Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Today I'm going to kick off a series called The Most Valuable Lessons I Learned as a Financial Advisor.

Some of these lessons will be the lessons that I learned from the business. Some of the lessons will be the lessons that I learned about personal finance from my clients. But today we kick it off with the number one lesson, which is this. There's always business available, but you've got to get up and go get it.

Now to put that into context, let me share with you how I got into the financial services industry. In summer of 2008, I was laid off from a job where I had been working in the marketing industry for a small company, but I had been working as a mid-level analyst in that company.

They eliminated my job position and laid me off. After I was laid off, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. I had desired to leave the company. They laid me off in June or July. I had been planning to leave in January, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do.

I did, however, have some attributes sketched out of what I wanted in a job. I just wasn't sure exactly how to get there. I wanted a number of different things. I wanted to be paid for performance, not for time. I wanted to have revenue that would be built up over time.

I wanted to be geographically independent. I wanted to build something that would last and that would really grow. I didn't want to just go and work in a corporation. After I left the company, I was having lunch with one of my former bosses. He suggested to me that I consider going into the financial services business.

I had never thought about financial services prior to that time, but on his suggestion, I started interviewing in the industry. I interviewed around a few different companies. I wound up signing a contract to join a company that is a large traditional life insurance company cum financial services company. In this company, I decided that I would have the opportunity to learn and I could build a business without having to come up with a product.

I knew that I wanted to own a business, but I didn't have any great product ideas. At the time, I didn't understand the value of just adopting a business model that's already proven, purchasing a franchise model, so to speak. I understand that greatly now. At that time, I didn't know.

So, I said, "Well, if I start a financial services industry business, then I can build the business, but I don't have to manage the product." That seemed very attractive and appealing to me. So, in fall of 2008, I began my practice with no experience and just the tiniest bit of knowledge.

I'd been a long-time personal finance buff, so of course I had some ideas that I thought would help everybody in the world, but I didn't know anything about the technical side of financial services. So, the first step that was taken was to start with an insurance licensing course. In the company that I joined, their approach and their recommendation for new company representatives was to start with an insurance focus.

I felt like that was a really good idea. I still think I still recommend that to other people. It makes a lot of sense to me. Here, I'm differentiating between having an insurance-focused practice versus an investments-focused practice. The idea is this. In a very short period of time, I could teach anybody enough about insurance where they could be very useful.

Give me a day-long seminar and I could give you enough knowledge on life insurance that you could go out and help people choose an appropriate amount of life insurance for their family. There are companies that do this all day long, a few hours of training, and they send newly minted life insurance agents out into the field.

I think they help a lot of people by doing that. So there's a shorter learning curve for basic insurance planning for new financial services representatives than there is in investments. With investments, it's such a wild and worldly frontier out there that all the time you're coming across something new you've never heard of and trying to answer a question.

It takes a little bit more time and more instruction. The first step was to take what's called in my state a 40-hour class. Most states have similar requirements. In my state, Florida, to get an insurance license, you sit for 40 hours of classroom instruction, and then you sit for the 215 state insurance licensing exam.

Upon successful completion of the exam, you're now licensed to sell life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, and annuities. After that, I went to company training. Each company does training a little bit differently, but the company that I joined focused right up front. It was a three-week training program. Most of the first three weeks of training was, I would say about 70% of it was focused on the business model, how to actually run the business in terms of daily activity, and how the marketing model works.

About 30% is based upon actual specifically detailed technical instruction. It's really hard in the financial services business to do technical instruction in a classroom format. It's a format that's better suited to reading and to working with somebody who's more knowledgeable than classroom-focused format. The first week, however, we started off with understanding the business, understanding the business model, and then we had to put pedal to the metal and actually figure out how to bring in customers.

Now, to describe the prospecting model in financial services, there are various prospecting models. Every business has a prospecting model. Where do your customers come from? For some people, the prospecting model is a sign hung above the door. For others, it's television ads. For others, it's internet traffic. For others, it's personal referrals, et cetera.

Every business has to figure out how do they attract an interested, prospective customer to them. That's the first basis. Well, I was taught a prospecting model that's called referred lead prospecting. Essentially, the way that referred lead prospecting works is this. The business person here, the financial services rep, asks people for introductions to other people who might be interested in their particular service and then asks for permission to reach out to those people to see if they'd be interested in setting up a meeting with them.

