Ep 36: Overcoming the Tyranny of the Urgent with Rich Campe

Episode 36 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (39:33)

Episode 36 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Rich Campe joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to address a state most advisors describe but few escape: a practice run entirely on whatever is loudest that day. Campe’s reframe is that urgency is a symptom of an unfocused client base rather than a scheduling problem. His model concentrates on the ten to twenty percent of clients who are genuinely ideal, arguing that duplicating those relationships changes a business in a way that servicing everyone never will, and he attaches a number to it, roughly six favorable introductions per ideal client per year. The operational half of the episode is about replacing reactive contact with a planned calendar, including scheduled sessions on purpose, multigenerational planning, and risk. Holt’s closing observation is blunt: advisors regularly win business simply because the incumbent stopped calling.

What this episode covers

• Why constant urgency is a symptom of an unfocused client base
• Identifying the ten to twenty percent of clients who are genuinely ideal
• The introduction arithmetic Campe uses, and what it implies for growth
• Replacing reactive contact with a planned annual contact calendar
• Recurring sessions built around purpose, multigenerational planning, and risk

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Adam, is the tyranny of the urgent wreaking havoc on advisors? That’s a very, very intellectual question. Tyranny of the urgent. Yeah. What is that? Well, it’s open for interpretation, but you ever find yourself or maybe in early days as an advisor where you were just stuck putting out fires all day in your business and you’re running around like a blind squirrel trying to find a nut before winter sets in.

Like everything’s always super urgent. I got to deal with this right now. Did you ever find yourself feeling like that? I think I felt that way about an hour ago. I mean, this is, that explains my entire life. Everything is urgent, Derek. I’m an entrepreneur, which means I’m solely responsible for the outcome. Even if I’m not, by the way, I take it personally that I am solely responsible for the outcome of everything that touches my brand and everything is urgent. I would agree with you. I find myself in the same boat, but I think there is a distinction here, especially when we put on our advisor hats, that one can get stuck in that tyranny of the urgent, or one can realize it’s there and actually get unstuck and get out of it.

And there’s ways to deal with that. Would you agree with that? But then what? What about all the fires that are going to burn the house down? I mean, what about all the stuff that’s not going to happen the way I need it to, because only I can do it well. And what about, how am I going to do that? Okay. Let me ask you a question. All right. We’re going on this whole fire thing. Yeah. If your house is burning down, did you try to put it out with a garden hose or you call the fire department? Well, knowing me, I probably would use the garden hose.

Wrong person to ask. Or maybe, okay, you’d use your garden hose, but you’d probably call the fire department as well. Yes. That’s probably true. I would do both at the same time. That’s true. Okay. So I think what we’re getting at here is that a lot of advisors are stuck just using the garden hose. Or they’re ignoring the fires that are happening behind the fire that’s in front of them. I mean, that’s really the challenge. I’ve always talked to my coaches about how I tend to be stirring multiple pots. I get in this habit of having multiple projects. I’m excited about them. They’re all stirring at different levels.

Some start to burn, so I put that to the front. I start stirring it like crazy, trying to save it. And you know what happens? Just like spinning plates analogy, eventually some of them fall and you have to decide what’s going to work. What I think this is really a question about is, is it time, regardless of where you are in your practice, to just take a stop for a second and assess what’s really going on and what you’re doing and if it serves you. That’s really where I think this is going, Derek. I agree. Take pause, take a deep breath, come up for air.

Watch what’s going on. My first year was such a blur as an advisor. It’s a blur now as an entrepreneur, but in a different way. But back then, man, I had no idea what was going on. I suspect a lot of advisors were in similar situations, but then they woke up five years later and they still hadn’t come up for air like you’re talking about. So, okay. So what does an advisor do? How do we avoid something like this? Well, you know, it’s an intro into our guest today, Rich Campion. Well, let me tell you about Rich Campion because when I invited Rich to be on this podcast with us, I had a very specific intent.

