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Steve Wershing:       
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing, and on this episode, we talk with Josh Patrick, founding principle of Stage 2 Planning Partners, and the man behind AskJoshPatrick.com. Josh has something of a distinction among financial planning practitioners, in that he’s run other businesses in different industries before he came to financial advice.

We have a great conversation about what it means to run a successful financial advisory business. We talk about things like plans versus planning. We talk about how to understand where the real value lies in your business. We talk about the fact that Josh is a niche-aholic, and why it’s important to know who you’re meant to serve. We talk about branding individual advisors versus branding your advisory firm. Why it’s important to become irrelevant in your firm, and the five things you need to do to have a sustainable business. It’s a great conversation with a lot of tips on how to run a more successful advisory business. So, without further ado, here’s Josh Patrick.

So, Josh, welcome to the show. We’re tremendously pleased to have you here.

Josh Patrick:
Thanks, it’s a thrill to be with you folks today.

Steve Wershing:
Josh, part of what’s interesting about you is your background, and that financial services was not your first career and, in fact, even now, you’ve got a career that’s sort of separate from that. Can you sort of tell us how you got here?

Josh Patrick:
Sure. I was going to college, thought I was going to be a lawyer, and my senior year I actually started looking at what lawyers really do in life, and said, you know, I don’t think I’d be really happy having to defend guilty people. I felt that was probably a bad choice for me, and I was going to Boston University at that time, had a bunch of job offers at BU, and I also had a chance to join the family business. And, like many people joining family businesses, it was the path of least resistance. And that’s what I ended up doing. So, my first 20 years in business, I joined the family business, bought part of it from my father, built that up, ended up buying his piece of the business back about 15 years later, and after 20 years I figured out that the vending business was one of the two or three worst industries in the United States.

Julie Littlechild:
Congratulations on choosing that.

Steve Wershing:
Yes, right, nice. Nice work.

Josh Patrick:
Yes, that was a great choice, and I decided it was probably time to sell, and luckily, I found a buyer for us. And after I sold, I said, okay, there’s one of three things I can do. I could go into life insurance business because I like consultative selling, and my experience with our life insurance agents was they did a really good job of that. I could have opened a software company, because I was really kind of a tech savvy guy, and I liked it, but I didn’t know how to program and didn’t want to learn. Or, I could have done public speaking because I had been doing a lot of that at that point at the end of my vending career, but again, I didn’t want to be on the road 100 days a year. So, I said, well, life insurance sounds good, I like it, let’s give it a shot. I started working for a large life insurance company, and lo and behold, I found out that when you work for a life insurance company, they want you to sell life insurance.

Steve Wershing:
How about that? Who would’ve thought it?

Josh Patrick:
Yeah, but my natural market was private business owners, and when you’re working with private business owners, life insurance is important, but it doesn’t solve even 3% of the issues they have. So, I left the life insurance company, opened my own wealth management firm, joined Partners Financial, which was an insurance producer group, they had just started a broker dealer which became NFP Securities, is now Kestra, did that for 20 years, and then last fall, we decided it was time for us to leave the commissioned world, move into the fee-only world, and we formed our own RIA. And while I’ve been doing this, I also have started a sister company called Ask Josh Patrick, where I do coaching, mentoring, for private business owners on how to create a sustainable business. I sort of have two tracks that I run on, and I spend a lot of time in the sustainable business world of how you create an economically and personally sustainable business. And we can get into the five things you need to do if you want to. But, that’s how I got to where I am.

Julie Littlechild:
I’d love to get those five things, for sure, but I was just wondering, how connected are those two businesses, or are they? Do you find yourself doing a lot of consulting and coaching for your business owner clients who are part of the wealth management firm?

Josh Patrick:
No. As a matter of fact, I sort of separate that. We charge a pretty good fee for the consulting side of the business, and the reason we charge a good fee is because it’s completely optional whether people choose me as an investment manager, and the folks who have been using me on that side of the world pretty much don’t want to use me as an investment manager, they just want completely independent advice. And the only way they believe they get that is by paying me a fee.

