You're listening to Financial Adviser Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers 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 TheAdviserCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]
James: What is up financial advisors? If you're interested in marketing and building your business and living a better life, you are in the right place and I am the guy who can help you do just that. I mean, I really need some hobbies. I don't really do anything anymore. Like I used to collect coins and shoot guns and do martial arts and all these cool things, but pretty much all I do anymore is help financial advisors. I do this podcast, I write my emails.
Jonathan: Stack cash.
James: I help financial advisors with their emails. I run TheAdviserCoach.com and I write the inner circle newsletter, but no hobbies in there. What a sad story.
Jonathan: Yeah. I feel bad for you with. You forgot to tell us about how you swim in your money like Scrooge McDuck. [01:17.8]
James: Hmm…Yes, secret room in my house, dive into the coins. That's a by-product of helping people. And I, I mean, I give a lot of money away is I've talked before about the charitable work that I do and DonorsChoose and it's been difficult. So it's actually been a little harder to give to DonorsChoose because I have very strict criteria and I want to make the reason I have DonorsChoose as my favorite charity is because I get to choose the classrooms. But a lot of this stuff is virtual now. I can't really find projects that meet my criteria of having books in them and being matched because a lot of stuff, they're just doing it online. They're not reading like physical books anymore. I typically pick up the tab for books and just not as many anymore. So we'll see what happens. And out of all the stuff I do, the newsletter is my favorite. It brings me the most joy, the most satisfaction out of anything in my business. So I guess that is it's worth it. I mean, if hobbies would make me happy, the newsletter newsletter makes me happy and it helps financial advisors in the biggest way, because it's a monthly dose of advice delivered directly to your door. [02:24.0]
It's a paper and ink newsletter and they get a secret email subject line with the ability to ask me anything I'm qualified to answer. And surprisingly, not many financial advisors as a percentage use this privilege. I mean, even though it's there. So I only spend about 20 to 30 minutes per day answering the questions. And the other cool thing is that now they don't, don't sign up for this alone. I'm just telling you like this doesn't happen that often. So do not sign up for this alone, sign up for the newsletter or sign up for the bonuses, but don't sign up for this. You can get access to potential clients because sometimes people will reach out to me because I got TheAdviserCoach.com and I've got the blogs about financial advisors and questions they should ask and all that other stuff. So people find me through Google, and they tell me that they're looking for financial advisors and I just refer them to inner circle members who may be good fits. I mean, I'll ask, I look at the website again and just make the referral. But just to be clear, I, again, I don't get a ton of these, so do not sign up for this alone, but when it happens and it can pay for your subscription in full many times over in perpetuity, because I'm literally handing the person to you. [03:29.8]
About three weeks ago, I had someone in Alaska reach out to me, and ask about hiring a financial advisor. And he said to hire, that he preferred hiring someone in Alaska. And he did an entire episode where there's still a small segment of the population who prefers geographically bound financial advisors, and this person is one of those examples. So he said, basically, Hey, I'm an Alaskan. I’d like an Alaskan financial advisor. And go figure Alaska is the only state in which I don't have any inner circle members. So a little bit of a slap in the face there. So go figure. So for the longest time I get a bunch of, they tend to come from like New York and Florida and Delaware, my home state. I think they feel sorry for me here in Delaware. New York, Florida, California, and surprisingly Hawaii. I've got a bunch of inner circle members in those States. And for the longest time the three States that didn't have any in, I didn't have any in New Mexico. I didn't have any in West Virginia and I didn't have any in Alaska, but I got some people from New Mexico. And I think I got two, one or two people from West Virginia. So Alaska is my last frontier. So if there are any Alaskan financial advisors out there who want to help a brother out and reach his lifetime goal. [04:50.1]
Jonathan: Get it.
James: Selfishly begging you here. Completely selfish, no benefits here for you. No bullets or anything. No teasing. No bonuses, just help a player out. If you're from Alaska, I will be forever grateful. And by the way, if you're curious, I have a lot of inner circle members from Canada as well, I'm really surprised, but it is true. Canadian advisors love the newsletter. The rest are just sprinkled out all over the country, all 49 other States and the United States and the rest of the world. But enough is enough about that. If you're interested in subscribing to the inner circle newsletter, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. Well just in my 100% bias, but accurate opinion, it will probably be the best business decision you've ever made. But we'll see. [05:40.2]
Today, we are going to talk about priorities that may be screwed up specifically, a broke lady who drove an escalade and what a weird, what a weird way to open the show, but how this can help financial advisors get more clients. So I'm here to entertain and inform the people on this podcast. Although I do one more than the other, and I'm going to entertain today via story form. It's been a long time, since I've talked about my casino days on the podcast.