Now, Rich has been a coach for many years. He’s the CEO of ProAdvisor Coach, works with, gosh, as far as I know, some of the top advisors in the entire country. I know several of them that use him personally and talk to him daily and or weekly, and he’s helped an extraordinary number of advisors really break through this conversation. And last time we talked to him, he had something like 23 inner circle coaches that deal with advisors all day long, five million coaching hours achieved. He’s spoken in lots of different places with Les Brown and George Bush Senior, Tony Robbins, Zieg Ziegler. Ironically, he’s been such a student of growth.

He’s got eight first degree black belts in martial arts. I have a canvas belt that I wear every once in a while. So that’s clearly a testament to commitment. And actually the irony behind it is that Rich and I met when he was 21 and I was 17 at Tony Robbins in 1991 at his certification event. I was a kid just trying to figure out life. And I got dragged along to that conference and he was actually at this conference so many years ago. And so we’ve had this kindred spirit idea and it was really fun to have an opportunity to hear how he’s coaching some of America’s top advisors.

So are you ready, Derek, to hear from Rich? Yeah, I think everyone’s going to really love this conversation. So let’s jump in. All right. Give us your perspective of the financial advice market for those that you’re serving today. Yeah, I think that the tyranny of the urgent is wreaking havoc on the industry. It’s just so much to do, so much information to digest and be able to focus is really important now more than ever. What does that mean though? Because I’ve heard you use this tyranny of the urgent before. Help our listeners understand what does that really mean to us in the real world? Yeah.

How much time do you spend with your clients? Which clients do you spend time with? How much do you spend getting new clients? How do you service your clients effectively? How do you digest the information? How do you give them information back to your clients? There’s so much coming at us. And I think that advisors in the industry is getting so deluded because it’s just difficult to digest. So it’s really less is more. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, right? And these are puns out there, but I think they really hold true now more than ever of creating more focus in our lives and in business.

Well, you’re to that point, Rich, that definitely sounds like a challenge. I know I’ve faced that challenge myself. Do you think that there will be a trickle down effect where there’ll be additional challenges or missed opportunities because of this tyranny of the urgent? Is it more of a system problem or is it something that could be fixed relatively easy? It can be fixed if we’re willing. It’s a trust, right? It’s a trust of of self and others and where we’re headed. I think that’s where it starts. I think we’re literally addicted to it more than some of the most addicted drugs that are out there.

We’re addicted to the tear to the urgent. We’re addicted to racing and going so fast. But if we slow down and work on our lives and on our business, it’s hard to slow down, right? Like we we’re racing. We have this adrenaline and Dorphins and all these things that are kicked off in our system because we’re so used to racing for so long that people can’t slow down to stop and really look at it and where they want to go. It’s profoundly simple, actually. You mentioned before that this idea of us always being distracted and running as advisors to what’s most valuable is almost a selfish perspective.

Help us understand what you meant when you said that. There’s primary needs that we all have and we don’t know what they are. We’re just going, going, going. It’s like an addict, right? We’re addicted to getting our primary needs met. Instead of pausing for a minute and say, wait a minute, what am I really after here? What are my clients after? What are we really doing? It can be selfish because we just keep operating in our tunnel vision or just go, go, go, go, go, instead of, wait a minute. Let me really pause and look at where I want to go for myself or my family, for my community, for my clients.

Where I really want to go instead of just go, go, go. That’s the selfish part to me. You mean selfish to the consumer. We don’t go to Walt Disney like to say, hey, I’m going to go meet Walt Disney. You’re going there for an experience because it’s Disney World. I think that so many advisors end up in the critical path of everything. Their whole business is built around them and they don’t think beyond themselves of how do they create something that is creating relational currency or experience that’s beyond who they are as a person. It is selfish, right? They end up with hundreds. I don’t think any one advisor can manage more than 40 or 50 clients effectively themselves, right?

