[INTRODUCTION]

Welcome to this episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint Podcast with your host, Brad Johnson. Brad’s the VP of Advisor Development and Advisors Excel, the largest independent insurance brokerage company in the US. He’s also a regular contributor to Investment News, the Wall Street Journal, and other industry publications.

[00:00:25] Brad: Welcome to the Elite Advisor Blueprint, the podcast for world-class financial advisors. I’m Brad Johnson, VP of Advisor Development and Advisors Excel, and it’s my goal to distill the best ideas and advice from top thought leaders and apply it to the world of independent financial advising.

What’s the best resource for becoming a better speaker and presenter? This is the question I asked Darren Hardy, former publisher of Success Magazine and someone who has literally interviewed just about every successful entrepreneur and thought leader out there. The first words out of his mouth were, “Read Michael Port’s book, Steal the Show,” which is why I’m both excited and humbled to have Michael on as a guest today.

Michael is a professional speaker, a coach, and a 6-time bestselling author, including Book Yourself Solid, Beyond Booked Solid, and his latest, Steal the Show. His training and work as an actor on shows like Sex and the City and Law and Order helped him develop a very unique perspective when it comes to public speaking, which we’ll get into today.

During our conversation, Michael breaks down the exact strategies he teaches his students to help them master the art of speaking, so they can professionally promote and present their message – which I know for financial advisors, is a big part of how to land new clients and build your business!

So, here are just a few highlights from our conversation. We start with the skills Michael learned as a classically-trained actor that influenced him as a publish speaker, businessman, and coach, and how you can apply these skills as a financial advisor. Then we dive into how to apply his Red Velvet Rope policy to your business so you’re only letting in your ideal clients, ones that energize you, inspire you, and allow you to do your very best work.

From there, we discuss how financial advisor mess up their response to that, “So, what is it that you do?” type of cocktail party question. Michael shares the four elements needed to craft a better response and then gets into what actually led him to selecting his current financial advisor. It all ties together. Later on, Michael lays out his creative book launch strategy that took his book to number two overall on all of Amazon and how you can replicate it.

[00:02:20] Brad: Then Michael shares the biggest speech he ever bombed that left him feeling absolutely broken but more importantly, what it can teach you about being fully prepared. Lastly, we cover why so many presentations don’t lead to appointments and how you can go from sounding like a spreadsheet to sound like a true financial professional.

Okay. Before we get to the conversation, as a special thank you for listening in, Michael’s gifted all of you Blueprint listeners his 50 Tips You Can’t Afford to Ignore If You Want to Wow Your Audience. There are 50 short and actionable tips to maximize your results any time you’re on a stage. Make sure to check it out in the show notes at BradleyJohnson.com/40. Go grab a copy. Also, all the additional show notes, books mentioned, people discussed, as well as a full transcript of the show can be found there as well.

One last thing, an added bonus for this episode is anytime I can share some additional knowledge from one of our show’s guests, I try to make it happen. I grabbed a handful of copies of Michael’s latest book, Steal the Show, to share with you all. So, here’s what to do next if you’d like your free copy. All that I ask is that you leave an honest review out on iTunes for our show. You can visit the link, BradleyJohnson.com/iTunes, or simply just swipe down to the review section on most mobile players. Once you’ve left a review, just drop us an email via [email protected] with your iTunes username and a mailing address and we’ll drop you a copy in the mail as a thank you. That simple. So, that’s it. As always, thanks for listening and without further delay, my conversation with Michael Port.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:50] Brad: Welcome to this episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint Podcast. I’m incredibly excited. I have Michael Port here with us live today. Welcome to the show, Michael.

[00:03:59] Michael: Thank you very much. Great to be here.

