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 is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I am your host, James Pollard, the guy behind TheAdvisorCoach.com, pretty cool website with lots of neato things for financial advisors who want to grow their businesses, and today, oh, man, I've got something that is especially relevant for those of you who are in that low- to mid-six-figure income range. So, if you're making around $200,000 a year or $250,000 a year, or maybe even $300,000, as a financial advisor and you feel that there's another level you should be playing at, but you're just not sure what needs to change, then this episode is for you. [01:09.0]
This episode was actually inspired by a question I got from a financial advisor, and here it is: “I've grown my business fairly quickly in the past year, going from around $200,000 to $300,000 in revenue. While I'm proud of the progress I've made, I can't shake the feeling that I'm still thinking too small. I know there's another level and I haven't tapped into it yet. I'm at a point where I've got some traction. Clients are coming in and referrals are happening, but I also realized that the systems, mindset and strategies that got me here probably won't get me to $1 million dollars and beyond.” That's correct. “So, I'd love to ask you what you would do if you were in my shoes. What separates advisors who stall at this level from those who make the leap to seven figs?” [01:52.4]
What's funny about this question is it's very timely, because I've been kicking around this idea for an Inner Circle bonus called something like “10 moves financial advisors should make to grow from $250,000 per year to $500,000 per year and beyond.” I know that's a very specific title, but many of my Inner Circle members are in this area. I mean, some are slightly below. Some are more, yeah. I mean, that's kind of how it goes when you have a group of people, but most of them are around that area.
Many financial advisors join the Inner Circle because they know they have the raw materials necessary to hit mid-six figures and beyond, but they need a little help to get there faster. That's the thing they're buying from me, by the way, not a newsletter, not a community, at least not in and of itself, even though both of those things are cool. The newsletter is fantastic, the community is awesome, but they're really buying a shortcut to their goals. They're buying a way to reduce their learning curve. [02:49.3]
Imagine taking something that would have taken a year for you to do on your own and getting it done in six months because you had a little bit of help. How much is that worth to you, or taking something that would have been an all-day ordeal and getting it done in an hour because you were able to spend some time in the office hours, or you were able to send me an email and ask if I knew of anyone who could help you or any resources that were available to you? If your work day is eight hours and you get something done in an hour, that is an 8x improvement. Again, how much is that worth to you?
I ended up writing an email, as I often do, answering that person's question, and I'm going to talk about that later in the podcast episode, but when I sent that email, another financial advisor emailed me later and referenced that email. He said, “In one of your emails, you mentioned that advisors making around $250,000 per year are your ideal clients because they have a proof of concept. What exactly do you mean?” That is one of the things that I said in the email, that if you are a financial advisor and you're making about $250,000 per year, then helping you grow is a cakewalk for me. [03:54.3]
Obviously, I can't guarantee any specific results, because I don't know you. I don't know your specific situation. Growth is determined by your experience and your background and so many other factors, so it is goofy for me and it would be disingenuous for me to say, I can absolutely 100% in every case, help financial advisors grow if they're making $250,000 per year—however, it is pretty darn easy, because if you're making around $250,000 per year, you've already passed several important milestones.
You've proven that people will pay for what you do. That is awesome. That is your biggest proof of concept. You've likely figured out who you work well with. That's another huge proof of concept. You've gotten some traction. Maybe you've gotten referrals or some content, or some outreach that's working. Basically, you have a marketing strategy or a couple of marketing strategies that are already working for you. You are not guessing anymore. You've built something real. However, again, this is a big shift you need to make. We're going to talk about a lot of shifts. [04:54.0]
Most advisors at this level are still operating like they're at the 80k or 100k level or just entry level. They're still doing everything themselves. They're relying on word of mouth or hope-and-pray marketing. They're often too busy to step back and rethink things strategically. They're so busy working that they don't have time to think. They don't have time to just sit down and think to themselves, Okay, how can I get to that next level? Because they've had some success, they start to wonder to themselves, Okay, if I've had success with this, then I just need to do more of what I've been doing—and that's not always true.