It’s totally selfish. They can’t possibly do that effectively. Do you think that as a result, people are just not getting the service they deserve or require because advisors are trying to take on too many? I remember Derek’s history. What’s your history, Derek? Oh man, it was project 200, raised to 500, a whole colony of phone clinics every week. I think the way I’m almost interpreting what Rich is saying, it was like this rat race that we got stuck in and it was just keep making the dials, keep setting up two appointments for the future. Hold on a second. I think a lot of advisors, including myself, it became a real monster that’s something I was not proud of and not happy with and not excited to go to work every day for.

But Rich, are you seeing that mentality after 10, 15, 20 years in the business, just sticking to a point where advisors have to control everything or think they control everything because that is the measure of their customer experience is really tied to them. I think so. Yeah, because they have to trust, right? Trust themselves, trust systems, processes, trust others, right? Extend beyond who they are and they can be challenging, right? The business, you’re trying to pay your bills and things like that, but that’s the deeper work that I think it is trusting, right? Because it’s typically 10 to 20% of a client base is those are the ideal clients.

So it’s like someone has 100 clients and that would mean 10 to 20 of them are ideal. If they were to duplicate those 10 to 20, their business would be totally different. Than trying to service the 100. And we know based on statistics and enough research that you should get six favorable introductions per ideal client per year. So in our example, if you have 10 ideal clients, that’s on the low end, that’s 60 favorable introductions per year. Then what’s one of those clients worth and what’s the conversion rate? That’s the kind of thinking that’s more focused. But yet what happens is as an advisor grows, they just get more and more caught up in that trap of that tier and the urgent of go, go, go, go, nonstop.

Instead of creating a more focused approach that I would think is even a systemic process of bringing relational currency to those ideal clients. And that’s how they grow, but it’s really a trap, right? Because they just keep applying the same thinking they had when they started the business, which is important, go, go, go, to what they’re doing two, three, four, five, 10, 20 years in the future. They’re still applying the same thinking, which is very much a single warrior tier and the urgent, instead of thinking more and slowing down and looking at what’s most important. Advisors that are listening to this and they’re like, you know what?

Rich, I’m stuck where you’re telling me I’m stuck. I’m feeling that. What are one or two action steps that an advisor listening today could say, all right, go do this. This is how I can start to feel better about things, be more valuable to my clients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What’s something they can do? The first thing is to look at ideal clients. They have clues, right? So there’s demographic and psychographic attributes of your ideal clients. And so get clarity. The demographic, there’s things that are very measurable. So is it a geography? Is it types of products they have? Is it age, household income, family status?

So very tangible things. And then the psychographic, which I’d say a lot of cases are even more important to some degree, which are the more soft skills, similar family values, very coachable, future orientated, family orientated that are more soft skills. And get clear about who your ideal clients are. And then how can you score them? How can you segment them effectively? And then put a system in place that’s very scalable, not depending on the advisor, that is a process to drive relational currency consistently, both on the business side and on more the personal side, the soft or relational deeper side, right? So say you have 10 ideal clients, you know where they are.

And then what is the process that you’re going to follow? Not leave it up to happenstance, but have an actual process of what you’re going to do. Yeah, so that’s great. I mean, it’s funny. We talk about this, Derek and I, about being more intentional about stopping for a second. Stop, why are you doing what you’re doing? Can I be more intentional about what I’m trying to create? Why I’m running this? And it does tend to be a bit of an idealistic question of ourselves though, isn’t it, Rich? When I think advisors finally recognize, okay, I’ve gotten to a certain place. Maybe I’ve plateaued. Maybe I’ve created some level of success.

Now I need some coaching for perspective. I mean, we all know every top professional athlete has a coach, right? And we know why, but I’m really curious how we can also help those that are just starting in the business because I don’t want to say it’s a first world problem, but being able to cut your clients or trim or being intentional tends to happen after you’ve created some level of success. Are there things that we can learn from that path to help all advisors out there consider how they could maybe do things different in the early ages or the early starts of their business? Yeah, I’d say two things.

