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 back to another episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. Actually, it may not be “welcome back.” This may be your first time, and if it is, I'm glad to have you. I am your host, James Pollard. I'm the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com. I've helped tens of thousands of financial advisors get more clients, and I've had a heck of a run and I feel like I'm only getting started, at least some days. [00:55.0]
I've been doing a lot of deep thinking lately about financial advisor marketing and the process and the strategies, and all the cool things I help financial advisors with, and one of the things I've been thinking about is that it's as if I'm not trying hard enough with my own marketing messages. I don't really know how to explain it. Some days I feel like I am doing enough. Other days I feel like I'm not.
I guess a good way of explaining it is that maybe I'm relying a little bit too much on my reputation, because at this point in my career, I fully realized that I have like a magic wand for helping financial advisors get more clients and make more money. If you can't make more money with the stuff that I teach and help you with, and if I'm right there helping you and you can't make it work, honestly, and I know this sounds a little cocky, a little arrogant, truthfully, the problem is you.
You have to realize this is something I have been doing day in and day out for over a decade now. Plus, I have this enormous data set, probably the biggest data set in the entire world about this topic, what works and what doesn't in financial advisor marketing, and sometimes, if a financial advisor is skeptical about me or the products I offer or things like that, I think to myself that it's kind of like questioning a master electrician or a surgeon. [02:07.8]
You wouldn't question a master electrician’s ability to wire a home and you wouldn't be skeptical of a master surgeon's ability to give you stitches. Yet I know some financial advisors will be forever skeptical of my ability to help them. I've always thought that was strange, to say the least. I guess the reason is that marketing advice doesn't feel like wiring a house or stitching a wound. It's not as immediately visible or as easily measured in the moment.
When someone flips a light switch and the lights come on, they see the result instantly. When someone gets stitches, they can see the thread holding their skin together. But with marketing, especially the right kind of marketing, the results are often delayed. You might put the right strategies in place today, but the payoff could come weeks, months or even years down the road, and that delay messes with people's perception. It makes them feel like the advice isn't working, even when it absolutely is—and that's why a lot of financial advisors keep looking for quick fixes and shiny objects and marketing hacks, because those things feel like they're doing something. They give the illusion of progress, even if they're actually getting nowhere. [03:10.7]
The truth is, the real marketing work is often invisible. It's happening behind the scenes, like compound interest. You don't always notice it at first, but over time, the momentum builds up, the results start stacking. That's why I always tell people that the best marketing isn't always the flashiest or the sexiest. It's the stuff that works consistently over time.
I guess a good takeaway from all this deep thinking is that I need to do a better job of demonstrating that to you, not just telling you that I have this magic wand, but showing you how and why it works over and over again, because I genuinely believe that if you see what I see and you feel what I feel deep inside, it'll make sense to you and you'll stop questioning what works. You'll start implementing the kinds of strategies that actually bring in more clients and make more money month after month and year after year. [03:58.0]
Another thing I've been thinking about is something I believe could solve 99% of a financial advisor's marketing problems, and, no, that's not an exaggeration. In fact, the only reason I don't say 100% is because I'm cautious about sounding overhyped, but I genuinely believe what you're about to learn here can completely transform how you think about marketing and give you a massive advantage over other advisors who are stuck on just regular old thinking or just commodity marketing, and just doing the same old, same old.
Here's the idea that I want you to take away from this podcast. I think this has the power to change everything for you. You need to ask yourself, “Is this easy for someone else to do?” That's it. That's the insight. But let me explain why this is so powerful and why it solves so many problems. I talked about this with my Inner Circle members during the May office hours session.
If you don't know, on the second Tuesday of every month, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, I make myself available exclusively for my Inner Circle members. I hang out on Zoom. I have my camera on. I have my microphone on. I'm just hanging out with them, talking with them, helping them with whatever they need. [05:02.5]
It's one of the best parts of what I do. It's some of the most fun I have helping financial advisors, because I get to interact live with them. They're serious about what they're doing. They are ready to get to work. They are interested in making their marketing better, and it's actually really cool. They're implementing. They're asking real questions. They're growing. It's just fantastic.
