(upbeat music) - Welcome, welcome. Today's featured guest, Bill and Soul, the thriving financial advisory practice. And we're going to talk about that today, but there's more. In the middle of building his practice, he created a networking group that morphed into something larger than I think he ever could have imagined. And I think you're going to find this fascinating, possibly inspiring, but there's more. Our guest is the best-selling author and challenging the way many people, advisors and clients like, think about retirement. He believes that many of the traditional ideas we've been taught and even taught our clients might be the wrong advice, at least for some. This episode of Top Advisor Podcast is sponsored by NextRudo and the Academy of Relationship Marketing. NextRudo helps financial advisors attract and engage qualified pre-retires in their local market by filling educational seminars with high intent prospects and turning those audiences into new client opportunities. To get your free local market report to see how many millionaire pre-retires are in your area, just go to nextrudo.com, that's n-e-x-r-u-t-o.com. And I'll tell you a little bit more about NextRudo and the Academy of Relationship Marketing later in the show. All right, so my future guest today is Derek Coburn. As I mentioned, Derek built and sold a successful financial practice. Along the way, he founded a networking group called Codre, a curated community for entrepreneurs and business leaders. And while Codre started as a way to grow Derek's advisory business, it eventually grew into a powerful community of, say, movers and shakers in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Derek is the author of two best-selling books. Networking is not working. Stop collecting business cards and start making meaningful connections. And his newest book, which I will hold up to the camera, the USA Today Best Cellar, Let's Retire Retirement, How to Enjoy Life to the Fullest, Now and Later. So, Derek Coburn zooming in from Arlington, Virginia, welcome to Top Advisor Podcast. Bill, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we've been trying to get this going for a long time and I'm excited as well. Read your book. Love it. Well, it's a good looking book. I just, I loved the way it's a little different, too. I have to say. So, if I opened it up, you see it's all marked up with my notes. It's a great read. Before we get to that, let's start a little bit with your journey as a financial advisor. So, you started with Mass Mutual and you went independent with LPL and NetHub. So, tell us a little about each of those stages, the evolution and maybe a little bit of the Y behind some of those shifts and those changes. Yeah, I love to. So, in between my junior and senior year of college, I took an internship with American Express Financial Advisors. I was basically cold calling for two of the advisors at the time. And, you know, of course, I'm like 20 years old. I don't even really realize, I'm not thinking too much about what I'm doing, but I apparently end up being good enough at cold calling that the head of the office has me lead a talk for all the advisors who are already doing this for their career on how to be more effective. And of course, at the end of the day, it's just tolerance of rejection, right? It's just I was, I was, you know, getting shot down by girls a plenty, you know, in my spare time then. And so then I was going and applying it to getting turned down and having the phone slam down on me by these prospective clients. But that made me realize, okay, maybe this is the right thing for me. And I had some interviews and I ended up with a mass mutual agency right out of school. I continued to be very good at the cold calling thing. And that's what allowed me to grow my practice. And I got to a point where like, it's still not enjoyable to cold call the time, even though I was good at it. So I pivoted to networking and started doing that pretty efficiently. And we get to 2008 when the things in the market are getting a little rocky. That's also the year I got married. And then we were getting ready to have our first child in 2009. And I realized, I don't have the flexibility with my time going into having a kid that I had prior to having a kid. And I might need to start rolling up my sleeves and exploring how I can be more efficient. And I realized also that the majority of the people that I wanted to meet 10 years into having my practice were no longer going to the networking events. So people that were going to the large networking events were people that were looking to sell and pitch their wares. And there's certainly some good people there. But the busy, successful people already had their people that they wanted to spend time with. And they weren't going to networking events. So I started curating and hosting smaller events on my own where I would invite my clients to invite some of their friends and their colleagues to different things I was hosting. So for example, I would host roundtable lunches. I would have five or six of my clients come. They would bring five or six of their client, strategic partners, centers of influence, what have you. We would all get an opportunity to share what we were doing, how we did it, who we could help, et cetera. There was an event that Seth Goden was hosting in DC, I think around 2010, I invited five of my clients and I got all of them two tickets, one for them and one for one of their guests. And I took them to this great event that was hosted by a phenomenal entrepreneur and author. And two of the, we had lunch afterwards and then two of those five guests ended up becoming clients of mine without me having to ever pitch or solicit them. And this is what made me realize that maybe the big catch all networking events were not the best way to spend our time. And instead curating and hosting smaller events around the people that you wanted to go deeper with and the people that had connections to others that you wanted to meet. And that's what eventually led to us forming cadre. And I'll put a pin in that just to kind of finish my wealth management journey. We transitioned to LPL from Mass Mutual just because we wanted to, we were more in the holistic planning game. We