by Jason R Owens | Oct 5, 2012 | Uncategorized
Chances are that running your own business is more than just some thing that you do on the side.
It is how you put bread on your table.
It is how you pay your bills.
You have come this far, and it doesn’t make sense to quit now. The problem is that you may have hit a snag. A road block. Something that you don’t know how to get around. Maybe you just lost a big customer. Maybe you were counting on some money coming in and it didn’t happen. Now this is causing you to doubt your current path. You’ve become uncertain. Thoughts of “Should I keep doing this, or should I just quit and go get a job?” run through your mind.
Uncertainty stinks. I know I have lived through my share.
What I have found for me is that I am most uncertain when I feel isolated. Like there is no one out there who can identify with me. Worse, like there is no where I can go for help. I see others being incredibly successful. Why not me? Where’s the boundary between “persevering through the tough times” and outright stupidity?
Then there are times when the clouds part — they invariably do in time — and I can see things more clearly. I can see how my business can provide for my family, pay the mortgage, pay the bills. This space. This mental space where I can see possibilities is where I want to live. This is where I want to stay.
Here’s the tricky part. I know that cloudy days are unavoidable and that obstacles will find me no matter what. AND I know that I will go through the same cycle of doubt that I’ve experienced before. Here’s the two part trick that I know I need to master.
- I have to allow myself to go through the cycle without beating up myself for being here. If the cycle is part of who I am (I believe it is part of us all), then it is only a natural part of self-management.
- Make my time here as short as possible. I’ve been here before. I have learned from it. I know the short cuts out. I have to give myself some time to accept that I’ve had a loss. Mourn it. And then get on with business. I know that dwelling on my loss and dwelling on my “situation” it is what keeps me here in the loss-mourn-loathe cycle.
How about you? What helps you overcome an obstacle or setback
by Jason R Owens | Aug 10, 2012 | High Attrition, New Financial Advisor
For Some New Financial Advisors, Solo is the Way to Go
New financial advisors face enough hurdles in their first 24 months — licensing requirements, developing new skills, information overload. It can be a lot to absorb. The last thing you want to do is complicate things by trying to take on too much, especially if you lose focus on obtaining new clients.
In my time as an advisor an a coach to advisors I have only seen a handful of advisors who are able to make a solo practice really work. Most have far too much unpaid work on their desks, or their lives are ruled by incoming service calls. Unless you are paid specifically for doing service work, you will want to steer clear of being completely on your own, even in the first 24 months.
Pros
Low overhead
The good part about being solo is the low overhead. You can work from your home or in a respectable key man office space. Since you are doing all the work you have no staff to pay.
No workflow issues
Again, since you are working by yourself you do not need to be so concerned with not knowing what is happening in your office.
No office politics
I know of many wage earners who love their jobs, but would trade-in their co-workers in a heartbeat.
Cons
Details
It is pretty common to need to juggle reworking your calendar to fit in Mrs. Jones who wants to rearrange her appointment with you for afternoon on Friday even though you have a standing policy against taking clients on Friday afternoon; working on an analysis but getting interrupted by a service call at a critical point; writing a note about a client’s low priority issue that you plan on handling tomorrow after your analysis is done; placing a 48 minute phone call to tech support because your printer will not print the analysis you just finished; and looking for the handwritten note that you lost regarding the customer (can’t remember her name now) who called yesterday wanting her dividend option changed. All this can happen over the course of only a few hours. It can be a lot to remember. If you are good with details, you will get your chance to push your limits in this new role.
Alone
Some people simply enjoy a little camaraderie once in a while, so being on their own is quite easy for them. Others simply have a hard time working alone all day. These people crave interaction, and one more webcam meeting isn’t going to suffice. It has to be a live person-to-person meeting for it to count.
by Jason R Owens | Aug 9, 2012 | High Attrition, New Financial Advisor
Is New Financial Advisor Failure Preventable?
Perhaps if we study why a new financial advisor tends to fail at such an alarming rate we’ll be able to find ways to prevent it. In this blog post I have captured a few articles that grabbed my attention lately. You should find a broad scope of articles here for people who are captive agents, independent agents and from the world of online insurance sales.
While Why I Failed as a Broker is a little dated (2006) many aspects of the article still ring true for today’s new financial advisor. For example, the author of this article said that he was attracted to the business because he wanted the chance to manage money. Later in his stay he realized that he could only afford to spend about 5% of his time on actual money management because he needed the other 95% of his time to prospect for new business. Another interesting point about the article is that the author is not complaining — he does not blame his company. Click through to the article to learn more.
Why Agents Fail talks about the importance of new financial advisors having good communication skills, staying up to date with your product offering and keeping pace with new technology. It is written by a company that does online insurance sales.
