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: Hey, financial advisors, welcome to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. This is the show where we cut through the fluff. We help you actually get more clients and grow your business. I'm James Pollard, founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, and today, I'm here to ruffle some feathers. This podcast episode is titled “15 Signs a Financial Advisor Isn’t Going to Succeed.” [00:55.7]
I know that's a bold title. Some of you will love it, some of you might squirm a little bit, and others will stop listening halfway through the episode because they'll feel personally attacked. That's fine, but if you're still here by the end of the episode, it means you are not one of the advisors I'm talking about, or maybe you were, but now you're ready to change. Either way, this episode will be valuable to you. Let's dive in.
I originally shared the signs in an email and it was about red flags that make me refuse to work with a financial advisor. I thought about it for a little bit and realized that since I'm in the business of helping winners win more, if I won't work with a financial advisor, then it's because that advisor likely wasn't going to succeed. I know that might seem a little harsh and perhaps a little egotistical on my part. However, that's what I've observed from a decade of helping financial advisors.
You have to view it from my point of view, or at least, please do. If someone came to you and said, “I'm going to bake a cake with gasoline, tar and concrete,” you would say, “There's absolutely no way you're going to bake an edible cake with those ingredients. It would be obviously wrong.” You'd say, “You cannot make a cake with those ingredients.” Yet financial advisors do the marketing equivalent of that to me all the time. [02:12.0]
Sometimes I get viewed as the bad guy for telling them that they're not going to succeed, even though I know exactly what it takes to bake that metaphorical cake. You can't do it with tar and gasoline and concrete, or whatever ingredients I just said. It just will not happen. So, please take that with a grain of salt. Please try to view it from my point of view.
No. 1: having a “Just tell me what to do” mentality. Oh, this gets on my nerves when financial advisors are like, Give me that the exact 482 step-by-step plan that I can follow and have a successful business. No, it does not work that way. Marketing is about context. It's about timing, positioning, messaging, relevancy, consistency, all of these elements. What works for someone in a niche targeting dentist won't necessarily work for someone going after pre-retirees in Alabama. [03:00.0]
If you're asking for a magical, perfect script that works 100% of the time, then you've already lost. You're not going to make it. There is no such thing as a step-by-step formula to build a successful business that works 100% of the time. Are there segments of marketing that have step-by-step instructions? Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the financial advisors who think they don't have to use their brains at all. They believe all they have to do is find some sort of playbook or guide that would show them everything with no critical thinking involved on their part.
If you just took the time that you're spending on trying to find this magical resource that no one else has discovered yet, and you use that time to actually think critically about your situation and how to improve it, you would be so far ahead right now, it would be laughable.
No. 2: having a victim mentality. These advisors will blame the economy, compliance, their firm, their parents, their brother, their sister, their dog, their wife, whoever they can blame for their lack of results. They blame everything and everyone but themselves. [04:05.4]
Look, winners find a way while losers make excuses. There's always a way to communicate your value, even with strict rules, even if you're going through a tough time, but you have to want to figure it out. If you're constantly blaming external factors, you'll never take the actions necessary to change your results.
No. 3: being skeptical to the point of paralysis. Healthy skepticism is fine. I like skepticism to a point. I encourage financial advisors to be skeptical, especially in the marketing world and especially because there's a lot of B.S. out there. But the kind of skepticism that leads to inaction is unhealthy. You don't need to spend three weeks researching something that cost a few thousand bucks or less. I'll give you a good example of this. [04:47.6]
I recently had this advisor ask me to give him a bunch of references, and this was after the advisor messaged me and asked for my help on how he could get more. Clients, think about that. There's a reason why he was asking me for this. There's a reason why he came to me. I suggested email marketing, because I can practically get clients on demand for advisors with email marketing, and I sent him to a page where he could book a 90-minute intensive session with me for $5,500, and that's when he hit me with the “I want references response.”
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to give you references for a single little consulting engagement. I've helped tens of thousands of financial advisors. I have gobs of testimonials. I have 300-plus Financial Advisor Marketing podcast episodes. You're listening to one of them right now. I have 100-plus blog articles. I've been publishing the Inner Circle Newsletter for years. If someone truly wanted to find proof that I know what I'm doing, it's already out there.
So, no, I don't provide references, sorry. Not because I don't have them, but because I refuse to participate in someone's stalling behavior. You don't need to do a full prostate exam to spend a little bit of that cash. You just don't. Sorry, sorry, sorry. [05:57.5]
No. 4: bouncing from system to system. These are the advisors who go from one bright, shiny object to the next, from one tactic to the next. They see something and they're like, Ooh, got to do that. They see something else. Ooh, got to do that. Maybe one day, it's a funnel, because they read one of Russell Brunson’s books, and I like Russell Brunson as a marketer, he's fantastic, but I don't really like his audience. The audience are like, Oh, I can funnel-hack this and I’ll funnel this and I do this. No, that's so dumb.
