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: This is the 300th episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. It's hard to believe that this show has been airing every single week, without fail, for 300 consecutive episodes. I am so honored that you're listening. Thank you so much.
I want to make sure I express my gratitude, because I truly am grateful. I'm thankful, and I'm humbled that you've made some time to listen to me, whether this is your very first episode or your 300th episode with me. If it's your 300th, kudos to you. You are a superstar. Thank you so much. [01:04.4]
When I started this podcast, I had a few guiding principles. First, I wanted to focus on entertainment instead of merely teaching. That's why I tell stories, why I keep it casual, and why I go on rants sometimes. This show is meant to entertain you, first and foremost. If you get some value out of the show, quote-unquote, “value,” then that is awesome. I'm happy if you're happy. However, I never, ever approached this show as a way for me to just give information to financial advisors.
I actually don't listen to that many podcasts myself, but when I do, I listen to be entertained. I do not listen so I can learn something. If I learn something, that's a side benefit, that's cool, but I do not listen because I think to myself, Okay, I'm going to get some information from this. That never happens in my personal life. I know I am not the market sometimes. When I give advice to financial advisors, sometimes I say, “You are not your market. Stop thinking like you.” But I'm sorry I'm a bit of a hypocrite here, because I treat the podcast in the way that I personally listen to podcasts. [02:02.2]
Second, this is important, I wanted to tell financial advisors the truth no matter what. I wanted to tell them what really worked and what didn't work. I wanted to do this because there are so many people out there who tell financial advisors what they want to hear, and candidly telling people what they want to hear can make you a ton of money. It's a good business. You just go in and tell people whatever it is that they want to hear. You soothe their fears. You tell them it's okay, everything's fine, or you reinforce their faulty beliefs. You give them some confirmation bias.
In fact, social media makes a ton of money off confirmation bias, because if you believe something, the algorithm keeps showing you the thing that you believe, and it reinforces your belief. It gets you upset about things you don't believe. There's so much money in this. I didn't want to do that. It has always seemed scummy to me, and I just didn't want to do that at all. I would rather have someone be honest with me and tell me what I need to hear instead of what I want to hear. [02:57.3]
That's one reason why the show is so polarizing, and I am a polarizing person, too, even if I don't always intend to be. People either love me or hate me. They either love the show or they hate the show, and that's intentional. With the show, it is. The show, it's definitely intentional. I don't want people to be lukewarm, because they won't take any sort of action if they're lukewarm. They'll just sit there.
I can sleep well at night knowing I have tried my best to help the financial advisors who are willing to accept my help. That is all I can do. I can put offers out into the marketplace. I can say, “Hey, look, I have this, this and this. I can help you. Results are guaranteed. Sometimes results are not guaranteed. Other times, there are certain things that you have to know in order to work with me,” so on and so forth. I can put the offer out there, and financial advisors can choose to accept it or they can choose to reject it, but I have done my part. I have put myself out there to make sure that they have the resources if they're willing to accept them. [03:47.8]
Third, I wanted to show financial advisors that I was truly committed to them and making the financial-advice industry better than when I found it. I wanted to leave this world a better place than when I found it. You have to understand, I started helping financial advisors back in 2015. I say that a lot. It's just true. I can't believe it's been that long, but it has.
I distinctly remember some of the hate I got back then. People said I was too young, that nobody would take me seriously, that I should just give up and call it quits, all sorts of hateful things that I personally wouldn't say to other people, but I never gave up because I knew I had something valuable to offer financial advisors. I knew I could contribute to the industry, to society, to the world. I knew that I could do it, so I kept going.
I helped one advisor, then another, then another, then another, and the people who said those nasty things to me, they started dropping. They gave up. They quit. They couldn't run profitable businesses because they could not help financial advisors the way that I could help them, and I am still here all of those years later. [04:55.8]
In fact, if you go through a list of a who's who in the financial advisor–marketing world, the coaches, the consultants, the lead-gen agency owners and all of the marketers out there, I can tell you right now that 90-ish percent of them have been on my email list, have purchased stuff for me, or have been current or past Inner Circle members. I see how I've influenced them. I see them using the words and phrases I use and that, in some cases, I have coined. I know they've been influenced by me.