The Top 7 Reasons New Insurance Agents Fail to Reach Success offers some good insight for those who are able to take advantage of an independent insurance agent platform. For those of you who happen to be on an independent platform, this article is quite good. New financial advisors who are captive agents may face a few restrictions in implementing the approaches listed here.
Why 77% of Insurance Agents Fail Within the First 6 Months appears to be a sponsored article written by a company that sells a marketing system. The four primary steps of their system are Interrupt, Engage, Educate and Offer. What I like most about this article is the all-too-real depiction that the author gives of what a new advisor faces in his or her first few years.
Why do 95 percent of Insurance Agents Ultimately Fail? is written by Lew Nason out of Dallas, GA. Lew’s stance in this article is that hiring a mentor is a really good idea, and he gives you some advice on how to properly hire a mentor that will provide you with a positive return on your investment.
Here are two others that caught my eye while researching.
In Are Financial Advisers Failing the 99% the author makes the case that the average american just isn’t being served well by the typical financial advisor. The reason: advisors just don’t make a great deal of money on people who have less than $100K of investable assets.
In Financial Advisors Flunk the Undercover Sting we find role playing taken to a new level. Only the advisors didn’t know they were role playing. Researchers from MIT and Harvard hired actors to play affluent couples and sent these prospects to visit firms in the Boston area.
by Jason R Owens | Aug 7, 2012 | High Attrition, New Financial Advisor
Two Ways New Financial Advisors Can Cope with Failure (second in a 2 part series)
In my previous post on What to do with Failure?, I mentioned that new financial advisors tend either to internalize their failures (it is always my fault) or to externalize their failures (it is always the prospect’s fault). How do we resist the urge to feel overwhelmed (with a sense of self-loathing) or misunderstood (All these people just can’t get it right)? Those who tend toward internalizing will need to travel by one road, and those who blame others will need to travel by a different road.
For New Financial Advisors who Internalize
There is no going around this mountain. There are tough lessons here to be learned, and the only way past this mountain is to go through it traveling the path of pain. You will most likely experience adversity when trying to set appointments. For some, you will be fortunate enough to be assigned some orphan clients who have a relationship with the company. For others you will need to build rapport through calling a list or by phoning friends and family. To many this will seem like an exercise in torture at first. But, it gets easier. Once you find this not so painful you will move on to the next step. People who stand you up for appointments.
You may travel to their house to find that the prospects are not there, or you will find that the prospect insists on a 7:30 PM meeting at the office and then fails to show. Again, you endure this a few times and you find that it isn’t the end of the world. You graduate to setbacks dealt to you by Compliance or by Underwriting or by predecessor companies who do not transfer money quickly enough, etc. The point here is that you probably need to experience losses in each of these areas a few times before you are able to shrug it off as being not such a big deal. The problem that new financial advisors face is getting surprised by these setbacks when they least expect it.
For New Financial Advisors who Externalize
The number one work that I can offer here is ownership. Chances are pretty good that everyone else is not the problem. You screw up, too. Own it. The only way for you to get the benefit from your experience is to admit that you had some part in this two-person dance’s not working. Once you are able to reach this hurdle, you can then see more clearly what steps you could have taken to save the deal.
Final Words
In this article I provided more depth on what new financial advisors can do to recover from failure. In my next article I will introduce a third response – making note of what happened, and then moving on. Remember that resilience is one muscle that can not be built without use. No one can do this for you, and you can’t get better at it by reading a book or watching a video. Resilience is best developed through hardship.
by Jason R Owens | Aug 7, 2012 | High Attrition, New Financial Advisor
Two Ways New Financial Advisors Can Cope with Failure (first in a 2 part series)
In my past few posts to new financial advisors I wrote that you should not blame yourself if you find this business is not all that you had expected. I also wrote a piece on getting your emotional game in line before you attempt the numbers game. I feel that I can’t do this latter issue enough justice, so I’m writing on it again today.
Your emotions come from the heart. Why does a failed case send you into a tailspin? When a client who loved you last week does not return your calls this week, why do you freak out about not having enough money in the pipeline? If you are running behind on your production schedule, why do you lose sleep over it? These fears strike at the very core of our identity sometimes. When a deal that was “in the bag” suddenly dries up, you could interpret that as your not being good enough to save the deal. That somehow it is a shortcoming on your part. You may have internalized the failure. Or, you could blame the prospect for being a flake. After all, you did your part of the bargain.
I have seen many new financial advisors internalize failure. I tend to do this myself. Somehow I should have been smart enough, good enough, fast enough or fill-in-the-blank enough to get the prospect to close the deal. It is great to learn from failure, but there’s a danger in blaming yourself as you could become paralyzed with self-doubt or feelings of inadequacy. If you give these feelings time to take root, your business is doomed.
