[inaudible 00:04:21] be in the mail.

Brian Fricke:                    
And our advisory board was commenting because I was sharing with them that, unbeknownst to me, an index annuity salesperson had somehow gotten the trademark for the term worry free retirement. So the good news is you can’t trademark a book title so the book itself is fine, but he was asking for us to stop using the term worry free retirement and everything else we were doing, our website, our monthly newsletter. So we were getting feedback from our client advisory board and I was surprised, shocked, when the majority of the folks, their feedback was, “Yeah, that’s kind of a hokey title. We really don’t buy into it. We’re human, we’re always going to worry to some level, maybe not as much.” And then I got to thinking, that’s really not what we’re all about, we’re all about helping folks really enjoy life to its fullest, especially during retirement, return on life. Then I got to thinking about the movie It’s A Wonderful Life and then I just started playing with different terms for wonderful and incredible came up. So we’ve been going with that.

Julie Littlechild:               
I’d love to dig in a bit because you said a couple of things that I think you could almost throw away, or a lot of people could say without necessarily having a process behind it. One is: I focus on retirees. All right. So a lot of advisors would say, “I focus on retirees.”

Brian Fricke:                    
Sure.

Julie Littlechild:               
But not necessarily have a client experience or messaging that we might see as fundamentally different from others. So I’d be interested in how this approach that you’re taking, you believe, sets you apart and what’s… Maybe the first question is just, what’s different about it? How do you help people have an incredible retirement? And then how do you articulate that process or that experience to them?

Brian Fricke:                    
I think in terms of helping them, a lot of times it’s just helping them maybe brainstorm how they can accomplish what they want in a non-traditional manner. One of our clients years ago loved boating and his dream was to own a yacht, but with his income, with his job, with his resources, unless he bought a winning lotto ticket, there’s no way he was going to have the funds to purchase a yacht. So he did something even better, he went out and got his captain’s license and became a captain for the owner of a 76 foot yacht. And the cool part is when the mechanic bill came, he sent it off to the owner, he didn’t have to pay it himself. He actually got paid a nice salary, almost six figures for running this boat. It was a private person, he didn’t charter the boat out. He only used it maybe 30 days out of the year, and yet with boats, you got to use them all the time. So he had the use of a boat without the expense of a boat.

Brian Fricke:                    
So really just challenging people to think outside the box and not just limit their thinking to what their financial limitations might be.

Steve Wershing:             
Okay.

Julie Littlechild:               
So you find that being able to articulate that makes that clear for someone who’s in a very broad market. With retirees a lot of advisors would be focusing on investments and making sure you’ve got enough money. It sounds like you’re taking a slightly different approach. And what is it about that that you finding really resonates with people?

Brian Fricke:                    
I think it’s just that. There’s no shortage of a financial advisors targeting retirees and it seems like everybody has pretty much the same story. My investment strategy, strategic asset allocation, modern portfolio theory, establish your goals. Everybody does that and we all tend to look alike after a while. So I show up with a book and a fairly, I’ve been told, catchy book cover, book title, and then folks go to our website and they see a picture of me surfing, which is different than most financial advisor websites. It just goes from there.

Brian Fricke:                    
When the book first came out, to get clients connected and engaged, we had a contest and it was a picture contest. So send us a picture. We had bandanas made with the title of the book because I figured a lot of people aren’t going to travel lugging a book around but they’ll carry a bandana with them. So take a picture with you proudly displaying your bandana, send us a picture with a short story, and then we’ll pick a winner for the best story and they’ll get the use of a yacht for an afternoon because I had a connection to a guy that had access to a yacht.

Julie Littlechild:               
That’s awesome.

Steve Wershing:             
That’s really cool. I love that approach too. I love the fact that you put yourself on your website surfing because you’re sort of the embodiment of that, doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, the way you want to do it, so you show people how you can blend that in even before you retire.

Brian Fricke:                    
Yes, exactly. And yeah, I try to walk the talk, to some extent anyway.

Steve Wershing:             
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:               
I think it’s a really important point actually because we talked to a lot of advisors who do have some clarity of messaging, but if you go to the website, it can start to look like everyone else and the fact that you have aligned not only your lifestyle, so it’s authentic, but the imagery on your site as well because you could authentically be doing all that, but we could still come to your website and find you in a suit in a corner office or something and it might not align. I think that the whole concept of alignment really comes into play here.

