Retirement Planning Firm Books 2,798 Appointments at $222 in Eight Months

The firm serves people approaching and entering retirement, coordinating income, Social Security, taxes and healthcare planning. It consults nationally rather than locally, which removes the geographic ceiling most advisory firms hit and replaces it with a harder problem: at national scale, a campaign either finds a repeatable way to produce qualified conversations or it produces expensive volume.

The specific risk was efficiency. Most advertising programs buy additional volume by accepting a worse cost per acquisition, because the easy audience gets exhausted first and everything after that costs more. A firm doubling its appointment volume normally expects its cost per appointment to rise.

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The program ran as a continuous creative test rather than one funnel with rotating ads. Across the period, 21 distinct VSL funnels ran, each entering the same retirement problem from a different angle: income durability, tax exposure, market timing, the gap between what people have saved and what their plan actually requires.

The distribution was not close. One funnel, built around a Nobel Prize-winning finding on retirement income, produced 41% of every appointment booked. Two more carried the rest of the weight, taking the top three to 84% of total volume. The remaining eighteen funnels produced the other 16% between them.

That concentration is the point, and it is only visible because the alternatives ran. A program that launches one funnel and optimizes it has no way of knowing whether a different entry point would produce twice the volume at a lower cost. A program that runs twenty finds the one that does, then moves budget into it while continuing to test replacements against it.

The winners also did not stay fixed. Funnels that carried volume early faded and were replaced by others as the audience saw them repeatedly. Scaling from 774 appointments a quarter to 1,278 required new entry points, not more spend behind the existing ones.

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Between February and September 2026 the program spent $620,423 and booked 2,798 appointments, a blended cost per appointment of $222 and an average of 350 appointments per month.

The direction matters more than the totals. In the first three months the program booked 774 appointments at $243 each. In the last three it booked 1,278 at $213. Volume rose 65% while cost per appointment fell 12%, which is the opposite of how scaling usually behaves.

On prospect quality, 37% of people booking reported investable assets above $1.5M at the point of booking, with 12% above $3M. Those are self-reported figures captured in the booking form rather than verified balances.

Results described are this firm's and are not typical. Cost per appointment and volume depend on the firm's market, offer, creative supply, sales capacity and campaign maturity, and other clients have had different results. Figures are drawn from the campaign's own tracking and have not been independently audited. Appointments booked are not clients, and nothing here describes investment performance or client outcomes.

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