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. [00:32]
James: Financial advisors you've already seen the title, you already know what this episode's going to be about. It's called “My biggest limiting belief deeply and irrevocably personal.” Whew, how's that for a title? Jonathan?
Jonathan: Those are big words.
James: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I don't really want to dumb it down too much. I know that the recommendation is to have like an eighth grade reading level and dumb it down for the people, but I don't know what else I would call it. The thing that hurt me the most, I don't know that doesn't sound good or they are too personal to discuss elsewhere except in a podcast where thousands of people listen.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. Just between us.
James: Just between us, you, me and the, the, my mother who's listening, I guess. I don't know. I don't know who, whoever can listen. You can tell the people, I don't even get my stats for the podcast. Is that true?
Jonathan: And yeah. I mean, you know, you want them.
James: Well, I do.
Jonathan: But now I'm helping you. I didn't believe it at first, but now I'm helping you. I'll just read your reviews and tell you numbers that when you don't want them to, to agitate you. [01:32.9]
James: So I was having a conversation with a financial advisor and he asked me about the podcast and he was asking about how many listens I have and how many people listen. I was like, honestly, like, I don't know. He's like bull crap!
Jonathan: No, you know what? The real answer is, James. And I'm going to give this to you, you can use it. When they ask you how many listens you have or who's listening, only the people that matter. Everyone.
James: That’s true.
Jonathan: Everyone that matters is listening. That's it?
James: That's true. Well, so the reason I don't get my stats and I don't pay attention to exactly how many people are listening and all that anymore, because it wouldn't change anything. I, I, I don't get, it's going to be hard to explain this, but there's a fine line between knowing your metrics and tracking them and improving them and just being too focused on them. It's, it's called like a perverse incentive. That's like the thinking term, the mental model term for it and chasing the wrong metric can cause damage. So my metric is not necessarily to accumulate as many listeners as possible it's to accumulate the right listeners. So you hit it dead on like only the people that matter. [02:41.6]
Jonathan: Yeah. And it's not just that though. You're also looking at what you've done in the last year and your success. Like, when you look at your bank account, does it look different? All right.
James: Oh Yeah.
Jonathan: Things I'm doing are, are working.
James: Yeah. Well, yeah. It's just, it's, it's a different, I'm playing differently. I mean, I remember reading something from Jeff Bezos. I think it was an article and they were asking him how he felt about a recent quarter’s earnings. He was like, Oh, that quarter! He was like, that was baked in three years ago.
Jonathan: Wow.
James: He's like, I'm thinking about three years from now. I'm not thinking about, you know, next month. So to see the number of listens last week, like yeah, it will be cool. Or the week before I get it, whatever. But there's a, like I said, there's just a balance there and this is not right for everyone. I know that in many other areas like advertising, marketing, and getting your direct response pieces together, like, yes, you should relentlessly track the numbers. You should know your metrics backwards, forward side to side, every angle, you should know them, but I don't necessarily do this podcast for like listeners or whatever. I at some level, it's a hobby for me, I do it cause it's fun. [03:51.3]
Jonathan: Sport.
