I had lunch last week with an advisor who’s been on this newsletter since around 2019.
We live in the same city. Run in overlapping circles. And somehow, in all those years, we’d never actually sat down across a table from each other.
That’s how this industry works sometimes.
I spent nearly 15 years on the Canada Life side before moving into independent distribution with PPI. And even within this industry, there are silos you don’t realize exist until you try to move between them. Bank channel. Direct channel. Career shops. General insurance. Proprietary lock-ins everywhere.
People build entire careers inside one model and never meet the people two doors down building theirs.
The things that cut through all of that are the national associations. Advocis. CALU. The estate planning councils. Those rooms don’t care what your distribution model is.
But that’s not actually what connected us.
What connected us was LinkedIn.
How this lunch actually happened
A few years ago I started putting content on LinkedIn. I linked it to the newsletter. People found the newsletter, subscribed, and started reading the stuff you’re reading right now.
I had no grand plan. No funnel. No lead magnet strategy. I just liked writing, and I thought it might be helpful to other advisors.
This guy was one of those subscribers. Quietly reading for years. And eventually the timing was right, we grabbed lunch, and I got to hear his story properly for the first time.
Here’s the short version.
A couple of years ago, he was working inside one of those distribution models I mentioned. Nothing wrong with it. Good firm. Real clients. But there was a ceiling on what he could earn and how he could grow. He could see it. He could feel it. He just couldn’t move it.
Then an opportunity crossed his desk.
Most people would have looked at it, thought about it, and stayed where they were. Change is uncomfortable. The devil you know is easier than the devil you don’t.
He went.
And he dominated.
He went from making a decent living to making life-changing money. Not because he became a different advisor overnight. He was the same guy. Same work ethic. Same skills. Same clients in his pipeline.
What changed was the environment around him.
This is the part most advisors miss
I’d love to take credit for his success, but I can’t. I didn’t make that move for him. I just happened to be one of the voices in his ear during the years he was figuring it out.
What I’ve noticed is this. There are a lot of really good advisors sitting inside models that are quietly capping them.
They don’t know it, because they’ve never seen the outside. They’re comparing themselves to the person across the cubicle, not to what’s possible in a different structure entirely.
If you work at a bank and you’ve never really understood how independent distribution works, you owe it to yourself to look. Not because the bank is bad. It isn’t. But because you don’t know what you don’t know.
If you’re independent and you’re capped because you can’t write bigger cases or can’t write more of them, the answer isn’t to work more hours. The answer is to look at the structure around you and ask what’s actually in the way.
The point isn’t that everyone should change firms. The point is that you should constantly be scanning. Not just scanning where you are, but scanning where the opportunity is.
Most advisors don’t do this. They put their head down, work hard, and assume that if they just keep going, things will open up.
Sometimes they do. Often they don’t.
The conversation we actually had
At lunch, we got into the weeds on what he should be doing now that he’s in this new seat.
He’s already connected to a great network. The question is what to do with it. And this is where it got fun, because we started talking through specific strategies he could be bringing to his existing clients.
One of them was the back-to-back, also known as the insured annuity.
I’ll be honest. I think the back-to-back is often better as a conversation opener than as a strategy someone actually implements. But it opens doors nobody else is opening.
You sit down with a business owner and say, I think we can take your tax bill close to zero. Are you interested?
Then you walk them through it. Money sitting in the corporation. Drop it into a lifetime annuity. When they die, that annuity has no residual value, so the money disappears. But pair it with a level UL that also has no cash value, and suddenly you have a structure that wipes out the tax bill and leaves the estate intact.
Does every client implement the full strategy? No.
But something happens in that conversation. The business owner starts thinking about taxes in the context of insurance. Some of them go, you know what, maybe I just want to put more money into a bigger policy. Maybe I’ll do the back-to-back. Maybe I won’t.
Either way, you’re now having the exact conversation you wanted to be having.
That’s the point.
Opportunities are not the problem
Here’s what I told him, and here’s what I’ll tell you.
Opportunities are not the problem. Opportunities are everywhere. The question is whether you know what the right ones look like when they cross your desk.
The advisor who changed firms saw an opportunity most people wouldn’t have taken seriously. The business owner who does the back-to-back is one conversation away from being a very different client to you. The person you’ve been following on LinkedIn for three years might be the person who introduces you to your next chapter.
None of this happens if you’re heads-down inside your own little box.
Why I keep bringing this back to events
Here’s the thread that connects everything I’ve said so far.
When I started writing the newsletter, I didn’t have a plan. When I started on LinkedIn, I didn’t have a plan. I was just showing up, consistently, over years.
And then one day you wake up and realize the network is enormous.
I’m a Sens season ticket holder. I literally cannot walk into Canadian Tire Centre without running into ten advisors, two business owners, and somebody I met at an Advocis event in 2021. I’ll be grabbing popcorn for my daughter and there’s a line of three people behind me saying hi.
That didn’t happen because I set out to build a network. It happened because I kept showing up in places where the right people were.
This is exactly what the Advisor Event Engine is about.
The Event Engine isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s a way of operating. You create the reasons for your clients, prospects, and centres of influence to spend time with you and each other. You become the connector in your market. You stop being one of many advisors your clients talk to and start being the only one that matters.
Because here’s what I’ve learned after years of doing this. People want to be part of a community. They want to be part of your world. And if you build a world worth being part of, the opportunities find you.
The advisor I had lunch with? He’s not my client. He’s not my recruit. He’s just a guy who’s been reading my stuff for years, and when the timing was right, we sat down.
That lunch happened because I’ve been showing up for half a decade.
Your version of that will look different. Maybe it’s a client appreciation event. Maybe it’s a dinner with three centres of influence. Maybe it’s a lunch-and-learn for a group of business owners on the back-to-back strategy we just talked about.
The format doesn’t matter. The consistency does.
One last thing
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while and we’ve never actually met, reach out. Seriously. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.
And if you’re sitting in a seat right now that feels like it’s got a ceiling on it, spend some time this month looking around. Talk to people in other models. Ask questions. Scan the universe.
You might be one conversation away from a very different year.
Talk soon,
Andrew
