Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the top advisor marketing podcast brought
to you by Proudmouth.
I'm your host, Matt Halloran.
Being your own loud is not new to
marketing, but the mindset, strategies, and resources to
help you get there are evolving faster than
this industry is keeping up. It is time
to find a new perspective on what works
why
(00:21):
and how to move your business forward.
Listen as I interview guests to help you
learn from them how to be your own
loud.
Let's get to the show.
Hello, and welcome to another top advisor marketing
podcast. I'm your host, Matt Halloran.
So our guest today, I have spent time
(00:41):
at many conferences. She's a keynote speaker,
an absolutely amazing human being, and she's on
our podcast for two major reasons. The first
reason is I want Sheena to talk about
her brand,
why she branded the company the way she
did, and more importantly, how she took
negative
feedback, messages, comments, DMs, and turned that into
(01:02):
a hugely recognized brand within financial services and
truly leaned into who she is and really
where she came from. And then the second
thing is we're always trying to find ways
to bring value to all of you so
you can separate yourself from the adviser down
the street. And one of the ways to
do that is to provide meaningful investment opportunities,
which is gonna be the second half of
the show. Shanna, welcome to the show. Thank
(01:23):
you so much for having me. I'm super
excited. I can't believe we haven't done this
before.
I
when we met before, we were recording doing
our prerecord call. I was like, I've interviewed
you before, and you're like, no. You have.
I was like, how is that possible? Okay.
So here's the question.
Let's talk about the brand. Before we get
into the hate, which is how you really
blew the brand up, where did this idea
(01:43):
come from?
Why did you name the firm the way
that you did? Give us the background of
that. So I'll start with what led me
to launching the firm to begin with, and
then we can get into how we branded
it. I launched the firm because over the
last 8 to 10 years,
I've been working with the advisor market, right?
The wealth management
space. As a portfolio manager, I've helped develop
(02:04):
technology solutions.
When I was at Orion, I've managed portfolios,
but my first love and passion is alternative
investments.
I was introduced to them in 2007, which
you would think, why in the world would
you fall in love with hedge funds and
private equity
and right before the financial crisis? That doesn't
sound like a normal person that makes you
sound insane, but actually during that process, I
(02:27):
actually realized the value of many of alternative
solutions and portfolio diversification and helping
limit downside. Yes, there were definitely stories that
weren't great, but for the most part, alternatives
did their job during that time. And I
realized that this is game changing, but nobody
can access it, right? Because at the time,
the average person could not access alternatives unless
(02:49):
they were accredited investor or qualified purchaser.
But there has been changes to the regulatory
environment that have allowed for alternative types of
products to be available. Strategy wrappers like interval
funds, ETFs, and mutual funds make these strategies
more accessible to the average person. Over the
years, I've worked to help advisors build alt
platforms,
(03:09):
and I've evaluated a number of different solutions
that say they will help advisors
access alternatives
and build all platforms
and even interviewed
to work for some of them. And I
would give candid feedback and say, there are
a couple of things I think you need
to consider if you wanna support advisors correctly,
(03:30):
you gotta think about the advisor business and
you gotta be advisor centered. And nobody wanted
to hear that because
there's an cost involved. It's not an immediate
revenue,
that comes from doing the things that I
was suggesting.
But I knew
that if they did it, they would just
dominate the market. Nobody wanted to take my
advice. So I was like, screw it. I'll
(03:50):
do it myself. Do it myself. I launched
Von Rand with the intent of providing advisors
the tools they needed to allocate to alternative
investments at scales
and be able to provide them different resources
to handle for any client. So everything from
a liquid model marketplace to, access platform,
to operational and compliance and legal workflows, to
(04:11):
education,
business development, we can get into that into
the second half of the show. I had
this great idea. I was like, this is
gonna I'm gonna disrupt the market. This is
gonna be game changing here, but I gotta
come up with a name. Right?
So I thought, what do people know me
for? What do they just automatically associate with
me? One of those things is that I
(04:31):
used to do pageants. Right? I still am
involved in the pageant world. Once you're in
it, you can never get out of it.
A lot of my best friends come from
that space. I thought, okay, I wanna do
something that is a nod to that. So
Queen Capital Management,
Tierra Capital Management, Crown,
all sound so lame,
but also taken.
(04:52):
So sounds lame, but let's just see. Is
it even available? No. Not at all. So
all of those names are taken. There were
firms that have those names. So I took
the word queen and I threw it in
a translator,
and I had it spit out to me
the word for queen
and a 100 different languages.
And then immediately honed in on the 2
languages that I have a personal connection to.
(05:13):
And those are Gaelic because my mom is
from Ireland and Polish because my dad's parents
are from Poland.
And so the Polish word for queen
was not gonna work because Polish is not
phonetic,
uses, like, a weird hybrid of, like, traditional
Latin alphabet and, like, Cyrillic, and nothing is
pronounced the way it looks. So that was
(05:35):
out of the question. But the Gaelic word
for queen is banrian.
And so
it just made sense. We branded ourselves with
a nod to the Irish heritage and the
queen part of me doing pageants. Everything's no
bulk from there. I told this story on
a podcast,
and Cynthia Murphy said, well, that makes sense
because you're the queen of alternatives. And then
(05:55):
I was like, I'm trademarking that, and I'm
taking that, and I'm going to leverage that
because I give myself that nickname. Somebody else
gave it to me. I joked that Cynthia
is my Shaq to my Paul Pierce. Anybody
who follows sports knows that Paul Pierce's nickname
is the truth and the person who started
calling him that was Shaq. So, yeah, she
gave me that nickname, and I have run
(06:16):
with it, and we branded it, and it
just all makes sense. We also happen to
be female led, and until
2 months ago, we were an all female
team.
Okay. So banner ring was born,
queen.
It's always good when somebody gives you the
moniker. If you create the moniker yourself, it
comes across as
be a little bit self centered. So you
(06:38):
were dubbed the queen of alts.
And because of
this, you're a highly sought after keynote speaker.
