Create High Volume New Client Flow While Managing Time Effectively

Lee Milteer (00:09):

Hi, everybody. This is Lee Milteer, and I’d like to give you an introduction to one of my favorite people on Earth, Mr. Stephen Oliver, who is with the Advisor Marketing Podcast. Stephen is a true maverick, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Not only in our business, but I have to tell you, his clients universally love him, and they grow at rates that they wouldn’t believe it’s possible.

Lee Milteer (00:36):

Now on this podcast, in each episode, Stephen is joined by various members of his team, or special guests, who share insider secrets to rapid growth, and high net profits, in your financial advisory practice. So I just want you to know, you’re in for a wild ride, new information and a lot of exciting new future, because of Stephen Oliver.

Greg Moody (01:04):

The other outcome for us, is that you have your marketing going, you have your business running, but also, it’s in a position where it’s running so well, that you could be gone for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and your business is still going to run and you’re still going to be profitable. That’s something that a lot of times, as we grow, we become a slave to the business, and that’s not what we want for any of you guys. We want the business to run and work for you, so that … That’s a lifestyle we want, and there’s this, almost a badge of honor as an entrepreneur. “Well, I work 100 hours a week, look at how successful I am.” But that shouldn’t be the badge of honor.

Greg Moody (01:38):

The badge of honor should be, “I’m working 10 hours a week, or 20 hours a week, and look how well my business is running. Look how profitable I’m doing.” That really means you’re running a business well. That really means that you’re successful. That should be what’s regarded entirely, so we want to have all the system of your business, all the marketing of your business, which is more of what we’re going to talk about today, be very, very effective and not have you do things that aren’t effective. Have all the tweaks in place. And all the things that we’ll talk about, a lot of this is … It seems like a secret when we tell people, but it really shouldn’t be, but it really is across the industry. And we come from an outside point of view with a lot of the businesses that we’ve worked at and our history, and I think that’s what’s really great about what we bring to the [suez arnage 00:02:35] here.

STEPHEN OLIVER (02:36):

Yeah. One of the most profitable financial advisors that I know is just running around like a chicken with his head cut off, and I’ve been working with him, not so much on him talking to more people or worker harder or one thing or another, but just having a support team around him. And at the same time, automated systems at create a much smoother workflow. In this case, he’s talking to people that he shouldn’t be talking to, because they’re not adequately qualified. He’s handing service issues that he shouldn’t need to handle, and frankly, he’s having a lot of things done manually, including by him, that should just be automated.

STEPHEN OLIVER (03:23):

All this stuff, once an appointment’s set, we have it set up where they get four or five emails automatically, four or five texts. They get automated voicemails that remind people. So a lot of it is about systematization, and as you were saying, Greg, we come from a unique perspective. I’ve been in and out, involved with this industry for 20 or 30 years now, working with others. But coming from an outside perspective, God, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a group of business owners that, number one, are more cloned. In other words, just kind of looking around and doing what everybody else is doing, so indistinguishable from one another, and at the same time, that has such rudimentary, mediocre marketing systems in place.

STEPHEN OLIVER (04:13):

I was doing a lot of work, in other words, still I am, with Northwest Mutual, but it’s all manual labor stuff. It’s great to get referrals, but what we always ask people, “Okay, you get most of your business from referrals. What referral system do you have in place,” and that almost always evokes a blank stare. “What do you mean by referral systems?” “Well, how do you get referrals?” “Well, people who like me, they send me people, and sometimes I ask for them.” Well, okay. Asking is sort of a referral system, but there’s an awful lot more to it than that, to organize and systematize it.

STEPHEN OLIVER (04:49):

But let’s start with automation a little bit and then expand it into the marketing side, is we’ll talk endlessly about building a marketing Parthenon on it. And what that means is, it’s kind of like I got the Neiman on the wall with the façade of Wall Street, but it’s kind of like that. All these different columns and having 10, 15, 20 different columns that are all driving new clients, rather than just having one or two mechanisms.

STEPHEN OLIVER (05:25):

But when you do that, what most advisors I talk to when I start talking that way, they either think, “Oh my goodness. You either you want me to spend more money in advertising than I’m bringing in revenue,” which is not at all the case, or they’re going, “Well, I can barely keep up with everything.”

STEPHEN OLIVER (05:43):

Mindy, remember … I forget the name we were talking to, fairly successful advisor, last week. And now we got his daily appointment record and one thing or another, and he’s got people just [inaudible 00:05:58] into his office all day. The phone’s ringing all day, he’s responding to emails within 12 seconds, or five minutes, or whatever. And the minute he shows up at the office, until the minute he goes home, his time is completely out of control and completely just going crazy.

STEPHEN OLIVER (06:18):

With the Parthenon idea, part of it is, you should just block off an hour a day, maybe two hours a day, but at least an hour a day, that your focus is, how do I keep my new client flow going on. Right? What is it I should be doing? What else additionally should I be doing? What activities am I doing now, that aren’t being as productive as they could be? But just block into your calendar. If you have staff, if you have people underneath you, other advisors underneath you, lock your damn door. The whole idea of having an open door policy, and anybody can walk in and ask you anything, anytime is stupid.

STEPHEN OLIVER (06:56):

It’s like all this software innovation. There was an article in Wall Street Journal, I think two or three days ago, but it was critical of slack, which … We use slack, I don’t particularly like slack. But it was critical of a lot of those software tools that are based on instant messaging, rather than asynchronous communication. Once you start your day and you’re getting instant communication from staff, from prospects, from clients, now your day just goes to hell. You have no control over it.