So, maybe it's a funnel one day. Then it's a YouTube channel. Then it's email marketing. They come to me and they get a little dopamine fix with email marketing, even though I try to turn them away. Then they think they need to start a podcast, so they go to one of these podcast companies. Then they think they need to master online ads. They just go to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. They never stick with anything long enough to get good at it—and guess what? Consistency is the multiplier of marketing. If you cannot commit, you cannot win. [06:52.8]
No. 5: looking for shortcuts. These are the people who say things like, “What's the fastest way for me to get clients? What can I do to get results really fast? I need . . . I need it.” Let me tell you what that question really means—“I've screwed around for months, maybe years. I haven't taken my life seriously and now I want to fix it in a week because I'm in a bad place.” That is what it really means. It does not work that way.
Client acquisition, building a successful business is a system. It is not a slot machine. It is not a scratch-off ticket. It is not a lottery ticket. Shortcuts only work after you've earned the right to take them. Shortcuts do exist, I'm going to tell you. Like the guy I just told you about for the email intensive, if he hired me for that email intensive, if he said, “Yes, James, here's the money. Let's do it,” that's a shortcut.
I would have told him, “Do this. Do that. Go here. Do this. Send this email. Write the subject line. Change this.” He would have gotten a shortcut that would have made him-- obviously, I can't guarantee results or whatever. I'm not implying that you'll get the same results, but probably, based on what I know about his business, he probably would have made several hundred thousand dollars based on the advice I would have given him. That would have been a shortcut. But he had to earn the right to take that shortcut. [08:01.2]
He had to have part of the systems in place. He had to have some marketing. He had to have a proof of concept, okay? He had to have real systems and messaging and trust, and all of those things. So, shortcuts do exist, but if you haven't earned the right to take them, then you, my friend, are almost certainly not going to succeed.
No. 6: thinking transactionally. I am not interested in transactional relationships. I want to build with financial advisors who are willing to commit for the long term. I have advisors who have been doing business with me since 2015. When someone joins the Inner Circle, for example, I send that person a thank you card congratulating him or her on making a long term commitment. I say, “I look forward to seeing what we'll build together over the next few years.” I think in terms of years, not weeks or months, because what you can build in a few years should absolutely crush whatever you're able to build in a few weeks—and I just got an email this morning from a financial advisor, an Inner Circle member, who told me, “James, I am so thankful for what you've helped me do, what you've helped me build over the past such-and-such period of time. Where I am now compared to where I was last year is such a huge difference, I can barely recognize it.” [09:10.5]
No. 7: it’s not reading. Ooh, this is a high level tip right here, boy. I have optimized much of my marketing, my website, email, direct mail, social media posts here and there to attract readers. I have discovered that people who can't be bothered to read a long email or a long sales page, those people are usually horrible clients. Unfortunately, a few bad apples squeak through every so often.
For example, I got this email from a now ex-Inner Circle member last year. Here it is, I'll read it to you. “Hi, James. Is it possible to pause my Inner Circle subscription? I haven't had a chance to read or go through any of the materials since I've signed up. I'd like to stay on, but can't justify the investment for something I'm not currently using. I'd like the opportunity to read through everything before I make the decision.” [10:02.6]
Oh boy, I am so, so, so concerned for financial advisors like these, because the newsletter is roughly, let's do some math, it's 20 or so pages per issue, so if there are 30 days in a month, then that works out to less than one page per day. If you are someone who struggles to read one freakin’ page per day, then you are in for a world of hurt. This has nothing to do with your relationship with me. It has nothing to do with Financial Advisor Marketing or your business even. It's just general life advice here.
If you can read more, then you'll probably get better results, and if you're someone who struggles to read less than one page per day in anything—again, this is not about me. This is just general life advice—if you cannot get that done, you are going to have trouble with wealth, health, happiness, family, love, relationships, platonic relationships, making friendships where you go out and take trips and have coffee and go out to dinner. You're going to have trouble with all of those things, because you just don't have “it.” You don't have that drive. You don't have the ability to sit down and get stuff done. Less than one page per day. [11:16.5]
Also, keep in mind, let's take it back to the Inner Circle, I offer direct email access to me for help. I have had 10,000-plus conversations with Inner Circle members over the years, and if that's not enough, I offer monthly office hours where advisors can swing by to get live, direct, personalized help with their marketing and business-building challenges, right there, on the spot.