were not just in the life insurance game and we were doing comprehensive financial planning and wealth management for our clients and had a good experience there, still clear through LPL. But in 2019, we were approached by hub a private equity company. Primarily the time specializing in property, casualty insurance and they were looking to expand their reach and their offerings and they've been acquiring a lot of wealth management shops. We were one of the first ones, but did that in 2019. So still technically with hub, I've got a practice that I manage. I'm not looking to actively grow it much these days. But I've got my clients I've been working with for 25, 30 years that I still enjoy meeting with and will occasionally work with the new client. But yeah, it's been quite a journey. So you are technically still a practicing advisor. You mentioned cold calling. There was a time when people actually answered the phone and you could call call and occasionally reach people. I just posted a video on LinkedIn. I got a lot of feedback. It's a flame and stuff. And it said cold calls and bad leads or God's punishment for failure to get enough referrals. Yeah. I like it. But the roundtable lunches and the curated networking events is still fits what the research is sharing today about how people want to meet their advisor. It's referral from a friend, family member, colleague, center of influence, and other human-to-human-type connections. So yeah. So let's lean into Cod right now then. So you decided, all right, not the big networking events, Chamber of Commerce and all that kind of stuff, but your own things that you put together. Were these all business owners? Were the other professionals who would come to these roundtable lunches? Was there some common theme with all these folks or not necessarily? Yeah. So I was doing those roundtable lunches. We call them our un-networking roundtable lunches prior to cadre being a business. And what happened was I started reading books at the time. This was around the advent of social media and being able to leverage things like word of mouth marketing that we weren't able to lean into as financial advisors because of compliance. And I said, well, this is an opportunity here. And I want to take advantage of it. And so what I ended up doing was I ended up cutting my wealth management practice from about 350 clients down to 75. This was in 2010, 2011. I was qualifying for the big fancy trips that still took place at the time and was having conversations with the majority of the advisors on these trips who were all like a minimum of 10 years older than me. And they all had 1,500 to 2,000 clients. And they all had the same story, which was they really only loved working with about 20% of their clients. But because we were so limited in terms of how we could grow our practice. And we would just take the referrals that we could get. We would put our head down. And if somebody had unreasonable expectations,
or they wanted to call us all the time, we would just kind of deal with it. And I said, I don't want to do this. So I went down to 75 clients, and then I had the capacity and the bandwidth to start this new thing, cadre with my wife. And because I was doing it and charging money for it, I didn't feel like it would be appropriate for me to ever directly promote my wealth management practice to my cadre members. So a lot of them knew what I did, and some of them ended up becoming clients of mine. But we've had other financial advisors in cadre over the years. And when we first started, we identified about 12 to 15 people, my wife and I, who were well connected, who were well known, and who kind of got this idea, 'cause what we were organizing around was finding people that had the ability and the desire to show up focused on how they could add value for other people. So this was not bring leads, this was not, you know, pitch your wares, this was, we're gonna do the job of curating the right people who are already successful, and we want everybody to put their guard down, and trust the fact that everyone here is genuinely looking to help first and add value first, which of course leads to people leaning into working together, giving referrals to one another earlier in the relationship development process, because they trusted us and knew that, okay, this person isn't here because they're trying to get something out of me, and that's kind of how it was born. And we ended up posting 78 lunches the first year we ran cadre, where we would just have 10, 12, 15 people in a private room at Capitol Grill or BLT, and everyone would get an opportunity to talk about their business and how other people could help them. It was really pretty unique at the time. - Now was this just generate revenue for you that it cost you money? I mean, people paid for their own lunch, I assume. - Yeah, people paid for their lunch early on. We were charged, we launched, we did a pilot run where we hosted lunches over two months, and then everybody that attended a lunch got an opportunity to join as a charter member where we charged $250 a month, and it was a month to month. I was borrowing, and I still do borrow to this day with cadre from the wealth management practice of a pay as you go because of the value and the benefits that I see both ways there where you're only paying if you really want to be here, and if you're not showing up and you're not doing what is expected of you, then we're going to ask you to not be a part of it. So we launched that initial group, and then we said, going forward, we're going to charge $500 a month, any new members that we bring in, and then we did that for three months, and then we said we're going to add an upfront fee. So by increasing what we were charging at different intervals early on, we were also baking in some real urgency to encourage people to join sooner rather than later. So if you join now, it's $500. If you wait three months from now, and want to join, you're going to have to pay $1,500 plus 500 a month. - Well, I guess too, it's the old gym membership mentality if people are investing a certain amount of money, they're hopefully going to make it worthwhile for themselves and everyone actually. - Exactly. - But I was also seeing networking groups at the