Latest / The Perfect RIA / Not Bringing on New Clients? It's Because You're Playing Office [Episode 269]

Transcript

Not Bringing on New Clients? It's Because You're Playing Office [Episode 269] · The Perfect RIA

• 0:00
  Amber Kuhn: My good friend, Micah Shilanski has build his
• 0:06
  practice with ugly graphics, typos, misspelled words and bad
• 0:22
  grammar. Well, welcome to this episode of the podcast.
• 0:55
  TPR Nation. We've got some incredible news. TPR LIVE just
• 0:59
  got bigger and better. Thanks to overwhelming demand, we now have
• 1:03
  a larger space and more seats available. Imagine being in the
• 1:06
  room with two industry rock stars who cracked the code on
• 1:10
  running wildly successful practices. This is your chance
• 1:13
  to learn directly from Matt and Micah in person as they dive
• 1:17
  into value adds and fees and connect with other advisors who
• 1:20
  are ready to deliver massive value and transform the
• 1:23
  industry. And if you're looking for how you can help your
• 1:26
  clients through tax planning, stick around for the Retirement
• 1:28
  Tax Services Tax Summit. TPR Nation, I want to see you there,
• 1:32
  so don't let this life changing event pass you by. Join us this
• 1:36
  September in Arizona for an experience that will redefine
• 1:39
  your career. Visit theperfectria.com/live and save
• 1:43
  your seat today.
• 1:44
  Matthew Jarvis: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode
• 1:45
  of The Perfect RIA podcast. I am your co-host Matthew Jarvis, and
• 1:49
  with me, as usual, the man, the myth, the legend, and as quoted
• 1:52
  in the book, delivering massive value. Micah Shilanski, Micah,
• 1:55
  how are you? My friend?
• 1:56
  Micah Shilanski: Well Jarvis, I'm doing well. I know your
• 1:58
  book, delivering massive value has been out for a little bit,
• 2:01
  but recently came back up and had a little bit of an excerpt
• 2:05
  of how you're just, I don't know, but basically, like, what
• 2:07
  kind of bashing my website might be a fun thing to talk about.
• 2:10
  Matthew Jarvis: I was highlighting your strengths and
• 2:12
  natural ability, right? Some people, they say, like, Oh, he's
• 2:15
  got natural charm. That's, that's what is like. That's not
• 2:18
  the case for you. Micah, well, and it's also, we'll talk about
• 2:22
  this throughout this episode. But Tom Gower's the same way
• 2:25
  people would say, Hey, Tom, we looked at your website. It's
• 2:27
  garbage. You don't have a fancy brochure, you haven't done the
• 2:30
  Peter Montoya package. Like, whatever that is. He's like, I
• 2:32
  don't know. I'm gonna laugh all the way to the bank, like,
• 2:34
  that's not what I'm solving for. And you know, Jess, we're not
• 2:38
  saying the stuff isn't important. We're not saying,
• 2:40
  hey, ask somebody spell check your stuff and proofread. We're
• 2:42
  not, not, we're not. But if graphics, if fancy graphics,
• 2:46
  we're going to get you all the clients in the world. Fidelity
• 2:48
  and Schwab and Vanguard would already have all the clients in
• 2:51
  the world.
• 2:51
  Micah Shilanski: Yeah, it really comes down to a lot more the
• 2:53
  intentionality behind it, right? Are you answering your prospects
• 2:56
  questions? This is what it comes down to. At the end of the day,
• 2:59
  sometimes fancy graphics do that most of the time they do not,
• 3:03
  and why they don't? Right? I can pontificate on it for a quick
• 3:06
  second. I think it's because all you're doing is playing office,
• 3:08
  and you're getting so neat and fancy, you're missing the core
• 3:11
  essence of the prospects questions so often when I hire
• 3:15
  graphics people and they change things that I've done into
• 3:17
  something that looks prettier, it absolutely looks prettier,
• 3:19
  but it doesn't solve the question that this was designed
• 3:22
  to solve? Yeah.