Steve Wershing:
And is that financial advice or do you mean the management consulting and coaching type stuff?

Josh Patrick:
Yes, both.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. So, is it common that the business owners that you mentor and coach, in terms of developing their business, also utilize you for a financial plan?

Josh Patrick:
You know, I have a funny feeling, Steve, I don’t know if I’ve talked with you about this, about financial plans. I hate a financial plan, I think they’re a waste of time. I love financial planning. So, the answer to your question, they use me for financial planning, I have never given any of them a financial plan.

Steve Wershing:
Oh, I see, okay.

Josh Patrick:
We can get into—I actually have an issue with planning, versus plans in general.

Julie Littlechild:
Yes, it would be interesting to get your take on that.

Josh Patrick:
Well, very simply, I think planning, which is a fluid activity, is a really important activity, and it’s something we need to be doing our entire business career, or actually, just life, as far as I’m concerned. The problem with doing a plan is that you get this big, long document and you think you’re done. You know, the first place I found this was in the exit planning world. I spent a lot of time working with the Business Enterprise Institute and was one of the early guys on that side of the world, and what happened is, you would put together these 25, 30, 40-page exit plans, they’d sit on the shelf and nothing happened. And the real problem with that is, whatever we wrote down in the plan was wrong, it would likely have to be completely revised within three to four years.

So, instead of writing a really long plan, what I’ve been doing is working what I call client facing stuff, where we do the planning process with the client, and the client facing tool, we use Money Guide Pro and we’re testing out Advisor right now on the financial planning side, and I use a tool called Core Value on the business planning side and another tool which is called AVI for Values Work, and we do that with the client looking at the same computer screen, helping us make adjustments as we go along.

I think it’s crucially important that we honor our clients as experts in their lives, and experts at what they want to do. And, in my opinion, for me to sit along and write this plan and then present it for somebody is presumptuous, because the client hasn’t been part of the solution. Yes, I’m an expert at what I do, but my clients have expertise and we need to work in a collaborative basis. I’m very involved in the Purposeful Planning Institute, which is John A. Warnick’s thing, and the problem with collaboration is we don’t start with our clients. We come in saying here’s what you need to do. Well, instead, doesn’t it make more sense to ask our clients what’s important for them and dig down in the whys and then go back and revisit that what to make sure it’s the right thing to be doing?

Steve Wershing:
So, let me go back a little bit and learn more about the genesis of this. You can get onto a computer and work collaboratively with a client and, you know, use their input to adjust projections and those kinds of things, because now we have that kind of technology, but you’ve been doing this for a while and you were doing this before we had those online collaborative tools. How did you take that approach before we had a Money Guide Pro or an Advisor or anything like that?

Josh Patrick:
I actually have a tool I call the four boxes of financial independence, which is a yellow pad financial planning tool which I invented for business owners. The reason I invented this was, most business owners think their business is going to get them to retirement by itself. The truth is, for less than 1/10 of 1% of the businesses in this country, that’s true. So, I needed a way to sort of knock some sense into the heads of the private business owners I work with, and say hey, you need investment real estate, you need a qualified plan. You don’t need the stuff for diversification although you do, what you really need it for, if you don’t do it, you’re never going to be able to stop running your business.

There’s a thing I call, which I think I invented the term, I’m not sure, but it’s called Perma-five. And, Perma-five is when you go to a business owner or anybody for that matter, and you say, when do you want to do something, and they say five years from now. And you go back two years from now and again, it’s five years.

Julie Littlechild:
I’m only laughing because it’s true, Josh.