One is that we look at things in laggly lift, so simplifying the business, right? So lag is the end game. It’s the lagging behind stuff. It’s total clients, total revenue. So if we said, hey, together the three of us wanted to have 10,000 pounds of beans as our harvest, we couldn’t say we want 10,000 pounds of beans and have it by tomorrow. That’s just unrealistic. It’s going to lag behind. We’re going to have to do things to create that. We’re going to have to find a field. We’re going to have to plant seeds. We’re going to have to water. We’re going to have to fertilize all these things.

So simplifying things into laggly lift, I think it’s a starting point to have a clear plan. It could be just that simple. So lag is your total revenue, your net income, your total clients. And here’s what’s so profound to me is that the lead indicators are usually never more than three to five consistent things that I like to run in 12-week games, but it’s usually just three to five things that done consistently will have the biggest impact, right? So if we were applying this to our beans metaphor, we’d have to water five days a week. We’d have to pull weeds three days a week. We’d have to fertilize twice a week.

If we did those core things consistently, no guarantees that we’ll have the 10,000 pounds of beans in the harvest, but chances are pretty good. And so it’s so easy to get caught up in the text, the voicemail, the social media, the shopping on Amazon, the internet searches, and confuse activity for progress or progress for activity. That is it. It’s really crazy. We said we wanted to gain 30 pounds of muscle. What are the lead indicators for that? We want to gain 30 pounds of muscle in six months. What are the lead indicators? It’s probably go to the gym five days a week, one hour. It’s probably eating 40 ounces of protein five days a week.

It’s that simple, yet we overcomplicate it because of our monkey brains jumping all over the place and being addicted to the tyranny of the urgent that we don’t simplify it. It’s actually profoundly simple, but we overcomplicate it. And then we spend our time on all these things that are just consuming time because we’re addicted. We’re literally addicted to it. What are those three things to get 10,000 beans for an advisor? It might be obvious, but I’m curious which ones you guys are talking about at ProAdvisor Coach. Yeah, it’s different. Now we gamify this. Our idea is that what if everybody knew if they were winning or losing in 10 seconds or less at all times, both personally and as a team?

What if it were that simple that you knew at all times? It is different. Someone that’s newer in the business is going to be much different, and it’s a totally different type of lead indicators as you progress through the business. But if you operate from this concept of also that 10 to 20% of your client base is ideal clients. So as soon as you get 10 total clients, you want to focus on that one ideal and go deeper and wider with them because you want to duplicate that one. Even if you just have 10 clients, that one of doing an exceptional job deep and wide and understanding who they respect and who they’re involved with in their community, at church, at the synagogue, at the country club, whatever that is, that’s where the power is going to come from.

It’s not go get 10 more. It’s take your 10, understand the one, and really go deep and wide with that one. So what is it you’re going to do consistently for that one because you’re going to get six fable introductions from that one if you do it well. Then once you have 20, 30, 40, 50, now you start doing the math. Now you’ve got five that you need to focus in on. So what’s the system or what’s the model that you’re going to do consistently with just the five because those five are your key to grow in it from 50 to 100. Then how do you service the other ones?

That’s great. Beyond what you’re sharing with this tier in the urgent, what do you think that the advisor community needs to hear today that they’re not thinking about with coming down the path, maybe five, maybe 10 years down the path that people don’t see? I think we’re going to see a lot more of coaching integrated in the financial services industry. Where do you want to retire? What’s that going to look like? What’s your vision of the future? What do you want to be doing to grandkids? Bigger holistic approach to the clients of the advisors. Are you saying, Rich, that the financial advisors have to become coaches in a sense or that effectively they are now, but maybe they’re not trained in how to be a coach.

Is that fair to say? Yeah, I don’t think they’re trained in how. I don’t think they’re doing it. I think the industry is going to become more and more commoditized, right? Where if you’re just providing assets under management, here’s my return. If you’re just focused on someone’s return and managing their retirement and their insurance, that stuff is going to get easier to get, less expensive and more commoditized. If the advisor doesn’t start adjusting to a more holistic approach, I think they’ll get squeezed out. When you define coaching or an advisor, Rich, are you referring to, for example, I had a meeting with a client on Friday and we were talking about their investments and their income and their taxes, pretty granular stuff, but also kind of boring.