• 3:24
  Matthew Jarvis: I mean, I'm thinking of an example, Micah,
• 3:25
  when we talk about tax buckets, which is an episode that we've
• 3:27
  done, and you, you draw it out, right? And we've done training
• 3:30
  on that inside the message passers, videos on this. And
• 3:32
  then the graphics people, which we have a great graphics team,
• 3:34
  they said, great news. We didn't we visualize this thing. It
• 3:37
  looks so much better. But because they hadn't been in the
• 3:39
  meeting, because they hadn't been across from the client,
• 3:41
  they didn't realize that the core of the illustration was not
• 3:45
  the font that was used. It was how it was articulated to
• 3:47
  clients. Micah, I think the other reason why these fancy
• 3:50
  graphics don't help is the fancier your graphics, the
• 3:53
  thinner your message. It's kind of this, all sizzle, no stake.
• 3:56
  And so if you're a consumer and you're looking at 10 Advisor
• 3:59
  Websites, and they all have lighthouses on them, or rocks or
• 4:02
  or, you know, whatever, same color scheme. It's making it
• 4:05
  really, really hard for a consumer to tell these apart.
• 4:08
  Micah Shilanski: Yeah, it really does. So why are we talking
• 4:10
  about this again? Just highlight how my best friend bashes me in
• 4:13
  a public edition in his book. That's one benefit that to bring
• 4:16
  up and to talk about right now. To be fair, Jarvis the rest of
• 4:18
  that quote was, was really nice and talking about, okay.
• 4:21
  Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, I feel like there was more to that
• 4:23
  quote.
• 4:23
  Micah Shilanski: Yeah, there was, I selectively grabbed that
• 4:28
  lips, this in there. But no, the real important part about this
• 4:30
  is, this is now August. We're rolling out you should have done
• 4:33
  by now your mid year review and jars. One of the things we're
• 4:37
  talking to advisors is that we we miss in the media review, in
• 4:41
  my opinion, is the lag that it takes to go from prospective
• 4:45
  marketing to new clients onboarded, right? We, in our
• 4:49
  mind, we like to say it's like instant. This is what happens in
• 4:51
  my world, is 18 months. It's 18 months from when we're really
• 4:55
  doing that prospecting and starting that prospecting push
• 4:58
  to where there's new clients that are coming in. Maybe you
• 5:01
  have a shorter time period than that, right? But I don't want to
• 5:04
  hold any excuses that are out there as to why you're doing or
• 5:07
  not doing marketing. So let's really kind of dive into this.
• 5:10
  Again. It's all about that growth metric, right? I should
• 5:12
  say all about one of the aspects that we need to focus on is our
• 5:15
  growth metric. And how are we growing our practice is, that's
• 5:17
  how we transform people's lives.
• 5:19
  Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, my kind of Pullman 18 month thread a little
• 5:21
  bit further right, and maybe some channels are a few months
• 5:24
  shorter, maybe some are a few months longer, whatever the case
• 5:26
  may be, but this stresses again, why one of the drums We just
• 5:29
  beat endlessly is do what works. If you're going to do a
• 5:32
  marketing or prospecting channel, you have to commit to
• 5:34
  doing it for at least a year. Let's use seminars. For example.
• 5:38
  Micah, you and I both done a lot of seminars. You still do them
• 5:40
  to the day today, we coach a lot of advisors on this. If you're
• 5:43
  going to do seminars, you've got to do several of them, like six
• 5:45
  to 10 of them over the course of several years to even get dialed
• 5:49
  in so and the reason why it's so important to do what works is if
• 5:52
  you're just like, and I've done this, I bought a seminar off the
• 5:54
  shelf years ago. Oh, this is going to be great. No one shows
• 5:57
  up for the first one. One person shows up for the second one, and
• 5:59
  then I quit. Now it could have been a bad seminar, but it more
• 6:03
  likely was that I just didn't have confidence. I do it enough
• 6:06
  times and again. Our friend Benjamin Brandt that we've
• 6:09
  coached for years, he says the same thing the podcast, don't
• 6:11
  start a podcast unless you're gonna do 20 episodes. And by the
• 6:14
  way, don't do 20 episodes unless you're gonna do 200 like we
• 6:17
  actually look this morning. This is our 690th episode of this,
• 6:21
  690 episodes, that's the level of commitment it takes to a
• 6:25
  marketing channel,
• 6:26
  Micah Shilanski: And one day we'll get traction with this.
