It seems like only yesterday when I was the young agent sitting in the front seat hoping to pick up something from an industry speaker, and here we are 38 years later, and now I am older than the majority of you in the room.

What’s important is to recognize that time keeps moving, and it’s incumbent on us to make the most of it and to continue to seek ways to grow and improve professionally and personally. I think if you would have told me 38 years ago that, at some point in the future, I would have an opportunity to address the Million Dollar Round Table, and people would actually have an interest in what I had to say, I wouldn’t have believed you. I had a less than an auspicious start in this business. The old-timers in the room will remember that you had to take an aptitude test before you could get contracted. Well, I was one of the few in history who failed the aptitude test, and if it wasn’t for a compassionate agency manager at the time, who had to force-feed me the answers to the questions once I took the test the second time, I probably wouldn’t be standing before you today.

My only saving grace was that I was single when I came into the business at the age of 24, so I didn’t have much financial responsibility at that point in my life. I was therefore able to survive the first year on the paltry amount of income that I earned and lived to see another day.

What I learned early on is that the first step in overcoming adversity is to recognize the psychological barriers that may have caused it. We often see how people from other industries who have experienced success try to make it in our business and fail miserably. They’ve never had to prospect for new business; they’ve never had to deal with the negatives associated with trying to develop business. I even remember a CPA who tried to come into our business, and after a year determined it wasn’t for him and made a very interesting statement to me. He said, “When you’re an accountant, you come into your office Monday morning, and there’s a pile of work on your desk that you have to complete, think through, get done. In our business, you come in Monday morning, especially when you are a new agent, and you have to go out and first develop the work to do and then do the work.” That is a huge difference, and many people cannot overcome it, but we get good at it.

Those who survive know that this is an activity-laden business, so you go out, you meet people, you become socially mobile, you create opportunities, and you overcome the psychological barrier of developing enough people to talk to.

Isn’t that where the rubber hits the road for those in our business? In the old days, they used the term “prospect.” Let me talk, just for a moment, to the new members of the Round Table.

Let’s talk about growth. You’ve made the Round Table, and by industry standards, that’s a great achievement, and I applaud everyone, especially the first-timers.

You’re going to be walking around the halls of this meeting, and you’re going to see people with different-colored ribbons on, and some of them are going to say “Court of the Table,” and some of them are going to say “Top of the Table.” We are all competitive. We all want to grow. How the heck do you get there? I want to do a look back at critical decisions made throughout my career that helped me grow. Let’s talk about going from base Round Table membership to Court of the Table and, ultimately, Top of the Table.

In a sense, you can’t do it on your own. You can, but you can’t. So, as I look back, I see there were three huge decisions I made.

Coming to the Annual Meeting

The history of this meeting — and, fortunately, I feel that it is changing a little bit — was that you paid your entry fee, you paid your airfare, you paid your own hotel expense, you bought your food. It was an investment in you. It was an investment in your improvement, and it was an investment in your professionalism. And I think if the organizers of this meeting compromise on that issue, I believe it’s a mistake. But that’s another day’s discussion. Coming to this meeting will be a game changer and a life changer for you. Coming to this meeting will teach you more than you’re going to learn in any industry journal. Coming to this meeting will give you the confidence that you too can grow. It will help you break out of whatever self-imposed comfort zones you’re dealing with. You know we are all functions of our environment. And our environment dictated how we grew up; socioeconomically, the people we hung out with; the schools we attended, etc. And we all know people who can’t break out of a comfort zone they’ve developed, which perhaps their family’s been caught in for many years. They don’t know that they can grow. They don’t know that they can get ahead. They don’t know that they can break through with what Dan Sullivan calls “a ceiling of complexity.” This meeting will teach you and show you and give you the confidence that you too can grow. You’ve got to be willing to listen. You’ve got to be in motion. You’ve got to talk to people in between meetings. You’ve got to develop relationships. But the Million Dollar Round Table will challenge you to be a better producer. To be a better spouse. To be a better parent. To be a better community servant. To be a better friend. To be a better person. This isn’t a business. This is a religion. You’re essentially members of the clergy, the financial clergy. People are going to entrust to you their most important decisions. They are going to entrust to you the financial security of their families and businesses. They are going to tell you things they don’t tell their own spouses. This is an awesome responsibility. And the Round Table, this Whole Person concept, sets the stage for your physical makeup, your psychological makeup, your never-ending aspirations to grow and be better. Growing doesn’t always mean you make more money. It means you get better. Remember that. So, No. 1, come to the meeting.

