You're listening to Financial Advisor 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 TheAdvisorCoach.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's going on, another week, another podcast episode for you, financial advisors. I actually just got back from Charleston, South Carolina, beautiful city loved it. I went to a few of the plantations out there, the boom plantation, the Magnolia plantation. They were pretty cool. Charleston had some good restaurants too. I love to eat. So, that’s one of my bad habits, Jonathan. I've got a bad habit of sleeping indoors. Who was that, Doberman Dan says he got a bad habit of sleeping indoors and eating three meals a day?
Jonathan: Terrible.
James: I liked this place called High Cotton. So if you're in South Carolina, shout out to High Cotton, if you go there, you know that the great James Pollard was there. And that was a good one. Miller's All Day was another good one. And I went to this place called Rodney Scott's, which apparently is one of the most bang in barbecue spots in Charleston, but they were actually out of pork. So, I can't really give them an honest review cause I wanted to have the pulled pork or the ribs or something. And he didn't have it, so Rodney Scott, you let me down, but I'm sure it's amazing. Anyway, when I was down in the Carolinas, I was going to all these places and I didn't rent a car because, well, why would I, I mean, we've got Uber and Lyft. There's no point I'm not a boomer, Jonathan only boomers rent cars these days, right? [01:51.7]
Jonathan: Oops! I’ve been doing wrong now.
James: Well, I was out there taking Uber, Uber zooming back and forth. I mean, I probably took 20 Uber rides while I was down there, which was still cheaper than renting a car. Get that I took like 20 Uber rides and I didn't even come close to the cost of renting the car.
Jonathan: Wow.
James: And yeah, it's crazy. One of the reasons I love taking Uber rides is because I get to see how different people are. One guy, one of the Uber drivers was a straight up redneck. He looked like he was out of Duck Dynasty. He was playing country music. He was chewing tobacco. He, while he, I don't know if he was chewing. I don't remember that he had chewing tobacco, the red man chewing tobacco in the passenger seat, like Hmm. Straight out of duck dynasty, this guy. Another guy had a minivan. He had a tablet hooked up to the center console where he would play Yanni like a downloaded concert footage of Yanni’s.
Jonathan: Hmm. [02:47.3]
James: That was weird. I was a little worried with that one. I was like, Oh, you're sure you're taking me to the airport. Oh, you're taking me to like your secret warehouse where you gotta tie us up. Another Uber driver, this guy picked us up. His car was immaculate. It was so well kept. That was probably my favorite. I mean, I tend to keep my cars clean too. So, I relate to that guy, but I got to see men. I got to see women, young, old, black, white, basically all walks of life. It's a beautiful thing. And I know I'm not surprised to judge people, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Why did ya?
James: I judged based on the car. So, if you pull up and you've got to do once a trash in the floor and paper bags and stuff, that's a signal to me about what's going on in your head. If you pull up and your whip is shining in the wheels of spotless and the leather smells good. That's a signal too, of what's going on in your head. And I really, I really truly believe that. I know you're not supposed to judge people. I judge people who don't use their turn signals. I judge people, if they have those little crappy rims, the little doughnut rims, and they ever, they can't switch them out. And this really got me thinking about mindset. And even when I was talking to these Uber drivers, because I mean, I took several every day, they all approached the same topics in different ways. One person will be like the weather's amazing today. I love it and be upbeat and positive. And then another person would be like, yeah, the weather's all right, but I don't know how long it's going to last. On the same day, different people would have the different approaches to the same thing. [04:14.2]
Or if I would be like, I'm going to this place, one person would be like, eh, it's not all it's cracked up to be. And I would leave that place. And the next Uber driver would be as like, Oh, that's really great, this is an amazing place. Did you have a great time? Very, very, very interesting. And that's what inspired me to get on the show this week and talk about mindset. It's one of the most underrated topics in all of business, not just finance advising. People sleep on it because they don't think it matters. They don't take it seriously. I don't know, but I can tell you that high performers in every field take it seriously. So here are five mindset shifts to accelerate your growth. Number one is to have an investor mindset. This is for everything that if you listen to the Ben Settle episode, I did, we since deleted it. It's not even available for free. It's available when you just subscribe to the inner circle newsletter. [05:07.6]
Jonathan: Great.
