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: This episode is scheduled to come out on December 23, so I figured I'd do something different, because you've got the holiday season in full swing. I want to talk about book recommendations, and the reason I want to do that in this episode specifically is because a lot of financial advisors relax for a little bit around this time of year. I don't think you should take your foot off the gas completely, but I do think it's important that in between gingerbread cookies and opening presents and popping champagne for New Year's Eve and New Year's, it's important to relax and recharge so you can take off running in 2025. [01:05.0]
One of the things I'd like to challenge you to do is read at least one book by the end of the year. It doesn't have to be one of the books that I recommend here, but just read at least one. If you're listening to this episode, the first day it comes out, that means you have eight days left until January 1, 2025. If you get a book that's 240 pages, then all you have to do is read 30 pages per day, which isn't that much. If you read a page a minute, then it's only 30 pages per day.
What I'm going to do in this episode is talk about some of my favorite books. These are not necessarily marketing-specific and they definitely are not specific to financial advisors. These are just books that have influenced me and how I think, and how I've orchestrated my life. I've read hundreds and hundreds of books over the years, and these are a few that have made the biggest impact.
First, we have the Bible. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, because I think it speaks for itself. Even if you don't consider yourself a Christian or a religious person at all, I still think that you should have an intellectual understanding of what's inside and how it has shaped the foundation of our modern civilization, especially Western civilization. [02:08.5]
Actually, you could make a strong argument that we wouldn't even have the other books if it wasn't for the Bible, because the Bible was the most important factor in spreading literacy throughout the world. Other religions had sacred texts. The Bible isn't the first sacred text in the entire world. It's just not, but it was the first one that was spread throughout the world on that scale because the other religions didn't have the push to evangelize. The Bible had that, and when people shared the Bible, they were also spreading literacy.
I think it's a mistake to get to the end of your life not having read the Bible, cover to cover, at least once. Yes, read all of it, every single word. Don't just read the main stuff. Don't just read Genesis, and then Psalms and Proverbs, and then go to Revelation. No, don't do that. I know some people try to skim over the Minor Prophets and everything. No, everything is important. You should get through it at least once in your lifetime. [03:03.5]
The second book I'd like to recommend is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It seems like every time I mention this book, I get some pushback. There's somebody who messages me or emails me and says, “Oh, do you know the truth about Napoleon Hill?” Yeah, I kinda sorta know where you're going with this, because sometimes the pushback is from people who say they've read the book that they didn't like it, they don't see how it applies to their life, or it seemed too weird to them, they thought it was too mystical—and, I mean, I guess it kinda sorta is. That doesn't make it false, though.
Other times, the pushback is from people who say Napoleon Hill was a conman who made up all the stories he tells in Think and Grow Rich about him meeting people like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, that he just made it all up and he's just a conman. There are some popular online articles out there, and even a biography about Napoleon Hill called Lifetime of Riches, and they say bad things about Him—and, look, I don't know if they're true or not. All I know is that Think and Go Rich is not about Napoleon Hill himself. The book is about the principles you can use to acquire wealth in your life, and those principles are true, in my experience. I’ve found them to be true. [04:06.2]
One of the things I like to say is that the truth doesn't matter who tells it, or the truth is the truth, no matter who tells it. It doesn't matter if the worst person in the world tells you about gravity, because gravity is still real and it still works, whether you like it or not.
If you have read Think and Grow Rich and you have liked it, then I'm going to recommend that you read the final book that he published, which is, Grow Rich!: With Peace of Mind. Let's say he was a con man and a terrible person during his life. It seems like he cleaned up his act near the end of his life, because he was stressing the importance of being kind to others and not doing bad things, because nothing is more valuable than your peace of mind. So, maybe that's his lesson, if he really did all those bad things, that he realized that giving up his peace of mind was not worth it and that it's important to grow rich with peace of mind. [04:54.6]
The next book on my list, the third one I have here for you is The Outsiders by William Thorndike. I talk about this book all the time, and I love it. I reread it at least once per year. It profiles eight successful CEOs, including Warren Buffett, so financial advisors should pick it up for that reason. They love Warren Buffett. Warren is in this book.
The book discusses what those eight CEOs did differently than everyone else. The cool thing about these CEOs is that you can see their returns to shareholders, and you can plainly see that they outperform not only the S&P 500, but also everyone else in their industry. These are real results that are 100% verifiable. They cannot be faked.