[00:04:01] Brad: This has been really fun for me as this podcast has taken off and to have amazing guests like yourself and it’s always interesting how I first come in contact with guests that come on the show. And so, I just to have to tell the story for the listeners out there right out of the gates. I was at actually a speaking engagement where we brought Darren Hardy in. So, publisher of Success Magazine, obviously an incredible thought leader out there and so after he came off stage, also an incredible speaker I might add, and he comes off stage and I just picked his brain for probably 5 or 10 minutes and I asked him, if I wanted to become a better public speaker what resources would he recommend? And literally, the first words out of his mouth were, “Read Steal the Show by Michael Port.” So, what’s interesting, we were talking before we went live, Michael, had you ever actually coached Darren or not. It doesn’t sound like you have yet but when you have somebody…

[00:04:50] Michael: Yeah. I was featured in the magazine once a number of years ago, but Darren and I don’t know each other well so it was very kind and very humbling. I’m appreciative of the kind words that he offered.

[00:05:02] Brad: Well, and that’s the guy that’s been exposed to, I mean, at Success Magazine has thought leaders every day all day long and for him to basically recommend you as the guy, I mean, I knew I need to get you on the show someday.

[00:05:16] Michael: Thank you. Well, part of it may be because I bring a unique perspective to the, I guess, industry of public speaking because I was a professional actor. So, I was in business for years and I wrote six business-focused books before I moved most of my focus over to public speaking and I was, of course, a professional speaker on the circuit for 15 years myself. But before all of that, I was a professional actor and I have an MFA from NYU, so I was a classical-trained actor. And what I bring to the work of training, developing a craft for speaking is based on the work that I did as an actor and as a student of acting and through the terminal degree that I earned at NYU, and I think that makes a big difference.

It’s one of the reasons that a lot of very high-level folks either read my book or work with me and my wife and my team directly because when you have a certain amount of natural talent and you got the gift of gab and you’re clever and you have a high degree of expertise, you can get away with winging it for a while. But you get to the point where you hit a plateau and you know you can be better, but you don’t know how because you do not yet have a craft. And so, we teach a craft that can be applied to all public speaking and as a result, one feels like a professional because they have a craft even if their job is not to speak professionally but you speaking to promote a message or to build a business and that of course for advisors it’s such a big part of their marketing platform for many of them.

[00:06:57] Brad: Absolutely. What I’m excited about is I’ve seen you do the coaching live and we’re going to get to that, and I mean there are some people that are incredible players but don’t make the greatest coaches. I’ve seen the combination and you were – now, I’m not going to rank how you are as a player versus a coach, but I do know that you are an incredible coach because I’ve seen it live in action like on the spot. So, I want to get there but just to cover the curiosity from the audience because that’s an interesting transition to go from professional actor to then the guy that writes a best-selling book, Book Yourself Solid, and another best-selling book, Steal the Show. So, can you share just high-level how did that whole transition happen? By the way, we’re going to throw in the show notes your actor’s reel because I saw already on YouTube as I’m doing research I’ve got you in Sex and the City so we’re going to make sure to include that in the show notes.

[00:07:47] Michael: That’s the thing about the internet. Once it’s out there, it’s always out there. So, just a warning, word to the wise, if you do look at that reel, there may be some scenes where I don’t have a shirt on and that was 25 years ago, and I had lots of hair on my head. So, I went to grad school because I wanted to build a craft. I wanted to be a professional and then when I got out of grad school I did shows like Sex and the City, Third Watch, All My Children, Another World, As the World Turns and 100 Centre Street, Law & Order. I did the Pelican Brief, Down to Earth, The Believer, Last Call, and dozens and dozens of voiceovers. I used to do a lot of voiceovers for Coors Beer, AT&T, Pizza Hut, Braun and then also on-camera commercials. I did on-camera commercials for Johnson & Johnson and Budweiser. I was one of the “How you doing?” guys. “How you doing? How you doing? How you doing?” So, those are out there too if you look up the Jersey.

[00:08:42] Brad: We could include all of those classics in the show notes I promise.

