You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Two big announcements before we get into the meat and potatoes of this podcast episode. First up, this episode is set to air on September 30. That means, if you're listening on the first day this drops, then it is also the last day to lock in your spot for the October Inner Circle Newsletter issue, because it will ship out first thing on October 1.
If you're unfamiliar with the Inner Circle, it is a real paper-and-ink newsletter, actual paper, mailed directly to your door. It is chock full of marketing and business-building information that you can use to get more clients, build a better business, and honestly, build a better life. You can check it out for yourself at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. [01:11.7]
What's even better is that Inner Circle members get monthly office hours, where we hang out together in a Zoom meeting and chat about whatever it is they want to talk about. These office hours are not formal. They are not fancy. They're not designed to have any sort of structure whatsoever, except from being from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the second Tuesday of every month. Advisors can swing by for five minutes, or they can stay for the entire two hours. It is up to them. I am there to help them. These office hours are designed to serve advisors and to make sure they get the help they need. That is my job, to serve advisors and make their lives better. [01:49.5]
Here, I'll share a little secret with you. The reason the newsletter has done so well and has helped so many people is because I get paid when others get paid. Our incentives are aligned, because if I can deliver results for advisors, then they are incentivized to stay, and if I can't deliver those results, then they would just cancel their subscriptions, plain and simple.
There is no long-term contract or anything like that. It’s $99 per month. But why would you ever cancel when you're getting good stuff every single month like clockwork? That is pretty much the business model. I get advisors to subscribe. I help them make a bunch of money. They keep paying me. They break me off a little piece of that bread every month. Wow, super complex, right? But it works.
I think one of the biggest hesitations that advisors have or had about subscribing to the Inner Circle Newsletter was they were wondering if they could make it work for their specific situations. Now, from my point of view, I have helped financial advisors from all walks of life and all backgrounds, and all sorts of companies with all sorts of compliance headaches. This stuff is not new to me, but it will be kind of rude for me to outright say, trust me, you are not different. Instead, what I do is I offer the opportunity for advisors to show up to the office hours, and we can chat right then and there. I will literally be right there to help. I don't think I can possibly make it much easier. [03:11.8]
One more time. The link to check it out is TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. The deadline is September 30 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Otherwise, you will have missed out on the October issue, but you can always subscribe for next month's issue. If you subscribe in the month of October, then you'll be locked in for the November issue, and so on and so forth.
Now, what is this week's podcast episode about? Let me go back and look at the title. Oh yeah, it's about marketing advice for new financial advisors, or business advice for new financial advisors. Now, it's been a while since I've talked specifically to my new financial advisors out there. A few months ago, I released a podcast episode about seven marketing mistakes new financial advisors make, but I want to do something different and just chat about things I think you should know. Just hang out, not as casual, I'm just going to tell you some stuff. [04:00.7]
First, I want you to understand that it has never been easier to build a highly profitable business. You have access to the world's information at your fingertips. You have artificial-intelligence tools that can chip away at more difficult tasks. Artificial-Intelligence tools can replace entire employees. Are you kidding me? You have social-media networks that let you contact people like partners and mentors, and potential clients, instantly and directly. You can message someone. It could be 1:00 a.m., you could hop on LinkedIn, contact somebody, get your message out into the world—all while society is being dumbed down.
Your “competitors”—and I use “competitors” in air quotes because I don't really believe in competition. I believe in creation, but I know it's just a word that people use, your competitors—likely have minuscule attention spans that, I would say, an attention span that's shorter than that of a goldfish, but apparently we are way beyond that, and an aversion to hard work. You have an absurd, unreal advantage if you can sit down, pay attention and just work for several hours straight. [05:06.8]
Here's a good litmus test to see if you have a good chance of being successful. If I gave you a business book, could you read it for two hours straight? Could you sit down in a chair and actually read the book without stopping? No phones, no television, no distractions, only you and the book.