Study group

As a result of coming to the meeting, I heard of something called a “study group.” What the heck’s a study group? A study group is a group of like-minded individuals in the same business who are willing to share anything and everything to help each other grow and become better. What a concept! In 1998, I sent a note to the Round Table. I said, “I’m interested in joining a study group.” The next thing I knew, I got invited to a meeting that was hosted by a now long-time dear friend, Ron Greenberg, whom I’d never met before, and 12 of us showed up. And the whole thing was “Who are you?” “Where are you from?” “What’s your specialty?” “Would you like to get together and form this thing called a study group?” And 12 of us said yes. So we met for the first time in November 1998, in Las Vegas, and not only did we start to build a format for how our meetings were going to be held and run and the sharing of expenses and all of the things that go into it, but here we are 21 years later, and five of us are still together, and we’ve got it down to a science. We meet twice a year, in March and September, as a general rule. We have rotating responsibilities, and we afford different types of meetings. This all has developed over the years. For example, one of the meetings is just the five of us. We will spend two to three days twice a year, and we will share experiences with clients. We’ll talk about who we have on our teams — their responsibilities, how they are compensated. We talk about our revenue and expenses. We bring in guest speakers. We talk about our personal financial plans and critique each other, and we hold each other accountable to the goals and aspirations that we all have. We get in each other’s faces when we see something that we think is hindering the growth of one of our members.

So let me tell you about this group. We have the leading producer in the Lincoln Financial system from Baltimore, Maryland. The kid is an amazing machine. He’s from South Africa, and he’s been in the States for many years. He goes on road trips and has done a magnificent job in providing high-quality planning, attracting assets. He’s got a big team. I think he exceeds 20 employees at this point and just does a magnificent job. His name is Peter Maller. A top-shelf guy, period.

We have one of the leading producers in the Raymond James system from Minnesota. We have one of the leading producers in the Raymond James system from Minnesota, Bryan Sweet, who is addressing this meeting. Bryan is so far ahead of the curve in building a client-centered practice: The services he provides to his clients. The office environment that he has built. The quality of the team he has established. The various processes that he’s developed. The books that he has written. He is a true professional. Big thinking. He is a colleague of mine by age, and he’s got aspirations to take this thing to the moon.

We have one of the leading producers in the M Financial systems from New Jersey, Ron Greenberg, who was kind of the initial organizer of our group. Ron has a wonderful practice and has developed the asset management side of his business without forgetting protection-side planning. We’re going to talk a little bit about that because I do see a shift where some folks are going exclusively into asset management, and they are forgetting about the insurance planning part of what we do and how critically important that is. So we will talk about that in a just a moment, but Ron does a magnificent job.

And one of our former Million Dollar Round Table Presidents is a member of our group, Brian Heckert. Brian comes from a little, bitty town in southwestern Illinois, and he has accomplished so many magnificent things, both personally and professionally, in addition to becoming the President of the Million Dollar Round Table. Anybody who’s involved in the Round Table knows the incredible amount of work it takes to put yourself into position to be considered for the presidency. My hat’s off to Brian on that one. But from little, bitty Nashville, Illinois, he has built a powerhouse financial services company. He has done numerous acquisitions of practices in his region and has taught us all what to be on the lookout for, if that is something of interest to you.

So one of our meetings is just the five of us. There’s another meeting we all have with, let’s call them, junior wealth advisors in our practices, perhaps our successors. So we have a second meeting style where we bring our second-in-command, and sometimes they sit in on the meetings with us, based on if we have a speaker or something. Sometimes they break off into their own sessions and they talk about their responsibilities; they talk about how they are continuing to grow; they talk about how they are supporting the senior advisors in the practice. So that’s the second style of meeting we have.

The third style we have is an administrative meeting, held once every other year, where we will bring one or two of our key administrative team members — our office managers and perhaps others — and the whole meeting concept is geared toward improving office operations. And I can’t begin to tell you the collaborations that have taken place, as these young people have met each other and now have their own communication going; they have a source to bounce things off of and how much they enjoy a get-away meeting. We all have an opportunity to do that, but many times our staff people don’t. So we try to accomplish a lot during the day and have a lot of fun at night.

And the fourth style of meeting we have is a spousal meeting. Our spouses have gotten to know each other over the years. Our whole meeting is geared around things that will help us improve professionally. Often, we step off the deep end a little bit and do some exercises or bring a speaker in who challenges us on our doing the right things to keep and to have a good marriage. I am 31 years in, and my goal now is to get to 32.