[00:08:45] Michael: The classics. So, you know, look, here’s the thing though is I was making money. I didn’t have to work a second job which is unusual I suppose for an actor but I, a, wasn’t particularly satisfied with the work that I was doing because I go and I work for a week and then I wouldn’t work for three weeks, and then I’d worked for a day and then I wouldn’t work for two months, and then I’d work for a month and then I wouldn’t work for three days. I’m very, very ambitious and very entrepreneurial and I like to work. So, that I found frustrating and I was immature at the time. I didn’t want to wait for other people to give me work. And now I think maybe I would’ve approached it differently because there are so many more tools that one has to produce their own material but when I was acting, it was a little bit different and I left and when I told my agent that I was leaving, her jaw just dropped and hit the table. I think I heard a thunk because she said, “You’re right there. You’re right there.” I said, “You know, I could be right there for the next 20 years, but I wanted some control over my life so I’m going into business.”

And I talked my way into a job for which I was completely unqualified in the fitness industry, on the business side of the fitness industry, and I told them I was unqualified. I said, “Listen, I’m completely unqualified based on what you think you need for this position.” But, of course, I had nothing to lose so my pitch was, “But I think you’re hiring the wrong people for this job. Based on what I’ve seen, based on my research, here’s what I think you need and here’s why I think you should hire me because I think I fit that profile.” And I was fortunate they took a chance on me and people often give me credit for that. They think it was like a give me props for that, but I had really nothing to lose so it wasn’t some big courageous act of heroic feat of some kind. I just had nothing to lose and that really helped me in that process. And three months later, I was moved to the director level and then three months after that I was on the vice president level and I was managing a whole division.

[00:10:45] Michael: And from there, I went and built another health club at the senior vice president level and then spent a little bit more time in entertainment at that same level and then went out on my own and started consulting for the industry and then built up a business out of that. But it was just one foot in front of the other and eventually, I felt like I had some control over my life because my business eventually became mine.

[00:11:07] Brad: So, where in that timeline did Book Yourself Solid come in and how did that come to be? Was that that business experience that you just packaged up in the book?

[00:11:15] Michael: That’s exactly right. So, the division I ran for the sports club company I had about 500 independent contractors that I had to look after. And so, I learned quickly what made them successful and what they should avoid doing. So, when I wrote Book Yourself Solid, I wrote it with those people in mind but of course, I wrote it for independent professionals, service professionals of all kinds because there were so many similarities in those verticals. And as a result, it became a hit. I got very, very lucky. The first day that the book came out, I hit number two on Amazon and not in a category but in all of Amazon. Dr. Oz was the only book that was ahead of us and he was on Oprah all week so that was tough to beat.

But because it popped up the top of the charts so quickly, it got a lot of momentum and because it was good, it stayed there and it’s the three editions plus an illustrated edition plus a very big comprehensive app as a workbook and that was in 2005 that I wrote that book so it’s 13 years now and a third edition I just put out in this past fall. Of course, the times have changed. When I first wrote the book, there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or any of those other social platforms. So, that’s how I started with that book but that’s when a lot of the speaking offers started coming in. I didn’t know you could make so much money speaking until they started showing up and saying, “Hey, would you come for this?” and I said, “Yeah. Of course, I’d come for half of that.”

[00:12:46] Brad: So, Book Yourself Solid was really what had you segue into the public speaking a lot more frequently.

[00:12:52] Michael: Yeah. I was using public speaking as a way to get in front of audiences to book business, to book clients but really putting me on the professional circuit was Book Yourself Solid.

[00:13:04] Brad: As our mutual friend, Michael Hyatt says, “There’s life before the book and there’s life after the book.”

[00:13:08] Michael: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:13:09] Brad: Very cool. So, let’s go back because what’s interesting, a lot of our clients’ financial advisors have written a book or that’s on the to-do list going back to how to become more of an authority. Obviously, author, authority they go hand-in-hand. You went to number two on Amazon which is an amazing feat. Was that sheer luck? Did you have a promotion planned running behind that? Can you unpack that a little bit?