But then we started talking about his why behind everything. She encouraged him to go create a vision board and re-thinking, bro, Rich, and we have a real moral, almost emotional conversation. So I’m using that as an example. Would you say that that is more of the coaching element that you’re talking about? Yes, we’ll manage the money, we’ll do the retirement projection, but let’s actually talk about why and really help them crystallize that. Is that what you’re saying? 500%. Yep. And having a system, so you’re doing it intrinsically because you have that natural slant ability to see that, to pick up on it, which is great.

But there is a system, there’s a process I think that can be created about that. So actually having every three years a why session with them, hey, this is our, or this is our vision casting session, or this is our multi-generational planning session, or this is risk management, or this is a dreaming session, right? Really being intentional with what’s being done with them and helping them to navigate through. So there you have it again, Derek. There is that intentionality question about him. I love what he had to say and just listening to that multiple times now, it just resonates and it brings back some good and some bad memories from the early days.

I’m sure, I’m sure. But such a brilliant man, really smart, insightful, and he’s talked to so many advisors, it’s just really cool hearing what he had to say. What resonated with you? What are some of your thoughts? Well, according to Rich, I have a monkey brain, so that’s just an awareness. Because I’m constantly, I feel like I’m very much wired for just focusing on what’s burning. Adam, go fix it. Adam, go address it. Now, granted, I do trust, I thought there was some really interesting commentary on this idea of selfishness, right? The comment he made about Walt Disney, you wouldn’t go to Disney World expecting Walt Disney to give you the personal tour.

And then once he’s done with the family in front of you, come all the way back and they’ll give you the tour. You’re going for an experience that Walt Disney inspired, other people built on that vision, and now it’s a mega brand, right? And not that every advisor wants to build a mega brand, but I think the key is scaling, which is a conversation that comes up all the time, especially for you and I in FinTech. How do you scale? How do you grow? How do you do more with less, right? This constant question really requires advisors to get out of the way. And I thought his position that it’s selfish to think that you can actually do everything and not delegate or not allow other people to create processes and experiences around your clients is selfish.

I thought that that was kind of a trick, but it does require trust. Did you pick that up on that? It definitely requires trust. And you know what’s interesting? I’ve known you for a little while now and we’ve gotten pretty close. And I don’t think you have a monkey brain in the way that he explains it because you do have an amazing team around you and you don’t seem like you’re putting out fires. It almost seems more like you’re creating these creative ideas that you want to go pursue. So I guess that’s a sidebar, but I think in the early days, we all had the monkey brain and it was a trust issue.

Be like, oh my gosh, like if I don’t take care of this client exactly the right way, I’m not going to get paid, which means I can’t pay my bills. I can’t feed my family. I need to be a control freak here. And I need to control all of this just to make sure. I would argue that some of it is required. In the early years, but as he talks about, and I’m going back to my archeology days now, you’re going from this hunter-gatherer mentality of eat what you kill to sustainable farming. That’s scalable and that takes time. And I think we all go through that at some level, but some of us forget that maybe we should become farmers.

We don’t realize it. We just stayed doing the earlier version of ourselves. But it’s interesting because his position is that if you use that analogy, whether it was the beans or the farming, is that we should be planting the seeds that are intentionally that we want to grow. We shouldn’t just haphazardly just putting seeds in the ground just so we can keep harvesting. Hopefully stuff comes up, but be intentional. The comments on the ideal clients, I know has been a big statement of his for years and the whole pro advisor coaching community because ideal clients leave clues. And the bigger challenge for many of us is that we were taught, like he said, of the 500 project, the 200 project.