time too, that were charging $20,000, $30,000 a year, and I was a part of a few of these, and initially I was thinking, well, if people are writing this big of a check, I think that they're going to be pretty serious about developing ideal relationships with other centers of influence, and what I saw pretty often was six, seven, eight months into this thing, you started to feel the urgency. Why, I paid $30 grand for this, and if I don't get $30 grand out of business, it was a bad decision for us to join. And then all of a sudden, you have people going around looking for ways they can get an ROI, which of course flies in the face of collaboration and forging good long-term relationships. - It could, it could. A couple of questions. First of all, I mean, I've been to a couple of cadre events, and the two that I've been to were kind of evening things, where you had a speaker, but it sounds like these meetings weren't just having a speaker in the group. There was other kinds of, we said, what did you do with these meetings? What did these people come together to do? - You mean for the lunches? - Yeah, I guess, yeah. - Yeah, so what we did with those was we gave everybody six or seven minutes, depending on how many people were there, to kind of give their elevator pitch, right? To say, here's who I am, here's what I do. Here's who I do it for. Here's how you can help me. And we have these very strict anti-solicitation rules, which are you can't call somebody after one of these lunches to say, hey, it was great meeting you. I'd love to tell you even more about how awesome I am. Can we meet for lunch next week to do it again? But we were very pro-our members working with each other, hiring each other, and creating opportunities for each other. So what that looked like was, if you did a good job of describing your value proposition and sharing who you did it for, and a lot of this is the work that you do, Bill, then people would ideally reach out to say, it was great meeting you. Yesterday, I'd love to learn more about your work and how it might fit in for me or for some of the people on my network. And so was the motivation to do this, to do these lunches? And I've heard of other advisors doing similar things where they become kind of the common denominator of the group. And that's a reason for them to be in touch with everybody. And then over time, people see what the advisor does. And they says, all right, this guy, this gal, seems like person worth doing business. What was your ultimate motivation to grow your practice? Or was it almost a separate business, or a certain, in-between? It was a separate business, you know? And I've gotten a lot of value out of having two businesses running side by side at the same time. Some ancillary benefits that I didn't really think about. First and foremost, just the ability that I had to be extra picky about who I was going to work with in each business. And so if you just have, if I just had my wealth management practice, then I have to take whatever business that is coming my way. And oftentimes that meant working with people that we weren't aligned, or they had unreasonable expectations, or, you know, I just didn't enjoy being around them or working with them. And then the flip side of that is with cadre, I think, what's allowed us to curate it so effectively over time, to really just stick to our guns in terms of who's a good fit for this community, who really is a give first, who has a pay it forward mentality. I didn't need anyone's $500 a month to fund my kids' $529 plan because my wealth management practice was paying the bills. And so by me having the two things going side by side at the same time, I got-- I had the courage and the ability to really dig my heels in in terms of who do I really want to work with in a way that I don't think I would have done if I just had one business. Well, it comes to mind. It took the neediness, if you will, out of it, out of the equation, which is huge. Yeah. You've had some-- I was essentially born from my-- there was a need that I had as a financial advisor that the market wasn't providing. And it was all a bunch of networking groups that were collecting people that wanted to find ways to make more money and get more clients. And there wasn't anywhere that I knew of where I could go and feel like, OK, I'm around people that they're really interested in helping me. And I can show up as somebody that's really interested in helping other people. And we can just lean into that and watch some magic happen. Nice. You've had some pretty big names. Daniel Pink-- that's one of the ones I went to-- the book on his regrets, book, no regrets. Oh, yeah. Gary Vanderchock, Seth Gaudin, So Hill Bloom. How do you get these big names to come to your events? What I realized early on was a lot of authors who also speak will make themselves more available around the release of their book. And you probably know this. And I know this that when the book's coming out, you want to try to aggregate a lot of sales in a confined period of time, because it helps elevate your book. It can pop you on some lists, which internally to more sales and more eyeballs over time. And so I was on the look at early on for some of these bigger names who were coming out with books. And what would typically happen is if a speaker was charging $50,000 to give a keynote, but they had a book coming out. I could buy 1,000 copies of their book, get a huge discount off of what they normally charge to speak. And they'd be happy to do it because they wanted to do whatever they had to do to get out of a gate strong with their new book. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. So in a minute, we're going to shift the conversation to your book, let's retire retirement, and shift everyone's thinking perhaps a little bit around retirement and what we've been taught and what we teach. But first, let's hear a very quick word from one of the folks that makes this show possible. I want to take just a minute to talk to you about hosting educational seminars as a way to get in front of qualified prospects. Now you may be thinking, what is Bill Kade's the referral coach doing endorsing seminars? Well, about 25% of financial advisors continue to find educational events.