[00:13:30] Michael: Oh yeah. Sure did. I mean, my books have also been on the New York Times bestseller list to Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly. They’ve been selected as the top. So, my book, in turn, in effect was the Number One Sales Book of The Year for 2008 for 800-CEO-Read. Amazon selected them as the Top 10 Books for The Year, etcetera. So, they’ve been on a lot of lists and a lot of different categories and, yeah, we’ve always been very intentional about how we promote them. So, you asked about Book Yourself Solid when it hit number two, is there some luck involved? There’s always luck involved in everything you do but we worked hard to promote that book, really, really hard. And then it was a different time. We could use email promotion only meaning we didn’t have to worry about all the social platforms because they didn’t exist, and people would pay more attention to their inboxes at that time because they weren’t being bombarded with as many digital messages so that was helpful.

But we did a campaign. One of the things that I try to do is I tried to reconfigure what already exists to turn it into something just a little bit better and when Book Yourself Solid came out, the marketing concept that a lot of people were using was what was called the Amazon campaign. So, the idea was that you try to get to the top of Amazon and you would give away all sorts of freebies so that people would buy the book. So, you go to 50 of your friends and say, “Listen, can you give me some sort of product that I can give away?” And when someone buys the book, they get that. So, the pitch was always, “Oh, there’s $15,000 worth of products you can get for $15 when you buy one copy of the book.” And they were getting kind of old and tired and most of the things that were being offered on those sales pages were just recycled freebies that were given away on that person’s site. So, the value started decreasing. The concept made sense, trying to get all these people involved and moving a lot of traffic to that one page.

[00:15:24] Michael: So, what I did is I took the concept then I reconfigured it and I thought, “Well, maybe we could do it as a contest and we can give away real prizes like vacation trips, cruises, Blackberries.” There were no iPods to giveaway at that time but things that actually had a real cash value. And the people who donated them then help promote that this campaign was going on. And so, if you bought one book, you got one ticket. If you bought three books, you got five tickets and if you bought five books, you got 10 tickets. And so, the more books you bought, the more raffle tickets you got for this campaign. And there were legitimately over $50,000 worth of real prizes that people could win. Here’s the thing, I think you’re probably supposed to register if you do some kind of campaign like that. I didn’t know anything. I mean, it was 13 years ago.

So, I’m not recommending that people do that because that is a contest and there may be some legal issues around doing it. Fortunately, I didn’t have any issues at the time, but I got 7,000 new opt-ins that day just from doing that in addition to hitting number two on Amazon on that day. So, lots of leads came in for the business as well and it was really effective because it took that same concept that people were used to, but it threw a new spin on it and added a little bit more value. And so, every time we’ve done a book launch campaign, we’ve tried to do something like that. And when I launched Steal the Show in 2015, I packaged it with a 50-episode podcast that we released that supported the book and that worked very well. That was very effective as well. So, each time we try to do something different.

[00:17:15] Brad: Yeah. I think the biggest lesson there is don’t just blend in with the crowd. Do something that’s unique and is going to show up as valuable to your potential prospects out there.

[00:17:25] Michael: Yeah. I mean, look, I wanted to be a best-selling author. I don’t want to have a book as a business card. I didn’t actually personally see a lot of value in that and I wasn’t looking to sell a few copies. I figure if I’m going to do it, I want to be on the airport tables. I want to be on the bookshelves. I want to be everywhere people are looking and I want people to read it because there’s real value in reading it.

[00:17:46] Brad: Yeah. I have a challenge of you have way too much content to cover on the time we have together so forgive me if I just plow through some of this stuff and then we’ll segue wherever the conversation goes. But just starting like as I look at how to take what’s in your head and what you’ve put out in books and bring as much value as possible to the financial advisors that are either watching or listening. By the way, if you’re listening, please go to the website and watch because Michael wins best backdrop of the podcast ever because – do share a little bit for the listeners, Michael, where you’re at and what your backdrop is there.