There's another layer to this. When we were
at the Edge conference with our friends at
FICOM, you shared stuff with me. I'd like
the audience to hear the backside of that
because you got a little bit of a
backlash. Would you mind sharing a little bit
about that, please? Sure. I came up at
(06:59):
Edge because I was attending with my chief
of staff, Britney Mason. Part of this story
is affiliated with her and how we became
friends. One of the things I found throughout
my career is that women in this industry
feel the need to make themselves non distracting.
When I first got into the industry, I
was told don't be a distraction.
Dress conservatively.
(07:20):
Don't wear a lot of makeup, low heels.
Don't call too much attention to yourself. Right?
Because you don't wanna distract all the men
in the room. And I lived that, and
it wasn't authentic because I'm the former model
and beauty queen who loves fashion and makeup,
and that is not an authentic version of
me. That's Shaina trying to hide herself and
(07:42):
not be seen, and that's not who I
am. And so as I got
more senior in my career, Rusty Vadaman at
Orion
hired me to work there, and I started
doing media at Orion. He said to me,
you really have a special brand, and you
should really lean into it and build that
because I think it will suit you, and
(08:04):
I really wanna encourage you to think about
that. So I thought to myself, that's good
advice,
and I found myself as I was being
more authentically myself,
getting messages from women. I remember getting a
DM from a dad saying his daughter saw
me on TV and said, daddy, it's a
Disney princess.
Because
she thought I looked like a Disney princess.
(08:24):
I get messages from women saying it's nice
to see someone that reflects how I see
myself. I think that's really important in an
industry where we struggle to have women in
positions of authority.
It's important for women to
see themselves in roles that they aspire to
be in. For me, I look at Sue
(08:44):
Thompson and I think,
can I be Sue Thompson when I grow
up? Like, she is unabashedly a fashionista.
She's drop dead gorgeous. I can't believe she's
a grandma. I follow her Twitter. She's always
doing fashion. She's also one of the 100
most powerful women in finance in the world
according to Barron's and is constantly recognized for
her influence in the industry. She showed me
(09:07):
that you could be that
and succeed. Melody Hopson is another one. I
worked for Melody. She's the same way. Melody
is unabashedly Melody. She wears
really fashionable clothing and she puts herself out
there in a way that's a reflection of
who she is authentically. I started doing that
too.
And the downside of that is in an
(09:27):
industry that is dominated by men, men don't
like it when women are empowered to be
feminine. Right? So they do
try,
especially with what they think are low hanging
fruit. So, like, they're not gonna go after
Melody or Sue Thompson because those are women
who have major power, but they will look
(09:49):
at the up and coming, the younger women,
the women who are on that side and
try to disrupt it. So I get a
lot of hate from men. And I get
a lot of your bimbo
comments about having
lip fillers done, which is not true. Your
face is frozen from Botox. You wear too
much makeup. What do you think you're going
to the club? You're a bimbo? What's your
(10:11):
only fans? Like, the amount of that kind
of stuff that I get is overwhelming.
And every time I get it, I'm like,
I'm gonna lean into it more. So Brit,
my chief of staff, was told by somebody
that she would never be successful in finance
or business because she has bikini photos
on Instagram. Now
(10:33):
if you don't know Brit, Brit used to
be a supermodel.
She still walks runaways for fashion week all
over the world. That's who she is. That
is authentically who Brit is. She's also incredibly
brilliant,
well connected, articulate, and wonderful, and that's why
she's on my team. But somebody told her
recently,
she would never be successful because she puts
(10:54):
pictures of her in bikinis on the Internet.
And so I was
I posted a picture of me in a
bikini on the Internet, not because I want
male attention, but the men will say that's
exactly what I'm doing. What they're missing is
that it's not about that. It's about showing
women that you don't have to cover up
and hide who you are and worry about
that.
(11:14):
You being sexualized is not you. That's them,
and that's their problem as I've had some
health issues over the last 8 months. Some
pretty serious ones, I had to basically learn
to walk again and rebuild my entire lower
body. Everything atrophied. I had no muscle left.
I could barely stand without assistance, and I
had to rebuild all that. So I spent
(11:36):
a lot of hard work in the gym
to rebuild my physique and my body, and
I'm still a lot thinner than I was
before.
But I posted a picture kind of celebrating
that I had achieved that after everything, and
I got comments like, you're embarrassing your son.
Because,
apparently,
(11:56):
my wearing a swimsuit is offensive.
If I were to let that stop me
from continuing to post those things,
then that would signal that behavior is going
to get the outcome they want. So when
you go to my Instagram or you go
to my ex feed and you see me
post fashion photos or photo shoot to celebrate
(12:18):
healing from cancer and my recovery,
and it was a fashion photo shoot and
it's glamorous. I posted those pictures because after
this year, I wanna celebrate
everything I've come through and how I came
through it. That's not because I want men
to send me DMs.
That is about celebrating
who I am authentically and encouraging other women
(12:38):
to do the same.
When we were sitting there at the conference
and Britt was there, you had both showed
me
messages that you had gotten from professional
people in financial services that were just abhorrent.
Thank you for walking everybody through that for
a number of reasons. Number 1, because as
somebody who's tries desperately to be an ally,
(12:59):
I want more people to hear this, and
I want more people to understand the onus
on why you're doing it. It is about
the celebration of you. It's not for the
attention of others, and I absolutely love that
too. I love the fact that you leaned
into that. When I met Britt, I had
met her before, and we're we're all talking.
And then she said, well, you knew that
I used to be a model. And I
(13:19):
was like, it didn't even cross my mind.
And then she's like, follow me on Instagram.