During that May session, we talked about something called “the commandment of entry.” I first learned about this from one of my mentors, M. J. DeMarco, and he wrote this book. He has written several books, but the book that had the biggest impact on me was The Millionaire Fastlane, and that book completely transformed my life.
It made me realize that I didn't have to wait until I was in my 60s or 70s to have millions of dollars and just live the life I wanted to live. Instead, I could create value, solve meaningful problems, and position myself in the right markets to accelerate my success. I could just make a ton of money by helping a ton of people, or helping the right people in a major way. [05:59.0]
I don't want to get too detailed into the book because this episode is not about the book, but the gist is, you can help a small amount of people in a major way. You can help a ton of people in a little way, or you can help a ton of people in a major way, and then you make humongous money. I have tried to do a little bit of all three and it has worked extremely well for me.
“The commandment of entry,” what is that? If something is easy to enter, meaning, the barrier to entry is low, it naturally attracts a flood of competition. When there's too much competition and not enough differentiation, the marketplace gets saturated. Prices get driven down, and most players end up competing on who can do it cheaper, faster or with less effort. That is a losing game. It's kind of like food trucks. I think of food trucks. There's a period in the mid-2010s where everybody seemed to want to open a food truck. Then you have the crypto stuff of 2021 and the metaverse. [06:55.5]
I'm still a believer in the metaverse. I actually use the metaverse quite frequently for work stuff and business stuff. I think it's a fantastic tool, but people were hyping it up in 2021 and the barrier to entry was low. You just start a website. You slap AI on it. You slap metaverse on it. You slap crypto on it, and boom, you’ve got media attention. That doesn't last long, because the barrier is low.
The real opportunity in life and business, those opportunities come from when you focus on high-barrier activities, things that require more effort, more thought, more commitment, and more of you. Those are the things that naturally filter out the majority of other people. They create a moat, a protective barrier. It makes it incredibly difficult for others to copy what you're doing or to compete with you, because if it's easy for you to do, it's easy for other people to do, and if that's the case, it's not a competitive advantage.
This is how you separate yourself from every other financial advisor out there who is doing the bare minimum. If something is difficult, whether it's difficult to think about—a lot of people think about physical effort and just doing things, but sometimes the hard stuff, the barrier to entry is just the thinking. Thinking is the hardest work in the world—if something is difficult to think about, difficult to execute or difficult to commit to long term, that is where you create real separation. That's where you build your moat. [08:15.8]
Let me give you a specific example so I don't keep talking in abstracts. Right now, there's a lot of hype about artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT—and don't get me wrong, I love artificial intelligence for what it should be used for, which I'll explain in a moment, but there's a huge problem when advisors over rely on AI for their marketing.
For example, if you go to ChatGPT and ask it to write a social media post about retirement planning, it will do that for you in seconds. That sounds awesome. That's a huge win, right? Hmm, maybe not. Every other financial advisor can do the exact same thing just as easily. There is no moat. There's no barrier. There's no unique advantage. Do you understand this? [08:57.6]
In fact, AI is literally trained to be or is an aggregate of average content. It is literally the purest form of average that can exist, because it has all of this human knowledge. It has tens of thousands of millions of data points from people all around the world, so it is the purest form of average that exists. Its entire purpose is to produce the most likely next word based on what it’s already written and what it knows has been written across the internet. It's not creating breakthroughs. It's not producing deep thought leadership. It's not telling your story. It is just generating mass market, bland, middle-of-the-road content.
So, if you rely on AI-generated content as your primary marketing strategy, you're essentially saying, “I want to be as average as possible.” I'm not an AI hater. I love AI. I use AI tools all the time, but I use them for efficiency, not strategy. For example, I use AI all the time to check the compliance of my online ads, specifically Facebook ads, because Facebook can be a huge pain in the butt. [10:00.0]
I will paste my ad into ChatGPT and I will ask it to review the ad based on Facebook's advertising policies. I will literally take their policies. I will upload it to ChatGPT. I'll say, “I want you to read this and study every single word, and I want you to read my advertisement, and I want you to pretend you're an attorney and just make sure I am compliant.”
That is smart usage because it saves me time while protecting my ad account. That is what I want. But I never use it to think for me, because it cannot. [10:31.7]
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.