and work shops as a meaningful trust building, client acquisition strategy, especially in the pre-retire and retiree market. And this is where next Ruto comes in. Next Ruto helps financial advisors fill rooms with local pre-retirees who have between one and ten million dollars in investable assets. Their introductory campaigns will deliver 50 sign-ups, that's real contact info, names, phone numbers, emails, and 25 attendees per event. So you walk away with 50 qualified prospects in your pipeline and 25 serious ones in the room ready to learn from you. Now here's what I appreciate about their model. Everything is branded to your firm, the ads, the invitations, the registration page, etc. Prospects know they're coming to meet you, a professional financial advisor, no free, enter gimmicks and plate-lickers, no pretending you're a professor, and the lead list is yours, period. You also get an exclusive territory. Once you're in your market, no other advisor in that territory can become an ex-Ruto client. Now even if you've tried educational seminars in the past, I suggest you take a look at next Ruto's business model. I think you'll find that it's effective and more affordable than you might think. And should you decide to work with next Ruto? I will provide you with a complimentary coaching call on how to work some aspects of the referral process into your seminar initiatives to reduce your cost per opportunity and maximize your ROI. This is my gift to you listeners of top advisor podcasts. To learn more, to get your free local market report and the schedule a strategy session with their founder, Steve Abbott, go to nextruto.com. What might make sense for you? And now back to the show. And we're back. At what point in all of this did you begin to realize that just maybe the way the industry viewed retirement might be amiss? In other words, what's the backstory behind your newest book? Let's retire retirement. You know, I would say that the first seed that was planted for me was reading Tim Ferris' book, The Four Hour Work Week. And this is I think back in 2005, 2006. I had a general agent at the time who was very focused on retiring at 55. And it never made sense to me. I didn't like what he did. I was really focused on retiring. The book opens with a great story about your dad. It's well told. It's a great point. Tell us a little bit about how do your father's experience shape your perspective on work and retirement? Yeah. So my father got dementia at 62. And this was in 2013. He lived with it for nine and a half years before he passed away. And a lot of the ideas from the book were formed after he passed away because I was thinking initially like my father was working and my father was putting off and enjoying his life. And he missed out on a lot of great experiences. And after he passed away, we were going through a lot of the family photos. And I started realizing that that wasn't the case for my father at all. My father was taking a lot of vacations. My father was one of the OG stay at home dads. He was a CPA and he turned down a partnership at a big CPA firm when I was 10 and he had set up an office in our house. He had a literal door that he laid on top of some chairs that became his desk. And he was always around. He went to all of my games. We had dinner together almost every single night. And I started to realize that my dad was not a victim of this retirement ideology. But in fact, he was the one that sort of showed me that we could do this differently. And I don't think that my father would have ever stopped working. I think he would have kept going. I think he would have done it more on his terms. And it took me, unfortunately, it took me until after he passed away to really get some of the lessons that he had left and created for me over his life. Well, it's always refreshing to hear a story with a positive role model because you hear so much with the negative role models from parents. All right, so let's get into some of the meat of this concept. In the book, you have something you call the tale of two tonies. Talk us through that a little bit and this idea of maybe not quote unquote retiring whenever one society tells you you have to retire, et cetera. Yeah, I especially like sharing this story with financial visors because I've never had anybody accurately guess the difference and the impact that it can have on someone by deciding or planning to work longer. So in my book, I talk about this guy, Tony, who's 45 years old, he makes $150,000 a year and he has $150,000 safe retirement. You can change these numbers and add a zero or cut them in half, whatever, whatever works for you. He meets with this financial advisor and they decide he's going to stop working at 65. And the advisor ends up telling him at the next planning meeting that in order for that to happen, he has to save about $2400 a month every month, adjusted for inflation for the next 20 years in order to stop working. So Tony, like a lot of the people that we all work with, looks at that number, it's 30,000 a year, it's 20% of what he's currently making and it's a non starter and he feels like, where am I going to come up with this money? He stops going to the gym as much, he stops sleeping as much, he has to cancel the family vacation. And I create an alternate timeline where I say in between that first and second meeting with the advisory goes home and his wife