I was at CALU last week, sitting at the bar with a few advisers, having drinks.
One of them is someone I respect a lot. He’s on this email list. He’s already bought the Adviser Event Engine book. Actually, here’s the part that made me laugh, he told me he’d uploaded the PDF into Adobe and had the text-to-speech voice read him the whole book on his flight down to the conference.
I didn’t even know you could do that.
Anyway, a few drinks in, I asked him about the events he’s been running in his practice.
And he told me a story I’m still thinking about a week later.
The trip
Back in 2019, he had a client. One of his top clients. The client and his wife were huge Andrea Bocelli fans.
So he sent them to Italy. To see Bocelli perform.
Flights. Hotel. Restaurants. The Bocelli concert. The whole thing, taken care of.
Now I don’t know exactly how much the client covered versus what he covered. I didn’t ask. But the idea of it, the gesture of it, was significant. This wasn’t a lunch. This wasn’t a hockey game. This was sending a client and his wife to Italy to see a once in a lifetime concert.
Then it gets better.
Some months later, Andrea Bocelli was on tour in Montreal. So he took the client and his wife to that show too. A second Bocelli concert, this time on home soil.
The next night, the Habs were playing. Carey Price was still in goal back then. The client was a huge Canadiens fan. So they went to that as well.
Italy. Bocelli in Italy. Bocelli in Montreal. A Habs game with Carey Price.
I sat there with my drink and just stared at him.
The math
Eventually I asked the obvious question.
“What was the return on that?”
We didn’t get into exact numbers. But what he described was significant. Not just from this one client, but from the client’s network. Other policies. Other introductions. The kind of compounding return that comes when you do something extraordinary for the right person.
We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. Possibly more.
Now think about that as an ROI calculation.
I have no idea what the trip actually cost him. But let’s say the whole thing, all in, was $25,000. I’m making that number up. Could be more, could be less.
If he made $100,000 off that relationship, that’s a 4x return.
If he made $1,000,000 off it across the client and the network, that’s a 40x return.
Show me the marketing channel that returns 40x. Show me the LinkedIn ad budget. Show me the cold email campaign. Show me the SEO strategy.
There isn’t one.
The highest return activity in this entire industry is investing in deep relationships with the right clients. Period.
Now, before you do anything crazy
I want to be really clear about something.
I’m not telling you to fly your clients to Italy.
That story is the extreme version. It worked because the adviser knew that client deeply, knew Bocelli was the thing, knew the relationship could carry a gesture of that size. It also worked because the client was the right kind of client for that level of investment.
If you take the wrong message from this story, you’ll spend a fortune on grand gestures for clients who aren’t going to do anything with you.
That’s not the lesson.
Here’s the actual lesson
The event doesn’t matter.
Read that again. The event itself does not matter.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a lunch, a dinner, a hockey game, a cooking class, a private theater rental, or a trip to Italy to see Andrea Bocelli.
What matters is two things.
One. Are the people you actually want in front of you going to attend?
Two. Will the format give you the chance to build the relationship deeper than it was before?
If the answer to both of those is yes, then it’s a good event. The dollar amount on the invoice is almost irrelevant.
A $200 dinner with three of the right clients can be a better event than a $20,000 box at a hockey game with twenty people you barely know.
The adviser who took his client to Italy understood his client at a depth nobody else in that client’s life understood him. The trip was just the proof.
That’s what the client was actually buying with the policies that came later. Not Bocelli. Not Italy. Not the Habs game.
The proof that someone in his financial life understood him better than anyone else.
The Winnipeg conversation
Funny thing happened later in that same conversation.
A couple of advisers from Winnipeg jumped in. One of them said something interesting.
“Hockey games don’t even work for me anymore. I get invited to so many of them I don’t want to go.”
That’s a really important data point.
For some clients, in some markets, the standard wholesaler box at the rink isn’t the move. They’ve seen it. They’re tired of it. It doesn’t say “I understand you” anymore. It says “I have a budget.”
So we started talking about what would actually work for those clients.
Cooking classes where four couples make a meal and eat it together, almost like date night. That came up. Small, intimate, different.
Private theater rentals. I told them about a smaller event I ran where I booked out a whole theater for the new Mario Brothers movie. Popcorn. Drinks. Families. Kids losing their minds.
There’s a theater near where some of these advisers live that does private events for groups of 300. The new Toy Story movie is coming out. Imagine renting that out for clients who are grandparents, or parents in their forties with young kids. A family event. Something they’d want to attend but probably wouldn’t organize themselves.
Different markets, different clients, different events.
But the same principle every time.
What do the people you want in front of you actually want to attend?
That’s the only question that matters.
Now what?
Since the book came out, I’ve been getting one question more than any other.
Okay Andrew, I’ve read it. I see what you’re saying. I’m bought in.
Now what?
How do I actually put this into action in my practice?
Here’s what I told the adviser at CALU. And here’s what I’ll tell you.
Two things.
First, pick one or two anchor events for the year. Real ones. Put them into your business plan and build the year around them. Not as an afterthought. As the centerpiece. Spring event. Fall event. Whatever fits your practice and your clients.
Second, and this is the part most people miss, you have to run them consistently. One great event is nice. The same event, every year, with the right people in the room, becomes the thing your practice is known for. Year three is when it really starts to compound. Year five is when it changes the trajectory of your business.
That’s the secret. Not the event itself. The consistency.
The accountability piece
Here’s the harder truth.
Most advisers don’t follow through.
Not because they don’t care. Not because they don’t have good intentions. Because life happens, business happens, and the events plan is the first thing to slide when the calendar gets full.
So if you’re serious about this, you need somebody holding you to it.
Maybe that’s your MGA. A good MGA should be helping you build the plan and checking in on whether you actually executed. That’s a big part of what I do with the advisers I work with at PPI.
Maybe it’s a coach. There are good ones in our industry.
Maybe it’s a peer group. Three or four advisers who hold each other to the calendar.
I don’t really care what the structure looks like. But you need one. Because without it, the plan stays on the page, the events don’t happen, and another year goes by where you’re doing the same thing you did last year and getting the same results you got last year.
Back to the math
I keep coming back to that ROI calculation.
A 4x return on a client event is good. A 40x return is practice changing. Even a 2x return, repeated consistently across the right clients over five years, is a different practice than the one you have today.
There is no other activity in this industry with that kind of upside.
Not LinkedIn posts. Not ad spend. Not seminar funnels. Not buying leads.
The highest return activity available to you is sitting in a room with the right clients, in a setting they actually want to be in, and proving over and over again that you understand them better than anyone else in their financial life.
That’s it.
Some advisers do it with Italy. Some do it with a private theater. Some do it with a small dinner at a restaurant they know the client loves.
The format doesn’t matter. The principle does.
If you want the full playbook, the Adviser Event Engine book is where I’ve laid all of it out. The frameworks, the planning tools, the trackers, the questions to ask yourself before you commit to an event. Not theory. The stuff I’ve used and the stuff the advisers in my network are putting into practice right now.
And if you’ve already read it, send me your event ideas. The best ones I’m hearing right now are coming from advisers who’ve taken the framework and made it their own. Some of them I’ll probably end up writing about in future emails.
Talk soon,
Andrew