You don't usually want to grow by brute force. Sometimes you do, but usually you don't. Usually, you want to grow by installing leverage on top of what already works. If you've been listening to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast for a long time, you've heard me talk about multiple marketing strategies again and again and again. It is the holy grail of financial advisor marketing, and one of the reasons it is is that it is the epitome of installing leverage on top of what already works. If you have a proof of concept in one area of your business, let's just call that Area A, then installing that in Area B is almost certainly going to work very well for you—and that is where things start to change. [06:11.6]
That's why advisors at this level are so ideal for me to help because I'm not trying to help them get started. I'm not giving them a bunch of beginner information that, honestly, they could just find elsewhere. Instead, I'm helping them scale what is already proven. Plus, from a sales-pitch perspective, it is a very easy way for me to provide them with a strong ROI. In fact, here is the actual pitch I give advisors at this level:
You are currently making $250,000 per year. The Inner Circle is $199 per month, which works out to be $2,388 per year. That represents less than 1% of your income. So, here's the question: do you believe that over the course of an entire year, I can help you become at least 1% better? Because if I can help you land just one additional client or improve your marketing enough that you save some time, avoid mistakes, or even raise your fees, then the investment can easily pay for itself. And let's be real, if I can't help you become a measly 1% better, then I have no business running a marketing company for financial advisors. [07:19.2]
And by the way, if I help you become 2% better, that's a 100% ROI. I don't know where you have your money invested. I don't know what you're doing with your fungolas, but if you're earning 100% ROI, please let me know so I can do it, too.
And that's the logic I lay out, because I'm not promising miracles. I'm not saying that it's going to 10x your business overnight, but I am saying, if you've already built something solid and you're looking for the next edge, I am confident I can help you find it, and often that little change in thinking is all it takes to break into a season of serious growth.
Here are some examples of installing leverage in your business. You shift from winging every prospect call and prospect meeting to using a proven discovery process that increases your closing ratio, meaning, if you usually get one out of every two clients, maybe now you go to two out of every three. That is a massive improvement over time, because you now get more clients with the same time that you're spending, which means you can spend more time working on your business, which means your business becomes even more productive, which means you get even more clients, and it's just a virtuous cycle. [08:21.2]
Another example is you stop creating content from scratch and you start repurposing high-performing ideas that have already been tested. This is extremely easy to do. This is also why I give so many examples. I give word-for-word scripts. I give photos. I give screenshots. I give so many things that financial advisors can literally just use because I want them to use that instead of just sitting around. “Hmm, what can I post today? Hmm, what can I email today?” I don't want them to do that. I want them to work from a proven system. [08:51.2]
None of that stuff, like installing leverage, is flashy. It's not sexy, it's not magical, but it works, and it's especially effective when you already have something to build on. That is what makes this stage in an advisor's career so exciting, because small hinges, like changing the discovery meeting a little bit or changing content marketing a little bit, or changing a LinkedIn headline, those small hinges swing big doors.
Let's think about this. Let's dig a little bit deeper into the shifts that you should make if you want to go from $250,000 per year to $500,000 per year and beyond. These are based on working with thousands of financial advisors over the years. Here are patterns I have seen again and again.
Let's start off with number one, obviously, a great place to start, which is the shift from the technician to the business owner, because at $250,000, you've likely got your hands in every little part of your business. You're doing the marketing as you should be. You're doing the meetings as you may or may not want to do. You're handling the administrative work, which you probably shouldn't be doing. You might even be printing paperwork or messing with tech and just doing all of the things in your business. [10:01.3]
But the leap to $500,000 and beyond requires that you shift your identity from technician to business owner. Technicians ask, “How do I do this?” Here's where a lot of people go wrong. Business owners ask, “How can I get this done?” They think in terms of outcomes, or they ask, “How can this get done? How can I get this done through systems and processes and maybe people? Or how can this get done?” You have to stop measuring your success by how busy you are and start measuring how leveraged you are.
Are you noticing a theme here? I keep talking about leverage. That is where this comes from, that your success as a business owner will come from this. If every dollar depends on your time and your energy, you are going to hit a wall fast.
Notice, I did not say that business owners think, “Who can get this done for me?” or “Who can help me get this done?” because it does not mean hiring people. That is a rookie mistake. That is amateur town, because sometimes people think the business owners would just say, “Okay, who's going to do this for me? Who's going to do marketing? Who's going to do this? Who can I get to do this? No, no, no, that is wrong. It is not “Who can do this for me?” It is “How can this get done?” [11:14.8]
Hiring someone and delegating a task might be the absolute worst thing to do if the task doesn't need to be done in the first place, if you haven't documented a repeatable process yet, if you're just throwing bodies at inefficiency instead of solving the root problem, if you're outsourcing something that should actually be automated or eliminated.
The whole business owner mindset is not about building a team for the sake of building a team. It's not about the “who” all the time. It's about resourcefulness. It's about creating systems that reduce your input and maintain or improve your output. That is what productivity is. It's input versus output. [11:55.6]
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.
