Let's do a Q&A today on radical personal finance. Kay writes in, asks me a question, says, "Joshua, I would like your thoughts on transitioning from working in the job of a physician to becoming a financial advisor, specifically to becoming a financial advisor with a large insurance company like you were a part of.

Would you do it?" Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. Today we do this Q&A. If you were a 31-year-old physician making $150,000 a year and you'd spent the last decade of your life preparing for your career but are really frustrated with it, would you make this switch?

I'm going to dish the dirt today on radical personal finance and tell you what the business is really like. I love to do these Q&A questions and I never expected really the question of giving so much information about the business of being a financial advisor to be so popular on the show.

But what I've learned is that there are many, many of you who have a deep interest in pursuing this career path in some form or another. So you're asking me about it. Let me just start with reading the email here. Yes, I print emails. I'm going to read them on the show.

You never know when a computer goes down right in the middle of filming your show. So this comes in from a listener. We're just going to call this listener Kay. Kay says, "Hi, Joshua. I've been really into personal finance for about five years now and I'm considering becoming a financial advisor with a specific large company very similar to the one you used to work for.

I'm currently a 31-year-old physician making around $150,000 a year. I've spent a long time preparing for my career but I'm always drawn to becoming a financial advisor. The medical field is becoming increasingly draining with charting, liability, decreasing reimbursement, increased regulations, etc. The problem is in my career I can only make so much money.

I can see some more patients every day but eventually you can only work so much and with that it would just take more time. I already work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, not even including my commute. More patients would just add more time to that. Quite frankly, with the liability and difficult patients I see all the time, I don't think I'm paid enough of a premium to take on the risks I take.

Now, I know everyone says they aren't paid enough but I can literally be sued for anything, especially the surgeries I do. In addition, the aggravation of arguing with some patients on deductibles they owe, co-pays, etc. I don't know if you know what it's like to feel – I don't know if you know what it's like to argue with somebody about a $32 bill after giving them necessary medical services because they have insurance and feel they are entitled to everything medically related for free but it is draining.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on becoming a financial advisor with a company like you were with. Pros and cons, what kind of income can I expect and for how long, what was a day like for you? Can you really start taking off with your career? Do a lot of people make it?

Why not? How do you actually make money as an advisor? Do you develop a niche or do everything? I always imagine being in a nice clean office creating a plan for people's finances. Is there a bad side to the business in terms of lifestyle? Is it really difficult finding clients?

I know there are hundreds of thousands of advisors out there so there's a lot of competition. Also does the regional location make a big difference? I'm a regular listener of your show. Not only have I listened to every episode but I've done so numerous times. I have all the frugality and investment stuff down for the most part but I'm trying to explore the whole quality of life and work as if I can never retire type of mentality.

Obviously this is a huge decision so I wanted to get as much detail on the job as possible. Thanks so much, Kay. Well, Kay, it's your lucky day and I'm going to do my best to give you all of the details that I can based upon my personal experience of what the industry is actually like.

I'm going to tell it to you with as much detail and as much information as I can and I'm going to try to give you the good, the bad and the ugly because you know what? Every career has things that are awesome. Every career has things that are not awesome and everything – every career has things that are questionable and there are great things about everything.

So I'm going to dig into these questions individually one by one. I'm going to answer each one of them for you. So if you have interest in this type of content or interest in this field, then this is a show that you will enjoy listening to. Before I answer these questions though, sponsor of today's show is Trade King.

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Please use TradeKing.com/radical. So, Kay, I'm going to answer these questions that you asked in the context of your email and I'm just going to go through it one by one. In the intro here, I read briefly through the email. I'm going to read the specific questions that you wrote here.

But I want to start with what you wrote in the introduction and this might be the most valuable thing. You said, "The problem is in my career, I can only make so much money." Let me point out to you, that's not the problem of your career. That's the problem of the way that you are participating in your career.

The reason I know that is because there are lots of medical doctors who are making way more money and there are lots of medical doctors who are participating in the practice and business of medicine in a business structure that doesn't involve their trading time for money. You've invested a lot of time and a lot of energy into becoming a physician.

I'm going to give you the inside scoop on what the financial advisory business is like. But you've got to recognize you've invested a lot of time and energy into becoming a physician. Now should you just automatically say, "Well, because I've invested so much time and energy into this career," no.

If you were to say that, we would be succumbing to what we've talked about in the past is the sunk cost fallacy. In general, you always want to ignore what's happened in the past when you're making a fresh decision. You want to ignore the fact that you have invested a decade into something.

If you've invested a decade of blood, sweat, and tears and time into this career, that's not necessarily any reason for you to keep doing it. If you can't stand the career, if you can't stand the business, if you don't have any interest in it, if you don't have any desire or passion for it in any way, then there's no reason to waste another year of your life on it.

So what if you've invested a decade? It's all done. It's gone. It's irrelevant. It's sunk. So we call it the sunk cost fallacy. You look forward and say, "Am I still excited about this going forward?" Zero-based thinking, famous, most important question, one of the most valuable ways of thinking, "Is there anything which, knowing what I now know, if I were going to do it over again, that I would do differently?" Ask yourself that question.

Now, it would appear to me, especially since you said that you've listened to all the past episodes of the show, it would appear to me that you've been doing that. And your answer to the question is no. If you were to do it all over again, work through the process of becoming a physician, would you do it over again, knowing what you now know?

The answer is no. At least that's what I'm picking up from your email. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you automatically need to change from the career of a physician to being in the career of a financial advisor. Because my guess is what's actually going on here, it's not that you don't like medicine.

It's not that you don't appreciate certain aspects of working with people and helping people with their medical problems. Rather, it's that there are some aspects of your job now that are really driving you crazy. And because of those things that are driving you crazy, you're feeling extremely disillusioned with the whole business.

But it's probably not the whole business that's the problem. It's probably just parts of it. And it's very possible and very doable for you to adjust and change within the practice of medicine into something that's more like what you would like to do. You probably had some deep-seated desire to want to help people gain their health.

And that's the common thread that you are finding between personal finance and working as a doctor, is wanting to help people improve their health. In one sense, their physical health, in another sense, their financial health. That's probably a common thread. So my guess is you haven't lost this past – you're still the same person that you were a decade past, but you just learned that there are some aspects of your job and your business that are no longer suitable to you.

And you know what? The same thing happens to financial advisors. Financial advisors may start in one company, in one format, one style of practice, and they get into that and they learn. And then they have to realize, "You know what? Where I started isn't exactly still the best place for me to be." And they have to adjust and they have to move from one style of practice to a different style of practice.

