I was in the army. So I had always kind of made connection requests. but I was like, okay, I think I'm going to do this. Let me just start posting and let me start connecting with more people. And what ended up happening is before I even opened up my doors to the financial planning practice, by just putting myself out there and saying, this is what I'm doing. This is how I'm thinking about it. I had clients within the first week and it wasn't, people were running down the doors and I didn't have a lot of clients at the beginning, of course, just like anybody else starting out, but I had clients. And over a period of time, I just kept iterating with my content. In the beginning, it was very much about me and how I thought. And I would say I did that for the first 18 months or so. And then as things happen, I got, very, very busy. And I mentioned I coached high school football. And so last year was my first year on the varsity staff and I had a whole bunch of new clients. And so kind of the summer, fall of last year, I fell off on a little bit of LinkedIn. I didn't do as much posting. I had a good amount of clients. I didn't feel like my marketing needed to push. And then towards the end of the season, as things kind of settled down, I looked at my practice like, okay, I can take on some more clients now. And I really committed to LinkedIn and I did two things. I really started to think seriously about what type of content I was posting. And the other thing I did was start to collect a lot more data. Using Publer and some of their own LinkedIn data analytics, I started to get very serious about what type of content was resonating in the terms of impressions and meetings. And I started to think seriously about what type of content was resonating in the terms of impressions and meetings. Yeah. You're not hiring the plumber. You're buying a solution. You want your toilet fixed. Yeah. You want your bathroom remodeled. And so what I ended up coming to was more of a post that speaks to clients and takes me completely out of it. Because when somebody is looking for a financial advisor, financial planner, someone to manage their money, it's because they have a problem that they are trying to solve. And so what you'll see now is I don't ever talk about me in any of my posts. It's very rare. Occasionally I'll put something in there just to kind of change things up a little bit. But for the most part, I am talking about client scenarios, clients, client problems, getting very personal. I use names. I use ranks. I use very specific scenarios of my ideal client archetype and talk about the problems. And a lot of times I don't even talk about solutions. I might obliquely kind of reference the concept that would solve it. But I'm trying to let people know that I understand at a very deep level the problems and issues that they're facing. And when I started to do that, both LinkedIn and my practice just really took off. I bet. It was hockey stick type of growth, both in terms of clients and LinkedIn engagement. To use LinkedIn numbers, I did a very respectful quarter million to $350,000. This year, I'll do well over 2 million impressions, and I'm starting to turn away clients now. And yeah, it's a wonderful problem to have. And that's all just because I got very serious and focused on how to show up and then use the data to inform them. I love that. I love like what that speaks to, you know, my systems brain coming out of, you know, my time in the military. And I love how organized you are around that. And then the other piece that I love about it, again, that really resonated for me when I looked at your content is your client as the hero of the story. There's an organization called StoryBrain, and their whole thing is like when you're telling stories as a business, your customer needs to be the hero. You are not the hero. Your customer is the hero. And so that shift to talking about them, but then also like from an interest standpoint with going back to the comment of LinkedIn being a social media platform still or where attention is, writing about those problems and then that resonating with your audience. It feels like a no brainer now sitting and thinking about it, that that worked for you. Obviously, you know, you had to iterate and you have to look at the data. I love the way that you approach that. I assume that lines up because you talked about senior military leaders transitioning, but your tagline of veterans hire me to make their lives easier. Like how did you land on that tagline? Because you know, in LinkedIn, when you post a headline, that bio, that headline piece is so important. It follows you in comments. It's everywhere. So how'd you land on high earning veterans hire me to make their lives easier? I would say I probably changed my headline as much as I changed clothes. Cause I just, I think that is the hardest thing to do. It's not easy. Not just the headline, but just how do you synthesize what you do as a value proposition in 50 characters or less? Yeah. And it's really hard to do. And it's something that I, it's almost like the same thing in the sense of how do you come up with the hero text for your website? It's the same problem, right? How do you, when I work with a client, when they first come on, it's on average four to five months of work to build out a financial plan that I built. How do you synthesize that down to one line? Yeah. It's hard. And I appreciate the feedback on that because I've iterated on that easily two dozen times. Yeah. And it's very easy to get too