If you sell a service people can’t see, you have a trust problem before you have a marketing problem. Nobody hires a financial planner, a bookkeeper or an attorney off one clever ad. They hire the person they already believe.
Nick Garofalo knows this from the inside. He founded Openhanded Wealth, a fee-only financial planning firm in North Georgia, and on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast with host Daniel Hill he laid out how a second-year firm earns trust from zero. It’s a playbook you can lift for almost any professional service.
Explain what you do in one breath
Nick’s first trust problem was that nobody knew what he did. “Financial planning is almost like saying, yeah, I’m an artist.” So he built a five-letter framework, RIITE (retirement, investments, insurance, taxes and estate), that a prospect can remember after one conversation.
You need the same thing. If your service takes three minutes to explain, a referral can’t pass it along. Shrink it into something a friend could repeat at a barbecue, and you’ve made every happy client a better salesperson.
Say how you get paid before they ask
Nick puts his compensation on the table early: “I’m fee only, I’m agnostic to carrier, I don’t make commissions, I’m strictly paid by my clients.” When the price question comes up, he frames the relationship as one that has to create more value than it costs, or “it doesn’t make sense to hire me and you shouldn’t.”
That kind of plain talk about money is rare in professional services, which is exactly why it works. If you’re cagey about pricing, the prospect fills the silence with the worst assumption.
Give the advice away
Nick’s whole marketing philosophy fits in one sentence: “people have to know, like, and trust you to do business with you.” His way of getting there is to give real help away for free, the same way he was helped when he was starting out.
“There’s just so much free advice out there. So if I can give somebody a piece of advice that actually helps their situation, earns a little bit of trust.”
You might worry that giving away the answer means nobody pays for it. In practice, the free answer proves you know the work, and the client still needs someone to apply it to their situation. Erika Braeger made a similar point about telling one story everywhere.
Then go shake hands
Here’s the part that should make every content marketer a little uncomfortable. Nick posts short videos, writes blog posts and runs his own podcast, and his best channel is still the oldest one.
“A warm handshake is worth a thousand LinkedIn posts.”
He was clear that the online work still matters. You “have to look and be again quote unquote legitimate,” and the content is what someone checks after they meet you. But the meeting is what turns into a client. For a local professional service, a calendar with two in-person events a month will likely beat a perfect posting schedule. It’s the same logic behind local links being relationships with URLs: the offline relationship comes first, and the digital proof follows it.
Be patient about the niche
The last piece is the hardest to hear. Everyone tells you to niche down. Nick’s point is that you can’t know your niche until you’ve seen enough clients to know which problems you solve best, and he called it “a cart versus horse question.” So in year two he’s taking a broader mix, from an attorney with a large payout to manage to a service-business owner who felt strapped for cash despite good revenue, and watching for the pattern.
So which of these are you skipping? A one-breath explanation, plain talk about price, free help, a handshake, or the patience to let your niche show itself? Pick the weakest one and fix it this month.
Nick Garofalo is the founder of Openhanded Wealth, a registered investment adviser. This conversation is general education only and is not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Recorded June 2025.
Listen on Castos or read the full episode recap.