[00:18:20] Michael: Sure. Right now, I’m at Heroic Public Speaking HQ. This is our headquarters. We got 6,300 square feet of theater which you can see behind me. We have our rehearsal rooms, lounges, conference rooms, a bar, all of our staff offices are here, and this is where we do our events when they are fewer than 75 people. Our big event, Heroic Public Speaking Live, we do in Philadelphia at the Kimmel Center because we needed a theater that can hold over 600 people but for all of our events and our private coaching with our faculty and clients is held here. So, we built this from the ground up because we needed the space that can accommodate the kind of curriculums that we teach, and nothing really existed and the teams we could find were very hard to book because they weren’t ours and so we were limited. So, we just built it ourselves.

[00:19:09] Brad: Incredible setup. You guys don’t happen to be hiring, do you? I might switch off this gig and come out and work with you guys.

[00:19:17] Michael: Well, whatever it takes to get you, I would do it.

[00:19:20] Brad: All right. So, as we go into Book Yourself Solid, as I tried to distill what was in the book down to what can bring a lot of value here, there were a few things I took from the book. The first one being your ideal clients are everything. So, if we can just start there, we don’t have to go to deep but just speak to why that’s so important and it really applies in financial services.

[00:19:38] Michael: It sure does. Look, the first chapter of Book Yourself Solid is called The Red Velvet Rope Policy because I think you should have a filtration system. If you have a red velvet rope in front of you that allows in only ideal clients, clients that energize you, clients that inspire you and most importantly, clients that allow you to do your best work because there are two things that happened when you’re doing your best work. Number one, you love almost every minute of the work you do. I don’t think you’re ever going to love every minute of the work you do. It is work after all, but you will love almost every minute of the work you do because you love the people you’re working with.

And secondly, the people you’re working with are out in the world talking about your best work. And that, of course, is the best marketing in the world. Because most of us have worked at some point with a dud client. Now, when I say dud client, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the person necessarily. They’re just not for us. My ideal client might be different than your ideal client. Your ideal client to me might be a dud client. My ideal client to you might be a dud client. But we won’t work with people that drain our energy, frustrate us, make us feel like our work isn’t worthwhile, don’t respect the work that we’re doing, and make us want to do bodily harm to that. That’s not the best way to get new clients. So…

[00:21:00] Brad: Especially that last one.

[00:21:01] Michael: Yeah. That last one is just not going to work in your favor. So, I just figure you didn’t go into this business to be miserable and to work with people you don’t like working with. You went into business to live life on your own terms for the most part and sometimes it’s a little confronting to people who are newer or are a little tight meaning they’re not quite as book solid as they want. They might say, “Well, that’s easy for you guys to say because you’ve got thousands of clients and you’re already established and blah, blah, blah,” but this is the thing that helped me at the beginning because I got booked solid faster because I was really intentional about who was ideal, and I went after those people, and that’s different than your target market. Your target market is a demographic, is a group of people or businesses that you serve but your ideal client is a small subset of that target market. Not every single person inside your target market is going to be ideal for you.

So, if you’re a financial advisor and you say, “Well, my target market is anybody that has a net worth of over $5 million and has an income of over $750,000, blah, blah, blah.” Well, okay, that’s helpful but you think you’re going to like working with every person who’s in that particular demographic? I venture to say no. So, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to figure out who do we our best work with inside of that target market? And then we go after them and all of our marketing materials, the way that we show up in the world, all of that screams. It tells those people that we’re meant to serve them, and it pushes all the other people away, people with whom we don’t do our best work because they know that you’re really clear and intentional about who you work with and who you’re going to help and so they go away and the people you’re meant to serve come to you.

[00:22:51] Brad: Yeah. Well, and also cross paths, you and I, at Pete Vargas’s Advance Your Reach event where you were kind of like one of the primary guys coaching a lot of – it’s kind of like an American Idol for speakers is the best way I can describe it. But one thing that’s interesting, I just look at some of the work he does where he’ll have subsets of groups such as a local group of entrepreneurs or doctors or dentists and as you identify who is your ideal subsets of people, now you’re much more able to go after and go specific to places where those individuals are too. So, it’s just interesting how it can all play together, and you can even deliver from the stage while doing that.