I would encourage study groups for anyone who is interested in growth, is interested in collaboration, is interested in developing an intimacy with others in your business, and in the things that you won’t find any other way, in my opinion. They have done nothing short of helping us all grow amazingly. We felt so strongly about the study group that we actually wrote a book because there is so much that goes into the organization, the sharing of responsibilities, the sharing of expenses, developing the thematic types of the meetings that we have. So, we do have a book, an instructional manual, if you will, on how to develop and sustain a study group. The study group has had an amazing impact. I think we’ve actually done the math on this, and when we all came together, collectively the group was generating about $800,000 a year in revenue, and, I believe, last year the smaller group, the five of us, generated over $13 million. I used to be one of the larger producers of the group, but now I’m the smallest. I am lucky they still let me hang around.

Professional business coaching

The third game changer for me was professional business coaching. I am proud to say I am in my 21st year as a member of the Strategic Coach program. I have had Dan Sullivan as my coach from day one. And I can tell you, having had this experience for this many years, that just about everything he talked about in the late 1990s and the early 2000s has come to pass. The guy is a visionary. It’s a very different meeting. It is not specific to the financial services business. It’s all centered around productivity, developing teams, delegation, focusing on the proper activities and leveraging technology. Dan is a mastermind at developing so many tools that have become part of our culture in our office in the ways we transform the experiences we’ve had and try to improve them for the future. The tools also help in how we make decisions if we’re going to move forward on a new initiative and how we evaluate performance in the office. So external coaching — where again, you’ve got to be willing to take the time. I go once a quarter to the meeting. I have to invest a fairly significant amount of money in my tuition to attend, and I can only tell you when I come off it, when I come back from that meeting, I’ve got my agenda in place for the next 90 days.

Here I am in my 38th year, and I am as excited about the business today as I was in my first year. So to the experienced producers in the group who think those types of experiences are for the younger producers, I can tell you that you’re wrong. I would tell you that if you want to be a better professional, if you want to retain your excitement for the business, if you want to still have growth at the forefront of your thinking, I think getting into some type of a business coaching program will make a world of difference.

So, in summary, participating in the Annual Meeting, having been involved in a study group all of these years and having external coaching have been the ingredients that have helped me grow over the years and also, most importantly, increased my mental and emotional capacity so that I could believe that I, too, could grow. Who is the most important person to convince you that you can get from point A to point B? It’s yourself. It’s between your ears. And what restricts us? It’s thoughts like That’s not for me. I can’t do that. I don’t know how to get there. I believe in these external stimuli that I have been so lucky and blessed to have been surrounded by. These big three, as I call them, have put me in a position to continue to grow and to have fun along the way.

OK, let’s talk about building an organization. As I reflect back on my career, I realize that, every time, I have been able to grow. My history has always been that I get to a level, and I kind of stumble along for a while, and then a lightbulb goes on, and I make some decisions, and I am able, sometimes in a quantum leap, to go to another level and try to retain that one. And, hopefully, it will happen again. But as I look back, every time I have been able to grow, or the practice has been able to grow, it had something to do with the people decision. So let me go back to the beginning.

If you are out there and you are doing it all — you’re prospecting, you’re filling out your applications, you’re calling customer service, you’re doing everything it takes to run your practice — then I would submit to you that you have somehow relegated a big part of your day to a $10, $12, $15, $20 an hour position. So, if you choose to continue to do that work, God bless you, you’ll burn out, and I probably won’t see you at this meeting again. So here is what I did.

I invested in a full-time person. Now, there is a psychology to growing a financial services practice. I hope I’m not stepping on any toes here, but if you’re a member of an agency, you know that agencies sometimes develop a dependency where you, as a producer, are dependent upon an agency to provide you with your administrative support and your office, to print your business cards, etc. I think there is some risk to that because this is a business, like any other, and you need fiercely independent thinking at times and to recognize whom you work for. No. 1, you work for your clients; No. 2, you work for yourself and your team; and, along the way, we represent a company or a bunch of companies, depending on how you operate. That’s the mentality. When you start investing in people, normally, it’s coming out of your pocket. That’s where many young advisors have a very difficult time justifying the expense. They are just making it; they are just covering their bills; and now I’m telling them to go out and get an administrative assistant? Come on. So it takes a lot of confidence. And there is a theory on that. There is a theory that if you wait until you can afford it, in this business, anyhow, you’ve waited too long. So I challenge you to think that one through.