Brian Fricke:                    
Yeah. And I know I’ll violate most. I’ve seen other advisors to advisors say, “Dress for success,” and all that good stuff. I probably would just make them cringe. I own one suit and I’ve worn it once, soon to be twice in the last ten years.

Julie Littlechild:               
That was a funeral? [inaudible 00:11:36].

Brian Fricke:                    
Actually, it was a wedding, my son’s wedding.

Julie Littlechild:               
Oh, there you go. Okay.

Steve Wershing:             
There you go.

Brian Fricke:                    

But he didn’t make me wear a tie.

Steve Wershing:             
Yeah. And I love that about how you do that. You wear Hawaiian shirts, really high-end, beautiful Hawaiian shirts, but Hawaiian shirts to the office when you meet clients and that’s just exactly what the guy on the cover of your book is wearing in the hammock.

Brian Fricke:                    
And it’s also kind of the subtitle of the book. Do what you want when you want. I really don’t want to wear a tie. I really don’t want to wear a coat jacket, so I’m not going to.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah. I’m sort of interested, and I don’t know if you’ve thought about it this way, but the shift from worry free to incredible. Underlying that at the risk of over-analyzing, which I do by the way, it’s a shift from positioning from loss aversion to aspirational, like we’ll help you not worry versus… And there’s all this research on which is the best way to go so it’s interesting that your clients responded that they were more about the aspirational, ultimately, than loss aversion.

Brian Fricke:                    
Yeah. Yeah. And I did take that into account and was initially concerned when we made the switch, but I must say the clients that we’ve attracted since making the transition are the kind of client we enjoy working with and I would think our quality of client has improved since that.

Steve Wershing:             
So let’s go back a little bit. I’d like to know a little bit about your journey into financial advice because you did other things before that. Can you give a summary of the journey that took you into financial advice?

Brian Fricke:                    
Oh golly. Probably not the traditional path, if there is one. So my father died when I was 16, he was 42 sudden, heart attack, no advance warning. He and my mom operated a residential real estate brokerage firm, an ERA franchise, and I’m the oldest son so naturally it’s the oldest son’s job to take care of Mom now so, when I turned 18, I got my real estate license, I think at the time I was the youngest person to get my real estate license in the state of Florida, and immediately went to work selling homes with Mom in the real estate brokerage and quickly learned that I really didn’t like doing that.

Brian Fricke:                    
I met an investor who bought and sold like 10 homes from me, and got interested in investment real estate, and by my mid-twenties I had accumulated maybe 15 rental homes and then people started coming to me for financial advice. Then I had heard about this, this very new thing called financial planning. I opened up the phone book, there was no internet back then [inaudible 00:14:47]. Whoever was advertising in the phone book as a financial advisor, I contacted them and spoke with as many people as I could and got disillusioned very quickly. Back then it was the tax shelter product salesperson or the insurance salesperson and neither one fit my definition of true financial planning so I opened my own firm. And here we are today.

Steve Wershing:             
That’s interesting. So how did you come to what your definition of financial planning was so that you could see that contrast between what they were and what you were envisioning?

Brian Fricke:                    
After my father passed away, a year or two later, I discovered that Dad had purchased a $50,000 whole life insurance policy from the agent affiliated with our church, and for the same premium he could had $1 million term insurance policy. And I don’t need to tell you which policy my mom would’ve preferred to have.

Steve Wershing:             
Right.

Brian Fricke:                    
And that was a life changing decision.

Julie Littlechild:               
Wow. Yeah.

Brian Fricke:                    
That really was the catalyst that got me interested. I knew people needed to make smart choices in all areas of their finances. Insurance is a piece but it’s not the whole pie, it’s just a piece of the pie or puzzle. Same thing with investments, taxes, estate planning, and everything else that goes into a well-rounded financial plan.

Steve Wershing:             
Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Julie Littlechild:               
And so I’d love to come back to some of the client experience items that we… We started talking about helping people open up about possibility, I’m paraphrasing here, but open up about the possibilities in their lives. I’d love to know if you found particular questions or ways of doing that particularly helpful. We’ve talked about your website, we’ve talked about the dress code. So there are things that are, in my mind, all part of the client experience. Are there other aspects of the service that you deliver, or the client experience that you deliver, that really supports this overall positioning that you’ve got for the business?

