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: I originally sent an email about this topic, but I wanted to make it a podcast episode so I could add some more detail and make my explanation a little bit longer. I wanted to do this because short explanations are one of the biggest reasons why so many financial advisors stay trapped in shallow thinking about marketing, and you'll see what I mean in this episode, because the gist is that quick tips create quick conclusions, and quick conclusions create fragile businesses. [00:58.3]
Do you really think that you're going to build the business of your dreams with a couple of quick tips, tricks and tactics? I mean, if you do this is probably not for you. If you're the kind of financial advisor who only wants to use hacks and shortcuts or something that you can half-listen to while you're answering emails between meetings, or you just have this honest background noise while you're driving, this episode is probably going to irritate you, and that's intentional. I am doing this on purpose.
This episode is for financial advisors who want to understand what is actually happening in their business, why it feels that way, and what a rational response looks like when you strip away all of the marketing noise out there. There are so many people trying to get in your pockets. There are so many people who are trying to just sell you a load of B.S.—and, honestly, I mean, yes, I have stuff to sell, too. I am very proud of the fact that I am pretty darn good at selling stuff, but I feel like I'm a lawnmower salesperson in a world where there are so many people out there trying to sell you on the idea that scissors are the best thing for your lawn and for cutting your lawn. It is just so exhausting sometimes. I just want to tell you, “This is what works.” [02:08.0]
I've been doing this for over 10 years now. I have so many success stories. I've got a track record that practically speaks for itself. Of course, I like to speak for it sometimes, and it's just exhausting being the lawnmower salesman. But back to what I'm going to talk about in this show.
I am recording this on a Monday morning, and you're probably listening to this on a Monday morning because most of the downloads for the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast come on Mondays, so I want you to imagine something with me.
I want you to imagine waking up every Monday morning, opening your calendar and feeling calm. There's no knot in your stomach. There's no quiet panic about where the next good client is coming from. There's no underlying sense that if you take your foot off the gas, even for a little bit at a tiny little amount of time, like a week—or, heaven forbid, a month, or you actually step away from your business for more than a month—that everything could wobble. You know why your calendar looks the way it does. You know why the right people keep showing up. You know what is actually driving growth in your business and what is just background noise. [03:14.1]
Hold that image for a second. Let's think about that. How does that feel? What comes to mind when you think of that? That feeling is the real subject of this episode. I'm not going to discuss tactics or marketing trends or buzz words. I want to focus on that feeling, because that feeling is possible for you. It is possible for other people. I've helped thousands of financial advisors achieve that feeling.
Let me start with the truth that almost no financial advisor ever hears said clearly—you do not want more marketing ideas. Goodness gracious, the last thing you need on your plate is another freaking idea. You want certainty. You want to know that the effort you're putting in today is building something durable tomorrow. You want to know that the business decisions you are making make sense in the context of the entire business, not just for next week or next month, or the next post or the next campaign, or the next whatever. [04:11.4]
You want to know that the business you're building can support your income, your family, your mental bandwidth—actually, not just your income, but the income you want, the income you want to grow into—and your entire future, without constant improv. You’re not on SNL. You're not on Mad TV, if you remember Mad TV. “It's time to take your medication, Grandpa.” I loved Mad TV back in the day. You're not an improv actor, okay? You are a business owner. You are a financial advisor. You're a financial planner. You're not someone who just needs to improv everything.
Now, most advisors mistakenly assume that this frustration with marketing comes from a lack of tactics. It does not. I have talked about this for literally years. I have more than 370 episodes of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I think this is Episode 372 or 373, something like that. I've said that many, many times over the years, and hopefully, you get that by now. [05:11.7]
It is not a tactics problem. The frustration comes from living in a state of permanent uncertainty every single week, the advisors who are uncertain are forced to make decisions that carry real weight. “Should I post more? Should I change my messaging? Should I niche down further? Should I run ads? Should I attend another event? Should I hire help? Should I go to this conference? Should I network with this person? Should I do this and this and this?” and, oh my goodness, every single one of those decisions cost cognitive energy.
If you make enough of those decisions without a clear framework, then even the most competent, intelligent, disciplined person, assuming that's you, of course, you start to feel unsteady. Of course, you feel like something is off, and of course, you are holding yourself back. [06:03.8]
The reason this is so punishing for financial advisors specifically is because marketing is the part of a financial advisor’s business where uncertainty compounds the fastest. You already understand this because you understand investing and compounding. I hope you do if you're listening to this podcast. Small errors and judgment repeated over time destroy your outcomes. Jim Rohn talked about this in his podcast.