James: I got inspiration for this from Ben Settle because he has had an investor mindset on everything. So, my newsletter is $99 per month. This means if you're a financial advisor and you're making $300,000 per year, all I need to do is help you increase your income. One-Third of 1%, that's it. That's all I have to do, but I've seen people get anxious, hesitant the skittish about joining. And at the same time, they tell me they're making several hundred thousand dollars per year. It's goofy. It's holding them back. And I've talked about having an investor mindset before on this show, it's one of those things that I want to bring up every so often because it's so, so important. It is critical, even for non-marketing related things. You can't freak out at spending money when it's an investment. So, an example from my own life is bought the Tesla. I love it. I don't know if you want to share with the class that you also have a Tesla producer, Jonathan. [06:03.5]
Jonathan: I think you just did.
James: We can always cut it out. We can cut it out of the show, but now you're rolling. You're rolling big time. You're rolling bigger than I am. I just couldn't bring myself to spend more. I, I told you my strategy for buying a car is to generate more investible assets than throw off cash to make the payment.
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: Even though I paid for the car in full, I wanted to have enough cash set aside to make the payment if I had to do so. So that is my criteria. That's I don't want to toot my own horn or anything, but that's kind of sorta how successful people think. They don't think can I make this $800 per month payment? They think, what can I invest in that will give me $800 a month so I can make the payment, pay the car off and continue to have that $800 per month coming in. Just a little hint. So, I bought the Tesla. I love it. Now, why would I spend the extra money on that car? When I could get a Honda civic, a Toyota Corolla, I could get a Honda Accord it's because the money itself is irrelevant. I don't care about the actual money. I only care about the return on investment because I think like an investor. First, I do a lot of business travel. I'm going to deduct mileage. I've got a trip coming up where I'm going to Pittsburgh to Columbus, to Cincinnati, to Louisville, maybe to Indianapolis, like I'm doing a lot of driving and it's a business trip. Plus, I had a free supercharging for an entire year. So, I don't even have to pay for charging when I do the business trip. [07:25.2]
So, let's say I drive down to Orlando, Florida to visit my favorite podcast business person. That's a $600 deduction right there. I know that's not a lot in as far as deductions is concerned, but when you talk about a deduction from the cost of ownership, it's a pretty big deal. Plus, the car requires very little maintenance. So, the cost of ownership, if we're talking maintenance is extremely low. People who don't think like investors have it backwards, they try to spend as little as possible upfront without much thought to the long-term cost. You need to change that mindset. You've got to get in the habit of looking at the total cost of these things.
Let's say you invest in, I don't know, like a service or a consultant or a product or whatever that makes you an additional $60,000 this year. That's $5,000 per month on average, which means every single month you let pass by without moving forward with that investment is costing you for real $5,000 that you could have made. You might not feel it like that. You may not feel the money leaving because it's opportunity cost, but it's still costing you. Financial advisors, they love to talk about how inflation is the silent killer of wealth. How you might not feel the money being eaten away. You may not feel inflation working against you, but it's still there. Well, opportunity cost is the same way you guys it's the same thing. Opportunity cost is the silent killer of wealth. And thinking like an investor is the way to slay the opportunity costs dragon. So, which is that a good quotable for the show? [09:01.1]
Jonathan: Use it, man, use it. I love it. Calling them out.
James: People like, Hey, don't you want to have investments that protect you against inflation. Okay, financial advisors don't you want to make investments in your business that can protect you against opportunity because working against you. So, it's just silly. I mean, honestly, if, if you're not thinking like that, I even, I can't help you. I, I just, I don't even know what to say anymore. So, I’ll go to number two, the second mindset shift is to kill your marketing budget. There's literally no reason whatsoever to have a marketing budget. You can have a test budget where you test something, you spend like a thousand dollars or a hundred dollars to see if it works. You can spend a thousand dollars on a mail campaign to see if you get any calls, but assuming something is working. You should never limit it, let that sucker run. And I can't really blame financial advisors for thinking this way, because it's so ingrained into the profession. This is one thing where financial advisors who try and they're, they're genuinely passionate about helping other advisors. This is something where they, they stumble with this or they get it wrong. They're constantly crunching numbers. They're constantly running spreadsheets or evaluating the cost of things. And when you do that all day long, you naturally begin to think in terms of budgets, but you've got to get rid of it. If you want to be a better marketer, let me give you an example. I have an online ad running right now as we record this, that's generating leads for less than $5 each and making on average $13.50 cents per lead, per email address that I get. [10:39.5]
Jonathan: Nice.
