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: Financial advisors, this episode is going to be very interesting because a few months ago, I included a bonus with the inner circle newsletter, all about how financial advisors can hire virtual assistants. And it got some awesome feedback. It turns out that financial advisors are really interested in this topic, or at least the ones that are interested were very vocal about it or maybe they wanted to hear me talk about it because I have hired many freelancers’ contractors, virtual assistants, different companies to help me to personally in my personal life and we'll talk about that. In the advisor coach as a business and so on, I literally run a virtual team like I do that every single day. It is just what I do and even the people who helped me with my finances are people I've for the most part, never met in person. I've never met my financial advisor in person. I've never met my accountant in person, my accountants’ team, I've never met anyone who works for the advisor coach in-person ever. So, I am literally running a virtual team. So, when I'm talking about hiring virtual assistants and how to get, not even, it doesn't even have to be a virtual assistant, it could just be you getting assistance virtually in your business, not assistants’ with an S assistance with CE at the end. So, you're getting assistance. [01:48.1]
And since that bonus was so popular, I decided I would expand on it in this podcast episode because well, that's what smart marketers do. If something works, I'm going to do more of it. However, my inner circle members had a lot more context and a lot more buildup for some of the things I talked about in that bonus. It got into some of the details, the nitty gritty details, including what I look for when I hire exactly where I go to find virtual assistants and stuff like that. In this podcast, I want to scale it back a little bit and I want to explain the philosophy behind outsourcing when it makes sense, when it doesn't make sense why advisors should or shouldn't do it and a few things I've learned along the way. So, let's get started. [02:27.1]
Outsourcing is a huge buzzword, and it has been a buzzword for the past few years. Everybody has this pipe dream of hiring people to do the work for them. There's this weird misconception that a business person should hire a bunch of people, put them together and get them to do the work. And yes, that is kind of, sort of what running a business is all about. Eventually, meaning once you have the cashflow, the infrastructure and the people to manage the new hires, then you can do that. So, if I were to buy a fast-food franchise, I'm not going to be in there, flipping the burgers and cooking the fries. I'm going to get someone to do that and I'm going to get a manager to manage those people. But in order for me to even the, to buy the franchise in the first place, I need the cashflow. I need to be able to financially support that investment. Otherwise, I would just be buying a job. Virtually all businesses operate that way. [03:18.0]
But I imagine that 99% of financial advisors listening to this are operating either by themselves or in a team of fewer than seven people. And at that point, it's really hard to build something self-sustaining where you have a manager who is managing the new hires for you and you don't do anything except check on the manager. Seven is really like the accepted business number where people can come in and you can have a manager to manage those people and so on and so forth. Until then you have to do the work, you can't subject yourself to this pipe dream that you're just going to hire people and everything's going to be hunky-dory and rainbows and sunshine and you can leave your business for 10 years and come back and be a millionaire or a multimillionaire through your business. It's just goofy. I don't understand why people even believe this. I guess everybody wants to believe in something and I don't want to spoil it for the people who do, but whatever. [04:09.7]
I want to give you a piece of advice that was given to me several years ago, and it has stuck with me and it is influenced the way that I do business and I try to share it with financial advisors when I can, here it is. You cannot outsource your push-ups. You have to do some things yourself. And despite what a lot of internet gurus might tell you, there are some things you have to do. You cannot outsource. And there are some things that you can eventually outsource, but they still require your involvement in the beginning. And I'm going to give you a few examples. The first one is outsourcing your bookkeeping, when you don't have that many transactions, it would just be a waste. And when you do your own bookkeeping and you keep your eyes on your receipts, on your inflows, on your outflows, it gives you a chance to review what is happening in your business. It's and I'm one of the last people to tell you to cut costs, instead, I would tell you to focus on increasing your income, but keeping a close eye on your books can help you run lean and mean. And that is a huge advantage when you're trying to operate a business. [05:10.5]
