When we started, we had no clients, so we went out and we were aggressive in the marketplace. We were doing 25 seminars per year. Now that we are a few years in, we don’t need to do so many, and we are also getting better at the marketing side. The people who are coming have more money, so that’s also beneficial to us. Now, we’re only doing seminars 12 days per year. How do we do it?

To connect with people who drive expensive cars, have expensive watches and have expensive handbags, are we going to run seminars at a cheap, one-star hotel? Or are we going to go somewhere seriously exclusive? In England we’re very fortunate; we have lots of castles. Peckforton Castle is a beautiful place to go, so that’s the venue we go to. The venues are always going to be five-star. They are always going to be the best of the best. And we want them to be exclusive because what we want is when they come to our event and then they’re back talking to their friends, they’re going to say, “Do you know where I went to today? I went to Peckforton Castle because we went to this really good wealth management firm.” If we send them to the Days Inn, they’re not going to say that because they want to brag about where they’re going. It’s not cheap. But cheap is not what we’re about. First class is what we’re looking to do.

We do data mining, which is to look for certain types of clients in the area. Mainly, we want to know the types of houses that they’re living in, as in the price range of those houses. We don’t want to invite people who live in modest houses. We want to invite people who live in the big, expensive houses. We want to look at their share portfolios. Specializing means making sure that we bring the right people in to sit in the room, so that’s what we do from our data side of things.

We send out old-fashioned invitations on paper. We don’t do email or any of that side of things. This is a paper exercise that goes out with the old-fashioned postman. The way that the invitation is put together, it needs to look nice and feel right. If you’ve got a nice watch, what’s the box that watch comes in that you put in a drawer? Sometimes the box costs a few thousand pounds. They’re incredible. We need those touchpoints on all the bits that we do.

We invite our own clients to the actual seminar. We’ll have a mix of existing clients and prospects. Each client is given a lanyard. Our clients have black lanyards, and the prospects have silver lanyards. It’s pointed out to them. Our clients become our unpaid sales force because the people, when they are having their lovely dinner at the end of it, will all be mixed. They can make sure that they can communicate because they will say nice things about us, which will help us in the journey with what we are doing.

The age of clients who we are looking for is generally 50 and upward, so probably in that range of preretirement and postretirement because that’s the marketplace that we are focused on. We base the invitation on a theme we call “All You Need to Know.” They come to a targeted presentation featuring all they need to know about estate planning, retirement planning or wealth management. We’ve also written six books now on “All You Need to Know.” They’re available on Amazon. But the reason we have those books is to give us credibility as a published author. When people come, they get copies of our books. We just give them away. You have people who ask, “Can I take one for my neighbor?” “Of course, you can.” It’s the power of a book, which costs us a couple of pounds to produce but means a big difference to our clients.

On the day of our seminar, they all get a gift pack, which includes books and this and that and a variety of different things that they can walk away with. So, chocolates, as an example. When they leave, they all get personalized chocolate bars or other things that we do.

The food and the drinks have got to be quality. When the clients and prospective clients come, they are greeted, they have drinks to start with, they get drinks and cakes at the first break, and then they have a meal at the end of it. There are some, as we always think, that just come for the free lunch, but that’s fine because if they go away and say, “Oh I’ve had a free lunch, but it was with this company,” at least the association is with us, and it’s that magnetic attraction that we’re trying to produce.

They all get pads and pens, they get their chocolates, and at the end of it, they all get a handwritten thank-you card because we’re very appreciative that they’ve come.

In the presentation the key things that we talk about are to make sure they understand who we are. We have changed the order on how we do our presentations. It was something I got an idea of a couple of months ago.

When I was thinking about our presentations, how we started off was all about us. So we changed the running order. Now how do we start off? We have a script that’s put together, but I start off with basically a flip chart, and I introduce myself and then I simply ask everyone, “Why are you here?” And with a little bit of coaxing, they will tell me they’re here because they want to know more about wills, trusts, taxes, pensions or whatever it is. It’s always the same answers. They’re different people, but they all have the same problems. Now there’s our agenda. What we’re really saying is, these are your problems. Now our presentation is about solutions because we know their problems before they do.

At the end of the first half, we used to go, “This is all us. We’re the best company in the world.” Now at the end of the first half, we do just a little bit about us. Then we take our break, and at this point, we’ve got some real good talking points because the last thing they heard was about what we do. And because we have client video testimonials and things like that, it just works very nicely. So, we changed our running order of it over the last couple of months, and it’s helped to improve the appointment ratio, which is the most important part at the end of the day from our side.