STEPHEN OLIVER (07:29):

So you’ve got to have the time when you lock the door, you turn off the damn phone, you ignore text messages. The worse I see is people sitting at their desk and they get a ping notification every time they get a text or every time they get an email. All that stuff should be cut off, but at least you set aside an hour a day. I always like to, before I go to bed at night, and the first hour in the morning, my routine for years was I’d go to Starbucks’s with a blank legal pad, now one of these notebooks, and just brainstorm with myself, what I should be doing to generate new client flow. And of course, we’re going to give you a whole bunch of new systems.

STEPHEN OLIVER (08:08):

But part of the system for getting your life under control, and getting your practice under control, is taking that hour at the beginning of the day, where nobody can get a hold of you, where you’re not putting out fires, where you’re not solving problems. Where you don’t have staff, you don’t have clients, nobody else is communicating, and you’re just looking at your business, you’re looking at growing the practice, you’re looking at what you can do and just focusing every day. Frankly, for many advisors, if they would just do that, and stop being busy being busy … Zig Ziegler used to say, “Confusing activity with accomplishment,” so rather than confusing activity with accomplishment, just sit down, shut off the world and focus on one thing at a time.

STEPHEN OLIVER (09:00):

Greg, Mindy, wouldn’t you agree? And I didn’t introduce as all, with our technical problems, but I’m Stephen Oliver and we have Mindi Godfrey and we have Greg Moody, better late than never here. But part of what any and every business person should do, certainly financial advisors should be, is they turn off all notifications on their phone, they turn off all notifications on their computer, they get in a mode of checking email maybe every other day or maybe at the end of the day, but they don’t have it where it’s interrupting them all day long. And they get clients and everybody into an asynchronous mode. In other words, people know you’re going to check your messages in the afternoon.

STEPHEN OLIVER (09:43):

One of the books, and it’s half silly and half really good, that I looked years ago, was that 4-Hour Work Week book, by Tim Ferriss. But that was part of what he did, is he trained his clients with auto responders, one thing or another, “Here’s when I check these messages, here’s when I deal with them. If it’s this issue, this other person should handle it. If it’s this issue, this other person should handle it. If it needs to be handled by me, I deal with it at this time.” By his writing in that book, it took a business that was taking over 100 hours a week of his time, and turned it into a business taking, maybe 20 hours a week of his time. Just by getting that kind of stuff under control.

STEPHEN OLIVER (10:25):

But –

Greg Moody (10:25):

Yeah.

STEPHEN OLIVER (10:26):

Go ahead.

Greg Moody (10:26):

I was going to add, Stephen Covey says that, is, I think his quote of, “The tyranny of the urgent.”

STEPHEN OLIVER (10:31):

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Greg Moody (10:33):

And I think that what we’re talking about is, everybody can hear this and go, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” And then they turn around and leave the webinar and go, “Oh yeah, but I really do have to check all these emails. Yeah, but I really do.” And the answer really is, no you don’t. No you don’t.

Greg Moody (10:51):

The cost of not responding to stimulus is usually, and really in all cases, really, really low. So doing that is a good first step into this idea that I sort of was talking about at the beginning, when were trying to get connected and everything, of simplifying your life.

STEPHEN OLIVER (11:12):

I think I got booted off. Yes.

Greg Moody (11:13):

Right. Of simplifying your life, so that you can kind of get things in the right structure. And if you do that, what ends up happening is, you’re a lot more productive. So this is one of the fundamental things that I think everybody here, just to anchor that in and spend a second more on it, that if everybody can get that idea, the ones of you or the few of you that will get that idea, are going to be a lot more profitable, productive and keep a little bit more sanity in your life.

STEPHEN OLIVER (11:39):

Yeah. Again, I mentioned the one client whose, he’s got a great practice, 220 million assets under management right now and he’s got another 00 or 70 lined up, hopefully, in the next 60 days and we’ve generated more new client flow for him in one month, than he had in the previous three years. But what it showed was, how hard he was working and really, how poorly organized his staff was. He has a small staff but, what really should have been happening is, somebody else should have been calling to make appointments, so be an appointment setter. Automated system should be confirming appointments. That appointment setter can screen, so that he’s not talking to anybody who’s not reasonably qualified to talk to himself.

STEPHEN OLIVER (12:34):

What I typically like to do is have a couple steps that people go through before they get to the primary advisor who’s going to be actually closing the deal, signing whatever it is they’re going to do, closing, putting together the plan. But creating staff so that … The way I like to think about it, [inaudible 00:12:58] said, “The purpose of any business is to create and keep a client.” And what I see a lot of times, is advisors build staff, but the staff end up in these little niches on technical stuff, and they not have the perspective of, my point of being here is to help him or her create new client flow and to keep the ones that we have, happy. And I would add to that is, keep the ones we have happy, generate new referrals. In other words, generate client flow from the existing clients, and figure out ways to move the existing clients up the value chain.

STEPHEN OLIVER (13:35):

If your staff aren’t constantly focused on that, if they’re just focused on filling out paperwork, submitting life applications, submitting disability applications, going to Morning Star and looking up, comparing stuff and putting together the financial plan. But without thinking about how does this keep the client happy, how do I get a new client, how does this grow the value of the client, then what you end up with is the primary advisor, the owner ends up being the one that’s working their tail off all the time, and everybody else is just doing what they’re told, when they’re told to do it. And it’s a horrible way to operate. Let’s talk a little bit, Greg, about systematization and automation, and then shift into how this all ties to marketing.

