You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Financial advisors, welcome to another episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I very rarely do guest episodes, but I wanted to do this guest episode this week because I have an absolute rock star superstar, someone who has a great business, someone who is engaged in multiple marketing strategies exactly the way that I teach. His philosophy is aligned with mine.
He's got a book. He's got a podcast. He’s got a fantastic website. He's involved in some charitable organizations. He's the CEO of his own nonprofit, which is major, major league. I love this stuff. I love what he is doing. It is Elliott Kallen, CEO of Prosperity Financial. I actually have his website pulled up right now, ProsperityFinancialGroup.com. [01:12.8]
I'm going to let him introduce himself because I'm sure he can do it better than I can. He has been on several podcast episodes. He's a great guest and I'm honored to have him today. Elliot, take it away.
Elliot: Thank you so much, James. I love that introduction. I’m honored. I don't hear that. I wish I heard that a little bit more for my children. That would make my day more complete.
James: Tell me about it.
Elliot: Yeah, so thank you for having me on. I've been a financial advisor and CEO now for 30 years here in California, Northern California. I'm originally from the New York, New Jersey market. We still say “coffee,” “talk.” I haven't lost that accent. I'm the CEO of three organizations at this point and that is Prosperity Financial Group. Prosperity Wealth Management. Prosperity Wealth Management handles on a national level. But you put the two of those companies together, we're just shy of a billion dollars in total assets between those two. And I am CEO of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity called A Brighter Day or ABrighterDay.info. [02:10.1]
I've been receiving your newsletter for a couple of years now and I read that religiously with a pen in my hand, looking for a nugget out of every issue. Sometimes I read these on a plane two in a row, because I fly a lot. We have 60 of our own podcasts out there. Plus, I've been on probably another 60 shows on top of that as a guest speaker. I teach on leadership. I teach on entrepreneurship and I teach on giving back. For me, media and marketing go hand in hand.
James: Thank you for mentioning the newsletter. Your check is in the mail. No, but, seriously, I appreciate that, and looking for one nugget is exactly the right way that I want financial advisors to approach the newsletter. I've said many times in emails and the podcast, it's written in a buffet style. You would not enter a buffet trying to get every last morsel of food. It would do far more harm than good. [03:03.5]
Like I said, I'm looking at your website. One of the things, financial advisors, I want to point out that Elliot does really well that I think you can model, he has a button right above the fold on his website, it says, “Call us,” and has his phone number. When you click that button, it actually brings up a pop up to, guess what? Call him. Exactly what the button says, and I really wish more financial advisors did that, because while I love email, I love forms, I love the calendars, I love the schedulers—and by the way, he also has all of those things—sometimes you just want to put a button in front of people, and if they want to call you, they can call you.
This is just for my personal curiosity. Have you noticed an even split between people who book and people who call, or people who email? What is the breakdown of that?
Elliot: It's a really good question there, James. It's not even close, though. The people who book appointments, and I want to tell you that it's maybe 5% of the people that look at your website. I don't want you to think it's 50%.
James: Sure. [04:00.0]
Elliot: When we invest significant dollars in our website. It's very robust. We've used multiple outside third parties and in-house parties to fix that and make that exciting. They make appointments. They’ve got my calendar, that's great. The number of the ones that call are few and far between. It does happen. But I'll tell you where it comes in much handier and that is if I met somebody and then they got to the website rather than ice cold.
Ice cold has the results that you would think of it having pretty cold on the temperature scale, low probability of success, because there are people that are surfing and they maybe sent me a note along with a half a dozen others on a Saturday afternoon. Right? But if I met them Saturday, this past Saturday and I went to a winery party up in Napa, and I live just south of Napa, and we're very into wine. I've got a 1,000-bottle wine room of Cabernets myself, and Cabernet, Debauchery, [unclear 04:51.6]. [04:52.0]
When I talk to people, people will say, “He really knows what he's talking about. What do you do for a living?” and I was grateful enough that the host of the party that I've given one of our books to—the book Driven by Elliot Kallen, which is behind me—I've given him a book and signed it for him maybe six months ago. He’d say, “Elliot, I want you to meet some people,” and he’d introduced me as “Meet Elliot Kallen. He's not just a big red wine lover. He's a successful financial advisor,” and that really made a difference. Then those people, I'm just noticing, were on my website in the last 48 hours checking me out, so that's what that can do. Then once said to me this morning, “Reach out to me, please. Here's my email address and phone number.”
James: That’s awesome.
Elliot: So, that’s what it does. It's much more supportive than it is as a primary.
James: You hit the nail on the head, it is there to build trust, credibility and rapport once someone has entered some other way. Now, do people go to the website cold? Absolutely. But like you said, it's just a small percentage and I'm glad that you're thinking accurately about that. I also love that you brought up the wine tastings and being below Napa, because that's a perfect segue into what I want to talk about next. I love your firm trademark. “If it's not money, it's personal.” What does that mean to you? And how do you use that throughout your business? [06:06.8]
Elliot: “If it's money, it's personal.” You added the word “not.”