James: I will admit that, but I don't know. I don't need the podcast, that's for sure. But it's just fun to do and I love it. And we're going to be here. So onto the show I'm going to talk about my biggest limiting belief. This is something that's held me back for years and I still kind of struggle with it every now and then. The reason I'm going to talk about it on the show is because I've seen the same limiting belief in financial advisors. But first I want to answer a question and advisor sent me about neediness. His question is, do you have a resource for blog posts for, for how to not come across as needy? And the reason he asked that question is because tip number 13 in my 57 Marketing Tips PDF guide, which you can get at TheAdvisorCoach.com/57, the numbers. Tip number 13 is eliminating neediness and it's one of the most important tips in that entire thing. [04:44.5]
And here's my answer to the gentlemen. There aren't really any true do this, not that type resources for eliminating neediness. It's a higher level strategy. However, the basic idea is to truly and deeply understand that there are far more prospects out there than you and this comes from Ben Settle. He's the one who taught me this, is that there's always going to be more people out there than you. There's always going to be more people out there who need your stuff and the demand is greater than your supply. And it will always be that way. And my personal marketing is very anti needy and it's done on purpose. I mean, even the stuff on the Advisor Coach’s homepage, it says stuff like this, it says, ‘Read the blog or don't, I don't care.’ It's all intentional. And of course it's exaggerated a little bit. I've cranked up my personality, the tiny, tiny bit, but it's still there. And here's the best way I've found to not be needy genuinely, not, not need to stop. Don't need the money. That means you're literally not needy because by definition you don't need whatever it is. [05:51.0]
I mean, I just got done discussing this. I don't really need the podcast, but I enjoy it. I don't need the listenership. I mean, I've got the email list, social and the website and the traffic. I don't need the podcast as another arm. But I guess that I enjoy doing it. People get caught up in lifestyle creep a lot when it comes to being, they're needy in the business because they have a bunch of crap that they buy. They buy a bunch of expensive stuff and it traps them. They need people to say yes to them. They need people to give money to them. Cause they're slaves to what they own. I mean, the stuff owns them, not the other way around. And it's amazing. One of the reasons I'm so anti needy, it is because I literally don't need it. I ended up donating a bunch of money to charity, anyway. I love supporting first book and donorschoose.org and having money as nice and everything. But you just, there's a point at which you don't need anymore. You shouldn't have to be placed in a predicament where you absolutely have to do business with someone. All of the advisors I've seen who got to a point of not needing money. And they got to that point through lifestyle reduction or income expansion, or both preferably both, they saw their businesses grow. So that's my answer to the question. And now onto my limiting belief. [07:01.2]
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: Which is about money actually.
Jonathan: I gotta call BS on you.
James: Oh Oh!
Jonathan: I'm going to call BS on you.
James: Oh no. You're going to talk to tell them about all my expensive toys.
Jonathan: No, I didn't even know. Oh no. I'm not going to tell them about the movie theater and the gym in your basement. I would absolutely not talk about that. What I am going to say is that guy was looking for a resource to get rid of neediness. And in the last episode you gave it away.
James: Hmm. Well, that's true. But I guess you're right, that episode hasn't been released by then and yeah, totally gave it away. So if you are interested in learning more, go back to the previous episode, listen to that.
Jonathan: There you go.
James: And coming back to the episode before that, so before that, and the episode before that, listen to all of them. So yeah, but this is going to be my, my belief is it is about money. And I have briefly talked about this on the show before, but I was specifically asked to expand on it. So here we are. I mean, a lot of the content on this podcast comes from financial advisors who email me, ask questions, maybe they're not in the inner circle newsletter. So I don't email them back. I don't pen pals with them because I just, I only have so much time in the day, but they sent me the questions and I'd write them down. [08:07.5]
And my assistant puts them in a little folder and I look at them on the weekends and stuff and, but write them down as content ideas. So my biggest limiting belief in my own life has been me believing that you need to work hard to make a lot of money. Just, it just isn't true. It's just flat out, not true. And I started breaking out of this limiting belief when I read, ‘Think and Grow Rich’ for the first time. Because in that book, Napoleon Hill says, and I quote, I have it in front of me here; I'm going to read it, “If you are one of those who believe that hard work and honesty alone will bring riches, perish the thought, it is not true. Riches when they come in, huge quantities are never the result of hard work. Riches come, if they come at all in response to definite demands based on the application of definite principles and not by chance or luck.” There's a lot to unpack there and I'm going to try my best to explain everything in this episode. So let's get started by asking what are limiting beliefs? What are they to begin with? [09:13.5]
Whoa, the basically beliefs that holds you back, they limit you thus the name— Limiting Belief. They can be about you, it can be about the world, other people, whatever. You may believe that what's a silly example, a silly example is that you may believe you'll receive an electric shock, if you touch plastic, it will be completely false. It is not true, but you will operate as if it were true. Most people have beliefs that are just completely false and stuff like sexism, racism, ageism, all the isms. They tend to be rooted in limiting beliefs on both sides, both in the people, you know, perpetuating this stuff. And the people perpetuate the idea that it doesn't necessarily exist. In any case, if you accept a limiting belief, it will become a truth for you. If you believe that in the case of ageism, if you believe that old people can't perform a certain job, as well as a younger person, that is a limiting belief. [10:12.8]