STEPHEN OLIVER (14:23):

One thing that we see … We were just having this conversation earlier with a company that we work with that does a great job on Facebook and LinkedIn marketing and so forth, but within the niche, there’s all these different companies that sell leads to advisors. Some of them are probably good, and awful lot of them are pretty worthless, but what I’ve been seeing is one problem that happens is, advisors don’t recognize … What has to happen in the chain is, the minute somebody expresses interest, they have to be communicated with. It used to be Marketing 101 was if you want to get somebody’s attention, and whether it was TV advertising, newspaper, now online, they had to see you seven times and one thing or another. But in today’s world, I don’t know what it is, they’re seeing 5,000 advertisements a day, they’re getting 250 emails a day. They’re just inundated. And if somebody is on social media and they see an ad for you, or they go Google and they’re looking for an advisor …

STEPHEN OLIVER (15:34):

We get those that come through our website, all the time. Or they’re being connected or touched on LinkedIn or whatever, or they’re doing a Google search or you’re doing retargeting in Google, whatever it might be is, if you don’t get to them while they’re looking at the website, while you’re looking at the page, and get information in front of them, communicate with them immediately and preferably get them on the phone, they don’t remember you exist tomorrow.

STEPHEN OLIVER (16:04):

The problem we see a lot of times is, let’s say I buy a lead from a company. By the time you get the lead, it’s 24 hours stale and then it sits on your desk for a day or two before you start doing outbound phone calls, which if you didn’t know already, and you do is, what happens nowadays is people don’t answer their phone if they don’t recognize the number. Now you’re just chasing a dead lead, because it’s far enough away that they don’t even remember that they filled out a little form on a website. Right? What we’re always trying to do is, preferably generate the lead ourselves. In other words, going directly into the medium and setting that. Not that we don’t use providers.

STEPHEN OLIVER (16:47):

Greg, you do a lot of work with Google search, with search engine optimization, with SEO. We have a great company that does a lot of great work with Facebook and LinkedIn and so forth, but we want it to be where it’s going into our automated systems. And what we’re doing with a lead is, the minute the lead comes in, whoever’s going to be responsible for doing an outbound call to them, gets a text immediately with a name, the qualifying information, and the phone number, in order for them to make an outbound call. At the same time, the prospect gets a text immediately from whoever is going to be making the outbound call, suggesting that they do an inbound call. At the same time, we’re still using email. We’re doing an automated sequential automated responder, or email automated sequential automated responder, text message automatic sequential automated responder, postcards or other kinds of physical mailing. And then we’re re-targeting everywhere you look, and Facebook, Google, et cetera.

STEPHEN OLIVER (17:48):

But the most important part is the immediacy. Greg talked about that with … Like when people come into a website, what sloppy advisors do, what good ones do.

Greg Moody (18:01):

What we know from Google’s data is that, when you respond within 30 seconds, your appointment rates or your response rates for closing are 90% higher. So think about that for a second. If you respond within 30 seconds, what we speculate is, while they’re essentially still on your site, so they’re still looking at your site, or their looking at your ad or whatever you’re running, whatever the media is online, if you respond within 30 seconds, then your appointment rates are 90% higher. It drops off precipitously once you wait. So every few seconds, that makes a big difference.

Greg Moody (18:34):

Now that might seem in contrast or in conflict with what our advice was at the beginning, that you spend some time away from the office and turn everything off and control your notifications. These are a little bit different because these are … What you want to be able to do is filter in the high quality, high value lead notifications, maybe have somebody else answer them. But also what you’re talking about Stephen, is all the systems that are set up to text and email and voice broadcast and do all these other pieces, immediately, so that, that stuff happens immediately, within that 30 second window. So that they’re getting bombarded sounds cajour. It sounds like they’re getting over stimulated, but the reality of it is, they’re not. Because each individual person that might be asking for information, is probably going to only pay attention to one of those pieces of information that you send out.

Greg Moody (19:35):

They may only respond to text, or they may only respond to the email, if they also got a text. Or they may only respond to the voice broadcast, if they also got a text at the same time and therefore, they paid attention to it. So to do all those things is not really overload. You’re not pounding your clients. Well, you are, but it’s appropriately so, so that you can make sure that they even pay attention. The average person gets, the last count was 211 emails in their inbox, so you’ve got to make sure that you contact them in as many possible places as you can.

Greg Moody (20:11):

Now what we see a lot of people do, is they buy some … When we talk about automation, some people might be thinking on the call, “I already have a system.” There’s a bunch of different CRM systems out there, and they go, “Yeah, I already have one of those.” When a lead comes in, they get the email, and it’s already pre-done for me, so I don’t have to think about it. Well, in every case that we’ve seen, for every software system that’s out there, they’re all okay. They all do some of the things that we’re talking about, but there’s none of them that don’t need other supplemental pieces added on. They’re all, usually pretty mediocre.

Greg Moody (20:48):

And if you’re relying on email for communication, both to your current clients and to your prospects, remember this, delivery rates of email are generally around 20%, even for people that know you. So think about that. When you send an email out, only one in five people are even seeing it in their inbox, let alone, paying attention to it.

Greg Moody (21:11):

So number one, it’s really important to respond quickly and have all these automated systems. Number two, those automated systems need to be robust. They need to have lots and lots of media that respond immediately, that’s the most important. That’s your first line of attack. And then after that, the follow ups really important as well, but that first line of attack is what’s critical. Usually with very –

STEPHEN OLIVER (21:34):

Yeah, but in –

Greg Moody (21:36):

… Inadequate responses. Sorry, go ahead.

STEPHEN OLIVER (21:38):

No, no, no. no. I’m sorry.

Lee Milteer (21:39):

Hey, it’s Lee Milteer, and I’m delighted to interrupt you today and let you know that I’ve been working with Stephen Oliver for 10 or 15 years now. He’s a great guy. I love all the research that he does, and I just wanted to let you know, that if you’re enjoying the content on this podcast, then you really want to make time to visit advisorwealthmastery.com.

Lee Milteer (22:05):

Why should you do that? Well, because you’re going to receive two of his great books, and actually one of mine, called, “Success is an Inside Job.” You’ll also get a lot of absolutely free material, on growing your practice through effective marketing. So again, take the time to go to advisorwealthmastery.com.