On the other end of the spectrum are the new financial advisors who externalize failure — it is someone else’s fault. While these individuals typically do not learn much from failure, they are not paralyzed by it either. In their minds the prospect is always the one causing the problem — the prospect got cold feet, the prospect didn’t turn in the paperwork, the prospect got too busy to return calls. Again, externalizing can be a healthy way to respond to a setback in your sales efforts, but I have also seen this mindset bleed over to interpersonal dynamics with fellow team members (The other guy is the problem; there is nothing wrong with me), but I’ll save this item for a post at a later time.
The most important thing that you can do with failure is to learn from it but not dwell on it (much easier said than done for those analytical-thinker types out there). Failure must be framed in your head as something that polishes you, not something that drains you. It adds to your repertoire for the next prospect meeting. This is the school of transactions. You learn by doing. Managing your emotions is a choice that we make day by day and hour by hour. The better you get at this skill, the better you’ll become in all aspects of your life.
by Jason R Owens | Jul 29, 2012 | High Attrition, New Financial Advisor
As a new financial advisor (new FA) sometimes you just find yourself in a bad situation. After weeks and weeks of licensing efforts maybe you are behind in production, or perhaps the portion of your income that is steady is about to run out. You might be frustrated and wondering how you worked yourself into this position. You have to remind yourself one simple thing…
It’s not your fault.
There is a very well oiled machine that brought you to this point. The machine is doing its job — it is recruiting qualified people into an organization. You can take some comfort knowing that dozens or hundreds of other people in your recruiting class had to pass the same entrance qualifications that you did. For every person who made it to where you are know, 22 others didn’t make the cut. Maybe they didn’t pass the original assessment that you passed. Maybe they didn’t pass the interview that you passed. Maybe they didn’t pass all the licensing exams that you passed. You made it. They didn’t.
Even though you survived the cut you may be thinking that you wish you hadn’t. You may not have fully understood what you were signing up for. Sure, you were probably told at some point that you were going to have to reach a production hurdle, but how do you gauge that when you’ve never been in production before? If you were given a number, did you fully understand what that meant for you? Did you really know what assets under management (AUM), production credits, or accumulated base commission (ABC) meant for you as far was your workload was concerned? If you answered “no” to this question, don’t despair. Most people don’t really know what they are signing up for when they say “yes” to this job.
by Jason R Owens | Jul 24, 2012 | High Attrition
Again we turn our attention to one of the hottest growing insurance markets in the world for a few lessons. The insurance market in China has until recently been concentrated in metropolitan areas. Given China’s rising middle class insurance sales has spread to rural areas. It is reported that China has 83,000 representatives in the Sichuan provence alone (Tian, 2011). Tian (2011) performed a study that suggested rural insurance salespeople thrive on training.
Those with more training have significantly higher sales in terms of First Year Premium.
Agents reported a preference to group meetings rather than self-paced training. As a bit of commentary I will add that it is interesting to see where the Chinese insurance market is in relation to training. It appears that the US companies are continuing the ever-present push to reduce training amount and training dollars. It may be that the Chinese insurance market is in such a period of growth that it is easier to spend money on training. As this new market matures over the next 20-30 years it will be of interest to see if spending on training tapers off as growth slows.
Reference
Tian, W. (2011). Study on influencing factors of rural insurance salesman’s sale performance. International Journal of Business and Management. doi:10.5539/ijbm.v6n5pl80
by Jason R Owens | Jul 24, 2012 | Uncategorized
Currently in week 6 of my writing class. My mentor is fantastic and giving me lots of latitude on my first draft. I have tons of work to, yet it feels really good to be making solid progress.
The literature review phase is probably the most wonderful part of the research journey thus far. There is such a wide universe of research available. What surprises me is that there are many people researching the ins and outs of personal selling, and there is a great amount of rigor out there.
Right now I am exploring the literature around salespeople. In particular I’m fascinated to see the literature surrounding the failure and success of insurance producers. Until I started my research I had no idea that there is an entire journal devoted to sales — The Journal of Personal Selling.
by Jason R Owens | Apr 2, 2012 | Uncategorized
Happy to report that I aced my final paper in my last class. I ended the session with an A. Now it is on to the next class on Contemporary Systems Management. I just looked at the syllabus, and it appears that the instructor has included a heavy dose of my favorite topic – strategy!
Aside from dissertation, I have only this class and one more traditional class to go.
by Jason R Owens | Mar 29, 2012 | Uncategorized
I revised my schedule again earlier this week. Pending everything going well with my grade in Ethics and Political Acumen I will move on to my last two traditional classes.
- Contemporary Systems Management
- Architecture of Leadership
I will fit a dissertation class in here between the two. Right now, it appears that my traditional classwork will end on the first week of November.
I’m feeling a lot more confident about my research topic and the progress that I will make towards my dissertation. I’m looking forward to it.