I remember when I was young in the business. I was pretty good at going out and meeting people and gathering facts and picking up things to evaluate, and then I’d bring all these files back, and then they’d pile up on my desk. Because once you develop the pile of work, someone’s got to do the work. So early in my career, I recognized that. I happened to have an associate who made a career change in his 50s. He was a brilliant person. He understood the financial markets. He had credentials. He was great on a computer, but he came from an engineering background. He could not sell you water in the desert. If you asked him what time it was, he was going to tell you how the clock was constructed. We all know the type — wonderful guy, good field, no hit. But I needed someone on the analytical side. I needed a case-planning specialist, so we banded together, and, all of a sudden, that pile of work I was able to create was sometimes done the same day I created it. Now, think about that for a minute. That means if I’m in a fact-finding session, I am so confident I can turn around whatever we’re going come back with into a presentation, if you will, that I could make the follow-up appointment when I was leaving the fact-finding session. I didn’t have to chase that person down to make an appointment a week later. So we developed tremendous efficiency to the extent that we developed our own fact finder, and, often, I didn’t even have to meet with him on the case if I took proper notes. So, I’ve developed pretty good skills on asking the right questions, writing down the right answers, getting the proper financial data, opening the doors to talk to attorneys and accountants, and that was a game changer for me. And it was probably the main reason I was able to qualify for Court of the Table for the first time back in 1991.

Over the years, we recognize, as we build our asset management business, that that business, more than any, requires a backstage person to do research, to help construct portfolios, to keep in touch with clients, to develop investment policy statements, to put together investment committees — all the things that go into successfully running an asset management business. It’s another person who, again, propels you to get to another level. And you can take that thinking to fee-based financial planning; you can take it in many directions based upon what type of business you’re creating. I know folks who have employee benefit specialists, qualified plan specialists on staff, and many of you have created very substantial teams and understand the concept that I am referring to and have developed quality team members who allow you tremendous leverage with your time to be focusing on the activities that are most important to growing and sustaining your business. So please recognize you’re not an advisor; you’re not an agent. You’re a businessperson. You are in the financial services business. You have to build out your structure. You have to support it financially. You have to make financial decisions that will make you more prepared and better qualified to give advice as you upgrade your marketing to better markets, and you are talking to professionals, and you are talking to business owners.

Let’s talk for a moment about building an organization and your branding. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. There are philosophies. Some advisors market themselves as representing a specific company, and, again, that’s OK; that’s a conscious decision we all make. I was always comfortable trying to develop an identity and also creating my own little brand in developing name recognition in our community. I choose to use my last name, Moshides Financial Group. I hired a graphic artist, who helped me develop a logo, who worked with me on a jingle, who worked with me on a color scheme and who educated me on how to create the brand and how it’s used in whatever you produce.

I developed presentation materials; we have a website; we produce our own newsletter. I learned this from my study group guys — when you produce your own newsletter versus buying a newsletter and putting your name on it, it’s a whole different feeling that your clients have when they receive it. They can tell it was written internally; they can feel the hominess of it. We can highlight people within our organization. We can make references to our community service. If we have a client appreciation event, we can publish pictures. We can put a recipe in there that we think people will enjoy seeing. I have an opportunity to write a blog. Obviously, we have to have it approved by our compliance department, but it gives us a forum where people get a better understanding philosophically where we are as a company. I find it highly effective. We are willing to invest in that.

The latest is we are trying to put videos on our website, quick ones that I can produce in the office and, once approved, I can throw on the website. The videos highlight a particular topic that I think others might be interested in hearing about. We have a welcome video if it’s your first time visiting. I learned from Joel Weldon, our speaking coach, to make it short, under two minutes. Address why people are coming to your website. He told me a new person is there for one of two reasons: People either have been referred to you and want to know more about you and how you operate, or they have some issue on their mind and haven’t been able to find a relationship that can help them resolve it, and they are trying to figure out if you might be the organization that can help them. So in my welcome, after I say, “Hi, I’m John Moshides,” I get right to the heart of the issue. You’re probably visiting my website for one of two reasons. So I try to keep their attention and then invite them to go to various spots within the website. But make no mistake about it, if people are referred to you, they are going to your website today. It doesn’t have to be the greatest website out there. You don’t have to spend a zillion dollars to do it, but it has to be reasonably good, and it has to look reasonably professional. It’s like putting out a video. Sometimes videos are more effective if they’re not professionally produced, if they’re not too polished, where instead you’re saying, “Hey, I got involved in this situation for a business owner, and we’re able to resolve a succession planning issue using this technique, and if you want to talk about it, give us a call.” Powerful.