So, instead of asking, “Who can I hire to handle this?” start asking better questions like, “Can I automate this with software? Can I eliminate this entirely? Do I need this? Can I batch this to save time?” [13:09.0]
That is a highly underrated productivity technique is task batching. Instead of writing one email and then going to the next marketing thing, and then making a phone call and then having a meeting, how about you have all your meetings on the same day? How about you sit down for three hours and write all of your emails for the next few months? How about you take a morning and plan out all of your social media posts for the next few months? That is task batching.
You can also ask yourself, “Can I make this a template so it's a five-minute task instead of a 45-minute task?” That's something I help Inner Circle members with all the time. I give a bunch of templates. I've given dozens throughout the 80-plus issues that I've written over the years, because that's what frees up your time. It frees up your headspace, your energy. It frees up everything you have to actually grow your business. [13:55.6]
One of the fastest ways to tell whether someone is stuck in technician mode is by looking at that person's calendar. If it's full of meetings and these one-off tasks, and custom work and low-leverage activities, it's all reactive. A business owner's calendar is not reactive. It's proactive. It is intentional. It reflects priorities. It's like you're building. You're not just doing stuff. You're building. You are intentionally doing the things that you want to do in order to grow your business, in order to accomplish your goals.
Moving on, the second shift is to go from this hope-and-pray marketing or throw everything against the wall to see what sticks to predictable marketing, because if you're going to grow you need a repeatable automated client-acquisition system—sometimes automated. I like the automated stuff because it's completely separate from your time, but as I just said, it doesn't really need to be automated, but it is cool when it is—and this goes hand in hand with the first shift we just talked about going from technician to business owner, because it's a form of leverage. [14:56.8]
I have hundreds of podcast episodes about this topic, so I'm not going to talk a lot about it here, but it could be a content system. It could be a social media system. It could be an online advertising system, an email marketing system, or whatever you want it to be, as long as it's either separate from your time or scalable, or both, actually.
The third shift is to raise your standards, and this is huge. I'm talking about raising your standards across the board, the clients you serve, the way you run your calendar, the quality of your communication, and even the other professionals you associate with. Why? Because when advisors break through to $5000,000, $750,000 or even seven figures, it's rarely “just” because they worked harder. Do they work harder? Yes, but it's usually because they went through a season where they upgraded as much as they could. [15:48.5]
Let me explain. At lower income levels, you often take whoever comes through the door. For better or worse, that is just what some advisors do. You say yes to subpar clients. You say yes to high-maintenance people. You say yes to people who don't respect your time as much as you wish they would, and maybe that's necessary in the beginning. I'm not saying it's always necessary, but sometimes it is in order to build that momentum.
It becomes a liability very quickly, though, because top advisors are ruthless about who they say yes to. They know that every difficult client comes with an opportunity cost, and it's not just the time they take up, it's the energy they drain and the space they occupy that could have gone to a better fit client.
So, if you want to grow, you've got to start asking yourself, “Do I want more people like this?” You point at John and Jane on your client list, say, “Do I want more Johns? Do I want more Janes? Is this someone I'm proud to have as a client? Am I accepting these people because they're ideal or because they're available?” This is hard stuff. This is the hard work. This is the thinking work. [16:49.0]
Another thing that gets upgraded is the calendar. It’s the time-management system, because advisors who grow fast don't let their calendar happen to them. They happen to their calendar. They don't spend weeks reacting to everyone else's request. They create time blocks for their marketing, for their high-value work, for their deep thinking, for their rest, and they protect those blocks like their business depends on it, because it does.
A cluttered, chaotic calendar is a reflection of unclear priorities. You can't scale when you're bouncing between this email and this client request, and this little meeting that came up and you're trying to put out this fire. It just does not work. Raising your standard means getting rid of that junk. It means saying no. Ooh, did you know that no is a full sentence? You can just say that. Someone asked you to do something? No. Someone wants you to go somewhere? No. Someone wants to catch up? I haven't caught up with people in years. I have my friends, I have my family, this is cool, but I'm not just going to waste a couple hours just catching up for no reason. I've got stuff to do. I have to move towards my goals. I have this sense of urgency. [17:53.8]
Another thing that gets upgraded, and this is something I don't think I've talked about in any podcast episode, but it's something that is extremely true, and it gets overlooked, it's your communication. The further you go in business, the more important your communication becomes, because your words now carry more weight. Your emails are setting the tone and expectations. Your discovery meetings are either converting or losing high-value prospects. Your content is shaping how people see you.