actually says to him, Tony, are you sure you want to stop working at 65? You like what you do, you like who you do it with and even if you're not doing that, I can't imagine you sitting around doing nothing for 30 years. He's like, you know what, you're right. So he calls the advisor back and he says, let's update my plan to show me working until I'm 75 instead of 65. And when you do that, the amount of the money that Tony has to save on a monthly basis goes down from $2,400 a month to $110 a month. It goes down by 96%. And I know that's on shocking no matter who is listening to this, but I think your crowd will get it quicker more than most. And that is in the first scenario, we've got 10 extra years of saving or 10 less years of saving, 10 less years of working, 10 less years of that money compounding. And then we need an amount of money that's going to last in for 30 years because in both scenarios, I have him dying at 95. In the second scenario, it's 10 additional years of working, 10 additional years of that money compounding, not touching it. And then you only need an amount of money that's going to last for 20 years. And so even if, even if Tony says I'll work until I'm 70 instead of 75, the amount that he needs to save goes down to $600 a month that goes down by 75%. So I just think that it's important for people to realize that, a, you're probably not going to be happy not doing anything for 30 years. And if you agree with that and feel like you're going to work maybe a little bit longer than what you were previously thinking, it opens up a tremendous amount of flexibility in the short term with respect to how you get to spend your time and your money right now. All right. So I'm personalizing this a little bit because on this day that we're recording this, I turn 75, I turn to quarter a century. And I joke that I'm one quarter retired. I don't say semi retired because I'm working a little more than semi retired. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to play golf a couple of times a week. You look great by the way. I don't know if everybody can see you right now, but you look incredible. Well, if they're listening, they can't, but if they're watching on YouTube, then they can. Thank you. Anyway, so I can kind of relate to this now. My dad, he worked for the federal government. He retired as quickly as he possibly could. He was a negative role model in terms of what to do after retirement, but he was a simple man. It was fine. Me, on the other hand, I'm an idea guy. I'm writing another book. I just, you know, I've got the energy I want to do it. So a lot of us going to depend a little bit on what we're doing.
what the person is doing, what is that work? Some places have mandatory retirements or what if someone is in a business or a job that isn't fulfilling, right? So it's this option of working 10 years more, it doesn't always apply to everyone, is that making sense? - Absolutely, I mean, look, if somebody hates what they do, I don't think they should do it any longer than they have to, right? But I think that there's a lot of options here where you could explore things like sabbaticals, you could turn down the knobs on, I mean, financial advisors have an amazing opportunity to sort of create the ideal business for ourselves, whatever that may be, right? Like we see plenty of advisors, especially as they have an established practice who will take summers off or they'll take Fridays off or they'll block off chunks of time, you can do it your way however you wanna do it. And I think our clients have that opportunity to where we can help show them where maybe you're not working as hard or as much as you are right now, maybe you're not earning as much money, but if we can find you something that doesn't suck your soul, that doesn't like take the life out of you and it affords you the opportunity to have a much higher quality of life everywhere else, then maybe you're not gonna wanna stop doing that at 65. Maybe you'll do that 'til you're 70 or 75. And that's kind of where I think, you know, for like if you're not happy now, I'm not sure that I'm sure that sitting on your front porch drinking lemonade for the first couple of weeks is going to feel great, but I don't think that's going to unlock eternal happiness, doing it over and over and over again for 10, 20, 30 years. - Yeah, there's a lot of factors and clearly you, wherever you go, whatever you do, you bring yourself with you. - Yeah. - One of my interviews for the top advisor podcast with was a longevity expert. And when I say longevity expert, he wasn't about nutrition and fitness and that sort of stuff. He was an actuarial and he saw the tables and he just saw how most people underestimated how long they were likely to live. And he did some research and he found that the centurions, these were people who lived a hundred years or more in a vitality. First of all, they wouldn't tell others how old they were because then they would get stereotyped. But he says, "The common denominator of these people that lived vital lives, active lives into one hundred or more, the common denominator is that they had a purpose. They didn't stop working. Maybe the work changed, could have been a different type of job or maybe it was in non-profit work versus owning a business, but they never stopped working. So we do know that there's a lot of evidence that working longer, as long