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 going to be a little different than what I usually do. This is going to be a bit of a rant-style episode, so if you don't like those, then turn this off now and go away. You're not going to like it. I am also going to talk about a lot of stuff with younger people in mind, specifically people in their 20s, but a lot of this can apply to you no matter where you are right now. You could be 50, 60, or 70 years old. A lot of these ideas are going to apply to you because 10 years are going to pass anyway. What I want to talk about in this episode is what to do right now to ensure you're successful in 10 years. [01:09.0]
Okay, perhaps the most important thing you need to realize is that even the people with 10 or 20 years of experience don't really have that much experience, or at least not all of them do. They just have one year of experience repeated 10 or 20 times. Lots of people go through life doing the exact same things over and over again. They do the same routine with the same people in the same places every single day and every single week, and to be fair, having a routine can be a superpower. I love routines. I have routines in my life, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about a morning routine or a productivity routine, or a work routine. I'm talking about people who don't read books, people who don't learn new skills, people who don't do anything new in their lives to push the envelope. They simply don't have any ambitions. They're just going through the same thing again and again. You cannot be a top 1% human being by doing stuff that 99% of people do. It cannot happen. You must do different things. [02:13.0]
I'll share something with you. One of my goals for this summer was to spend more time at the pool and the beach than I have at home, and so far, I've accomplished that goal, I have been able to spend every single day with my family still, as always. I've talked about on this podcast that I've spent every single day with my family for the past several years. I have never missed a day. I am in better shape than I've been in years. I'm making more money than I've ever made. Those are effects. They are not causes, okay? They're not causes. They are effects.
Sometimes I feel like . . . I don't know how to say this, but I feel like I straddle the line between arrogance and inspiration. I don't share these things with you to be arrogant or anything, but sometimes I just get tired of people acting like their way is better when their lives are objectively horrible. I'm sorry, what you say does not have merit because you don't have the results I want. [03:05.7]
Guess what? I run the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I talk about marketing. My marketing assets enable me to have all of the things I talked about earlier, spending time with family, and health is better and more money, and all that cool stuff. I practice what I preach.
I'll give you another example of practicing what I preach. In the past few days, I've spent $11,490 on direct mail. The average financial advisor spends something like $16,000 per year on marketing. The median is something like $6,200. At $6,200, I have spent nearly twice the median financial advisors advertising budget in a couple of days on a single marketing strategy.
So, I don't know, maybe I'm someone worth listening to. Maybe, just maybe, you can learn from me if I'm personally spending my own money on a strategy I tell you to do, and I'm spending double your entire yearly budget in a few days. I know, again, that might sound arrogant. I don't want it to come across as arrogant. I just want to establish some credibility. I share these things so you’ll say, “Okay, James, I'm going to take you seriously. I'm going to listen to what you tell me.” [04:14.7]
Again, these are effects, not causes. I am able to invest that much money in direct mail marketing and in a single campaign, because I know it's going to work. I don't have to guess. All I have to do is find the people to mail and that's it. When I say it's an effect, it's because I know it's going to work. If you want better effects, then you need better causes.
I've discovered that people go through these cycles of about every 10 years where they morph into different people. There's a saying called the seven-year itch. It applies to couples. When they get married seven years later, they divorce and that sort of thing. Who you are at 20 is completely different than who you were at 10. Who you are at 60 years old is different from who you are at 50. I have seen this with grandparents and parents, and aunts and uncles. I've seen them go through stages of life. I've seen it with nieces and nephews, and cousins and everyone in my family, and it's just absolutely remarkable. About every 10 years, this happens. [05:15.4]
Let me talk to young people, specifically. A lot of you were told that your 20s should be the best years of your life. I am telling you right now, man, they absolutely, unequivocally should not be the best years of your life. That is a dumb philosophy. You don't feel the pressure of time in your 20s, and even if you feel a little bit, you don't feel it as much as you should. You absolutely should feel the clock ticking, because the same amount of time is passing from age 20 to age 30 as from age 50 to age 60. It's a huge jump and you need to start building as soon as possible. You need to start producing better causes so you can have better effects when you're my age and older. A lot of the Inner Circle members and financial advisors I help are a lot older than I am, and they can tell you the same thing. [06:04.6]
When you turn 30, you really start to see who was building versus who was not building in their 20s, you start to see who took their 20s seriously versus those who goofed off and, quote-unquote, “had fun,” and quote-unquote, “lived life.” You also encounter a lot of people who talk about how they wouldn't trade those times for anything and how they have no regrets. That is cope. They are coping with their bad decisions. Again, you cannot become a top 1% human being by listening to whatever the other 99% of people do.