In one of Nas’ songs Ether where he's dissing Jay-Z—this is the obscure hip-hop reference for the hip-hop heads out there—he says, “name a rapper that I ain't influenced.” Hmm. Name a financial-advisor marketer that I ain't influenced. That's real, okay? My website has been visited millions of times. My online advertisements have been seen millions of times. My emails have been delivered millions of times. I'm not talking thousands anymore. I'm talking millions. [05:50.1]
It is such an honor that I'm able to deliver this 300th podcast episode to you, and I want to say thank you again. I feel like I can never say thank you enough. But it still feels like I'm just getting started with the show, with Financial Advisor Marketing, with TheAdvisorCoach.com, with all the resources that I have. I feel like it is still day one, truly and I mean that I really do. I am as hungry as I've ever been. I am as ambitious as I have ever been. I am on a mission to help financial advisors get more clients and grow their businesses, and I will see it through no matter what.
Now, what's this episode title? It is “How to Be Successful.” It's inspired by an article of the exact same name, written by Sam Altman. Now, Sam is the founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, DALL-E, just an artificial-intelligence beast. I think he is already one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and most influential entrepreneurs, for sure, especially now, and he is someone that I've been studying for quite some time. He's already a billionaire, but I think he has a very good chance of being one of the world's richest people, top five or top 10. [06:52.8]
He wrote this article, again, called “How to Be Successful”, and I highly recommend that you read it. You can google Sam Altman, How to Be Successful. He gives 13 thoughts on how to achieve success, and as I was reading it, and gosh, it is really good, by the way. Seriously, you should google it. You should read this article for yourself. I realized that many of the things, actually all 13 if you really think about it, can be applied to financial advisors. What I'd like to do is pull out a handful of his thoughts. All the credit goes to him, and I would just want to give my take. I want to comment on it and I want to share it with advisors, because I think it is just so awesome.
The first thing he says, the very first “how to be successful” tip that he gives is you should compound yourself. Pay attention to the words there, “compound yourself.” Compounding your investments is cool. I love that financial advisors love that. This is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, after all. But compounding yourself is better, because even if you lose all of your investments in your businesses, and all of the material possessions in your life, you will still have your mind. You will still have your knowledge, your skills, your ability. [07:59.8]
That's why my Inner Circle Newsletter focuses so heavily on how to think, not what to think, because what to think changes. That's fickle. Algorithms change. Little tips, tricks and tactics, they change over time. How to think is what allows financial advisors to compound themselves over years. That's also why I say you should not subscribe unless you're willing to stay subscribed for years. Otherwise, you'll just be wasting your time, because you cannot compound yourself with one month, two months, three months, even a year. A year really isn't quite enough. I mean, you're getting there, but only join if you're willing to stay subscribed for years, multiple years.
In this section about compounding yourself, Sam says that most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. He says you should be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential, what he calls step changes, so basically, the exponential curves in your life. I see this a lot in the marketing world. Financial advisors focus so much on linear growth that they wake up one day and realize that years have passed and they could have done so much better. They could have done so much more with their lives. [09:07.0]
It's like a punch in the gut, just, bam, right there, realizing you could have been compounding this whole time, but you didn't, because you focused on linear stuff, and now your life has passed you by. You'll never get the time back. You'll never get the years back, and you are just worse off than you ever thought you would be by this stage in your life, and it sucks.
That's why I'm always talking about building marketing assets, like your social media profiles and your website, and your direct-mail campaigns and your email marketing campaigns. Those things can scale. They can improve over time. They can grow exponentially. They can compound for you. But so many financial advisors get caught in the trap of trying to get one client, then one more client, and then one more client. [09:51.5]
They get stuck on what I call the prospecting treadmill, and sometimes they trick themselves by saying that they're focused on, quote-unquote, “revenue-generating activities.” That might be true in a linear sense, but they're generating $100 per hour when they could work on the thing that will bring them $1,000 per hour, even though that thing generates nothing today. The market rewards people who take a long-term view. If you are willing and able to do the right things and be patient, then the marketplace will almost certainly reward you for it.
Another thing Sam says is you should learn to think independently. He says entrepreneurship is difficult to teach because original thinking is difficult to teach. Oh, I love that. Sometimes I'll get financial advisors who email me, not sometimes, pretty much almost every day at this point. They'll email me. They'll be like, James, give me step-by-step instructions for this. Why don't your emails ever give me step by step? Why don't you ever just tell me the thing? Or they'll want to know exactly what they should do to be successful in their businesses, like, James, do you have a 32-page PDF with every single step that I can follow in order to be a super-duper successful financial advisor who is super-duper awesome? There is no such thing. Stop looking for the easy button. It doesn't exist. [11:06.7]
The secret truly is independent thinking. If there is a secret, there you go, independent thinking, learning to apply stuff to your situation. Here's a quote directly from the article. “One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution.” That's independent thinking. [11:27.3]
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.
