Okay here we go.
The last post talked about what is going wrong in my life and what is causing the most challenge to me and my family. While small and insignificant my problems would be to most people, to me it is a major challenge. But enough of that, let’s talk about how to get out of it.
I am reading a book by Sheri Dew that is a biography of President Hinckley called Go Forward With Faith. President Hinckley has a quote that says something like ‘Get on your knees and pray like everything depends on the Lord, then get up amd work like everything depends on you.’
I have long struggled with the idea of getting a consistent flow of clients and trying to figure out how to keep them coming in on a regular basis. I have a few criteria that I think are important. They are:
- Clients must call me
- They must have an immediate need for my services (traditionally, we have always talked about a future need which was having "x" amount of money 20-30 years in the future)
- There needs to be a way to charge for the service that I offer
- It must be an E.L.F business, or "Easy, Lucrative and Fun"
- It must be manageable by one guy (me), at least initially
- It must be as turn-key as possible, or in other words, I wanted to be sure that it works without much testing
- It must be extremely profitable
Well, after thinking and reading about how some other people have accomplished a business like this, I realized that it could be done and is being done by many people in my business, as well as other industries. I got a tape program called "Piranha Marketing" by Joe Polish (who came up with the E.L.F. mentioned above) and he talked about his situation, which was a lot like I fell about mine. He was broke and living on credit cards and struggling to get ahead in life and business. He almost got out of the business and went to do something else until he talked to a friend of his that told him that the problems he was having were not problems unique to his industry. In other words he said that if you are having problems being successful in this business, what makes you think it is going to be different in another business? In my case, I am not in the financial services business, I am in the marketing of financial services business. If there are successful people in my industry, then the problem is not the business, it is me.
I took that to heart and decided that I was going to make this business work. If I got out of this business and into another one, I would be at least a year to be profitable and I didn’t have the funds available to finance a change, or the time to go to school. This has to work and I know now that it can work.
An old Indian adage says "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." I think there is some truth to this saying. After praying for help and praying to figure out how to make the transition to success and prosperity I began finding some interesting things that seem to be just what I need.
I got invited to listen to a conference call that talked about how any financial adviser could add $5000 – $25,000 per month to their business. I admit, it sounded kind of hoaky, but it appealed to me and caught my interest. It was sponsored by a company called "Cash College Funding", and Brian Kay. It met a couple of the criteria that I was looking at so I decided to take a look at it.
The main premise of the system is to talk to clients that are getting ready to send their children to college in the next one to two years. This matched with the immediate need that I was looking for. They said that you should charge money for your services, which met another criteria that I was looking for. So far, it sounded pretty good.
Well, to make a long story short, it seems to be working just like they said it would. It is a complete marketing program and is designed with every step laid out in detail. I enjoy knowing what I need to do and what the projected results will be. This is important to me, but it wasn’t a huge draw of new clients. I needed something that would bring in a large amount of clients.
Well, there was another conference call that they offer that talked about how to promote this service through workshops. I thought back a few years to when we were being very profitable and it was when we were using workshops to market. People are hungry for information.
Here is the summary of what I figured out:
If I have an hour of time to meet with people, am I better served to meet with one couple or a lot of couples at the same time. Obviously, it is more productive to meet with more then one at a time. So if I could have 40 families in a room together, it is better then just one family. If I met with 70% of them, which I believe that I could do eventually, then that would be 28 appointments, which is about 20 more per month then I have right now. If I met with people that are interested in finding out how to pay for their child to go to college, that would be an immediate need that they would need to have discussed and with the workshops that are being run now by various advisor’s throughout the country they are selling 70% of the appointments on the service. If I could sell the service to 70%, or 19 of them (which would be for anywhere between $695 and $995) then I would make fees of $13,205 to $18,905 per seminar. This would go a long ways to getting me out of debt and back on my feet.
This also is only the front end of the business. When you factor in the back end sales, they are averaging about 70% of the people that sign up to pay the fee would convert to back end sales, which equal about $4,500 – $6,000 per client. This would mean back end sales of $85,500 – $114,000. To make a long story short, the seminars are very profitable and provide a great service to the target market that I am after.
What is exciting about it is that the program is totally automated. It is pre-recorded in tele-seminar and webinar format, as well as in hard copy that I could do at PTA meetings, libraries and other venues. So I can automate the seminars to run whenever I want, whether I am around or not. I won’t go into many details but the seminars could be put on every week, or twice a month, or how ever often I want to run them.
It will be interesting to see what happens. I am going to get the seminar this week and get the process started. I plan to have the first one running by the first of October and go from there.
I will update when I get the seminar and how it goes.