He's one of the people that I listen to the most. I wish I could have met him, but he died a long time ago. He's absolutely phenomenal. He had this story about how, instead of eating an apple a day, you eat a chocolate bar a day. You might not become overweight or have all the negative health outcomes right away if you just have one chocolate bar today and another one tomorrow. You might not even see anything for a month or two, but over years, that small decision to eat a chocolate bar every single day will just grow and grow. [06:58.5]
In financial terms, imagine carrying a credit card with debt on it that you never pay off. That balance will just grow and grow and grow, and that's what happens with uncertainty in marketing. It's so insidious because it rarely happens in dramatic ways. It usually happens in slow, almost invisible ways, imperceptible ways, and to make matters worse, marketing mistakes rarely feel like mistakes. They feel like doing what you're supposed to do.
That's why so many advisors fail to achieve the growth they desire, even though they're working hard. They're doing stuff and trying things, and reading and listening and implementing, and yet they feel like they're constantly behind the eight ball and adjusting, and reacting and hoping that the next move sticks—but hope is not a strategy. Clarity is. [07:53.4]
Let's think on that. Let's think about clarity for a second. The feeling that I told you to think about in the beginning of the episode, where do you think that comes from? That comes from clarity. Now let me tell you something important, because I want to remove this layer of self-blame that a lot of financial advisors carry around with them.
If that is you, if that sounds like you, you are not broken. You're not lazy. Maybe you're lazy, I don't know. You could be lazy. You are not missing some rare personality trait or gene that everyone else has. You are experiencing exactly what happens when intelligent, capable people are forced to operate without a clear system for decision-making. Of course, that happens.
In a world with gravity, if I hold something up in the air and I let go, it is going to fall. It is the expected outcome, because there is a force operating on that object, the force of gravity. This is exactly what's supposed to happen. This is not an aberration, right? The moment you understand that, the problem refrains itself, because the real question stops being “What should I do next?” and the real question becomes “How do I know what actually matters?” [09:11.2]
That question changes everything, because when you can answer that question, marketing gets lighter, not necessarily in an easy, magical sense, but lighter in the sense that decisions don't feel risky. They don't feel like, Oh my goodness, I have to make this. I have to do this again. I don't know, should I post more? I only have a finite amount of time and money. I don't know which direction to take—that stops happening, so trade-offs stop feeling threatening, which means your confidence comes back, or you start having confidence if you've never had it before, not because you're pumped full of motivation that only lasts for a couple of minutes or maybe a day, not motivation in the sense that you watch a YouTube video and power through your day, but because you understand what you're doing and why. [09:56.0]
This is also where most marketing advice completely fails financial advisors, and I want to be very blunt about this part. This will not win me many friends, but I want to tell financial advisors the truth because I care about them. The marketing industry thrives on uncertainty because confused people buy stuff. That's not an insult. I don't mean that in a bad way, necessarily. It is just an economic reality.
Confused people buy more stuff. They buy tools and courses, and software and tactics, and masterminds and templates and systems, and all of those purchases might feel rational in isolation, because financial advisors will tell themselves, “It's not that expensive,” or “This might help,” or “Other people are using it,” but over time, together, taken as a whole, these purchases create something far worse than wasted money. It doesn't matter if it's $20 or $20,000—they create complexity without understanding. [10:56.2]
That's how financial advisors end up with all of these things and moving parts, and decisions and just all of this stuff demanding so much attention, and they still have no clear sense of what is actually holding the business together, because the marketing industry has no incentive to give you a simple, coherent model that allows you to say no to most things. Because why would they say, “Say no to all this junk out there, and if you say no, that means we don't make money”?
Simplicity does not scale well. I should know, I've been selling some simplicity for 10-plus years, and goodness, I would have so much more money if I just gave financial advisors what they thought they needed. I would have millions and millions and millions and millions of more dollars if I did that, but I have a conscience. I have a moral compass. I'm doing something that's much bigger than just making sales when I'm helping financial advisors. [11:49.7]
That simplicity, that judgment, does not sell easily. Activity sells. That's why advisors are fed these fragments instead of structure. They're fed a fragment, like “Post more” or “Tell better stories,” or “Be authentic.” What the freak does that mean? Be authentic? “Do a video. Instead of doing this, you’ve got to do video. You’ve got to get on YouTube, man. You’ve got to do this thing, guy. Launch a podcast, man.” Most of that advice is not wrong, given the right context, and that's actually what makes it so dangerous, because correct fragments without context create confusion.
They tell you what could work. YouTube could work. Podcasts could work. Stories could work. Being authentic, I mean, yes, that could work. But the problem is that financial advisors are not told when it should be used. They're not told what it should replace. They're not told how to evaluate it to see if it brings in business, or even if it doesn't bring in business directly, if it supports something else in your business, or in your business, it brings in more clients. That happens all the time. [12:58.2]
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.