James: Yes. Oh, okay, “If it's money, it's personal.” Yes.
Elliot: But here's what we realized early on in our career as we were building the company that money or investments or security, or whatever way you want it, is different for every single person. For instance, my mother, who came from the Depression and was at a concentration camp in Europe and a horrible youth, she always felt she was just $1 away from poverty, losing it all, because she grew up during the Depression having nothing, and then was in prison for most of World War II, a horrible life. So, for her money meant “I just don't want to spend your dad's money. I know he passed away, but I don't want to spend it.” That's very different than, let's say, you or myself or my children who feel like “Well, money, I’ll just get a different job” type of deal. [06:59.5]
James: Yeah.
Elliot: If we took the assumption to every one of our clients, and I have about 120 clients—the firm has 1,000. I have about 120—and we understand when we talk to them, it’s a personal conversation, and you've got to find out what that means to them.
For them, money means “I can sleep at night.” For somebody else, money means “I can live my dream of traveling around the world, maybe first class.” For somebody else, “I can visit my grandchildren more often.” For somebody else, “I can help get a car for my kids when they need it or buy a house, or just be there,” and for somebody else, “I just want more money that when I die, my last check bounces,” that old-fashioned one. It's really important, and so I tell everybody, if I don't know the purpose of why we're collecting money for your retirement or what retirement is for, then I really don't know you.
James: That's very true, and that check-bouncing one, that would terrify me. That's just an example of why it is so personal. I would never in a million years want to do that. I would never want to come that close. What are some of the questions that you ask people when they're in front of you to kind of dig into that and to find out what money is to them? [08:06.0]
Elliot: I went to a seminar years ago and I can't remember the person, and his seminar was “What does money mean to you?” I don't really ask that question because I don't know what the answer is to that.
James: It’s vague.
Elliot: Yeah, you might say security is peace of mind, and we're not any smarter at the end of that. But having money means something different to everybody, and so I dig. To them, I say, “Listen, when you're in retirement, let me tell you the top five hobbies that people like to have in retirement, and then tell me if that's why we're saving.”
The first one is travel. Everybody likes to travel. But not everybody is a travel bug and travel for me is going to Europe because I lived there at one point. Travel for somebody else is picking up the grandchildren in your RV and being the national parks guy, the national parks grandparent. To somebody else, travel means that my child lives in Dallas, Texas, “I'd like to go down here once a month and play with my grandchildren.” So, that’s travel. It means different things to different people. [09:00.4]
James: Right.
Elliot: Then golf obviously is way up there, and what does golf mean? I play golf, but I don't love golf. If I never play golf again, I’d survive. But for other people, they can't wait to go to Ireland and Scotland with their buddies and play more golf over there, so that’s what kind of golf is. It was in there.
How about having dinner out with your spouse or significant other, or dating, if you're single, whenever you want at the restaurant that you want to go to? That's what money can mean. “Look, we've eaten at home and sacrificed our whole life. I want to go eat out a little bit, enjoy this.” So, that means that. Or “I want to go to New York City more. I want to go to the shows more often. I want to enjoy some culture.”
Just for other people, money has different value-driven goals to it and you’ve got to dig for them, and it's not just one. It could be [many.] I mean, I want to see my grandchildren, too, but I want to travel all over Europe and the world. They're not mutually exclusive. Some of my time isn’t mutually exclusive because that's the most finite part of my life. It’s my time. I can only do one thing at a time here, but having the money that lets me do that. [09:59.1]
It's also what I work for. I don't work for my paycheck. I work for one day, because I love what I do, and, James, what I work for is having some pot of gold that I would be able to do anything I want to do when I want to do it. I don't care about the race car. I can't even get in and out of it because I've had too many back surgeries, so I don't think about the race car anymore. I don't care about the big house in a winery. I'd love them, the big house in a winery, but it's just my wife and I. What am I going to do with that?
So, those have different values. But for other people, it's about the big show house. I have a friend with three houses. That's really important to him to have multiple houses in these locations, because it reminds me a little bit about Vanderbilt and Biltmore and all these places that they have houses around the country and he likes that. But I travel more than he does, because he's locked into his houses.
James: One of my mentors is a guy named Tai Lopez and all the little marketers out there will be like, Oh, is that the guy who had the ad about the knowledge and like, Here in My Garage? Yes. If you know him from that, then that's what he does. But he actually is a part-owner of Bodybuilding.com, RadioShack. He is a mover and shaker. Very similar to you, Elliot. [11:06.5]
One of the things that he has just drilled into my head is that people have four basic motivations. Now, people very rarely have just one. They usually have one, two or three, or all four, but they're usually dominant in one, and those four motivations are mastery, where they're mastering something in their life. That sounds like you, and I'm driven by mastery as well, just wanting to become better and better every day. There's movement, which is travel, people going to different places. That also sounds a little bit like you. Used to be like me and I got the travel bug and moved on from it. Then you have mating, which is basically your family and your children and a spouse, people who are driven by that. Then you have material objects, so that person you mentioned with the three houses, that person sounds driven by material.