And it's going to prevent you from making the hire to someone who is older, could take your company to the next level, someone who could just totally rock your world in a business sense. The limiting belief could be as simple as that, or it could be as complex as believing that touching plastic will give you an electric shock. And it just happens that I believe for a long time, that I had to work hard to make money and that became a truth for me. And for a long time, if I didn't work hard, I didn't make any money. I was stuck. I was doing private coaching, I was making phone call after phone call. And even before I started the adviser code, I would work 16 hour days, 12-16 hour days, because I wanted to make a bunch of money. That was something I wanted to do. It was just a goal for me. My logic was if I make $20 per hour and I want to make more money, I got to work more hours. I mean, kind of makes sense on paper, but it's extraordinarily dumb. [11:13.4]
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James: Producer Jonathan, and what do you think about working more hours?
Jonathan: That's the worst thing you can do? It makes you underpaid.
James: Is it worst way to double your income is to work twice as hard. I had to find that out the hard way, and that that's what I would do, that was my thinking back then. It was just like, okay, $20 an hour, you know, I make, let's just say $5,000 a month. If I want to make $10,000 a month, I've got to work double the hours.
Jonathan: That's the linear thinking, right? We're into compound thinking or exponential thinking these days.
James: Yes. It's. It's just it's, I used to think it's something that you could teach, but the more I do this and the more I encounter people who have already done it and are doing it, I don't know. I think it's got, it's something that people have to realize for themselves. Something has to change just like me. If someone sat me down and said, you don't have to work hard to make money, you don't have to work hard to make money. It's just like, I'd be like, yeah, okay. Go away. I don't believe you, whatever.
Jonathan: Lazy loser. [12:50.2]
James: I had to realize it for myself. You know what I mean? It's just, this is something you have to learn. Like when the student is ready to teach her peers, it's kind of like that. So I started working smarter. I became more productive instead, and I work fewer hours and I got to the point within the advisor coach now. So I had the business, I was working with financial advisors and all that, where I was only working five or six hours a day. And I was making just as much money as I did when I worked 12 hours. And I also started raising my consulting fees. And I think when I started, I was charging a hundred dollars per hour and I would take on financial advisors in blocks of four sessions. I mean, I probably shouldn't be talking about this stuff like behind the scenes, because I know that they're going to quote unquote experts out there who are like, okay, this is this business model.
Jonathan: Yeah. [13:41.7]
James: I mean, write it down. I'm going to copy it, but they'd be copying the wrong thing. So, but yeah, no, I, I charged like a hundred bucks an hour and I would take someone on, in a block of four sessions. That's what it would look like. And I could be wrong because I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure that's what I did. And then I distinctly remember I upped it to $425 an hour and I kept there for a while. So that's a lesson in and of itself. I went from a hundred dollars an hour. I didn't go to 110, 120, or even like 150. I went to 425, over 400% increase in prices and not much changed. I mean, nobody, not that I think two people left and said, you know, sorry, you can't afford that anymore. Whatever, but most people stayed on and it worked pretty well. I just replaced those people and kept it moving. And then I started getting rid of one on one coaching entirely, and I raised my price to a thousand dollars for a 30 minute phone call. And I put that on the contact page of my website over that TheAdvisorCoach.com/contact. [14:43.7]
And that means not only did I raise my price, but I committed to spend less time on the phone. And at time of this recording, I'm currently charging $2,500 for a 30 minute session. So I've raised my prices again and again and again. And the amount of effort required by me as far as physical exertion and time on the phone, it's about the same. What changed was the amount of value I bring to the table. I can now bring more data, more information, more experience than ever before. And I'm at the point where like one or two tweaks can make a serious difference in a financial advisor's business. It's all about leverage. I mean, let's say that you're a financial advisor and you're making $250,000 per year. If you book a call with me, think about this and it's not like my whole business is taking these calls. I don't get that many of them. I get very, very few because I mean, the prices are high enough to keep most people away, but just think about it this way. You're making $250,000 per year, all I've got to do is help increase your income 1% and I pay for myself, in the first year. If I help you increase your income 2%, I just doubled what you, what you pay me. [15:50.5]
And it's just very, very easy for me to do now. I mean, someone could come to me, like it's very, very easy for me to give them something that's going to increase their income 2%. It is like sleeping for me or like breathing. It's just so easy because I've seen so many different financial buyers and I have the inner circle newsletter. I had all the different products and the, the audience, like, I just, it's just easy. I can, I don't know any other way to describe it, but that is how my business model has progressed. I don't think I've ever talked to producer Jonathan, about that.