Another one is email management. If you're anything like me, you get dozens, if not hundreds of emails, every single day and inbox management takes up a good chunk of your day. One of the beautiful things about having a general virtual assistant, not someone who specializes in one thing or the other, but someone who is there to help you with different things and is very flexible with what he or she does is you can assign control of your inbox to that person. And this is what I do personally. In the beginning, you are going to handle the email management yourself, but that isn't a bad thing because it will force you to become more efficient. This is going to be a theme through this podcast episode. This is one of the messages that I want to get to you. By not outsourcing a lot of different things, not just email management, but by doing this stuff yourself at first, you will become more efficient, you will notice patterns, you see ways to make things better. And you might be thinking to yourself, oh, but couldn't my virtual assistant just see those patterns and make things better. Not always, not always be. And we will talk about that because I'm going to talk about how nobody cares as much as you do. But a lot of times virtual assistants, they just see the task they want to do it. It depends on the person you hire. It depends on the personality. You're I don't want to say you're gambling because obviously you can control a lot of factors in the hiring process, but at least when you do it yourself, you can know for sure, 100% that you're putting yourself in the frame of mind to spot inefficiencies and to fix them because you care about your business, you want to see it grow. And you know, for sure, without a doubt, this is extremely important. You have the certainty that these things are going to get better over time. And necessity will force you to become more efficient and that will be amplified when you hand the task to someone else, because you're handing something over to a virtual assistant or to a company or someone else, you're handing something that has already been made more efficient. [07:01.9]
For example, when you're trying to manage your inbox yourself, you might be just motivated to get your amount of time down. So, if you're spending an hour a day on email management, you're going to be motivated to get it down to 45 minutes, to get it down to 30 minutes. So, you might learn different tips and techniques for managing your inbox. You might learn how to use flags, rules, filters, things like that. And you might get a software in there and integrate it with your inbox. You might use a dictation service to write your emails faster. You might use a service like text expander. My point is this. When you learn about those things, you can document them and pass them to your assistant. This is critical. The reason you want to do this is because when you have those systems in place and you give them to your assistant, you will be giving something that has already proven to work. And you know, for sure that is going to get done. If someone else who doesn't do it, if someone else tries to outsource something that they haven't done themselves, and they hadn't, haven't made efficient, they're basically betting that the virtual assistant will make it efficient. They don't know for sure. If you, do it yourself and you outline these systems, you know, for sure that your foundation that you're handing off is stronger than it was previously. [08:13.2]
Another thing that you can eventually outsource is your follow-up with clients and prospective clients. Let's say someone schedules a meeting for you next Thursday. Well, you can have someone give that person a call on Monday or Tuesday to confirm the appointment. Will you need to outsource this in the beginning? Absolutely not. Because you won't have that many calls to do and doing them yourself again, will help you become more efficient. You will see the gaps in your process. For example, if someone tells you on the phone, when you're making the follow up call that something confused them on the appointment page or the intake form, you can fix it right away. You're right there, you're getting feedback directly from the people who matter. If a prospective client says, oh yeah, I look forward to meeting with you, but I must tell you that when I was trying to set the appointment, I saw XYZ or the link in your follow-up email doesn't work. You can fix it immediately, quickly. You know exactly where to go. It just, it's a far better process and you can make your machine super-duper efficient and then you can hand it off. So those are some things that you can eventually outsource. Now, let me give you some things that I think you should know about outsourcing itself. [09:21.7]
The very first thing I want you to know, and I've already mentioned, this is that nobody will care as much as you do. Outsourcing will quickly, quickly, quickly teach you to be okay with good enough and that requires margin. If you don't have the margin to get down to good enough, then you are not ready to hire. That's why I recommend doing a lot of this stuff yourself to start off with that way, you can hand a proven process to someone else. If you are just good enough and you hand your system to someone else and they don't care as much as you do, you've just taken you're good enough to good or like worse or crappy. It just doesn't make sense. But if you start off great, and then you hand your process off and it's still just good enough, because you have that margin there, then everything is fine. Your business won't fall apart. You've got the thing running. So, outsourcing will quickly teach you to be okay with good enough. And in order to even get to good enough, I think the thing is I don't want to go off on a tangent or anything. I think that another myth that people believe is that their systems would just automatically improve or magically improve over time, merely because they have assistance or they've outsourced some of this stuff. It's just, it doesn't really happen that often. Some business owners fall prey to this myth that they can just hire great team members who will love their businesses and go the extra mile and well care more than they do. That's why I'm saying nobody else will care as much as you do. It just doesn't happen. [10:52.8]
