Quick note off the top.
CALU is in Ottawa in a couple weeks. I’ve already got some meetings booked with people coming into town. If you’re going to be here and you want to grab a quick drink or a coffee, send me a message and we’ll find a time in the calendar.
Ottawa is my city. I’m always here. But if you’re in town and you want to meet, let me know. Happy to make the time if I can.
Now, onto the thing I actually wanted to write about.
A meeting I had this week
I was sitting with an advisor this week who’s in a bit of a rebuilding phase.
Not rebuilding the practice. Rebuilding the network.
They’d let some relationships go quiet over the last couple years. Life happens. Focus shifts. You blink and suddenly it’s been eighteen months since you’ve been to a business association lunch or a chamber event.
Their niche is in the construction and home development space. Builders, developers, trades, the people around them. And they were gearing up to start showing their face again at the networking events, the association dinners, the stuff they used to do before things got busy.
So we started talking about the plan.
And pretty quickly, the conversation landed on something I think a lot of advisors get wrong. Not the networking itself. The thirty second window.
The question you’re going to get asked
Here’s the thing about walking into a room full of people in your target market.
Some of them already know you. Some of them will remember you from three years ago. And some of them are brand new.
At some point in the night, somebody is going to ask you the question.
“So what is it you do?”
And most advisors, in my experience, answer that question the same way. They say some version of “I’m a financial advisor” or “I help business owners with their planning” or “I work with families on life insurance and investments.”
All true. All fine. All completely forgettable.
You’ve just used your thirty seconds to describe your job title. The person in front of you now knows what you do in the most generic sense possible, and they have zero reason to ask you a follow up question.
You didn’t give them anything to be curious about.
The reframe
Here’s what I told this advisor.
When somebody asks you what you do, that’s not a request for your job title. That’s an invitation to share something interesting. The question behind the question is “give me a reason to keep talking to you.”
So give them one.
Instead of describing your role, describe an outcome you’ve helped create. Something specific enough to be memorable. Something novel enough to make them lean in. Something that makes them say “wait, how does that work?”
That’s the goal. Not to explain. To intrigue.
You don’t have to teach them the whole strategy in thirty seconds. You just have to plant something interesting enough that they want a second conversation.
An example I used
I gave this advisor a couple of examples, but the one I want to share here is the corporate insured annuity.
Now, full disclaimer up front. I’m not an accountant. People who have been on this list a while know that already. There have been interpretations coming out of CRA and some work through CALU on how this structure gets treated, and some of the mechanics have evolved. So if you’re actually going to put one of these on paper, do your own research, talk to your MGA, talk to your carrier’s advanced markets team, talk to the client’s accountant. The point of this email isn’t to teach you the technical build.
The point is the conversation.
At a high level, the corporate insured annuity works like this. A business owner takes a chunk of capital that’s sitting inside their corporation. They use it to buy an annuity that pays out an income stream. That income stream is then used to fund a permanent life insurance policy on the owner.
The result, broadly speaking, is that a large pile of corporate capital gets effectively converted. Instead of sitting on the company’s balance sheet as a taxable asset that’s going to trigger capital gains on death, it gets moved into a structure that can substantially reduce, and in some cases effectively eliminate, the tax liability on that capital when the owner passes.
Corporate dollars, sheltered. Estate value, preserved. Tax bill, shrunk.
That’s the mechanic. Complicated in the build. Simple in the outcome.
Now watch what happens at a networking event
Somebody asks the advisor what they do.
Version one. “I’m an insurance and investment advisor. I work with business owners on their planning.”
Okay. Nice to meet you. Have you tried the shrimp.
Version two. “I work with business owners, mostly in construction and development. A recent thing we did with a client, we took a big chunk of capital sitting in his holding company and ran it through a structure that basically wiped out the tax bill on it at death. His family’s estate went up meaningfully. Took us about six months to put together.”
Now the person in front of you is doing something different.
They’re thinking about their own balance sheet. Or their business partner’s. Or their brother in law’s. They’re thinking about that chunk of retained earnings that’s been bothering them for years. They’re thinking “wait, you can do that?”
And then they say the thing you want them to say.
“How does that work?”
And you say “it’s a bit of a longer conversation, but I’m happy to walk you through it. Want to grab a coffee next week?”
That’s the whole game. You didn’t sell anything. You didn’t pitch. You didn’t corner them at a networking event and try to close them over a glass of wine. You just shared a real outcome from a real case in plain language, and you let their curiosity do the work.
It doesn’t have to be the corporate insured annuity
I’m not saying the corporate insured annuity is the magic pitch. It’s one of dozens of strategies any of us can point to.
Maybe it’s the charitable term donation strategy where your client gets a massive tax receipt today for a policy they already own. Maybe it’s a capital dividend account play that turns corporate money into personal money tax free at death. Maybe it’s a hybrid structure where you combine par with a universal life chassis to grow the estate instead of just cover taxes. Maybe it’s a critical illness policy that paid out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a client last year when they got diagnosed at forty seven.
The strategy doesn’t matter. The structure of the answer matters.
Specific client situation. Specific outcome. Language a non advisor can follow. Enough intrigue that the other person wants to hear more. Stop there.
You’re not trying to close a case at a networking event. You’re trying to earn the second meeting.
Speaking of events
Here’s the other thing I want to tie in, because it’s all connected.
Last week we ran a client appreciation night at a Sens game. Suite at Canadian Tire Centre, food, drinks, networking before puck drop, the whole thing. I’ve been running events like this for years, and I talk about them constantly, because I genuinely believe they’re the single most underused tool in an advisor’s practice.
But something happened at this one that I want to flag. Because it’s the exact thing I write about in my book, The Advisor Event Engine, and I watched it play out in real time.
One of the people in the suite was an advisor who’s been thinking about joining PPI. He likes us, he’s been circling for a while, but he hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. I invited him to the event. He came.
And within about an hour, I noticed something.
A handful of the PPI advisors in the room, the ones who love being at PPI, the ones who’ve built real practices here, were just talking to him. Telling him why they joined. What it’s been like. What changed for them. Why he should stop thinking about it and just do it.
I didn’t say a word.
I didn’t have to.
My clients were doing the selling for me. Not because I asked them to. Because they believe in what we’ve built, and when you put them in a room with a prospect, they naturally share it.
That’s the thing most advisors miss about events. They think the value is the event itself. The game, the dinner, the speaker. It’s not. The value is what happens between your clients and the prospects you invite into that room.
You build a culture. You run events consistently. Your best clients become your best advocates. And when you put a prospect inside that culture, even for three hours, the conversation does itself.
That’s the whole thesis of The Advisor Event Engine. It’s why I wrote it. It’s how I’ve built the practice I’ve built. And it’s the exact mechanism that turned a lukewarm recruiting conversation into a real one last week, without me having to sell anything.
If you’ve been thinking about running events in your practice and you’re not sure where to start, or you’ve been running them and they’re not producing the results you want, this is what the book is built to solve.
Putting it together
The thirty second answer at the networking event gets you the second meeting.
The events get you the culture that closes the second meeting.
Both of them are the same idea wearing different clothes. You don’t grow a practice by telling people what you do. You grow it by letting them experience it. Sometimes that’s thirty seconds of the right story. Sometimes it’s three hours in a suite.
The advisor I met with this week is going to try the networking reframe at their next association event. I told them to also start thinking about the first event they’re going to host once they’ve rebuilt the network.
One feeds the other.
Talk soon,
Andrew
P.S. Serious on the CALU thing. If you’re coming into Ottawa and want to meet up, reply to this email. I’ll find a window.