This is normal for every career. So I encourage you, spend a lot of time thinking and searching for a solution that is going to – that might be a little simpler than to make this dramatic transition. I'm not saying to deny your interest in something else. I am saying you've got a starting place in the world of a physician that's much stronger than you do as a financial advisor.

There is practically no transference of skill or background or ability to change from a physician to a financial advisor. There's really nothing that goes with you except the fact that you're a physician. And that might help you a little bit to perhaps if you wanted to work with other physicians in financial planning, which by the way I don't necessarily recommend because it's probably the most competitive place.

So it might help you a little bit to understand what a physician is going through. But it's not going to help you nearly as much as if say you wanted to get involved in building some – opening some new urgent care facilities there in your town. And there you've got the background in medicine and you can add on the experience of business.

Or if you wanted to develop a consulting group of some kind or if you wanted to transition and let's say you're looking for a life of adventure and you want to go be a physician for Doctors Without Borders and travel to war zones and help people in that context and you don't make as much money or any money but you now can use those skills of being a physician to still pursue that primary passion.

I don't know what it is. My only point is that you've got a strong foundation to build on. And the example that I would draw for you would be look at why I'm able to speak effectively here in Radical Personal Finance. It's because of the background that I have.

It's because I'm an authority in this area because of my experience. Now does that mean that I couldn't go and build a podcast on parenting? Of course not. I'm doing that. But I'll tell you I don't have really any credentials in that area. And so there's a totally different approach.

Now I still like doing it but I was confident transitioning to Radical Personal Finance as a business venture. I would not be confident transitioning to being some kind of parenting guru as a business venture. So there may very well be an opportunity for you in the medical field that would fit some of the things that you're looking for and I would encourage you practice zero-based thinking.

But don't throw away who you actually are or what you actually have because there's this relationship there between not being overwhelmed by the past but recognizing what you now have from the past. You need to draw those things forward and use those strengths, those leverages. So if we were using and thinking about the concept of the sunk cost, accounting term, we spent money on an investment project and we lost the money.

Yes, we have to write that money off as gone. We're not going to consider it any longer. It's gone. It's sunk. It's dead. But we're not going to lose the lessons from it. We're not going to lose the learnings from it. We're not going to lose the experience that we've gained.

We're not going to lose the insights that we've gained. We may have sunk a million dollars into some kind of research project and we may not get nearly a million dollars worth of benefit out of it. So it's a sunk cost. We can't worry about it. But we better use the results from that research project in today's world.

Your career is no different. You better use those things that continue in you, whatever it is, the care, the medical authority, whatever it is, bring those things forward. And don't be scared to make a dramatic change but recognize the value that you have from that experience and from that learnings.

So let's talk about the – becoming a financial advisor. And here I'm going to describe the path that I took because the word "financial advisor" is a very general nebulous term. There's lots of companies you could join. Every company has a different perspective. So you can join a big company.

You can join a little company. You can join an established company. You can join a non-established company. You can join a company where you run your own deal from day one. You can join as a junior advisor under a team. You can focus on investments. You can focus on insurance.

You can focus on a specific niche specialty. So there's all kinds of things. I'm going to specifically answer the question that you asked me, which was, "Joshua, what was your personal experience with this type of approach?" Meaning a large traditional insurance company which has transitioned into a comprehensive financial services company.

And what did you learn from that? Pros and cons. You said, "What are the pros and cons?" Well, the best thing about the financial advisor business – and this is what really drew me to it – was you can build your own business from day one without having to come up with a product or an idea.

So the lingo – if I were engaged in recruiting you, I would use words like, "You're in business for yourself." I'd say, "You're in business for yourself but not by yourself." And you know what? That is absolutely true. As a financial advisor in the path that I took, you're in business for yourself.

I was in a situation where nobody told me when to come in, nobody told me when to leave. That's really powerful. And I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew that I didn't want my income to be tied to my time. I knew that. And so I was looking for an entrepreneurial opportunity but I didn't have a specific idea that I could implement.

I didn't have an X-grade idea for a cool shoe company that I wanted to make. I didn't have an idea for a cool ballroom dancing storefront thing that I wanted to open. I didn't have an idea. So I had the opportunity to use somebody else's products, somebody else's ideas, but to build and run my own business.

And that was really, really valuable. The great thing about insurance and investments as a business is you don't have to stock the shelves. You can have world-class companies that keep the inventory. You can have world-class insurance companies and they're responsible to make sure that the policies work as advertised.

World-class investment managers and they're responsible to make sure the funds work as advertised. That's awesome. It's really, really awesome. Another great pro of the business is you can be in business with a minimal financial investment. If I were going to go and open a storefront in my hometown here, some kind of brick and mortar business, I would need to have a significant amount of capital ready to spend in the initial opening stages of that business.

Buying the space, adjusting the decorations, buying inventory, hiring employees, there's a lot of money that's needed for that. Well, when opening a financial advisory practice, there's really no money. You don't have to pay anything out of pocket. Usually the companies that are recruiting you, they'll cover most of your initial expenses.

Your initial expenses are low. The only real financial risk is that you need to be able to cover your personal expenses during the startup period. If your personal expenses are low and minimal, then that could be a very reasonable sum. If you're trying to cover $15,000 a month for the first year, that's a less reasonable sum.

But you can control those things. Your financial risk is minimal. That's a powerful, powerful strategy to be able to – it's powerful. I am to this day convinced for somebody who was starting with few advantages, this world, being a financial advisor, selling insurance, selling investments, helping people with their financial planning, this is one of the best opportunities to establish a business with huge upside potential with very little financial risk.

So it's a powerful, powerful opportunity. The pro of the business is that it's very, very established. For example, the company I was with, I mean, they've been in business for – since what, 1857? So 160-ish years basically. They know how to do their business. It's established. You almost can't ask a new question.

You almost can't come up with a new system. The system has been proven again and again and again and again. So all you got to do is just do what you're told. In the years that I was working in the business, I never saw a single person who did what they were told fail.

That's powerful. It's like the benefits of opening a franchise as compared to the benefits of opening your own business. If I were going to open a restaurant, man, I would seriously, seriously consider opening a franchise if I could afford the franchise fee. In the most valuable thing of a franchise is somebody gives you, yes, the brand, but they give you the operations manuals.

They tell you how to run the business. A good franchise, they've got all kinds of – they've worked it all out for you. That's powerful. Personal story, I delivered pizzas for a week in a Papa John's store. I did it because I thought that delivering pizzas might make enough money for me to be a Segway job.

But it's not. It's not a profitable use of time. But I also was excited to do it because I thought it would be fun to work in a franchise model. This wasn't the major reason I did it, but I knew there would be some ancillary benefits which is why I was willing to do it for a week.