• 6:28
  All right? So I'm just kidding, right? It's taken off like
• 6:31
  wildfire, but, but it wasn't on episode one. It took a lot of
• 6:34
  that that's going there. Now I do want to talk a little more
• 6:37
  about live events in just a little what I'd love to dive
• 6:41
  into is, and I know we're all about this, right? Let's get
• 6:43
  into the reality of it. Let's jump into our marketing channels
• 6:47
  that we have in how they work, how we're working them, and what
• 6:52
  we're seeing from them. Is that going to be okay? Yeah, let's do
• 6:54
  that. That'd be great. Okay, fantastic. So the first one I
• 6:57
  want to talk about is social, because everybody likes to talk
• 6:58
  about social, and it's just, boy, it's a triggering word for
• 7:01
  me, but let's talk about it, because everybody likes to chat
• 7:04
  about it. This is a do, what works question, right? It is
• 7:08
  very simple. There's a difference in marketing and
• 7:10
  advertising. Advertising is when I just want to get my name out
• 7:15
  there, because I believe in some cause that's out there, and I'm
• 7:18
  not expecting a direct return on my dollar. I put that in an
• 7:22
  advertising camp. Example, we're sponsoring a shooting event
• 7:25
  Alaska. I'm pro to a I think it's going to be fantastic. I
• 7:28
  want to help sponsor this. I am not expecting direct clients
• 7:31
  from it. Now, we have got clients from which is a separate
• 7:34
  conversation, but I'm not expecting that. Then we go to a
• 7:37
  marketing event. A marketing event is going to be like a
• 7:39
  seminar. It's an event I'm doing. I am expecting $1 for
• 7:42
  dollar or multiple of my dollar for dollar return on that
• 7:46
  investment directly. And that's where social needs to come into.
• 7:51
  The category. You're not supporting a cause of Facebook
• 7:54
  and YouTube and Instagram, right? That's That's not helping
• 7:56
  anything. This needs to be a marketing event. So if they're
• 7:58
  going to do social, it has to be like, how much you going to
• 8:01
  spend and direct return for dollars, not likes? Are you
• 8:06
  going to have in your bank account? And I think Jarvis for
• 8:08
  me this, you know, I've tried all the different platforms
• 8:10
  really, believe it or not, YouTube has been pretty
• 8:13
  fantastic. I didn't think it would work, so props to my team.
• 8:16
  Social was blowing up across the board on us, and I was tired of
• 8:19
  spending money on it, and they want to do YouTube. And I said,
• 8:21
  Absolutely not. And they said, Okay, well, what could we do? We
• 8:24
  know what metrics we have to get to in order to start you
• 8:27
  channel. Fine, we came up with these marketing metrics. They
• 8:30
  crushed them, they then started YouTube channel, and it's
• 8:32
  actually taking off and working, which I find very interesting,
• 8:35
  because who wants to watch me on YouTube?
• 8:37
  Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, I suppose that YouTube is social media,
• 8:39
  and in my mind, this thing, right? Because podcast channel.
• 8:45
  What I worry about with social comes up is most advisors I see
• 8:48
  that say social media is my marketing channel. They sit on
• 8:52
  Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever the case may be, for
• 8:55
  hours, and they kid themselves. I mean, I see advisors posting
• 8:58
  this. I do four hours of LinkedIn every day, and I've got
• 9:01
  seven followers, I don't really care. I want to say, show me the
• 9:04
  last 20 clients you brought in. If you can show me that some
• 9:08
  portion of those came from social media efforts, then by
• 9:10
  all means, keep turning that thing up. Otherwise, 99 times
• 9:14
  out of 100 times spent on social media is strictly playing
• 9:16
  office. And if you want to spend time on that channel, and I
• 9:19
  spent time I was a guilty pleasure of mine, it has to be
• 9:21
  confined. So most marketing activities, we say, hey, what's
• 9:24
  the minimum number? Each week, I'm going to call five centers
• 9:28
  of influence. Each week I'm going to record two podcasts.