This advisor could have said, “James, what recommendations do you have for getting this page a day read?” I laugh, but I seriously do want to help. For getting this one page per day read. I could say, “Here, here's how you improve your productivity. What does your current situation look like? What are your goals? Is anything else going on that I should know about? Here's a speed-reading tool. I used to use tool called 7 Speed Reading back in the day. They rebranded to a company called Spreeder—it’s like “speed reader,” Spreeder—and that was such a huge help for me. So, I have all of these resources. I truly am willing to help. [12:11.0]
“Justify the investment,” the advisor talked about. “Oh, I can't. I'd like to justify this,” or “I can't justify the investment for something I'm not currently using.” Are you kidding me? The newsletter, the Inner Circle, it’s a community, and direct email access and everything is $199 per month. Let's just call it $2,388 per year, because I want long-term thinkers.
In many cases, getting just one new client per year is more than enough to pay for the Inner Circle membership and then some. That doesn't even include the increased productivity Inner Circle members tend to experience. I frequently show them how to set up marketing systems that save them hundreds of hours per year, and I'm always talking about tech and tools and gadgets that advisors can use to become more productive. I personally only work 20 to 30 hours per month, and I'm trying to get that down. [12:56.0]
I mean this in the nicest way possible, if you cannot get one new client per year with 12 newsletter issues chock-full of real-world marketing campaign scripts, strategies and templates, an entire year's worth of direct email access to me, and 12 monthly office-hour sessions where you can learn from me and your peers, then you probably are not going to succeed. I'm just keeping it 100% real with you. [13:20.5]
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.
No. 8: being overly focused on tactics instead of strategy. When people obsess over which font they should use or the exact minute they should post on social media, I know they're probably not a good fit for me because they can't see the big picture. Don't get me wrong, tactics are important, but they're useless without strategy. I'm not going to spend too much time on that because I've talked about that in about that in a ton of podcast episodes.
No. 9: having a big ego—and this one always cracks me up, because the guys with the biggest egos are usually 40-somethings and 50-somethings who make a few hundred grand per year. They think they're hot stuff. I just smile and let them keep thinking that. Go back to bragging about your little rollovers while you beg for LinkedIn connection requests. Go back to your little strip-mall office, big dog, whatever. You are not that guy, right? [15:08.0]
I'm not saying I'm that guy either. I am not the main character. I don't think I am. I am nowhere near where some of my peers are, where some of my personal friends are. I'm nowhere near that. I am not that guy. I am no one to have an ego. But I think it's so silly when these guys, and yes, I say guys because it's primarily men. Women rarely have the ego, at least with me. Maybe they have an ego behind closed doors and I just don't see it, but it's just the men, man. It's the 50-something, balding, overweight, make a few hundred grand per year, got a little leased BMW or Mercedes, and they just think they're hot stuff, right? They go golfing once a week and they're like, Oh yeah, I'm a big dog. I'm on top of the world. No, you're not, bro. You're just not. I'm going to stop here because I'm going to get myself in trouble, but having a big ego is a huge sign that you're not going to succeed as a financial advisor. [15:59.5]
No. 10: needing hand-holding. If you need a motivational pep talk every time something doesn't work perfectly, you are probably not a good fit for me. This is marketing. It is not daycare. Sometimes things work. Sometimes they don't work. The only thing that matters is whether you adjust and keep going. In fact, the whole point of what marketers call split testing or A/B testing is in order to find something that does not work. That is what it is. If you test Headline A and you test Headline B, one of them is going to perform worse than the other. It is expected. That is the shift.
Sometimes financial advisors will stop doing a bunch of financial advising and try to get into marketing and they tend to not get good results, or at least their results aren't as good as a marketer who goes into financial advising like I did. The reason why is because the financial advisors who try to shift into marketing cannot put that marketer hat on as effectively. See, I've got it. I cut my teeth with it. I was with that from day one, so I understand you have to go through those things. [17:07.8]
The origin of the word “prospecting,” guess where it came from? It's from filtering. It's from excluding. A lot of people just want to go and pick up gold. They're just saying, “I’m going out in this field. I'm going to get this gold nugget, this gold nugget?” No, it doesn't work that way. You have to get a bunch of dirt and then you filter the dirt to get to the gold. That is how marketers think.
But financial advisors who, again, and a lot of these things blend together, where they want this step-by-step plan and they have this big ego so they feel like they deserve this step-by-step plan and it's out there somewhere for them, they think they could just go and get a winner after a winner after a winner, and there are so many things that could go wrong along the way that they don't understand and they don't plan for, and things just screw them up and they're not willing to accept help—that's another sign that they're not going to make it—and because they don't accept help, they just speed up their own demise. It is nutty. You just have to keep going and you have to understand what you're doing. [18:00.0]
No. 11: obsessing over what compliance won't let you do. If every sentence out of your mouth starts with “Yeah, but compliance,” then I already know how it ends. You're going to avoid doing the work. You're going to blame everyone but yourself for the lack of results that you have. Look, it kills me when financial advisors are like, James, what about this compliance department? as if they want me to say, “Oh, my goodness, compliance. What's that? I've never heard of that. I don't know what a compliance department is. I was not aware that financial advisors had these rules that they have to follow. Thank you so much for informing me. I've been doing this since 2015 and I've never encountered a compliance department before. Wow, let me bow down to you.” No, it insults my intelligence. It honestly does. [18:48.7]
No. 12: saying, “I already tried that and it didn't work.” The translation for that is “I half-assed it for three days with no strategy, no consistency and no clue what I was doing, and then blamed everything but myself.” You may have tried direct mail, but did you try direct mail the way I show advisors to do it? You may have tried email marketing, but did you do it my way? You may have tried building systems, but did you build them the way I have helped countless advisors to do? Probably not.