Remember how I said earlier that I started this podcast because I wanted to tell financial advisors what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear? This is one of those things. There are lots of gurus out there who would love to sell you their magic course or program, or training or coaching, and they swear up and down that it'll fix everything for you and make you millions of dollars and make you happy, too. Don't forget that. It’ll make you happy. I don't do that. Sure, I might provide specific solutions to specific problems, but I don't ever want to take away independent thinking from the equation, because you have to be the one to decide what is right for you. Nobody else can do it. [13:03.3]
Another thing Sam says in his article on how to be successful is make it easy to take risks. I think this is really profound. He says that “Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more.” That is what he said.
With stuff like the Inner Circle Newsletter, I have a raw, unfiltered view about what it takes to succeed as a financial advisor. I have a vantage point that literally no one else on the entire planet has, period. That’s my unique value proposition. Literally no one else on Planet Earth has the vantage point that I have, has the access to financial advisors that I have, has the information that they share with me because it's private that they get direct email access to me. They don't have to say this stuff in public. They don't have to give a speech about it. They can say, “James, I'm very embarrassed. I'm sad. This is my revenue. This is what I've been doing.” I get the real stuff, okay? Financial advisors share their numbers, their analytics with me, so I see the real deal. [13:58.3]
I'm telling you right now, the most successful financial advisors, hear me now, they fail a lot, but that's because they do a lot of stuff. They try a lot of things and failure comes with the territory. They simply have, to use a sports analogy, a lot of at-bats. They are getting up to the plate and swinging. If they miss, they miss, so on and so forth, but sometimes they hit a home run and you can only—let me use another cheesy sports analogy here. Actually, I'll make it a quote—you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. That quote comes from me. I said that. No, I'm just kidding. I think it was Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan.
Speaking of quotes, here's another quote that I love. This is from Sam in the article: “Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered, you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works.” That’s from Sam, not me. I say that because it sounds like something I would say. I talk about the newsletter since it's on my brain. I talk about the newsletter all the time. It's $99 per month. Is that risky? I guess, I don't know, but it's a good example of what Sam is talking about. [15:13.2]
Let's say that you join and tell yourself that you're going to give it an entire year. You're going to commit for 12 entire months. Oh, so risky, so scary. $99 per month times 12 months is $1,188. That's how much you're risking. Now, think about this logically. Do you think that an entire year's worth of marketing newsletters, chock-full of business building information delivered directly to your door could help you get a few more clients?
But wait, there's more. I'm going into infomercial mode here. Because you also get direct email access to me for your questions, which means if you're struggling with something and want some help, you can let me know. You can send me an email and I'll try to help you to the best of my ability. Even if I can't, because there are some instances where I truly cannot help financial advisors, I have a pretty deep network, so I can try to refer you to someone who can. [16:03.0]
But, wait, again, Infomercial James is here, because there's even more, because I also have monthly office hours exclusively for Inner Circle members, where I hang out in a Zoom room on the second Tuesday of every month. Inner Circle members can swing by and get live help right then and there, right there in the Zoom meeting with me right there with other financial advisors. I can answer whatever questions they have. I can even open it up for other people in attendance, other financial advisors there to help as well, because I don't have all the answers. I just said that, I don't have all the answers, right? I never have and I never will. I have a lot of answers, but I don't have all of them.
Oh, and by the way, this episode, the 300th episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast that you're listening to right now, is scheduled to come out on October 7. If you're listening to this on the first day it drops, that means tomorrow is—what comes after October 7? October 8, and that is the second Tuesday of the month. That means tomorrow, October 8, 2024, Tuesday, October 8, 2024, will be the monthly office hours for October. [17:12.5]
So, if you're not an inner circle member and want to be a part of this, then I suggest subscribing today at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, so you can attend the office hours tomorrow, on Tuesday, October 8, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. you'll get the Zoom link presented to you immediately after you subscribe.
Anyway, Infomercial James, go away. Back to the risk and reward thing. The risk here is that you lose $1,188, but the potential reward is much, much, much higher. Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, you could get five or six extra clients that you wouldn't have had otherwise over the course of a year? I mean, think about the risk and the reward here. How much do you make per client? It just seems like a no-brainer. [17:53.2]
Another success principle that Sam shares in this article, actually two principles, is focus, that's one, and work hard, that's another one. I can picture it now, there are some financial advisors out there right now who are thinking, Focus? Work hard? Sam, give me the secrets. Or, James, in this case, give me the secrets. Tell me the top secret stuff that you don't tell anyone else that only you and your friends know about. In Sam's case, your billionaire friends. Actually, I mean, I know a few. Tell me the one tactic you’ve used, not work hard. But working hard is part of the secret here. Focus is the thing that gets you there.