• 9:30
  Social media has to have a time cap. So you say, Great, each
• 9:34
  week I'll spend one hour in a designated block, but me sitting
• 9:38
  at home, scrolling on my phone that is playing office, that is
• 9:40
  not marketing, it's not marketing. It's just playing
• 9:43
  office 100%.
• 9:44
  Micah Shilanski: All of these channels, Jarvis, I can pull out
• 9:46
  a little bit more lovely channels, have to have a time
• 9:48
  cap with them, right? You can play office in every single one
• 9:51
  of these. So we got to start up there with what the goal is. So
• 9:55
  one of our primary goal, right? Our goal across the board, is we
• 9:58
  want to deliver massive value. We want to transform the lives
• 10:02
  of the people we come in contact with, right? That's our goal of
• 10:05
  our podcast, not only this one, but also on the plane to fight a
• 10:07
  retirement the secondary goal, after transforming their lives,
• 10:11
  is to drive them to the website. Right? We don't get anything by
• 10:15
  them being on YouTube, et cetera. Now, if it gives them a
• 10:17
  good tip, they help grow and change their life. That's
• 10:19
  amazing. Goal number one. Goal number two is drive them towards
• 10:23
  the website.
• 10:24
  Matthew Jarvis: Everything has to have a path. This is where
• 10:26
  advisors get stuck. This Micah, where you and I have gotten
• 10:28
  stuck, you can have a phenomenal let's use this podcast as an
• 10:31
  example. This podcast gets 10s of 1000s of downloads, but if
• 10:34
  that was the end of it, yeah, we're helping the industry. It's
• 10:37
  not helping drive our cause forward. Same with the pyfr
• 10:40
  podcast. So we need to have a call to action, and then
• 10:43
  ultimately, what we're trying to do is get people off of someone
• 10:45
  else's platform and onto our platform. So whatever device
• 10:48
  you're listening to this podcast on, we don't own this platform.
• 10:51
  I know you thought we owned Apple podcasts and Spotify and
• 10:54
  Amazon. We don't. We need to capture email addresses so that
• 10:58
  now it's not someone else's platform, it's our platform.
• 11:00
  Micah Shilanski: Yep, and that's going to bring me into the pod
• 11:02
  too, right? So that's my other kind of big mass marketing
• 11:05
  channel that we have is our podcast with plan your federal
• 11:07
  retirement. We have a bi weekly podcast a little over two a
• 11:10
  month go out. And again, we're getting really good traction on
• 11:14
  that, several 100 episodes into it, right? This isn't just a one
• 11:18
  time and oh my gosh, I got traction. This took a long time
• 11:20
  as a as content plays do. And I'm a big content guy, you guys
• 11:24
  know the podcast content plays take a long time to build, but
• 11:29
  then they key. It's a snowball effect, right? It just keeps
• 11:31
  rolling and building and growing. And that's the same
• 11:33
  thing we're seeing with the podcast. It took a long time to
• 11:35
  get to where we're at, but now it's growing. We're having
• 11:38
  people contact our office directly saying, Hey, I listen
• 11:41
  to Micah podcast, and I want to sit down and meet with him,
• 11:43
  right? So that's the end goal that we want. Course, number one
• 11:46
  is transforming their lives and those in the podcast and then
• 11:49
  bring them to the website. It's everything on the mass marketing
• 11:52
  channels are pushing people to the website. Jersey, echoing
• 11:55
  again just what you said. I want to put them on our platform
• 11:59
  where we can start capturing their email address, right? I
• 12:01
  got to give them a lead magnet, which we can talk about as well,
• 12:05
  something so valuable. They would be crazy not to give me
• 12:08
  their email address. And now, all of a sudden, we're not going
• 12:10
  to spam stuff. We're going to provide them with excellent
• 12:13
  content and showcasing why we in this field.