According to NerdWallet.com—let me hit you with some studies and statistics and research—of people aged 35 to 44, and I would have gotten age 30 to 40, but I found 35 to 44, the median net worth is $135,300. I am sorry, but if that is your net worth and you are in your 40s, then you have made some terrible, terrible life decisions. If that stings, if that's you right now, good. Let it wake you up. Comfort sedates you. It's not a reward. It's not good. [07:12.3]
If you're someone in that age bracket who has a much higher net worth, be careful, too, because every time you think to yourself, Oh, I'm doing good, I'm doing very well, I'm doing fine for my age, you're swallowing a little pill that knocks your ambition out cold, because the market doesn't pay extraordinarily well for “just fine” or “I'm doing okay.” It pays for results.
That's one thing I wish someone had hammered into my head when I was a teenager. I didn't truly figure this out until I was in my mid-20s. Again, the 10-year thing, right? I wish someone at age 15 had said, “James, look, this is how it's going to be,” and that way, by age 25, I would have been so, so much further ahead. I wish someone said, “James, the marketplace pays for results. You need to become the guy who can deliver results. Nobody cares if you work hard or if you show up on time, or any of that stuff, if you can't get results. Results are the only things that matter.” [08:13.0]
This is also what I try to tell financial advisors to help them avoid getting scammed by the 500,000 coaches, consultants and gurus out there who all claim to be able to help them with their marketing. Can those people post results? Can they share receipts with you? Can they point to where they're running their own marketing? Because I can. Even with the direct mail thing, I can pull out my receipts and say, “Here you go. This is what I spent. This is what I sent. It's exactly the same thing I'm recommending for you to do.” I'm not one of those people who tells you to do one thing and then I do another.
The harsh truth is this. If you don't have your life together in your 30s, 40s and 50s, it is simply because you screwed around in your earlier decades. This should not be a controversial topic. It is simply a manifestation of your decisions. They are effects. I can't say that enough. They are effects, not causes. [09:05.7]
We don't confuse this with other stuff. We don't see someone who's morbidly obese and start rationalizing all of these weird reasons why the person is obese. No, obesity is merely a manifestation of that person's decision to consume more calories than he or she burned. That is it. I've got a little bit of fat all over my body. It is because I chose to eat more calories than I burned. I made those decisions. The fat on my body right now, my little rolls, these rolls are manifestations of bad decisions that I've made in the past.
If someone's obese, it doesn't mean that person is bad or stupid, or immoral or anything like that. It is merely a reflection of that person's decisions—and if you are the 35- to 44-year-old with a net worth of $135,300, that means you are the median and I am not going to listen to what someone in the median has to say if my goal is to be in the top 1%. I would not model an obese person's behavior if my goal is to have a six-pack. [10:04.3]
So, I don't understand why it's so hard for people to understand this concept. I guess it scares them, and if so, then this is really going to scare them. You probably need to set bigger goals. I wish someone had told me that, too. I wish someone told me when I was starting out that building a seven-figure business is not that much harder than building a six-figure business. I really regret not setting bigger goals. I wish I thought bigger. I wish I stretched myself more.
What ended up happening was this. I set goals that, at the time, seemed big to me, but I didn't move fast enough after reaching those goals. I didn't double or triple. I was too focused on incremental growth for too long, and here's what that looks like in practice. Let's say you set a goal to make your first $10,000 per month in profit from your business. When you hit that goal, you should not set a new goal that's only a few thousand dollars more per month higher. That's what I did. I did that. I should not have done that. What I should have done was set my sites at double or triple. [11:08.8]
So, if you're in that situation, then you should set your sights at $20,000 or $30,000, or heck, I mean, you could go higher, right? But you get the idea. The reason why is, you already have a proof of concept. The structure of the goal itself has changed. The things that make up the outcome have changed.
When you're getting started, you just need proof that the market will pay for your skills and services. Once you have that, you completely eliminate the question of if people will pay for what you're offering, and that means you can move on to solving a completely different problem, which is how to scale it, and since scale should not be incremental, then by definition, you should not set incremental goals. [11:48.2]
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.