And I was like, okay. I was really
quite surprised
in such a good way that she leaned
into that so comfortably because it really is
who you are. And we talk about this,
Shannon, all the time on this podcast. You
have to rise above the noise and be
your own loud. You are such an embodiment
of that and including leaning into it even
(13:40):
more with being the queen of alts and
just basically giving everybody the finger And and
now going beyond that, I'm not the only
one. There's women like Sue Thompson and Cameron
Dawson
and Jacqueline Shattuck. There's Nancy Davis. We all
lean in. If you look at Cameron Dawson's
Instagram, it's not drastically different from my own
other than I'm a mom, so there's some
photos of my son there. We do it
(14:02):
because
we wanna
show women and especially young girls, they don't
have to compromise who they are authentically to
be in finance and be brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
And the fact that she also happens to
be dropped out gorgeous doesn't change that. It
just means she has to work a little
harder for people to take her seriously, which
is really unfortunate. But, hopefully, when people like
(14:24):
her and me do this, the next generation
won't have to. I also think it's really
important to show young women that you can
be confident in yourself and celebrate yourself. We
spend so much time as a society
culturally
trying to make women feel bad about who
they are and insecure because then we can
sell them makeup and Botox and all sorts
(14:45):
of other stuff because we're taking advantage of
women's personal insecurities.
But when young women see women who are
out there celebrating themselves, their initial reaction is
to be like, oh my God, she's so
full of herself. Who does she think she
is? Because
inevitably with that confidence comes male attention and
(15:06):
opportunities.
And there's this immediate reaction because we culturally
train girls to think that's not okay. If
you're doing that's icky, that's gross. Like you're
taking advantage of what you look like and
you're taking advantage of that. And I think
that's totally the wrong way to look at
it. We should help young girls feel confident
in who they are and celebrate who they
(15:26):
are.
Hopefully, change the norm so that the next
generation's reaction to seeing women out there shining
and celebrating themselves isn't ew. She's so full
of herself.
Now our podcast listeners aren't gonna be able
to see your shirt, but what can you
share what your shirt says? Because it makes
me really happy. I underestimate me. That'll be
fun. I think it's appropriate for this conversation.
(15:49):
I agree. I'm so happy you wore that.
Let's dive into the queen of all. Right?
Thank you for sharing your story. I want
everybody to hear that.
Now rubber meets the road with
we have to be able to help financial
services professionals
offer things that are meaningful to their clients
in a way that's easy for them to
(16:10):
execute,
communicate, and actually
replicate,
and that's what you've built. So in
the minutes we have left,
go. Okay. So I think what's really interesting
to me, and I talk to investors, like
venture capital investors all the time, and I'm
always frustrated that they don't understand the nuance
(16:30):
of what we're trying to do. They just
look at us as one of 100 of
thousands of alternative platforms you and I have
spent a lot of time talking about. Like,
we're nothing like all the other ones. And
every time we sit down and talk to
advisers, and I just got off the phone
prior to coming on with you with a
very large REA, who said in the call,
who are your competitors? I feel like you've
mentioned ICAP and Caisse a bunch of times,
(16:52):
but I feel like you're nothing like that.
I feel like you're a completely different animal.
And my response to that is, like, on
paper, the people who are looking at us
are people who are also looking at ICAP
and Caisse, but you're right. We are a
completely different animal. So we focused on
building
to be an adviser centered model. So we
wanted
to look at it from the eyes of
(17:13):
the adviser because that's what I used to
be, and that's what our team and our
partners over at Mammoth used to be. We're
all former
advisers. And alts are a way to stand
out from the crowd and to connect investments
with personal passions
and personal values.
All serve a way you can use as
a business development tool to stand out and
(17:34):
also reach where your niche market is, right?
So perfect example is I recently was interviewed
with Sportico
about sports rights. Sports rights is incredibly
compelling. And you mentioned it to a client,
even if they've never done anything in the
Altspace before they want to hear about it.
If you are somebody who works with athletes
and people in the sports industry, that's going
(17:56):
to resonate
with them and that's something that they'll connect
to. And that is a way to earn
that business. So we've really focused on providing
advisors with a complete solution
from beginning to end to help them use
ALT to
bring in new business, improve relationships with existing
clients, and differentiate themselves
(18:17):
from their peers, but, also,
we understand that alts are complicated and operational
compliance and legal. So we have this front
end, I like to say, where we do
the due diligence for you and are completely
transparent. You can see our DDQs and DDRs.
You don't have to ask us for them.
We provide you with all of the information
(18:38):
you need to use a
proactive sales.
We do webinars and educational content and we
have research available to you and analytics,
so you can make those decisions. But if
it's too complicated to invest in, you're still
not gonna invest. So we have partnered with
Mammoth Technology
to create a operational compliance
(18:58):
workflow that integrates with
all the different types of
accounting software you use, reporting software you use.
There's a tool called Canoo that's often used
by advisors to scrape
data
so that you can reconcile data. We streamline
all of that and integrate with Orion Black
Diamond, Adipar and Tamarack
(19:19):
so that everything is in this real nice,
easy ecosystem that you never have to leave
from the beginning to the end of the
transaction.
You can continue
to maintain oversight so that you can justify
billing on these assets too. You're still managing
them. You're getting the cap calls and raising
the cash and you don't have to wait
for the client. You're still reporting on everything
and can make decisions on these things, which
(19:41):
is something that just hasn't been available before.
While there's a lot of people that do
little parts of what we do, there's not
anyone who does it from beginning to end
seamlessly where you never have to leave the
ecosystem.
Oh, and, yeah, you don't even have to
leave your back office accounting software.
It's all there. It all integrates. It's all
seamlessly pushing into those places so that it's
(20:04):
much smoother experience for everybody involved. So that's
really what we do. And so we like
to work with advisors to help them differentiate
themselves using alternatives.
So when we were when you
I people might be surprised at this just
because I'm not an adviser, but you walked
me through a demo, like, when we were
you're like, hey. Let me just show you
this, and you had it up on your
(20:24):
screen. And
one of the neat things that I really
liked in going back to the so the
athlete component and being able to but you
have
systems for
almost every niche in a way that you
can position
whether they have a conversation with you or
your team so that an adviser can actually
sit down and say, okay. Shana, I really
(20:44):
wanna focus on working with
female
obstetrician.