You have to know what it is for you, and I think that you can see that as a financial advisor and I think other financial advisors have an amazing window into seeing what drives people. I do think it is a mistake to assume that it's one or the other. That's why I don't like the cookie-cutter questions, meaning, you're assuming that someone is driven by something that you are driven by or that another client is driven by, and that has always fascinated me, so I'm glad that you brought that up. [12:19.8]
One of the things that I specifically wanted to ask you about people's motivations and the behavior behind investing, one of the little niches that your company has is capitalizing on downturns and I love that. I've made some money during downturns. How do you do that in your business or how do you approach that with your clients?
Elliot: That’s a difficult question, because downturns are a double-edged sword. Clients that are in, fully invested, which most of them are, of course, they hate downturns. They absolutely hate downturns because they go down and they can't sleep at night and they're upset. Everybody loves to make money. Everybody hates losing money. [12:58.2]
But for when we talk about it, there's a correction coming. I think in 2024, we’ll probably have at least one quarter that’s down 15%, at least. Okay, I don't think the year is down. I think the quarter is down. There's going to be a correction. We just caught up a little bit too fast. These things come and I tell everybody, this is an opportunity, and when that comes, let's realign and let's be prepared for what comes out of it.
If I'm touting investments, I can tell one sector that comes out of a downturn really fast usually or an economic downturn are small companies that are growth-oriented. But they also get beaten up during a downturn. So, let’s be low on today, but let's be aware of the fact that a market makes a V down or a hockey stick up, whatever we want to call that, we want to be prepared that we're in the right place at the right time for when it recovers, lined up that whole time.
James: Keep in mind, financial advisors and anyone who's listening, this is not necessarily financial advice. In fact, you shouldn't consider it financial advice at all. We're here giving you some entertainment and maybe some education along the way, so don’t take this as financial advice. [13:58.0]
However, I loved the 2020 downturn. I loved October 2022. I just wish I had more cash. I kicked myself. I was just like, Oh, I should have done a little bit more. I really should have leveraged a little bit more of what I had and pushed a little harder. I imagine I'm in the minority there, really just loving these things. How does that conversation go? If someone comes to you, and I love that you set the expectation that, hey, there's going to be a downturn, but if someone comes to you is like, Elliott, I'm afraid right now, the stock market is going down or my investments are losing value, at least on paper. What do you say to comfort that person?
Elliot: We talk about what the money is for again, James, so what are we saving for? Then what's the opportunity in front of us? I want you to know that everybody runs their firm in different ways. You've got you know thousands and thousands of listeners here that if they're sometimes in a big brokerage house, they have to put their money wherever the investment committee is telling them to put their money, the clients’ money. That's one aspect. [14:57.0]
There are other people who are at the opposite end of that like myself that only run their own portfolios and can tweak it whenever they want. They’re very different and it's not right versus wrong, so we’ve got to be clear about that, too, because they all work. Those big brokerage houses have been around longer than I've been alive, so obviously they've got staying power on that.
You've got to make sure that you're talking to your client about why we have the holding, not just what we have. But it's really easy today to talk about why we're only in the top five or six internet cybersecurity or whatever holdings, because they're the top performers in the last 18 months. That's a really easy conversation to have. Tell me why you're holding value stocks, things that pay dividends that are the biggest underperformers in large companies. Why would you still hold them? And that's a conversation you should have about soft landings or we want to protect some downside, or the stock market doesn't go just one direction and we want to be prepared to make money in all directions. [15:59.2]
I love that because I get to tweak all the time. I get to play money manager here quite a bit, and I do that. I just did that again this morning, tweaking, so this is an area that is doing a little bit better than the other and I can look at it every day. I don't want to be a lazy money manager and just say, “I'm buying and holding and forgetting,” because I don't believe it just forgetting. It worked five years ago. It doesn't have anything to do with today. You've got to be in the moment on that.
So, for your FAs that are listening to this, it is talk to your clients about the why of why you have this in a portfolio, and that you are just as not keen on watching it as they are of them watching it, because that's trust and confidence, and you can never make up for the word “trust” ever. There's nothing you can do to make up for the word “trust.” Once you lose trust, it's over.
James: Okay, how do you build trust? What are some strategies that you've used to build trust? I agree it's paramount in a business. [16:58.4]
Elliot: Yeah. Trust is all about communication. It's not about your degrees. A degree may get you in the door, a CFP, a CFA, a master's in something. That opens up the door, but that doesn't get you to keep the business. Trust is this—can you look them in the eyes? Can you speak from the heart? Can you communicate with them more than just once a year? Can you let them know that you're thinking about them when things are not going well and then say, “I'm calling you up. I just want you to know I know we're down. I'm watching it every single day. I just want you to know that”?