Josh Patrick:
It’s absolutely true. And I needed a way to get Perma-five out of the conversation. Because what I learned is when someone says five years out, that’s always a key for me that they know, the person I’m talking to knows they need to do something, they just don’t know what it is, and they believe whatever it is is going to magically appear and reveal itself in the next five years. So, I would just bring out my legal pad and draw four boxes on it, and box 1 would be the business, box 2 is qualified plans, box 3 is investment real estate they probably own, and box 4 was other investments. And I’d say, let’s take a look at all these assets and see what they actually produce in income when you start working. And it would generally prove to the business owner they need to do something, if they ever wanted to retire. So, financial planning does not have to be complicated. The problem with smart people is we take simple things and we make them way more complicated than they need to be.

Steve Wershing:
Well, and to some extent that’s, I suppose, because we want to have something that we feel justifies paying for our expertise, right? We feel like we have to have something impressive if we’re going to ask people for big fees when, in reality, what you’re doing with people, which is bringing your expertise to the table, is really where the value is generated, right?

Josh Patrick:
Yes. It’s not the written document that people value. That’s a feature, it’s not a benefit.

Steve Wershing:
Exactly.

Josh Patrick:
And it’s a feature most people don’t even care about. I remember when I first started doing strategic planning in my company. My first strategic business plan was 60 pages long. Would you like to know how many people read the plan?

Julie Littlechild:
Did you?

Steve Wershing:
Yes, right, including you?

Josh Patrick:
Zero, including me. I wrote it, it went up on a shelf, and there it is. My last year in business, would you like to know how long our strategic plan was?

Julie Littlechild:
A page?

Steve Wershing:
Yes, a page?

Josh Patrick:
It was four pages. And actually, it became the genesis of a thing we call four-tiered budgeting, where, if you look at four things, you know what you need to do for your next year. Again, let’s take the complicated stuff and simplify it. Let’s not take the simple stuff and complicate it.

Julie Littlechild:
I love it.

Steve Wershing:
So, we were talking about, we want to eventually get around to how does an advisor get their clients talking about them and spreading the word to other folks. I think, one of the messages, it sounds like, is that you know, understand where the value actually comes from and what you’re doing, and that it’s not selling financial planning by the pound, but it’s being cognizant of the client’s expertise in their own life and bringing your expertise to helping them sort through that stuff. Is that right?

Josh Patrick:
Yes. And Steve, you know that I’m a niche-a-holic. I refer to myself as a niche-a-holic a lot.

Steve Wershing:
That’s what I was going to get to next.

Josh Patrick:
And what that really comes from is, I have deep expertise in what makes a private business successful. I have no expertise in working with a widow who has just lost her husband, so I need to be able to say “No” to the widow and say “Yes” to the private business owner. Because I can help a private business owner with very, very little effort on my side. I know enough where I’ve dealt with at least 500 businesses in my career, and as a result, there’s themes that run through this stuff. And, by looking at these themes, it’s relatively easy for me to take a look at a private business and say, if you do this, this, and this, here’s your results you’re going to get, because I’ve done it a zillion times already. I can’t do that with a widow. I would not be serving a widow nearly as well as I serve a private business owner. You know, as my buddy Michael Port likes to say, it’s really important to know who we’re meant to serve. You can only do that by becoming a niche-a-holic.

Steve Wershing:
So, let’s dig into that a little bit, because it seems like that would be a really good litmus test for whether or not you’ve got it right. You know, the ability to say, look, I have a deep expertise in—and then fill in the blank. And then, what we should do is sort of build some bumpers around that so that if you say I have a deep expertise in asset allocation or financial planning, you’re really not saying anything. But you need to be able to say something germane to the client, that I have a deep expertise in, and that would both be persuasive to the client and help you focus on the right thing, right?

Josh Patrick:
Yes. And we also have to realize as an industry, say if you have a deep expertise in asset allocation, you’re going to be commoditized out of the business. Because robo-advisors, there’s lots of ways, artificial intelligence is going to make that part of our business gone. It’s not an if, it’s a when. If we don’t have something that the client really values, that artificial intelligence isn’t going to be help with, we’re probably going to have a difficult time maintaining our position in the industry.