as it's joyful, is good for your health, your mental health and physical health, right? - Absolutely. - Yeah, in a second, I want to have you talk about something you call the $50,000 money concept. I also want to hear the reactions you've gotten from people around your book, that's retirement, but I do need to pause for a very quick word from someone else who has made this podcast possible. - You know, most advisors are referral dependent, but very few are referral intentional. If referrals are your number one source of ideal clients or you'd like them to be, shouldn't you have a reliable process to make them happen? Now here's the opportunity right in front of you. According to a recent study by Michael Kitses, 45% of high net worth clients met their advisor through a referral from a friend, family member or colleague. Another 20% through a referral from another trusted advisor, such as an accountant attorney who are consultant. And another 25%, met their advisor through an in-person gathering, such as a client appreciation event, networking event, or seminar. So about 90% of the people you would like to meet want to meet you through some sort of human to human connection. All the other methods, lead programs, LinkedIn activity, content marketing, et cetera, account for about 10% of advisor client acquisition. So it doesn't make sense to focus your client acquisition on meeting people the way they want to meet you. And that's why I created the Kits Academy for relationship marketing, which I believe, with all humility, is the most complete on-demand referral training on the planet. Now as a member of this affordable program, you gain immediate access to proven strategies, scripts, coaching resources, and practical ways to become more referable, more relevant, and more magnetic to right fit clients. And for advisors who want deeper implementation, support, and even accountability, many choose one of my coaching programs. Where a full year of the Academy membership is already included. Now, my process isn't about pressure, awkward referral asks, or chasing people down. It's about building a business where not just word of mouth referrals, but introductions happen more naturally and more consistently. Where you get more introductions without asking, and learn how to ask without looking like that creepy referral guy. If your growth minded and want to explore what's working, where your gaps may be, and how I might be of some assistance, let's set up a complimentary strategy session. After I hear from you, but before we talk, I'll send you my referral strength assessment. I know that taking this 12-minute assessment will create valuable insights for you right away. So just send me an email, Bill
[email protected], that's Bill
[email protected], or connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know of your interest. I hope to talk to you soon, and now back to the show. - So, Derek, what does this $50,000 money concept you talk about? I think it's pretty interesting. - Yeah, $50,000 moments, I call it in the book, where I'm sorry, okay. - No, it's okay. And it was thinking about a lot of moments that happened in our lives, that maybe we're taking for granted while they're happening. And the story that I shared was, I'm a father, and a lot of what I talk about in this book is, and the pitch that I'm making for people to hopefully realize that they're gonna work longer. It's to free up the time to be more present with our kids, to be more present with our significant other, to be more present with our friends, to be more present having a good time. And when my kids were 10 and seven, my wife and I had a bedtime routine with them, where we would alternate kids each night, and we would lie in bed with them, read them a story, tuck them in, have a nice snuggle, and wait for them to fall asleep. And when my kid was 10, my oldest was 10, I realized that this wasn't gonna last much longer, but I also realized that I was spending a lot of my mental energy in the moment, wishing it would go faster. Like, geez kid, hurry up and fall asleep so I can go, watch Netflix or-- - I've been there, yeah. - Yeah. - Hang out with my wife, you know? And I wasn't saying this out loud, but-- - I get it. - I'm going to lean in and be more present, and I tried willpower and that didn't work. And then one day, I just had this crazy idea pop in my head, and that was in the future, if there was a company that invented a time machine, well I'm 65, you know, 25, 30 years from now, and they were offering me the opportunity to go back in time for one night with my 10 year old son, one night with the 10 year old version of him, where I read him a story, where I got to snuggle with him, where I got to just lay next to him, how much money would I pay for that? And for me, it was $50,000, right? And I think it's probably more than that for a lot of us, where I think when we're 65 years old, and we think back over the years, and we think about gosh, like those car rides with our kids, or the dates with our spouses, or the trips with our friends, what would we pay to go back and relive them again? And so part of my motivation with this, you know, putting off retirement concept is to liberate people and free people to lean into these moments more often while they're happening, because I'm pretty sure there's not gonna be a time machine in the future, and we're gonna wish