James: Should I turn that off? Should I have a marketing budget for that? Here's another example, since I'm thinking about online ads now. I had an inner circle member, send me an email showing off his Facebook ad that he did and I told him to change the headline to something that has been proven to work. He changed that headline and he immediately lowered his cost per lead. He made the ad much more profitable. Should he have a marketing budget? Assuming that the ad continues to be profitable? Of course not. So, kill your marketing budget. [11:08.9]
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. [11:31.6]
James: Number three realized that, and this is another one that came from Ben Settle. So, all credit goes to him, he's the inspiration for this one. Realize that you are the scarce resource, not your clients or potential clients. And sometimes this can, it can come off as arrogant. It can come off as cocky, but it is true. Sometimes the financial advisors, as an example, the ones who haven't gone through appointments on autopilot. They'll worry about people unsubscribing from their email list. They get so freaked out about it and they say how much unsubscribes hurt their feelings, how much it bothers them. But what they don't realize is that they are the scarce resource, not the email subscribers. Let's say you're a financial advisor in Chicago and you're focused on teachers. So, I typed in teachers into LinkedIn and then I filtered for Chicago. I got 86,000 results. That's an abundance of teachers. So, if any one person doesn't like your marketing, it literally does not matter. It does not matter. [12:33.2]
There are so many more potential clients out there that you can move on to the next one. And one of the most beautiful testimonials I've ever received was about this concept. It was about how I helped a financial advisor, beat prospecting reluctance by shifting his mindset on this very topic. I don't even really do anything on prospecting, reluctance. It’s also known as call reluctance if it's about cold calls. But the advisor got the benefit. As a result of realizing this, he knew that he was the scarce resource. Again, I don't mean this in a cocky or arrogant way. You're not putting people down. It's just a fact of business. If you ever find yourself with a scarce amount of prospective clients, you've screwed up somewhere along the line. There are so many opportunities out there. Take advantage of them. And I felt like your time, Jonathan was pretty scarce because I was trying to book a call on the Results Leader podcast. And I had to book in May, I think May or April. [13:28.9]
Jonathan: Yeah. My team is doing a good job.
James: So, financial advisors, we are recording this in March and this guy is so busy or at least pretending to be so busy that when I tried to schedule a time to go on his brilliant Results Leader podcast, which you can find by searching Results Leader. And there's a bunch of actual people who are getting actual results and not just like flexing for the gram. I don't know.
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: I had to book in May, but whatever life goes on, I understand I'm not important to you.