I'll tell you, the biggest thing that I – one of the biggest things I learned, it was a cool experience. I had never previously worked in a minimum wage type of job. I had never previously worked with people who were just kind of just applying for a job. I'd always worked in mostly skilled jobs.

By the way, there's a lot of skill in spinning pizza dough. I never figured that one out. I tried. They tried to teach me, but I wasn't there long enough to learn that. But I never – so I had – it was a cool opportunity for me. But one of the things I noticed was how different the training of the employees was in that venue as compared to what the employees actually did.

Simple example, the thing I learned in studying the Papa John's training – I'm not a lot. I didn't get the franchise or books. I just noticed that just what the initial training videos I went through is as a delivery driver and that's what I was doing, as a delivery driver, something as simple as you're supposed to call out as you walk out the door the order, what's in it, and whether or not you have – whether or not you have drinks or sides or desserts.

In the restaurant business, most of the margin that they make is not in the food. The margin is in the drinks or the sides or the extra stuff. And so for pizza franchise, it's no different. Yes, there's going to be some margin in the pizza. But if you can buy a two-liter bottle of soda and a dessert and some chicken wings on the side, the margins go up substantially.

So there's an important focus on upsell and you've got to do it professionally and do it politely. But the upsell will make a huge difference in the profit margins. So the manual is written to encourage an atmosphere of professional upselling. As a delivery driver, you're supposed to go out the door and say, "Two pizzas, one two-liter soda," et cetera, and everyone calls out.

In that way, the team knows how we're doing as a group. So Joshua, I'm a rule follower. Okay, here's the training manual. This is what I'll do. And immediately the first night, I find out that nobody follows the rules. Next, I go on a trip with a delivery driver for a trainee and all the rules that were told in the manual in the training video, I find out they're breaking all the rules.

They're not doing what they're told to do in the training. I became convinced after a couple of days, man, all I would have to do to have a pretty good business would be to buy these franchises and actually just replace all the management with people who are actually going to follow the rules because the systems have all been worked out but the people are lazy and the management doesn't require and the managers don't have any financial incentive to make things work and the whole system is broken simply because the rules aren't followed.

So I draw that as a parallel to the same thing in the financial advisory business. The pros are that you're given the playbook. You're given the scripts. You're given all the solutions. All you got to do is do it. A lot of pros. Other quick pros, it's a flexible business.

You can have control over your time. I always found that to be valuable. One of my highest priorities is freedom, freedom and flexibility. I don't like to say no to things because I don't have the time. I don't like to go and ask a boss for, you know, can I have this day off or can I have five days off?

That's a higher value for me than money. I'll take less pay and more flexibility every time if I have to choose one over the other. So those are some pros. Now, as far as the cons, there are many. There are many cons. You know, a con for you personally, you're going to go from a fairly respected position and status in society to a fairly disrespected status and position in society.

You got to be emotionally okay with that. Now, I'm not saying that being a financial advisor is disrespected, but in the initial stages where you're just learning, it's a pretty low status occupation. Why is it? I don't know. Should it be? I don't think so. Cons, you got to work a lot.

It is a tough, tough, tough business to get to. You have to work a lot. And some of the cons, especially of the business structure, there are a couple that are important. First, although you're in business for yourself, and that's a good thing, it also means you're in business for yourself.

So once you get things established, you've got to go on and generally you've got to hire your own staff. You got to rent your own office space. You've got to build your own little business. And one of the biggest cons though is that doesn't come with all the freedom that you would get if you were truly in business for yourself.

Not only is the financial advisory business itself highly regulated, just like the practice of medicine, highly regulated at a federal and a state level, lots and lots of rules about what you can and can't do, but in working with a big company, they are extremely inflexible. Extremely inflexible. Now, do I fault them for that?

I don't, because if I were running one of these huge companies, I have a responsibility to my policy owners to make sure that things are – that our affairs are conducted circumspectly. And how do you do that? Well, you keep lots of rules in force and you enforce them.

You can't open yourself up to unnecessary threats of litigation. But that also means that there's going to be a lot of control from the top. So yes, you get the flexibility of come and go as you like to a certain extent, but you don't get any flexibility of being able to be creative with your approaches to marketing your product.

You don't get any flexibility to be able to build any kind of meaningful media. That was the straw that broke my back was I said – and I still believe this, that in many ways, the traditional financial services business, they are – they're shooting themselves in the foot. There's no meaningful marketing that's actually bringing people in the door.

The years that I worked in the industry, I never got any meaningfully useful leads and the leads that I did get I grew to despise. And by – despise is not – forgive me for that. I don't mean to despise the person, but I grew to see that the leads were not valuable leads.

Usually when someone would call into the local insurance office and say, "Hey, I'm shopping for life insurance," what they're doing is they're calling around for quotes and quotes are a very poor way of selling. Personally, I don't generally ever want to be in the low-cost business. I want to be in the high-value business.

And the company that I was with, he never had the cheapest insurance, never. Now, I don't think necessarily that everyone should want to have the cheapest insurance. So I always had to try to – I always had to quote the cheap ones because people are price-sensitive to try to figure out what is the opportunity and is the more expensive models of policy, are they appropriate?

And by cheap, I'm not talking about policy design. You got to figure out what policy design is appropriate. But I am talking about just the specific company. In some things, you get what you pay for. In most things in life. And the differences are small, but it goes – but it does remain – the fact remains that we were never the cheapest.

So when I get a call, I get a lead, somebody is shopping around, I mean I would call them back to try to do a good job. But I can't remember – I remember selling a couple of policies to inbound leads, but generally those policies would fall off the books and that's even more destructive to your compensation.

So I grew to dislike that. That was very different than me going out and finding a client, establishing the value, establishing the process and everything up front. So just like the franchise model where you get a lot of good things about it, you get the subway sign, you get the subway manual, you get the subway forms and documents and standard procedures.

But you can't all of a sudden take the green sign and turn it blue. And you might reach a point at which you want to do that. That's very frustrating. That's probably the biggest con of the business. What kind of income can I expect and within how long? These numbers range significantly depending on your background and experience.

You can get these actual numbers from the company that you're recruiting with. They'll give you the actual numbers. I believe in my first year I made something like $40,000 in my first year. The challenge is that everything about the financial advisor business, everything is deferred. And it's simply deferred due to the length of the sales cycle, also the wholesale's process, the challenge of finding new customers.

If I were to start with the simplest thing, let's go with the simplest, easiest sale of all time, a simple life insurance policy. You're 31 years old. You're working with a fellow physician. This physician decides that they need some term life insurance or you talk with them. They need some term life insurance and some disability insurance.