STEPHEN OLIVER (22:29):

Without beating it to death, as you know, pre-pandemic, I was over email. Why even freaking bother with email. During the pandemic, kids pretending to be at home doing remote school while they play video games, and parents working from home as opposed to in their office, email readership did go up, fairly dramatically during the pandemic, to tell you the truth. However, the best indication is look at Slack and Basecamp, whatever Microsoft’s version of it is, it always slips my mind. Teams, Microsoft Teams. Look at all the different software implementation that’s hot right now in corporate environments, all of them are designed to kill email. Because companies hate email and individuals hate email, and by the way, young people don’t use email, as a general rule. My daughter who’s in college, I don’t know why I would ever email her. It would just sit there in her inbox and when she checks once every three months or something like that.

STEPHEN OLIVER (23:36):

I was talking to an advisor, I think it was yesterday, and we mentioned direct mail and he goes, “Oh my God, you still use snail mail”. It’s like, well, wait a minute. If the average person gets, I think it’s four pieces of mail in their mailbox, per day, and the person that you want, the qualified business person, CEO, whatever it might be, are probably at 250 pieces of email per day, in their email box. And that’s if it gets delivered and if it doesn’t end up in Google spam folder, or in the whoever spam folder, or end up in the promotional message folder. So they get 250 emails, none of which they’re eager to read, or enthusiastic about. In fact, they’re already in a bad mood when they go check their email.

STEPHEN OLIVER (24:26):

It’s like the old movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” and Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are sitting there, waiting for the little mailbox to pop up. That era is way long gone. That was AOL, right? They’re waiting for the little AOL?

Greg Moody (24:37):

Right.

STEPHEN OLIVER (24:38):

Well nobody cares about checking their email. Frankly, in my case, my auto responder has me pulling out my hair and saying, “Screw it. I don’t use email. Communication by carrier pigeon.” But it’s using just auto responder email and broadcast email, to try to warm up a list. It’s fine, because it’s free, but it’s inadequate. Certainly it’s a waste of energy, to have that be the only follow up mechanism for a hot lead.

STEPHEN OLIVER (25:15):

If you are using somebody to buy leads from, okay. But let’s make sure that it goes directly from their system electronically, into your system. Let’s make sure we can kick off automatically, automated follow up systems. Let’s make sure that you have somebody in your office that’s designated to make outbound calls immediately, and I’m not talking about just 10:00 to 4:00, but pretty much anytime the lead comes in, short of 3:00 A.M., in the morning. But make sure that there’s follow up systems immediately, because frankly, if somebody hands you off what they consider to be a good lead four days later, they’re already dead, in today’s day and age.

STEPHEN OLIVER (25:53):

I used to think that there was a half life of 72 hours, but now it’s more like there’s a half life of 22 minutes, so every 30 or 60 minutes it goes there, half is likely to even remember that they filled out some form somewhere. They would –

Greg Moody (26:14):

That’s a –

STEPHEN OLIVER (26:14):

Go ahead.

Greg Moody (26:14):

That’s a good point. I just want to make one comment on that. We have a lot of people that we talk to, that are buying leads or they’re buying traffic, and a lot of times, as we’ve said, they’re very mediocre leads and we would agree with them. But that being said, a lot of the marketing that we’re going to suggest that you do, will generate a flood of traffic, and will be very quality. But if you don’t follow these processes that we are talking about, you’ll come back and say, “These are bad leads. These are low quality leads.” Well, no. The way that people are programed today, because of the way that their stimulus and response mechanisms work, you do need to respond quicker than we would have had to, 10 years ago even.

Greg Moody (26:58):

So it does work differently in terms of the overall system that we’re dealing with in the environment. So if you’ve been an investment advisor for 10 years and you’re going, “I used to get really high quality leads. I’d call them back the next day and they’d respond.” Well, guess what? The same quality of lead, if you don’t respond the way that we’re talking about, very quickly, exact same person, exact same quality of lead, it doesn’t work the same way. You have to respond quicker. So it is different. There’s a couple factors here that are really important.

Greg Moody (27:29):

You’re muted there.

STEPHEN OLIVER (27:34):

And again, not to repeat myself but, this is … In general, if you look around, what all the other financial advisors are doing from a standpoint of marketing, is they’re mostly not doing much of anything. The worst role model that you, in all likelihood have, are friends and associates, and if you want to consider them competitors in your area, and looking at what they’re doing. That’s why this industry has such a huge failure rate. Look at newbies coming into the market. The three year failure rate, I don’t have an exact number on it, but it’s got to be in the 90% plus number, because there’s these one step shy of being vacuum cleaner sales guy. You know where they give you the new vac and you go sell to your aunt, your uncle, your mom and your dad, and your next door neighbor, and then you’re done.

STEPHEN OLIVER (28:32):

What really has to happen is, build that Parthenon of marketing systems. For somebody who has critical mass, and I always consider critical mass to be, maybe around 100 clients. So somebody who has 100 or more clients, especially two, 300 clients is, there’s an awful lot of money and awful lot of traffic, buried in your client list, buried in the client relationship, that in almost all cases, is never mined. Once you’re at that critical mass stage, you can have five, six, seven different referral systems. You can have periodic client appreciation parties.

STEPHEN OLIVER (29:12):

I have one client who did it as a wine tasting. Another one did a client appreciation at an art gallery, where they invite their friends. You can have informational, educational meetings every month nowadays, in a webinar format, with Zoom or what not, that they’re invited to attend and bring their friends, as long as you get registrations. You can have a book, or even, you can have a new book every quarter, on a different topic. We’re talking about maybe 70 pages, 50 pages, but on different topics, where all of your clients … If you had 300 clients, every one of your clients gets three copies each, and basically it’s a sales letter for them to communication with you, to help them with their 401k, help them with college planning, help them with whatever it might be, as a second thing.

