Boise advisor Alex Lundgren turned live AM radio into a Micron client niche

Alex Lundgren's husband spent 27 years at Micron, the kind of Boise tenure that ought to open doors inside the company; it barely moved her book. The clients came from a radio show.

Lundgren, an advisor with Tree City Advisors of Apollon, and a fellow advisor co-hosted an hour of live AM radio five nights a week during drive time, a format that ran closer to an open phone line than a market report. "Idaho's Money Show" aired from 5 to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, in the valley and followed whatever was moving—something breaking at Micron, a swing in the share price, a rough stretch in the broader market—with a standing invitation for listeners to call in with questions. Callers became prospects, prospects became clients, and the clients brought their co-workers along.

"We got people that came in as potential clients, and they are the ones who actually truly built the referral network," Lundgren told Financial Planning, which profiled the practice as part of its Know Your Niche series on how advisors choose and build a defined client base. Asked whether her husband's 27 years at the company were the route to those first clients, she was direct: not many came from him.

The show produced a specific kind of fluency. Micron is prominent enough in Boise that its pay cycles, its stock and its benefits register as local news, and the co-hosts used that to translate market conditions for a workforce holding a large share of its net worth in employer equity. "Once you understand how the retirement plan works, how the stock options or restricted stock work, because you've seen enough of the plan documents, you can get really well versed at this," she said. "And if you do a good job for the people you work with … you can get quite a great referral network."

Lundgren estimates 187 households on her client list, 30% of them Micron employees and another 20% at large hospitals in the area, which works out to roughly 56 households at Micron and the two employer categories accounting for about half the book. The radio audience added that base on top of the focus she started with: women in transition—divorce, widowhood, and the recalculation of retirement on a single income.

The format has changed: the drive-time run is gone, and what remains is a three-hour Saturday program carried in multiple markets and distributed as a podcast, a different product from the one that built the book—live, local, weekday, and reachable in the exact hour people were commuting home and thinking about money. Whether the weekend block still converts callers into clients is a question the coverage does not answer, and it is a live one for any advisor weighing airtime against a podcast feed.

The durable choices in Lundgren's model were in place before the microphone. She picked an employer whose workforce is large enough to be its own market and concentrated enough in one metro that a single AM signal could reach most of it, made the content about the things that move inside those households—plan documents, stock options, restricted stock—rather than generic market commentary any advisor can deliver, and stayed live and reachable so the audience could become a pipeline without an intermediary. Letting the clients do the internal recruiting is the part that compounds: a well-served employee at a company where everyone compares notes is the cheapest source of referrals a practice can have.

The profile leaves the airtime economics unpriced: whether the hours are bought or brokered, how the co-hosts divide the work, and how much of the book arrived through the show rather than other channels. For an advisor sizing a paid-media budget, those are the numbers that decide whether an hour of local radio beats a podcast, a seminar series or a referral relationship.

Audience access is sold in several forms: CD Valet charges advisors $500 a month for access to the investors who compare CD rates on its site, as we reported in September, and Schwab's Advisor Network, where a $5 million referral floor has forced firms to weigh a thinner pipeline against the cost of generating their own leads, makes the same trade in a different currency. Lundgren's version is the build-it route, and it took years of live hours to produce a client list that is still a single-practice business.

About half her clients sit in two employer categories, one tied to a single company's plan documents and share price. That fluency is what produced the referrals, and its value moves with the employer that supplied it. The next test is distribution: three Saturday hours across multiple markets plus a podcast now have to do what five live weeknights once did for her practice.