• 12:17
  Matthew Jarvis: Yeah. I mean, if we boiled down a content play at
• 12:20
  the end of the day, you're you're trying to establish that
• 12:22
  you're smarter than or you have more expertise in what they need
• 12:25
  than anyone else they've run into right now. Again, this is
• 12:28
  why a niche is so important. If you're trying to say, Hey, I'm
• 12:31
  trying to compete with Vanguard and have more information on
• 12:33
  retirement, oh, that's that's going to be a tough content play
• 12:36
  to win. You're going to drown in this ocean. But when you go
• 12:39
  super narrow and you say, Hey, listen, I only develop content
• 12:42
  for this audience, and I speak exclusively to them. That stands
• 12:46
  out. An example I heard years ago, Micah, was, let's say you
• 12:48
  were getting audited by the SEC, not just a normal audit, but
• 12:51
  like, they're really coming in. They're angry. Are you going to
• 12:53
  call your estate planning attorney? No, I'm not. I mean,
• 12:56
  they're an attorney to practice law. Same thing if I got
• 12:58
  testicular cancer, like I'm not going to go to my general
• 13:00
  doctor. Be like, Hey, listen, you think you can take care of
• 13:02
  this? Like, I want of this. Like, I want to find the guy or
• 13:03
  the gal that's the person for this. So on a content play,
• 13:08
  you're trying to speak to a very narrow audience and say, Hey, I
• 13:11
  know more about your situation than anyone you've ever met. But
• 13:15
  Mike, again, to your point, that takes time. It takes time to
• 13:17
  establish that credibility. One article, one post, even 100 100
• 13:21
  posts that alone is not going to do it insurance.
• 13:23
  Micah Shilanski: I think of the content play a lot of times,
• 13:25
  people like, yeah, yeah, I get it, but I don't want to exclude
• 13:27
  everybody else, right? And as soon as you do that, but in
• 13:30
  there, you're sabotaging your entire marketing plan, because
• 13:33
  it's not about excluding everyone else. It's about
• 13:35
  focusing the mass valued, mass benefits to them. Now someone
• 13:39
  else who's not a federal boy comes across my website, comes
• 13:41
  across my podcast, they're going to be turned off by it. And
• 13:45
  guess what? That's 99.9 and 99% of not only people the world,
• 13:49
  but but retirees. That's not who I'm going for. I am just going
• 13:53
  for this, and it's a healthy way that I can help transform now,
• 13:56
  could I say and cut it? Just fine. Well, look, my information
• 14:00
  is about 90% could apply to everybody. Is only 10% of this
• 14:04
  is really unique to that. I could argue that all day long.
• 14:06
  But does that help? If I talk to everyone, I talk to no one. So
• 14:10
  on these podcasts, on YouTube, on the podcast, on our website,
• 14:13
  I want to talk to my audience. I want to talk to my avatar.
• 14:16
  Sometimes I can have a little two avatars going on. Example,
• 14:19
  this is a normal federal employee and a federal employee
• 14:21
  and a federal employee with special provisions, right? So
• 14:23
  they're a little different. And so on those unique pages and
• 14:25
  topics, I can talk about that, but I want to be talking to my
• 14:28
  avatar.
• 14:29
  Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, it's pretty rare. I'm just trying to
• 14:31
  think Mike, of all the advisors we've coached since, it's lots
• 14:33
  now training them. Who's gone too narrow? It's it's tough to
• 14:36
  go too narrow, as long as it's a profitable niche. I guess I saw
• 14:38
  one advisor and his his niche was super narrow, and it was
• 14:42
  super narrow with a demographic that had no money. And I said,
• 14:44
  Dude, this is a great example for your pro bono work, like,
• 14:48
  again, I know you're passionate about this. You cannot run a
• 14:50
  business around that market was less than a couple of 1000
• 14:54
  people that that's how that's how targeted was.
• 14:56
  Yeah, real, real narrow, right? You don't have, like, a 50%
• 14:59
  market saturation, some crazy things. So short of that, this,
• 15:02
  again, where it's good to have a sounding board, especially in
• 15:04
  marketing, we start drinking our own Kool Aid. Oh, man, if I run
• 15:07
  this Facebook ad campaign, I'm gonna get so many clients coming
• 15:10
  in that the money I borrowed to pay for it will pay for it.