Brian Fricke:                    
Yeah. What I find is most people come to us with prepared answers. They kind of sort of know what they want in terms of a cashflow in retirement. Everybody wants to have a travel budget or extra money for travel and sometimes there’s a second home or an RV or a boat in the mix and that’s where it stops. So one of the questions we asked people is just, “Imagine for a moment you won the winning lotto ticket and money was no longer an issue the rest of your life, how would life change? What would you do? What would be different?” Just to try to get them to open up. Because I think most of us kind of suppress some dreams, we don’t allow some of our dreams to become goals because subconsciously we just don’t think they’re attainable.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah. I know that people’s past has an enormous amount to do with that as well. If you grew up in a certain environment or certain family where that kind of dreaming wasn’t the MO of the household, that carries through, right?

Brian Fricke:                    
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:               
And so you’ve got some questions. Are there other elements of what you deliver that you think really supports this particular incredible retirement process or is it that it’s not different on the client experience side but much different in terms of your positioning and the way you speak about the goals with your clients?

Brian Fricke:                    
I think maybe it’s more the latter, just the way we position ourselves and speak to and with our clients. I don’t know if it’s anything extraordinarily unique as far as the client experience. This is just from me observing clients over the years. I’m still surprised to learn that financial advisors, planners, are printing plans. We stopped doing printed plans years and years and years ago and now we use MoneyGuidePro, we use what’s called the Play Zone within MoneyGuidePro where it’s interactive with clients. Our clients really enjoy that, and we send them a link and we let them play afterwards. We find that much more engaging with clients than asking them to page through a 20, 30, 60 page document that they’re just going to take home and put on the shelf and let it collect dust.

Julie Littlechild:               
Let me ask you about, because you’ve just reminded me of something you often hear about with the age of clients and are they using technology? You just made me think of going down that path, which I find interesting. If you are talking to clients about an incredible retirement, does that assume I’m thinking about retirement or are people attracted to that who might be in their forties or fifties?

Brian Fricke:                    
I can’t speak too much to folks in their forties because a lot of our marketing and our website and our messaging lets people know that our sweet spot are folks 50 plus years of age, retirement’s the primary focus, college funding is… those years have passed them by.

Julie Littlechild:               
Right, right. Okay. And so you’ve drawn a line in the sand and you say, “This is who we work with.” Has it always been that way?

Brian Fricke:                    
No, not always. Just starting out, probably like any other new business owner, if you can fog a mirror, you can be a client. One of my first clients was a retired aerospace engineer from a large defense contractor in central Florida. He and his wife did everything the right way. They paid the mortgage off on the house, 30 years of mortgage payments, put four kids through college, kids graduated debt-free. They never did much for themselves while he was working. He had finally retired, had a modest pension, a modest 401k, but they were acting like kids in a candy store, just excited about what the future had in store, and they never got to do anything.

Brian Fricke:                    
His wife was, shortly after he retired, diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He became her full-time caregiver and 18 months later she passed away. And as you can tell, that situation has stuck with me. Golly, what did they miss out on doing? What could they have done that they put off because they told themselves, “We’ll do this later.” And, and for them later never came.

Julie Littlechild:               
Right.

Steve Wershing:             
Yeah.

Brian Fricke:                    
So some of our clients are surprised when I tell them in their client review, “Hey, when you take the trip overseas, go first-class not coach. Who cares what the cost is. The benefits will far outweigh the cost.”

Steve Wershing:             
That’s right. When we talk about what things you’ve incorporated into your experience to reinforce that message, what kinds of things do you have in your client communication strategy that help reinforce that? How often do you reach out to clients? What kinds of things do you distribute to clients in terms of information, that kind of thing?

Brian Fricke:                    
So with clients, clients receive a weekly video, a two to three minute video, they receive a monthly newsletter, our associate advisor makes periodic check in calls, touch calls, just to see if anything’s going on between review meetings, a monthly print newsletter, ink on paper, received in the mailbox.

Steve Wershing:             
Okay. Interesting. So there’s an interesting juxtaposition there about the technology they like to embrace and the technology they don’t embrace. Tell me a little bit about the videos. What kinds of things do you talk about there? And if you could also tell us a little bit about what goes into making them, because we talk with a lot of advisers who like the idea of video but they’re really intimidated by it. They hesitate in doing it because they’re concerned about how much effort it’s going to take, how much expense it’s going to take. Can you tell us a little bit about what you put together in that regard and the process of putting them out?