James: I love that.
Elliot: Yeah, you’ve got to be able to call when it’s bad news and be able to use the phrase. I use the phrase, “Listen, I have no good news to give you right now on your portfolio. I'm watching every day and I realigned it for when the market turns around. I'm not quite sure when it's going to happen. It's pretty soon and we're in a good position for when that happens.”
James: That's really nice. I like that and I like the proactive approach, because they're thinking about it. Some clients are out there. “Hey, why hasn't my financial advisor contacted me? What is he doing? What am I paying him for?” All of these thoughts are going through their minds, and if you're out there thinking that they're not, then you're just being naïve. [18:10.6]
Elliot, since this is the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast, what I would like to do is to dig into some marketing stuff specifically, so I'd like to chat about the following. What has worked best for you so far, in terms of marketing your business?
Elliot: James, I've always been a strong marketing person. This is not my first rodeo. This is my third company that I've started and have been very involved with marketing. I started trying to improve what I did every day with Anthony Robbins in the ’80s and doing that and walking on fire and building up confidence in that direction. Zig Ziglar and Ken Blanchard and all these people that I've met with over the years. I'm very much into self-improvement and company improvement. I think you can get better every day and I come to work with a passion to do better today than I did yesterday, so that’s where it begins. [18:58.8]
Then you look for what's working in marketing, and marketing means “What am I doing to improve my ability to attract new clients without losing the clients I have?” because you have to do both. You can't have so many clients leaving the back door believing that the front door is meaningless. You've got to protect that back door and go in through the front door. It's a lot like playing sports. If you're a sports person, I played football and ice hockey. It's great if you could score four goals, but if you're giving up five every game, that's not going to really help the world, and that's the same thing in here.
From the very beginning on, we started to look at the early days of building the websites and I used third parties for that because I didn't have any ability to do it, and I worked with Lincoln in those days, so I had no knowledge of marketing, no idea about how to do anything at all and kind of worthless on the marketing. The other marketing idea was to go by American Funds and let it do it for you. That was their version of marketing and that's completely out of touch with what has to happen. [19:57.3]
Today, we went from having maybe 15 different companies that we used on the outside to, in 1999, we brought all this in house and created a marketing department, so I actually have three in house marketing people that work for me now and that one person just says nothing but social media. Another person does writing and creative materials, and the third person is kind of the head of the whole thing and he's just doing a lot of everything. Then he sometimes outsources something because he feels somebody could make our podcast look a lot more like CNN and Fox than him doing it, and that's a good example of him knowing his own limitations on there.
James: A key win.
Elliot: Mostly in house at some outside. I think you've actually spoken to my guy, Chris, on that, who does a fabulous job. We really liked the idea of what can we do every day to attract new clients, and we're still doing the old-fashioned dinners, but I think those dinners, the cost of doing dinners has become so high that the wall of success is just so steep that even if you succeed, you've lost money, so you need to rethink whether that's a good program, the dinners, the old-fashioned steak dinner and Country Club dinner. That works. It just works sparingly like it used to, compared to where it used to work. [21:11.5]
But we think there are ways to market people and think about what clients are doing every day when they're not with you, if they're on the internet or if they're doing things. And how can you get your face in front of them doing what they like to do instead of what you like to do? I'll give you a good example. If you know that a lot of your clients play golf, should your face be on something at golf courses. If you know that everybody in your community goes to Safeway, should your face be at Safeway somewhere? Should the words be at Safeway? Those are ways to think of how to get in front of your clients within their world, not in your world.
I tried a mailing with Travel + Leisure magazine, very unsuccessful, but I felt most of my clients probably subscribed to Travel + Leisure magazine. It turns out most of my clients love travel and leisure, but not the magazine, the difference. But I didn't know that until after I did it and I flopped and fell on my face. [22:09.4]
By the way, when we're talking about marketing, we're talking about three steps forward and two steps back. Sometimes the opposite, because it doesn't all work. Most of it doesn't work, but the persistence of doing it, James, and knowing that you're going to get your nose bloodied on a regular basis.
One of the Rocky movies that I always talk to my kids about, this phrase, and I think he's talking to his son in Rocky IV or V or LIX or however many Rockys are. But he says, “You don't understand. It's not how many times you get knocked down. It's how many times you get back up,” and marketing is all about that. It's not how many times it fails. It’s which one of these works? And, by the way, what worked in 2023 may not work in 2024. You’ve got to be able to rotate.
When I first started at Lincoln in the ’90s, they told me, “Listen, whatever you decide to do, I want you to remember that financial advisors have this tendency to find out what works and then stop doing it.” [23:05.8]
James: Amen to that.