• 15:13
  Somebody like you need to have someone who can be the reason
• 15:16
  when you're doing any kind of marketing channel. And that
• 15:18
  person, by the way, is not the company trying to sell you these
• 15:21
  ads.
• 15:22
  Micah Shilanski: And I like to set these rules up in advance,
• 15:24
  right? Yeah, so great. What are my KPI you guys know me on the
• 15:26
  podcast so far, I like ranges. What is my range of success?
• 15:30
  What's the minimum viable? Okay, this is a good idea, and was
• 15:33
  absolutely amazing. Oh my gosh, I would. I'd be crazy not to
• 15:36
  keep doing this kind of thing. I want to see these ranges on each
• 15:39
  one of these activities. Trevor said, point you said earlier, I
• 15:41
  want to bring it back. I want to put a ton put a time period with
• 15:44
  this as well. This is how much money and how much time I'm
• 15:47
  going to spend, and this is the range of results I expect from
• 15:51
  this if I'm working company. And this is, Well, Mike, it's really
• 15:54
  not about bringing a client's spot, adding more likes unlike
• 15:57
  them, and go find somebody else, right? Because likes aren't
• 16:00
  going to pay the bills and and I keep beating on this because I
• 16:03
  find so many advisors have fallen into that truck here,
• 16:06
  right raising my hand right here, super guilty of hiring
• 16:08
  these companies and they do these interesting things which
• 16:11
  boost your traffic and like, but it's not your ideal clients,
• 16:14
  it's not your target markets. You're not actually transforming
• 16:17
  people's lives, and you're not bringing on clients.
• 16:19
  Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, totally, totally. Mike, one of the thing
• 16:21
  you've got to commit to on this is, how much time are you going
• 16:24
  to invest being the best there possibly is at whatever channel
• 16:28
  you're going through, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos,
• 16:31
  whatever the case may be, the people who excel at this and
• 16:34
  Micah, you and I have been coached by most of them, because
• 16:36
  we always seek out the people that are best, right when we're
• 16:38
  coached by Evan Carmichael, who's one of the top YouTubers.
• 16:41
  This guy is relentless, relentless on the amount of
• 16:44
  content he creates. When we talk to John Lee Dumas, right? John
• 16:46
  Lee Dumas podcast, God, his sort of like persona is like, Hey, I
• 16:49
  just sit by the beach in Puerto Rico. And magic, those money
• 16:52
  flows in. But then you talk to him, and you realize he's done
• 16:54
  five episodes a week, every week for 10 years. He's done like,
• 16:58
  five or 6000 episodes. So whatever the channel you've got
• 17:02
  to come and say, Hey, I'm going to be the best there ever was at
• 17:05
  this, not dreaming like here's literally what I'm going to do
• 17:08
  to make this happen.
• 17:08
  Micah Shilanski: So that also brings us kind of to the in
• 17:10
  person events that we do as well, right? So after again, we
• 17:13
  that broad marketing that we've done on the social pause drive
• 17:16
  by the website. Now we have a good list, and now I'm going to
• 17:18
  start kind of calling that list with you master person events.
• 17:21
  This is just how we do it, right? So whatever's gonna work,
• 17:23
  and we do two to three in person events a year. They're one day
• 17:27
  all day. Seminars are about seven to eight hours in length,
• 17:30
  so it's pretty intense that we go through and then Jarvis when
• 17:33
  we're doing this. This is one of the things that the seasons
• 17:35
  change. Sometimes I can send out an email and the entire seminar
• 17:39
  is gonna be full, send out that email blast, and I'll get like,
• 17:42
  10% full, right? Sometimes you don't want to sit on a podcast,
• 17:47
  and sometimes I don't drive in traffic. Sometimes it won't
• 17:49
  we've gone back to the mailers, which I know you love, because
• 17:52
  we were like, Hey, we weren't getting as we once with the
• 17:55
  emails and podcasts, and so we started mailers. Mailers didn't
• 17:58
  work during covid. Online worked, and everybody got that.