Brian Fricke:                    
Yeah. So for the weekly videos, the technology we use is, for recording, we use an iPhone 10 or an iPhone X with a-

Julie Littlechild:               [crosstalk 00:24:33] That’s all you need, right?

Brian Fricke:                    
-with a wired microphone and the wire is, I don’t know, 10 feet longer or whatever, we get some distance, and there’s a couple of LED lights. I’ve learned more about lighting than I ever cared to, to make things look halfway decent. Yeah, that’s our technology. Well, I take that back. I also do a… What do you call it? Teleprompter. So I’ve got an iPad that I’ve turned into a teleprompter. I actually script out the video ahead of time. I’m just the type of person it’ll get rid of a lot of my ums and ahs. I want to make sure I get the message across in a compact period of time. I shoot for about a three minute video, sometimes they’re a little bit less. I think the longest ones maybe been five minutes.

Steve Wershing:             
And what are the topics typically?

Brian Fricke:                    
The topics I try to make them timely so we’re just listening to the questions the clients are asking, questions that are coming up in review meetings, emails, we get stuff that all advisors come across, whatever the news media is talking about. I tend to, and I’ll dictate a rough draft, I’ve got dictation app on my cell phone, so whenever I think of a topic I’ll dictate a rough draft of a script and then I’ll go back and edit that. I just try and have a library of scripts that I can pull from, then when we actually record, we record usually four or five weeks, four or five videos at a time.

Steve Wershing:             
Oh, okay.

Julie Littlechild:               
Oh, okay.

Steve Wershing:             
Oh, interesting. Okay.

Brian Fricke:                    
Insider secrets, so I bring four or five shirts to the office and I change shirts [crosstalk 00:26:35].

Julie Littlechild:               
You’re obviously in board shorts or something if you really want to live the message. We should throw some in the show notes, put some links to those teleprompter technologies. I’ve used them. It feels like this hidden secret. You can have them on an iPhone, you can have them on the iPad. They’re really good.

Brian Fricke:                    
Yeah. Yeah. For me, that’s been a huge help.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah.

Steve Wershing:             
Interesting. One of the things that I love about you is that you’re always willing to experiment with marketing ideas and try out new things. Can you tell us about some of the more notable successes and failures from a marketing standpoint that you’ve tried over the course of years?

Brian Fricke:                    
Currently, and most recently, I’m actually sending out daily emails to our prospect list, not to our clients, but to our prospect list. And there’s always a call to action to the email and the email call to action is always schedule a call, and there’s a link in the email to do an electronic calendar to schedule a call. The emails are written by a professional copywriter so that they’re engaging and entertaining, entertaining more so than informative. And my idea behind that, I don’t expect anybody to open every single email every single day but I want top of mind awareness so that, when they’re thinking about an issue with money or finance, they’ve got my email coming in and they don’t hurt my feelings if they don’t read the email and if they don’t want to get it hit the unsubscribe button.

Brian Fricke:                    
That’s one of the newer things. The other thing that we’re just putting the finishing touches on, clients from our client advisory board, one of the things we’ve learned is they really like community with each other. So we’re creating a private client Facebook group page, something like that. I’m having one of my sons put it together, I don’t even know all the terms and whatever. [crosstalk 00:28:45] But the idea is clients can ask each other questions, share pictures, get advice from each other. What’s it like to spend a month in an RV? Whatever’s on their mind.

Brian Fricke:                    
And then some of the stuff that hasn’t worked, for me anyway, is hiring a mailing service to buy five or 10,000 names on a mailing list and bribe them to come to a steak dinner and spend 15, 20,000, whatever it is. I haven’t done those in years. But because of the marketing we do, I have my own internal house list. I’ve got a list of probably 1200 people. I have their names, their mailing address, and their email address. So if I was ever motivated, right now I’m not, but if I was ever motivated to do a live seminar, I wouldn’t buy a mailing list, I would just mail to my 1200 person list. I probably would get a higher attendance than one of these outfits where you got to mail to 10,000 strange strangers and bribe them with a steak.

Julie Littlechild:               
And how did you grow that list? So what were the things that contributed to that?

Brian Fricke:                    
So we have our monthly a print newsletter, we’re always telling recipients if they have friends or family that want to get a copy of the newsletter, there’s opportunities for that.

Julie Littlechild:               
Okay.

Brian Fricke:                    
When people subscribe to our weekly videos, we’ll give them an invitation to get the newsletter. Occasionally when I speak, we’re just giving people the opportunity to get the newsletter.