If you read this book, one of the things you will discover is that these CEOs did not follow these popular, goofy management trends that ultimately ended up becoming fads. They did not just read airport books and follow those to become successful CEOs—and I think that's important for financial advisors to realize because I see so many advisors who just chase trends in their businesses. They do whatever is flashy right now. They do whatever is hot at the moment. Literally, none of the eight CEOs in this book did that. Not a single one. [06:06.1]
Instead, they did a lot of things I tell financial advisors to do. For example, the biggest thing that separated them from everyone else is they thought like investors. They were capital allocators. Hmm, don't I tell financial advisors to do that all the time? Don't I tell financial advisors that they should focus on risk-adjusted return? Don't I say they should focus on money-out and money-in? Don't I say they should do those things? Yes, all the time. Don't you think it's strange that the most successful CEOs all did things like that? Certainly, it isn't a coincidence.
One of the things they did differently which allowed them to outperform was this: they focused on, and I already told you this, but I want to stress it here, capital allocation instead of just growing revenue. Don't be a revenue chaser. Be a capital allocator. That's money-out and money-in. The CEOs wanted to increase profit, not revenue. [06:59.0]
Financial advisors can model this by investing in better marketing strategies. This is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, so obviously I'm going to tie it back to marketing. Rather than aiming for just rapid client growth at all times, like the ‘grow at all cost” mentalities, what if you prioritized quality clients? What if you prioritized profit? How different would your business be?
Another thing they did differently from other CEOs was that they were long-term thinkers. They prioritized long-term shareholder value, even if it meant delivering a bad quarter or two. Some other CEOs, they were afraid to post a bad quarter, and even today, CEOs are afraid to put up bad numbers. They just do short-term activities over and over to look good so they have a good Q1, then a good Q2, then a good Q3, but having a bad Q1 and Q2 could lead to an absolutely amazing, phenomenal Year 3, 4 and 5. Does that make sense? I hope it does. The exceptional CEOs, they were focused on the long term. They did things that may have looked bad in the short term, but we're fantastic for the long term. [08:04.3]
I'll try to tie this back to marketing, too. Let's say that for one quarter, you go hog wild with marketing. You invest so much money in marketing, you spend a bunch on paid ads and direct mail, and seminars and all these other things. You just go all out. You spend so much money that your accountant thinks you've gone mad.
For that one quarter, your income statement might show a lower profit or, heck, even a loss. But what's really happening here? You're getting marketing results, and even if you don't get the marketing results right away, you get data that can help you improve next quarter and the next quarter and the next quarter, and that's how these successful CEOs operated. They embraced a long-term perspective and that's why they outperformed.
The fourth book I suggest, if you want to check any of these books out, I highly recommend this one, too, it is The Ultimate Jim Rohn Library. However, this actually isn't a book, like a Kindle book or a physical book. I actually got this from Audible, so it's an audiobook. I listen to this every year, usually in December. This year, I listened to it a little earlier. I love Jim Rohn, so I couldn't wait to put Jim Rohn in my earbuds again. [09:12.0]
I don't think I mentioned the newsletter yet, the Inner Circle Newsletter, so I'll plug it here. I'll say this. If you are the type of person who likes Jim Rohn—or Tony Robbins or Brian Tracy, but primarily Jim Rohn, because I just jive with Jim so well—if you like Jim Rohn, then you are probably a fantastic fit for the Inner Circle Newsletter, because you have already been exposed to the success principles and self-improvement mindset that he teaches. So, if you like that sort of thing, then you are someone I want as an Inner Circle member.
Realize, this is the final month and, really, the final week, actually, or the final eight days to become an Inner Circle member for $99 per month, because on January 1, 2025, I'm increasing the price of the newsletter to $199 per month. All existing subscribers will be grandfathered in at the $99-per-month price, which means if you pay $99 per month now, you will continue paying that in the future, even when everyone else pays $199 per month. [10:13.0]
So, if you'd like to check out the Inner Circle Newsletter for yourself, you can do so at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching.
Anyway, back to Jim Rohn. I love Jim Rohn's materials because he focused on timeless principles. Are you noticing a theme here? It seems like I'm a really big fan of timeless principles, because we have the Bible. Then we have Think and Grow Rich from 1937, I believe. Then we have The Outsiders about CEOs that followed timeless principles. Now we have this. I'm going to give you a few of the biggest lessons I've learned from Jim Rohn that I think could really help you.
He is probably most famous for the quote that says, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” and I’ve found this to be true. Who are you spending your time with? Are you spending your time with negative people who are always complaining? Are you spending your time with people who would rather watch Netflix and eat Ding Dongs and build businesses? [11:05.4]
Or are you spending your time with people who want to have fantastic lives filled with love and happiness and fulfillment? Because whoever you spend your time with, those people are influencing you and you're influencing them. It goes both ways. You can surround yourself with greatness or you can surround yourself with mediocrity. It truly is your choice.