Develop what’s the right brand for you. Spend some money with a professional. Write well. If you’re going to do a video, articulate well. Have a Joel Weldon in your life to critique you. Learn how to be a great public speaker. Not that I am, but I’ve learned things over the years, and I am trying to improve.

The next topic I’d like to touch upon is transitioning from commissions to fees — no easy task, by the way. Those of us who have been around for a while will remember when everything was commission-based. When you sold an insurance product, you were compensated with commissions. If you were starting to get into the investment management business, there was a time where all you were doing was selling front-end load mutual funds. So everything was essentially based on a commission; you would earn from the products you were using for the benefit of your clients.

A lot has changed over the past 10, 15, 20 years, which suggests that the industry continues to move more toward fee-based planning versus commission-based planning. In my world, both still exist, but a bigger percentage of the revenue we generate now comes from fees — fees for financial plans that we create for our clients and fees for the various asset management programs we have, such as advisory accounts.

Now, when you start the transition, again, it goes back to convincing yourself, first, that you’re doing something that is either in the best interest of your client or mutually beneficial between you and your client, but it is a change. We all get kind of used to certain protocol that we’ve used over the years, and now we have to find a way to educate our clients and position ourselves as those who can be compensated or engaged on a fee basis, whereas perhaps in the old days it was all commission-based.

Here’s what I’ve learned. People will remember a small percentage of what they hear verbally, but they remember a great deal of what they see visually. So I believe that in order to transition to fee-based planning, you have to develop a process, name it and then show pictures to people on how it works, what they can expect and why they should write you a check.

So let’s first talk about fee-based financial planning. And I’m going to preface this by saying, for young advisors, that fee-based financial planning can put you out of business pretty quickly. What I mean by that is, to do it right, with all the compliance requirements to deliver a fee-based plan, it’s very difficult to charge enough to justify the time that you spend, especially if you don’t have an administrative team that can help you get the work done. But nothing brings you closer to that client than when you do a very thorough comprehensive financial plan, and it has the potential to create some very big opportunities in the insurance planning and investment management side of our business. You need to be No. 1 to have a system in place to handle it. You need to recognize that you’ve got to be very careful with it, and then you’ve got to be able to deliver the goods.

Many years ago, we developed a system called our “Wealth Management Process.” Nothing profound there, but it was the best I could come up with. This graphic overview is the first piece I use when I am trying to motivate a person to consider us to do a fee-based financial plan. [visual] My discussion with them will go something like this:

Mr. Jones, I think you are a candidate to do some pretty holistic comprehensive planning, something called our Wealth Management Process. As you can see here, we’ve broken it down into six steps. The first step is our free vision workshop [emphasis on the word “free”], where we invite you to come in and have a discussion, and the whole intent is for you to educate me and perhaps to clarify in your own mind what your vision is for the future. Because what we have learned is, people don’t necessarily want a financial plan. They want a life plan, but they are smart enough to recognize that it has to be supported financially. So we help you determine what that vision is. Then we’d like to invite you into the program [emphasis on the word “invite”] where in Step 2, our Life Strategy Session [formerly known as the fact finder], we get into a high-level talk of where you’d like to go, and we start to identify the strategies required to get there. Step 3 is what we call our Goal Verification Meeting. So before I finalize the plan, I am going to come back to you with a summary of what we’ve discussed and some of the assumptions I am suggesting that we use, which could be the year you want to retire, the year you think you’re going to take Social Security, the rate of return you want me to use on the growth of your investments for our cash flow analysis, etc.

So, what I am finding is that I am really locking that person in so that when I come back with the plan in the modeling we will be doing, we should have nailed it, and the assumptions that we are using should be within the parameters that the client wants us to use. In Step 4, we develop our Financial Blueprint. I like the term “blueprint.” I think it suggests that it’s really custom; it’s specific for the clients and is a detailed financial plan to help you achieve what you’ve established in the previous meetings.

When I charge someone for a plan, I have to tell them in advance, “You’re engaging me on a fee basis. In Step 5, when we start to identify some things that you have to possibly do to pull it all together — what we call the “implementation” part of the process — you don’t have any obligation to do business with us if it requires an insurance product or if we’re making any investment management recommendations. We hope at that point we’ve earned the right that you would have an interest in doing that business with us, but there is no obligation. Step 6 is our annual review, where we keep you in step with any changing tax or legal things that you need to know to keep your plan going in the right direction.”

