Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - David DeCelle Co-Founder & Chief Partnership Officer, WealthReach

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

David DeCelle is the co-founder and Chief Partnership Officer of WealthReach, and the President and CEO of Model FA — the advisory growth firm whose intellectual property WealthReach acquired in April 2026. He has built his career helping some of the largest registered investment advisors in the country crack the organic growth problem, coaching 250+ firms on client acquisition, personal branding, marketing funnels, and the referral systems that separate billion-dollar producers from everyone else.Learn More: https://www.wealthreach.aiInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/david-decelle-co-founder-chief-partnership-officer-wealthreach

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have back with us, David DeSell, who's the co-founder and chief partnership officer with wealth reach. And I was talking to David here right before we started recording. And it has been about four years since we've been back.

So I am super excited to have you back. David, welcome back to the program. Mike, I appreciate you reaching out. And it's good to reconnect. And your memory is a steel trap. You shared some things before we recorded that you remember from four years ago. So I appreciate the space that you've allowed for me to stay in your brain over the years. Yeah, it's neat because, you know, isn't it cool how in business we can.

can live vicariously through other people's social media. And you see like, like for as an example, probably if I called his name, you would recognize this person. But about a month ago, one of our mutual contacts had a baby. And I clicked a little like and hey, congrats. And he responded, hey, we need to catch up. That's the way that social connecting works. And so I connected with you, or saw your announcement on wealth reach.

And it was like, hey, you've built such an ecosystem with Model FAA. and now you're launching into this new chapter to add on to what you're doing. So I want to learn everything there is about wealth reach. What was it in the industry, in financial services industry that you were seeing that you saw as a gap? And I'm only assuming that you saw a gap because it's like when we watch Shark Tank and someone goes, hey, I wanted this thing. I looked all around, couldn't find it. So I made it.

And here I am. You had to have seen a gap out there to go, hey, I think I can do it bigger, better, faster. And let's do it. What were you seeing? Yeah. So the industry, probably over the last 12, 18 months or so, there's been a buzzword of organic growth. You know, a lot of folks in the industry have grown inorganically through acquisitions

and things of that nature. But everyone was talking about organic growth. But no one was actually talking about the solutions and how to solve for that. And when you strip out M&A, you strip out. referrals from, you know, some of the referral platforms like a Schwab, Fidelity, etc. You strip out additional wallet share. You strip out market growth. Organic growth in this industry is abysmal. It's, you know, to the maybe 4% on average across the board. So with Model FAA, Model FAA is a consulting company where we help with organic growth. We actually, a good

friend of mine and I co-authored a book called The Organic Growth Revolution to not just talk about it, but to share step by step by step everything someone needs to do to actually achieve double-digit organic growth. And then where tech was heading, where AI is today, you know, myself and my business partner, Michael Barrasso, he's the tech person behind the scenes. he's our CEO, and he's built everything that we've visioned together. And he's also, he has a cool skill set where he can sort of see ahead, so to speak, as to what people need and what will be received well in the marketplace. So wealth reach is think of it as a technology layer to help support firms in their organic

growth efforts. I love it. And I think that when you can strip things down to like the, the it's like in the football analogy you know don't learn the crazy trick plays learn blocking and tackling like really good now we can layer in some extra things but that organic growth is is so key because I feel like people want the quick fix and they go to things that look good shiny object oh and we can name a few things like let me just buy leads let me do Facebook ads and they can work and sometimes are working but I feel like that should be added on

once that solid foundation of the organic growth is there. So I love that you recognize that and then you need some tech. You personally may not have been the one to do it. So you bring in that partner, that, you know, expert and now you guys come together and one plus one equals 100. So that's awesome. What is it about wealth reach then that is that it's solving the organic growth problem. But what does that look like?

Yeah. So there's really four main components currently. And it all starts with the advisors website. So throughout the years, advisors have had basically two options. One is the beautiful but very expensive agency level websites that are 20, 30, 50, $100,000 to build, but they look beautiful. The other option is the legacy providers, the subscription pricing, but it's all templated. and, you know, they look the same, different colors, same sort of lighthouse, you know, on the, on the homepage. And we, so we spent the time and obviously technology helped, but we audited 30,000 financial advisor websites.

And what we found is that almost every single one of them was broken from a foundational standpoint. And advisors have been sort of sold on the idea that a website is used for credibility when people are doing research. research on you. Key part of that is doing research on you. But if the technical foundation is structured correctly, and I'll get into that in the moment, you can attract people who are doing research that then find you. So the technical foundation is things like meta description, schema markup, proper heather structure, all the things that you wouldn't see by looking at a website.