Elliot: Yeah, so find out what works and do more of it. Then pivot and shift and write down, “This worked in ’23. It's not working right now. Why don't we bring this back in about the fourth quarter of ’24?” because maybe we'll get it. We've gotten a little stale. Maybe our clients are getting a little bored with a dinner and an education dinner or the place you're having it is no longer very exciting. They’re used to the Italian meal or the Mexican meal, or the theme meals at country clubs give. They're just bored with that. They want something different.
Now, is $100 a person, $140 a person enough? I don't know. That seems pretty high and I've done that. My friends in Milwaukee have still advisors in Milwaukee. They do beer and pretzel meetings.
James: Yeah, I’ll sign up for that. [23:53.1]
Elliot: Yeah, beer, pretzel and hotdog meetings, you know? And I'm thinking, holy cow, I would love to do that. But that's not a California thing. I can't. I can't pull that off in California. But in Milwaukee, in certain places, I could do that. Or in Kansas City, maybe I can do you know a barbecue, and barbecue, beer and money, something like that, whatever it might be. We live in too sophisticated an area to do that. Probably New York and Chicago have the same thing, although in Chicago, I would do deep-dish pizza and money. I think that's a great thing.
James: That can get expensive, too. Financial advisors, I want you to pay attention where he says three steps forward, two steps back. That's absolutely true. One thing I would like to interject to make sure that the listeners get it. From 2015 to 2019, I did a bunch of research into what makes financial advisors successful. The recent podcast episodes of the show, Financial Advisor Marketing, was about what I've learned from 10,000-plus conversations with advisors. A lot of the stuff is just from that research also, and I discovered that thinking like a financial advisor is one of the most important things that determines marketing success. [24:56.8]
The reason I bring that up now is because let's imagine that you have a basket of ETFs or individual stocks, or whatever you want to call it, right? Some are going down, some are going up, but in the aggregate, over the long term, the reason you're investing, hopefully, is to have that money grow over time. Your marketing is no different, even within subsets of marketing strategy. Some emails within email marketing do really well. Others do really poorly. Within social, some posts do really poorly, some do really well. But in the aggregate over the long term, the marketing should work.
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James: You mentioned the Travel + Leisure magazine not working for you. I want to know, what are some of the strategies that have not worked? So, Travel + Leisure magazine. Are there any others that have just completely flopped for you? [26:05.2]
Elliot: Oh, Cigar Aficionado?
James: What is that? Oh, the magazine, okay.
Elliot: The magazine. That went well. Generally, wealthy people, very male-dominated like cigars and, yeah, but they don't like finance on cigars. They don't do that. I think what has to hurt us is the buying of the names from these periodicals like Travel + Leisure, and assuming that just because I have the name, it says James Pollard, you'll open it if I referenced Travel + Leisure, and you won't.
We’re spammed in a way that we've never been spammed before. All, everybody listening here. I mean, I get close to 400 emails a day because I have three email accounts open all the time and so there's tons of junk, and sometimes I'm going through my emails at a red light. I don't recommend that, by the way. It's illegal in California and dangerous, but I do do it. [26:59.5]
So, I think you've got to understand, if I'm doing that, so does everybody else doing stuff like that, or doing it in a bathroom or doing it in crazy things, and they're giving you three seconds to look, so you’ve got to be able to get their names. And if they know you, you might get 30 seconds. If they don't know you, it would be the worst. So, you find a way, find a way to get them to want to receive what you're sending them. That's a trait. That's an art. “Can I send you something? Can I forward this to you?” I mean, I even get phone calls on that. “Elliot, I like what you do. Can I forward this to you?” “Sure, go ahead.” Maybe they’ve got that. They've got a better chance of me opening it up.
But other than that, we don't want to be spam. We don't want to be junk mail. We don't want to be stopped at the receptionist desks. I mean, we all have that same problem, which is that we're being stopped with an iron fist because everybody's too busy.
James: That's true. A lot of times when I talk about email marketing, people say, “Do you mean cold email?” No, I don't mean cold email and it's precisely for the reasons that you've described. You're getting 400-plus a day. I think that's the average CEO. I mean, I think you're average. I think that's right. I should Google that and fact-check that, but I think the average CEO gets at least a couple hundred emails per day. [28:11.4]
I don't think I get 400, but I'm up there, though. At least 100-plus, right? And it's just unbearable sometimes. They podcast pitch, and I accepted yours because you're a newsletter subscriber and I really want to be there for newsletter subscribers, but you’ve got to realize, I think so far today, it's currently 01:33 when we are recording this. I've gotten over 10 so far. Just delete, delete, delete, and sometimes these people are not good fits for the show. They're real estate agents. No, this is Financial Advisor Marketing. Or they have a supplement store. No, this is Financial Advisor Marketing. And I get so many of them, so I empathize with that and I appreciate you sharing what did not work.