Here's a good litmus test for you, if you'll be successful. Can you sit down with a book and read it for two hours straight? Just you and a book, that's it. Nothing else, no phones, no computers, nothing. Can you read a book for two hours straight without stopping? If you can't, then success will be more difficult for you to achieve than someone who can do that. I'm sorry, but it's true, you need to be able to focus on one task at a time without getting distracted. [19:01.7]
As for working hard, he explains that you can get to about the 90th percentile by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment, and this has been my experience as well. If you are just a hard worker, you can get to the 90th percentile. If you are just a smart worker, you can get to the 90th percentile, and in America, that means you're making something like $200,000–300,000 per year and that's not bad, but it's certainly not the top 1%.
A top 1% earner in my home state of Delaware earns $480,000 per year. In Florida, it's $623,000 per year, and in Connecticut, it's $896,000 per year. That means, if you walk around Connecticut one day, you go to the grocery store, you go to the library, you go to the post office, you just walk around in the streets and you see 1,000 people, 10 of them are making $896,000 or more. That's the top 1%, and Sam says that getting to that level the 99th percentile or the top 1% requires working hard and working smart. [20:04.6]
That is so true. You need to do the right things, and you need to do them well. You need to put in the time and the effort. That's why trying to go at it alone is so dangerous. I don't know why you would ever try to figure something out yourself when you have resources available and people like me who are willing to help you on your marketing journey, and since it's the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, I want to help you on your marketing journey. But even if you have someone like me, even if you're working smart, you still need to work hard.
I'll give you one more success principle from this article and then I'll end the show. Sam says you should be hard to compete with. The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. Hmm, this is something I tell financial advisors to do all of the time, too. Heck, even something like those monthly office hours can be a form of leverage. You can show me your ads, your emails, your direct mail campaigns. You can show me whatever and get help right there on the spot. That's insane leverage. [21:05.8]
Another form of leverage is having marketing assets that your competitors cannot easily replicate. This podcast itself is a good example. If someone woke up tomorrow morning and decided to help financial advisors with their marketing, that person could not just snap his or her fingers and create 300 podcast episodes. That takes time. It takes years.
Another direct quote from the article is, “Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior--” Ooh, that's a good word, mimetic. “This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.” Gosh, I wish I could get financial advisors to understand this. Maybe they will take it seriously because a billionaire said it instead of little old me. [21:53.1]
Listen to me, stop worrying about what dum-dum next door is doing. Do you want dum-dum results? I see this on social media all the time and it kills me. A financial advisor will share the marketing equivalent of cutting his lawn with scissors and all of these other financial advisors will be like, Oh, bright, shiny object. How can I cut my lawn with scissors too? Duh. Carve your own path.
Think about what is right for you. Do you think you're going to get to the end of your life and be happy with yourself if you lived your entire life just copying what other people were doing? I also saw it a lot back when I was coaching financial advisors one on one. People would literally come to me and tell me all about what so-and-so was doing. Who cares? Just because Joe in Wichita, Kansas, is doing something doesn't mean you should do it, too.
I sound like someone's mom right now, don't I? If Joe jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? But, seriously, there are so many copycat advisors. To be fair, it kind of depends on what you're optimizing for, but you also have to be careful, because you might be copying someone who is okay with things that you are not, that someone has accepted consequences that you're not comfortable accepting. [22:59.8]
I'll give you a good example. I know this guy who makes multiple millions per year, five-ish million dollars per year, somewhere in that ballpark, but his health is terrible and he doesn't get to spend much time with his family. I mean, he gets two hours per night and maybe a few hours on the weekend. Maybe that's acceptable to some of you, but it's not acceptable to me. It would be foolish of me to copy him, even if I was optimizing for money, because his lifestyle has consequences that are not acceptable to me.
I posted my cardiovascular age on social media a few weeks back. My cardiovascular age is eight years below my biological age, so even though I look like an absolute slob, I'm actually fairly healthy. That's important to me and I've taken steps to achieve that. I'm looking forward to having it be 10 years below my biological age in the near future. That'd be really cool, and hopefully that happens in the next few years. My point about that is I wouldn't just randomly copy someone, because I would rather use my mind . . . hmm . . . to think about what I want and put together a plan to get that. [24:06.4]
I don't know, you guys, it's just something to think about, and if this episode got you thinking a little bit, then I've accomplished my goal. I want you to think independently, like I said. Don't just blindly accept what people tell you, even me. I want you to question things I tell you, because they may not apply to you. They may not make sense for the life you want to live.
In any case, thank you. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I can't believe it, 300 episodes. I'm so thankful. I appreciate you, and I will catch you next week. [24:39.4]
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