[00:23:31] Michael: Sure.

[00:23:31] Brad: So, as we go in there, another thing I took which gets butchered horribly in our industry that I would love to hear your thought on is learn to speak about what you do in a compelling way. So, the cocktail hour question like, “What do you do for a living?” I’ll throw out what I typically hear and then I would love to hear what is actually, what financial advisors should say when they typically hear a very generic term like, “I manage assets. I help you create an income you can’t outlive. I do risk and fee analysis,” all of like the generic mumbo-jumbo that you hear in our industry a lot. So, if you’re a financial advisor and you’re hanging out at a cocktail reception and somebody asked you what you do, what would be some better examples of how to communicate that?

[00:24:12] Michael: So, let me start by saying I’m a personal finance junkie so I know the industry pretty well. Of course, I don’t work in it, so I don’t know everything about it, but I understand everything you just said, to put it that way, and I do a lot of reading on this particular subject. When you use those kinds of terms or a professional category, just financial advisor or certified financial professional, something like that, to most people, it just lumps you into a broad category and generally when somebody thinks of a financial advisor they think of, “Oh, somebody who is going to take a percentage of my money.” That’s what they think. “Okay. This person’s going to come after me to get my money.” That’s what they think. Now, people make assumptions all the time. My father is a psychiatrist. They make assumptions about psychiatrists. If someone is a plastic surgeon, they’ll make assumptions about the plastic surgeon. They’ll make assumptions about me as a professional speaker or teacher or author, whatever, and sometimes those assumptions are positive and a lot of times they’re negative if they have had any negative experiences with somebody who does the thing you do.

So, if we just rely on our category and that’s it, we make it lumped in with the guy that was putting my mother-in-law in loaded funds and then every six months moving her from one to another so that he get that big hit every time we put her into the new one and it was I thought frankly criminal. So, it’s not going to kill you to use those terms or to say you’re a financial advisor, but I think there are essentially four elements that I think are important to get really clear on that help people understand what you do. And I think we should talk about what we do without using an elevator speech of any kind because I think the elevator speech, the highfalutin, hyperbole-filled pitch that is supposed to be in an elevator, get something, just take their wallet out and give it to you by the time they get to the fifth floor is an unreasonable concept.

[00:26:14] Michael: It’s reasonable, say, in the world of venture capital. If you’re trying to raise a money for a startup and you meet a venture capitalist, they say, “All right. Give me your third, second pitch. What’s the pitch in the product?” And then you give them the pitch and they say, “All right. That’s not bad. I’ll give 15 minutes in my office.” We go in 15 minutes. If they like it, “I’ll give another 45 minutes,” etcetera. But that’s not generally the way relationship develops between you and a client. You’re a service professional and, yes, you sell certain financial products but ultimately, you’re a service professional. So, the person I rely on for advice is my CPA and is also a CFP. He’s both. And I love that combination so he’s a fiduciary to me. And I pay him a lot more money than most accountants would get, and I rely him for advice because I trust him implicitly and explicitly and it took me about a year-and-a-half before I was willing to hire him. But he was willing to take that time to develop the relationship with me and he knew that I had experiences with people that did the kind of things that he did that weren’t that positive.

So, he’s willing to take that time and he was very clear about who his target market was and who his ideal clients were, so I knew that he knew my world inside and out. Because he served people like me, I was in his target market and I knew that he did great work with people like me because I was ideal for him based on my values, the way I see the world, the way that I behave, etcetera. And he was also very clear on my needs and my desires. What I needed meaning the things I wanted to move away from and the desires, the things I wanted to move toward. He was also very clear on the result that I wanted to get, very clear, and he knew what the benefits of that results are for me from a financial, from an emotional, from a physical and even from a spiritual perspective.