Right? And because of your background as being
an adviser and you know these products and
services so well, that's when you and your
team can sit down and say, hey. Here's
something that we think they would be very
attracted to. Could you talk just a little
bit about that real quick? Yeah. So while
(21:05):
we were at Edge, I met with an
adviser who likes to work with entrepreneurs. Right?
So we have a firm on our platform
called Merriweather Group Capital. They do middle market
direct lending to small businesses, and their fund
is called the hero fund. And the tagline
is supporting America's heroes.
And by that, they mean America's small businesses.
(21:26):
So the idea of that in the way
of positioning it in a whole
way that, like, they resonate and they market
themselves really is something that other entrepreneurs
would resonate with. Right?
Another example is like a wine fund. If
you have a client that loves wine,
then a wine fund is really gonna appeal
(21:46):
to them, especially if, like, once a year,
they get a case
of the latest vintage that they can open
up during the holidays and say this came
from my vineyard. They're not lying. It did.
And something to be said about being able
to target that. And what makes us really
different is we're not trying to have the
biggest managers in the world on there. We're
looking for managers that can give you some
sense of exclusivity, which also means we gotta
(22:08):
have a lot of managers. Right? Because some
of these managers don't have a lot of
capacity,
but we wanna be able to have these
opportunities, these niche opportunities to connect with what
your target market is as an adviser,
gain the business, earn the business, and deepen
those relationships, get more assets from existing clients
by really bringing them things that's gonna resonate
(22:31):
with them. Because let's be honest, like, you
bring me the Vanguard S and P 500
ETF, like, fine. You can put it in
my portfolio, but I don't care.
Do I care that it's Vanguard or Fidelity
or Spider? No. Like, whatever. Just whatever is
cheapest.
But so does every other adviser. I'm not
gonna differentiate myself because I use Vanguard and
that guy uses
(22:52):
Spider. Like, it's the same thing, man. You're
not doing anything special, and I'm not getting
I can do that myself. I can open
a Fidelity account and buy it myself. Why
am I paying you?
And we can argue that there is other
things that go into it, but at the
end of the day,
don't you want to offer something differentiated? And
I think we talked about this. I am
(23:13):
in no way, shape, or form suggesting to
invest in stuff that's not a good investment.
Right. But I am saying that the world
is very broad,
and there are lots of good investments in
a lot of different spaces that will meet
a lot of different people's needs and that
will resonate with them. Why not help people
invest
in ways that align with their interests and
(23:33):
their passions, and then they get excited about
investing and then they're more educated and then
they're paying attention. And then the conversations are
happier and they're less likely to panic sell
because they care and they're attached to it.
All of these things have a psychological component
too. But I really think that advisors need
to start to think about that in a
world where there's fee compression
(23:55):
and everybody and anybody can access the same
stuff.
Like, where do you
stand out and how do you do that?
And we're really looking to build something
to help advisors do just that.
If somebody wants to reach out to you,
one, who should? Number 2, where should they
go? We primarily service 2 markets, financial advisors,
(24:17):
and asset managers in the alternative space. So
if you are an alternative investment asset manager,
whether it be private or public,
who is struggling with your distribution strategy to
the adviser market, give us a call. We
do coaching and support you to be more
successful in that. We are not a third
party marketer. We are not there to raise
assets for you. We're simply
(24:38):
there to put you in a position
to have better chance of success
and to pair you with advisors that are
looking for folks just like you. And on
the advisor side, same thing. We're here to
help you
use alternatives to improve and grow your business,
grow your client relationships,
succeed to get the types of clients you
want, and do that in a way that's
(25:00):
differentiated from everyone else. So if that's you,
then give us a call and we work
with you, Matt. I say this all the
time.
We really feel it's important to give advisors
all the support and tools that they need
to be able to do that. And if
you're an advisor who isn't really sure what
that niche is, we work with Matt and
Proudmouth to help provide you with coaching and
(25:23):
opportunities
so that you can figure that out and
lean into it and help you succeed in
doing just that. So we have partners that
help with marketing,
help with branding,
and we continue to grow that because we
think that
advisors want that. They don't just want a
place to go find a private equity fund.
(25:44):
Nope. First off, thank you for sharing your
story. I want everybody to know the main
point
of the first half of the show was
you have to lean into it, be your
own loud, support yourself, be confident in who
you are, and please make sure that even
with a little bit of love or a
little bit of hate, that you're gonna be
able to be who you wanna be because
that's really then you have no competition. So
(26:05):
that's number 1. Number 2, we talk a
lot on this show about trying to get
greater share of wallet from your existing clients,
able to have passion type investments
that you can have exactly what Sheena was
just saying, or sink their teeth into it.
They're not gonna be looking at getting in
and out of it because it's something that
is I'm pointing at my heart instead of
my head. Make sure that you realize the
(26:25):
power of that. And thirdly,
thank you for saying we do. I love
working with you. Any of your that we
can help, and I hope that a lot
of our advisers that listen to the show
will engage you specifically. We can find you
on LinkedIn and Twitter. Where else should they
go? You can find me on Instagram.
And, of course, you can go to our
website, bonrancapital.com,
and you can always email me shaina@bonrancapital.com.
(26:47):
And we'll make sure that we have all
of those links. Shaina, lastly, listen, if you
are struggling with your niche, your brand, your
ability to separate yourself from the ad on
the street and stop being the best kept
secret, please go to the PodRocket Academy. We
have lots of wonderful courses and the coaching
that Shana was just talking about to help
you figure stuff out for yourself. So for
(27:08):
Shana, all of us here at Proudmouth, this
is Matt Halloran, and we'll see you on
the other side of the mic. Thanks for
listening to the Top Advisor Marketing Podcast brought
to you by ProudMouth.
If you wanna know more about how you
can be your own loud, visit us at
proudmouth.com.
Sign up for the PodRocket Academy.
Through courses and office hours led by a
professional podcast producers and digital marketers, you will
learn everything you need to know to become
(27:29):
trusted subject matter expert you were meant to
be.
