Part 5 of 5 for my origin story
Full Transcripts
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
Yesterday I talked about part four of my origin story. Here’s part five and last part.
So I decided to become a financial advisor and its a rough journey. You would think everyone would want to be financially successful and I could be the one to help them with that but then I realized that people are very emotional about money and don’t always make the best decisions. It was not enough to tell people that they needed to save more money and they did it. Those were my favorite clients because they listened and then the benefit from the advice like save more, which is the majority of people need, which is save more. When I was with my company they gave me a salary for the first 9 months but I had to meet certain benchmarks to keep my salary going. I did pretty well in my first 6 months because I would just call all my friends in DC to see if they needed a financial advisor. A lot of them said no but I just needed a few to sign on. I was also given some clients to service them and see if I could do anything else for them. The company I worked for was a broker-dealer and they had different incentives if you sold more products. This all I knew what was available plus I didn’t really know how to conduct my meetings as a financial advisor so I just continued with what I knew.
I wasted a lot of money on marketing to try to get clients and I made mistakes on trying to convince to hire me as their coach. Every time I have trouble in life, I search for someone else that had my problem and I try to use their techniques for success to see if it works for me. I was continuing to listen to the Hal Elrod podcast and he talked about he wrote a book and started using it as a marketing tool. So I decided that I was going to write a book for myself. I was already reading a ton and listening to about 20 hours of podcasts a week and gaining so much valuable information. I knew people didn’t consume the amount of information for me and I decided to write a book that puts all those tips in one book to make it easy for folks. I thought it would be a help to give it potential clients and have them sign on with me. By listening to podcasts, I heard that selling books is a hard business to get into. The average bestseller only sells like 3000 books and that the author only makes like $3 off each book. So you would end up with $9000 dollars. Not enough to change a life. But If I could use the book to get a client that would pay me $2000 for a financial plan, then it would be worth it. It took me 20 months to write the book and publish it and it was a good experience. I also like that now if I were to pass away, I still have my principles written down in a book for others hear. I realized thanks to my public health degree, that you need to have money to invest, and you need to have a good job so you had a good salary, and to get that good job, you need to be a competent individual.
While I was going through this, I was starting to have issues with my previous spouse. She didn’t understand what we were getting into and she had family members that providing stress that a stable job with a stable income would help with. She also wanted to go overseas and do international development. I didn’t want to go overseas and wanted to work on my businesses. So we ended up getting a divorce. It was rough but it was probably one of the best things that happened because now I’ve been able to focus on my businesses full time without the stress of having to support somebody else but this happens in year 3, and that was a terrible year for business for me. I depleted my savings and was running on paycheck to paycheck. I even got a loan from my parents. In year four, I decided I didn’t want to work for the company anymore because the expenses were too high. About $4500/mo to stay in business.
I am so glad I found XY Financial Planning Association which focuses on a fee for service and no commissions. I researched this and discovered that I could do financial planning for $600/mo instead. There is a lot of regulations when it comes to becoming a broker-dealer and I didn’t want to deal with that either. There are less regulations on the fee for service model. I wish I would have known about this model beforehand to save me a lot of money but it was all a learning experience. I am going to take what I learned over the past four years and use turn Grow With Joe into a great company. By doing my own things, I have more freedom to target the audience I want. I feel better about my decision because now there is less conflict of interest on my part. To help more people to become better versions of themselves, this new business will help me do that. So my goal is to give you tips on how to grow yourself as a person to you can live the best version of your life. There are opportunities to succeed by listening to me, and I’m going to do my best to show you how to take advantage of them moving forward.
I want to thank you for listening to today’s episode.
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