wordy, but the reality is that's what I do. It speaks to the service I provide for clients who is the best fit for me. And ultimately the value proposition, which is I make people's lives easier. And frankly, when you're talking about who ought to hire a financial advisor and who gets the most value out of it, I would love to be able to help everyone, but I am just a solo business owner. And so there's a gating requirement just in terms of business operation, but also prudence on who ought to hire a financial advisor. And so it just comes down to, look, I help high earning veterans, make their lives easier. Yeah. And I appreciate the feedback on that because it was a long journey to get there. It certainly wasn't the first thing I came up with a word salad in the beginning. I've become almost like a savant collector of these types of, it's something that I never expected my mind to be obsessed with, but the tagline and just a very good, not even elevator pitch. Cause that's not the right term for it, but just like headline of what you do and how you help both in LinkedIn. And again, cause you have such a limited amount, like you have the benefit of them knowing that you're a financial planner. So there's that, right? You don't have to get that specificity, but I would notice it as I went to being in sales, I go to a lot of conferences and people's conference booths have just the most generic nonsense. It is market slop. I was like, I don't know. I'm looking at your booth. I see your name. I see your tagline. I don't know what you do. Like if I could know that Kyle is a financial planner and he helps high earning veterans. Make their lives easier. Like, okay, got it. Like I know exactly what you do. Let me talk. I'm a high earning veteran. Let's talk. Like there's so many of these other businesses and individuals out there who have such fluff around what their tagline is. It hurts my brain. It's even worse in the financial services space. Oh, I'm sure. Because no two advisors you speak to are the same. And so many people call themselves financial advisors. They're not. They might be investment managers. They might just handle your portfolio. They might actually be a commission salesperson and just be doing life insurance. It's a little industry inside baseball, but in the financial services industry, particularly in the space that I'm in, the tagline will be something effective. We provide comprehensive wealth management or financial planning. And I'm like, what does that mean? Yeah. I mean, how are you figuring out my grocery budget for the week? Like, is that how comprehensive you are? Exactly. So it's accurate. But unhelpful. Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes it's not even accurate. Right. Because what's your definition of comprehensive? Yeah. My definition is going to be different than the next advisor you speak to. So one of the things that you do in your content and I expect in the way that you work with your clients is get very specific. So you talk a lot about specific numbers, you know, pensions, VA tax, disability tax, everything like that. And I go to a lot of local networks. networking meetings and chambers of commerce, you know, run into, there's always a financial plan there. And when I talked to him, I go, look, don't take this the wrong way, but to me, you're all the same. So like figure out a way to be specific. And you found a way to do that with numbers. Walk me through how you got to that level of specificity. How did it come? Was it natural? Was it something that you thought I need to do this? Otherwise I'm going to be like everybody else. It started in the very beginning when I started to think about how do you deliver a financial planning offering to veterans that is fundamentally different than what's in the market right now. And being a planner and being an analyst, I wanted to develop something that both felt familiar and customized at the same time. And when I thought about what that looks like in a very specific fashion, I immediately started to think about the pension and be a disability. And how does that get incorporated into the financial plan and then be reflected back in the investment decisions we make and the industry standard, just to give some kind of background on why or how my financial plan works. Offering is fundamentally different. Typically in financial planning, or when you work with an advisor, you're going to have a plan and you're going to have a portfolio. And to me, the plan is the future looking vision. And the portfolio is the expression of how that vision actually gets created. And there was two things to me that were really frustrating looking at the industry outside in as a career change. The first was the only connective tissue between the plan and the portfolio was an arbitrary questionnaire about risk tolerance, which then would produce a statistical simulation and a probability of if you have this risk tolerance, you should have this portfolio. And this portfolio, based on historical data, ought to be able to produce this rate of return. And so we think you end up having a 80% chance of success. Well, number one, what is 80% me? Yeah, I found it completely unhelpful. And obviously, when you use this sort of method, the bias is going to be to get that percentage as high as possible. And maybe a 50-50 might be good enough, but there's this bias to try to get it towards like 90 to 100%. And then that's also going to lead to underspending. I like to say that I'm like one of the few financial advisors, planners