Just like that, I was in the position of getting paid to prospect. Furthermore, because I opted to use employers, adult education centers and community colleges, they did all the advertising and registrations for me. I was walking into a room full of people, getting paid $200 for doing it and walked out with a few solid prospects and a bunch more for my email list.
When I started, I was literally doing these workshops without a PowerPoint presentation and with the cheesiest handouts you have ever seen. In fact, for my DIY Retirement Planning workshop, I was handing out four pieces of paper:
Page 1: A cover page with my bio and the agenda
Page 2: My 10 beliefs about retirement planning, with space for them to take notes
Page 3: The 10 most common retirement planning questions I get, with space for them to take notes
Page 4: A response form to capture their email and find out what they needed my help with.
I’m sharing that with you because too often advisors and financial coaches are hesitant to step out of the ordinary until everything is just perfect and it looks and feels a certain way. But it doesn’t have to be that way, especially if you tap into an area that isn’t being addressed by other professionals in your area.
Along the same lines, I’m not here to say it will be easy and that everything will go as planned. I got plenty of “Nos” and “Are you crazy?” but it wasn’t about meeting others’ standards and using the same bait as they do. It’s about grabbing that show-stopping frog and casting it out there to catch the big ones.
Robert Laura is the president of SYNERGOS Financial Group, the founder of RetirementProject.org and the creator of the Retirement Wellness Report and DividendPaycheck.org. He can be reached at [email protected].