Julie Littlechild:
I find interesting in the way that you phrase this, which I haven’t necessarily heard before, we all, a lot of advisors will talk about a niche they serve, or expertise they have. Not a majority, but many. But it’s almost as if you’re equally confident that you’re not the person for other niche markets, and in that, I don’t know if you said that as intentionally as I heard it, but it’s about being able with confidence to say I’m just not the right person for everybody else, and frankly it’s in the best interest of that person that they find someone who is an expert in that. Is that fair?

Josh Patrick:
Absolutely. There’s two pieces there that you hit on. One is the word “no”. The other is the principle of behavioral economics which is loss aversion. Let’s talk about “no” first because it’s actually a word I wish people would use a lot more in life. If you don’t learn to say “no”, you can’t say “yes”. Let me explain that for a second, because it sounds sort of silly. If you can’t say “no” to the wrong people, you’re not going to have the time or capacity to say yes to the right person. And when you’re saying “no” (sic) to the wrong person, you’re spending an incredible amount of time and effort trying to make that person happy, and you’re never likely to do that. But when you’re saying “yes” to the right person, it’s easy. You don’t have to work very hard. And I’m an incredibly lazy person, and I just don’t want to work that hard. So, I want to only work with people who I can actually do something useful for. And, as a result, I’m able to spend time learning even more so I become even more valuable for the people who I’m meant to serve, which are private business owners that have between five and 200 employees in the blue-collar world.

Steve Wershing:
And I think I, let me sort of refine that a little bit, Josh. I think the inability to say “no” doesn’t mean that you can’t say “yes”, but it makes your “yes” less meaningful. If you say “yes” to everything, then you’re not really bringing anything to the table, but if you have a very clear and specific “yes”, then that “yes” becomes more compelling, or I may just be going down a semantic rabbit hole but…

Josh Patrick:
No, that’s absolutely true.

Julie Littlechild:
I was just saying, maybe I can just sort of pickup on that then, and talk to us a bit about then how you are positioning the work that you do when you do come across someone. Or how do you position yourself to the world, I suppose, to attract exactly the right kinds of clients?

Josh Patrick:
I am a prolific writer, podcaster myself. I do videos, I’ve done a bunch of public speaking at business conferences. I used to be a blogger for the New York Times, I wrote in their small business blog. I’ve written for Inc, I’ve written for Forbes, I’ve written for American Express, besides writing for my own places, and as a result I’m known as a thought leader. If you do any work with me, I have a couple of audio CDs that I put together that I give away free. One is on how to create a sustainable business. The other is why financial planning for private business owners is crucial and needs to be the first step before you ever think about leaving your business. So, I have got lots of ways for people to figure out I know what I’m talking about. My websites are pretty much authority-based. Ask Josh Patrick is definitely around how to create sustainable business. Our purpose at Stage 2 Planning, which is our wealth management firm, is to help make our clients’ lives better. You know, my expertise is private business owners. I know the person in here, her expertise is working with divorcees. Another of her people here, his expertise is working with blue collar pre-retiree workers who are five or six years out through retirement, so we have different expertises but we are very clear about what those expertises are, as we’re talking to people.

Steve Wershing:
Can we pull that apart for a minute, because one of the things that I end up talking with advisors about a lot is branding, and the difference between branding a firm and branding an individual practice. So, this is one of those things that a lot of firms struggle with, you know, so some want to brand the firm as doing something in particular, you know, having a target market and a niche that they offer that target market, and then we’ve got firms like yours where you’ve got each person who has their brand because they’ve got their own target and their own niche. So how do you juggle between the individual brands and what does Stage 2 stand for, if everybody has a different focus?

Josh Patrick:
Well, our purpose is to help make our clients’ lives better. I mean that’s, you know, and the way we do that is through the different market segments that we serve. You know, Steve, that’s a really good question, and it’s one I continually am working on. One of the things that we’re playing around with right now is the world of online advertising is starting to attract people in the different market segments we serve, through different funnels and campaigns that we operate. And I’m just at the very beginning of that, I’m absolutely convinced that it’s some real opportunity there, and I’m working on that. But it’s not, we haven’t cracked the code for it yet. That’s for sure. I do think that most firms have multiple specialties they need to be talking about.