So we get people through, we’re showing them, we’ve named the process, we talk about a free vision workshop, and we invite them into the program. Invariably, the next question they have is what it will cost. You determine what your price is, and we’ve got a pricing metric in place based upon the complexities we anticipate. Let’s assume it’s a base financial plan. You’re going to charge a person $2,500 to $3,000 — whatever you choose to charge. Someone says, “John, I’ve never paid a fee for a financial plan. Why should I start now?” Then I pull out piece No. 2 and say something like this:

Well, Mr. Jones, here’s what I’ve observed over my career. Many successful people like yourself have been, in a sense, winging it. They have insurance in place, either through their employee benefit program or a product that they’ve purchased from their pal at the country club. They have various investment products. They may or may not have done their legal documents, or they may or may not be up to date. What we call this is falling into the “shoot-from-the-hip trap.” What we’ve observed is, people have lost opportunities to build wealth — paying too much in taxes, making bad or emotional investment decisions, not following their asset allocation model, spending too much. They haven’t done a cash flow analysis, and they may have too much debt. We also often see families not adequately protected. They don’t have their wills or trusts in place. They don’t have the right insurance, or it’s not owned in the right place. They haven’t thought about how they are going to educate their kids. And they really aren’t achieving their goals because they’ve never written them down. They don’t have a clear vision. It’s not written down. They haven’t identified the obstacles to getting there. They don’t know the tools that are available to them. What we like to say is, if you come into our Wealth Management Process, the alter ego to the shoot-from-the-hip trap, you will be achieving the Ultimate Life Plan, where we will help provide the strategies to maximize your wealth to make sure your family is adequately protected, and you are achieving your goals.

So, here’s my theory. Let’s think through the steps:

• Step 1: Identifying a prospect we think is someone who needs a comprehensive financial plan
• Step 2: Showing them the steps to the process so that they’ll know what to expect
• Step 3: Setting the stage to ask them to write a check because that’s an art

If you have never asked someone to write a check for a fee-based plan, wait until you ask for it the first time. Sometimes you stutter. Sometimes there’s fear in your voice. So showing them pieces of what you’ve observed over the years, which is reaffirming in their mind why they should come through the process, and then showing them what the end result will be, should provide you with the confidence to ask for the check and them the motivation to write the check.

Let me show you a variation of the Wealth Management Process that’s designed for owners of family businesses. The reason I put this one together was to motivate people who own companies to really reflect on the planning they have, or perhaps have not, done, and the steps that have to fall into place for them to feel like they are really making progress with respect to this type of planning. So you can see here, I also have six steps. [visual] What I’ve changed here is that I have some bubble thoughts coming off each of the steps. What I’ve observed over the years is that there is often a common thread among business owners where they are constantly thinking about these types of things. So for example:

• Step 1: Where are you as the CEO of the company in the life cycle of your career as it relates to the business? Are you still having the energy? You have plenty of years to go. Are you getting tired? And are you starting to think of your successor? So, where am I today?
• Step 2: What’s your vision for where you would like this company to go in the future? It was left to you by your parents. What would you like to leave for your children or whomever is next to run this company? Sometimes people have the vision but maybe not the energy to carry it out.
• Step 3: Who’s going to help us get there? Have I assembled the right team of advisors? There are normally three people involved in this planning process — the accountant, the company attorney and someone like yourself.
• Step 4: Often, before you can get into the nitty-gritty of discussing succession planning with the owner/owners of a company, they want to make sure they have the peace of mind of having the right program in place that is going to assure them of their own financial independence. Should they walk away from the company, sell their stock, no longer have salaries and bonuses, etc.?
• Step 5: Have they identified the successor? Who’s going to carry that torch in the future? Is it one person, or will it be co-CEOs? Is it a family member, or is it a key employee? Who’s taking the reins, and how are we going to give the business to them?
• Step 6: Normally, what plays into this is, if people have accumulated any wealth, have they thought through what’s important to them with their legacy planning for their family, for their charitable interests, etc.?

What I find here is that, when I share this overview with business owners, they’ll often say to me, “Oh my goodness, that’s what I think about in the shower. That’s what I think about at night when I’m by myself or I’m petting the dog. Can you help me get there? What role do you play?” And my answer is, “We try to play the role of quarterback. We try to work very well with your other advisors, whom you may have had a longer relationship with than with me, and have everybody rowing the oars together to address these important issues.” I can use this to do a fee-based plan for that person. It may be very different from a personal financial plan, although the personal financial plan is really still kind of the heart and soul of this, and you’d be adding things like estate planning, charitable giving planning, succession planning to it. So it’s a more comprehensive plan; therefore, you ask for a higher fee: $5,000, $7,000, $10,000. I’ve seen people charge very significant fees. It takes confidence to ask for the big checks. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s undercharging.