Jim Rohn also said, and this is an exact quote as well, “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced every day.” He tells a little story about eating an apple every day versus eating a Hershey bar every day. He says, if you ate the Hershey bar today, you probably wouldn't see negative effects. If you ate a Hershey bar tomorrow, again, you probably wouldn't see negative effects. But a Hershey bar every single day would lead to negative outcomes over the long run. [11:54.1]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
I've seen this in financial advisor marketing as well. When financial advisors tell me they're not getting the results they desire, it is almost always because they aren't doing the things that get them what they want. You can't complain about not harvesting corn if you never planted corn, and you never watered and you never did anything to get the corn in the first place. You can't complain about the results you didn't get if you also didn't do any work. [13:19.0]
Another gem from Jim Rohn is “If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan.” That's the harsh reality for a lot of people. So many people are just players in someone else's game. They're NPCs. They're just bobbing along, going wherever life takes them, and never charting their own course. I think that's a sad way to live your life, and I made a commitment to myself that I would never live that way.
Jim Rohn has been instrumental to me in helping me set goals and figure out what I want to get out of life, because a huge part of the battle is simply knowing what you want like. What do you actually want? What do you want your life to look like? What do you want your house to look like, your car to look like, your family to look like, your health to look like? What do you want? You have to figure out what it is you actually want. [14:03.8]
Even if you don't get The Ultimate Jim Rohn Library, that's what it's called, you should get something by Jim Rohn. He has books. He has a bunch of videos on YouTube. He doesn't. He died in 2009, I believe, but there are videos on YouTube of his speeches and lectures, and they're all awesome. I don't think I've ever seen a single Jim Rohn thing that I did not like.
The fifth book is 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall. Perry was a guest on this podcast two episodes ago. We talked a lot about the 80/20 rule, so I won't spend much time on this here either. All I'll say is that a lot of financial advisors hold themselves back because they never sit down and identify the 20% of things that generate 80% of the results in their businesses.
Here, I'll give you a hint. The 20% is almost always going to come from outside of you. It's almost always going to come from someone else who inspires you or gives you an idea and helps you implement it or possibly helps you implement it, whatever. That's kinda sorta what the Inner Circle Newsletter does. It gives financial advisors the strategies and templates and ideas that they can use to grow and build better businesses. [15:10.2]
In any case, I am highly focused on the top 20% of stuff because life is short. I don't want to waste my life worrying about the bottom 80% of stuff that only generates 20% of the results. My time is too valuable. My life is too valuable, and I hope you feel the same way—so 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, a fantastic resource. If you didn't grab it when he was a guest two weeks ago, you should probably get that now.
The sixth book is The H Factor of Personality by Michael Ashton, and someone else who is slipping my mind right now, I apologize. Michael Ashton and his coauthor that I can't remember [Kibeom Lee] literally created the HEXACO personality test, which I believe is the most accurate personality test ever designed. I've been through so many. I've been through the OCEAN and the DiSC and the Dark Triad and 16Personalities. There are just so many out there. [16:02.8]
I did an entire two-part podcast series about the best personality type for financial advisors, where I went through the HEXACO letter by letter and explained what I think the ideal financial advisor would look like. It was fascinating stuff. It was a lot of fun.
If you don't want to read any of these books, I still recommend taking the HEXACO personality test, because you will learn a lot about yourself that you might not have known—and The H Factor book specifically is about the “H” part of the HEXACO. It’s H-E-X-A-C-O, so the “H” stands for honesty, humility.
Someone who is high “H” is someone who is very trustworthy, someone who is authentic, sincere, someone who has one of the ingredients that makes up a good financial advisor. Someone who is low “H”, on the other hand, should be cautious about his or her natural inclinations, especially when dealing with clients, because someone who is low “H” is not going to be as honest or as authentic. That person is going to lean more into what we would call unethical behavior. [17:00.8]
The H Factor of Personality in the HEXACO also provides a little bit of insight into why financial advisors might clash or not clash, I guess, connect with certain people over others, why you like certain people more than others. People who are high “H”, very honest, very authentic people. They're often frustrated by clients and other people who seem entitled or seem greedy. If you can understand this about yourself, then you can not only grow your business a little bit better, but you can be more at peace as well, because you can realize that not everyone is the same as you and you cannot make the world conform to your standards.
