Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Derek Notman Founder & CEO of Couplr

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Derek is a CFP® with 20+ years in financial advice. He helps hundreds of families and business owners plan for retirement, weather life events, and stay invested through market cycles. In 2013, He tooks his practice fully virtual, an early bet that technology could make advice more accessible and human at the same time.Founded & CEO of Couplr AI in 2022 because the way most people find a financial advisor is broken. Directories match on geography and credentials which misses what actually determines whether the relationship lasts: fit, communication style, and how you make decisions. Couplr’s engine uses 1,300+ behavioral and financial variables to match consumers with financial advisors on a much more human level. On the firm side, they help wealth and insurance organizations grow more predictably by matching the right prospects with the right advisors from day one with our CouplrMatch product. They also drive organic growth through our prospect and client enrichment tool, Couplr IQ.The For the Love of Money a LinkedIn newsletter with 20,000+ subscribers on money, fintech, behavioral finance, and what are learning through their industry work and research.He co-founded the REBL Dads community to help dads become better leaders at home and work. Host an annual gathering on Necker Island. Out of that community, Derek co-authored REBL Dad, a book revealing what 100+ dads share about successful leadership at home and work, with a foreword by Sir Richard Branson.Outside of work, he is a husband, dad, and lifelong tinkerer. Love travel, surfing, dogs, and turning wrenches on cars, the hands-on stuff that keeps him grounded.Learn more: https://www.couplr.ai/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-derek-notman-founder-ceo-of-couplr

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 with us Derek Notman, who's the founder and CEO of Coupler. Derek, welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. Great to be with you today. Really appreciate it. Hey, you're welcome. First and foremost, before we dive into who you are and why you do what you do,

let's define what is Coupler. Think of Coupler as the find an advisor fixer. We fix the find an advisor tool for wealth management firms, financial advisors, you name it. And if you want to have a little bit of fun with it or use a dating analogy, think of it as like, the e-harmony or Bumble for insurance and wealth management. So I love it. I love analogies. You know, your wife and my wife would probably be rolling their eyes going, okay, another analogy.

Guys love analogies, you know, but I like that because it really is like, oh, at the crux of the matter, we need to stand out. If it's a dating app analogy, how am I going to stand out in the right way? but what makes the what makes coupler help an advisor stand out in that finding advisor? What does that actually look like? So we are competing with a lot of other advisors. And at the end of the day, a lot of us have the same credentials. We can sell the same products and services and so forth.

So those are, I would not argue, are differentiators really at all anymore. And what it really comes down to is the human connection. You know, I've been an advisor, Mike, for over 20 years myself. I have multiple credentials. I was a New York life career agent before I went fully independent, and I own my own RIA now, too. And at the end of the day, the best client relationships are the ones where we have a human connection first. The client buys the advisor. Does the advisor understand, and do they have shared commonalities, interests?

Does the advisor understand me because we have these deeper human connections? And so, Coupler helps do that. We connect on a human level. And by doing so, now the advisor and the client that were always meant to be together, actually get together. And that's where great stuff can happen because if the client loves the advisor and vice versa, now you have a much better and deeper exchange of information, if you will. Because the advisor is only going to be as good as the information the client shares. And if the client doesn't want to share everything because they don't trust the advisor,

then you know how that ends. Yeah. You know, you brought up a great point there, and it reminded me of an example, not an analogy, but an example of in business school, you know, I learned like, hey, what's the best selling Nike shoe of all time? And it's the Air Jordan. Well, why was that? Because his personal brand was behind that. People thought of him, not some canvas shoe or not some rubber shoe or whatever, but it's the personality. And you bring up such a huge point because, fact,

facts tell and stories sell. So the personality, the stories we tell, the connection we have. And what's that Maya Angelou quote? People will forget the way that you, what you said to them, but they'll never forget the way you made them feel. And all of that ties together, right? Yes, 100%. That's exactly right. Yep. And that's crucial for a long-term client advisor relationship. So here's, I guess you, You hinted at it, but here's kind of where my mind goes. Correct. There's a big chasm between everything I want as an advisor to know about that client and everything that client doesn't want to tell the advisor either in the first,

mini, second, many, third mini, or ever. So how do you close that gap? It comes back to establishing rapport and trust. And if you don't have those, which are foundational to a successful. whole client advisor relationship, then none of that other data exchange is ever going to flow. The client will never share their hope streams and goals, their financial skeletons, what keeps them up at night because they won't feel comfortable because money is personal and money is private. Yeah.

You have to connect on those levels. Isn't it sort of like what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, that whole mindset of, you're safe here, do whatever you want. No one's going to find out, which, ha, ha, you know, that's not the case. but if you can engender that feeling of trust in that relationship, now they're going to open up. Kind of like the attorney-client privilege or HIPAA where doctors can't disclose. People know that so they feel comfortable disclosing. Well, how do you get there?

Like, I agree. I'll check the box. Yes, I agree. You need to have that trust within that relationship. What is your tool do to help create that and solve that? Yeah, good question, Mike. So it's about experience. I'm sure virtually every one of your listeners, including yourself, has had the experience where they fill out a form online or something because they want to get a quote for insurance or whatever.