Here is the basic sales cycle of that process. You call up your buddy. You say, "Hey, listen. I just got into the financial planning business. I'd like to sit down with you and talk to you about finances." He says, "All right. Well, it takes you a week to get him on the phone because he's busy.

He's working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. too." He says, "Okay. That'd be fine. It takes you a week to get him on the phone." So there's one week. Then you set an appointment for the following week. There's two weeks. You go out for that appointment. You do what we would call a fact-finding appointment, which is you find out about his goals.

You find out about his needs. You find out about his assets. You find out everything that he has so that you can make a professional suggestion or recommendation of what he needs. That takes a week. You tell him you're going to get back with him the following week. Let's assume that he keeps that appointment the following week.

That's now your three weeks. You come back together with him. You put together a simple basic financial plan, which you present to him. You also go ahead and present to him a simple recommendation for some life insurance. You cannot – generally, you're going to have to be stretched out because most people have an attention span of a few minutes.

But if you get beyond 45 minutes or an hour as far as one of these types of meetings, you're too much. And so if you're going to present a financial plan, that's going to take the whole meeting and you might barely get to talk about term life insurance. Pretty simple.

You're not going to get to life insurance and disability insurance. So let's say you're at three weeks now. You present the financial plan. The next week, you come back and you go over how a simple term life insurance policy would work. You make some recommendations. "Hey, I think you need 2 million.

I think you need 2 million for your wife." He goes ahead and says yes. You're at four weeks now. You go ahead and fill out applications. You submit those applications to the home office. The home office is going to take three or four weeks to get the policy done.

They got to get the medical records in. They got to get all the information in. So now we go from four weeks to seven weeks. Then you go ahead and call your buddy for a delivery appointment eight weeks and you get paid sometime around the time that you deliver the policy depending on how it's structured.

So there's about an eight-week process there. Now could it happen that fast? Well, in theory, does it happen that fast? Almost never because what happens? It takes you a week to get your buddy on the phone and you schedule an appointment. But that week, he gets called in late because he's the junior guy and he's got to cancel that appointment or his wife had a tough day and so they canceled the appointment.

So the next week, he comes in. You come in for that meeting. You have a good meeting. You have a financial planning meeting. You go and present the financial plan. You're supposed to get together the following week to talk about life insurance, but he's busy that week. Okay, can't do it.

Another week goes by, busy that week. Okay, you go ahead and finally get back together with him and say, "Okay, this is really good. We need to think about it," as he should. Okay, it takes a week, two weeks. Finally you call him up and say, "Listen, buddy, are you going to get together?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We really want to get some term life insurance." Okay, you go ahead and get together with him. You fill out applications. The doctor doesn't return the medical records in time. He's got to all of a sudden, they're reading through one thing and he's got some kind of weird heart things.

They got to track down the cardiologist to get this and it just, the point goes on and on and on. Now the challenge of that, that's a perfect situation. So you can see the challenge of getting a business going. It's going to take you eight, 10, 12, 15 weeks from the beginning.

But the next big challenge is the ratio, the number of people that you will talk to as compared to the number of people that will actually buy something from you. Here I'm just talking about insurance because the insurance is the fast sales. Investments are very slow, whether that's a sale of a mutual fund or whether that's the management transfer of accounts.

It takes much longer generally for someone to say, "Hey, let me transfer to you a million dollar account," than it does to say, "Let me buy a couple million bucks of term life insurance. I know I need it. They've been bugging me about it. I'll go ahead and get it." So you should stick with insurance.

The numbers of people that you are going to reach out to, we always talk about it, is with the company I was with, it was built upon the work of a man named Al Granum who was an incredible life insurance agent out of Chicago. He built something they call the Granum system, G-R-A-N-U-M, an incredible book called Building a Financial Services Clientele, which was the manual that I used from.

It's the franchise model that I built everything in my business from. But he would talk about a ratio of what we affectionately called 10-3-1, which means that for every 10 referrals that I would get, I'll cover that in a little bit, every 10 referrals that you get, I call those 10 people for an appointment.

Of those 10 people that I would call, remember it takes time to get people on the phone, which is the biggest issue I think that's happening right now in the financial services business. Very few people want to answer their phone anymore, so it takes time to get people on the phone.

And especially the better people, it's even harder to get people on the phone. Just consider yourself. How much do you answer the phone between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.? The answer is you don't. Not a bit. Not a bit. But call 10 people. You reach 10 people on the phone and you ask them for an appointment.

Of those 10 people, if you're good, 5 of them will meet with you, take an appointment of some kind. The 5 that meet with you, 3 of them will share all the information about their financial lives with you and they'll have some kind of need, something that they're trying to figure out and the financial need is broad, some area of input that you can help them on.

Of those 3 that share all that information with you, 1 of them will buy from you at some point over a 3-year period. And that's what's so startling. They know because they've tracked it. What they find out is you need to follow up with people for about 3 years because 60% of your actual sales will come in the first 12 months of meeting somebody, 30% will come in the 12 months, 12 through 24, and 10% will come in months 24 through 36.

So if we were to talk with actual numbers, let's just stick with 1,000, you're going to reach out to 1,000 people in your first year. You actually need to do it higher to be at the proper numbers. It's going to be about 1,200 to 1,600 people depending on how hardcore you are.

1,200 to 1,400 is about 120 a month in the first year. But you're going to reach 1,000 people. Of those 1,000 people, you're going to have 500 appointments. Of those 500 appointments, 300 people are going to share with you all the details of their lives. Of those 300, only 100 are going to buy, 60 of them are going to buy in the first year, 30 of them in the second year, and 10 in the third year.

This ratio is both your enemy and your friend. It's your enemy in the beginning, which is why it's so difficult to get started in the financial services business. It takes so much work to get things established and many people aren't willing to put in the work. So it takes a lot of work in the beginning.

You're very underpaid in the beginning, overworked and underpaid. But it's your friend because once you build this system and you're talking to thousands and thousands of people and you build a system for following up with them, they respect you, they appreciate you, what happens is that when the time is right and people feel like they're in a position where they can go ahead and make significant financial decisions, to go ahead and do the financial plan, to go ahead and open the college account, to go ahead and buy the life insurance policy, to go ahead and transfer the old IRA or whatever it is, once you have built that, then there can be a steady supply of new business.

So as far as the income that you can expect and within how long, you can expect it to be very low for a long period of time. But on the back end, it can be very profitable. So again, I think I made $40,000 my first year. That was top quartile.

The other thing you've got to remember is – so that was top quartile, about $40,000. Then it can grow from there. I forget the numbers now as far as what the top quartile number is for after three or four or five years. But it gets into the $150,000, $100,000, $150,000.