Welcome to the top advisor marketing podcast brought
to you by Proudmouth.
I'm your host, Matt Halloran.
Being your own loud is not new to
marketing, but the mindset, strategies, and resources to
help you get there are evolving faster than
this industry is keeping up. It is time
to find a new perspective on what works
why
(00:21):
and how to move your business forward.
Listen as I interview guests to help you
learn from them how to be your own
loud.
Let's get to the show.
Hello, and welcome to another top advisor marketing
podcast. I'm your host, Matt Halloran.
So our guest today, I have spent time
(00:41):
at many conferences. She's a keynote speaker,
an absolutely amazing human being, and she's on
our podcast for two major reasons. The first
reason is I want Sheena to talk about
her brand,
why she branded the company the way she
did, and more importantly, how she took
negative
feedback, messages, comments, DMs, and turned that into
(01:02):
a hugely recognized brand within financial services and
truly leaned into who she is and really
where she came from. And then the second
thing is we're always trying to find ways
to bring value to all of you so
you can separate yourself from the adviser down
the street. And one of the ways to
do that is to provide meaningful investment opportunities,
which is gonna be the second half of
the show. Shanna, welcome to the show. Thank
(01:23):
you so much for having me. I'm super
excited. I can't believe we haven't done this
before.
I
when we met before, we were recording doing
our prerecord call. I was like, I've interviewed
you before, and you're like, no. You have.
I was like, how is that possible? Okay.
So here's the question.
Let's talk about the brand. Before we get
into the hate, which is how you really
blew the brand up, where did this idea
(01:43):
come from?
Why did you name the firm the way
that you did? Give us the background of
that. So I'll start with what led me
to launching the firm to begin with, and
then we can get into how we branded
it. I launched the firm because over the
last 8 to 10 years,
I've been working with the advisor market, right?
The wealth management
space. As a portfolio manager, I've helped develop
(02:04):
technology solutions.
When I was at Orion, I've managed portfolios,
but my first love and passion is alternative
investments.
I was introduced to them in 2007, which
you would think, why in the world would
you fall in love with hedge funds and
private equity
and right before the financial crisis? That doesn't
sound like a normal person that makes you
sound insane, but actually during that process, I
(02:27):
actually realized the value of many of alternative
solutions and portfolio diversification and helping
limit downside. Yes, there were definitely stories that
weren't great, but for the most part, alternatives
did their job during that time. And I
realized that this is game changing, but nobody
can access it, right? Because at the time,
the average person could not access alternatives unless
(02:49):
they were accredited investor or qualified purchaser.
But there has been changes to the regulatory
environment that have allowed for alternative types of
products to be available. Strategy wrappers like interval
funds, ETFs, and mutual funds make these strategies
more accessible to the average person. Over the
years, I've worked to help advisors build alt
platforms,
(03:09):
and I've evaluated a number of different solutions
that say they will help advisors
access alternatives
and build all platforms
and even interviewed
to work for some of them. And I
would give candid feedback and say, there are
a couple of things I think you need
to consider if you wanna support advisors correctly,
(03:30):
you gotta think about the advisor business and
you gotta be advisor centered. And nobody wanted
to hear that because
there's an cost involved. It's not an immediate
revenue,
that comes from doing the things that I
was suggesting.
But I knew
that if they did it, they would just
dominate the market. Nobody wanted to take my
advice. So I was like, screw it. I'll
(03:50):
do it myself. Do it myself. I launched
Von Rand with the intent of providing advisors
the tools they needed to allocate to alternative
investments at scales
and be able to provide them different resources
to handle for any client. So everything from
a liquid model marketplace to, access platform,
to operational and compliance and legal workflows, to
(04:11):
education,
business development, we can get into that into
the second half of the show. I had
this great idea. I was like, this is
gonna I'm gonna disrupt the market. This is
gonna be game changing here, but I gotta
come up with a name. Right?
So I thought, what do people know me
for? What do they just automatically associate with
me? One of those things is that I
(04:31):
used to do pageants. Right? I still am
involved in the pageant world. Once you're in
it, you can never get out of it.
A lot of my best friends come from
that space. I thought, okay, I wanna do
something that is a nod to that. So
Queen Capital Management,
Tierra Capital Management, Crown,
all sound so lame,
but also taken.
(04:52):
So sounds lame, but let's just see. Is
it even available? No. Not at all. So
all of those names are taken. There were
firms that have those names. So I took
the word queen and I threw it in
a translator,
and I had it spit out to me
the word for queen
and a 100 different languages.
And then immediately honed in on the 2
languages that I have a personal connection to.
(05:13):
And those are Gaelic because my mom is
from Ireland and Polish because my dad's parents
are from Poland.
And so the Polish word for queen
was not gonna work because Polish is not
phonetic,
uses, like, a weird hybrid of, like, traditional
Latin alphabet and, like, Cyrillic, and nothing is
pronounced the way it looks. So that was
(05:35):
out of the question. But the Gaelic word
for queen is banrian.
And so
it just made sense. We branded ourselves with
a nod to the Irish heritage and the
queen part of me doing pageants. Everything's no
bulk from there. I told this story on
a podcast,
and Cynthia Murphy said, well, that makes sense
because you're the queen of alternatives. And then
(05:55):
I was like, I'm trademarking that, and I'm
taking that, and I'm going to leverage that
because I give myself that nickname. Somebody else
gave it to me. I joked that Cynthia
is my Shaq to my Paul Pierce. Anybody
who follows sports knows that Paul Pierce's nickname
is the truth and the person who started
calling him that was Shaq. So, yeah, she
gave me that nickname, and I have run
(06:16):
with it, and we branded it, and it
just all makes sense. We also happen to
be female led, and until
2 months ago, we were an all female
team.
Okay. So banner ring was born,
queen.
It's always good when somebody gives you the
moniker. If you create the moniker yourself, it
comes across as
be a little bit self centered. So you
(06:38):
were dubbed the queen of alts.
And because of
this, you're a highly sought after keynote speaker.