• 18:02
  Now, mailers are working again. Got to have these things in your
• 18:05
  bag, and you have to try them. But the reason we know what
• 18:07
  we're what doesn't work is because we have, I know how many
• 18:11
  mail sent out. We know what the return was. I know how many
• 18:14
  phone calls we had to make to agencies in order to talk to
• 18:17
  them about the training. We know how many events, right? So we're
• 18:19
  building all of this at us, right? I want to do this event.
• 18:23
  I know how much work goes into it. You might be thinking, holy
• 18:26
  crap, this is a lot of work. Yes, it is. We should be 100%
• 18:30
  clear with this, and we haven't even got to preparing for the
• 18:32
  presentation yet, right? This is just the marketing side of it,
• 18:36
  and this requires a ton of work, but jars again. Your point? You
• 18:40
  know, do you want to commit to being successful or not?
• 18:42
  Matthew Jarvis: It's a ton of work. And let's be really
• 18:44
  honest, if you're doing it right, it's super boring,
• 18:48
  pedious work. So recently, I saw the headlines that Ken Fisher,
• 18:51
  that we joked about a minute ago, he sold 20% of Fisher
• 18:54
  Investments for $2.5 billion $2.5 billion Wow. Everyone seen
• 18:59
  Ken's ads. They're the same ones. I hate annuities. They run
• 19:02
  them again and again and again and again. Just embassy. And why
• 19:07
  is the boringest ads in the world? And yet, he just sold 20%
• 19:09
  of his firm for $2.5 billion the best firms do the boringest work
• 19:15
  now again, I even Ken Fisher. He's got $2.5 billion in his
• 19:18
  pocket. He could do some fun, sexy ads at this point, and he's
• 19:21
  still doing the same boring stuff.
• 19:24
  Micah Shilanski: I'm going to push back on that. I'm going to
• 19:26
  say Tesla firms do what works. Now, you may think it's boring,
• 19:29
  but you know, I'm going to say it's the do what works aspect of
• 19:32
  it totally and we have to keep doing the thing that continues
• 19:35
  to work, and we choose not to do a thing that works, then we're
• 19:38
  choosing to do something that doesn't work, just by
• 19:41
  definition, right? So we really got to be intentional about
• 19:44
  that. I agree. 100%
• 19:45
  Matthew Jarvis: Settled joke, right? It works so well I quit
• 19:47
  doing it. So 100% we're all guilty of that. Least I am,
• 19:49
  yeah, for sure. For sure. Of course, Mike, as you mentioned,
• 19:52
  we could do an entire episode, dozens of episodes, on how the
• 19:55
  seminar works, how the meetings work. We've done these before.
• 19:58
  You go back through the archives again, 690 episodes deep at this
• 20:01
  point. Of course, we'll be talking about this at TPR, live
• 20:04
  at great length. It's work.
• 20:05
  Micah Shilanski: It just is really work. You know, one thing
• 20:07
  I want to bring up, we talk about the in person seminars,
• 20:10
  right? So we have other advisors which are doing fantastic with
• 20:12
  onboarding the team. They're learning the presentation,
• 20:15
  they're presenting it, etc. And one of the things we talked
• 20:18
  about, whether it's meeting with a client, doing a presentation,
• 20:20
  you have to know the presentation so well you can
• 20:23
  give it at a subconscious level. The thought here is you can only
• 20:26
  one conscious activity, well, at a time. And so if I'm up front
• 20:28
  for presenting in front of a group or sitting down with a
• 20:31
  client, and all I'm thinking about is what I'm going to say
• 20:34
  next. I am not paying attention to anything else going on in the
• 20:36
  room. I'm not paying attention the dynamics. Where did I lose
• 20:39
  somebody? Where do I need to engage? What do I need? Like,
• 20:42
  the presentation? Where do I need to walk to who has a
• 20:44
  question? I can't pay attention to any of that because I'm just
• 20:47
  focused on what I need to say, because that's my soul conscious
• 20:50
  activity. But once you've mastered the content, you can
• 20:52
  now push this to a subconscious activity. Jervis, you tease me
• 20:55
  all the time. I'm like, What am I going to talk about? And
• 20:58
  you're like, Mike, it's okay. You're like, this little monkey.