One of the marketing strategies that I like that you have done that I think financial advisors should pay attention to is that you wrote a book. You have a book called Driven. What inspired you to write that book? How have you used it as a marketing tool? [29:04.0]
Elliot: The word “driven,” the book Driven, it's not about stocks and bonds and mutual funds. I don't think the world needs another book on that at all.
James: I agree.
Elliot: But what I thought is I had an interesting story talking about leadership. This is the mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make, and it's a little less prevalent in our industry, but, look, when I was at Lincoln, they told me the day I started, “We have a 95% five-year turnover, so good luck being in that 5%.” I'm sure it's more normal than the exception of that big turnover in our industry, and most of it is because they can't market or it's not for them, or whatever reason. Right? I understood the odds were against me doing that.
I've started several companies and for some people in the entrepreneurship world, they think the path to success looks like Facebook or Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, that “I'm going to do this long enough, and at some point, I'll take it public or I’ll sell my company, and I'll cash out a billionaire. And if they could do it, I could do it. I'm smarter than them anyway.” [30:09.0]
I thought there's a real misconception out there that success and entrepreneurship is now easy, and it's the word “easy” that really got to me because “easy” is not in a rulebook. That button at Staples used to give out that said, “Easy,” and you hit it, remember that red button? It doesn't exist in real life. Your marriage isn't easy. Raising your kids isn't easy. Running an entity isn't easy. Securing bank financing for your growth, that's not easy. Handling receivables and payables, that's not easy. Finding clients that are going to stay with you for 10, 20 years, never leave you, never question, that's near impossible, but certainly not easy. So, you’ve got to think about that.
So, I teamed up with another person that had an idea and the two of us wrote that book Driven. He wrote. Adam and I wrote that book and we have opposite chapters. He's a young guy that came out of a financial business and quit the financial industry. He said it wasn't for him and he went into lead mass media and website, and so forth, and I hung in. I hung in there. [31:13.0]
For some people, and I'll use my finger, some people, they think their success line looks like the stock market. It's a mountain chart. “It has a couple little rows that go down, but for the most part, I start here and I finish here, and this has been great. All three of my kids are going to college, become successful. They're going to give me a dozen grandchildren and life is really, really good.” And yes, James, there are people who have that result, but I'm not one of them. For me, that line looks like this and sometimes backward [crosstalk].
James: Yeah, I get it. Yeah.
Elliot: Yeah, and including the loss of a son and including running out of money in one of my businesses where I was like, Okay, what do I do? I can't cover payroll this week. How do I secure payroll by just a week? And I'm up at 03:00 in the morning trying to think about this every single night. [32:01.4]
As an entrepreneur, not just a financial advisor, because I am an entrepreneur. Immediately every day of the week. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got a team of people that work for me. I've got mouths to feed, lights to keep on, marketing to do every day. I think about that. That's the entrepreneur world. How do you make that successful without it eating you from the inside out? And sometimes you have an easier time, sometimes a harder time, and that's why I wrote the book to let you know that perseverance is one of the key attributes of success.
James: I agree.
Elliot: Sometimes, you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness and integrity, and a core value to see through your dream, and bend and model your dream as necessary, because just because you have a dream in 2020 doesn’t mean it's effective in 2024. You may have to model that a little bit and scrape away some edges and add some more clay to it, depending on what's going on in the marketplace, because you have to grow as an individual. [33:01.0]
You have to grow as a financial advisor. You always have to grow as an entrepreneur, and one day you have to step away because you're getting too old for this, too burnt out, and if you're not aware of what phase you're in, and thinking through that phase, you're suddenly going to be facing 70 years old in a mirror and thinking, Now what?
James: There are seasons of life and seasons of business. You have to be able to identify them. I think Tony Robbins said that. You mentioned Tony Robbins earlier. He is a big proponent of constant and never-ending improvement, and, wait, that's from Awaken the Giant Within. That's actually one of my favorite books. I love that. I know Tony is under fire right now because he has a new book out that's private equity or something. I don't know. I don't keep up with this stuff. But he has some great work. He’s influenced me.
Elliot: I've had that on my bathroom wall for decades.
James: I love that.
Elliot: Because I love improvement, and I walked on fire with him and I'm a big Tony Robbins fan. I wish he didn't touch the financial services business. He teamed up with somebody else in the Midwest and wrote a book with them and he's doing that. I think he's touching in areas he shouldn't touch on. But that's his business and he's going to do what's right for him. [34:07.6]
James: Yeah, that's a story for another day. You also have a podcast, so a fellow podcaster in the house. I love that, too. What made you start a podcast? Because podcasting can be brutal.
Elliot: It's very funny, I’ve got to tell you. It's called Meet the Expert with Elliot Kallen, because you can't trademark “Meet the Expert.” There are too many of them out there. Meet the Expert with Elliot Kallen. Back when I brought all my marketing in house in 2019, here's what also helps a little bit. COVID hit in 2020 and I had a marketing team in place, and I said, “We have to communicate with every one of our clients and the people out there, because they are scared to death that the world is coming to an end. We are going to have a global plague and the world could disappear, as well as their life savings.”