I'll share my personal stats. I read 102 books in 2023. I read 119 in 2022. I read 80 in 2021 and I read 86 in 2020, and actually, if I'm keeping it a thousand percent real with you, those are just Kindle books. I know because I pulled those numbers from the Reading Insights section of my Kindle app. That doesn't include audiobooks. That doesn't include physical books. That doesn't include literally reading the Bible multiple times or print newsletters that I'm subscribed to, or digital things that I'm subscribed to or anything like that. Those are just Kindle books. Yet, you have grown men and women walking around proud, outright proud that they haven't read a single book in their adult lives. It's crazy to me. [06:11.2]
Forget about all the work stuff. Forget about all the marketing stuff and the business stuff, okay? I'm not James the financial advisor marketing guy anymore. I am just James, person to person or business owner and a business owner, whatever. Imagine the advantage that you could have in life if you just buckled down and read 100 books about a topic. What if you committed to learning about something, anything, and read a few 100 books or even just 100 about that topic, the things that you want to learn about? What if you just buckled down and did it? You would have an insane advantage in that area. Just do the work. Stop expecting everything to be so freaking easy. [06:51.8]
I think in the age of TikTok and Amazon same-day delivery, people have been lulled into this false belief that things are supposed to be easy. What if they're not? What if they're supposed to be difficult? Actually, what if you took things further? What if you expected things to be 10 times harder than you think they should be right now, meaning, if you think that you'll have to work on your marketing two hours per week, what if you actually had to work on your marketing for 20 hours each week? What would you change? How would your priorities change? Really think about that.
While I believe dogma is dangerous, I think a lot of success in life boils down to how committed and how persistent you're willing to be—and I say dogma is dangerous because it is possible to be persistent in the wrong things. Being persistent, absolutely, for sure, does not guarantee success. Now, of course, you have to choose the right things and you have to use basic common sense. However, a lot of life seems to be a game of discipline and delayed gratification. [07:49.8]
You've heard of the marshmallow experiment, right? These kids were placed in a room with a marshmallow in front of them. They were told they could eat it right away if they wanted to, but if they waited for 15 minutes without eating it, they would receive a second marshmallow as a reward. Those children were tracked over several years, and it was found that the children who were able to delay gratification tended to have better life outcomes in all sorts of areas, academics, personal happiness, work, a lot of areas.
Guess what? It's obvious to me that some of you would have eaten the marshmallow as children. You wouldn't even have waited a second. You would have just nom-nom-nom. You would have eaten that marshmallow right away, because many of you have the mediocre life you have today because you were unwilling to go without it. Let that sink in. You had to have that metaphorical marshmallow.
This applies to personal finance, for sure, because delayed gratification has all sorts of implications for financial success. If you're able to take a little bit of money today and sock it away for later, you will likely have more money later. Whoa, awesome. But lots of people have to have that flashy new thing. Maybe it's a new car. Ooh, ooh, shiny. Or the latest techno gadget that'll be obsolete in a few years anyway. Yep, gotta have that. [09:06.0]
Young men and women, listen to me. You need to focus on making money and saving most of it. That probably means working really hard and delaying gratification. You have the time now. You have the opportunity now. You have the resources now. Do not squander them. You don't know what the future will bring.
I reached middle-class financial freedom in my late-20s, meaning, I had enough money in investments and assets and all that stuff to sustain a middle class-lifestyle passively. Listen to me here, I remember all of these sad, depressed, burned out, 40- and 50-year-olds telling me that I couldn't do it or that it was unrealistic—and they were right. It was unrealistic for them. It wasn't unrealistic for me. Do you get what I'm saying here? [09:54.4]
If you're currently in your 20s, do not listen to the people who tell you that you need to live your life and just enjoy your life, especially if they mean go out and blow all of your money so you can be just as broke as them, because a lot of people are just crabs in the bucket. They don't want to see you climb out of that bucket, so they will pull you back in. They want you to be just as miserable as they are. They don't want to see you win. But that's okay, you're not winning for them. You're winning for yourself. You're winning for your last name. Do you understand me? Who is more important?
Let me get real with you right now. I want you to pretend that you're dead. You died and your funeral is tomorrow. Who is coming to your funeral? Make a list. Write down everybody who you truly believe will attend your funeral. Those are the people who matter. Those are the people who you need to prioritize. Nobody gives two S-words about what some dumb F on social media says and what they say about you should do or should do this. Is that person attending your funeral, really? [10:57.4]
I have Inner Circle members right now, where, if they died, I would hop on a plane immediately and go to their funerals. That's a hundred percent real. That's how committed I am to these financial advisors. I am sure that some of them would do the same for me, so I need to prioritize them and they need to prioritize me. That's how it goes. Stop worrying about what some bozo on the internet says, who is tired, depressed, broke and burned out.
Jim Rohn said, “You must endure one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” That is so true. You must choose one. I don't know about you, but I will choose discipline all day, every day, because I know that is at least a known variable. I know how much activity I have to do today. I know how much I have to sacrifice in the present. The regret is unknown. It's an unknown variable. You're just letting life do whatever it wants with you, and if you choose pain and regret, then you're pretty much gambling. [11:51.3]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
I'll tell you something else. I'll reverse this a little bit. Some of you who are listening to this podcast right now are winning and you don't even know it. You're not grateful for it. You're not thankful and your life is just going to get wrecked, okay? You have to have gratitude. [13:06.4]
Some of you have gorgeous spouses, amazing kids who love you, fantastic health, and I'll never discourage you from wanting to be more, do more and have more, but get real, you're already winning. Not everything is about money. There are people who have way more money than you who would trade places with you in a heartbeat if you have those things.