However, how you've got to read through those numbers is you have to recognize that that's gross income for your practice. It's not your net profit. That's gross income for your business. And so that's where you've got to take those filters and ask – if you're working with a recruiter, ask the recruiter for those sales figures.

But then you have to filter that through the actual expenses of the business. That's the other thing that most people miss. Because as you're building this business, if you think about the challenge of reaching out and speaking to a thousand people, then it takes quite a lot of work.

And so you've got to build the business behind it. Not only do you have the expenses for renting your office space, you have to start to build up your staff. And so now all of a sudden in the third year, you're going to add on staff salaries of say $30,000 plus all the other expenses or $40,000 or however you structure it.

And now you've got to take expenses out. And when you're going through this traditional systematic process of building a business, when you hire an employee, you're always overstaffed right away. And then at some point, you're properly staffed. And then at some point, you're understaffed and you've got to hire again.

But you're usually at a period of overcapacity. And figuring out how to deal with that overcapacity is challenging. So what kind of income can you expect and without how long? That is largely determined based upon how much you work and how effective you are. The number of people that you connect with, the financial capacity of those people, and how effective you are at working with those people.

Those are the ratios. So I'm not avoiding the question. I'm just simply telling you that the majority of people don't make it at all and they go out of the business without ever building it themselves without ever making it, which we'll come to in a moment, why don't people make it.

But then some people can make six figures in their first couple of years. Some people can make multiple six figures. Usually, however, the people that can make multiple six figures in the first few years are people with some other background, experience, connections, network, some unique characteristic that helps them to be successful.

There's no doubt in my mind that if I were to go back and start from scratch, I didn't have access to any of my former clients, friends, anything like that. I just went back to the company I was with and I started completely from scratch. From what I know now, I mean, I don't want to be overly optimistic, but no doubt I could do six figures in the first year and I would say multiple six figures, but that's because I'm not a newbie anymore.

And that's what's so challenging about the start of it is imagine if you were thrown into the practice of medicine without years of medical school and without years of residency. That's challenging enough to be a new physician with medical school and with residency, right? Now imagine you were thrown right into business on day one without all those years of experience because it doesn't take much to get started in the financial advisor business.

All you need is a couple of licenses. You need an insurance license. That's a week of class and pass a test and you need an investments license and that's a week of class and pass a test depending on how good you are as a student, how familiar you are with financial terms.

Just a couple of tests, series seven, 63, series six, series 65, depending on the structure that you're going in. So those things are, they're minimal requirements. I mean, it's laughable with regard to the experience and expertise is laughable compared to what a professional physician has to do to even to get a license.

And this is one of the things that people are trying to change, but you don't really need that much to hang yourself out as a financial advisor. But as far as your actual experience, you hardly know anything. So you've got to learn how to run a business. You've got to learn how to use sales language.

You've got to learn how to effectively gather facts. You've got to learn financial planning. All those things take years and years. So if I were to go back and do it today, it's not the system that's the problem. It's the fact of having the knowledge, knowing how it works, having good sales language, knowing how to connect with people, having all the soft skills and the hard financial planning skills and the discipline and the work ethic and all those other things.

So some people come into that very prepared for it. Some people come into it very unprepared for it. So that's the real story is that it's largely in many ways up to you. Now as far as the long-term income potential, the long-term income potential of being a financial advisor is tremendous.

And after you build that foundation, after you build that large practice, after you've found your specialty, after you've found your platform, you can dramatically pull back on the work. You can dramatically pull back on the effort. But you can keep the very profitable business there. Because once somebody buys from you once, they'll go on to buy from you throughout a lifetime.

And if you think about the number of financial products and the amount of financial advice that somebody like you, an attorney – excuse me, a physician is going to need throughout their lifetime, it's huge. It's massive. And so if you can become a trusted advisor for a number of people, that can be really, really valuable.

The business model that I latched onto was I knew when I was 23 years old, I didn't have the interest or the experience that I felt like somebody was at 23 years old going to write over their million-dollar portfolio to me. I didn't know what I was doing. But I knew I could sell insurance.

And I knew I could do that effectively. I could learn it. I could feel confident with it. I could help people. And so the model that I grasped that worked for me was – and the other thing, I didn't want to be a junior advisor. I didn't want to have a job.

I wanted a business. So I knew if I build an insurance, that allows me to meet hundreds, even thousands of people. I'll build a strong client base with hundreds and hundreds of clients. And then I can go through that client base and I can keep the choice clients, the clients that have big potential for the long term, big financial potential.

I can keep those clients very close to me. And little by little, the other clients will just drift away. And then I'll build this very, very solid practice of that base of clients that's really strong. My target for me, the sweet spot that I decided, I wanted 100 households that were middle 40s to 60s, retirement planning, a million bucks a household.

That was the plan that I was working on. So you can adjust. Now, there's lots of other ways to run the business, but you can adjust. Next question you asked, what was a day like for you? Well, in the beginning, I started at 7 a.m. usually, 7, 7.30. And usually, I would come into the office at work for an hour, a couple hours, doing case preparation, doing studying, doing those things early in the morning.

We had a thing that we used in our business called golden hours. And the idea was basically from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., those were golden hours. And so the rule, if you wanted to be successful and make it in the early years, those golden hours, you do not do office work during those golden hours.

I use the word working to refer to either sitting face to face with clients or prospective clients, or as my managing director said, the words ringing in my ears, fighting to get face to face with clients or prospective clients, which means picking up the phone and calling people. And so generally, I would schedule appointments.

And I tried to work from a specific calendar. Our rules when I was starting was that you had to have – going into a week, you had to have a minimum of 25 appointments scheduled. And if you had 25 appointments scheduled, you would wind up keeping about 15 of them.

When you actually have physical face to face appointments scheduled, almost in the first couple of years, about 50% of them cancel. In later years, it drops down below that as you have to start to work with clients who are more established. Your keep ratio changes significantly. So I would have appointments scheduled at 10 a.m., 11.30 a.m., 1 o'clock p.m., 2.30 and 4 o'clock p.m.

That would give me a total of five opportunities to meet with people. And I would do that five days a week, so that would give me 25 slots. So if I was in the office from 7 till 9, I'd pick up the phone, 8.30 or 9, phone for an hour.

Often we'd have a sales meeting once a week or other training things in the morning. But then after those, starting at 9, you'd phone from 9 till 10 or 8.30 to 9.30, something like that, and go to your first appointment at 10 o'clock. Once you start to get effective, what you actually learn to do is usually double book.

So you try to double book a few of those appointments, which means you have two appointments scheduled at 10, two appointments scheduled at 11.30, or two appointments scheduled at 1. You don't have usually all of them scheduled, but you wind up to really be effective. Often I've seen for a while I was there myself, and then sometimes I would taper off, which is my biggest weakness.