So it's almost like, exactly. So it's almost like the advisor approved the design, compliance approved the copy, but no one approved the foundation. And when you don't have those technical pieces dialed in, it renders you invisible online. So the only time you show up is if someone is researching you or your firm specifically. But if they're asking questions online, you have no chance of ranking. So we set out to build beautiful agency. quality, technically sound websites, but for legacy provider pricing. And where technology is today, we're able to do that. And now what advisors are experiencing when it's dialed in properly

is a website that is actually an asset that can attract people to you that didn't know who you were beforehand. So the first thing is websites. The second thing is our tool called attract. Think of it as an SEO and AEO agency that lives inside your website. It monitors every single page every single day. It lets you know what's dropping and ranking, rising, what's moving sideways, tracking keywords in the same fashion, but that it doesn't stop there with an analysis. It gives you recommendations on content that you should be putting out there, pages that should be fixed.

And then the next step is it actually drafts and fixes all those for you. All you need to do is get it approved. click launch and it ships to the website. So now we have something that becomes living and breathing, barring any sort of rebrand that the firm is doing. It's effectively the last website they will ever need because it's constantly improving and evolving. So now we have website traffic ticking up. And the question becomes, well, what if they don't book an appointment?

How do we leverage some of those visitors? So our next tool convert, by and large, de-anonymizes website visitors. So Mike, for example, I saw you doing your research just before this podcast. I saw you go on our website, got notified. But you didn't fill out of form. You didn't book an appointment, nothing like that. But I know that at 1144 a.m. Eastern, you hit our site. So if you were a prospect of ours, if you were a prospect of an advisor, I can now reach out to you, introduce myself, put a voice to the firm. So that's our third tool convert. I'll pause there because you look like you got something on the tip of your.

Yeah, I was going to say SEO search engine optimization, you know, that's classic, that's OG. Everyone knows typically what that means. But on page, what you described, that's huge because most of the time you get SEO providers that go pay me a gazillion dollars a month and I'll get you, you know, links or whatever the case is. And that may or may not be helpful. But the on page is key.

And I would say that many times website providers know how to build a pretty website, charge you a lot of money, but the on page with meta this and alt tags, that is huge. So that's a big win. Secondly, the AEO getting found with people are using the other search engines, artificial intelligence, massive. But I really want to key in on what you just said there. When you said you saw me hit the website, did you see a name? Did you see my contact information? So if an advisor's website, if they're scanning through that daily or whatnot, are they seeing

like, oh, Tom Smith, visit my website, but do they know how to contact Tom Smith? I'm seeing your name, your title, your company, your LinkedIn, your address, your cell phone, your email, your estimated business revenue, estimated amount of employees, estimated income and net worth. Wow. I'm seeing it all, dude. That's scary. Use a BPA.

It's scary in a good way. that's scary in the sense that if I'm an advisor and I am getting in front of the right people with the right content with the things you just mentioned with, hey, look at these keywords reports. You should write a blog post about and oh, by the way, we'll probably help you write it with some good AI just to prove it compliance and hit, you know, if you get in front of the right people and now you've got the ability to go, oh, look, this person looks like a dud. This person looks like, ooh, I'm going to reach out, connect with them. Let's hit their LinkedIn. and let's whatever the case is. That's some technology that is massive. I think that is, I've heard rumor out there that there's, that technology exists,

but to have you dial it into something like that just has got to be spectacular. Well, and to put numbers to it, Mike, and thank you for that. To put numbers to it, let's say, you know, we get a firm up to use a round number, a thousand visitors a month. you probably have a handful of form fills, but we can deenonomize between 30 and 40% of their website traffic. And the reason why it's not 100 is if they don't accept the cookies banner on the site or if they don't or if they're on a BPN, excuse me, then we can't identify them. So net net, it's about 30, 40%. So on a firm who gets a thousand hits a month on their website,

you have three to four hundred people every single month that you can start to build a relationship with get them into your ecosystem, nurture them. And just like our relationship, we knew each other before 2022. We became, uh, you know, you were on, or excuse me, I was on your podcast in 22. We've loosely stayed in touch over the years. We've kept tabs on each other, uh, you know, on LinkedIn and here we are again in 2026. Um, so like that nurture process. is very effective. But now once they become a client, we have another tool called Multiply, where we licensed referral methodology from a very close friend of mine that Model FAA licensed his IP a number of years ago named Dan Allison, who's spoken around the world for the last

22 years on his referral methodology. It's incredibly effective for context. One of the clients that we work with. We started working with them in September of 2024. That entire year, they got 30 referrals. They implemented the methodology. In 2025, they got 110 referrals, and they're up 300 million in AUM just from client referrals. So the methodology works.