But since it's the financial advisor marketing podcast, I get it, I get it, I'll tie it back to marketing and business building. Here's something else that is incredibly important. You should work on what you are offering to the marketplace. We live in a capitalistic society where people enter the marketplace to sell goods and services to other people in exchange for money. Ooh, this is Econ 101, okay? A lot of you didn't even get this in college and you paid $160,000 for a degree that you can't even wipe your butt with. But this is a capitalistic society, okay? We live in that. So, in order to get some of that money from this society, you must be able to provide people something they value. [14:10.2]
Note, I want you to pay attention, I did not say you must be valuable. Lots of gurus say you need to increase your value, and you need to be of value and worthwhile, and that's only partly right. You must be valuable to the people in your market, the people who will see you, the people you're going in front of, okay?
I remember when I got out of college, there was a period of time where I applied to literally hundreds of jobs. I had dozens of phone interviews and probably at least a dozen in-person interviews, and I got rejected from all of them. Not a single person wanted to hire me, zero out of hundreds of job applications. Why? Because I wasn't valuable to them. I could have blamed them for not seeing my greatness. I could have gotten frustrated and bitter about it. Instead, I saw the truth for what it was. I simply wasn't valuable enough to them. [15:06.6]
\
Here's something funny, though. A lot of the jobs I applied for were entry-level jobs paying something like $15 to $20 an hour, and that was years ago, by the way. They will probably be something like $25 to $30 an hour or so, something like that now. So, I got rejected again and again and again for these entry-level jobs, $20 per hour, and not long after that, I got a job doing marketing for a company and I was making $70 an hour.
What was the difference? How did I get rejected for the equivalent of $40,000-per-year jobs, while getting hired pretty much on the spot for the equivalent of a $140,000-per-year job? After all, I was the same guy. Nothing changed about me. My approach wasn't different. It was simply this: I was more valuable as a marketer to these people, the people who hired me, than I was in all of these other entry-level jobs. [16:04.8]
My main gig at the time was handling marketing and promotions at a casino. I talked about that on the podcast many times before and maybe I'll do another episode about that in the near future, because people usually like it when I talk about the casino days. I've got some pretty wild stories. But I kept embracing various marketing roles on top of all of the other stuff I was doing, and I was doing marketing consulting for one company and making something like $200 per hour. Now, again, I was valuable in one spot and not in another.
This is related to financial advisor marketing, because a lot of you are trying to make a business work. You literally are not offering anything valuable to the marketplace or you're settling for a small amount of money when you could make a lot more by increasing the value that you offer to your specific target market? [16:52.7]
I know this might seem like a silly example, but there's this guy that I hire on a fairly regular basis to soft wash my house. I do it usually every spring and every fall. One day, he was like, Hey, while I have all my equipment out and I'm already here, would you like me to clean your roof as well? I can also check for any damage while I'm up there and see if you have any shingles that need to be put back in place, and just different things. I said yes. I said, “Heck, yeah, go ahead, do it,” and he made a few extra $100 for 30 minutes or so of work.
The next time he came back, he asked me if he could clean my gutters for me, and I knew my gutters needed cleaning because I was going to get someone to come out and do it, but, again, I told him yes, and he cleaned the gutters for less money than I would have paid someone else to do it because he was already there and he was already doing another job. He already had his equipment out.
This guy is an Asian immigrant. He came from China with nothing and built an incredible life for himself. He has his own business with a fleet of trucks for various jobs and he likely makes something like $1,000 a day in profit from doing these jobs and cleaning houses and soft washing, and gutter cleaning and roof cleaning, and driveway asphalt whatever it is that where you reput asphalt on driveways. He does all of that. [18:09.7]
I'm friends with him on Facebook, and he is constantly posting pictures of the stuff that he does with his family and all the vacations he takes. He's living a fantastic life. I'm sure he didn't listen to nonsense about, oh, live your life, spend your money, live in the present that people like to peddle. He got to work and he made the most of the opportunity that he seized, when a lot of people who were born in America aren't even making the most of what they had handed to them since birth.