We were taught how to ramp up a business in many cases. And those skills and strategies, I think sustained us in our early years. We weren’t necessarily taught how to cultivate the ideal clients. It’s almost like the gardener knows exactly which rose to pick, which to replant and so forth and which ones to ignore. Whereas we just see a bunch of roses. We’re like, yay, we got roses. So, isn’t that great? And that was, I think, one of the other things I took away, Derek, which was this idea of lag and leading indicators as financial advisors, we tend to focus at some measure on financial performance of the instruments we manage or place for people.

And we probably stay on top of those things. But the question is, if we were to treat ourselves as a business, are we actually tracking our lagging and leading indicators more than just anecdotally? Like, oh yeah, I did pretty well this year and yeah, income was good. We covered our bills. We paid everybody a little bonus. We feel good versus I know that we’re actually tracking leading indicators as well. And that’s where I’ve seen a lot of lack. I think on the financial advisor side is we really haven’t been trained how to track on a consistent basis and inspect ourselves to both the pre-performance and the post-performance indicators.

Do you have any experience there? Well, I think you’re right. We haven’t been trained. And one of my takeaways that Rich mentioned multiple times was systems. Like, I gave my example about how I was working with my client and Rich was like, that’s awesome you’re doing that intrinsically. But to scale that you have to have systems around. Are you having those why conversations? Are you setting up systems to schedule meetings to talk about their dreams and about the why and these very personal things? So if you’re an advisor listening to this right now I think that’s one question I would have is are you haphazardly having these conversations as they occur in your monkey brain?

Or are you actually systematizing them and saying, you know what? I should ask every single client this question once a year. And now it’s built into your systems. And yes, it takes a little bit of time to set that system up but then it’s repeatable. We’ve talked about that a couple of times, right? Asking those deeper questions of meaning to all our clients, right? I told you that in prior podcasts we do a family meeting once every five years bring the whole family in talk about meaning get connected obviously to next generation, succession show them that we’re actually on top of this we’re looking out for mom and dad, right?

There’s a lot of reasons to do that on the business side but I’m really excited to hear that you’ve been promoting this others have moving more to this bigger meaning of money vision boarding as an idea for your clients. Can you imagine if your clients came in instead of talking about performance allocation and all of a sudden you said we’re not doing that today or we’re going to do that in the last 10 minutes, okay? Because I already checked it out. I’m going to give you the summary. We’re going to talk about modeling out visioning out what is this going to look like how do we know when we’re going to be successful and how do the decisions we make today those leading indicators make sure that we experience those lagging outcomes which are you get to retire happy, right?

Or you get to have the life you want. That vision board is so, so powerful. I mean, I never did this with my clients in a systematic way but I think having a vision board meeting almost you bring it to the annual review and you’re like, hey, did we hit this? You wanted to buy a boat. Did it happen? Let’s take that. Let’s check that one off. What do you want to replace on the vision board this year? Instead of talking about, well we did this compared to the S&P like I don’t care. Like, did I get my boat or not? That’s right. Can we afford it?

Are we going to lose the house? Right. We have to sell something. No, it’s very true. What else did you take away from the program today? Well, I think that what resonated with me and I learned this late unfortunately was is that we really need to take pause and figure out what we want as an advisor. And I actually even ask advisors and connector in the training we have there to do this is to take a step back. Get out of the fires you’re putting out every day and please come up for a breath of air like you want. Where do you want to go?

Like what is your life going to look like? How do you want your family dynamic to be? What do you want to do for your community? What experiences do you want? Instead of just go, go, go for go sake. That point of his really resonated with me because I think we all did it for a long time just for going sake. And I know we would check our dashboard. All right. How many policies did I sell? How many did the next guy sell? Who’s the leader? None of that had anything to do with real quality of life stuff. So I’m going off on tangents here now.