There's another layer to this. When we were
at the Edge conference with our friends at
FICOM, you shared stuff with me. I'd like
the audience to hear the backside of that
because you got a little bit of a
backlash. Would you mind sharing a little bit
about that, please? Sure. I came up at
(06:59):
Edge because I was attending with my chief
of staff, Britney Mason. Part of this story
is affiliated with her and how we became
friends. One of the things I found throughout
my career is that women in this industry
feel the need to make themselves non distracting.
When I first got into the industry, I
was told don't be a distraction.
Dress conservatively.
(07:20):
Don't wear a lot of makeup, low heels.
Don't call too much attention to yourself. Right?
Because you don't wanna distract all the men
in the room. And I lived that, and
it wasn't authentic because I'm the former model
and beauty queen who loves fashion and makeup,
and that is not an authentic version of
me. That's Shaina trying to hide herself and
(07:42):
not be seen, and that's not who I
am. And so as I got
more senior in my career, Rusty Vadaman at
Orion
hired me to work there, and I started
doing media at Orion. He said to me,
you really have a special brand, and you
should really lean into it and build that
because I think it will suit you, and
(08:04):
I really wanna encourage you to think about
that. So I thought to myself, that's good
advice,
and I found myself as I was being
more authentically myself,
getting messages from women. I remember getting a
DM from a dad saying his daughter saw
me on TV and said, daddy, it's a
Disney princess.
Because
she thought I looked like a Disney princess.
(08:24):
I get messages from women saying it's nice
to see someone that reflects how I see
myself. I think that's really important in an
industry where we struggle to have women in
positions of authority.
It's important for women to
see themselves in roles that they aspire to
be in. For me, I look at Sue
(08:44):
Thompson and I think,
can I be Sue Thompson when I grow
up? Like, she is unabashedly a fashionista.
She's drop dead gorgeous. I can't believe she's
a grandma. I follow her Twitter. She's always
doing fashion. She's also one of the 100
most powerful women in finance in the world
according to Barron's and is constantly recognized for
her influence in the industry. She showed me
(09:07):
that you could be that
and succeed. Melody Hopson is another one. I
worked for Melody. She's the same way. Melody
is unabashedly Melody. She wears
really fashionable clothing and she puts herself out
there in a way that's a reflection of
who she is authentically. I started doing that
too.
And the downside of that is in an
(09:27):
industry that is dominated by men, men don't
like it when women are empowered to be
feminine. Right? So they do
try,
especially with what they think are low hanging
fruit. So, like, they're not gonna go after
Melody or Sue Thompson because those are women
who have major power, but they will look
(09:49):
at the up and coming, the younger women,
the women who are on that side and
try to disrupt it. So I get a
lot of hate from men. And I get
a lot of your bimbo
comments about having
lip fillers done, which is not true. Your
face is frozen from Botox. You wear too
much makeup. What do you think you're going
to the club? You're a bimbo? What's your
(10:11):
only fans? Like, the amount of that kind
of stuff that I get is overwhelming.
And every time I get it, I'm like,
I'm gonna lean into it more. So Brit,
my chief of staff, was told by somebody
that she would never be successful in finance
or business because she has bikini photos
on Instagram. Now
(10:33):
if you don't know Brit, Brit used to
be a supermodel.
She still walks runaways for fashion week all
over the world. That's who she is. That
is authentically who Brit is. She's also incredibly
brilliant,
well connected, articulate, and wonderful, and that's why
she's on my team. But somebody told her
recently,
she would never be successful because she puts
(10:54):
pictures of her in bikinis on the Internet.
And so I was
I posted a picture of me in a
bikini on the Internet, not because I want
male attention, but the men will say that's
exactly what I'm doing. What they're missing is
that it's not about that. It's about showing
women that you don't have to cover up
and hide who you are and worry about
that.
(11:14):
You being sexualized is not you. That's them,
and that's their problem as I've had some
health issues over the last 8 months. Some
pretty serious ones, I had to basically learn
to walk again and rebuild my entire lower
body. Everything atrophied. I had no muscle left.
I could barely stand without assistance, and I
had to rebuild all that. So I spent
(11:36):
a lot of hard work in the gym
to rebuild my physique and my body, and
I'm still a lot thinner than I was
before.
But I posted a picture kind of celebrating
that I had achieved that after everything, and
I got comments like, you're embarrassing your son.
Because,
apparently,
(11:56):
my wearing a swimsuit is offensive.
If I were to let that stop me
from continuing to post those things,
then that would signal that behavior is going
to get the outcome they want. So when
you go to my Instagram or you go
to my ex feed and you see me
post fashion photos or photo shoot to celebrate
(12:18):
healing from cancer and my recovery,
and it was a fashion photo shoot and
it's glamorous. I posted those pictures because after
this year, I wanna celebrate
everything I've come through and how I came
through it. That's not because I want men
to send me DMs.
That is about celebrating
who I am authentically and encouraging other women
(12:38):
to do the same.
When we were sitting there at the conference
and Britt was there, you had both showed
me
messages that you had gotten from professional
people in financial services that were just abhorrent.
Thank you for walking everybody through that for
a number of reasons. Number 1, because as
somebody who's tries desperately to be an ally,
(12:59):
I want more people to hear this, and
I want more people to understand the onus
on why you're doing it. It is about
the celebration of you. It's not for the
attention of others, and I absolutely love that
too. I love the fact that you leaned
into that. When I met Britt, I had
met her before, and we're we're all talking.
And then she said, well, you knew that
I used to be a model. And I
(13:19):
was like, it didn't even cross my mind.
And then she's like, follow me on Instagram.