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.
There are so many things that you want to have in your business that seem like they don't bring in clients right away or at all, but are actually completely 100% necessary for other structures—that's a topic that's way too deep for this podcast episode. I’ll talk about that maybe never because it's too valuable for a free podcast episode—but the burden of judgment falls entirely on you. [14:19.3]
You're expected to decide everything for yourself. You're expected to know and decide and figure out what applies, what doesn't, what deserves your time, what should be eliminated, what should be doubled down on, all without having seen enough of anything, any variation to recognize patterns—and that's where the mental drag comes from. It's just so silly that financial advisors are expected to do business this way, and to make matters worse, you can actually do okay doing it that way. You can build a decent business. Many advisors do, but they pay an enormous price for it. I don't know why you would ever, ever do things this way. [15:01.0]
It is so expensive to build a business the way that so many financial advisors do. They work harder than necessary. They tolerate either, knowingly or unknowingly, extremely fragile businesses, and a lot of these businesses don't even look fragile. They might even look strong, but they are really fragile.
They accept all this stress as just the price of admission to the point where it takes years off of their life expectancy, and again, this is not something that you can see. You can't see, Okay, five years ago, my life expectancy was 85, but now, because I've worked myself to the bone and I've done things inefficiently, my life expectancy is now 78. You don't see that, but it is a real cost. [15:44.0]
Doing things this way also caps growth, just being practical and telling you about business growth, because when decisions feel risky, people default to conservative choices, and conservative choices conserve. That's what they do. Conservatism is about conserving whatever it is you're conserving, values or the way things have been, and when you're conservative, you rarely grow. You don't improve your future. You don't get the growth you desire from just hunching down and conserving and conserving and preserving everything. [16:16.2]
That brings me to how I can help you with the James Pollard Inner Circle. Yes, this is a quasi-sales pitch. I know, I know, put your torches and your pitchforks away. I know all the common wisdom is that you're not supposed to, quote-unquote, “pitch” on a podcast episode. You're supposed to give value and be a good little boy or girl, but this is some of the most valuable information I can possibly give you, so please do not tune this out. I just want to be able to help you.
I like to ask financial advisors whether they think they can help more people by giving away free information to everyone or by working with people who actually pay them and become clients—100% of the time, there has never been an exception to this, financial advisors tell me they believe they can help people more when they become clients. I am the same way. I am no different from you. [17:03.6]
The cold, hard truth is that I can help you more when you want to be helped, and you demonstrate that you want to be helped by becoming an Inner Circle member, because that's where the community is. That's where I give the information. That's the distribution channel and all of that. I want to explain what it is in a way that makes logical sense, not marketing sense. I'm not going to really be James the marketer here. I'm just going to be James the guy telling you what I've seen over 10-plus years of helping financial advisors, because I realized I talk about the Inner Circle all the time in this podcast, but I rarely explain the core behind what makes it so effective.
It is not a course in the traditional sense. I mean, I get there are course-like aspects of it. It is not a content dump or a content graveyard, as I would call it. It is not just another program you buy once and forget about in a few months, because it's sitting on your bookshelf or it's sitting on a file somewhere on your computer. [17:57.4]
It is designed to improve decision quality. That's one of the core values of the Inner Circle, because better decisions mean fewer mistakes. Fewer mistakes mean less wasted time, less wasted money, and a lighter cognitive load. A lighter cognitive load means clearer thinking and better execution.
Inside the Inner Circle, you are exposed to something most advisors will never, ever get access to—that's pattern recognition. You can see how thousands of financial advisors behave over time. You see what works, what doesn't, and what only works under very specific conditions. You see second-order effects that are invisible when you're only looking at your own business, and that changes how you evaluate everything. [18:49.4]
I want you to think about how many ideas you've chased that sounded good but never quite delivered. Think about all the tools you bought, the campaigns you tried, the strategies that you kind of sort of implemented because something felt good and then something felt bad, but you couldn't really articulate why. A good filter prevents those mistakes before they happen. That's what judgment does. That's what pattern recognition does. That's what the Inner Circle is designed to build.
Here's something that surprises a lot of members—they gain orientation. It's not really about generating leads and getting clients, although that happens. That is a natural byproduct of pattern recognition and knowing what works and what doesn't. Of course, that happens, right? But they prize the orientation, or at least, the super smart Inner Circle members do.
Orientation is the difference between confidence and bravado. Bravado is thinking, Oh, I'm just going to push harder. I'm going to grind. I've got the willpower. But confidence says, “I understand where this is going. I know exactly what to do. I know what moves to make,” and that has downstream effects that most advisors don't even anticipate. [19:54.8]
Pricing conversations become easier because you're not compensating for uncertainty. I wish I could explain this clearer. Maybe I'm not doing a good job with this. I don't know, until this podcast episode comes out, but it is so obvious to me that I wish it was more obvious to financial advisors. You say no to people more comfortably, because you understand what you're optimizing for.