For example, I consult with a few other financial firms in the country, and literally all of them, which are ensemble practices, the firm itself can’t be an ensemble because the people in the firm have different specialties. One of the firms, one of the people works with widows. Another person works with engineers. Another person works on alternative investments. And they’ve got some very interesting things they do. And what we’re working on is helping them develop their own niches and being able to be found in the communities that they serve, which is really important, especially in the wealth management world.

Frankly, most wealth management firms are locally based. If you’re known as being the person for, say you’re down in Blacksburg, Virginia, and your specialty very easily down there could be working with faculty members at the university. And you need to know everything about the faculty members’ benefit package, how they work, what their thought process is, all the stuff that goes in there, then you become an expert and you’re known in that community. Another one of our clients is out in the Portland area, and one of the people there has become an expert on Intel. She knows everything about Intel engineers. She even helps them figure out when it’s time for them to leave Intel and move to another place because, frankly, if you’re in that world, what’s the most valuable asset you have? Your ability to earn money. And by the way, that’s something, I think, in the wealth management world, for a huge amount of people that we serve, we don’t pay any attention to because we don’t make money on it. I mean, that’s a big mistake.

Steve Wershing:
So I want to challenge you on this a little bit, Josh, because it seems like if you’re essentially working on personal branding, so that if you have a multi-practitioner firm you’ve got multiple brands going on because you’re telling the practitioners that they should become known as something first, it seems like it might dilute the potential branding power of the firm because then the firm stands for multiple things, one for each of the practitioners in it, but it also seems like you’re really setting yourself up for a succession issue. Because now, if I believe Ask Josh Patrick is the place I need to go to help me manage my small business and learn better how to be a businessman and then you at some point want to retire, well, once Josh Patrick is out of the picture, then Ask Josh Patrick, the value of that brand, kind of goes away, doesn’t it?

Josh Patrick:
Well, there’s a couple of points there. One is, yes, it is a difficult thing to do and you have to sort of brand your firm on, you know, I’m not sure that branding the firm makes as much sense as branding an individual. And yes, it does cause a challenge for succession. At the same time, when I look at the way wealth management businesses are transferred, it is the most ridiculous methodology I have ever seen from any business transfer in any industry, and I have looked at hundreds of industries over the years.

Our industry sells businesses for 35% down in cash, 65% in owner financing, and a lot of the time, and I’ve written about this a lot, my first three posts in the New York Times was the worst business transition I ever saw, and it was basically done by that, and this industry thinks that’s a good way to sell a business. A much better way to go, what I think, for most wealth management firms, and this is for the firms that probably have less than 300, 400, 500 million dollars in assets, and that’s the vast majority of the industry, is to do what I call the wind-down. A wind-down is where you say, I’m going to pay 80/20. I’m going to take 80% of my book and I’m going to find a really nice home for it, I’m going to keep 20% of my business, I’m going to work one day a week serving these groups, and I’ll probably make more money when I do that than I made having my entire firm. And, I have no risk. And, I like what I do, it keeps me involved.

I will tell you that—in fact I’m going through this with a client right now in this industry, is that when you leave the business, you’re going to have seller’s remorse. And that’s true across all industries, not just the wealth management business. The only person I’ve ever met who didn’t have seller’s remorse from selling a business, including me, was my father. The only reason he didn’t have seller’s remorse was because he was mourning that my mother had died and he decided he had to leave the business at that time. So, he didn’t have seller’s remorse, but he was mourning.

Steve Wershing:
Two things pop to mind. One, Julie, that sounds like something that would be interesting to talk with you about, the implications of that on Absolute Engagement. On the one hand you’re talking about gradually focusing your business on that thing that motivates you and inspires you, but it would be interesting to look at a separate direction of saying, instead of focusing it gradually, just sell 80% of it off and keep the 20% that kicks you out of bed in the morning.