Raising your standards here means being more intentional with your copy, every word that you put out, improving your messaging so it attracts better-fit clients. Wait a minute, maybe that's what I'm doing here when I say, if you're a financial advisor around the $250,000 mark, you are a great fit for the Inner Circle. Maybe that's what I'm doing here. It means saying more with less and with greater clarity. It means being clear and confident, because that sort of communication is a business-growth multiplier, and I'll probably talk about this a lot more in the future because it's seriously underrated. [18:51.5]
It also means upgrading your network, your professional circle. This stings for a lot of people. If you're spending your time around people who are constantly negative, playing small, stuck in the same place year after year, it's going to rub off on you. I feel like a lot of people think, Oh, I'm the exception to this rule. They think I can keep these same friends, I can hang around these people, and it won't affect me, because I'm somehow different. Wrong, it will. Your thinking will shrink. Your confidence will stall. Your standards will lower to match the room.
When advisors start breaking through the plateaus, you'll often hear them saying things like, “I had to change who I was spending time with. I got around people who were playing a bigger game. I stopped taking advice from people who weren't where I wanted to go.” This ruffles a lot of feathers when I bring it up. I took this advice very early on and it was some of the best advice that I had ever received. It was just to not take advice from people whose lives suck, I'm sorry. [19:52.0]
I talked about this in a recent Inner Circle member office hour session where I talked about this marketing legend. I highly respect the work that he's done. I respect what he's done in the business. I respect the clients that he's helped. He is an awesome person, but the truth is, he didn't have the lifestyle I wanted. He was doing all these speaking engagements. He was hopping on a plane, going here, traveling here, riding on a Greyhound bus, probably, I don't know that. I know he flew a lot, and that is just a nightmare in and of itself to me.
So, he was just dancing on stage, going from stage to stage, speaking to people, doing his little dog and pony show, and he was doing client work, and I just didn't want to do either of those things. I didn't want to work for a whole bunch of clients in order to scrape by. Even if I was making good money, I still would feel like it's scraping by because it's at an enormous time cost. I knew I didn't want to go do all these speaking engagements and I knew I didn't want to do client work, so I just never really studied his stuff, and I've done pretty darn well despite not studying his stuff. [20:50.7]
I also say this all the time and this is the part that really, really ruffles those feathers—sometimes financial advisors will get discouraged because so-called mentors will tell them to do or not to do certain things. I'm sorry, if you have been in a business for a couple of decades and you're still making low-six figures and your health is not in check and your family life is not in check, I'm just not going to listen to you. I'm sorry, I'm just not going to, because my results in the money area and the family area and the health area are probably significantly better than yours in every aspect, so why in the world would I listen to you?
I don't mean that in an arrogant way. I don't mean that in a mean way or a disrespectful way, but it just is what it is, right? A NASCAR driver is not going to listen to someone who just got a driving permit, okay, or someone who has been driving for years and is still a horrible driver. It's just not going to happen. [21:50.7]
The whole upgrading thing applies to your personal life, too. I say all the time that your business is a reflection of you, because business success doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you're exhausted, if you're distracted, if you're running on fumes, you are not going to be an effective leader. You're not going to be an effective marketer or decision maker. That's why raising your standards personally is just as important. That means upgrading your sleep. You'll think better. You'll be able to operate. Sleeping well is one of the most important things you can possibly do as a human being. It means upgrading means upgrading your mental health. It means upgrading your fitness. It means upgrading your spiritual health.
The advisors who are truly crushing it aren't just growing their revenue. They're growing themselves and their revenue is growing because they're growing themselves. Do you understand that? Their revenue is growing because they are. It's not necessarily because the business is growing by itself. The business is growing because they are. [22:45.0]
So, if you're stuck around that 250,000-ish or anywhere around that, $100,000-400,000, and you just want to grow and you can't seem to break through, ask yourself this: “Where in my life or business have I let my standards slip, or where have I not upgraded my standards? And what would happen if I upgraded them?” because that's often the thing that unlocks the next level. And the best part is you're already capable. You've already proven that you can make money. Now it's time to upgrade everything around that foundation and build something that scales. [23:17.3]
So, if you're hovering around that mark and you know you have potential, you know you're capable of doing more, earning more, helping more people, growing faster, then it might be time to stop trying to figure it all out alone and get some structured, proven support, whether that's through the Inner Circle or something else entirely. I don't necessarily just want to push the Inner Circle on you, but seriously, get help from somewhere. It doesn't have to be me. Go somewhere. You know you can do it. You just need some help.
The key takeaway I want you to get from this is, what got you here won't get you there. I know that's an old saying. It's very cliché, but it is so true. You don't need more little tips. You need leverage. You need systems. You need accountability, and you need to think like the business owner you want to become. That is the difference maker.
All right, that's a wrap for this week's episode. I hope you had as much fun listening to this as I did recording it for you, and I will catch you next week. [24:11.2]
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