But that was really important to me because at the end of the day if we can’t do that for ourselves how the heck are we going to help our clients? Yeah, that’s a great point. You know, there was something else that Rich said that he mentioned and I think probably could use a little bit more clarity. But he talks about having an actual process for the ideal clients because they leave clues and he mentioned about psychographic measures and do a line on interest and family values. But I actually remember a conversation with a head with Rich years ago and he shared with me that when you identify your ideal clients you actually come up with a very specific intentional reach out strategy.

When you’re going to call them you actually plan it out for the full year. When you’re going to call what are you going to do? The gifting that remember we had Joe from a greetable on there. He says, he says you actually curate specific gifts that are based upon what they care about and what motivates them and events and you literally take them to these events and you literally embed yourself in their dreams. And so that when you think about these six favorable introductions you can imagine if your closest friend becomes your financial advisor and you trusted resource. Do you even think about not referring them?

You’re looking for ways to get your other friends to have these awesome experiences because look the generic market for financial advice is pretty pathetic. We don’t have a great reputation as an industry of caring and reaching out and being accessible. And gosh, we know half the time we can take over business from other advisors just because they didn’t call their clients. So think about for the person who goes well above and beyond for an ideal client you can see they really, really want to deliver value and they get it back tenfold with probably without expecting it. So I think that’s really when we talk about what is the actual strategy we’re talking about not just yeah, you call them once a quarter we’re talking about actually delivering significant value and that has to be custom to each of us because if it’s not authentic and then it comes across as salesmanship.

Oh, it totally does. I mean, knowing you’re as deep and wide really know your ideal clients. And it’s almost funny you’re talking about like the financial advisor space and how there’s not a lot of trust. You know, the really great ones they’re not financial advisors at all. They’re relationship advisors and they just happen to manage the money and get paid really well to do it because they are so focused on knowing their ideal clients and helping them do whatever is important to them. That’s true, that’s true. All the hoagie stuff that we used to laugh at and roll our eyes about even ten years ago.

It’s so true, right? Being an advocate for their dreams. Oh, that sounds too fluffy. But no, that’s actually what you’re doing. And actually that’s what your clients want you to do. They just don’t have any good terms around it that don’t feel too fluffy. The reality is that people do what? They do everything to support their emotions and they justify it with logic. The key, I think, for all us in today’s environment is that we have for the probably more than ever in humankind been able to be as authentic and transparent without judgment. And I think just kind of getting right to the core of it.

Let’s help people get what they really want out of life. So that’s an exciting thing. All right. It’s time for our community question. You ready for this? Let’s do it. All right. Now, Meredith wrote in. Now, Meredith, I don’t know where we don’t know where you’re located. Where is Meredith from? You know, she’s in LinkedIn, the interwebs. Is she in the metaverse? Oh, my gosh. Don’t go that far. What is the metaverse? I don’t know what it is. I can’t even spell it. Don’t answer. Got it. Awesome. That’s like bigger than the universe, I think. Well, she says or she writes to us that all of the training I’ve ever received speaks to getting referrals and asking for them.

We grew up with that, right? Oh, yeah. With the discussion sending around digital marketing and social media, we aren’t hearing this so much anymore. So what’s the newest thinking on referrals, Derek? Well, I think recently you and I have heard some pretty powerful yet conflicting answers to this question. Some are saying that go all in on referrals. I mean, Rich even just talked about it, right? And he had some really valid, strong points to go all in. But we have talked to others. Maybe we’ll well, we’re going to have a future episode, I think the next episode, right? That’s going to talk about why you should not go for referrals at all.

The traditional way. Let’s put that caveat there. Yeah, it’s a great lead in Meredith. Yeah, it’s a really great question because you’re right, though. I mean, I think most of us are Project 200, ask for referrals. You want to hear a funny story real quick? Do we have a second? Yeah, absolutely. This is our podcast. We have all the seconds we want. What I did because I was told that you need to ask for referrals on the first appointment. It doesn’t feel great. So I stopped doing that. But what I would start doing on the closing appointment to make it easier, I went to Staples.