that we treated them like the $50,000 moments they were when they were happening. - Yeah, that's good advice. What surprised you, if anything, around people's reactions, let's retire retirement, anything you didn't expect, or what's been the reaction to the book? - You know, I knew that it was gonna be met in some instances with a lot of pushback. Look, there are, I think, that there's certainly a lot in my book that can be helpful for somebody who is in their late 50s or in their 60s, but there's also the potential for them to realize, "Oh, man, I wish I would have read this book 30 years ago." Or, he's describing me, but I wasn't thinking about this at the time, and now I have these distant relationships with my kids, or with my spouse, or my body's not working because I never went to the gym, because I thought I needed to have enough money by a certain age, and I won that game, but I think I might have been playing the wrong game. And so I tried to be mindful when I was writing to meet those people where they're at, and. And I still get some pushback from them because as you can imagine, like somebody's telling them after the fact that they could have done it a different way than they did it. And they wish they would have. There's some regret that's baked in there. I would say too, Daniel Pinky, interviewed me at my book release party, and he asked me, is there anyone that my advice might not be applicable to? And I answered, I said, I think people in their 20s and 30s, right? Like I think the majority of all of the amazing things that I have in my life stem from me working 80 hours a week in my 20s, making those 500 call calls a week, really just building up a nice firm base at that time to where I don't think balance needs to be the name of the game when you're younger. I think when you're younger, you spend a lot of your time and energy, and you should do that. Just building up the practice, building up the experience, building up the bank account, building up the wisdom. And so, those are a couple of takeaways, I would say, after the fact in terms of people that might not have received my book or shouldn't receive my book the way that others may benefit from it. - You know, when I was reading Let's Retire retirement, just to hold the book up again for folks watching, I read it from two perspectives. I read it from, what might a financial advisor do differently as an advisor with their clients, and then what might he or she as an advisor do differently for themselves, right? 'Cause I think the lessons and everything you're talking about being more present for children, all these things, implies that any human, right? So, knowing that the majority of the listeners to this show are financial advisors, can you think of one or two actions they might take that they might create either for themselves or their clients based on what you teach in the book? Does that question even make sense? - Yeah, definitely. I would say that a recurring theme for a lot of my clients who in their 60s and 70s right now, and maybe the primary topic of every conversation that we have is me encouraging them and urging them to spend more of their money. And I've been doing this for the past 15, 20, 25 years. I've been talking a lot about what's in my book to my clients this entire time. And we still have clients that have 10, 20, 30, $50 million of assets who are going to die with more than that, who are still nervous to spend their money because they were always, it was always, you know, going up only and now they're at a place where they need to start drawing down from it. I will say that an interesting tidbit that I've seen is I've got clients who are in very similar spots in terms of their net worth, in terms of their age, that's called 70. And one of my clients has completely stopped working and another one of my clients is still working in some capacity, any capacity earning some income. It's really fascinating to see how much more easily the client who is still working spends down their assets than the one who has completely turned that knob all the way off. They're not earning anything at all. And so I really do think that, especially with AI coming up now and emerging and AI likely, you know, at least in some part is going to be able to replace some of the actual financial advice from the perspective of the numbers that we're sharing with our clients that some of the best and some of the most real tangible value that we can add for our clients is helping them use the money that they have to live more right now. To spend the money on the vacation, to take time off, to be home earlier, to get better sleep, to not skip on the gym, because we're helping them have a better life right now, instead of just exclusively planning to make sure they're going to be okay financially 20 years from now. - Well, and I think that's over the 30 plus years I've been in this industry. That is the trend in the sense of, you know, more holistic advice, et cetera, a term being banned in around a lot. It's more than just the numbers, right? It's more than just the dollars, and it's more than just the return. There's so much more to it, and so many more advisors now are leaning into that, right? And they're helping their clients in other ways that go beyond just the dollars. But since money intersects every aspect of one's life, there's always a connection. - Absolutely, you