I am happy to report that I am taking some much needed time off from my classes during our 2-week holiday break. Classes start up in earnest on January 3. If the gods of academia are with me this will be the last holiday break for me while I am attending regular classes.
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The best way to describe The Venture Group is to begin with what we are not.
We are a community of men who run or aspire to run our own ventures. We are those who embrace risk as a constant companion. You will find the following types of men here:
We know that your schedule or your geography will not always permit you to come to our in-person sessions, so we make the community and our content available online. You are among equals here. Don’t just be in the silent majority. Join in the conversation. Contribute.
During our in-person sessions on Fridays, we will hold to our Sixty Minute Promise®. We start on time and end on time so you can get back to business.
Just so there are no surprises, this group started as a mens group at Mosaic Church of Charlotte. We consider ourselves under this church’s leadership and operate by its statement of faith. With that said we have only one agenda — to help you be more effective in your business.
We are not here to grow our numbers. We are not here looking for your money. We are here to serve.
Period.
If we are not delivering powerful content then we’ve missed the mark completely.
Nothing.
Fridays, 12:00 noon to 1:00 PM sharp
Bob Evans’ at Northlake
9253 Statesville Rd
Charlotte, NC 28269 (map)
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By this point in your career you’ve heard it a million times – this job is a numbers game. As a new financial advisor all you need to do is see enough people and everything will work out, right? I disagree. This is a mental game long before it is a numbers game.
To see just how far emotions rule the day, just turn on nearly any reality TV show. Contestants strive to do their best under situations that are designed to be pressure cookers. Invariably some break down in tears or fits of rage. After a decade of reality TV we recognize that these outbursts have been created for our viewing pleasure, but does this mean the pain is not real? No. It hurts to lose. It hurts to put your dreams on the line and then be told that you don’t make the cut. Your world as a financial advisor is not so different, is it?
No, you are under a great deal of pressure. Clients are not predictable. Prospects bail half way through a large case. Even when you get a deal the home office can misplace paperwork or ask for extra signatures which can jeopardize all of your hard work. When you are behind on your quota and your contract is in jeopardy, the “numbers game” theory goes down the tubes.
Frustration is real.
Under trying circumstances that are common in this career it is perfectly normal to get upset, so give yourself some time to vent. However, as advisors we get into trouble when we allow this frustration to rule us. Frustration can turn into dwelling, second guessing and doubting our career choice. This is a dangerous place to be. Spend too much time here and you will be calling it quits in no time.
It takes practice to back away from the edge. For me, I had to get my head out of the doldrums. Moving on — to the next project, the next client, the next piece of analysis, the next cold call — worked for me. It provided me with the pattern interrupt that I needed. Before too long my thoughts were back in the land of possibility rather than dwelling on impossibility.
For me I have seen that the emotional game comes before the numbers game. It is like the foundation to a house — you can’t afford to get it wrong. If you are going to invest your time or money anywhere invest in your ability to bounce back from defeat. The good news is that you will invariably build this muscle more and more the longer you are in the business.
I ran across an article published in the Academy of Management Journal. The primary author is Fred Luthans who hails from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I stumbled across the article when I was doing some research for class. It has been a game-changer for me.
I looked into his body of work to find that he has written numerous articles on the notion of building psychological capital. He claims, and has research to back it up, that things like hope, self-efficacy (confidence), optimism and resilience can be built. I find this quite intriguing because this is directly inline with my research, yet, until now, I had no idea this guy even existed.
Reference
Luthans, F., Avey, J. B., & Patera, J. L. (2008). Experimental analysis of a web-based training intervention to develop positive psychological capital. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 7(2), 209–221.
It takes courage to discover who you really are and to live from that center.
There is a story in one of the Gospels where Jesus, standing safely on shore, tells his soon-to-be disciples to give their fishing expedition one more try. This group was already dog-tired from a full night of fishing, and had nothing to show for it.
“Put out into deep water, and throw your nets out one more time.”
Against all common sense they rowed back out. This whole affair was going nowhere — or so they thought. To their delight the fishermen caught so many fish that their boats were swamped.
I made my decision to push out into the deep water, to discover and pursue the work that I was made to do. I enjoy the challenge of the search and the process of discovery. Some of our greatest innovations came to us through people who decided to persist in spite of adversity.
I will be presenting the findings of some of my research to a group of local business owners in August. I attended their event last night and it was very good. The location is TBD, but mark your calendars for 5:30 PM on Tuesday, August 27.
The mental drain of not knowing what to expect is what takes out most people. You have no way of knowing if victory is right around the corner, of if you are just making a desperate decision to hang on for one more day.
Say your home office tells you that the best way to generate sales is face-to-face meetings. They have found that the average agent makes one sale for every 3 face-to-face meetings. However, you decide that selling face-to-face is not for you, and that you would rather sell via email marketing.
Choosing your own path is all well and good, but you have to understand that the selling ratios are way different. The people at the home office may not keep a lot of data on email marketing success because hardly anyone uses it. If you are lucky you will find someone who can tell you, off the record, that only one out of a thousand people make a purchase on the average email campaign. You are in uncharted territory. Your only strategy here is to hope for the best, and, trust me, you want “hope for the best” to be your last strategy.
Take time to learn, and I mean really learn, what email marketing strategy really works for your company’s products. This will take time. Also, it will take some experimentation on your part. Having some definitive answers on what works, what does not work and what you can expect is key because you can now make a better decision if email marketing is for you.
Being mentally prepared for your journey makes all the difference.
It is really easy to get caught in the trap of not wanting to take one path (face-to-face sales), but not knowing what to expect when going your own way.
I will be sharing insights from my research on small business owners at the Charlotte East Rotary group on October 3 at 12:30 PM.
Venue: Red Rocks Café
Location: 4223-B Providence Rd Charlotte, NC 28211
I spent over a year as an internal consultant within a Fortune 500 financial services company. My job was to increase adoption of Salesforce, our new tool that had been launched to a group of 4500 field-based salespeople and support staff.
I traveled heavily in my last 5 months. I went to the states in my back yard — North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I also traveled to Washington, Oregon, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Iowa, Nebraska and Florida.
Not only do I have a great collection of travel stories including red eye flights, and a lack of good hotels near the oil fields of North Dakota. I can also tell you about the hundreds and hundreds of advisors that I met. They are all great people, and most of them really struggled to make sense of this new tool called Salesforce.
I have started my search for both a doctoral committee chair and one committee member this week. I imagine this will be about an 8 week process. I have found several viable candidates in the university’s roster. I reached out to my network this week in an effort to gain a few personal introductions. I did receive a few, and I will pursue shortly.
I am really hoping to find a person who is well grounded in phenomenological studies as this is my intended method for studying my research problem. The university appears to have several good candidates, and I intend to contact them by mid-week next week.