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That is a big mistake I made. It cost me a ton of time, probably years, because here's what happens when you set small, incremental goals after your initial success, after you have that proof of concept, after you've solved the first big problem—you keep playing at that same level with a little bit more effort. You don't think creatively. You don't build better systems. You don't invest in leverage. You just tweak what you're already doing. You may get a little bit better and a little bit better, and that's not bad, but you want to do that in addition to the things that are going to help you scale. [13:20.3]
What I've learned since then is that your goals determine your thinking and your thinking determines your actions, and your actions determine your outcomes. If your goal is only 10% bigger than what you've already achieved, you'll probably just work a little harder, doing the same thing. But if your goal is three times bigger or five times bigger, you have to think differently. You're forced to step back and reevaluate everything, and that's where the real breakthroughs happen.
So, if you're already at six figures, stop thinking like a six-figure business owner. Start thinking like someone who earns seven figures. Ask different questions. Build different systems. Stretch your goals so wide that they make your current habits obsolete. That is how you grow fast. That's how you stay ahead, because here's the truth—small goals will still require your time, effort and energy. So, why not aim higher and get a bigger return for the same investment? [14:12.1]
The book that really helped me shape my thinking on this idea is a book called The Outsiders by William Thorndike. I recommended it so many times in different interviews and in the Inner Circle Newsletter and during office hours, and just in multiple places. It is a phenomenal book, 10 out of 10, highly recommend. I reread it at least once a year. The Outsiders by William Thorndike. It profiles eight different CEOs. Warren Buffett is one of them, if you're curious, and reveals what these CEOs did to generate huge ROIs.
The main thing that was found was that these CEOs were better allocators of capital than everyone else, meaning, they could stretch their resources more than their competitors. Guess what? Your money is capital. Yes, but so is your time. Your energy is capital. Your attention is capital. Every decision you make is either allocating that capital towards something that compounds or something that maintains the status quo, or, I guess, something that depreciates, something that could actually destroy your life. [15:13.7]
When you set small goals, you tend to allocate your capital toward maintenance tasks, things that keep the machine running but don't really grow it, things like sending a few more emails, doing a little bit better, scheduling a few more meetings, tinkering with your website, all of the stuff that might feel productive, but it doesn't move the needle in the biggest way possible.
Bigger goals force you to make bolder decisions with how you spend your capital, how you invest your capital, because you start asking questions like, what's the 80/20 inside of the 80/20 in my business? Who can I hire in the business? Who can I partner with and how can that person immediately add leverage? Which activities can I do that generate scalable returns? Which activities just keep me busy? Where am I focused on just incremental returns? That's how the best business owners operate. They don't think about how to save a few bucks. They think about how to generate huge returns on every dollar and every hour they spend, and that kind of thinking only kicks in when your goals demand it. [16:14.2]
Another thing you should probably do that will set you up for success in the next 10 years, and again, like I said in the beginning, this can apply no matter your age, but this is really geared towards people in their 20s—begin taking more calculated risks. Unfortunately, lots of financial advisors cannot do this because they've succumbed to lifestyle creep. They buy a bigger house than they can really generally afford, nice cars, flashy watches, and all the so-called trappings of success.
But that stuff destroys your ability to grow faster, because let's compare two financial advisors who are both making $40,000 per month, not a huge amount of money, but decent compared to normal people's standards. Let's say one guy spends it all. He has a big house, kids in private school, big SUVs and all of the things that evaporate $40,000 per month like it's nobody's business. [17:06.8]
He becomes a slave to making that $40,000 per month and can't try new things to get him to the next level. He can't afford the temporary drop in income that comes from allocating capital to experiments, because he has no capital to allocate. Okay, so let's go back to The Outsiders by William Thorndike. If the biggest predictor of generating humongous returns on investment is allocating capital, you need to have capital to allocate.
Let's say the second guy who also makes $40,000 per month only spends 10,000 of it each month on all of his lifestyle expenses, credit card bill, mortgage, eating out. All the stuff, right? $10,000 a month. He can literally afford to do $30,000 worth of tests and experiments every single month. He can pour money into his advertising, test different marketing strategies, build new funnels, hire consultants, pay for high-level coaching. The sky's the limit for this guy, up to $30,000 per month, and it only takes one winner to permanently elevate his income and change the trajectory of his business. [18:10.8]
That's the power of maintaining margins so you can allocate capital. You don't want to be the guy who has no capital to allocate—and, again, this is not just about money. It's also about your attention and your energy, and everything that you have.