And I was like, okay. I was really
quite surprised
in such a good way that she leaned
into that so comfortably because it really is
who you are. And we talk about this,
Shannon, all the time on this podcast. You
have to rise above the noise and be
your own loud. You are such an embodiment
of that and including leaning into it even
(13:40):
more with being the queen of alts and
just basically giving everybody the finger And and
now going beyond that, I'm not the only
one. There's women like Sue Thompson and Cameron
Dawson
and Jacqueline Shattuck. There's Nancy Davis. We all
lean in. If you look at Cameron Dawson's
Instagram, it's not drastically different from my own
other than I'm a mom, so there's some
photos of my son there. We do it
(14:02):
because
we wanna
show women and especially young girls, they don't
have to compromise who they are authentically to
be in finance and be brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.
And the fact that she also happens to
be dropped out gorgeous doesn't change that. It
just means she has to work a little
harder for people to take her seriously, which
is really unfortunate. But, hopefully, when people like
(14:24):
her and me do this, the next generation
won't have to. I also think it's really
important to show young women that you can
be confident in yourself and celebrate yourself. We
spend so much time as a society
culturally
trying to make women feel bad about who
they are and insecure because then we can
sell them makeup and Botox and all sorts
(14:45):
of other stuff because we're taking advantage of
women's personal insecurities.
But when young women see women who are
out there celebrating themselves, their initial reaction is
to be like, oh my God, she's so
full of herself. Who does she think she
is? Because
inevitably with that confidence comes male attention and
(15:06):
opportunities.
And there's this immediate reaction because we culturally
train girls to think that's not okay. If
you're doing that's icky, that's gross. Like you're
taking advantage of what you look like and
you're taking advantage of that. And I think
that's totally the wrong way to look at
it. We should help young girls feel confident
in who they are and celebrate who they
(15:26):
are.
Hopefully, change the norm so that the next
generation's reaction to seeing women out there shining
and celebrating themselves isn't ew. She's so full
of herself.
Now our podcast listeners aren't gonna be able
to see your shirt, but what can you
share what your shirt says? Because it makes
me really happy. I underestimate me. That'll be
fun. I think it's appropriate for this conversation.
(15:49):
I agree. I'm so happy you wore that.
Let's dive into the queen of all. Right?
Thank you for sharing your story. I want
everybody to hear that.
Now rubber meets the road with
we have to be able to help financial
services professionals
offer things that are meaningful to their clients
in a way that's easy for them to
(16:10):
execute,
communicate, and actually
replicate,
and that's what you've built. So in
the minutes we have left,
go. Okay. So I think what's really interesting
to me, and I talk to investors, like
venture capital investors all the time, and I'm
always frustrated that they don't understand the nuance
(16:30):
of what we're trying to do. They just
look at us as one of 100 of
thousands of alternative platforms you and I have
spent a lot of time talking about. Like,
we're nothing like all the other ones. And
every time we sit down and talk to
advisers, and I just got off the phone
prior to coming on with you with a
very large REA, who said in the call,
who are your competitors? I feel like you've
mentioned ICAP and Caisse a bunch of times,
(16:52):
but I feel like you're nothing like that.
I feel like you're a completely different animal.
And my response to that is, like, on
paper, the people who are looking at us
are people who are also looking at ICAP
and Caisse, but you're right. We are a
completely different animal. So we focused on
building
to be an adviser centered model. So we
wanted
to look at it from the eyes of
(17:13):
the adviser because that's what I used to
be, and that's what our team and our
partners over at Mammoth used to be. We're
all former
advisers. And alts are a way to stand
out from the crowd and to connect investments
with personal passions
and personal values.
All serve a way you can use as
a business development tool to stand out and
(17:34):
also reach where your niche market is, right?
So perfect example is I recently was interviewed
with Sportico
about sports rights. Sports rights is incredibly
compelling. And you mentioned it to a client,
even if they've never done anything in the
Altspace before they want to hear about it.
If you are somebody who works with athletes
and people in the sports industry, that's going
(17:56):
to resonate
with them and that's something that they'll connect
to. And that is a way to earn
that business. So we've really focused on providing
advisors with a complete solution
from beginning to end to help them use
ALT to
bring in new business, improve relationships with existing
clients, and differentiate themselves
(18:17):
from their peers, but, also,
we understand that alts are complicated and operational
compliance and legal. So we have this front
end, I like to say, where we do
the due diligence for you and are completely
transparent. You can see our DDQs and DDRs.
You don't have to ask us for them.
We provide you with all of the information
(18:38):
you need to use a
proactive sales.
We do webinars and educational content and we
have research available to you and analytics,
so you can make those decisions. But if
it's too complicated to invest in, you're still
not gonna invest. So we have partnered with
Mammoth Technology
to create a operational compliance
(18:58):
workflow that integrates with
all the different types of
accounting software you use, reporting software you use.
There's a tool called Canoo that's often used
by advisors to scrape
data
so that you can reconcile data. We streamline
all of that and integrate with Orion Black
Diamond, Adipar and Tamarack
(19:19):
so that everything is in this real nice,
easy ecosystem that you never have to leave
from the beginning to the end of the
transaction.
You can continue
to maintain oversight so that you can justify
billing on these assets too. You're still managing
them. You're getting the cap calls and raising
the cash and you don't have to wait
for the client. You're still reporting on everything
and can make decisions on these things, which
(19:41):
is something that just hasn't been available before.
While there's a lot of people that do
little parts of what we do, there's not
anyone who does it from beginning to end
seamlessly where you never have to leave the
ecosystem.
Oh, and, yeah, you don't even have to
leave your back office accounting software.
It's all there. It all integrates. It's all
seamlessly pushing into those places so that it's
(20:04):
much smoother experience for everybody involved. So that's
really what we do. And so we like
to work with advisors to help them differentiate
themselves using alternatives.
So when we were when you
I people might be surprised at this just
because I'm not an adviser, but you walked
me through a demo, like, when we were
you're like, hey. Let me just show you
this, and you had it up on your
(20:24):
screen. And
one of the neat things that I really
liked in going back to the so the
athlete component and being able to but you
have
systems for
almost every niche in a way that you
can position
whether they have a conversation with you or
your team so that an adviser can actually
sit down and say, okay. Shana, I really
(20:44):
wanna focus on working with
female
obstetrician.