Sometimes financial advisors, I had one of these guys come up to me recently, and he's like, James, you talk a lot about direct mail on LinkedIn and I follow you on LinkedIn, and I tried direct mail back in such and such, I think it was like 2020 during the pandemic, and it did not work out for me. I asked him, “Hey, can you show me your mailer?” He dug around. It took him a long time to find the mailer, which is fine because he sent it out years ago, and it was just this one pager, a little brochure-looking thing. It was all about him. It was like, I do this and I can help this and I do this. No, that is not the way to do it. So, if this advisor said, “I tried direct mail and it didn't work,” of course, it didn't work, because you didn't do it the correct way. [19:56.7]
Let's go back to the cake thing. Oh, I tried baking a cake with gasoline and tar, and what did I say? Concrete? Yeah, and I didn't bake a cake. I tried so hard, but I didn't have that rich, delicious German chocolate cake. Well, duh, dumbo, because you didn't have the right ingredients. You didn't even know what you were doing. Of course, it didn't work.
No. 13: copying other advisors without understanding their goals and strategies. This one gets on my nerves, too. Mimicking others without knowing those things, without knowing their goals and their background, and their experience and what they want, that's how you end up broke and embarrassed.
Let me tell you a little story. Back in the 1970s, Burger King was struggling to grow. The fast food industry had all these competitors. If you study the history of business in America, you know that in that period of time, all of these restaurants were popping up and the franchise model was going crazy. Burger King's founders looked for every advantage they could get, including poaching top talent from McDonald's. [20:59.1]
They ended up hiring this guy in January 1977. His name was Donald Smith, and he was a young McDonald's executive. Smith went to work with this plan called Operation Phoenix, and what they did was they started copying a lot of what McDonald's was doing. Burger King started using the same equipment and buying from the same suppliers as McDonald's did, and guess what happened? Not much. Burger King made slightly more money, but Donald Smith eventually left for another position a few years later.
McDonald's continued to dominate and grow more because they were innovative. They vigilantly scanned the world for new opportunities to fill their coffers, and today, McDonald's is still one of the largest fast food chains on the planet. They still beat Burger King. They absolutely whop, and no pun intended, they throw a whopper on that King. The clown dunks on the king. You cannot copy your way to success. Logically, if you just think about it logically, it cannot happen, because your ceiling becomes whoever you copy. But that doesn't stop financial advisors from doing it, does it? I mean, they copy someone who copied someone else who copied another person. [22:13.4]
Did you ever play telephone as a kid? It's the game where someone whispers a message to you and you have to whisper that message to the next person, who whispers it to the next person, and it goes on down the line. At the end of the line, the original message might have been, “I love blueberry muffins,” and that turns into “Say hello to the aliens.” The message gets scrambled beyond recognition, and that is what happens when advisors copy advisors who copied other advisors.
No. 14. We're going to take this thing home. We’ve got two more to go. No. 14 is caring more about looking successful than being successful. This should be self-explanatory. I would rather be successful all day long. You have a fancy suit. I have hoodies and sweatpants, and complete time freedom. You have a leased Mercedes or BMW or a car that you're one of the big ego guys, right? I have a bedroom that hasn't used an alarm clock in years. Don't try to play the little success games. You will get eaten up and spit out. I don't try to play them. I've opted out of a lot of the success games. I don't need to impress anyone. I don't need to do anyone's little dance and do the dog and pony show. I don't need to do any of that. [23:21.6]
No. 15 is being allergic to investing in yourself. Let me get this straight, you want people to invest their life savings with you, you want them to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with you to manage, or you want them to pay five to $10,000 for a financial plan, but you won't invest a few hundred bucks to learn how to get new clients? That's not frugal. That is not smart. That's delusional.
So, I'm going to leave you with that. That's it for this episode, a little bit of a different one this week, but I hope it was still helpful for you. As always, I'm here if you need me. Visit TheAdvisorCoach.com to learn more. If you're interested in getting involved with the stuff I'm doing and the advisors I'm helping, go check it out, and I will catch you next week. [24:05.5]
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