Long before I became a Certified Financial Planner™ professional, I was a State Farm agent in Ridgway, PA. As the “new guy” in town, I had a big challenge to earn trust with my new clients. The agency I was assigned to had about 2,000 households, or families. That included about 2200 auto policies and about 1200 fire policies (homes, rental properties, business policies).
Pennsyvania had an interesting new “Tort Law” provision that impacted auto insurance. In this short video I share the story of how my small team of insurance professionals used this mandatory insurance provision to help our clients save money while building better protection for their families. The work we did on our end was monumental, definitely no easy task. In the end, we earned our clients’ trust and we were able to sell a wide range of financial products to our clients as a result of the trust we earned in the course of each insurance review.
As I’ve prepared to meet with BayRock clients in 2023, I’ve thought about that challenging time back in 1998 at State Farm. It was a ton of work for me and the people on my team. But it was the right thing to do and it always feels good to work hard at doing the right thing.
BayRobo is more than just a new Investment Strategy to sell to my clients at BayRock Financial. BayRobo is the investment strategy I’m using for my investments and for my family.
Each and every client who has ever hired BayRock for Investment Management has heard my “sales pitch”. For many years, even after becoming a CFP® Professional, I searched high and low to find an Investment Advisor who would look me in the eye and tell me that the investment program they were “selling” me was the same investment program they used for themselves and their family.
Believe it or not, I was never successful in finding a Certified Financial Planner™ professional (or any other investment advisor for that matter) who could meet that standard.
I went to work on Wall Street at Morgan Stanley in the Wealth Management department because I wanted to learn everything I needed to know to create Smarter Strategies and Better Results for myself AND MY CLIENTS.
From day one I’ve been selling the same investment strategies to my clients as I’ve been using for my own investments.
Today, I’m announcing a new set of investment strategies and in the weeks ahead, I’ll share much more about the strategies and the reasons for the changes.
In this video, I’m introducing the BayRobo Strategy and inviting you to consider joining me in putting BayRobo into place in your investment portfolio.
Why I became a CFP® Professional as a State Farm Agent
For years as an insurance agent, I had thought that knowing products inside and out was the key. Certainly, knowing products is important, but trust defines relationships. And I had thought that sales techniques were the answer, but genuinely caring about others’ dreams and needs is far more important. I had received extensive training in products and sales. For months, every department in our insurance company had trained us to be experts in every field, but none of them equipped me to uncover what matters most to my clients. All that knowledge and all that pressure to produce only took me farther away from making a difference in the lives of my clients. I believed in our products and services, but I didn’t know how to really help people in a powerful, authentic way. I had hundreds of thousands of bits of information in my brain, but until I met Rich at the Residency Program, I couldn’t put all the pieces together.
The program was designed to produce precisely the impact it had on me. In 1996, Kyra Morris was on the board of the FPA, and she was asked to study the feasibility of resurrecting the Residency Program, which had been dormant since the late 1980s. As a committee of one, she researched the needs and possibilities, and she launched a new version of the program. Her desire to recreate this training came out of the needs of her own practice. She told me, “By the late 90s, my practice had grown, and I needed to hire a few skilled, competent people to join me. As I interviewed people, I found that all of them had book knowledge, but many of them hadn’t made the transition to building relationships with clients. We had wonderful educational programs to teach planners to create a retirement program, conduct an estate analysis, or plan a tax strategy, but the art of financial planning is about much more than numbers. Too often, we chased rabbit trails with data instead of getting to know people to solve their problems and help them take steps of change.” A key focus of the current Residency Program is to equip financial planners in blending the art and science of the profession.
Kyra’s perspective permeates the Residency Program. She succinctly explained her business philosophy: “I don’t manage money. I manage relationships. We don’t just help with people’s accounts; we work with them to make their lives richer and more meaningful.”