I used to have a friend who was an attorney and he kept going through marketing consultants like people change their clothes. I mean, he kept trying to get me to work with him, but I said no, because I saw what he was doing to people. He kept trying to push them to do more and to take on more responsibility. And he told himself that he was being a good leader. He thought that's what good leaders do. I guess he was reading a couple of John Maxwell books, he got brainwashed into these leadership style. He thought, oh, I'm just going to push people. I'm going to help them take on more. I'm going to make them become better workers or people and employees or contractors or freelancers or whatever. He was confused. He didn't realize that these marketing companies that he was using, these marketing agencies, the marketing freelancers, they did not care about his business. They literally did not care. He was just another client for them because nobody cares as much as you do. He kept pestering them. He kept asking questions and every single time with one of these relationships, he would either fire the people he hired, or the people would fire him as a client because he wanted too much and he was downright annoying with this stuff. He kept trying to push him and I get it. I get that you want to have solid a players on your team. You want to have superstars; you want to push them to be more. But sometimes you just need to have the system built out yourself so you can hand it off. It is much safer. It's much more conservative to operate that way. Because what I'm going to explain to you is that all you're doing is just slowly increasing the dollar value per hour of your time over the course of weeks, months, and years, that's all you're doing and you're doing it safely, slowly and sustainably. You're not trying to hit your wagon to some star. You're not gambling. You are just making sure that you have the systems in place. You hand them off and you are protected. [12:41.1]
Now, speaking of that, since outsourcing is not this magical pill that will fix everything in your business, it's just another way for you to buy times. That's a perfect segue to my next point, because I see people make this mistake. They will outsource stuff and not fill that time with higher value task. Let's say that you work 40 hours per week. You take your average weekly income and divid it by 40 to figure out your average, hourly income from your business, you got that? 40 hours per week. Take your weekly income. Divide that by 40, you have your average per hour. So, let's say that on average, you make $100 per hour. This means you can hire people to take stuff off your plate for less than $100 per hour. However, here's the kicker. You need to fill your calendar again, if you want to grow fast. If you make a hundred dollars per hour and you hire a generalist virtual assistant for $40 per hour, and you are now making $60 per hour net. And for those of you who think that $40 per hour is too much for an assistant, you obviously don't understand how valuable a good assistant can be. And if you have proven processes and you have proven systems and you hand them off to someone who is even decently intelligent, you're going to be okay, so pay the extra money. [14:03.3]
But back from my math, you were making a $100 per hour. You get somebody and you pay that person $40 per hour. So, you're now making net $60 per hour right now. Assuming that the virtual assistant is a net cost, and I'll get to that. It means that now in order to get to break, even you need to do one or more of the following things. You need to ensure that your $40 per hour assistant is doing at least $80 per hour task. Do you understand how I got that number? Because you took a $40 per hour loss on your end, in order to make that backup from your virtual assistant’s time, you need to make sure that that person works on $80 per hour tasks. So, you're getting back to break even because they're having someone else bring a net positive, $40 back into your business. [14:56.4]
Number two, you need to pick up the slack on your end and raise your average per hour rate to $140 in order to make up for the slack on your end. This will get you back to break even. So, you're making up for the virtual assistants pay. If you just did that and you're just getting to break even you're in the same position that you were in the beginning, and this is where you have like companies that make $10 million in revenue, but only $2 million in profit. And they act like they're big and bad, when you have other companies that make $5 million in revenue and they make $2.5 million in profit. And it's like, like, oh, we make $10 million in revenue. It's like, okay, how much do you keep? Hmm…they you have people who are like, oh yeah, I make $600,000 per year...[inaudible] I was like, Hmm, how much do you keep? Because if you only give a $100,000 per year, and then you're talking to someone who makes $300,000 per year and keeps $200,000, well, that person's bigger and better than you are. So really pay attention to your numbers, like it's amazing how many people will be like they brag about the revenue thing is just goofy. [16:03.8]