Julie Littlechild:
Sometimes that’s the right way. It depends on the person too and their own internal things that are going on.

Steve Wershing:
The other thing I’ll say, Josh, is that this crazy succession strategy that most wealth advisors go through, I think, is a function of, or the dysfunction of the business model. What we see with the bigger firms that are acquiring other firms is that they go from a valuation of 2X to a valuation of 6X and the people who run those businesses, because they’re running them like businesses and not like practices, have a lot fewer problems in terms of building equity, succession planning, those kinds of things, because it’s not all about them, right? Does that make sense?

Josh Patrick:
Yeah absolutely. One of the five things you need to do if you want to create a sustainable business – and by the way, a sustainable business is a business somebody else would want to own. That’s my definition of it. One of the five things you need to do is make yourself operationally irrelevant. It’s the most difficult thing to do in the wealth management business. It can be done, it’s just really difficult.

Julie Littlechild:
Josh, you’ve referred to the five things, could you just give us a quick list of those five now?

Josh Patrick:
Yeah, sure. The first thing is, and this is where you need to start and most people resist this, is on values and mission. First, you have to know what your personal values are and then you need to morph those personal values into business values. A values-based business knows what they are doing. All businesses have values, they are either explicitly said or implicitly run. I think it’s much better to explicitly read. From the values you create a mission statement. The mission statement has to be ten words or less and can be answered with a yes or no.

For example, in Ask Josh Patrick, my mission is to help successful business become personally and economically sustainable. And Stage 2 Planning is to help our clients have a better life. Those are not radical statements, but it gets something up for me to – I’m either doing it or I’m not doing it and if I’m not doing it, then you should fire me. If I am doing it, you should stay with me. That’s number one.

Number two is you want to become operationally irrelevant. What that means is you want to make sure you’re not involved in the day to day operations of the business. Number three is you want to have a recurring revenue source. In the wealth management world, that’s the strongest piece of this business, is that we have the best recurring revenue model I’ve ever seen in any business. Whether we have contracts or we don’t have contracts, clients stay with us for a long period of time and if we’re working on an assets-under-management model we have a recurring revenue every year. Because the stock market has generally gone up forever, we get a price increase with doing nothing, which is unbelievable.

The fourth thing you need to do is you need to systematize your business. Now, as owners of businesses we generally hate systems, but our people love them because they want to know what they need to do to be successful and to do their job well. And without systems, there’s no way for people to know what they’re supposed to be doing. I’m a big W. Edwards Deming fan, he’s the father of quality control or lean manufacturing, whatever you want to call it. I’ve been using his stuff for over 35 years now and he will tell you that systems are the breakfast of champions, without it you can’t have a great business.

The final thing is your business has to make enough money to be successful. Most businesses in the United States are not profitable enough to be sustainable. They provide a nice lifestyle for the owner, but if you can’t go past that your business is not saleable and nobody is going to want to own it. There are four pieces to profitability. There’s having a good lifestyle for the owner of the business. There’s having the ability to put away an emergency fund with six months to a year’s worth of operating expenses. Bill Gates always wanted two years put aside. The third thing is to have enough money for growth because no bank is going to finance 100% of your growth. The fourth thing is to have enough money being made so you can save money for retirement because your business is not going to get you there all by itself.

If you do those five things, and it’s really pretty simple, you’ve done what it takes to create an economically and personally sustainable business that somebody would want to own, which I call sale ready, even if you don’t want to sell.

Julie Littlechild:
When you look at those things, and I don’t know if you can draw an immediate connection, but we’re talking about becoming referable here. What components of that, if not the entire process, do you think contributes to helping advisors become more referable?

Josh Patrick:
I think becoming referable, is becoming very competent at what you do. Those five things really don’t talk about excellence, but I think excellence in business is table steaks. If you’re not really good at what your business does, your business won’t exist for a long period of time. A lot of people think that the purpose of a business is to make money. I live in the Peter Drucker school, the purpose of a business is to create a customer and you can’t create a customer unless you have a really good product that you sell.