From a marketing perspective, I have seen high “H” people do really well by leaning into their authenticity. Truthfully, if you're a high “H” person, if you take the HEXACO and you rank highly in “H”, then you should just continue being yourself. You should put more of you out there in your marketing. You should have more videos, more content. You should just put yourself out there because you're genuine, because your clients, your prospective clients, will gravitate toward your style. They will see that you are not faking it. They can see or they will see that you're honest, you're straightforward, you're not super gimmicky. They will gravitate to that. [18:11.7]
If I could be like a marketing mastermind for every financial advisor, I would have them go through the HEXACO, and the financial advisors who are high “H” and also comfortable on camera, for example, I will put them in front of a camera. I would just have them talk. I would have them hang out, because their personalities would just shine, especially with something like money, where it's super important and people get nervous and jittery about it. When someone is just straightforward and calm, and honest and loving, and just a great, all-around ethical person, then that will come through in the marketing materials.
The seventh and final book I'll recommend on this second-to-last episode of the year is How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. This book rocked my world. I am so grateful I found it. [19:01.8]
Harry Browne talks about several traps that people fall into which keeps them from their freedom. One trap is the identity trap. This trap comes in two forms. First, it's the assumption that others will think and act as we do, leading to frustration when they don't meet our expectations. I used to fall into this trap all the time. I used to think, I work really hard at this, so other people work hard, too. No, that's not the case. Or I go above and beyond for other people, so I expect others to go above and beyond for me. No, that's not the case. It led to a ton of frustration in my life.
The second form of this trap, the identity trap, is the belief that we must mold ourselves to meet other people's expectations. This is someone who becomes a doctor because his or her parents wanted a doctor in the family. This is someone who does everything to please others and nothing for himself or herself. This is the person who does things that don't necessarily use his or her unique strength and desires. They're just living for other people. So, both forms of the identity trap lead us to live our lives for other people's standards rather than our own and that's no way to live. [20:10.7]
Another trap, I'm going to just give you two more—he's got 11 or 12, I think, in the book, he's got a lot—and it's called the intellectual trap. I see financial advisors falling into this one all the time. It is the tendency to believe that we can understand all aspects of a situation, that we can predict outcomes, that we can see what's going to happen, that we're intellectuals. We're smart, right? So, it's about believing you're smarter than you are and believing that you have more control than you really do.
Lots of people fall into this trap because they're overconfident in their ability to understand complex systems, like markets or relationships, or even life decisions. There's a popular headline. I think I shared it with Inner Circle members, I don't remember. It was “If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?” I think that's also the title of another book, and that's kind of what it is. You're falling into the intellectual trap. [20:59.6]
You cannot predict everything in markets and in a capitalistic society, and the value that you bring to other people and how customers will value your services. You just can't. But if you pride yourself on being smart, you're going to get humbled in that arena, because you're going to realize that it's not entirely up to you. A lot of it is, but not all of it is.
The final trap I want to share with you is the government trap from How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. This is where people believe they need to rely on the government or fight against the government to find personal freedom. But the truth is this: if you focus on the government as either a savior or an enemy, either one, doesn't matter—I've seen people love, like, The government's going to fix everything, and I've seen people like, Oh, I hate the government so much—either way, all you're doing is distracting yourself from your personal power, from your freedom.
Instead, what you should do is focus on what you can control within your own life, rather than changing or trying to change, or even if you do successfully change, large institutions, and don't depend on them either. I'm not going to give away much more about that book in this episode. It is a fantastic book, though. I highly recommend it. [22:07.1]
To recap, here are the seven books. If you want to read any of these, please do so. I have read so many different books and these are the cream of the crop for me.
You’ve got the Bible. It speaks for itself.
You’ve got Think and Grow Rich. The truth is the truth. I know that it gets kind of weird near the end with the like sex transmutation. If you have any questions about that, I can try my best to answer those honestly.
You’ve got The Outsiders. That's a fantastic, fantastic book. If you like Good to Great by Jim Collins, if you like business books, if you like reading about CEOs, you're going to love The Outsiders.
Then you have The Ultimate Jim Rohn Library. That's an audiobook that I got from Audible. I listen to that every single year. But the truth is, you can listen to anything by Jim Rohn and it gets my stamp of approval. Everything I've ever consumed from Jim Rohn has been absolutely fantastic.
Then you have 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall. If you're looking for something that will just help you dig down into what actually works so you can delegate, eliminate the stuff that does not work, then that is going to help you quite a bit. [23:09.2]
Then you have The H Factor of Personality. I think the HEXACO is the most accurate personality test ever created. If you don't read The H Factor, it can get a little dry at times because it's a psychology book, but if you don't read it, at least take the HEXACO.
Then, finally, you have How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. This book totally shifted my worldview. I am so thankful that I found it, and I probably want to reread that one. I think I'm going to go back and I'm going to reread How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.
Thank you for listening. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and I will catch you next week for the very final, the last episode of 2024. [23:50.5]
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