Jonathan: No.
James: Any thoughts about the progression over the years? From a 100 to 425 to a 1000 and more?
Jonathan: Yeah. I felt a little inadequate. All I charged the last time I did a call was 500 for a half hour.
James: Yeah. I remember reading somewhere about yours. Some article, I think it was on traffic and funnels where you weren't charging enough and they told you to charge more. Am I right? Is that
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: I mean, am I making stuff up?
Jonathan: They, they, they laughed at me when I closed it. They were a client of mine before I was a client of theirs. And then they started making fun of me on how a little, I charged. [16:51.0]
James: It's very interesting. And I know I don't want to date these podcasts, but I mean, they come out well after we record them and I've got a pretty big plan for next month’s inner circle newsletter and I'm going to, it's a gift and I'm going to give the gift to them for free. And then on the first of the following month, I'm going to launch it like for real. And it's going to be a couple hundred bucks and they're going to get it for free. And this is something that two years ago I would have released for like 20 bucks or $50. But no, I'm going to release it for probably 295.
Jonathan: Inflation.
James: It maybe 195, it maybe 295, depending on some other things that we do with it. But it's a 4X, 5X, 6X increase and the people that end up coming through are better. The financial advisors who end up becoming inner circle members are better, who end up doing the phone call. Like I said, they're not that many, but they're better. They are just higher quality. They are winners. My whole business shifted from banging my head against the wall, trying to get people to accept certain things, too, helping winners win. [17:55.2]
And another thing I seen not just with financial advisors, it’s that, some people feel guilty about earning a lot of money. So, and I think that I'm, I don't think I felt guilty, but I think there there's something like this that happened with me. So people feel guilty. So they put a lot of effort into their work to ease the guilt that they feel. They tell themselves I deserve it because I worked hard where they say, I shouldn't feel guilty because I earned it. I broke my back for this money. I'm not gonna feel guilty. They work so hard to get rid of this guilt, but I've said this on the show before, and I'll say it again. The bank doesn't give you a bonus just because you've worked hard. The bank also doesn't take money away, if you didn't work hard. You've got to understand that. So let me take you through this mental exercise. Of course, I am not saying you will get these results because I don't know you, I don't know your particular situation. I'm using this for example purposes only, but let me walk you through this. [18:51.9]
What if you did and extra 10 minutes of work per day, just 10 minutes, and you added another million dollars in revenue to your business over the next few years, how would you feel? Let me be honest with yourself, financial advisor, another million bucks for 10 minutes per day. And if that sounds farfetched, let me break it down for you. Let's say, I don't know, you start building an email list and all you do is add 10 subscribers per day. That's nothing you could do that through content marketing, social media, marketing, online ads, whatever 10 is like a cakewalk. And sure, you can start off slow, or you may start off slow and get one or two or three per day, but you can eventually get to the point where you're getting 20, 30 or 40 per day and it averages out. But for the purposes of this example, on average, you get 10 per day, that's 300 per month. Now let's say you have an email auto responder sequence that converts 1% of those subscribers into clients. This is also super conservative because honestly, if you're only converting 1%, something's wrong, like you're screwing up this. [20:00.8]