So what we've done is our consulting fee is very high for most folks. So what we've done is we've taken all that, knowledge, all that IP. We've digitized it into like a lightweight LMS so people can get indoctrinated into the IP. But then what are indoctrinated into the methodology, I should say. But then what happens is when they go to implement it, we link up with the note taker and immediately after they get coaching on what they did well, what they need to finesse, what they need to fix. And then also we've downloaded our brains into this tool so where they can, you know, chat back and forth and ask questions, hey, my client said this, how do I respond? How do I follow up

with this person? All based on that referral methodology. All based on that referral methodology. So now we've built a stack, Mike, in such a way to where we're attracting people to the firm. They're then bringing them through the sales process, closing them as a client. And then we're getting them to replicate them on the back end. So we have some other things on our roadmap that we're excited about that I won't share today. Yeah, because I don't know how much better it can get, but it's got to be pretty darn good. So that there's some there's some, wow, sick things in the work, Mike, but so here's a question. I think it's unbelievable. One question that pops in my mind, because I'm always inquisitive, curious, like in these conversations, I don't even want to call it

an interview because it's like, hey, tell me about what for each. But now I'm like, okay, tell me this, because I'm curious. One thing that pops on my mind, when you're looking at the keywords and making a suggestion to the advisor, hey, you need to have more content around this keyword. Does your website tool, does that have then an AI built in to go? Here's a recommended blog post. Make it your own tweak it, get compliance approval, but we're going to help do the heavy lifting. Is that part of them that equation too?

Yeah. So we draft the blog post for them. The blog post is based on SEO best practices. It's not like AI slop. We pull in real financial data, best practices on that front. And then it also goes through an SEC and FINRA scan. So it's compliant ready. And it actually builds a page on the website itself in the branding with the logo, everything, tile images throughout.

So it's like aesthetically pleasing, not just a block of text. And then, yeah, all that needs to happen is compliance, give the check mark, click launch, is ready to go, but it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty tough. That's like, so then the next thing is that's amazing. So that's now, you know, creating content that Google wants to see based on your industry, your target audience and keywords, love that. But then now the other aspect where it's like, oh, we saw 100, 200, 300, 300 people hit your website, here's their whole, you know, information.

I'm confident of this, but am I the, so the question would be, Does your tool have a way to have some type of automated outreach or is it the advisor going now I've got to slog through all of these visitors and go, well, let me just click their LinkedIn, send a request. What is the automation behind that that helps goose along those visitors to then connect with the advisor? Yep. So there's LinkedIn automation. There's email automation. Again, based on cold email, cold outreach, best practices, SEC, Finn, FinRefi. trained. And we also manage the entire email infrastructure. You know, best practices when you're

sending out a ton of cold emails. You don't want to use your own domain because you can get, you know, burned and end up in spam when you're communicating with your clients. So we manage the entire email infrastructure for them. However, what I will say is the firms that get the best results, they do four things really well when they do cold outreach. So number one, they use our data that we're surfacing for them, and they use that to build ads audiences and run ads to those folks, warm them up. They then do emails and LinkedIn to continue to warm them up, and you'll get some appointments booked in that process. However, if you stop there, you are drastically limiting your results. So the final step is having a person or having a team that also isn't afraid to pick up the phone and add a voice to the firm.

in the outreach and invite them to meet with you. The firms who are running ads, emails, LinkedIn, and the phone are crushing it. The firms who are just doing email and LinkedIn are not. You need to have at least the call on the end, but preferably the ads on the front end as well. Now, thinking, you know, if you were telling me this and I was like, ooh, I need to sign up, yes. do you provide like an ad on that goes, okay, we're going to set up all the ads and you tell us the budget,

we're going to run the ads. And if you want our team to make the phone call weekend, or is that something where it's like, just be aware you need to be willing to or have your assistant make the calls? Yep. So it's not official yet, but we have something cool in the works

as it relates to a partner for the ads management. So that's in motion. And then as of right now, Now someone at the firm needs to pick up the phone. So that part is certainly on them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes total sense.

You know, and it's kind of like, you know, you think about way back in the day like direct mail, it's dead because you go to the mailbox and you have 4,000, you know, pieces of mail junk, junk, junk. These days, I don't see, you know, when I go to my mailbox, I don't get as much junk mail. So maybe when you do a good mail piece, it is going to get recognized. Well, these days, what you're saying is if you get a human making a phone call and checking in and giving some relevant information, hey, I saw you visited our website, that's going to make an impact. Does it need to be, you know, so in other words, I don't cold call. Well, what you're proposing here is not a cold call. It's a warm call because they reached, they looked at your website. And you can reference that and go, hey, just you saw that you visited our website and we're looking at the article about.

Is there any questions we can help with? And I'm sure that, you know, you've got different scripts and things. But I think that kind of approaches, like even that language off the cuff is great. Like oftentimes when people pick up the phone to someone who doesn't expect their call, they overthink if they get in their own head. It's, hey, this is David. I saw you were checking out of our website. I wanted to put a voice to the firm and notice that you were checking out X, Y, and Z.

