If I were talking to any of you today and you were to say to me, "What would you suggest I do to build people in the database to make it work?" I believe in seeing a lot of people. I don't believe in making three or four or 10 sales a year because if you don't have a few of those that pan out, guess what? You've had a bad year. The numbers are the numbers. They don't lie.

I targeted my market first to AT&T, the phone company, which was the old BellSouth in Miami. I'm from Miami just down the road, and they had 5,000 employees within AT&T. I then targeted Florida Power and Light, the electric company, and they have a bunch of employees. We also targeted the Florida retirement system. The Florida retirement system has 700,000 people that work for the state of Florida. Firefighters, police officers. Miami International Airport has 1,300 employees. If you live in a city, I would identify large groups. Why? You want to become the expert in their pension plan and 401K plan. They had things in common. They were laying people off. People had to do something with their 401ks and pension plans. We became experts in that area.

Think of growing your business – if you ultimately want to get it ready for sale – like an oak tree. You plant an oak tree, but it just doesn't grow overnight. It takes years for that to happen. In your business, if you ultimately want to sell your business, you need to plant seeds to make it grow. Stack the odds in your favor. What would I recommend you do if you want to grow that business today?

Workshops. I did approximately 40 workshops a year, but I never did them in the summer. They were done January, February, March, April, May, and then we quit for the summer and started up again in October. And we would do the workshops on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Monday is a lousy day of the week to do it. Why? Because it's the first day of the week. Wednesday's the middle of the week. And of course, Friday is never a good day. So Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days of the week to do the workshop.

It's a dinner workshop. It would start at 5:30 p.m. We'd probably start at about 6 p.m., and we'd ended at 7 p.m. What did we do in that workshop? We did a section on social security. Everybody wants to know about social security. We did a little piece on IRAs and the RMDs, that’s required minimum distributions. The workshop would really focus on their pension plan and their 401(k) plan.

And at the end of the workshop, I would say, "How many of you got something out of this evening by a show of hands? If you did, if you would like to come in and see us for a no-cost obligation, please fill out the sheet that you have. Give it to my assistant who's here with me this evening." And we started building our database that way.

You don't want, in my opinion, any more than 30 people at a workshop because then it becomes unmanageable. Too many people. During the dinner, I would walk around the room and introduce myself to each person sitting at the workshop, and I would make mental notes about that person.

So for example, if I met David at the workshop, I'd say, "David, how many years have you been with Florida Power and Light? And he'd talk to me, "Oh, I'm planning to retire in so many years." And I'd make a mental note of that. I'd leave him, go back to the employee that I had sitting at the desk and say, "That guy over there, David Blake, he's going to be retiring in another two years. Make a note of that." So we'd start making notes.

At every workshop I did, I was always promoting the next one. How did I do that? At the end of the workshop, I'd say to them, "Would you do me a favor? I have a stack of flyers here talking about our next workshop," and I would give a stack of those flyers to the people that were sitting there, and they would be promoting my next workshop for me.

We always had a couple of workshops scheduled in advance of the workshop we were doing. So people were marketing for us. We then would call them the next day and try to set an appointment. We set a lot of appointments. And as of this time, we have 4,500 people in the database. We're doing a lot of email marketing to them. We're doing a lot of everything to get people to start calling us, and they do.

How many of you get a lot of referrals out there today? That's probably the best way to build your practice. Get referrals. I don't necessarily ask for them, but we provide unparalleled service in our office, and the fish start chasing the boat.