And the next thing they know, their phone and their inbox are blowing up. Yeah. Terrible client experience instills absolutely no trust and really has basically just boiled me down to another transaction, which feels icky. And so what Coupler does is that we actually empower the consumer. We went upstream and we said, okay, if we can make the consumer experience the best in the world, then that will flow down to the firms and advisors that ultimately get the leads. And so with Coupler, we let them know like, hey, you're here to get matched with the right advisor for you on a variety of levels. They go through a quiz.

And by the way, this quiz to go through, they don't have to give me their net worth, their 401K bank. their email address, their phone number, none of that stuff. And then they actually get matched with the top three advisors for them. And again, we don't gate that. We want them to control this experience and feel good about the process. They get to review those advisors who each get, each advisor and culprit gets a deep, rich profile where that really lets them tell their story professionally and personally. And so now the lead, the consumer, gets a very deep but quick, like gut reaction almost like, do I like the advisors I was matched with?

I liked all three, but man, I really like Mike. We have similar situations. He understands me. He works with people like me. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we take it even further. Mike, this is where it's cool. Is it instead of now selling that lead to one or multiple advisors at the same time where we've

take and again control away from the consumer, we actually empower the consumer to make the first move. So they have to initiate contact with the advisor of their choice. And that's where we ask for a little bit of commitment, like, hey, prove you're a human, give us your email address at least, and verify. But that's it. And then now they get to send a note to the advisors. Like, hey, Mike, we just got matched. Looks like you help people like me. We have similar. backgrounds, would love to find a time to meet. And so now that experience has been amazing for the consumer. They felt good.

They were in control. And because of that, now the advisor has a warm inbound lead that has already vetted them and has reached out to them. So unless the advisor doesn't follow up or has a terrible sales process or can't close, they're going to write that business. And so now the whole experience has been flipped. And it's so much better all the way. through that value channel.

You know, let's talk a little bit about something that as a marketer is, you know, ingenious with what you just said, gated content. And I think that becomes something that it kind of reminds me back in the day. I'm sure you've heard of Seth Godin, the marketer, you know, permission marketing. It's like people don't want the spam emails. They don't want the, you know, megaphone in their face. I want what I want when I want it. So when you have permission and when you have that gated content, the client or the prospect

feels in control and in charge. And then that outreach becomes really genuine and there's going to be less no show and less, you know, skepticism and all of that. I love it. Is there any analytic because my marketer mind goes to hearing what you said there and goes, okay, it's similar to. to like how many people visited a landing page compared to how many people converted and filled out the information. So with a non-gated approach, how many people are actually taking that step?

Are is there any way to quantify that? There is. Now, it's going to be different per firm because so Coupler is primarily a white label solution where we will embed in with a firm or even a marketing channel partner. And we have tested this. And we've done this lot. And I can reference two. One, we did this for a very large wealth management company where by simply replacing the call to action from, hey, enter your postal code and here are all these advisors that you have to pick from and reach out to or lose, you know, give your contact info to instead of you use coupler. In that instance, we increased the conversions from going all the way through to getting matched with an advisor. Those conversions increased over 525%.

Wow. We also, you've heard of bank rate, we did a test with bank rate where our experience, which even said it was an ad, which was this is hilarious, it even said it was an ad on their thing. This is how we did it. We still were more than three times more conversions than their own native application. Wow. So we know it works. People like it. They want it for the reasons we just recently discussed, right?

So we know it works. Have you ever heard of this quote? People love to buy, but they don't want to be sold. Bingo. That's it. And that's what we're doing with this at scale. That's exactly where I was going with that. I originally heard that quote from Jeffrey Gidimer, the sales trainer. I'm sure he got it from someone who got it from someone. But the point is, when we teach and educate, people don't feel pushed. And that's very similar to the Chet Holmes, you know, ultimate sales machine approach of selling and sales. It's like, don't push and buy. and deadline and go, go, go. How about let me teach you what you need to understand about this? Well, in your scenario here, this non-gated, warm approach, now when people are reaching out to that advisor, they're doing it and they feel like they're doing it on their own accord because

they are. And now the connection is that much warmer. So that, to me, is the ultimate mic drop to lead generation versus lead conversion. It's not going to be 100%. The advisor still has to be knowledgeable, nice, and all of that. But those barriers, I feel like you've really taken a huge step to removing a lot of those barriers. We really have. You know, as I said, I've been an advisor for 20 years.