It's a time-tested, proven business model that very few people like. Many people want to do what I call marketing, which is to set out all kinds of information and let the prospect and the prospective customers find them organically without having to face the risk of rejection. Can marketing work?

I think it can. It's very difficult, however. It's very difficult to do effective marketing. But with referred lead prospecting, the business person can be in charge. They can be in charge of the process. So the first week of training, Monday through Thursday, we had classroom instruction. We learned all about referred lead prospecting.

We were given sample sales language to memorize, to use. And then Thursday afternoon, we were given our marching orders for what was going to happen on Friday. Before I continue the story, just a moment to tell you what happened on Friday. Sponsor of today's show is Paladin Registry. I'm no longer a financial advisor.

I know I've surrendered all of my licenses even though I took the insurance exams and all of that stuff. I'm no longer a financial advisor. I don't sell any financial products of any kind, unfortunately, because I would be making a ton of commissions right now. But I do have a way to introduce you to prospective financial advisors if you're looking for them.

One great way to do that is to use a registry service and the best registry service that I know of is a company called Paladin Registry. A registry service basically is a way of bringing screening criteria to somebody who calls themselves a financial advisor. As you heard from my story, it's relatively easy to get an insurance license.

It's also not quite as easy but still pretty easy to get an investments license. So with these two licenses in hand, you can go and set up a business. It's not that hard to get in the business but it's a little bit harder to be good. So if you're going to hire somebody to help you with your money, how do you make sure that they're good?

This comes down to the screening system put in place. Either the company is responsible for that screening system or there's some sort of registry system. If you are looking for a financial advisor, choose from a pool of qualified candidates. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin, that's spelled P-A-L-A-D-I-N, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin or there's a link right on your phone or in the show notes for today's show at the blog at RadicalPersonalFinance.com.

That link, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin will forward you through to a landing page. That's a capture page where you'll put in your name, your email address, your phone number, how much money you have, where you live, etc. The Paladin registry will take that information and they'll match you up with a few different advisors in your local area to be able to help you to interview them.

I can't guarantee they're going to be perfect for you. I don't know if they're going to be a personality conflict or not, but I can guarantee that you're starting on a better foundation than just talking to whoever random person calls you on the phone, which is where I'm going next.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin. Back to the story. So, Thursday afternoon, the process has been explained to us and the instructions have been explained to us. And essentially, the first step is we were to assemble a list of our family and friends, people who would know us, and go out and schedule appointments to meet with these people on Friday to ask them for introductions to other people who might be interested in meeting us.

Now, if your skin is crawling because this is the way that things you've had to do with network marketing companies or things that you may have joined or done in the past, it should be because that's exactly the way that it is. It's a little bit uncomfortable for most of us, and it was certainly uncomfortable for me.

I think it was a little bit uncomfortable for me to ask, and it's uncomfortable for many people to make introductions because you're leveraging here your social capital. Now, if you're ever in this situation, you want to make sure that you've built up quite a bit of social capital. You want to make sure that your reputation is strong, that people know that you're a trustworthy person because then things will go a little bit better.

So all during the week, Monday through Thursday, we had been phoning our family and friends and scheduling appointments. And on Thursday afternoon, as we're there in training, hearing the instructions for Friday, which is when we were to go out on these appointments and get introductions, get referrals, and the reason I go back and forth between those two words is because they have a different technical definition.

So let's just use the word referrals as being more commonly used. We would go out and get referrals. In that case, somebody swung by the office and they said a challenge to me. And they said it to the whole classroom, but they said, "You can go out and on one day you can get referred to 100 people.

Let's see who can come back with 100 people." I didn't know if that goal was hard or not, but I figured if they said I could get referred to 100 people, so I took it seriously and I had a busy day full of appointments and I asked for introductions.

And on the end of Friday, I came back into the training on Monday morning and I had over 100 referrals on my list. A name of somebody who somebody thought, "Hey, this person might enjoy meeting Joshua," on a phone number that I could reach out to them and say, "Hey, I was introduced to you." Started with my parents, moved on from there, siblings, friends, reached out to all my personal friends, and I relied on their knowledge of me as a person for their confidence to make that introduction.