But you wind up with 30 to 35 appointments, basically about 30 appointments scheduled during those times. And you definitely try to constrict them to a certain number of days. So you know that two appointments and one of them almost always cancels. So that way you can actually keep appointments at those times.

And so from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m., you're either face-to-face with somebody, driving to get face-to-face with them, or you are on the phone calling more people, calling, scheduling appointments, rescheduling appointments. You're scrambling. Then you get back to the office, 5 o'clock on. This one you do your case preparation.

You work to build your financial plans. You build your proposals, do all of those things. And then also don't forget you've got to study. So you wind up studying at night. You wind up working on your CFP classes or your CLU classes and doing all of that. So I mean there were many times you're learning software.

You're learning how your financial planning program works. It was standard for me. I would leave the office more than once or twice a week, leave the office at 10, 11 o'clock. A lot of reps go home. If you have family, it's very challenging to go home, spend time with your family over dinner and then after you put the kids to bed, then you're working for two, three more hours doing all your prep for the next day.

It's an exhausting business. It's an exhausting business. It's a lot of work. And so that's an average day. Now you compare that and that's a day in the first couple of years. On the backside, what's an average day once you've been in the business 15 years and you've got several tens of thousands of dollars of monthly revenue that's coming in regardless and you've got staff that runs all your financial plans and all you've got to do is show up for your meetings and you've got highly qualified clients and prospective clients who all have relationships with you.

So your keep ratio is very high. You can do everything in three days a week, three or four days a week. So you can get there and that's where it's hard to describe an average day unless you look at both ends. So you do all the work up front for the backside.

When did you really start taking off with your career there? So first, I would say about three years. After about three years, everything started to click. I actually quit after three years to go and do something else. Quit for about two months and then I went back and continued.

And then after about four or five years, everything started to change. Because what happens is you start to go and make a transition from being that new person who's doing a new thing that no one really knows about to being an established, respected financial advisor where people start to call you instead of you having to call everyone else.

So three, four, five years was kind of the real change and then I remember I left after six. I really pulled back substantially. I didn't really work much my last year. I just kind of kept things going because I knew I was going to be making a transition and I took plenty of time off in there.

I was a top quartile rep my first couple of years and then I drifted back further in the pack because I take too much time off. Do a lot of people not make it? Correct. I think if memory is right, about 80% of the people who sign up to become a new financial services person, financial rep, financial advisor, about 80% are gone after five years.

Some companies it's 10% are still there. Some companies it's 20% but around those numbers. And this really hurts the industry because so many people come in and so many people leave that it leaves people with an impression that advisors are very flighty. And that's really, really I think it's a bad thing that happens.

They work really hard. All these companies work really hard to try to recruit good people. But what happens is it's hard without actually being in the business to know whether or not it's a business that's for you. So some of those people leave because they don't want to be in the business.

Some of them leave just simply for a different practice structure. So I described the practice model that I've done. But you don't have to do that practice model. There are other ways. For example, you could become – I've tried to interview other financial advisors who started. And if you were to talk with Alan Moore and all the people at XY Planning Network, none of those advisors who are pursuing that system, none of them are doing what I did, talking to a thousand people.

They're focused on establishing themselves as well-marketed in a specific niche. So they have a very different view of it. They have a very different experience. You may have advisors who come in and who are able to focus on years of education where they can transition in at a very high level.

There are as many different practice styles and models as there are companies and people. So I'm just describing my experience, which is what you specifically asked for in your note. But it all depends on having the right fit for the right person. The company that you're with matters, but the office that you're in matters far more.

So what can happen, especially in the insurance-focused companies, is you can have some companies that take the holistic financial planning approach. My office did. I had worked under two managing directors that took a comprehensive approach. We didn't have this hardcore – what's that? Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross thing. We didn't have the boilerplate sales room.

You know, "Get the policies. Get sling the policies." We had a financial planning culture. I never realized really how unique that was until much later in my career and all of a sudden I found out that not all offices were that way. And so you'll have – for example, I know that Michael Kitsis has been on the show, one of the leading pundits on the financial advisor business.

He started in an insurance office and he just – he failed out of it. He did not work in that high-volume business. He worked well in the very intense, very complicated, in-depth business and he had to find a way to the right fit for him. That was also the same thing that was my issue.

The people who are the most effective in the scenario that I described are those who have the ability to keep their head down and just to focus on finding one type of business and one consistent thing over time. My issue, what really dogged me as far as being able to be a star in that type of system was that I get too bored.

I get utterly bored with that sameness over and over and over again. So instead of being able to go out and enthusiastically keep focusing on the same thing, I'm like, "Well, I've been there, done this. I don't really want to do this again." So I want to go on to the next thing.

So I would transition from being the young person specialist to the disability insurance expert to – now I want to go and conquer the Spanish-speaking market. Now I want to move to retirement planning or I want to become an estate planning extraordinaire and move to group benefits or whatever.

I love to learn. And so my personality type does not fit well in that doing the same thing every day, each and every day. So it wasn't a great fit for my personality and I learned that now and I've learned how to find something that's a fit for my personality where I like to learn new and different things.

So that's why a lot of people don't make it. It's just tough. A lot of people are not going to put in the time. A lot of people can't make it financially because of that transition. If you don't have six months or a year's worth of – six months of expenses to cover you during those first six to 12 months, it's tough to make the transition.

How do you actually make money as an advisor? Is it based upon consulting fees, ongoing commissions, upfront fees for selling something? Depends on the practice but it also depends on the specific opportunity. So the simplest one is with insurance policies. So life insurance, disability insurance, long-term care insurance, those are the big three that are done by life insurance companies.

You can also do health insurance. I had a health insurance license for many years. I did a little bit of health insurance here and there until the Affordable Care Act was passed and that destroyed the market and I just pulled out completely. I just got sick and tired of everybody being angry at me because their insurance costs were going up all over the place.

So I focus mainly on life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance. The way the compensation models work in those types of insurance policies is there is a large upfront commission that's based upon the percentage of the first year's worth of premium. That varies depending on the product, depending on the company.

So if it's termed life insurance, depending on the company, it might be 50 percent of the first year commission. If it's other companies, it might go up higher. Some companies will offer 100 percent, 110 percent of the first year commission. In some ways, although this is not true across the board, in some ways you can almost judge the quality of an insurance product based upon the percentage of the commission simply because it's more cost and that cost has to come from somewhere.

So the commission rates are different with life insurance, term life insurance versus whole life insurance versus universal life insurance. It's different for disability insurance and long-term care insurance. So all those types of policies usually are paid out with a larger upfront commission and that's what keeps you in the business in the first place.