that I want my clients to spend money. That's ridiculous. It was something advisors could point out. And I think that's say, hey, I put this person in a portfolio based on their risk tolerance. And if they sue me, well, then I have statistical data to say that it was prudent. Right. So I found it to be much more of a compliance function than I did actual planning. The second portion that I found unsatisfying was the notion of being able to integrate guaranteed source of income as represented in the pension and VA disability into how we express the way we invest. And I think it's very intuitive if you have guaranteed income north of six figures, your portfolio ought to be a reflection of that. Right. And ultimately, what I came down to was a couple of things. First, there ought to be a very distinct connection between the plan and the portfolio, the implementation. And so what I found to be the best way to do that is to be a statistical simulation. And so what I found to be the best way to do that was rather than do a statistical simulation was to take the present value of all existing assets and future goals and then match the portfolio to the plan one-to-one. So here's a great example of how this works. Let's say you have a $60,000 pension. So you're retired as an O-5 or maybe a senior E-9. If you were to value that like a bond, which it has very similar characteristics to, it's not a perfect analogy, right? Because in a bond, of course, if you held it to maturity, you would get all of your principal back. However, if we look at what a long-term inflation-protected bond is, it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. It's very low risk, and it's going to produce income every single year. Well, that's what your pension looks like. And so if we were to. Value that like a bond, how large would that bond need to be today to produce that same amount of income in your portfolio? And what I find at that $60,000 a year mark, that ends up equating to about a $2 million to $2.5 million bond. So effectively, when you retire from the military, it's as if you have a multi-million dollar fixed income portfolio for the remainder of your life. That's wild. And so that's wild, right? Yeah, I don't think people think of it that way. And so when we build a portfolio, particularly we want to simplify this when we're thinking about a retirement portfolio, the portfolio is there to produce income. But if you're already getting $60,000 a year in guaranteed income, well, you probably ought to be holding less fixed income in your portfolio. And the function of how much fixed income you need in your portfolio should be reflective of your spending needs, whether that's additional income up and above what your guaranteed income is, or a goal that you want to achieve. And so if you're looking at a portfolio, you want to make sure that you have that amount of money that you have. Maybe you want to move and purchase a new house, and you want $200,000 in that, and you want it in five years. Why don't we take fixed income, duration match it to when you want it, because you've said this is really important to you, so that income is there. The rest of the money that you have in your portfolio could then be exposed to greater growth in the equity side of things. So it allows me to provide a very tailored personal experience. I like to say that for any decision I make in the portfolio, I can trace it back exactly to what a client said. This is why we're doing this. And oftentimes when veterans meet with financial advisors that aren't versed in the military, what they're going to do is they're going to give them a risk tolerance questionnaire and say, hey, you should be in the 60-40 portfolio. And intuitively, they know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I have this pension. How is this being integrated? It's a very unique thing that the military community has. And I've built my entire planning practice around it. I think that even dawned on me. I didn't think about how you would balance that type of income, the $60,000. What would you need from an investment standpoint, remove the military, to have that? And again, going back to how you put that specificity in your content, somebody reading that is like, oh, I hadn't thought about it that way. That needs to impact how I plan my finances moving forward. And then the other disconnect for me is, okay, I want to now take a vacation with my wife because we've earned it or do this. It's nice that I'm building this wealth, but I also don't want to not enjoy it before I'm dead. So there's a point to it. There's multiple points to it. I don't feel as though veterans understand just how wealthy they are, particularly the ones that I work with, because a lot of veterans are really good with budgeting and they've saved a lot of money. And so in some circumstances, it's not uncommon. For me to work with retired 06 and that they have $175,000 almost of guaranteed income and have a very large portfolio and their guaranteed income almost cover most of their spending. And so that portfolio that maybe was $1.5 million that they thought wasn't quite big enough, it's actually astronomical because they have $45 million of lifetime guaranteed income in value terms. And so what we can do now is spend more of that portfolio, have more of those experiences because they have that safety net. And I haven't even started talking about social security yet because that's the same thing. It needs to be valued as a bond. And so when we start to add that on top, well, now