I'll give you one more piece of advice and then I'll wrap up this episode. Every so often, financial advisors will ask me how I've gotten so good at what I do, and candidly, they don't ask that exactly and no financial advisor comes up to me and says, “James, how did you get so good at what you do?” But they wonder. That's the question behind the question. They wonder why there is such a difference in what I tell them to do versus what they hear from all the other coaches, consultants, gurus and lead-gen agencies out there, and they wonder, why am I able to help them succeed so much when all of these other approaches have failed them? [19:16.5]
Truthfully, there is no one thing, because it is a combination of many factors. That's why I can't guarantee results. That's why it depends on your background and circumstances and situations, and all of those disclaimers that I give all the time. Yet I will tell you about one of the biggest factors in this podcast. Are you ready? Here it is. I embrace strategies that have a long shelf life. Everyone else, for the most part, embraces tactics that have a short shelf life.
Let me explain a current tactic making its rounds in the financial advisor marketing world right now is recording videos and posting them on LinkedIn. There is an entire subset of the marketing world screeching about how important it is to push a video on LinkedIn right now. They squawk and squeal about how videos should be exactly 49.2 seconds long and have precisely this style of lighting and this type of editing, or else you're just going to fail. All of those things are tactics. [20:09.8]
Warren Buffett says you learn who is swimming naked when the tide goes out, and when the LinkedIn algorithm eventually changes again, because it's changed multiple times—I mean, I've been doing this since 2015. It has changed a bunch—and when that happens, these financial advisors and all of the so-called video, quote-unquote, “experts” will be exposed. You will see that they've been swimming naked. Once that happens, the value of that tactic will go to zero because it won't have any value in the marketplace. They will have to start from scratch and learn something new.
I'll give you another example. There were entire businesses built around seminar marketing for financial advisors. These companies spent years telling financial advisors how awesome seminars were, how everyone needed to do them, and how they were the magic golden ticket for getting more clients, and you just need to do seminars because seminars are the best way to get new clients, and you need to do them, do them, do them. You need it, you need it, you need it. [21:01.4]
Then, 2020 happened and those same companies pivoted, and they started telling financial advisors how awesome webinars were. It's like, Oh, these are the best way to get new clients and you need to do webinars, and you just need it, you need it, you need it. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, give me a frickin’ break. If webinars were so awesome, why weren't you talking about them before? Yes, I get it, everything shut down. Kinda sorta, the financial advisors have to pivot. But you don't specifically have to pivot, because you could have been talking about webinars the entire time. You could have done that.
If they were truly the best thing for financial advisors, you should have led with that. But instead, these companies switched everything at the drop of a hat. Why? Because they weren't making any money, and in order to extract as much revenue from financial advisors as humanly possible, because that's all they see you as. They see you as a cash cow. They needed to have some new bright, shiny object to pitch to the financial advisors, aka you, when seminars weren't viable. They knew they couldn't make money pitching a certain tactic, so they switched to a different tactic in order to extract as much money from you, the cash cow. [22:06.3]
Don't get mad at me, by the way. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just the messenger. All of that stuff is tactical thinking. Videos are tactics. Seminars are tactics. Webinars are tactics. You should focus on strategies instead.
One more example. I used to do webinars all the time, and actually, as far as I know, I am the single most successful webinar marketer in the entire financial advice marketing industry, the financial advisor marketing industry. I have served more impressions, more signups, more watch time, and basically, just whatever metric than anyone else. Sure, if you want to challenge me on this, reach out to me. Let's compare our numbers, okay? But I still got rid of all of my webinars in October 2023. And guess what? I'm doing better than ever before.
Yet ask a tactically minded person to get rid of his or her highest performing or it wasn't my highest, but a high performing tactic, and the entire business would crater. What is the difference? That's a question I keep asking on this podcast episode. What is the difference? The difference is I embraced the strategy behind the tactic. I embraced the thing that had a long shelf life. [23:14.8]
In the webinar example, the strategy is communication. Since I am a good communicator, I can make any tactic work as long as I can communicate with it, because that is the strategy behind the tactic. Here's why it's so important. This allows my skills to compound. When everyone else inevitably has to reset to zero due to the tactical tide going out, I can keep compounding.
Video stop working? That's okay, I can keep communicating. Webinars aren't in vogue anymore? That's fine, I can keep communicating. And on it goes. My communication skills get better and better and better. I never have to reset to zero, because I don't chase tactics. I embrace strategies that have a long shelf life. The tactics have shorter shelf lives than these strategies. If you can truly grasp what I'm telling you here and if you can implement it in your business, then you will be one step closer to being unstoppable. [24:13.7]
All right, that is enough for one episode. I ranted enough. Thank you so much for listening. It means the world to me that you listen, and I will catch you next week.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
