Nick: About 70 days, working each morning. It's something we needed to work on every day, or we might have lost our momentum
FA: That figures, because you both stress the practice of meeting every day to plan the advisor's day, and then reviewing what he or she had learned at night. You also insist that your partnership agreement-a statement of what each of you is going to bring to the advisor's business building effort-be written down. Who wants to expand on that?
Nick: I'm guessing we both will, so I'll confine myself to observing that our key discovery was that when two people meet in harmony for a common purpose, a sort of third mind shows up, and it's smarter than both people put together. More courageous, too.
Joan: And as far as writing everything down, I think we both felt, right from the outset of Nick's career, that if it wasn't written, it wasn't real. The writing was part of the discipline. It kept us focused on the behaviors that lead to success, one day at a time.
FA: Let me follow up that thought, because you make a big issue in your book about measuring success by the number of appropriate prospecting behaviors Nick had made in a given day, rather than the outcome of those behaviors. And I know this ends up being the spine of Nick's prospecting book. But what did it mean to you, Joan?
Joan: Nick had brought home very early on a tape program by the sales psychologist Aaron Hemsley, who thought traditional prospecting training was all wrong, because it scored "yes" as the only success and "no" as a failure. Maybe not in so many words, that's the way Nick had been trained, and the "rejection" was grinding him down. Aaron said every prospecting attempt was a success simply because you made it, and you just had to keep building up your capacity to make more and more attempts. I just flipped over that. I think it was probably the turning point. If I can just get that one idea across to the advisor's partner, I'll think this book was a success.
FA: You both talk a lot in the book about faith and fear. Can you expand on that?
Nick: I guess what we both figured out, talking it through every morning and every night, was that faith and fear weren't spontaneous emotions-that we always had a choice. And we found that when we were together it was relatively easy for us to banish fear and just concentrate on what I was going to work on that day. But it helped, too, that for some time Joan had more faith in me than I had in myself.
Joan: I think that given half a chance, most advisors' life partners can summon that faith, and share it with their advisor-that's another of my goals for the book.
FA: I start to get the impression that perhaps this is somewhat more your book than Nick's, Joan. Is that accurate?
Joan: Not at all, if for no other reason than that I'm not a writer. But by definition, I'm a member of the book's audience, and he's not. So maybe it was a little easier for me to speak to them simply and directly, from the heart. But he has a lot to say to them regarding the essential simplicity of the business, and I think that comes across very clearly.