And just see if there was anything I could help with. and if so, would love to set up some time. And if not, I appreciate you stopping by, but I just wanted to humanize the experience a bit. There's nothing wrong with that. Right. Yeah, that's huge. That's just massive.

Man, I mean, from every step along the way on the digital side of things, peppering in that human touch, this is something that I've been in the industry for 15 years, marketing, seven specifically with financial services providers and advisors. I don't, I've never seen anything like this. I mean, pretty website. Yeah, anyone can do that. Pretty website with SEO.

A lot of people can do that. But the other things you've been talking about here are just groundbreaking. And I am confident that when you are talking to advisors, they're, you know, as their jaw is dropping as much as mine is. Well, it's a pretty wild experience, Mike, experiencing product market fit. when you literally see before the words confirm what they're feeling, their facial expressions change as they learn about it. It's a super cool experience. Yeah, they're like, wait, what?

Because clarify that, did I hear right? So here's a question. You know, you mentioned at the top of this like, you know, hey, people spend 20, 30,000 for websites, but we found a way to, is your package something where it's like good, better, best and you want the basic package, it's X, and then if you want an upgrade, it's this, how does the pricing work? Yep. So each piece of the stack, except for multiply, multiply when you get the whole stack, we throw in for free. But each, the site, the SEO, and convert the prospecting

tool, the de-anonymization of website visitors are 500 bucks a month each. So the whole stack is $1,500. You basically need a client or two to break even. And I don't hold this out as a regular occurrence, but one of our best websites that we've built was launched on March 31st. They're not running any ads. It's all organic. And they brought in 41 appointments, $15 million in AUM.

They also charge a financial planning fee. And so it's a total of over 200,000 in revenue, and that was over a 60-day period. And do you have to sign a contract like for your minimum or anything like that? Forever. No, I'm just kidding. Perpetuity, like Mr. Wonderful would say. Yeah, we do 12-month contracts. Yeah.

So, I mean, you think about the ROI. And yeah, you can't say, oh, we're going to get this much and this time, but the number, are there given what you've already seen. But I guess what I would say is someone sitting there going, hold on. I have never heard of being able to and I'm committed to make the calls myself or my team or reaching out to. And it just stands to reason that if you know who's visiting your website and you could reach out to them, you've got good content, you've got a beautiful website, you're going to pick up a client or two, whatever you're doing, you know, fee only or AUM or FIA, whatever you're focusing on. And so it kind of just brings you up to 2026 as far as your digital footprint.

It does. One clarification, though, with that example that I shared, those 41 appointments were all inbound through the website. There was no outbound in that process. Wow. All because of the technology. Yeah, that's just massive. Get in front of the right flow of people providing the right vibe and the right, you know, feel. you know, it's just, it's just unbelievable.

Now, guess what? You can have those 41 appointments and not know your business and feel like an imposter and not have a good conversation and still, how many of them are you going to close? You know, you're just serving up to the advisor to help them get the at-bats. Now you still got to know your stuff, have a care and empathy for the client, ask great, questions, all of those things. But at least this gets you, you know, gets you in front of the right people. That's huge.

Yeah. And we don't have to go down this path in today's podcast, but wealth reach licensed model FAs full suite of IP. So for folks who want help with their sales process, their experience, their practice management in general, we offer consulting to go deep to analyze step-by-step processes and make sure that they have a well-oiled machine to increase the likelihood that when they have an opportunity, they capitalize on it and give themselves. the best shot at helping the person that they're sitting across from. Your Model FAA clients need the website digital side. Your Wealth Watch digital side website clients need the coaching and consulting. So what a good one to combo. Yeah.

Yeah. That's just huge, man. Well, I think Wealthor Reach is the time has come. It's just amazing. And I'm excited to see what happens in the future. So for those interested in getting a little bit more information and maybe checking it out, what's the best way they can learn more and reach out and connect with your team? Yes, I would say two places.

One is wealthreach. com. And then the second place, just Google my name. My LinkedIn will pop up, David DeSell, and I'm happy to connect. I'm happy to chat. Shoot me a message. We also try to do a good job posting content on RN that's educational, fun, not just advertising all the time.

We host a bunch of webinars. So, and there are guests on a bunch of webinars. So please connect on LinkedIn as well. But we'd love to help. And usually the first step is just allow us to audit your website. So on our website, there's a place to where you click free audit, drop in your URL, we'll reach out, go through it with you, and let you know if it's broken in the first place. And if so, how we can fix it.

And if not, we give you a pat on the back and send you on your way because you're already doing great. Yep, but it doesn't hurt to check. So that audit makes sense. So thanks, David, for coming back on. Great to reconnect. Love seeing what you're doing and all the best in this launch and providing this great service to your advisors. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on again, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, Visit www. www. Influential EntrepreneursRadio.com.