STEPHEN OLIVER (30:04):

Certainly, one of the things you could do … One of my clients has got a kid working for him, who goes to all of his clients’ LinkedIn pages. He has a lot of business owners, CEOs, CFOs, that type, and hedge fund guys as well. But he just goes through their LinkedIn, look at their primary connections, then he gets a list before any meeting with him.

STEPHEN OLIVER (30:27):

And then it helps to remind him to ask for referrals, and also, he can go through and say, “Joe, as we know, you’re CFO at blah, blah, blah company. I was wondering if John, a CEO, or Bill, a chief marketing officer, or Sue, chief information officer, might have some similar needs to the kind of planning that we’re doing for you.” So it helps remind him, and gives him some names to ask for, which is again, even in asking for referrals, the old technique that I think I stole from Tom Hopkin, of Isolate Faces, “Help them see different areas in their life,” and then help them there with into, is a way to do it.

STEPHEN OLIVER (31:18):

Again, I was talking to an advisor, and he’s doing a pretty good job now, of asking for referrals, but really all he was doing was, getting a name and a phone number, or a name and a phone number and an email address. I said, “No, why don’t we get a mailing address, and then we can put a box of … ” My friend Dan Kennedy calls it a shock and awe box. We can put a big box, and then the box drops in the mail to them, so you have credibility ahead of time. And then you can have a couple of your books in a box, we can send them another book following that. And then we can have the appointment setter getting ahold of them, but they’re already familiar with you, and of course all the collateral material is going to be driving them to an inbound call.

STEPHEN OLIVER (31:59):

Now all of a sudden, instead of just chasing down random names or random introductions, you have a way of building that credibility along the process. Pick up from there, Mindi or Greg. There’s all these different pieces that just get left in the dust, but starting with the referral systems, I think under 100 clients, it’s tough to build much in the way of effective referral systems to feed you enough traffic. It’s got to be mostly external. But once you get in the 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 client range, there’s all kinds of stuff you can do.

Greg Moody (32:35):

I think building authority is really important. So building authorities for, like a book or a whitepaper, and some handouts, some things that you can provide adds a lot of value, in a lot of different ways. One is, it also adds trust. I don’t think we said it on this call, but this shocking statistic is that 60% of people are not happy with their current investment advisor. Let that sit for a little bit, 60%.

STEPHEN OLIVER (33:03):

And then 30% were actively looking for somebody better.

Greg Moody (33:06):

Right. So that means there’s a 60% chance your clients are not happy with you. That doesn’t mean you’re doing a bad job, but what that mainly means is, either you’re that different and better than the other guys, or maybe you haven’t communicated well enough with them. It doesn’t mean you’re not good or not qualified, but if they don’t think you’re that much different than the other guys that are around … And we kind of started out our whole conversation with, everybody seems like a clone of everybody else, why are you different than somebody? But a book, or some sort of whitepaper would be a big difference.

Greg Moody (33:43):

And what we see a lot of too is, people are getting their content or their whitepapers from a subscription service. Here’s my book, but it’s really from so and so, and they just wrote a cover page from it. There’s a lot of ways to create content that’s yours, but you can even buy somebody writing the content, really, really easily. So you don’t have to sit down and be an author that writes a Stephen King novel, so –

STEPHEN OLIVER (34:10):

And you can do it the way we’ve done a bunch of them, is you do a Zoom recording, get it transcribed, then hand it off to somebody. A 45 minute Zoom thing is a chapter, so you do six or seven of those, you’ve got a book. And then you can have somebody clean it up for you.

Greg Moody (34:27):

Right, and we walk you through a lot of different options for that. There’s ghostwriting, there’s lots of options, so you can do it relatively inexpensively. So to have a piece like that, then you’re asking for referrals, you can have a piece that you hand them, an actual paperback book. We’ve done a bunch of them. We facilitate with some companies that do great jobs with that.

STEPHEN OLIVER (34:46):

You and Mindi have done a lot of that.

Greg Moody (34:48):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you hand the piece to them, and then they can give it to their kids or their friends, or whoever. If you’ve got a good client, usually people in their circle of influence are also potentially good clients, and that’s a great way to get referrals, because this also establishes you as an authority, that you literally wrote the book on this. So you really have something to say about that topic.

Greg Moody (35:14):

Some of our guys that specialize in doing work with advising chiropractors or advising people with high academic credentials, with PhDs or also in the military, or some kind of crossover niche like that, that’s really important. We haven’t really talked about niches yet, either.

STEPHEN OLIVER (35:33):

No.

Greg Moody (35:34):

But that also facilitates your referral process. Some kind of authority piece, because you really need to make sure that you’re in authority. You’re supposed to be an advisor, why should they pick you, versus some other dude?

STEPHEN OLIVER (35:48):

Yeah. I was communicating with Dan Kennedy, yesterday actually, and he made a reference. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He said it’s the theme song from Weeds. Have you two watched Weeds? I had never watched Weeds, and didn’t know anything about it, so I went on YouTube and pulled up the theme song. And the theme song is absolutely brilliant. I don’t know Greg, are you familiar with it?

Greg Moody (36:13):

Uh-uh (negative).

STEPHEN OLIVER (36:14):

Pull it up. But basically, the theme song is about everybody goes to the same college and they get their MBA and they end up in little green houses, with the same kids and the same thing, and he was referring to it as financial advisors, is that’s everybody and somehow they think that they draw a three mile radius around their office and they’re as geographically constrained as the Domino’s Pizza, making pizza deliveries, which of course is just insane.

STEPHEN OLIVER (36:45):

Several things that we’re always trying to do is, one, what makes you different. And I’m not talking about the alphabet soup, but behind your name. What makes you different, what makes you memorable, what makes you … Again, you used the word, “authority,” what makes you an authority? Obviously book, content, all of that stuff is great ways to do it, but also, what makes you different is, if you look at people who are memorable through the years, it’s not that they’re all clones of everybody else, it’s that there’s something unique about them.

