From The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA: a conversation with podcast strategist and producer Kyle Andree on what actually makes an advisor podcast work.
Most advisors who start a podcast quit before episode 30.
The ones who make it past that point almost always started for the same reason.
It has nothing to do with equipment.
Adam sits down with Kyle Andree, a podcast strategist and producer who has spent the years since 2018 helping business owners and financial advisors launch and grow shows through his company, In-House Podcasts. They get into the one question that should come before any equipment decision, the mistake that kills most advisor podcasts before they gain traction, and how podcasting fits into a bigger marketing system, the kind covered step by step in The Million Dollar Blueprint.
Before anything else, Kyle asks every potential client the same question: why do you want to do this. If someone can’t answer clearly, he tells them to go back and think about it before spending another dollar on equipment. In his experience, the answers that signal a good long-term fit sound specific, like a business owner who wants to share what they know with a defined audience. The answers that signal trouble are the vague ones, things like “my friends and I have funny conversations” or “I want to be the next Joe Rogan.” Those are status plays, not business strategy, and they rarely survive contact with the actual work of producing a show every week.
The difference comes down to whether the show is built to deliver value or built to elevate the host. Kyle points to one of his most successful shows as proof: a financial planning podcast built entirely around optometrists. It sounds narrow, even a little funny, until you look at the results. The show grew out of a broader “white coat” concept for dentists, optometrists, and veterinarians, but after the first 30 or so episodes, the data showed most new clients were coming from the optometry niche specifically. So that became the show. It delivers practical, actionable advice to a well-defined audience instead of chasing broad appeal, and that focus is what makes it work.
That same specificity is what makes podcasting different from a newsletter, social posts, or market updates. A listener spending 30 to 60 minutes with a host builds what Kyle calls a parasocial relationship: a one-sided sense of closeness that makes someone far more comfortable picking up the phone later. It is a version of the old “touches to build trust” number advisors have watched climb for two decades, from around seven touches in the 2000s to the low teens in the 2010s to the high 20s today. A podcast, especially one repurposed into shorter clips, produces more of those touches than almost any other content format, and it does it with more authenticity than a curated post ever will.
The most common mistake is spending real money on top-of-the-line equipment before committing to the work of making a podcast every week. Kyle sees it constantly: someone buys a few thousand dollars of gear, records a handful of episodes, and then discovers they don’t love being on camera, or editing is harder than expected, or they simply can’t keep the schedule. The equipment ends up sitting on a desk unused. There is a real number behind this pattern. Podcasters call it pod fade: most shows that fold do it before 30 episodes. Advisors who push through to episode 30 dramatically increase their odds of sticking with the show long term, so the smarter move is to start simple, prove to yourself you’ll actually show up, and upgrade equipment later if you stay committed.
Start with discoverability. Look at how episodes are titled, whether the podcast name and description are searchable, and whether keywords related to your topic show up naturally in your titles and show notes. From there, look at production quality. Listeners bail in the first five minutes if audio sounds bad or a host rambles, and that has nothing to do with the ideas being shared. Finally, look at promotion. Many advisors record and upload a show, then never actively push it through an email list or social following, sometimes because they feel a little exposed sharing something so personal with friends and family mixed into their audience. Fixing growth usually means addressing all three: discoverability, production, and promotion, not just one.
Format decisions come down to two questions: what can you actually repeat every week, and how much value can you deliver in that time. Solo episodes, guest interviews, and co-hosted conversations all work, but the format only matters if it is sustainable for the host long term. On length, the common advice to stay under 30 minutes is not a hard rule. It comes from the idea that most people listen during a commute, which in the US averages around 25 minutes, but plenty of successful shows run much longer when the content earns it. The real guidance is to avoid wasting a listener’s time and to stay under an hour in most cases, while committing to a consistent, ideally weekly, release schedule. Podcast listeners are creatures of habit. Once an audience expects a new episode every Monday morning, breaking that pattern without warning costs more trust than skipping a week ever should.
For advisors who already have the content but not the technical backend, this is where a producer earns their keep. Adam has lived both sides of it. He started his own show with a music studio already in his basement and enough equipment knowledge to sound decent, but he had no idea how to build searchable keywords, write proper show notes, or handle post-production well, and it was eating hours every week. Working with Kyle changed that. The process now is simple: record the episode, send Kyle the file, and he handles editing, show notes, keyword research, titling, and distribution to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. The technical backend stops being the reason a good idea never makes it out into the world.
Podcasting is one piece of a bigger marketing system, and it works best alongside the same principles that show up everywhere else in a growing practice: clarity on who you serve, consistency in how you show up, and a repeatable process behind it.