So, we said, “Why don't we put a podcast together?” and we came up with the name right away, Meet the Expert with Elliot Kallen. It's not that complicated of a name. We started to do it in our early years and it looks like an old black and white movie compared with today. We started to do that and people started listening to it. [35:10.7]
At first it was live, always live, and then we realized, wait, let's tape it, dress it up, and then put it out there and maybe put some money behind it advertising it. It's pretty amazing. We're now in the top 2% of all financial podcasts globally, and we're averaging, I just got the report yesterday, we're averaging 16,000 people per podcast.
James: You're more than 2%.That's more than 2%. Where did you get to 2%? Is that from ListenNotes.com or something?
Elliot: Yes, Listen Notes.
James: That is not accurate. I think you've got to be more than 2%. There's just no way, right? I am affiliated with the Podcast Factory, ThePodcastFactory.com. They handle all of this stuff. I'm telling you, you're more than 2%, so 16,000 per show is probably if you're not 1%, you're close to it. You have a 1% podcast, in my opinion, and you can quote me on that. [36:06.2]
Elliot: Thank you.
James: That’s really cool.
Elliot: We're doing it. We're bringing a lot of interesting topics. We're just about to make a shift in the show. I've been bringing people like yourself, experts in the industry. Maybe you're managing money. Maybe you're having a neat niche like social security or electric cars, or something like that, and I've been bringing experts, about 25 minutes a show.
We're just about to change that model a little bit, too. Okay, let's bring experts in all industries. Let's be broader than we've been and let's bring interesting people there that people want to listen to us. Instead of 25 minutes to make it 45 minutes and we become a more interesting show.
We've done a couple of shows on wine because I'm such a wine nut, a couple shows on exercise, and it's hard to believe how many people commented to us how much they liked those shows on wine and exercise and nutrition, things that I know a little bit about and I'm certainly no expert. And then stress and depression because I deal with a lot for the charity on stress and oppression. We brought that. People like that, so we’re broadening out, not narrowing out. [37:07.6]
There are people who say you should always be very narrow, because you want to serve a one-inch wide, one-mile down market because that's more effective and we've been doing that, but we have been getting feedback to get broader. Still dig into what makes people successful, how they think so you can get some good nuggets from the show, but change it that they're not just in a financial business. They could be in any kind of business.
James: I think you've stumbled across something that I've discovered also, where sometimes people ask me, “Hey, you didn't talk much about marketing in that episode.” You're right, I didn't and I did it for a reason, and there are certain things and certain stories and certain topics that do a lot better. Some of the most successful shows that I've had, some of the most successful emails, have absolutely nothing to do with financial advisors or marketing.
But that is a little too deep. I don't want to dig into that. I do want to ask you, if you could go back in time and give yourself some marketing advice, in your very first year as a financial advisor, what would you say to yourself? [38:13.1]
Elliot: If I were to do something over, James, I wish I looked more into buying other advisors’ books of business early on. I got that advice from a very good friend of mine who had been a financial advisor in New Jersey when I first went into business and he said, “Elliott, it is too hard to start from scratch. Buy books.”
I'm horrible at taking some of that advice and I didn't listen to him, but that would have been easy because over my first year of Lincoln, I had twins. Within a month of joining Lincoln, my wife gave birth to twins. I got one day off helping her and I had to go back to work. It was a hard time and I took a second job at 90 to make it because I didn't want to lose my dream, so I sold memberships at a 24-hour Nautilus. That was Nautilus Fitness. [39:06.1]
Then I was just working around the clock trying to make this happen and I think I could have gone to McDonald's and gotten a raise. I think that's the hardest way you could do it. You should look into what person older wants to leave the industry, wants to take you under his or her wing, wants to do something nice with you, nice for their clients. That's the advice I wish I gave myself.
James: That's similar to when I'm helping family members do in the Pollard household. I'm like, look at people who are-- but not financial advice businesses. More like HVAC and electrical and plumbing. Get into the trades. I can help you. I can grow that thing like you wouldn't believe. We can get on Google. We can do SEO. We can do content. See, I've got the skills to pay the bills, and if you just give me a local service business, I will grow the heck out of it. So, I believe that, for sure. [39:55.8]
There's a fantastic book that I love called Buy Then Build and that kind of is aligned with that thinking, and I wouldn't suggest that for every single financial advisor out there, but I think if you think like an entrepreneur and you know capital allocation and you know how to manage your money, then absolutely buy another financial advisor’s business and treat it for what it is, an investment in your portfolio or your business. So, I really like that.
We're coming up on time here, but I do want to make sure that we address your nonprofit. I want to make sure that you can share that, because I think you're doing some great work and I want to shine a spotlight on that. Can you share a little bit about A Brighter Day?