On the flip side, let's say you sit down and you write a social media post or an email, or content marketing piece, about your personal story, something real, something emotional, like how watching your parents struggle with their retirement planning made you passionate about helping others.
Let's say that you include a personal photo or you talk about the emotions you felt during that time, or the lessons you’ve learned now, how they drive you as a financial advisor. That is difficult. It takes vulnerability. It takes thought. It takes effort, and most importantly, nobody else can copy it, because it's yours. It is your story, your voice and your perspective. [12:08.8]
Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you here about the commandment of entry and creating a barrier to entry? If you are using your story and stuff that is pertinent to your life and your experience, you are legitimately creating one of the strongest barriers to entry that you can possibly have. That is a real moat. That is a real advantage.
Another example is email marketing. Many financial advisors pay for these canned email libraries, and actually content libraries, in general. Basically, they just log in. They pick and choose. They copy and paste, and you know, boom, bam, bim, done. Look, it's better than doing nothing—sometimes, I don't know. Sometimes I feel like you're better off doing nothing. But if it's easy for you, again, this is what I want you to get, if it is easy for you, it's easy for your competitors, too. [12:59.3]
So, what’s harder? Sending more frequent story-based, personality-driven emails that actually build a relationship with your audience, not the canned stuff. If you send the story-based emails, that's harder, because it requires you to write, for you to think, for you to share your ideas regularly. But because it's harder, most advisors won't do it—and guess what? That's exactly why it works.
Let's talk podcasts for a second. I have this podcast, the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, thank you so much for listening. At the time of this recording, I've published more than 320-something episodes, I believe. I've shown up every single week without missing a beat for more than five years. That's not easy. It takes planning. It takes recording, editing and uploading, and consistency.
But here's the thing: because it's hard, most financial advisors won't do it, and because I've done it for so long, I have built a massive body of work that nobody else can replicate overnight—and I just realized I said five years of podcasts. Scratch that, it's actually six years. I can't do math. I don't do math in public, right? [14:10.2]
It's the same with the Inner Circle Newsletter, which I've been publishing every single month since 2018. Each issue is 20-plus pages long. It's packed with in-depth strategies, ideas and tactics that help financial advisors grow—that body of work, think about that. Every single month since 2018 I have written these newsletters with my own hands. This was before AI, okay? A lot of these coaches, consultants, gurus and lead gen agencies, yeah, they can do a lot of stuff now because they have artificial intelligence tools, but were they doing it in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, before these tools really existed? They weren't, okay? They were not, but I was, every single month. I never missed a month and I put the content out there for financial advisors nearly 90 issues now, and that is extremely difficult to replicate. That's why it's so valuable. [15:03.1]
Let's keep it offline. The newsletter is offline. I send it directly to financial advisors. It's a physical newsletter. I have sent at this point, oh, my goodness, tens of thousands probably. I may have crossed 100,000 personalized direct mail pieces over the course of my career. I am talking handcrafted, tailored, specific marketing messages sent directly to a targeted list. It is time-consuming. It's detail-oriented and it requires effort, and—are you noticing a theme here?—that's why it works. Most advisors won't take the time to do stuff like that, but those who do are the ones who reap the rewards.
By the way, this principle extends far beyond marketing. It applies to wealth building. It applies to fitness. It applies to relationships. It applies to every other area of life.
I'll give you another takeaway. This is something that I have been meditating on a lot recently and this is something that I believe to be true. I believe it is far easier/more effective/better to optimize from the top down than to try to micromanage your way up and just optimize every little detail from nothing. [16:14.3]
Let me explain. In business, I think it is easier to just sell, sell, sell, generate more revenue, more revenue, more revenue, and then cut expenses later than to try to have your expenses as low as possible through the entirety of your business. I believe it's just easier to go hard.
If your goal is to bench-press 315 pounds, you should not train like someone whose ceiling is 315. You should not train like that is truly the end goal. You should train like someone aiming for 405. You should shoot higher. You should train harder, and when you fall short, you'll land right on your target, because even if you fail four or five, you could still be way above 315 and that is a huge win. [16:57.5]
Personally, in my grip stuff, I take my own advice here. I am training to close the Captains Of Crush IronMind No. 3, and if you think you could do it, I challenge you to go to Amazon, go to IronMind and order a Captains Of Crush No. 3 and let me see what you’ve got. If you can do it, then . . . I'll think of some cool price, but, yeah, you're not going to be able to do it.
