Luca Lixi is member of the financial advisory elite in Italy. His story recalls the narratives of the American dream, with the main difference being that he lives in a country more famous for its amazing beaches, tasty food, and open air museums than for its social mobility.
Luca Lixi, who has spent most of his life in one of the poorest regions in Europe, is the epitome of the undeniable power of brand building when it comes to building your influence and authoritative positioning in the niche where you operate as a professional or as an entrepreneur. In order to avoid useless misconceptions and be as specific as possible in describing his story in detail, I sent him an email, and he agreed to share his story and strategies as he never did before. 
“When I was hired in a bank, I was 19 years old and one of the happiest people on this planet. It was 2004, and I was taking my first steps into the job market in an area (Sardinia) that is widely recognised to be economically average.
Coming from a small and humble family like mine, being able to obtain a full-time permanent contract with your own strength and without any external help was considered exceptional. In 2004, the Great Recession that later happened in 2008-2009 was still far off and we were on the edge of the explosion of a financial bubble that greatly affected the Italian economy. No one had ever imagined that the job market and the business arena would change so radically in such a short time. In reality, I couldn’t imagine that the biggest change was going to happen inside me. Or better, it was more a return to the origins than a real change. I have always been a free soul. I very quickly understood that the responsibility of my success or failure would be the result of my own actions. And this inner belief led me to achieve good results. Unfortunately, at a later stage something stopped working. After having obtained my full-time permanent job in a bank, I suddenly realised that society and common sense want you to conform. It asks you to quit on your dreams while obsessively looking for comfort and security and crying about the old past now gone. Society and common sense ask you to be like everyone else because if you try to emerge from the undifferentiated crowd you are an egomaniac or a narcissist with no hope of redemption. Full-time permanent job. House with a loan. Retirement fund. And your free soul tends to die down. Luckily, not irreparably. Under 30 years old, in 2014 I decided to leave my full-time job and start a career as an independent advisor with a business license—and no salary from a big Italian bank. I realised very soon that it wasn’t going to be a game. There is a huge difference between being a professional in a consolidated institution where clients arrive without you doing anything and being an independent advisor. You need to create your own personal autonomy, your personal brand, your differentiating idea, finding a niche to serve and other features that nowadays can make an impactful difference. It was a painful awakening, because I immediately recognised that today, in Italy, we live in a backward country concerning sales and marketing. The area managers of the business I was involved in during my early stages as an independent advisor were still thinking of sales and marketing as they were done in the Eighties. 
They weren’t able to see that the world has changed since then, and you can’t base a lead generation strategy on:
It would be professional suicide. But those were the only indications they were able to give me during training courses on how to do prospecting. However, as I am not stupid (not that much, at least), I soon realised that those strategies aren’t going to work and will not work anymore. But this is still a problem. The only question a real professional or entrepreneur should ask himself is the following: “How can I acquire new clients?” Do you still wait for clients to knock at your door because you own a prestigious office, you have a degree, you sell a good product, or you are a nice person? Try to live with this hope and then you tell me how your business is going. Before going bankrupt, of course. How can I acquire new clients? How can I stay in business and implement my business? The first premise is that a process of lead generation (which is a marketing strategy) isn’t built in a matter of days. The problem is that average people lack patience. They would love to open a blog, start a podcast, or write a few posts here and there on social media and then start to receive new clients’ queries or requests to cooperate with specialised magazines or be invited to speak at industry events. It doesn’t work like that. Anything that is really valuable takes time before turning into a big success. Furthermore, average people are used to seeing the top of the iceberg. They just see your success, notoriety, and authority in what you do. They do not see what is below the water: the level of stress, hard work, study and risk you have taken. Thus, in April 2015 I opened my blog and my Facebook page. I do not write that much on my blog as I am neither a blogger nor a trainer. I am a professional pledged to blazon forth financial education and literacy. This is for two reasons:
My blog has the function to do lead generation with a lead magnet—a report that you can download for free—that has brought in more than 2,000 emails to my database. I do prefer publishing content on a regular basis on my Facebook profile as I find it more spontaneous and personal. There is no particular reason attached to this decision; it is just a personal preference. Writing high quality content (if it is meaningless, no one cares about you!), I started attracting the interest of magazines like Investors, Citywire, and Advisor. In 2016 I opened my Facebook Group, WikiLixi, that today counts almost 6,000 members. It is a community of potential investors where financial topics are discussed and where members can directly interact with me. 
In 2017 I published my book, with the same goals of the blog:
The book has sold more than 1,500 copies in a few months. A big success considering the niche where I operate. To conclude, I do believe that in finance, like in other industries, it is more important who said something than what was said. Thus, it is paramount to demonstrate complete knowledge of the topics on which your expertise is based, then launch a PR strategy that is able to amplify the reach of your content that otherwise would remain unknown and with no authority at all.” 
To sum up, Luca Lixi has used three simple techniques that helped him join the club of the most influential financial advisors in Italy:
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