When I came back in on Monday morning, I was shocked to find that most people only had a handful of introductions. There were a few other people that had in the high, I think I had the most. There were a few other people that had close to 100. Most of the people had 20 or 30.

I thought, "Huh, doesn't seem that hard to me just going out and ask people." But I quickly realized that I had started the ball rolling on a system. I had made lots of phone calls, set up lots of appointments, and then I had gotten lots of referrals. Well, then the training task for week two was to call those people and schedule appointments, which were to occur on the following Thursday and Friday.

We would go out with experienced reps from the company. They would do all of the actual work, and our job was just to set the appointment. That's when I started learning. I made my first sale. I think it was the fourth week I was in the business. The first three weeks in training and the first sale was the first week out.

Our business model was not what they call a one-call close, the old life insurance model where you sell the policy right there when you're there. That was not our business model at all. The lesson that I learned that first day of training, however, went with me throughout my time in the financial services business.

It was a lesson that I repeated many, many times. There were many times where when I needed new clients, I had used and gone through all of my prospective referrals, made phone calls. Some people said yes. Lots of people said no. Whenever I needed clients, I could pick up the phone and go out and call people.

What I learned from the model is that I could control the results by controlling the input. See, the industry statistics were that if I would do what I did, which was go and meet with people, ask them to be introduced to their friends, we would describe the type of person that we wanted to meet with in early years.

It was, "Do they have a pulse? If they do, I'll go talk to them." As I grew in my expertise and my knowledge, you become much more selective to try to work with whatever type of client that you want to work with. But as I grew in that and I gained more, I started to experience the same numbers as the industry would experience.

So essentially, the numbers would work like this. For every thousand people that I was introduced to, I would call those thousand people. I would use a very simple phone script, which basically went something like this, "Joe, my name is Joshua. I'm friends with your buddy, Tom. Tom said you're a good guy.

I work in the life insurance and investments business. Would you have any interest in meeting with me?" There's a little bit more than that. Tom didn't say he needed anything, because of course not. "Would you have any interest in meeting with me? Share with you the areas I work in and be a contact for you." That's basically the phoning language.

Of the thousand people that I would call, 500 people would say yes, 500 people would say no. So half of them would say yes and half of them would say no. When I'd go out and meet with those 500 people that said yes, when I was there, most of them, about 400 of them, three to 400 of them, would share with me information about their financial lives, their financial goals and dreams.

I'd filter that through. About 300 of them would have some kind of active need. We'd call that in the business having an open case. They needed something. They were interested in seeing numbers for something. How much does life insurance cost? Can I get disability insurance? My dad and mom are getting older.

Maybe I should buy long-term care insurance. We're going to be shopping our health insurance around next year, blah, blah, blah. Those are called an open case. About 300 of them would open up a case. Then of those 300, in the first year after the open case appointment, 60 of them would buy.

They would buy an insurance policy. In the second year, between months 12 and 24 after first meeting of them, 30 of them would buy. In the third year, between months 24 and 36 after originally meeting me, 10 of them would buy. So as you build the business, you put the people in up front.

You go out and meet with them. You talk to them about their needs, et cetera. Out of 1,000 introductions, you wind up with 100 clients over a three-year period of time. It was consistent and proven that those numbers would work. Of course, I didn't know who was going to be the big case, who was going to be the little case, where was it going to come from, but it was consistent and proven that if I did the up front activity, I could get the back end results.

That lesson went deep into me. To this day, it's probably one of the most valuable lessons that I learned from my work as a financial advisor because it trained me and it changed me. It was brutally hard for me to do that work. I was insecure. When I started, I was 23 years old.

I knew my own ignorance. I knew that I wasn't the most experienced person. I had all these personal shortcomings and it was hard, but I learned that if I put in the work up front and just worked it through the process, worked it through the system, on the back end, I could get the business out.

What I loved about that was it put me in control. It changed the way that I saw the world. I got to the place where I said, "I see how the world works." The world is not very useful. The benefits and the rewards do not come to the person who sits and waits for them to come.

The benefits and the rewards come to the person who goes out and gets them. The guy who sits on his front porch with his rifle ready rarely has a deer pass by. It's the guy who goes out and looks for the deer that usually finds them. I could make up more metaphors and analogies, but I hope you get the point that it's not what comes to you.