Right? And because of your background as being
an adviser and you know these products and
services so well, that's when you and your
team can sit down and say, hey. Here's
something that we think they would be very
attracted to. Could you talk just a little
bit about that real quick? Yeah. So while
(21:05):
we were at Edge, I met with an
adviser who likes to work with entrepreneurs. Right?
So we have a firm on our platform
called Merriweather Group Capital. They do middle market
direct lending to small businesses, and their fund
is called the hero fund. And the tagline
is supporting America's heroes.
And by that, they mean America's small businesses.
(21:26):
So the idea of that in the way
of positioning it in a whole
way that, like, they resonate and they market
themselves really is something that other entrepreneurs
would resonate with. Right?
Another example is like a wine fund. If
you have a client that loves wine,
then a wine fund is really gonna appeal
(21:46):
to them, especially if, like, once a year,
they get a case
of the latest vintage that they can open
up during the holidays and say this came
from my vineyard. They're not lying. It did.
And something to be said about being able
to target that. And what makes us really
different is we're not trying to have the
biggest managers in the world on there. We're
looking for managers that can give you some
sense of exclusivity, which also means we gotta
(22:08):
have a lot of managers. Right? Because some
of these managers don't have a lot of
capacity,
but we wanna be able to have these
opportunities, these niche opportunities to connect with what
your target market is as an adviser,
gain the business, earn the business, and deepen
those relationships, get more assets from existing clients
by really bringing them things that's gonna resonate
(22:31):
with them. Because let's be honest, like, you
bring me the Vanguard S and P 500
ETF, like, fine. You can put it in
my portfolio, but I don't care.
Do I care that it's Vanguard or Fidelity
or Spider? No. Like, whatever. Just whatever is
cheapest.
But so does every other adviser. I'm not
gonna differentiate myself because I use Vanguard and
that guy uses
(22:52):
Spider. Like, it's the same thing, man. You're
not doing anything special, and I'm not getting
I can do that myself. I can open
a Fidelity account and buy it myself. Why
am I paying you?
And we can argue that there is other
things that go into it, but at the
end of the day,
don't you want to offer something differentiated? And
I think we talked about this. I am
(23:13):
in no way, shape, or form suggesting to
invest in stuff that's not a good investment.
Right. But I am saying that the world
is very broad,
and there are lots of good investments in
a lot of different spaces that will meet
a lot of different people's needs and that
will resonate with them. Why not help people
invest
in ways that align with their interests and
(23:33):
their passions, and then they get excited about
investing and then they're more educated and then
they're paying attention. And then the conversations are
happier and they're less likely to panic sell
because they care and they're attached to it.
All of these things have a psychological component
too. But I really think that advisors need
to start to think about that in a
world where there's fee compression
(23:55):
and everybody and anybody can access the same
stuff.
Like, where do you
stand out and how do you do that?
And we're really looking to build something
to help advisors do just that.
If somebody wants to reach out to you,
one, who should? Number 2, where should they
go? We primarily service 2 markets, financial advisors,
(24:17):
and asset managers in the alternative space. So
if you are an alternative investment asset manager,
whether it be private or public,
who is struggling with your distribution strategy to
the adviser market, give us a call. We
do coaching and support you to be more
successful in that. We are not a third
party marketer. We are not there to raise
assets for you. We're simply
(24:38):
there to put you in a position
to have better chance of success
and to pair you with advisors that are
looking for folks just like you. And on
the advisor side, same thing. We're here to
help you
use alternatives to improve and grow your business,
grow your client relationships,
succeed to get the types of clients you
want, and do that in a way that's
(25:00):
differentiated from everyone else. So if that's you,
then give us a call and we work
with you, Matt. I say this all the
time.
We really feel it's important to give advisors
all the support and tools that they need
to be able to do that. And if
you're an advisor who isn't really sure what
that niche is, we work with Matt and
Proudmouth to help provide you with coaching and
(25:23):
opportunities
so that you can figure that out and
lean into it and help you succeed in
doing just that. So we have partners that
help with marketing,
help with branding,
and we continue to grow that because we
think that
advisors want that. They don't just want a
place to go find a private equity fund.
(25:44):
Nope. First off, thank you for sharing your
story. I want everybody to know the main
point
of the first half of the show was
you have to lean into it, be your
own loud, support yourself, be confident in who
you are, and please make sure that even
with a little bit of love or a
little bit of hate, that you're gonna be
able to be who you wanna be because
that's really then you have no competition. So
(26:05):
that's number 1. Number 2, we talk a
lot on this show about trying to get
greater share of wallet from your existing clients,
able to have passion type investments
that you can have exactly what Sheena was
just saying, or sink their teeth into it.
They're not gonna be looking at getting in
and out of it because it's something that
is I'm pointing at my heart instead of
my head. Make sure that you realize the
(26:25):
power of that. And thirdly,
thank you for saying we do. I love
working with you. Any of your that we
can help, and I hope that a lot
of our advisers that listen to the show
will engage you specifically. We can find you
on LinkedIn and Twitter. Where else should they
go? You can find me on Instagram.
And, of course, you can go to our
website, bonrancapital.com,
and you can always email me shaina@bonrancapital.com.
(26:47):
And we'll make sure that we have all
of those links. Shaina, lastly, listen, if you
are struggling with your niche, your brand, your
ability to separate yourself from the ad on
the street and stop being the best kept
secret, please go to the PodRocket Academy. We
have lots of wonderful courses and the coaching
that Shana was just talking about to help
you figure stuff out for yourself. So for
(27:08):
Shana, all of us here at Proudmouth, this
is Matt Halloran, and we'll see you on
the other side of the mic. Thanks for
listening to the Top Advisor Marketing Podcast brought
to you by ProudMouth.
If you wanna know more about how you
can be your own loud, visit us at
proudmouth.com.
Sign up for the PodRocket Academy.
Through courses and office hours led by a
professional podcast producers and digital marketers, you will
learn everything you need to know to become
(27:29):
trusted subject matter expert you were meant to
be.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.