I am training to be able to do that, and in order for me to get to that point, I am actually doing very, very, very hard training with the 3.5 which is the step above the 3. The 3.5 is absolutely unreal. It feels like you're trying to move a brick in your hands, like you're trying to crush a brick, and when I get to the 3, it feels a little bit easier, and every week it just feels a little bit easier, then a little bit easier and a little bit easier, and that is how you reach the target. [17:49.0]
Let's take it back to business. Think about you meeting a client who did stuff in business and worked extremely hard, consulting or sales or whatever, and ended up with $4 million in cash. Never bought a single index fund, never invested in any ETFs, no bonds, nothing. No life insurance, no investment vehicles or protection or anything. Just $4 million cash.
Is that the most efficient financial move? Is that the most efficient use of capital for long-term wealth building? No, of course not. No, no financial advisor would tell you that. But who do you think is going to have real success in the real world—someone who just goes all out and goes super hard and stacks up the cash, and just builds something massive and wonderful, or someone who second-guesses and doubts, and that person has no money, is trying to be 100% optimal and do all of the right things every step of the way to financial independence? You get what I'm saying here? At least, I hope you do. [18:54.8]
It's always easier, at least, in my experience—this is just what I have experienced in my life. I mean, I don't know, you can listen to me. You can ignore my advice. I've only helped tens of thousands of financial advisors and I've only gotten a lot of great results for my life, and I live a life that very few people have. So, you can listen to me or you can ignore me, I don't really care—you sculpt a masterpiece by starting with a massive block of stone and then removing the excess. You don't start by gluing pebbles together and hoping it somehow turns into a statue.
If you want to solve 99% of your marketing problems as a financial advisor, start doing things that are difficult. Start doing things that other people are not willing to do. Start building the real competitive advantages that cannot be copied, cannot be pasted, cannot be generated by a robot. That is how you win. [19:46.6]
Most advisors hear what I'm saying when I deliver this message. They just might nod their heads, I can picture it. They agree in theory, but then they go right back to what's easy. But here's the reality—the more you sound like everyone else, the more you get treated like everyone else. When your marketing is safe, generic and easy to ignore, it gets ignored. That's why most advisors will never break through to the top levels of this industry, not because they're not smart, not because they're not capable, but because they avoid the difficult stuff that actually creates breakthroughs.
If you want proof of this, all you have to do is look around at your peers. How many of them are truly . . .? Just be honest, judge. I know you're not supposed to judge other people. Judge not lest you be judged. But go ahead, let's do some judging here. Judge their effort. Are they doing the difficult things? It's rare and that's why this process works.
Most people try to play just big enough to hit their immediate goal. “I just want a few more clients.” “I just want to fill my calendar this month.” “I just want to hit my target this quarter.” That's fine, but that's small thinking. What if you started playing for something much bigger? [20:58.0]
What if you built a marketing system that flooded you with so many qualified leads, you had to wait-list people? What if you built a reputation so freaking strong in your niche that people sought you out like they were rabid for you? Even if they weren't ready to hire you yet, they just wanted to be around you. What if you created so much quality content, content equity, that it worked for you 24/7, even while you were working, asleep or on vacation?
If you aim higher, if you build something bigger than you think you need, you'll actually find that hitting your smaller goals become easier. Again, it's easier to optimize from the top down. That is what I mean by that, and here's the mindset shift you need to make—it's not about doing just enough to get by. It's about doing so much that your competitors cannot even compete. That's the commandment of entry. You have to ask yourself, “Is this easy for someone else to do?” [21:57.6]
I hope this helps you. I really do. I want you to pick one thing you thought of during this episode and start doing it. I know you thought of at least one thing. If you didn't, then, man, you've got some problems. Start implementing it now, and if you want my help, you know where to find me, over at the Inner Circle at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching.
I appreciate you listening, and I'll catch you next week. [22:21.2]
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