STEPHEN OLIVER (37:20):

We were talking about Jerry Spence. Do you remember the attorney with the ponytail and the suede jacket with the dangles? Well, all the other guys are wearing gray pinstripe suits and blue ties, and here he comes sauntering in from Wyoming or wherever he was, Montana, looking completely different. But part of it is, to have infinity with an audience, is you’ve got to not be the same as everybody else. You’ve got to have something that’s unique, that’s different, that stands out, that sets you aside. And that can be your hobbies.

STEPHEN OLIVER (38:01):

I have an advisor who’s into Star Wars. He’s got pictures of him dressed up in one thing or another. I said, “Let’s change your whole backdrop. We’re doing most of your meetings by Zoom, remote, so let’s change your whole backdrop and we’ll have a Star Wars theme and you can put that on the website.” Another one’s into collecting Porsche’s, specifically different iterations of 911 Turbos. I said, “Let’s build the office with a glass wall, and we’ll have a collection of cars over there, and we could have the whole suite car theme in the office.”

STEPHEN OLIVER (38:37):

It seems like if you’re fixated on product and you’re thinking, “Really what I’m good at is helping people with their 401k and figure out their tax planning in retirement,” that’s a dime a dozen. I heard somebody in a podcast, I’d give attribution or remember to, but he says, “It’s a poor, pitiful world, where people choose an advisor based upon what zip code they’re in,” and that should never be you. You should never be no worse than anybody else, and here’s the list, pick me out of the list because my office is close to you. It’s completely different. You should be opened up where, maybe not the world, but you can certainly cover the United States. I know there’s a little different licensing requirements you have to roll out with different things, but we’re mostly servicing everybody in the country, not a three mile radius.

STEPHEN OLIVER (39:31):

Creating unique personality, and then creating that Parthenon of different ways of feeding traffic in, that creates authority, that builds it up, but mostly, usually taking 20 hours a week out of the advisor’s month, from when they’ve been busy being busy, automating, outsourcing and delegating, so that they’re really doing the three to 5,000 an hour activity –

Lee Milteer (40:01):

Hey, it’s Lee Milteer, and I’m delighted to interrupt you today, and let you know that I’ve been working with Stephen Oliver for 10 or 15 years now. He’s a great guy. I love all the research that he does, and I just wanted to let you know that if you’re enjoying the content on this podcast, then you really want to make time to visit advisorwealthmastery.com.

Lee Milteer (40:27):

Why should you do that? Well, because you’re going to receive two of his great books, and actually, one of mine, called, Success is an Inside Job. You’ll also get a lot of absolutely free material on growing your practice through effective marketing. So again, take the time to go to advisorwealthmastery.com.

STEPHEN OLIVER (40:46):

… They’re not doing the $20 an hour activity. That’s a key component.

Greg Moody (40:55):

Yeah. I mean, and if you feel like when we’re talking about this, that you’re not the personality … I sent a picture of Jerry Spence. If you’ve ever heard of him, he’s a lawyer, if you want to look him up. But you don’t have to have a crazy personality or try to be a standup comedian, that’s not what we’re talking about. You want to be yourself. If you want to be the nerd investment advisor, but emphasis that, that’s a way for you to operate. But it should be something that is along the lines of what you do.

Greg Moody (41:27):

If you’re trying to compete on being the best guy, as you said, “That does 401k rollovers,” there’s a lot of those people. Search the internet, you’ll find a lot of those guys. It’s hard for you to compete on that basis. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also be that, you should be that. You should be qualified in what you do. We’re not saying –

STEPHEN OLIVER (41:50):

The mediocre majority focus on product rather than outcomes, for their clients.

Greg Moody (41:55):

Exactly, and that’s in every business as well. So this is not anything surprising or something that you would be … It would be any different advice if you were doing something else.

STEPHEN OLIVER (42:05):

Yeah. We’re going to run out of time here. We have a fairly small number of live attendees right now, so why don’t we open it up to … We’ll promote everybody to panelists. If you’re there, put yourself on video, and we can do any kind of Q&A and so forth, for the last 10 minutes that we have here. Any questions or thoughts? I know that there’s a lot more that we haven’t covered than what we have, but …

STEPHEN OLIVER (42:34):

Michelle, Jeffrey, Jeff, Paul, any and all questions so far.

STEPHEN OLIVER (42:46):

There you go.

Paul Benson (42:51):

Not yet. I’m Paul Benson, but I appreciate the conversation. I love the analogy to Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week.

STEPHEN OLIVER (43:00):

Yep.

Paul Benson (43:01):

I have two businesses. I’m a general contractor, and then also, I’m a financial advisor. I started that business last year, but my two markets I’m going after are, one is contractors, because most of them are not doing much to really build their wealth.

STEPHEN OLIVER (43:17):

Nothing. Yeah.

Paul Benson (43:17):

They make a lot of money, but they just blow it.

STEPHEN OLIVER (43:20):

Yeah.

Paul Benson (43:20):

And the other is therapists, because I was also trained as a therapist.

STEPHEN OLIVER (43:24):

Interesting.

Paul Benson (43:24):

So I just wanted to give you guys feedback. I’m enjoying the conversation and I know Greg, you and I are talking Thursday, I think.

Greg Moody (43:33):

Good.

STEPHEN OLIVER (43:33):

Excellent, excellent.

Greg Moody (43:36):

Looking forward to it.

STEPHEN OLIVER (43:36):

The going after, and let’s pick either one of us, but the therapists are mostly licensed. Those are fairly easy listing. The general contractors are pretty easy to target, but you mentioned two things. Being the expert to that niche, and then being one of them, really gives you a huge leg up. On the general contractor … We were having this conversation with somebody else who was very reluctant, because he had come out of the background of being a general contractor, and was very reluctant to go after the guys who were him. I was saying exactly what you’re saying, make the pictures of the projects you were proud of and give it the story.