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. [16:26.2]
What happens in reality is typically a mixture of both of these, and this is what I personally would do not would do. I mean, I literally do it every day. Your assistant might do a mix of tasks that are non-revenue generating, cause there are some things that you just need to get off your plate and they still need to get done and revenue generating while you spend slightly more time on higher value tasks and it all works out in the end. In any case, your goal should be to increase your dollar value per hour. Because when you do that, you can continue to outsource the lower value tasks and create margin within your team. Because if your business can generate $80 per hour with a task that you're paying someone $40 per hour to do you get to keep that margin. So do not get sucked into this narrative that you can hire people and go golf all day, assuming that you want to grow fast. [17:16.6]
If you want to grow fast and you want to make a lot of money, you need to buckle down and you need to do the work. You need to get rid of, let me just keep this super-duper easy. Let's say that you have a $50 per hour margin and you shave off 5 hours every single week. Okay? So, you're adding $250 so, five times $50, the another 250, then you get another 250 and you get another 250 and another 250. Every single month, you're creating a thousand dollars in margin within your business. Okay. Does that make sense? Over the course of a year? You now have a $12 that is cranking in and out cranking in and out cranking in and out. You can hire yourself another person. Let's just say you hire someone for $6,000 a month, total you have now gotten another person who can help you grow faster and you have net $6,000 back in your pocket. You have increased your personal income by $6,000 with this example. You're just shaving off your time. You becoming more productive, you becoming more productive. You put in it back in your business, you're becoming more productive. You're putting it back into a business. [18:16.3]
That is why when we revamped 57 marketing tips for financial advisors, we put embrace productivity as the number one tip, because when we started thinking about how important productivity was and the relationship, not even like an indirect relationship, like a direct relationship, one-to-one with a financial advisor's income, it just blew my mind. It blew everyone's minds on my team. They just, everything clicked. They were like, WOW, Productivity really is the most important thing. And that is what a lot of good marketing is about. If you have a marketing machine that is going like online advertising, like email, like direct mail, it's all about being productive. Like I can create a direct mail campaign and have it out in less than a week. And I can reach thousands of people. That is productivity. I can hire someone for like, like I said, at $40 per hour to make calls, to get people, to attend a webinar or attend a seminar. And that is productivity as well. But I am not going off and just golfing all day or just ignoring them because that wouldn't cause me to grow fast. Remember the example you're shaving often time you reinvesting it. You're shaving often time. You're reinvesting it. You becoming more productive. You're reinvesting it back into your business, that is crucial. [19:30.5]
Next here's something that almost no motivational speaker or business book would tell you, but I will tell you because it's something that I learned in my own experience and the experience of several world-class financial advisors. You should outsource this stuff in your personal life first. Remember how I talked about nobody caring as much as you do. Well and how you will see the patterns and the trends if you do the work first, well, that ties into this. If you outsource this stuff in your personal life first, you will get to keep control of your business for as long as possible. There you get to jack up your hourly value as high as you can possibly get it to create as much margin as possible before handing off your business tasks to someone else. Because if you have more margin than your competitors, you will win. You will dominate. A lot of people are in this rush to outsource as quickly as possible. Like I need to find someone, I need to find someone. I need to find someone. Do you really? Because if you are a business owner and you have your hourly value at like a $100 per hour, just for easy math and you are in a rush to outsource and I have taken my time and I have remained in control of my business and I'm a control freak. And I make sure that I'm squeezing every last drop out of my systems. I've gotten my hourly value up to $300 per hour. I can hire people that you can't. I could do things that you cannot, I can afford to take more risks. I can make bad hires and not have it affect me. But if you make a bad hire, it's going to hurt you. It won't hurt me. I can just move on. You know, I can hire someone and they can cost me $200 per hour and I'll still be okay. I can still take that dip, but you can't. And that is another huge advantage. [21:14.8]