[00:28:04] Michael: So, I think that if you know exactly who your target market is, exactly what their needs and desires are, the things they’re moving away from and the things they’re moving toward, if you’re crystal clear on the result that you help people produce and you know what the deep-rooted core benefits are of that result from a financial, from an emotional, from a physical even, and from maybe spiritual perspective too then you can talk about what you do I think which way until Sunday without using an elevator speech. Because if someone says, “What do you do?” you might say, “Well, I’m a certified financial professional or registered advisor, etcetera, and I help people like this target market,” or if it’s them like you achieve this and often these folks have these needs and these desires. And the thing that they’re looking for really are then the benefits from a financial, emotional, physical, and even spiritual perspective. But the thing is, is that the reason it works is because you don’t do it as a speech. It’ll never go the same way twice. I think one of the reasons people use these elevator pitches is because they don’t really know what they do.

So, they feel like if they memorized something then that will do the trick but if you really know what you do, if you know who you serve, if you know their needs and desires, if you know the result that you often get, if you know what the benefits are from the financial, emotional, physical, and even spiritual perspective then talking about what you do is super simple and you don’t feel the need to get all of it out immediately. You’re not worried that you’re going to miss this opportunity because you’re going to keep in touch with them over time because how is trust built? Trust it built over time. Trust is built by making commitments and fulfilling those commitments. So, Matt, my CFP and CPA, he over about a year-and-a-half period of time would make commitments to me and fulfill those commitments without asking me for any business. And the commitments sometimes were small. “Hey, let me send you this article about X,” based on the conversation we were having. And then he would do it exactly when he said he was going to do it and that seemed like a simple thing. But I was having a meeting with my staff today and I actually made a joke today.

[00:30:04] Michael: I said, “I’m going to do a book that’s just one page for service professionals, just one page. Show up when you say you’re going to show up, return the call when you say you’re going to return the call and you’ll be booked solid.” Now, of course, that’s not necessarily the case but we’ve been dealing with some contractors, and certainly, for contractors, that one-page book would probably be helpful. A little bit more complicated for financial professionals but nonetheless I think the same thing is true and that trust is built over time. And so, all of these elements, these five elements they come out over time. We don’t feel this need to slam them with all this information as soon as you need them. And as a result, you seem more confident, you seem more powerful, less needy. I think when you have this whole big pitch about what you do, it seems a little bit needy.

[00:30:49] Brad: It’s desperation. It’s easy to see it. So, going back, the issue is you can’t do that until you go back to step one, who is your ideal client? You have to be very clear there before you can start to define the benefits to that ideal client.

[00:31:02] Michael: That’s exactly right. And if the way that you talk about yourself suggest that you work with anybody that has a pulse and a checkbook, then the person you’re talking to doesn’t feel like you would be special or that you really understand their world and I think it’s an integrity issue because it’s unlikely that we actually can help everyone. There are people that we’re really not meant to serve. And if we suggest otherwise, then I think that people might not believe it.

[00:31:29] Brad: Okay. So, I’m curious now. So, Matt, how did he first come on your radar?

[00:31:36] Michael: Well, he actually first came on my radar because he came to one of our events. Now, he didn’t come to the event because he’s like, “Ooh, I’m going to get Michael and Amy Port as my clients,” I don’t think. He came to the event because he wanted to learn more about presenting because he was using his presenting skills doing small seminars on his area of expertise. And when I found out what he did, I engaged him in conversation because I’m so interested in it and I found that some of the things he was saying was different than what I was hearing from my current accountant and past accountants and financial professionals that I work with. Now, different is not always better. Different could be completely wrong. So, just because it was different, it’s not why, “Oh, it’s different. I want a shiny thing.” But it was different, and it was sensible. So, we would just every once in a while, get together before the session would start and we were just chatting. We would talk about financial issues and concerns and the world as it exists today.

So, we became friendly that way and at one point we were talking about a particular type of financial vehicle and he said, “Hey, can I put together some numbers for you?” I said, “Absolutely. I don’t think that thing is for me but happy to look at the numbers you put t