STEPHEN OLIVER (44:22):

In this case, he had built up his business and had sold it, so he had this great story to go with it, of building the business, selling it, investing the money, one thing or another. I said. “You got to build on that. That’s just great.” In all cases, we have a resource that we use called SRDS, standard rate and data service. But what it is, is it tells you what magazines are available in each niche, what mailing lists are available, one thing or another, and it’s basically got every list that’s available for sale in the U.S. So you can go through and find email newsletters where you can advertise, direct mail lists that you can buy. You can find trade magazines that you can go in.

STEPHEN OLIVER (45:06):

And oftentimes, by the way of the trade magazines, you might find … And it might not be that many in either one of those niches. Sometimes you might find a trade magazine where they have 750,000 distribution, so buying half page ad in the trade magazine is prohibitive. But what you can do is, you can buy a portion of their list and then use that for direct mail, use that for advertising, a custom audience for Facebook, retargeting and Google. You can get the subscriber list and then use that for other purposes, rather than just buying display ads, and it works really well that way as well. Go ahead, Paul.

Paul Benson (45:42):

I liked your idea of the Parthenon idea of marketing, with that picture behind you. So if I was targeting therapists, all across … Because I can do work with people in Canada and the United States, how would you a Parthenon of emails and snail mails, to therapists?

STEPHEN OLIVER (46:04):

Right.

Paul Benson (46:06):

And then how would I distinguish myself as the therapist financial advisor, or something like that?

STEPHEN OLIVER (46:14):

Yeah. Well, any –

Greg Moody (46:15):

Can I speak to that? Guys, I can speak on that a little bit –

STEPHEN OLIVER (46:17):

Go ahead.

Greg Moody (46:17):

… Because I’m a licensed therapist.

STEPHEN OLIVER (46:18):

You’re one of them too. Yeah.

Greg Moody (46:20):

I’m a licensed therapist. I do volunteer work, but I have my Master’s degree in counseling. What I would also do is narrow down from that list, and this is probably good advice for everybody here too, and that would probably make, possibly apply to contractors as well. Although you’ll know more about that than me, but there’s therapists that don’t make much money, and there’s therapists that make more money. You know how to categorize them based on their licensure.

Greg Moody (46:45):

If they’re a licensed therapist that is the … A licensed associate therapist, versus a licensed … And it’s different in every state. But that are licensed professional counselors, or as well as the social workers, and the ones that are psychologists versus the ones that have a PhD versus a Master’s degree. If you can kind of stratify which ones might be at higher income levels, then you might know which ones to spend more money on. So we can certainly build a Parthenon out, but then also, it may be worthwhile to, if there’s different stratifications of their income … Which you know, some of the guys that are counselors, for example, make $30,000 a year. Well, they may not have a lot of investable assets. Right?

Paul Benson (47:33):

Right, right. Yeah.

Greg Moody (47:34):

So that might be part of your decision process and your marketing plan, and I think this should apply to everybody on the call. If your niche is a certain niche, it may make sense … Like we talked to a guy that wanted to market to people with PhDs, he was a PhD in music. Well, the PhDs in music are probably not super high income learners. They’re probably teaching at school, which is great. Nothing against them, and there may be certain groups of those music ones, but he kind of wanted to go after the entire PhD market. Okay, but if you narrow that to the certain groups of PhDs, I might want to spend more money. More money on direct mail, more money on certain things, with certain groups within that niche.

Greg Moody (48:15):

This person also had a military background, so military people that also were PhDs, might be pretty high income earners, have more investable assets. So there’s some things to think about within that, before you build out the Parthenon for those groups.

STEPHEN OLIVER (48:29):

But going back to the therapists is one, there’s licensing requirements, so there’s public data on finding everybody who is licensed. Now, that’s not going to help you with the income, but there’s trade magazines so you can, as I mentioned before, advertise in the trade magazines, or you can get the trade magazines’ subscribers list. The nice thing about a lot of the magazines, is they’re very direct marketing focused. So oftentimes, they have a pretty good dataset of income. And obviously, they know geographically where they live and so forth, but a lot of times, they know income, they know full-time/part-time, whether they’re affiliated with the university or whatever it might be. But they have a pretty good dataset within that, so you could go in and you could say, “I want these people who have a certain number of clients, or a certain number of income.” We’d have to look and see what kind of dataset they have.

STEPHEN OLIVER (49:25):

And then of course, once you have a good list, part of it is … I’m repeating myself, but you can advertise specifically to them on Facebook, you can advertise to them specifically on Google. LinkedIn is obviously a good source, because it kind of sorts itself by resume and title. So you can do display advertising in LinkedIn, but you can also hire somebody or do it yourself in aggregate lists and communicate, contact them in one thing or another. Which, it’s a little bit laborious, through LinkedIn.

STEPHEN OLIVER (50:03):

But direct mail is usually a wonderful place to start, once you have a good list, because now I can do lead generating and direct mail. Yeah, there you go. I could do lead generating and direct mail that then drives them to either an opt-in page or a phone number. And then you start bombarding them with the credibility building material, in part to try to get them on the phone. Does that help a little bit, Paul?

Greg Moody (50:27):

Yeah. And I think this applies to everybody, because you all should have certain niches –

Paul Benson (50:30):

Yeah.

Greg Moody (50:31):

… That’s working, and these would just apply within. By the way, the licensing requirements would potentially determine income, I think Paul would agree on that, because different licensing requirements are dramatically different. Some are learning licenses, and some, they’d be able to earn a lot more. Although that could be different. There’s a lot of bell curve within those areas as well. But I think everybody should get that message, and it applies to everybody.