Then they come with smaller renewals or renewal commissions. So depending on the company, so for example the company that I was worth, it was 10 years of renewal commissions and then 10 years of what they would call persistency fees, so an ongoing base. So after a few years, that's why the business gets so much better after a few years.

You can get to the point where you have a few thousand dollars of monthly revenue simply coming in from your renewals. So you want to do as much upfront business as possible. The upfront commissions keep you in the business and keep your bills paid while you're building up that renewal base and that renewal base is so valuable because it gives you the financial standing to be able to hire staff.

You know you can pay them no matter what, to be able to expand, to be able to adjust things and it gives you that more passive type of income. For investment products, it's different. So for investment products, you have to look to see am I selling a commission-based product or am I selling a product that's going to pay me a management fee?

Depending on that, depending on where you are, that's going to adjust it. In some companies, you can sell commission products. Commission products are very much the – I don't know if they're – you need to be careful because I don't know if they're the minority now, but very few people want to buy commission products anymore because there's a loaded mutual funds.

There's such a vast array of high-quality, no-load mutual funds available out there that when you're going to sell loaded mutual funds, they're not popular and I'm not making here a claim of whether they should or shouldn't be, anything like that. I never really did much with that. You can work with managing accounts where you are going to be paid a percentage of the assets under management and that was the business model that I wanted.

Now, some major change is happening right now with the prospect of a new fiduciary rule. Under the management by fee, you become a fiduciary of the client and you have a much higher standard of care as far as working with the clients on an ongoing basis and you need to be compensated for that.

So that works out well. At some firms, you can go ahead and charge an upfront fee. Now whether you should or shouldn't as far as charging an upfront financial planning fee is a matter of debate. Some people like to do their financial planning for free and then make their compensation in the products.

Some people can charge the fees upfront. I never got to the point where I was not doing the majority of the financial planning "for free." There's nothing for free but where I was just simply doing it without charging for it and my compensation was on the back end with products.

I always tried to work that – I never got to the point where people were willing to pay me at that stage and I – where I had enough people coming and they were going to pay me $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 to do a financial plan for them.

The reason was I didn't have a media platform. I didn't have the ability to shop before they buy. I didn't have the experience to where I could do that yet. Today I could do it but at that point, I didn't. So I was working to get it there because I firmly believe that people should pay for a financial plan almost every time simply because I would pour hours, hours into carefully analyzing and researching somebody's situation, trying to present really, really world-class solutions to them and they just treat it like nothing because they didn't have any skin in the game.

I grew so sick and tired of doing that. I became convinced that the best plan was every client pays for a financial plan upfront, period. Now, whether they want to implement it with products or whatever, that's totally up to them. But they're going to pay for it because I got sick and tired of working for free and I got sick and tired of people not perceiving my advice as valuable because they hadn't paid for it.

So your mileage may vary. Those are the major approaches and so usually the products – usually the compensation is going to be based upon the products. When you work with a diversity of products, here's where I think it is really valuable to work with products. First, clients like to pay with commissions out of products.

People like to do that. Now, should they or shouldn't they? Mathematically, they probably shouldn't. They could probably get cheaper results just simply paying for advice. But when you work with a diversity of products, you build up all of these different diverse income streams and that's really powerful. So you can have – a lot of people have a health insurance business where they get a couple of thousand dollars a month from health insurance business, some individual health insurance, some group health insurance.

You can build up each of your lines of revenue. You have life insurance commissions. You have disability insurance, long-term care insurance. You can put in place some group insurance business. You can have investments that you're managing. You have maybe a 401(k) business for some employers you're working with. You have an individual investment business.

You have some financial planning fees that you're doing, straight up financial planning, etc. You build these diverse lines of revenue. That's one of the big pros of the business is it becomes very, very strong on the back end where you have all these great lines of revenue. And so from a risk perspective, especially when you're diversified with both insurance and investments, from a risk perspective, I think you're very, very strong.

That can be a really powerful model for building a great business. Do you develop a niche or do everything? Well, in the beginning, I did everything and I think most people do everything in the beginning. Now, could you develop a niche? Well, maybe. So it's possible that your experience as a physician could lead you to a natural fit of working with physicians.

For me, I would be very slow to do that. I never particularly liked working with physicians or attorneys or engineers. I don't speak engineer. I don't speak that detailed, very careful, like $32.67. I just say $30 a month. So it doesn't work well with my personality. And I didn't like working with physicians because I didn't like feeling like people wouldn't give me the time of day and not offended at you guys or intending to be offensive.

But I didn't like being treated like just a commodity, just sit here in my office and wait. So some of that was probably circumstantial. If I had the pressure on me that you guys have on you, I would probably do the same thing. But also some of it was based upon not just personality.

So I never liked working with physicians and I never particularly liked working with attorneys. The other thing is these are the most highly prospected areas. So I didn't like going where there's competition. I liked working with blue-collar business people. I liked working with just simple people. That works for me.

I think the future is most definitely that you want to have a niche. Now getting there can be a challenge. So in the beginning, you don't know what that niche is. The niche can be based upon working with a certain type of people. I work with blue-collar business owners in the trades and I work with them at every stage of their life.

Or it can be working with a certain type of product or situation. I do estate planning for high net worth individuals or I do long retirement planning, things like that. So you've got to find what type of niche. But the future is in the niche, especially when it comes to marketing.

Again, the biggest con of working with large companies, they don't allow you to establish your own separate branded presence. More than anything else, that would be the reason why it would be very difficult for me, knowing what I now know, to go back into that structure. I think that these companies are losing the game.

Playing this game the old way of making phone calls is – hey, you can still reach people on the phone. But when you can take a phone call and you can buttress that with being a known specialist in an area, with the access of information, with good high value content, man, it's hard for me to think that I would ever lose my voice or surrender my voice.

It was hard for me to ever think I would ever surrender my platform again knowing what I now know. Now, if I were brand new again, didn't have the opportunity, who knows? We're dealing in things that are in some ways unknowable. But the platform is everything. I always imagine being in a nice clean office, creating a plan for people's finances.

It's a good imagination. But if you want to do that, you need to be a back office specialist, financial planner for an established advisory team. Find a team that you can become a part of and you can become the technical specialist because that is not the business. The business is very much go, go, go, go, go.

I mean you drive a lot. You go in to see people. I made a couple of transitions. I successfully transitioned most of my driving stuff to doing web conferencing. If I were to do it today, I could today knowing what I now know, I could set up a completely independent virtual web only financial advisory practice.

That wasn't quite as easy in 2008 when I started as it is today. Is it as effective? No, it's a lot more work. But I could have done that. So in the first few years, it is nothing like you're imagining. On the back end, is it like that? Yeah, it really can be.