Julie Littlechild:
Yup.

 Steve Wershing:
So, Josh everybody says that they’re really good at what they do. If you wanted to get people talking about you, how would you go beyond that and be more persuasive about it?

Josh Patrick:
You need to be able to exhibit your expertise. The way you can do that is through writing, you can do it through videos, you can do it through podcasting, you can do it through running seminars. But, I believe in this industry, if you’re going to exhibit your expertise, you have to become a thought leader. Becoming a thought leader takes some time and takes some effort. In the vending business, we would bring our food in and we would sample it. We would take people on tours and show them what we did and we would point out the differences that we had. We had some guarantees that nobody else in the industry would do, so it made it pretty easy. We would give people a free day of coffee if we ever ran out of twelve items that we promised to have in stock 100% of the time.

Now, as it turns out, this was a really easy thing for us to guarantee because what we realized is 90% of our sales came from those twelve items. By the way, it only took me 15 years to figure that out. I wouldn’t accuse myself of being a fast learner. When we finally did figure it out, we would put three rows of Snickers in the vending machine and take away the Jujubes. Frankly, Snickers, believe it or not, was 40% of our candy sales.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting.

Josh Patrick:
So, why would we ever want to be without Snickers.

Steve Wershing:
Right.

Josh Patrick:
What happened was, and this is one of these byproducts you get from doing this stuff when you go for excellence. We had a byproduct that was an internal value that nobody ever knew about. Before we did this, where we went to this guarantee of not running out of stuff, our average service every time the guy opened the door on the vending machine was $40, on a snack machine. After we did it, it went up to $120. Now, for productivity purposes, that was incredible. That was a byproduct that came out of saying, “Oh, here’s a guarantee we can make.” Everybody else in the industry thought I was completely nuts. But, it was something that we had figured out how to do. We only ever had one day where we gave away a free day of coffee.

Same thing in this industry. You have to say, how can you create – you know it’s pretty easy for me. If I have a one-on-one conversation with a private business owner, in less than ten minutes I can show them that I really know what I’m talking about. When I worked for the large insurance company, they would say to me, “Oh, just try to get a fifteen-minute conversation.” I looked at them like they were crazy, and said, “Are you kidding? I can’t get out of there in less than an hour.” The reason why I got all that time was I brought value to the conversation.

There’s a great sales book, I don’t know if you guys have read it, called The Challenger Sale? The author really talks about the way I’ve always sold, that the best sales people are not relationship builders, they’re challengers. They challenge their customers to think differently and they have a solution for the problem once they’ve done that.

Steve Wershing:
That’s interesting. Josh, I hate to cut you off there, but we are at our time. You and I have spoken at length before, I know you’ve talked with Julie and I could just go on all day with you because there’s so much great stuff that you have. I want to thank you for coming on today. If people want to find out more about Ask Josh Patrick and if they do want to engage you, because I know you specialize in the wealth management field, where can they find you and how can they get a hold of your stuff?

Josh Patrick:
The easiest place to find me is you can send me an email at jpatrick@askjoshpatrick.com. We have two websites, our consulting website is www.askjoshpatrick.com. Our wealth management site is www.stage2planning.com and the two is the number two. If somebody is interested in getting my one hour audio CD which is free, all they have to do is take out their smart phone and text the word “sustainable” to 44222 or go to askjoshpatrick.com and just click on the big maroon button on the Home page and you can give us your mailing address and I’ll mail out that CD to you.

Steve Wershing:
We will also put all those connections in the show notes. If you’re listening to this and you missed it or you’re driving and you can’t write it down, just come back to becomingreferable.com and we’ll have all of those links in there for you. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today, it’s been great to talk to you as always and some great information for advisors and I hope we get to talk with you again real soon.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, thank you.

Josh Patrick:
Thanks so much, I really appreciate the opportunity.

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 BecomingReferable.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.