Darci Smith’s first placement took two and a half years to close.
It paid $133,000.
She built Roklyn, a wealth management recruiting firm in California, around deals that most recruiters wouldn’t touch. Long cycles. High stakes. Bigger fees for those willing to wait.
Financial advisor transitions. High-stakes career moves involving lawyers, non-solicits, and fees paid in two tranches across twelve months. Her clients aren’t filling a vacancy. They’re moving an advisor’s entire book of business from one firm to another. Sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
She launched five years ago with no background in financial services, a national wirehouse contract, and a list of 300 names she didn’t want to call.
“Let me be honest, Mark. I don’t like cold calling. I really don’t. And I think people are surprised by that.”
She made the calls anyway. And while she was waiting for the big fees to land, she built a career coaching business on TikTok that made her $150,000 in year one. She grew to 300,000 followers. She engineered her visibility on ChatGPT. She charged a $5,000 non-refundable deposit and figured out how to explain it so clients didn’t blink.
Five years in, Roklyn is her full focus. She’s now expanding beyond California for the first time.
This episode covers the business model, the $5,000 contained search approach, how she built a social following, and how she engineered visibility through AI search.
More importantly, it shows what it looks like to embed yourself so deeply with clients that they never look elsewhere.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [4:09] How sport led Darci into recruiting and her first role at Cybercoders
- [6:18] Why she left a 400-person firm to specialize and what that decision taught her
- [9:01] How she became a top biller at Athletes to Careers through in-person visits
- [14:25] Choosing wealth management with no industry background and why it became an advantage
- [18:43] First contract: a national wirehouse and 300 cold calls to get started
- [21:31] On cold calling: honest about hating it, clear about doing it anyway
- [24:49] How financial advisor transition fees work and why they take years to land
- [31:01] Building 300K TikTok and 100K Instagram followers while building Roklyn
- [32:16] Making $150K in year one from career coaching before switching it off
- [44:35] Five-year milestone: What changed and what Mark’s program contributed
- [45:29] Niching to California-only wealth management and the five-year payoff
- [47:35] Being found on ChatGPT, how she engineered it intentionally
- [49:49] The contained model: $5,000 non-refundable deposit and how to explain it
- [55:39] Supporting hires through onboarding and why clients keep coming back
The $5,000 Deposit That Changes the Whole Relationship
Darci was flying out to meet clients. Investing days in the process. Building job descriptions, designing onboarding plans, and screening candidates properly.
And watching deals fall over because the client had no skin in the game.
She started charging a $5,000 non-refundable deposit. Not a complex retainer. Not a third upfront. Five thousand dollars, applied to the placement fee if a hire is made, kept by Darci if it isn’t. She explains it the same way every time: it covers her time, her research, and the full hiring strategy she builds before a single candidate is presented.
“Look at it like a consulting fee. We’re going to walk through exactly what hasn’t worked and how we can make this better.”
Clients don’t push back. Because the way she frames it, it sounds fair. And it is.
What changes isn’t just the client’s commitment — it’s Darci’s. When there’s money on the table from both sides, she’s not just filling a role. She’s building something with them. She shows up at the office. She meets the team. She learns what’s gone wrong with previous hires. She designs the onboarding before anyone’s been placed.
About 90% of her W2 recruiting now runs on this model.
She also stays involved after placement. First 30 days. First 90 days. At the twelve-month mark, her CRM sends an automatic reminder and she jumps on a Zoom with the candidate to check in. That conversation gets her back in front of the client. Nine times out of ten, there’s another role on the horizon.
In five years, two hires haven’t made it past 90 days. Both of those clients still work with her.
“Once you start working with me, you can’t get rid of me.”
She’s not joking.
Staying Solvent While the Big Fees Develop
Here’s the problem with Darci’s business model: a deal that takes two and a half years to close doesn’t pay the bills in year one. Most recruiters wouldn’t tolerate that kind of delay. Darci had to build a business that could survive it.
So she built other income while Roklyn developed.
The first stream was W2 recruiting within the same wealth management space — client associates, portfolio managers, and financial advisors without a book of business. Charging 25% of first year’s full compensation, this was 80% of her time in year one. It kept cash moving. Now it’s around 40% and shifting further toward the transition work over time.
The second stream came from TikTok.
She started posting three videos a day — everything she knew about hiring, interviewing, CVs, and culture. No editing software. No ring light. Just her phone and a window. Within a year she was charging $300 an hour for career coaching. She made $150,000 that year from coaching alone.
She’ll tell you she got lucky. She didn’t. She posted three videos a day.
“I needed money and I needed some other outlet.”
The coaching was always a bridge. Once Roklyn took off she stopped taking paid coaching clients entirely. The content stayed live, the audience kept growing, and the referrals kept coming. Her third placement at Roklan came from a woman who found her on Instagram, booked a coaching call for her husband, a financial advisor, and that conversation turned into a search.
He’s been promoted three times since.
The point isn’t that every recruiter should build a TikTok following. The point is that if your core business has long cycles and unpredictable cash flow, you need something running alongside it. What that looks like will be different for everyone. For Darci, it was career coaching. Figure out what it is for you and start building it now, not when the pipeline dries up.
The 30-Minute Video Workflow That Built 300K Followers
Darci has never used video editing software.
She films on her phone. She edits inside TikTok or Instagram using the built-in trim tool. She can film, edit, and post in 30 minutes.
The question she gets most from recruiters: What do I even talk about?
Her answer: You’re already talking about it. Every conversation you have with a client or candidate is content. You’re explaining things, challenging assumptions, answering objections, and sharing what you’ve seen in the market. That’s the material.
Her process now: after a client or candidate call, she takes her notes and runs them through Gemini. She asks for a script with a hook and a close, built for a specific duration. She doesn’t read it word for word — she uses it for talking points, checks her phone between lines, films short segments, and trims the pauses in TikTok.
“Whenever I talk to a candidate or a client, I immediately go through my notes. And now what I do is use AI to say, how can I build a video from this?”
She doesn’t read from a teleprompter. She looks directly at the camera. When she loses her track she waves her hand so she knows where to cut.
On frequency: she commits to a series of four videos, names it, finishes it, then does the next one. Once a week is her current goal. Her advice to anyone starting out — if once a month is what feels doable, start there.
The same Gemini research that feeds her content also feeds her search visibility. She researched how to appear in ChatGPT results, took the output to her web developer, and implemented it. New clients now find Roklyn through AI search.
“Whenever someone comes to me and I ask how they found me, they say ChatGPT. I Googled California wealth management recruiter. You were the first one that came up.”
She didn’t stumble into that. She went and figured it out.