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: Yeah, a long time. But one of my first real jobs, “real jobs”. I mean, cause that's what people say is like, I mean, I did a whole bunch of other stuff and I ran a business before that, but like, it doesn't count unless you get, you're getting a W2 for some fricking reason. Like, so I need more money, not having a job as a teenager than I did having a job. But I got more clout and more respect from adults when they're like, Oh, you finally got a job. I was like, yeah. I was making more money online and you know, I had different ad sharing partnerships and whatnot. I don't have any ads on TheAdviserCoach.com like Google ad sense or whatever, but that's, I had different streams of income and I was making more. [06:54.1]
And I don’t want to get off into a tangent or whatever, but that's just, that's always bothered me. It's like the middle-class, lower middle-class, upper middle-class this group of people, they were like, Oh, when are you going to get a job? You should get a job. Whatever is I do. I don't think you understand, like I'm not going to get a job working at, you know, what's a store or something, Bed, bath and beyond or something, making $10 an hour. I'm going to make it way more doing the other stuff. But my family was really involved in a casino and harness racing and all that stuff. So long story short, I got into the casino biz and I was working in the marketing department, shocker, right? Me doing marketing in this casino. And I learned more about psychology; I learned more about marketing and more about human meat, human nature in two weeks, my first two weeks there than I learned in all four years of college combined, because I dealt with everyone from the gambling addicts who would spend their rent every month. I never quite understood that it truly is an addiction and anybody out there who's like, Oh, just stop. Trust me, these people can't just stop. Like they've they've thought about it By the way, I don't wanna go off on another tangent. I was listening to your boy Doberman Dan's podcast, the other day. [08:14.4]
Jonathan: Oh Yeah.
James: I re listened to. So his favorite episode that I like the, my favorite is, I think its titled, ‘The Crack Addict Secret to Getting Rich,’ where he talks about scabby Willy and how Willy, the crack addict had to get a couple hundred dollars every single day. And he would start with nothing and he was somehow hustle and make it. And you got people out there who are like, Oh, I can't make it work. I can't have a website. I can't do even marketing, but you got scabby Willy out there, the crack addict who will do whatever. He'll do woodworking, he'll get out there, he'll move cars, he’ll move boxes, whatever it takes to get that crack money. [08:51.3]
Jonathan: Hmm.
James: I mean, it sounds harsh, you know, just when I say it, like that sounds harsh, but you realize there are drug addicts out there who probably make more than some of the people listening to this show. Simply because they get out there and they get on the grind. So I am ready for your one star reviews, people where you say, Oh my God, I can't believe he talked about crack, crack addicts on this show. I can't believe that he brought that up. I'm so offended. Like, come on, get real. But yes, scabby Willy's making more money. It was a good show producer Jonathan, Congrats to you guys.
Jonathan: I forgot about that guy. That's awesome. [09:23.4]
James: But yeah, it's like, so these people, they were getting the money somehow. I don't know. So I work with those and I mean all walks of life. And I also work with the high rollers. These are the people betting like a thousand bucks a hand at blackjack, playing tens of thousands of dollars for pots at poker. So I saw it all, good times! So one of the people who worked in the marketing department, there was a middle aged lady named, well, let's call her Bridget. Bridget always wore designer clothes. I mean, we had to wear the little vest. I mean, if you go into any casino, you know that the hosts have to wear their suits in the name tags and the little badges. They have to have their security, uhhh not the security the casino license on them and all the time. So she had to wear that and she would wear Gucci, Louis, Prada, she had it off. And I always wondered why she would wear like these fancy Gucci shirts if she was just going to put her badge right through it anyway. She was going to put her casino license.
Jonathan: Yikes.
James: Like it has holes all in it, but Hey, again, I'm not judging. I'm just confused. [10:19.8]
Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.
When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.
Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [10:42.5]
James: So at the time I was driving my little beater of the car and she was rolling big in a big tricked out Escalade. Now I don't know exactly what her hourly wage was at the time, but I'd estimate that it was somewhere around $14 an hour, because at the time that's what the new supervisors made. I mean, they, they quickly got a raise after that and you have to demonstrate that you're actually good at what you do before you get the raise, but they start out at around $14 an hour and that's the supervisors. And I, she wasn't a supervisor, so I'm assuming that she went from like $11 or whatever, all the way up to 14, but let's do the math on $14 an hour at 40 hours a week. That's $2,240 per month. And I'll never forget the day she revealed to me that the payment on her Escalade was a whopping get ready, $850 a month.
Jonathan: Ouch. [11:44.1]
James: And she financed the car for 60 months Yikes! So after I picked my jaw off the floor, I asked her why she committed to such an expensive car when there was so many other affordable options out there. I mean, you've got Honda, you got Toyota, you got Ford, you got Kia. The little Kia Rio, that's virtually nothing. So she told me, even though she was behind on her utility bills and even though she didn't have a dime saved for retirement, I quote, she told me life is too short to drive a crappy car.
Jonathan: Love it.
James: The priorities, right? I mean, if that's your priority it’s cool.
Jonathan: Get it.
James: Like I'm not here to judge anybody. Like I really don't care. The car you drive doesn't affect me one bit. You liking me or not liking me doesn't affect me one bit. You have in the biggest mansion in Cedar Rapids; Iowa doesn't affect me at all. Like you do whatever you want with your own choices. Producer Jonathan, you going out to Utah and ripping it up on the mountains over there, doesn't affect my life one bit. You being abundant as possible and having as many clients as possible and donating as much as you can to charity and putting your child through the best schools in the country that doesn't affect me at all. [13:00.4]
You can have as much as you want or as little as you want. It's just your priority. I left that casino a long time ago, but legend has it if the moon is full and you're really quiet, you can still hear her bass stumping from her speaker system.
Jonathan: Nice.
James: But yeah, we all have different priorities. I mean, I've spent an ungodly amount of money on getting better sleep, on equipment, on coaches, on supplements. And I made sleep a priority for me. That's the topic of the show. Financial advisors with screwed up priorities. I've made that a priority because it impacts everything else in my life. If I didn't get good sleep, I wouldn't be closing in on a hundred podcast episodes along with sending daily emails, writing the newsletter, helping financial advisors and doing all the other cool stuff I do. I just physically biologically chemically couldn't do it all. [13:50.2]
So if you're reading between the lines here, you'll realize that this really isn't about the, the woman and her Escalade at all. It's all about priorities. So what are your priorities? I don't really care what they are, as long as you're clear on what you want. In many ways, Bridget, better off than a lot of the financial advisors that I interact with because she was clear on her priorities. She wanted the car, she got the car, she was happy with the car. The only thing I don't like is when the financial advisors say I don't have a big business because my family is my priority. Like that pisses me off because that's. You can have them both
Jonathan: You owe it to them. [14:27.2]
James: Yeah. You can have both. Just because you love your family doesn't mean you have to stay small forever. In fact, the reason your reason of loving them should be enough for you to get your stuff together and leave a legacy, not just a business. And we did an episode about lifestyle businesses. Those are perfectly cool. I'm fine with them, but make sure you're doing it for the right reason. If it truly, truly, honestly, 100% is your priority, Hey that's okay, but maybe you can make your business a priority to help your family. So if you're a longtime listener of the show, you probably already know what I think your priority should be— marketing. Nothing else matters, unless you can get people in the door. Unless you provide some type of service to other people so they pay you where money changes hands you can't do anything. I mean, otherwise there won't be a business to serve anyone. [15:24.7]
So a lot of people think it's the other way around. And I get criticized for this, but it's true. I'm willing to tell financial advisors the truth. I'm willing to take a stand. I'm willing to be their watchdog. I'm willing to look out for them and give them this stuff that actually works. So I do get criticized for this. A lot of people think that without clients, there’s no business. And that, that does make sense and I can jive with that. I mean, I'm telling you, that's, that's kind of, sort of the case, but what came first? The business or the clients? [15:55.4]
The business, you've got to take care of the business first, just like without good sleep for me, there won't be a podcast or a newsletter. So I've got to take care of that first even if I don't like it. Even if I'd rather help financial advisors, instead of get good sleep, I still have to sleep. I still have to get that out of the way. Here's another example. Some financial advisors will chase certification after certification; they'll get up to their ears and paperwork. They'll read countless personal finance books for “research” before they ever sit down and work on their marketing plan. That's nuts! And it's a clear sign that the priorities are screwed up because you can be the best financial advisor in the world. But if nobody knows it's about you or your business, it doesn't matter. [16:43.3]