So by my fifth or sixth year, I got to the point where I spent at least four days a week in the office and I did very few driving appointments just because I hated it. I didn't want to drive all over town and be treated like a traveling shoe salesman.

I wanted to just do it in the office. I also found that because the technology got so much easier that it was much easier and better to do. So it can become that way but it's not that way in the beginning. Is it really difficult finding clients? Yes, absolutely.

It's very difficult finding clients. It's the same in every business. Finding customers and clients is the most challenging thing. Is it doable? Yes, but it's certainly difficult. Nobody has it easy. But if you have a system that works, you have a prospecting system, you have a marketing system and you're diligent about it, it's doable.

It's not easy but it's doable and it can be very worth it. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of advisors but you know what? The majority of them are terrible. So if you're a good advisor, then all you got to do is just not – don't suck. Be effective and you'll find that people will be drawn to you.

That's where your time duration in the business makes all the difference in the world. I've emphasized how difficult it is in the first place, in the first beginning years. But on the back end, as you become established, it can be much, much easier. Now to your final question, you say, "I was curious to know if the location where you practice as a financial advisor makes a big difference in the income or quality of life and if there is a big gap in income between places like West Palm Beach, Florida versus Dallas, Texas versus Northern Virginia near DC, etc.

Also is it easy to transition from one location to another one once you get started or is that a huge setback?" So the answer is yes, the income is going to change depending on how you do it and that's where the world we live in in 2016 is so special.

The most productive – I believe he still holds the record, but the most productive insurance salesman of all time is actually a New York life salesman called – name, name, name, Ben Feldman. Ben Feldman was just an amazing guy who sold more life insurance than anybody else. He sold more life insurance based on every metric at that time.

Now if memory is right, he lived in a little rural town in Ohio, in Ohio River Valley somewhere. He wasn't in a big city. He wasn't in a big metropolis. So you can work effectively in just about any location. Now is there going to be an easier time in some locations versus others?

Yes, of course. So the bigger – and your style of practice is going to vary. If you live in Miami, Florida or Washington, D.C. or New York City, you could build a practice focusing on very high dollar cases and do relatively few of them. If you live in a rural town, you can do very, very well but you're probably going to have lots and lots of little cases, lots and lots of little clients.

When I was in the business, there was always – we would have every year a couple of conventions and at those conventions, they would give out sales awards. We had a regional one and a national one. When I go to the national one, I would always be blown away by the reps up in Minnesota.

There were these reps up in Minnesota and they would do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases and they did so well financially. But they were all much smaller average case size than the rep in Miami. So that's where you would measure production. So here specifically, I'm referring to insurance production.

You'd measure your insurance production based upon the average – the total volume of premium. Total volume of premium is what drives your upfront commissions. So you can do a million dollars of premium on one life or you can do a million dollars of premium on 100 lives or a million dollars of premium on 1,000 lives.

Lives means the number of policies, so 1,000 individual policies. But there's a very big difference of your average case size depending on whether you're working in a little town in Minnesota versus Miami. So you can build a practice in any place and especially now with being able to work with people in other countries – excuse me, other states.

I worked hard to become somewhat proficient on the phone and with video presentations. You can establish yourself – and there are many practice models to do this. You can establish yourself as a national expert. I was licensed in at least a dozen or two states. Or you just apply for them as you get clients and cases in those states.

So you can build an effective practice with video conferencing in a way that in the past was much more challenging. I've done it just on the phone too, phone and just FedEx everything. That's much cheaper to FedEx everything than to drive around your own city all the time and show up for appointments that are canceled.

That was the thing I looked at as efficiency. If I work on the phone, if someone cancels me, I'm right in my office. I can get right on to the next thing. I don't have to spend 30 minutes driving out there and 30 minutes driving back to get stood up.

So you can build it in any place but your practice is going to look different. If I were working in central Florida, I would be looking for the big farmers, the big money. I'd be working to work with them. But I'd also be effectively working with many more people of smaller cases.

And that's the cool thing about financial planning, especially if you can sell insurance. You can work profitably with people who are not multimillionaires. So it all depends on what kind of practice structure that you want to work with. If you have insurance to sell, you don't have to pull the Merrill Lynch, we only work with people who have $450,000 of assets.

You can work with young families. You can work with people and you can do it very profitably. But it all depends on the product mix that you have to sell. So location matters but you build a practice for the location that you want to live in. And so what I would choose is in setting things up, I would choose where do I want to live.

Do I want to live in a ski town in Colorado? Do I want to live in Dallas, Texas? Do I want to live in Washington, D.C.? Because your money in rural Kentucky will go farther than your money will in Washington, D.C. Your lifestyle will be very different. So you can choose the lifestyle that you want to live and then you can build a practice in that area.

There are – I think Edward Jones built their business based upon being able to work in little towns, right? Are they the firm that would send the people out knocking on the doors, "Hey, I'm opening up an Edward Jones office?" So you can adjust to the location. Choose the location you want to live in first and then figure out what kind of practice model will make sense there.

Now can you move after the fact? Yes, you can. Is it easy? No. You're going to – is it getting easier? Yes. You can do it as well with virtual meetings. You can move and you can maintain clients and a lot of advisors do this. Here in South Florida, there's lots of advisors that have an office up in the northeast and an office down here.

They try to do snowbirds and they fly one place, do a couple weeks of meetings and fly back and forth. There are lots of people who do that. You can set it up. So I know that – I mean those are the ways that – that's the detail that I can share with you to try to help you make a decision.

I know there's lots of information there, probably for some of you a dry show if you've made it to here. But that's my best effort for you. That's the unfiltered discussion on what the business is actually like. It is a tough business, Kay. It's a tough business. There's a reason why it's a lucrative business.

It's a lucrative business because it's so difficult. The insurance companies, if they wanted to – if they didn't – if it were easier to sell insurance or easier to place investments, they wouldn't have to pay as much commission. You think they just want to send all the money out in commission?

No. They want to pay it – they want to consent – pay it to get people to be worth – to do the work. So it's a very difficult business. You know what? I'm going to close – I'm going to kill the music for a second because I don't want to be brushed on this last thing here.

Every business has difficult things to it. Every business has good. Every business has bad. My business presently has a lot of good. But it's also got some things that I don't particularly love doing. No matter the business, it always comes with that. So my encouragement to you is get very clear on the why and then from there, you can build all of the things down the road.

Every business has pluses and minuses. I hope this information – we'll just skip the music here. I hope this information is useful for you and you can make an educated decision. So I wish you all the best. If this content and information has been useful for you, please consider becoming a patron of the show.

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