Elliot: Thank you, James, for doing that. It's a charity, A Brighter Day, or ABrighterDay.info is the website. Eight years ago, my son who was 19 at the time, a sophomore at the University of Montana, went up to the highway, no drugs, no alcohol, waited for a truck to come by and jumped in front of it and took his life. We were frantically looking for him because no teenager turns off their phone. His phone was off and we were frantically looking for him. [41:01.1]
At 06:30at night, a Friday night, Federal Express showed up with a six-page suicide note and, in it, he said, “Mom and Dad, I've been thinking about this for a long time. I never would have told you how I felt. I never would have asked for your help and I never would have taken your help.” Then we proceeded to go up to Montana to claim his body and identify it, it's a horrible story, and bring it back for burial.
I kept reading it. Even though it was six pages long, I kept reading that paragraph over and over and over and came back and said, “We've got to start some nonprofit, something that helps families not have to go through the devastation and destruction that we are just starting to go through in this process,” and that's how we formed A Brighter Day charity.
What it does is it builds resources for teenagers and their families on stress and depression, with a goal of stopping teen suicide, and we now are touching 5,000 to 10,000 families a month, a big number a month, and we've got a 24/7, all-50-state team text hotline, crisis hotline, where we get to speak to somebody within three minutes. [42:11.8]
We have an all-50-state live Zoom program with licensed counselors that both parents and teens can get help with, and we’ll pay for it. Counseling is $150 an hour. We don't want a family ever having to decide between feeding their other children and taking the one that needs help to get help. We don't want that to happen, so we pay for it.
Then we have so many things on our website and then we have a live Thursday night, a once-a-month event where parents can go in and either talk to an expert or talk with me directly on getting advice, because I share it from the point of view of a parent. I'm not a licensed therapist. I'm a parent and we share that. We’re trying to make a difference and, boy oh boy, there is so much stress and depression in that teenage world that we just want to have an impact, and we are. [42:58.8]
James: I imagine that a lot of the listeners to this show have teenage children, because a lot of them are in their late-30s, early-40s, 50s and 60s, and beyond. What are some of the risk factors that parents should be looking for when it comes to teenage depression? What are some of the warning signs? Could you share some of those, please?
Elliot: Yeah, what to look for, I can tell you that we all live on the phone. This is the enemy for your teenager, so if you can get that out of your teenager’s hands at dinner or in your car, or whatever you're doing it, that would be amazing to do because they're communicating.
Begin to look for social isolation. That's the number one warning sign of teens. They start to withdraw from their friends, from their family, from the things that they're having fun with, because they're not having fun. So, you have a Christmas dinner and your team says, “Mom, I'm bored. Can I go to my room instead?” and you say, “Sure.” That might not have anything to do with boredom, but they don't want to be at the family dinner. When you're having dinner, are they not talking to you? I have two boys and they communicate like they're cavemen, with grunts. You’ve got to get them to talk, not just how their day was. [44:06.7]
But you have to learn as a parent. You have to get really tight on those questions of what's going on with them and their friends, because if they're withdrawing, that's a real problem, because they might be withdrawing from class as well, because they're now thinking, I'm not going to be here anyway at some point. So, that’s number one.
Are you noticing a change in their sleep patterns? Are you noticing that they're awake when you're asleep? Have you noticed more moods than normal? Because teenagers are moody anyway. But now they're more moody. They're angry with you all the time. They're angry at them. “Why do you have to ask me that? Why do you have to do that?” All that stuff. That's a really big thing.
Then, finally, they just want nothing to do with anybody at all.
James: A lot of isolation, it seems.
Elliot: A lot of isolation. If you could look for that and then ask good questions, you might find out if a teenager is bordering on depression, and then you can decide what ways to help. You should go to our website, ABrighterDay.info, because there is no one way that works. [45:09.6]
Some teens will really react well to a text-in crisis hotline. Some teams won't even try. Some teams will react to Zoom programs, Zoom counseling. Some kids will try. Lots of kids won't react to live counseling. They don't want to be bothered. Some kids really react well to that. Some school counselors are really good. Some don't do it at all. You've got to find out what works, but you can't do nothing.
James: That's true.
Elliot: Inaction is not an acceptable outcome for a depressed teenager.
James: A very somber topic, but very important. I hope financial advisors take advantage of the resources, but whether you have children or not, if you're an aunt or an uncle and you're listening to this and you have teenagers in your family, this is a valuable resource. Be on the lookout for warning signs.
Elliot, one last question before we go. How can people get in touch with you if they'd like to do so?
Elliot: Oh, I'd love that. It’s ProsperityFinancialGroup.com. It's elliott@prosperityfinancialgroup.com, E-L-L-I-O-T, and my cell is 510-206-1103. [46:10.4]
James: Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. I enjoyed this episode, loved talking about what you did right, what you did wrong, what you learned. ProsperityFinancialGroup.com, financial advisors, if you want to check it out. Thank you so much for listening to the show, and I will catch you next week.
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