And I do get, I do get criticized a lot for the qualifications thing where people don't care about your qualifications. And I'm looking for the study right now because; I want to back this up, everything I'm telling you here is a 100% verifiable. You can look it up. I'm so sick and tired of people sharing big ideas like, Oh, this might work go try it. No, give me the data. Tell me what actually works. If you've got a marketing person coming to you and saying, Oh, text messaging can help you get more clients, but they're do, they're approaching you through email. That should be a red flag. Or if they say, Oh, text messaging is amazing for clients, you say, Awesome! I love that. Let me know, like, what are some of the stats to support your claim? So when I say you clients don't care about your qualifications, some financial advisors get butt hurt and they're like, Oh yes, they do they care about my qualifications. It’s like, no, this is not James Pollard saying this. This is not my theory or opinion. If you want to verify what I'm telling you and realized this it's not just BS. [17:43.1]
Google this study, the study is called Trust and Financial Advice; it was done by Vanguard Research. You can literally type it into Google right now. Trust and Financial Advice, Vanguard research hit the search button and you will get the study. They found clients do not care as much. There's not as big of a drivers trust if you have relevant financial industry qualifications. In fact, the single biggest driver of trust for clients and without trust, you don't have any clients is if you were an advocate for them, that is the number one driver of trust that clients are looking for. Being an advocate is literally 560%, a bigger predictor of trust and of clients and working with a financial advisor than the qualifications are. Now of course you want to be credentialed or you want to, at least have the knowledge there. You want to help them, if all else being equal, if you are both advocates and your competition is more qualified than you are that person's probably going to get the clients. [18:47.5]
But your focus, your priority needs to be being an advocate based on the study, it needs to be relating to prospective clients based on the study relating to the prospective client is way bigger of a trust driver than anything else. And then giving them a sense of financial overleaf about the financial situation is another predictor of trust. It is not being connected in the community. It is not showing awareness of financial trends and it is not the qualification. You cannot have your priorities screwed up. So if your priority priorities are screwed up, here's my advice to you. If you don't know where to start, start with marketing, get to know your clients. Marketing is all about reaching prospective clients, building relationships with them and building your business. Listen to all the episodes in this podcast, go to TheAdvisor, Coach.com/blog and read all of the blog posts there. I've got many, many, many blog posts up there for you to consume. They're free for you to read. Then at the bottom of any blog posts for me you can opt into my email list to receive, again free copy. It's a PDF copy of 57 Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors. It's 80 plus pages. [20:01.0]
A lot of these people out there are just saying, Oh, get your checklist, get your cheat sheet. They just throw something together because they, they have no real deep investment into the market. I'm just telling you like it is, I've got an 80 plus page PDF because I actually give a crap about financial advisors. I’ve got results for financial advisors. I can prove literally everything that I'm saying. I am deep in the market. So when you view someone else and you try to make a decision, they give you a little cheat sheet or a little guide or a little checklist. And you look at me who gives you literally; I don't charge you a freaking dime for it, 80 plus pages to get you something to get you started. It gets you to help you hit the ground running so you can make money with the stuff I give you for free. You can come back and break a player off some of that bread. [20:39.3]
I'm on your side. I want you to succeed. I am fighting for you every single day. I am the hard work day in and day out to make sure you have a chance to success. I hope you will take advantage of all the content I made available for you. I often get so criticized a lot for being so brash about asking for money. And I mean, I'm proud of it. I do run a business. I do ask for money. I do sell stuff that gets incredible results for financial advisors, but here's the thing. I have a huge library of free content that advisors can use to literally make the money to pay for the paid stuff. That way it doesn't really cost anything, anything out of pocket. So make sure you check all that out and start with marketing. It should be your priority. And that's it for this week, Jonathan. [21:25.7]
Jonathan: Man you set them straight. What do you have coming up first, next time?
James: Next week. I don't know if I've ever talked about Google on the podcast before maybe. I mean, I know I've talked about it like indirectly, but I don't know if I've ever had a podcast episode about it, but I'm going to talk about how Google is going to crush financial advisors.
Jonathan: Ooh, ominous. Cannot wait. Thank you Financial Advisor Marketing fans for listening to the show and we'll be back in your ear buds next time. [21:53.5]
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