Jonathan: You are very important. That's why we got you on a schedule in May instead of June. [14:11.6]
James: Oh, okay. So, number four fourth mindset shift that you've got to make financial advisors is you got to shift from an owner to an employee mindset. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. I'm just going to tell you people with employee mindsets, they see jobs as necessary evils that have to be endured people with owner mindsets. They embrace their careers as rewarding. They know that they're going to get something they're gonna help people. They're going to get their money by helping other people and adding value to the marketplace. Employees, they sit around and they wait for someone to tell them what to do and how to do it. Owners, people that own our mindset, they take responsibility for their success and they take responsibility for success of the organization. I don't care if you don't own your own business. Even if you're working, if you're a financial advisor who works for someone else for a, if you're an associate or something like that, take responsibility for the organization. You are the owner within that organization because your benefits come from the value you add to it. [15:08.7]
The employee mentality, it forces people to accept a ceiling on their success in return for a steady income, you sit in your chair from nine to five, you get a certain amount of money. The person next to you could be sleeping, you're actually doing the work. You're still gonna get paid the same exact amount of money. I mean, obviously the person could get found out or whatever, but you're you got a ceiling om your income. Owners are willing to take intelligent risk in exchange for the opportunity to grow and the best financial advisors almost always have this owner mindset. There are so few exceptions to this that I can't even remember the last time I encountered one. So, I'll move on to number five. This is the fifth mindset shift that you want to have as a financial advisor is to start viewing money differently. And I know I'm painting with a broad brush here, but hear me out. [16:00.3]
So many financial advisors view money as this thing to be saved, hoarded and accumulated. You've got to pinch pennies, put every dollar you can into the stock market. You've got to stop drinking lattes and start packing your lunch. Now don't get me wrong. That stuff is helpful at some level, it's helpful in moderation, but financial advisors, at least some of you, you take it to the extreme. There's a reason the Greeks put nothing to excess in the temple of Apollo. They wanted people to know that centuries into the future. They wanted people to know nothing to excess. It was one of the most important things. This entire civilization left behind. Unfortunately, financial advisers have this view of money in excess. Like you have to hoard it. You have to budget so hard and squeeze every dollar. And it's damaging. This is closely related to the first mindset, mindset shift about thinking like an investor, but it's important enough for me to give it its own number. So, this number five, right. [17:03.7]
Money is a tool to achieve your goals. That's it. Money has no value unless it's being used. If I have $10 million in the bank right now, and I live in a trailer in Alabama with no friends, no family members and I've got poor health, does the money do me any good? No. The money must be used to have value. This is why I talk about deploying capital. I don't really say spending money. I talk about investing money. I talk about deploying capital. You're sending out the soldiers in your army of dollar bills to bring back friends. You have to be smart about where you send your soldiers. Every month I send soldiers to the podcast factory to help me with the podcast. Their job is to make sure they bring back friends. If they don't bring back friends, I'm firing them. Now of course I have to do my part and I have to put in the work, but I'm depending on the framework that the podcast is put together, I'm depending on them and their systems, I am deploying my capital to them so I can achieve my goals. Money must circulate to have value. Most people don't understand this. This is like next level. I honestly, I can't even believe I'm giving this information away for free. Sadly, because I'm giving it away for free a lot of you are just gonna be like, Oh yeah, great podcast episode, and move on with your life. What I'm about to tell you is so critical. [18:24.2]
Money's called currency for a reason. It must flow in order to have value. And you want it to come back to you multiplied that's the word of the day. I want you to think about this for the rest of the day. Circulate circulate means to move continuously or freely through an area. If you're truly circulating, it also means to return to the point of origin. If your blood is circulating, your blood will move through the same veins again and again, and again. You want your money to circulate, to come back to the point of origin. You put it out into the world, you deploy your capital, it comes back. It's circulates. It comes back to you many times over. So, to recap, these are the five shifts you want to make. You got the investor mindset, kill your marketing budget, you are the scarce resource owner versus employee mindset and start viewing money differently and think about circulation. And that is it for this episode of Financial Advisor Marketing. [19:22.8]
Jonathan: Man, powerful. You are on a roll James. What do you have coming up next time?
James: Guys, I want you to email james@theadvisorcoach.com with your podcast ideas. I love hearing from you. I am so open to your feedback. My goal is to serve financial advisors because I operate from an abundance mindset or at least most of the time. I know I slip up. I have my moments. I'll admit that, but most of the time, I'm in an abundance mindset. I know that I can help financial advisors with their businesses. And if I do that, it will help my business. And I make no bones about it. I'm not hiding behind any ulterior motives, like some of these “experts” and “coaches” out there. I do want your money. I want it. I would love to have your money, but understand that in order for you to give me a thousand dollars, I need to help you make at least a thousand dollars preferably many times more. So, let me know what you want. Let me know what you want me to talk about james@theadvisorcoach.com. Hit it up. [20:20.2]
Jonathan: So, he's not going to give us a preview of next time. That's okay, that's okay. We'll surprise you guys; we will surprise you guys. That is a wrap for another Financial Advisor Marketing. Thank you for tuning in, and we will be back inside your ear buds on the next one. [20:35.7]
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