we're really in a better financial position than most people think they are. That awareness, it's obvious. It's easy to see how that resonates with the audience you're going after. Again, very specific to the people that you're trying to talk to. It's like, this is my lane. If you're in it, you're going to be in it. You're going to be in it. And listen up. You've shared some amazing stories and some really helpful insights for the type of audience you're looking for. I want to go a little bit more casual, a little bit more lighthearted. So I want to ask you some of the bonus questions. I want to start with the, if you're building a squad for a mission questions, you get one historical figure, one fictional character, and then somebody from LinkedIn who's on your team. Okay. So let's go. This is going to be very telling of who I am. So my historical figure is going to be David Hackward. He wrote a book probably in the eighties or nineties, and I probably read it a dozen times. as a young officer. It's called A Bowed Face. He was an enlisted guy in the Korean War and then was a little bit of a connoisseur in the Vietnam War and spoke truth to power a little bit. He was a Mustang as well. And so he had a great influence on me. Hell of a soldier as well. My fictional character would be Sad Sam Damon from Once an Eagle. Okay. That's an interesting cut. Yeah. That's also an interesting cut. Probably tells you a lot about me and my reading habits. Yeah. And can I go with David Goggins? Is he on LinkedIn? I think I just- I bet he is. Yeah. I'm sure he is. I just love somebody screaming and being motivating at us. Yeah. I love that. What's a trend on LinkedIn that you just can't stand right now? I hate the trolls. It just drives me- The trolls? Yeah. Trolls. Yeah. You're just going to get blocked. I just block people. You get a lot of people who come after you? No. It's like once every quarter. It's just an algorithm thing. One of the things I've noticed- One of the things I've noticed more on my posts is as I've gotten more traction, I get more and more out of network viewers. Sure. And one of the reasons I always go back, like sometimes I'll be like, well, maybe I won't be that specific in this post. And then I'll get like eight, you know, 12 comments saying, I actually got one the other day. It was pretty funny. It was like, guy has obviously never served a day in the military or something. Boy. And so that's just kind of one of the, I guess I call it the Facebookization of LinkedIn. And it's just like, that's not what this is, guys. We'll find somebody else. Yeah. I mean, that's obviously growing as the platform expands. And I would add on to that. What I don't love is when it's like veteran on veteran. Like I was like, hey, I was like, you can disagree with what I'm saying, what the other person's saying. Just don't say anything about it. Like, we don't need that. We're on the same team. And that really bothers me when you see veterans trying to take down or put down other veterans. I was like, that's not what we're doing. That's not what we're here for. Like, we can be better about that. I want to be conscious of time. So I'll close up my two questions. So two things that someone can start doing right now, either in financial planning or in a professional services field, what's two things they can do right now to start standing out in their space? I would say the next time you have an interesting thought, write it down. Ooh, that's good. Whenever a thought comes to mind, pull up Apple Notes or take a look. Take a dictation and just make sure you capture it in the moment and then commit to posting that. Because there's all sorts of talk about, hey, you have to post every day or you have to have a regular cadence. I think when you're just starting out once a week, once every other week, when you actually have a thought, post it. And then put the app down and don't look at the impressions. Don't look at the comments. Yeah. Or if you start getting some. Absolutely. Respond to it. Get the momentum. But it's a long burn. It's a long burn. Yeah. That's great advice. One, capture it because that idea will, it's fleeting and it will leave. And then have the courage to post it and put yourself out there. Who are two individuals that I should interview to kind of expose the type of content that they're putting or the impact that they're having in their community that are on LinkedIn right now? Oh, gosh, that's a tough one. I'll be honest with you. I don't know if I have an answer because I'm not on social media that much. Yeah. Okay. Well, that'll be a homework is think of one or two. Just like whoever, like, you know, somebody that you're, you like their content on LinkedIn or you like what they're doing. I would ask, is there anybody in the veteran space? Because I love, like, I've done a couple of those and I want to continue. Okay. Okay. So wrapping up, thank you for joining me today. You shared some great insights, some great tips for people to be more present on LinkedIn to show up as themselves. The process and the system that we kind of talked to, I think, applies to anyone, but specific to you. I think it applies to our veteran community a lot that they can take away in their financial planning world, but then also in how they're approaching entrepreneurship and how they're approaching leveraging LinkedIn to grow their business. So I want to thank you so much for joining me. Kyle Packard. He helps high earning veterans make their lives easier. So thank you so much. Thanks for having me.