Staples is still a store anymore. I don’t even know. It is, yeah. And I bought these memo pads that were carbon copy. You could put like 10 to 12 names on them, all pre-formatted. So all I would do, I added that to like my spiel at closing. I’m going to ask you for some referrals. Here’s what I’m looking for. Write them down. Here’s a carbon copy for you. You can call them first. But it was so cheeseball. But it worked. It worked really well. Oh, you mean you ripped off the top and gave that to them, but you had the carbon underneath? I’m like, you call these people and if they don’t want to hear from me, let me know because I won’t reach out to them for another week or so.

Now I’m assuming it worked because look how successful you are. It worked really, really well. And then you know what happens? Stop doing it. Of course, we always do that. Once it works, we stop doing it once we have success. That’s literally like what do you say? Gain 40 pounds. Once you gain 40 pounds, I’m like carbs. I’m going back. Go back. I got the carbs. Achieve my goal. I digress. I digress. But it did work. But it was, I don’t know if I would recommend doing that today. That was a long time ago. If you do everything consistently, you’re going to get a result.

How about that? I think cold calling works. Door knocking works. You do it enough, right? It still works. It’s a numbers game. Do you like doing it? Do you like doing it? I didn’t like doing it. No, I don’t know a lot of people like doing it. Unless you get over that, you know, it’s interesting. I don’t know if you heard this, but Kit’s just had Terry Parham on his podcast today. Ironically, I came out today and he was explaining how he earns referrals as compensation. And one of the lines he said in there, I did write down. It said, I wasn’t afraid to cut the neighbor’s grass.

I was afraid to ask the neighbor to cut his grass. Oh, weird. And recognition of the real fear in that was not doing the work. It was asking for permission to do the work. And it turns out that sometimes asking for referrals is the biggest fear and anxiety we have because we don’t feel like we deserved it. Yes, that’s so true. If we don’t feel like we earned it, it feels it doesn’t feel good at all. It feels like I’m asking you to give me something, right? You’ve already paid me. You’ve already trusted me for your business. Now I’m asking you to give more. And this relationship already had a value proposition that was acceptable when I came into these terms, which is you do this.

I’ll pay you that. Now you’re asking for more compensation in a form of a very, very intimate and sometimes awkward way. And that’s the challenge with referrals since the age of time, right? It really is. How do I know when I’ve earned it or when I deserved it? I would argue Rich’s position here is just deliver so much value that it will come back to you in many fold. But you have to have an intentional process around it. And actually several we’ve interviewed, as you just said, two really interesting guests that are coming up, which we’re going to leave a secret. One of them said, actually, do not ever ask for referrals.

And the second one said, do not ever niche, which is really interesting. So I’m excited to introduce this and hopefully, Meredith, you’ll get your answer. With that, Derek, why don’t you take us home? Well, it has been a pleasure as always. I hope everyone enjoyed listening. I know the best part of these is the amazing jokes that Adam and I have, because we’re such funny, funny guys. Monkey brains. Monkey brains. But in all seriousness, thank you so much and make sure if you haven’t that you subscribe. That would be awesome. Follow both of us on LinkedIn and share with another advisor. Share people in your organization.

There’s a lot of great stuff that we’re trying to lift our profession up and there’s a lot of great tactical stuff in these episodes. So please share it around just so we can all help each other grow. Definitely submit a question if you want us to try to tackle a topic for you. Absolutely. I think that’s all I got, Adams. I think those are all really great takeaways. Oh, and do all the stuff that Rich said in your own practice and you have two weeks to do it until your next podcast. So it’s ironic. I think, Derek, a lot of advisors are telling us that they’re trying to take one or two things away from each of these podcasts and implement it before the next one.

Use it as a coaching model for yourself. We hope to deliver some level of mentorship and as Derek already said, we hope to contribute in some way to your lives. Thank you, Rich Campy, for being part of it and all the help that you guys provide to advisors and pro advisor coach. Everybody, thanks for listening. Send them positive vibes your way. Adam, we’ll talk to you later, brother. You got it, my friend. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector.

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