The way you get there is by outsourcing this stuff in your personal life. And this is like I said, nobody's really going to talk about this, but you need to pay attention here. What am I talking about? I'm talking about things like your laundry. A lot of laundry services charged between a dollar to $2 per pound of laundry. And they usually have set pricing for sheets and comforters, but it is well worth it. I'm talking about things like your house cleaning. Right now, I pay $178 to get my house cleaned. Four people come to my house and they're here for about two hours total getting all the work done. So that is two times four that's eight hours of work being done. So, if you divide 178 by four that's, $22.25 per hour. Now I need to ask myself, can I make more than $22.25 cents by not cleaning my house? Yes, but remember, I don't just have them come in and clean the house while I'm watching Netflix or YouTube or something. When they're cleaning, I am working. I'm writing my newsletter. I'm sending out emails. I'm talking with financial advisors; I'm creating advertising campaigns. I am working. This is so important for you to understand. I am doing work while I am outsourcing. I am not outsourcing for outsourcing sake. I am literally just creating margin within the amount of money I make and the amount of money that someone else charges. That is what business is. Businesses about creating a profit margin. If you create a profit margin within your personal income, you can increase your personal income faster than you ever thought possible. [22:41.2]
Another thing that you should outsource in your personal life is cooking and meal prep. So, my wife likes to cook. That's one of the things that she just likes to do. She enjoys a lot. We have Hello Fresh delivered to our house and she cooks those meals. We rarely if ever go grocery shopping anymore. Whenever we go grocery shopping, it's almost always for holidays and special occasions. And even then, we still use grocery pickup, which saves time or we, well, we don't really have groceries delivered that much anymore, but every so often we will. This is also, this is going to be like blasphemy for financial advisors, but I buy my lunch almost every day. My favorite lunches come from restaurants called Pliable and Honey Grow. So Pliable has fruit bowls. You can dress it up with kale, granola, protein, and so on. Honey grow has salads, they have stir fry. I get the salad with broccoli, cauliflower, beets, kale, spinach, stuff like that. And both are about 10 to $12 per day per lunch, because if I get my lunch every single day, it's like 10 to $12 per day. But they are incredibly healthy and they're fast, so that's a win-win and my books. So, I am outsourcing lunch. I feel incredible with having these healthy foods, I can focus more. I am investing back into myself. Let's say that I spend $10 per day on lunch. Financial advisors would look at that and say, oh, 10 times 30 that's $300 per month. If you invest $300 per month into index funds over 75 years, that could be 40 quadrillion dollars. Like okay. Or because I feel focused, I can make an extra a $100 an hour, and then I can reinvest that or I can invest that and then reinvest that. Like you need to think about the second order consequences. You cannot go through life just thinking about the first order consequences, but that is a story for another time. [24:28.6]
Do I recommend you outsource marketing? This is the question that you probably want to hear me address in the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. So here we go. Do I recommend that you outsource your marketing? No, I don't. And here's why, because nobody will care as much as you do. Again, I said that before I'm saying it again. Nobody will care as much as you. And many of the best marketing systems in the entire world, don't take that much time anyway. One of the things I recommend financial advisors do is to set up an email auto responder sequence. You can do that yourself. It does not take that much time. You do not need a $10,000 agency to come in and write four emails for you. Now, if you really honestly, if you're desperate and you absolutely need it, and you want to have it done, like, and you have money to burn, then sure, go ahead. But I'm just telling you straight up, you don't need it. And this is coming from somebody like I charge financial advisors, a pretty penny to write emails. I do it like I like it, but you don't need it. You do not need it. You need someone to tell you what works. You need some templates like I have over the advisorcoach.com/ I believe it is appointments. That's something that you need. You just pay the one-time fee. You get access to this stuff. You can use it forever. You now own an asset within your business. [25:38.4]