Julie Littlechild:               
Okay, Great.

Brian Fricke:                    
Anytime somebody orders a book from the website they go on the newsletter list.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah.

Steve Wershing:             
How many people do the videos go out to every week?

Brian Fricke:                    
You know, I haven’t looked in a while. I’m such a horrible marketer. The email list is over 800, the average views are maybe 70 to 80, and then sometimes, if I’m newsjacking something, it can go… I think my biggest one has been 5 or 6,000 views.

Steve Wershing:             
Oh wow.

Julie Littlechild:               
You can’t be that bad a marketer if you know the term newsjacking. I’m just [crosstalk 00:31:15].

Steve Wershing:             
Right, exactly.

Julie Littlechild:               
You’re reading the right books.

Steve Wershing:             
What role, Brian, do referrals play in your business development efforts?

Brian Fricke:                    
For me the Holy Grail is to always receive that unsolicited referral, somebody recommended us, a client or what have you, because they’re always the highest quality client. The sales cycle, if you will, is always the shortest. Oftentimes we’re not competing with anybody, they’re just going on the recommendation of their friends. We’re always looking for ways to encourage referrals without the dreaded, “I get paid in two ways,” or all that kind of stuff.

Julie Littlechild:               
Some of us are still old enough to remember that phrase.

Steve Wershing:             
I had an advisor say that to me last week so…

Julie Littlechild:               
Really? Wow. It’s still circulating.

Steve Wershing:             
It’s still out there.

Julie Littlechild:               
Awesome.

Steve Wershing:             
Still out there. Yeah, exactly.

Brian Fricke:                    
I do find it’s much easier for clients to refer when they know they can just offer a copy of the book and I don’t feel like they’re turning them into a sales person, hungry to make a sale type of thing.

Steve Wershing:             
Yeah. Yep.

Julie Littlechild:               
Which feeds into a lot of, excuse me, what we hear. You don’t have to have written a book, but just the idea of having content that’s shareable probably falls into that same category, whether it’s a blog or what have you.

Brian Fricke:                    
But see in looking back, I’m so happy, so thankful I took the time and went through the struggle of getting a book pulled together because I turned the book into 50 different blog posts. I didn’t but my book publisher did.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah.

Brian Fricke:                    
So if you’ve got a book, turn it into blog posts, it becomes your business card, it becomes your better than a free report. What do they call it? Lead magnet.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah.

Brian Fricke:                    
To get contact information. And then with my book, I chose to hybrid publish. So I own the content, I own the rights to the book. I don’t know if I mentioned this to you, Steve. I am a contributing author to another book, Pre And Post Retirement Planning For Librarians.

Julie Littlechild:               
Now there is a niche.

Brian Fricke:                    
There’s a target market.

Steve Wershing:             
Yeah, right?

Julie Littlechild:               
Wow.

Brian Fricke:                    
The editor of the book, I don’t know how she found me, but she sent me an email, “Hey, I’m putting together a book and everybody is going to contribute a chapter. If you’re interested, send me three ideas for a book chapter.” So I just sent her what I thought would be the three most interesting chapters out of my book. She said, “Yeah, I like this one.” And I said, “Great. It’s a chapter out of my book.” And that’s when I learned about ownership of content. So I was thankful that I own my content.

Julie Littlechild:               
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Steve Wershing:             
Yeah, that’s great. That’s very cool. Brian, we’re coming up on time here, but if you were going to make a recommendation to advisors about what kinds of things they should be thinking about in terms of their own marketing, what would be your top recommendation or two?

Brian Fricke:                    
Two thoughts. The first would be market well and then you don’t have to sell, just market yourself so you automatically attract, you magnetically attract, the type of clientele you serve best, and then show up like no one else. Don’t be afraid to be different. People like that, they respond to that. And yes, you’ll turn some people off and those are the people that you don’t want and don’t worry about that.

Steve Wershing:             
That’s great. That’s excellent.

Julie Littlechild:               
Show up like no one else. I like that.

Steve Wershing:             
That’s right. Well, Brian, thanks so much for joining us. There was a lot of good stuff here and I appreciate your taking some time with us.

Brian Fricke:                    
My pleasure. I had fun.

Julie Littlechild:               
Absolutely.

Steve Wershing:             
Thanks. Take care.

Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really does help. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferrable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.