What's crazy? This is how you know most people are completely screwed. They have no hope, okay? Most people envy the first guy in real life. They look at the cars and the house, and the vacations and the private school, and they think, Oh, big dog, he's made it. But he's actually trapped. He's locked into his current income level and lives in constant fear of anything that might disrupt it. He can't pivot. He can't take extended time off to build something new. He can't reinvest aggressively. The second guy, the $10,000-a-month guy who's spending that much, he's living beneath his means and he can take the biggest leap forward, because he can invest and invest and invest. [19:01.0]
Over time, the gap between them grows massively, not because of talent, not because of luck, but because one had the flexibility to take calculated risks while the other clings to—clung. I think that's good, that's the right word—clung to stability. This is why I say, if you're a young man or woman in your 20s, by the time you're in your 30s, you will see who took life seriously. You will see who invested and who didn't, and this is true at any age group. When you're 50, you will see who really put in the work in the 40s and 30s. If you're 70, you will see who really planned for retirement and who did not.
What are some of these risks? You might be thinking, Okay, James, you say you take calculated risks. These are calculated risks with asymmetric upside, which is where the potential gain is far greater than the potential loss. This could mean testing a new offer, launching a different marketing channel, hiring someone out of your comfort zone, targeting a different market segment. [20:00.0]
I've had people hire me and buy my products and whatnot, and tell me it was uncomfortable for them to do it, but they did it anyway because they understood this concept. They realized, again, you don't need every bet to win. You just need enough of them to keep you in the game and one to hit big, because when it hits, it can change everything. This is how I try to, quote-unquote, “sell” my Inner Circle to financial advisors. It's not about every single month. It's about the years. You don't need to have a massive home-run amazing winner every single month. In fact, it probably will not work out for you that way.
Instead, you will find yourself skimming through the newsletter issue here and there, skimming through it. Okay, attending an “office hours” here and there. But then let's say that six or seven months in, you come across something that completely changes everything for you. That is how it works.
That is why I say you should not join if you're not willing to stay for years, because you'll never actually get the breakthrough, and it'll just be a waste of time for you and a waste of time for me dealing with you. It'll be a waste of money for you, and I mean, I'm glad to take your money, but I would rather have you get results in exchange. That way you can tell other people, “Holy moly, James Pollard changed my life,” and then I get more money as a result of that. Okay? Just being transparent. [21:13.5]
But here's the key—you need to hedge while you take those calculated risks. That means, again, keeping your lifestyle costs low so you're not financially pressured to make desperate decisions. It always kills me when I see financial advisors cutting costs in their businesses when it's far better to cut costs in their personal lives. They'll cancel a CRM subscription that helps them follow up with leads. They'll stop running online ads. They'll stop sending direct mail just to keep up payments on that stupid luxury car, just to keep the little freakin’ golf club membership, right? It is backwards. The business is the engine that funds everything else. Protect your business first. Your personal expenses eating into your business should never be the reason why your business can't grow, so do not cut from your business. Cut from your personal life. [22:04.6]
Advisors who play the long game and quietly keep their costs low, and invest aggressively into their businesses and take bets that others can't afford to make, those are the ones who are succeeding. They don't worry about what people think. They're focused on building a real asset, and as a result, they start stacking wins, and it might not happen overnight. It probably will not happen overnight. It probably takes years, because one experiment doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, then finally works, and then another doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, and then finally works. They find a new marketing channel. They land a partnership. They launch a new offer. They have a redesign. They change the wording somewhere.
That is how momentum builds, not from just scraping by month to month, but by consistently allocating capital toward growth instead of lifestyle inflation, and the cool irony of me making content like this is that the people who need to hear this message the most are the ones who are least likely to listen to it. [23:00.6]
I get it, when you're doing well financially, it feels like you've earned the right to spend more. You convince yourself that it's a reward for all of your hard work. But what most people don't realize is that the real reward comes later, after you've reinvested, after you've grown, after you've bought yourself freedom, freedom to take bigger swings, freedom to walk away from bad clients, freedom to build something meaningful instead of just keeping up appearances.
Unfortunately, this message gets tuned out by the very people whose businesses are most fragile. They're too busy trying to look successful to take the steps required to become successful on a whole different level—and the people who are already thinking long term, the ones living below their means and then doing the experiments and everything that I talked about in this episode, they're the ones who least need to hear this, but they're also the ones who are most likely to take it to heart, so I guess it all works out in the end. [23:51.0]
All right, that is enough for this week. I feel like plugging something. I didn't plug anything in this episode, so I'll plug “Direct Mail Secrets for Financial Advisors.” It is a 48-minute video revealing my exact direct mail process that I use to help financial advisors set more appointments. If you want it, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/mail. That's “TheAdvisorCoach.com/mail,” like direct mail, like the thing you get in your mailbox and letters and things. And I will catch you next week. [24:20.5]
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