I also have other processes we use. One is for our advisory accounts and trying to motivate people to transition to us for money management purposes and our wealth management services program. It has multiple steps. It’s based upon our belief in certain principles, and we actually show people what goes into the analytical side of the business, how we construct our portfolios and who our institutional partners are that help us with portfolio construction. The CFA evaluates our portfolios and gives us valuable feedback, as we have our investment committee meet each quarter and make adjustments to portfolio holdings. All of these types of things, when you name them, when you create pictures of how they are going to work, I think give you a leg up on trying to motivate people to take action with you and do things that are fee-based versus commission-based or, at the very minimum, a combination of the two.

I’d like to make a couple of comments that are geared toward the senior advisors, those who may be in their 50s, 60s and beyond and have had very successful, very fruitful careers but are reaching a point in their career where they may not be in a position to grow any longer. There was a legend in the insurance business who was a great supporter of the Round Table by the name of Al Granum. Al Granum coined a term for senior advisors called “premature retrogression,” kind of an interesting play on words, and I will let your imaginations take it from there. What Mr. Granum was saying is that successful advisors often stop doing the things that made them successful. He actually identified the reasons why that is. He said it has a lot to do with stopping the thing that I’ll call the prospecting cycle. Sometimes we fall into a trap of thinking we’ve arrived, and we don’t have to do the fundamental things that a lot of the young people have to do each and every day. So why do people come to that conclusion? He said because it’s no fun, too young and there’s no money in it. What does he mean by that? Well, to really continue to grow in this business, you should be calling on young people who are growth-oriented in addition to the senior folks you have. But often you forget that when you are calling on the young entrepreneur, you have to earn your stripes. So, all of a sudden, you’ve got the 28-year-old executive who’s going to tell you about insurance and financial planning and investment planning. He’s not that interested in what you have to say until perhaps you can educate him and persuade him to see it your way. So that’s “too young.” No fun — any rejection is a reality of life in this business, and as you’re calling on new people or you’re referred to new people, they don’t all want to see you. We become really, really comfortable going back to where the bed is warm. And what I mean by that is, we all have plenty of clients who, when we knock on their door, come to our office and are delighted to see you. You’ve been in their life for so many years, and it’s an upbeat meeting, a comfortable meeting versus your calling on Mr. Big in town. And he’s not that interested in seeing you, but somehow you finagled an appointment, and you have about 30 seconds to make an impression, or that guy’s going to tune you out psychologically and is probably going to be very cordial, but he’s going to escort you to the door. That’s the “no fun” part. But that’s part of the process. The other thing is, as you know, you have to earn your stripes with people. You’re doing things where you don’t get paid for your efforts early on, or it takes a while to gain their confidence to where they are going to do bigger ticket planning with you. Too young, no fun, no money in it.

So what do you do? What do you do at this stage if you’re in your 50s, 60s and beyond? First, I believe, you have to have an interest in grabbing the future and bringing it in to the present. You can’t be past-based in your thinking. We all have someone in our social circles who is past-based. Their best days are behind them. They long for the way life used to be. They are having trouble adapting to the new world. They are having trouble adapting to the needs and the challenges of technology. They are not crazy about this younger generation and work ethic. So, therefore, they long for the way things used to be. Wrong. You’ve got to go into the future. The people who are fun to be around and the people who are interesting to be around are looking at the future. What do we have to do to participate in the future? What changes do we have to make in our business so that we are positioned to be a player in the future? Technology. The way we present things. How we market to people. All the kind of things that are critical if you’re going to be relevant and be able to play a significant role in the lives of the young entrepreneur in the future.

So that’s an attitude. That’s a mindset. It brings into play this concept of retirement. We have to remember where retirement came from. It came out of industrialized Germany, where they had to get the old guy on the assembly line off the line and get the young guy in, and, at the same time, the person who had been doing the same task for 30 to 35 years was burned out, his mind was blown, and he wanted to do this thing called “retire.” In our business, I don’t think cold turkey retirement is what it’s all about. I really think it is based on identifying what you really love about our business and what you’d rather delegate. You have to have a team in place to do this. You have to have a young advisor or two or 10, however big your organization is, who would be willing to do some of the grunt work that perhaps you don’t want to do anymore. Your role could maybe be one of the rainmakers of the firm and maybe one of retaining relationships and developing new ones. It might be one of guiding the next generation of advisors in your firm to be on the same page with you to continue to grow and enhance the culture of your firm. If you play your cards right, you can develop the freedom of time that will keep you refreshed and rejuvenated but still active.

