When I sit down with a new client, the first thing I say is “You’ve got to understand that insurance pays.” I have a brochure with the claims that my business has paid since 2010: life insurance, total and permanent disability, critical illness and income protection.

Most people are slightly skeptical about what you do. They wonder whether at the end of the day, when they really need the help, if someone’s actually going to be there to deliver the money. So when I show this sheet to clients, I say, “There are three things you need to understand before we go any further. One is that everyone on this page started out in perfect health. If they weren’t healthy, they weren’t going to get the insurance. The second thing is obviously that the insurance companies pay. I’ve only ever had one claim where the insurance company hasn’t actually followed through in the way that I thought it would. The third thing is, you’ve got to start looking at those numbers and realize that there are big numbers and there are little numbers. And the decisions you make today are potentially going to be deciding what it is that you’re going to get when something goes wrong.”

My goal is to educate clients so that they can make good decisions. I say, “Look, I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m here to help you buy. I use my experience to buy the right insurance.” When you say it that way, it positions you metaphorically on the same side as the client. It’s a real trust thing as well.

So in that first hour, I talk about life insurance. I talk about total and permanent disability. I talk about income protection. And the last thing I talk about is critical illness. But there’s one part of the income protection presentation that is vital to the critical illness side of things. I say, “Right now you are earning 100 percent of whatever it is you are earning. What happens when you are disabled? In Australia [and it might be different where you are] you will only be allowed to ensure for 75 percent of your earnings. So you are immediately taking a 25 percent pay cut when you are disabled. Why do the insurance companies do that? Because for most people that 25 percent is their fun money. And when you are disabled, the insurance companies don’t want you to have fun, right? They want to get you off claim as quickly as they can.

Then I also ask about debt. In Australia most people typically are spending about a quarter to a third of their income servicing debt. Ninety-five percent of the people I talk to would be in that range. I finish off the income protection presentation and move ahead to critical illness.

A typical critical illness insurance will cover about 55 different events for which you can make a claim. I just say, “OK, medically acquired HIV. How many people do you know who have had that?” “How many people do you know who have gone from good sight to total blindness?” “How many people do you know who’ve had a major organ transplant?” And I’ve never had anyone say anyone. It just doesn’t happen. When you break down the actual numbers, most of the claims we pay are cancer claims; three out of four claims from critical illness insurance are cancer related. If we look at those numbers, is it critical illness insurance or is it cancer insurance?

We are selling cancer insurance. Why is that important? Cancer is a different beast. You don’t beat cancer. Cancer’s this horrible thing that lingers. It affects a lot of people. It’s not an individual disease. I call it a family disease. And when someone’s diagnosed with cancer, what I say to people is “We need to circle the wagons around your family so that you guys can defend yourselves against what’s going on.”

The stress involved with cancer can have an effect on your immune system, which can be, in some cases, as damaging as the actual cancer. And your stress is going to come from two areas: The first one’s going to be health: Gosh, am I going to survive this? But the other area where the stress comes in is the costs.

I say to clients, “I want you to have $100,000 worth of critical illness insurance to cover those costs. If you’re not willing to do that, well, then we are going to have consequences because I don’t want to be the guy getting the phone call that essentially says, ‘Can we get a terminal illness claim out of this?’ I just want to give you the money.”

Insurance is time. Who talks about time? Not many. This is my mom. [visual] At 14 years old, she had to leave school to work because her family didn’t have enough money. After a while she came to Sydney where she met my old man. Dad had just come back from Europe where he’d flown 27 missions over the French coast in a bomber. The survival rate was three missions. To say Dad was a little bit shattered is an understatement. There weren’t a lot of things he could really concentrate on too much. Mum was amazing, though. She just held the whole thing together. She never stopped working. But from about the age of 60, I noticed that things were getting really difficult with Mum. She got sacked from the firm that she worked at for 35 years. She couldn’t get another job. Things became really rough, and they got rougher, and Dad passed away. So now Mum’s on her own, and it just got harder and harder. I got to a stage where rather than visit Mum, I avoided it. Grace arrived, my daughter, her only granddaughter. I thought, I don’t care how I feel about this woman. I’ve got to make sure that she gets to know her granddaughter.

We opened up lines of communication again, and it started off pretty nicely, but it didn’t take long before we went back to this bickering and arguing, and it wasn’t pleasant. There was one night where she yelled at me, and I yelled back. I said, “I’m sorry. I just find it really hard to love you anymore.” She didn’t say a word for about 30 seconds. Then I actually started to see a little tear. Then she said, “When you were 7 and your brother was 10, I found a lump in my breast. I went into the hospital, and I woke up without a breast. Seven days after the operation, I was in the kitchen cooking for you guys because Dad couldn’t cope. Three years after that, I found out I had ovarian cancer. So I went in for a hysterectomy, and a week later I was at home cooking and cleaning. I had to battle through it. From that day I’ve hated life.”

What would critical illness have done for someone like Mum? Instead of enjoying the fruits of a very successful and hardworking life, she just dissolved into bitterness. But imagine if we’d had a year’s worth of salary that just came in the door, and she’d stayed in the hospital longer because we’d gotten housekeeping. She wouldn’t have had to go back to work because we’d have had money in the bank. We probably would have had 20 great years with each other at the end instead of 20 lousy ones.

Critical illness is not just about paying bills. Critical illness is about the well-being of your clients and giving them choices at a time when they need to have choices.