If you have pattern recognition down and you have orientation down, and you're certain about where you're going and what you're doing, you are comfortable saying no to the wrong people, and that makes your business so much better, because when you say no, you don't invest any more time in those people, and that time is able to be reinvested into other aspects of your business, which can grow over time. You can simplify. That's huge, too, because you know which parts of the business are load-bearing. If something is not load-bearing, you just get rid of it or delegate, or eliminate or all the other things, and it just becomes so fantastic.
With that said, let's talk about the investment, because smart financial advisors care about numbers. Of course, they do. The cost of the Inner Circle is predictable and controlled. You know exactly how much it's going to be. It’s $199. You know how often you're going to be billed that. It's every single month. That is, again, predictable and controlled. [21:11.2]
The cost of operating without this clarity is ongoing and it's invisible. You pay it, whether you know it or not. You pay it in time spent on low-quality prospects. You pay it in delayed decisions. You pay it in unnecessary tools purchased. You pay it in campaigns you run, because you're not sure what else to do. You pay it in underpricing, not charging enough, because your confidence is missing.
Most advisors underestimate this cost because it does not arrive as a neat, quantifiable, little line item that you can point to and say, “Yep, this is how much I'm missing out on.” Again, it's invisible. It's ongoing. One avoided mistake can pay for years of Inner Circle membership. One tool you decide not to buy because you finally understand why it will not work in your situation can cover the cost. [22:01.7]
One pricing decision made with clarity—it's $199 per month, right? If you're a financial advisor, and I can get you to a point where you just charge at least the equivalent of $199 per month more for your clients, then think, what is so hard? This is not a difficult decision.
If you are not an Inner Circle member, here's what I'd like you to understand. You are already paying for your marketing education. You are just paying for it in the least efficient, most expensive way possible. You are paying in wasted time and second-guessing and stress, and delayed action and opportunity cost. So, the Inner Circle converts that invisible tax that you're paying into an investment that actually produces leverage.
You might be thinking right now, I should be able to figure all this stuff out myself. Yes, yes, of course, you probably can, but the question is not whether it's possible. I believe a lot of things are possible, but is that belief that you can figure it out yourself, producing the results you want? Are you actually getting what you want? [23:05.6]
I mean, the real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. Every elite performer in every field shortens that performer’s learning curve by borrowing knowledge. These people do not insist on earning every lesson the hard way. They would rather just have someone show them what to do. This is no different.
You might be thinking, I don't need more information, and you're right. That's exactly what I'm trying to tell you here. Information without that clarity and structure and the orientation creates overwhelm, and I don't want you to be overwhelmed.
You might be thinking, I'm already successful. I don't need you, James. Go away with this silly Inner Circle stuff—good, this is for successful financial advisors. This is for advisors who want to make that success even more profitable, more stable, not just gamble on whatever is working, continuing to work, or tolerating unnecessary stream, because, remember, I told you earlier in episode, it is possible to build a decent business with this uncertainty, but you're paying an enormous invisible cost. [24:08.5]
If you want hype and novelty, the Inner Circle will be boring to you. If you want this constant dance and me making up buzz words just to keep you entertained and to say things like, “Oh, this trend. You need to hop on this trend and chase this bright, shiny object,” you'll be frustrated. But if you want reassurance and you want control over your decisions, and you want a lower cognitive load and you want a business that holds together without constant supervision, then this is for you.
So, let's go back to that feeling, the feeling of your calendar being full, the feeling of you knowing exactly what to do. Now let's go six months from now. I want you to imagine realizing that marketing feels a lot better—marketing is not as heavy as it used to feel. You're not tempted by every new idea, every bright, shiny object that comes your way. You know what deserves your attention and what doesn't. [25:06.2]
I want you to imagine how that affects you elsewhere. How does that affect your confidence in meetings? How does that affect your pricing conversations, like how much you charge? Because, again, going back, just telling you straight up, if I could get you to a point where you charge the equivalent of $199 per month more in your business, everything else is gravy. I don't know how else to explain that, and that's what clarity buys you.
That is what the Inner Circle delivers, and if this message resonates with you, then you already understand the logic so you can learn more and decide whether it makes sense for you at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, or you could just google “the James Pollard Inner Circle,” however you want to get to it.
I hope you take this message seriously. I hope you treat it with the respect it deserves, because it legitimately can change your life. If you optimize for clarity, things will be way better for you—and I will catch you next week. [26:01.2]
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