It's what you go get. To this day, my experiences of starting my business that way have given me the confidence that no matter the business, no matter the industry, I could walk into it and I could figure out a way to go and find the customers. Wouldn't promise to be easy, wouldn't necessarily promise to be simple, but it's doable.

It's possible. Not every business works well in that business model that I described to you. Of course not. But you'd be surprised how that focus on what can I do, what bushes can I go out and shake to see what birds will fly up, you'd be surprised how that changes your approach.

Another sales story deeply affected me. When I was in that place, I used to read every sales book and every sales trainer that I could find. I came across the story of Joe Girard, who bills himself appropriately as the Guinness Book of World Records holder of the world's greatest salesman.

He was the final recipient of that award before they retired the category. Joe Girard got his start selling cars, Chevrolet dealership, I think in Detroit, Michigan. His family was starving. He was out of work. He was out of options. He went into a Chevrolet dealership and he begged for a job.

The general manager of the Chevrolet dealership would not give him a job. He said, "Listen, I've got to have a job. Can you please just let me work here if I promise not to take any walk-ins off of the floor?" The guy said, "Yes." Joe Girard started his work, he started his job as a car salesperson, selling cars in the white pages, yellow pages, white pages, calling people in the phone book to see if they wanted to buy a car.

That was how he started. He had a very fortuitous event that his first night working, he was getting ready to leave the office. Nobody had wanted to talk to him. Nobody wanted a car and all the people that he was calling out of the yellow pages. As he walked out the door, somebody was walking in and he had promised not to take any cars on the showroom floor, but he's looking all around and there's nobody to serve the customer.

He goes over and serves the customer and sells the guy a car. That was his first commission check. He started by going and figuring out and saying, "I can at least cold call to sell cars." Cold calling is not the most efficient form of marketing, neither in the car business nor in the financial services business, but it's at least doing something.

Since I've learned that lesson and deeply appreciated the impact in my own life, I look around and I often find myself scratching my head to understand why other people haven't learned the lesson. I want to talk to you for just a moment about you. Are you doing the upfront hard work necessary in order to build success in your career, in your job or in your field of area of focus?

Are you picking up the phone and making phone calls? Are you going out and seeing people? Are you doing the things you know you need to do with a high frequency and a high intensity? Nothing happens until you start working. If you want opportunity, you've got to get out and go find it.

Opportunity comes knocking sometimes, but if it comes knocking, it's usually the person who's working really hard who's going to recognize it. If you don't see any opportunity, it's time to go out and start looking for it. In your business, in your job, there are tremendous opportunities available to you.

But if you sit at home and do nothing, your phone doesn't ring, your email inbox doesn't fill up. Exposure creates opportunity and you have the opportunity to start that process. Figure out what diligent action would look like for you in your situation. If you're looking for a job, don't just wait and see what comes along.

Make phone calls. Simplest thing to do, call people and tell them, "I'm looking for a job." I don't understand why more people don't do this, but if you lose a job or if you need a job, probably the very first thing you should do is pull out your phone, set aside a day and systematically call every single person in your phone address book and say, "I'm looking for a job.

Here are my skills. Here are the types of areas that I work in. Do you have any recommendations or do you know anybody who's in that field of work?" You should do the same thing with your Facebook contacts, with your Twitter contacts, with your LinkedIn contacts. You should make phone calls to those people and start the ball rolling because if you can get a thousand people working for you, spreading your good name all around the town that you live in, you're going to have a much easier time getting a job than if you sit at home and browse job boards.

That's the power of the financial services business. Once you have established yourself as a useful, valuable, honest provider of service, you'll have more business than you know what to do with. But it takes time to get that going. You got to put the time and effort in up front.

In your business, you can't sit back and wait for people to find you. In your job, you can't sit back and wait for people to find you. In your website, you can't sit back and wait for people to find you. In marketing your podcast, you can't sit back and wait for people to find you.

You've got to get out and introduce them to yourself. It's not who you know. It's who knows you. And it's your job to get out and make sure that the right people know you, know what you do, and know what you're looking for. Don't sit back and wait for the business to show up.

Pick up the phone, pick up the keyboard, get out and go find it. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert, or live event unforgettable? Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level.

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