I have a 24-year-old advisor in my firm. He was our intern while he was in college and came in as an advisor after graduating with a degree in economics. He’s been with us two years, but let me first tell you, it’s very difficult to develop and train a young advisor. Most successful advisors are not very good at it, and we’re so focused on our own things that we don’t want to necessarily commit the time that it takes. But here’s what I’ve experienced in the two years we’ve been together.

It’s taken me back to how difficult it is to establish yourself in the business. I’ve seen the many disappointments he’s had. I’ve seen the rejection he’s had to deal with, and I need to be there to support him both emotionally and financially and continue to help him pay his dues. But the positive side of this is, I forgot how much fun it is to develop new clients from the start and see the relationships develop and flourish and provide new opportunities for us. That has gone a long way to keeping my mind fresh and in the game. It also gives me an opportunity to delegate follow-up responsibilities and many of the action items that are required after we conclude a meeting with one of our clients or prospects.

In summary, for the senior advisor, recognize the signs of what Al Granum called premature retrogression. If you’re interested in staying and growing, put yourself in a position to have a bigger future. Don’t be afraid of it. Bring it into the present. Share ideas with your clients, who may have the same challenges, and what you’re learning at meetings like this or if you’re in a coaching program. I am finding that with our existing clients, when I go see them, I am often spending more time on issues that are unrelated to the business that we do together. It might be a topic or a concept that I’ve discussed at my Strategic Coach program that I believe will be helpful to them and how they conduct their leadership meetings, or how they delegate duties, or how they transform experiences they’ve had, or how they try to market and take advantage of digital marketing to a greater degree. When we get around to talking about the business side of things, it’s a foregone conclusion. People recognize that you’re there to help them in more ways than just giving an insurance or investment recommendation, and that’s when you become the trusted advisor.

Let me close with a couple of thoughts. The Round Table teaches us to be a Whole Person. We hear every day, especially in the sporting world, that guy or that girl, he or she is the real deal. That’s the man. That’s the person you go to. And we get caught up in that based upon the way it’s presented in society. You know how you become the real deal in our world? You become a real deal in our world when you have perfected the skill to put yourself in the shoes of the person you are talking to across the table and feel what they feel. Feel their fears, feel their concerns, feel their financial challenges. N. Feldman used to say it best: “You’re a tailor and you’ve got a bolt of cloth, and we are endeared with the responsibility to cut that bolt of cloth into a custom-made suit for that client.” We’re the tailor. We are the financial tailor in their life, and, make no mistake about it, that’s a skill. And, often, what’s the best compliment one human can pay to another? It’s providing your undivided attention. We all want to talk. It’s not about talking; it’s about listening; it’s about asking a penetrating question and sitting back and having people share their concerns. So you want to become the real deal? Think about how you relate to your clients. Think about what you deliver. Think about if you’re delivering value. It sometimes has nothing to do with insurance and investment planning. Think about if you’re a confidant to the folks you touch. Think about all the go-to people you had in your life whom you could always talk with when you had a challenge. In our business, we learn so much. You can’t be snookered after a while, but think about what you can share with the people you come in contact with so you become their go-to person. Think about your relationships with your friends, your family, your spouse. Think about your community involvement. Think about your spiritual life. Those are the things that, when you put them all together and you meld them together and you roll them up in a ball, enable people to become the real deal. This business, and this organization right here, gives us all of the raw materials to become the real deal.

And the last thing I will challenge you to think about is ego. Ego is a wonderful thing. Ego gets you up in the morning. Ego motivates you to try to get ahead. Ego convinces you to take some risks, which you have to when you’re in business, but ego left unchecked is a very dangerous thing. I’ve heard it all before. There’s no “I” in team, but we so often see an individual talking in terms of “what I did,” of “what I accomplished,” “it’s about me.” And, so often, those are the people who crash and burn and really don’t develop the true respect and admiration of our peers, of our friends, within our communities. Maintain your humility. Do things for the right reason. There’s no free lunch in this business. Those who get ahead work their tail off. They come to work every day.

Meet as many people as you can at this meeting. Take a lot of notes. And be a giver. It will come back to you in spades.

John C. Moshides, CLU, ChFC, is a 35-year MDRT member with 13 Court of the Table and 14 Top of the Table qualifications and president of Moshides Financial Group. He was president of the Estate Analysts of Western New York in 2017-2018. He is also a past president of the Buffalo Chapter of the Society of Financial Service Professionals and is one of only a few recipients of the Distinguished Service Award from the society.