And I didn't sign up to become a prospecting ninja and all that kind of stuff. I just wanted to sit with people at the kitchen table and help them with their money. And I had to have a relationship with them to do that. So I'm like, why can't we figure out a way to use technology to help do us do more of that? because also as an advisor, you know how awful it feels when I'm part of a lead generation program where I know the lead was sold to other advisors? Yeah, right, right. And I have to compete for it or I know that the information on that lead was data scraped

without telling the lead. And now it's kind of creepy, you know, like there's this, it feels really kind of gross as an advisor. Yeah. And it wastes a lot of my time and money. So, you know, yes, I wanted the consumer experience to be better, deeper, deeper, more in control. But if we do that, let's also improve the advisor experience so we can be the best advisor possible. So then where does coupler sit? It's a white label. It integrates in with what,

your own website or directory listings you're on? What does that look like? Yeah, the, like an ideal use case would be like a large RIA or a wirehouse insurance broker dealer, whatever. There's lots of places we can do it. We will power the find an advisor experience in that instance. So we will, you click that button and everything from there on, all fully embedded on the website. So it's your brand, your logo, everything. But now we power the matching engine. We power all of the advisor profiles, everything done right there.

And we even integrate with Wealthbox and Redtail so we can push the leads in there too. So what we have found, Mike, is that a lot of these firms, even advisors, they don't have a marketing problem. Yeah. They're already doing marketing at some level. And they also, they're already there as the advisor to service that client. But when they're pushing all these people with intent from the marketing side into a tool that doesn't convert or has such a terrible experience that almost no one converts, like the old, like, zip code base thing or fill out this form.

we'll get in touch with you. Yeah. That's the major disconnect between the intent and the advisor wanting to serve. Yeah. And that's why the company is called coupler. We're coupling those two sides together. I love it. It's just spectacular.

I think this is something that people really, really need to, you know, it's like, it's almost like, you got the, let's use a football analogy. Here we are coming up a football season. You got the ball to the one year. Like now you've got to just punch it in. And it's like that last piece, you know, that last piece of credit. trust, all of that just ties right into there. So in reality, if an advisor is listening to this going, I need that, it's not something

they reach out and go give it to me unless they can then go to their, all the directory listings that they're on. This is more like raising awareness to get some of the bigger players to go. Let's put this on for our larger group. Yeah, I mean, any firm with even 10 advisors would definitely want to look at something like this, but as an individual advisor, you also can take advantage of this. We have a direct product, and then we also have a partnership with the American College of Financial Services. So if you have a designation and good standing with them, you can come on through that channel. And in all cases,

though, one other thing that we have done is we have done extensive work on optimizing for how search is now done in today's day and age, specifically AEO and AI citations. And it's funny, so I'm in the middle or at the end of doing an audit of over 400 firms and finding advisor tools. And virtually, I would say out of over 400, maybe less than five, are actually optimized to be found in an AI citation. And there are some large national companies that actually block it entirely. And so it's not that the AI citation is giving a bad answer to consumers. It's giving no answer. The advisors literally cannot be found.

And so if you come to a coupler direct and sign up, you can be included in that because we've optimized for it. You know, I think what you just said there, we could spend about three hours on right there is the age of AI. And it's in a lot of people think, oh, I'm all about AI. I use chat chippy T to write my blog post in my. No. Right? Nope. It is a whole world out there on the AEO, the answer engine optimization, because yes, I feel like,

Google will never, ever, ever go away. People still, it's the default. Let me Google it. Let me go look there. But there is a rising, dramatically rising amount of people out there that start their search on AI. And I saw a stat recently that said 25% of a fluent pre-retirees or fluent people are starting their search for an advisor on AI. And what is AI going to say about you? if people are going, hey, let me look for a retirement specialist in my area.

Huge question. That's it. That is what is happening. Whether they do it in a normal Google browser, because the first answer there is an AI citation now or write in chat, GPT or whatever your preference is for a tool, if you're not there, if you're not being able to show up, then you're going to miss that stuff. And, you know, it's the whole, I don't know who ever said this, Mike, maybe you do, but like one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book is go where people are and be present.

Yeah. And people are on AI now. Like I read somewhere Google says something. Over a billion searches now are already happening in an AI directly. So like you should probably be there, you know? Yeah. Well, I've heard people say, hey, man, 50% of my marketing is working like a gangbusters. I just don't know which 50% it is.

So you got to, you got to know your numbers. You got to have the right things in. place and there's never some switch that you flip in. Hallelujah. You know, here comes a flood of people every single day. They're all closing. We know that. But if you can polish a little here, polish a little there, it's like Darren Hardy says in

his book, the compound effect. If you can just tweak and improve small percentage points in multiple areas, you have that compound effect. So I think this is just spectacular, Derek. It's really amazing to see how this is really, really coming together for advisors to really warm up those connections. So I love hearing all the things you're doing. If someone is interested in reaching out and connecting with you and learning more,

what's the best way they can do that? Yeah, I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's how you and I found each other, you know, through some, the other podcast, but Jeremy I did. And so definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just don't spam me. Don't try to sell me like a rollover or something, you know, just send me a know. I'm happy to connect.

I'm human. Let's be real. Let's be real about it. Yeah, don't use AI to send me some spammy message. Yeah, LinkedIn's perfect. And then also just you can always check out Coupler directly at just coupler.a.i. Love it. Well, Derek, thank you so much for coming on.

It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Mike. Really appreciate it. It's a fun conversation. 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.

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