Marketing agencies, they want to charge you $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 per month in perpetuity. They, you are a cash cow to them. They want that money forever. It's just, I have a lot of respect for marketing agencies. I love what they do, but I'm just telling you as an advocate for you, as someone who cares about you, you really need to go in with your eyes and ears open. Besides the best marketing agencies can still only work with good stuff. You cannot multiply zeros. You should not put lipstick on a pig. You should not put chandeliers in a haunted house. They, you cannot go to them and say, I have absolutely nothing. Will you create something amazing for me, that makes a ton of money and makes me $10 million in the next couple of years, they might smile at you and say, yes, sir, absolutely. Or yes, ma'am, we'll do that for you. We can absolutely do that. All you gotta do is sign on the dotted line and pay $3,000 a month. Listen to me if they could do that, don't you think they would do it for their own business? Take a look. Now I'm not saying that I'm some Saint or whatever. I'm not saying I'm perfect, but here's what I've got going for me. [26:41.4]
I have been emailing daily every single day for years. I kinda sorta know what to do there. Guess what I tell financial advisors to do? Email marketing. I have been running ads for a long time, long time for multiple businesses. I've seen behind the scenes of a lot of these things. Guess what I tell financial advisors do every so often? To run profitable online ads. I even included a free or recorded a free 42-minute video, literally titled - "How Financial Advisors Can Run Profitable Online Ads...", which you can watch over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/ads. So, I run ads. I tell financial advisors to run ads. Okay? Like I tell financial advisors to get clients with LinkedIn, to pay attention to LinkedIn. Guess where I spend most of my social media time? LinkedIn. So, I am not one of these agencies who are like, heck yeah, financial advisors, you can get clients with email and I'm sending you a direct message on LinkedIn. It's like, if email work, then why didn't you get me to sign up for your email list? Hmm…something to think about. [27:38.5]
There's a very popular financial advisor marketing agency that reached out to me to build backlinks. They wanted a back link on TheAdvisorCoach.com website, and they were using a third-party SEO service to do this. I am not making this up. I am not joking. There was an agency out there that literally, I swear to you sells SEO packages to financial advisers. All they are doing is taking your money and hiring a third-party SEO agency. It's not even them. And they are just taking the margin. It's called white labeling. This is what the, what it is. If you just Google white label business, white label SEO, white label marketing agency, that's all they're doing. So, I respect the hustle. I love it. I love to see people, you know, with ingenuity and marketing skills. I really do respect it, but I think it's a little scammy, I think is a low scummy at the end of the day, where you are reaching out to financial advisors and you're saying, we can help you with your SEO. And we just need to charge you $2,000 a month to do it. And you hire a white label, SEO agency that's not even you. And you just collect the thousand dollar per month difference. It's just not my style. It's not what I do. It's not something I believe in. [28:48.5]
I cannot have an agency say, yeah, we know how to rank you a Google and then just hire someone else because they really don't know how to rank in Google. And they are just lying to financial advisors. So sorry for that rant there, I guess. But back to my original point about putting lipstick on a pagan chandeliers and haunted houses and all that. You can only give them good stuff. Like you cannot give them crappy systems. If you don't have a way to follow up, if you don't have a way to execute, then it won't matter. It will not matter. I have seen so many different advertising agencies, so many different marketing agencies over the years, the ones that have the most success are the ones who are working with winners. If someone already has an advertising budget that is getting a 2X ROI of good marketing agency can turn around and make that 4 or 5, 6, 7, maybe 10X. Okay. But if an advertising campaign is losing money, it's very rare that they can get it to be a superstar. [29:45.3]
And by the way, if you don't outsource your marketing, you will have the finger or your finger on the pulse of your market, which can carry over elsewhere. Let's see that you respond to a piece of marketing in your industry and you see that and you go down the rabbit hole. You can immediately make changes with your marketing. Let's say that you are running Facebook ads and you see people responding to a specific Facebook headline. You can quickly pivot and bring that up in a phone call and see if the person responds, when you're making your follow-up call. You can put that in an email, in a subject line, you can put it into your social media account. You by not outsourcing your marketing, you know what is going on. You have a lot of information coming your way. You can compress time and when you compress time, you become faster and being faster is an advantage in business. [30:32.5]
So those are my thoughts for outsourcing. As always, I love to hear from you leave a review if you like this episode and make sure you check out the inner circle newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, who knows you might find out that you don't need to outsource as much as you thought or you might take some of the systems in that newsletter and outsource them right away. It depends on where you are in your business right now. Either way, I appreciate you and I want to say, thank you for listening. I will catch you next week. [31:00.6]
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