STEPHEN OLIVER (50:58):

And you can create the series of, let’s say books, but then you create one of them, it’s “The 7 Mistakes That All Therapists Use in Creating Their Longterm Income and Wealth.” And then on the contractors, it’s just becomes, “The 7 Mistakes That All General Contractors Make About Making Money, Rather Than Building Wealth.” Having it narrow cast and specific, gives it dramatically more value.

STEPHEN OLIVER (51:31):

It’s one thing to, “Here’s the 7 Mistakes That All Human Beings Make,” and send it out, but it’s something completely different to advertise to therapists, “Here’s the free book, ‘The 7 Mistakes That All Therapists Make in Dealing with Their Own Business and Developing Their Own Wealth,'” and then that’s the thing that gets them to raise their hand. But you being the author, that gives you that authority and that credibility.

STEPHEN OLIVER (51:55):

And again, the content. It could be that you have five different versions, and the content is cut and paste and replace the word contractor with therapists, generally, and it’s the same content for all of them. Do you see what I’m saying? But narrow casting it, makes all the difference in the world.

Greg Moody (52:12):

Yeah.

STEPHEN OLIVER (52:12):

Does that give you some ideas, Paul?

Paul Benson (52:14):

Yeah, and I don’t want to hog the space. If Jeff, or Jeffrey, or Michelle want to chime in.

STEPHEN OLIVER (52:21):

Yeah.

Paul Benson (52:21):

But yeah, I could keep going, but I want to give someone else the space too.

STEPHEN OLIVER (52:24):

Feel free to turn on your cameras and jump in, guys. No, that’s fine.

Greg Moody (52:26):

Thanks, Paul.

STEPHEN OLIVER (52:27):

We’re coming up on our time limit, but we’d love to answer any and all questions you guys have, if you have any.

STEPHEN OLIVER (52:40):

Well, easy enough. Easy enough.

STEPHEN OLIVER (52:44):

In an hour, minus our four minutes of technical glitches, we barely have a chance to scratch the surface. You are holding up some of our crap that we bombarded you with there, but anybody who hasn’t gotten that information, there’s that box that has a couple of my books, it’s got one of Lee Milteer’s books, it’s got some free reports in it and then that little thing that you held up has got about three or four hours worth of video on it.

Paul Benson (53:19):

I haven’t even listened to it yet, so I will now.

STEPHEN OLIVER (53:21):

Yeah. It’s got a really good video by Lee Milteer, it’s got a video, I think, by myself and Greg and Mindi, on marketing. You can fit an amazing amount of content on those. Yeah, there you go.

Mindi Godfrey (53:36):

Just flip the little tab out.

STEPHEN OLIVER (53:38):

Yep.

Mindi Godfrey (53:38):

And then it’ll insert right into the computer.

STEPHEN OLIVER (53:40):

It should auto run.

Paul Benson (53:42):

What got me on this call, was that I’ve been getting a lot of stuff from you guys, and then I saw my email Monday, “Financial Advisors.” I went, “Okay. Okay, that was it. That sold me. I’m getting on this webinar.” And then Mindi called yesterday to confirm, “You’re going to show up, right”.

STEPHEN OLIVER (53:59):

Very good. Very good. But you see how many different angles. And most of that, other than Mindi, is automated.

Paul Benson (54:08):

Yeah.

STEPHEN OLIVER (54:08):

So stuff just automatically goes out. It’s not like we’re sitting in an office somewhere, stuffing boxes or putting together this stuff. So all that stuff can be automated fairly effectively.

Paul Benson (54:21):

Because how many sub markets … Because I know you did stuff with karate studios, obviously financial advisors. You probably have about 100 sub markets you’re working with, right?

STEPHEN OLIVER (54:32):

No, actually we predominantly are focused on martial arts schools and financial advisors.

Paul Benson (54:37):

Oh, yeah.

STEPHEN OLIVER (54:38):

Which strangely, if you tell a financial advisor how similar they are to a karate school, they think you’re crazy. Or if you tell a karate school how similar they are to a financial advisor, they’d tell you, you were crazy. And I’ve got really good friends, one of whom does exactly what I do with lawyers, another one does exactly what I do with chiropractors, and the difference between a chiropractic clinic and a martial arts school is, just the deliverable is different. All the marketing is the same, all the sales methodology is the same.

STEPHEN OLIVER (55:09):

I will tell you though, of any of the businesses I’ve focused on, lawyers are pretty stupid when it comes to dealing with their business side of it. The financial niche is, people are just clueless on marketing. Most direct marketers know, if a lifetime value of a client is $20,000, I might be able to spend more than three emails to get one. And there’s this, blinders on, from a standpoint of being willing to spend money and having a marketing budget.

STEPHEN OLIVER (55:43):

If I spent $4,000 to get somebody who’s going to be worth $30,000, I’d be tickled to death. Most advisors are like, “Oh my God,” but at the same time, they’re telling their customers, “This is going to be a great return on investment. You’re going to get 7% a year.” But the marketing a lot of times, it’s 700% return, rather than 7% annually or something like that. They have a hard time getting out of their own way, if that makes sense.

Paul Benson (56:15):

Thank you the four of you for your time today, and Greg, I think we have a 2:15 appointment, to continue the conversation.

STEPHEN OLIVER (56:23):

Fantastic.

Greg Moody (56:25):

Yeah, sounds good.

STEPHEN OLIVER (56:26):

With that, we’ll call it a day. Michelle, Jeffrey, if you don’t have a time yet, we’d love to follow up. Mindi, what’s the number they should call?

Mindi Godfrey (56:35):

303-808-8719.

STEPHEN OLIVER (56:37):

Anybody watching the recording, if you haven’t gotten the whole box of free materials, just go to advisorwealthmastery.com, and it’s all going to be free. Paul, I look forward to talking to you soon as well.

Paul Benson (56:49):

Thank you guys.

STEPHEN OLIVER (56:49):

Okay, thank you.