Something is wrong, but I'm making this example with easy math. This means you'll get three new clients per month with 36 per year. So 1%, of 300 is 3, 3x12, 36 per year. Okay? Now let's assume that you make $5,000 from each client. All you have to do is keep those clients for 5.55 years, and you will have made another million dollars. This is all conservative estimates. You know, 1% is very conservative. If you're not getting that, you're probably targeting the wrong people or having the wrong people opt in, like who knows. And then $5,000 from each client is also very conservative. I mean, you, if, especially if you offer multiple services, if you offer tax planning, if you have insurance, you have assets under management, there are so many different things you could do. And 5.5 years also pretty conservative. [20:54.7]
If, especially if you're a financial advisor who wants to be in the industry for any length of time. Literally another million dollars for 10 minutes and the 10 minutes is basically writing your email, sending it out, nurturing your list, cultivating your list. Now the craziest part is that this assumes you stop after one year and you never send another email, but in reality, you're going to keep going when you see the results, because you want to get there even faster, but here's the point. How would you feel? Would you feel guilty? Would you feel as if the money came too easily for you? That's what you need to focus on if you do, if you say, wow, 10 minutes and in five years, another million dollars in revenue added to my business, all because of 10 minutes per day, like, wow, you know, I need to work five extra hours a day or three extra hours a day. I need to have this tied linearly two my time in order to make his money. [21:50.0]
So now the question becomes, if you have this limiting belief, how do you deal with it? Well, I may or may not be the right person to ask that question, but I'm going to give you what I did. And when I was dealing with it, I dealt with it slowly. The change did not happen overnight. And it was a gradual process. Like, like I talked about with my fees, I didn't go from a 100 to 2,500 overnight. It was like a ladder. I went step by step. And again, this could be the right or wrong way to do it, but I think that's how you have to do it. If you're a financial advisor who charges a flat fee or even a monthly retainer, you should probably raise your fees, just raise them. I found that a lot of financial advisors aren't charging enough. And if they have trouble charging more it's because their prospects don't understand the value there, there are some marketing problems, there's some positioning problems. They're just, there are other problems outside of the limiting belief. But if everything is there and they've got the marketing machine and they're doing the, the smart work, not the hard work, if you're doing the smart work and the positioning is there and everything else is there and they're still not getting the results they want, it's probably a limiting belief. [23:00.2]
And even with my own business, the amount I charge it is completely relative. If I asked you, if you thought that a $100,000 was a lot, a lot of money, you need something to compare it with. If I charged you a $100,000 to make 30,000 then, sure yeah, it's a lot of money. That's it! Heck of a lot of money! Well, if I charge you a $100,000 to make 2.3 million, just throwing that out there, not really based in anything, but just an example. It's not so much, it's all perception. And we talked about this in the last episode, dude. I mean, people buy the 999, the Kindle books and they get, they make a thousand bucks and they say, Oh wow, you know who you've returned? But it just doesn't make sense if I spend $50,000 and make 400,000 and I’m now $350,000 richer and your $990 richer, so it's all perception. Your job is to control the perception and make sure your clients and prospects perceive the value correctly. So I think that's it for this week, Jonathan, we're going to wrap it up. [24:03.4]
Jonathan: All right.
James: And in next week's episode, I'm going to talk about why referrals are killing your business. A lot of financial advisors want referrals, they seek them out, they crave them and to be completely clear, referrals can help. They are beneficial, but there's a very specific way. They can destroy a business for the wrong financial advisor.
Jonathan: Listen to this guy, heck of a teaser. All right, fam, that's a wrap for another financial advisor marketing. Thank you for tuning in. We will be back in your ear buds next week. [24:38.2]
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