know, I'll tell you that, I rarely have people walk into my office, at least before the book came out, with their hand raised saying, "I know that I don't want to retire at 65, so I would always schumer them." And I would say, "What do you want to do when you retire?" And the couples would look at each other very often, and they would say, "I want to travel the world with my wife." And I would say, "Great, me too." When was the last time the two of you went out on a date? And more often than not, they would look at each other for an extended period of time. And look, these conversations are uncomfortable, right? Like, it's much easier to just say, "Great, you want to travel the world together, move on, where do you want to go? How much is it going to cost, plug it into your software, and move on?" But the real value is in pushing back a little bit gently in the moment and help them realize that they're not doing the thing right now that they say that they want to do 20 years from now. I get this from a lot of men. Men will say, "I want to play golf five days a week, and I'll say to them, "Momo's the last time you played golf." And a lot of them, it's, "I've been playing two years." So what makes you think you're gonna flick a switch and all of a sudden start playing all this golf 20 years from now? You're probably not gonna be in the physical shape or have the relationships with the people that you want to play golf with if you're not starting to work on these things right now. - Yeah. And you know, you say pushback, and sometimes not really even pushback, it's just thinking it through, right? It's just, let's think through that a little bit. What would that actually look like? And I think, see, that's the next step that you as an advisor that advisors can do for clients is not take what they say its face value, but say, "All right, tell me more. "What does that look like? "How will that play out?" And that helps the client get clear. And it helps you as the advisor help them make sure the money set aside, et cetera, to whatever they wanna do. I've one of my tenences, there's nothing worse than an unfunded dream. Somebody has a dream. You know, let's make sure that you're setting up the whether it's money or just the mechanics of lifestyle to make it happen. Where can people learn more about your approach, access your resources? - Yeah, so I'm writing a lot still, you know, in fact, I don't know if you've ever experienced this bill, but I think that a month or so after I turned my final manuscript, there was like 17 new ideas that I wish would have been in my book. And I had a deep dark depression for two days, and then some of my author friends said, "Hey, this is totally normal. "You're gonna keep thinking of new and better ways "to say things." And so I've been writing a lot, I've been doing videos. So my website, dericorburn.com, is where you can sign up for my email list. I don't have anything that I'm selling right now. I'm just trying to share a lot of what I've seen that has worked well for me and people that I know in a way that I think will be helpful to a lot of other people. And I share a lot on LinkedIn and Instagram as well, but those are the three primary places where people can find me. - Well, definitely ought to connect with LinkedIn. They should definitely get a copy of the book, let's retire retirement. And even if it pushes back or gets you to think through your approach to retirement for yourself as an advisor, and/or for your clients, I think it's a big good investment. So with that, my featured guest today is dericorburn.com. Author of networking is not working, which is an interesting title. And as I know this book, let's retire retirement. How to enjoy life to the fullest now and later. Deric, thank you for your story, your perspectives, and for being a guest on top advisor podcast. - I love to bill. Thanks for being such an inspiration to me for several decades and there was an honor to be here today and conversation with you. - Oh, Shucks, thank you. To you, the listener of the podcast, a small favor. If you like this episode or like the podcast in general, please leave a five star review on the platform, Apple, I, you know, I podcast or Spotify or whatever. Not all platforms allow that, but if you can be grateful. Remember to check out our show sponsors, NextRudo. NextRudo helps financial advisors attract and engage qualified pre-retirees in their local market. And you can get a free market report and find out how many pre-retire millionaires are in your area. I just go to nextrudo.com, N-E-X-R-U-T-O.com. Don't forget to check out the Kates Academy for relationship marketing. Some advisors pair the Academy with a few coaching sessions with me to ensure they're maximizing their results. Check out the Academy at vkatesacademy.com. Decatesacademy.com and shoot me a message and we'll just talk. We'll see what makes sense for you. I also invite you to visit our resources hub that is jam-packed with free resources to help you attract and retain more right-fit clients. Go to referralcoach.com/resources. And I like to say while these are free to you, I think you'll find them quite valuable. This billkates reminding you that ideas [BLANK_AUDIO]
make you more successful. Only acting on those ideas will bring you the success you desire. Hey, thanks for stopping by.
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