• 21:01
  I'll wind you up. I'll pull the string, and then all of a
• 21:03
  sudden, you'll start going right, and that's it's 100% the
• 21:06
  case, because there's built in 10,000 hours in this into
• 21:08
  subconscious activity. Why do I stress this? Because in order to
• 21:11
  deliver value, we have to be able to connect with people,
• 21:14
  whether it's in person, a seminar, et cetera, and you have
• 21:16
  to have it presented so well, you could, again, just pull the
• 21:19
  string of the monkey the exercise we're going to do on
• 21:22
  that Jarvis, we have a big hike coming up with the advisors in
• 21:24
  the office. It's about 22 miles. We're going to knock it out in a
• 21:27
  day. And JT spoiled the fun for me just a little bit. So we did
• 21:30
  one last year as well. While he's going uphill, we're six,
• 21:33
  seven miles into it. Last year. I'm like, JT, go through the
• 21:35
  presentation with me real quick. And he's like, You have got to
• 21:38
  be kidding me. I was like, No, that was a great time, very
• 21:41
  exhausted, you don't want to think about it. So we did let
• 21:43
  the cat out of the bag for the other advisors, but that's what
• 21:46
  we're going to do here soon. Like to get out of your
• 21:49
  environment and practice this stuff as well, because that's
• 21:51
  going to really help you master your craft.
• 21:53
  Matthew Jarvis: Speaking of mastering your craft, this
• 21:55
  podcast is about taking action, right? Because the things that
• 21:58
  you know, and they're really not worth anything, right? Like you
• 22:01
  could, you could be 100 times smarter than Micah on federal
• 22:03
  employees. But if you're not taking action like you're not
• 22:06
  going to get anywhere, right? So it's only the things that you do
• 22:09
  that count. So actually, number one, your calendar for the rest
• 22:12
  of the year. Again, we're only in August. We have a lot of year
• 22:14
  left, but boy, it'll slip by fast each week, each week, you
• 22:17
  need to have designated the activities that you will do, and
• 22:20
  for some of us not do that, will move your advertising and
• 22:22
  marketing forward. So it's got to be blocked out as a given
• 22:25
  time. That's got to be your sole focus during that time, both the
• 22:28
  time you're going to spend and the reps you're going to create.
• 22:31
  I love it so important.
• 22:32
  Micah Shilanski: I'm going to say, measure what matters. This
• 22:34
  is one of the things as marketing activities. So few
• 22:36
  people do write down and document what are you doing?
• 22:38
  What's your time period and what's your expectation? Now, it
• 22:41
  could be a lot of guessing at five. Of guessing at first,
• 22:43
  because you don't know that's fine. That's where we all
• 22:45
  started. Measure it every single activity, whether it's a mailer,
• 22:48
  it's an email, it's phone calls, etc. You can see what the
• 22:51
  success rate is and how to improve.
• 22:52
  Matthew Jarvis: You totally can totally count, of course, last
• 22:54
  but certainly not least, vote, early. Vote often. Be sure to
• 22:57
  get this podcast five stars. Like and Subscribe, share with
• 23:00
  your other advisor friends, we are, like I said, 690 episodes
• 23:03
  in I think Micha, we probably got other, I don't know, 690
• 23:06
  episodes in us. You know, when we get to that side of it,
• 23:09
  appreciate all of the listeners. If you've got a question or
• 23:11
  something you'd like to see us cover on the podcast, send an
• 23:14
  email to lifestyle@theperfectria.com and
• 23:16
  until next time, happy planning.
• 23:18
  Amber Kuhn: TPR Nation. You know that it's a competitive market
• 23:24
  out there. So how are you standing out as an advisor while
• 23:31
  still having a streamlined process? If you're looking for a
• 23:39
  way to provide value and help your clients with estate
• 23:45
  planning, then it's time for you to download our Estate Planning
• 23:53
  Guide help your clients document their final wishes to ensure
• 24:01
  peace of mind, visit theperfectria.com/estateguide to
• 24:07
  get your access today.