How Using a Third Party Company Has Set This Advisor Up for Successful Dinner Seminars

In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Justin Cramer, who has outsourced all the planning around his dinner seminars so he and the team can focus on the presentation and talking with the potential clients.

The following article includes edited excerpts of this conversation, or you can watch the full interview below.

Getting started

My partner had been doing seminars for over 25 years when he and I both left separate firms and joined together about six years ago.

When creating our partnership, my partner and I decided we wanted to deal with high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families. We have families in 27 states across the country, and it turns out high-net-worth people do want to come to dinner seminars and sit and listen to topics that nobody’s talking about. In one seminar alone, we brought on a $5 million and a $7 million client.

People would say, “What in the world are those kinds of families doing in seminars?” Well, it turns out if the topic is interesting enough, everybody wants to come. We just had a family that we’ve brought on as a new client in a consulting relationship, they’re worth $15 million. So the numbers are there.

Delegating all the prep work

For the first two or three years together, my partner and I were doing seminars and taking care of everything in-house. We were picking the topics, choosing the invites and sending them through a local mailing service. We were attaining new clients, but it wasn’t the result we thought we should be getting.

We then made a huge financial decision to shift and use third-party marketing to take care of all the details of the seminars outside of the presentation and client contact. We chose a company out of Tampa, LeadingResponse, that focuses on lead generation for advisors, and I highly recommend them. They do virtually nothing but market financial seminars, with all the data.

The benefit with using LeadingResponse, is that no time, energy or effort from our team is used at all until the day before the seminar. LeadingResponse literally handles everything. They field all the calls. They can, if you want, call and confirm attendees. They do the mail. They do everything. So our team knows there’s a seminar, say, this Thursday, but they’re wholly uninvolved from anything that is involved in that until Wednesday afternoon. Then we step in and we’ve got a specific protocol that we follow.

Hot topics

When starting with LeadingResponse, we first asked about topics people wanted to hear about. One of the popular ones was Social Security—something that I knew nothing about. Thank goodness for Horsesmouth and Elaine Floyd, because I ordered the manual for Social Security, looked at the presentation, and convinced myself I could fake my way through it—and I did. Our first Social Security seminar had 30 people for two separate nights—and a 212 person wait list! We continue to do Social Security, but we did find at times it was difficult to go from that to talking about managing their investments.

Collectively we went back to Horsesmouth and decided taxes would be the next topic because this was about the time the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act came out. We came to find out CPAs aren’t talking to their clients a lot about tax planning. Tax attorneys aren’t talking to them about planning and the person buying and selling your stocks, they probably don’t even know anything about planning.

We obviously have to walk a fine line because we’re not CPAs. We’re not tax preparers. We can’t advise on taxes related to your filing, but FINRA has over and over again said, “Listen, if you tell somebody to sell a stock that’s appreciated, you are responsible for the tax implications of that recommendation, and the same if you tell them to do a Roth conversion.” So there is certain wealth and investment-related tax information that we, as the advisor, are responsible for according to FINRA, but nobody’s talking about it. Nobody’s talking about, “Hey, is it better for me to hold this stock in this account or that account?” Well, it turns out that it matters, and so we’ve done about 100 seminars over the last three-and-a-half years, and probably 70 of them have been on taxes—that includes last year.

We did seminars in January and February, and then Covid happened. We then were hunkered down March through June, and we decided—despite a lot of people’s recommendations—that we could respectfully and correctly do a socially distanced seminar. So we doubled our room size and cut the number of people almost in half. We had come to the conclusion that it’s no different than walking in the grocery store; we had everybody follow protocol of hand sanitizer, the whole deal. We finished last year—even after taking five months off—with $27 million in new assets just from seminars, not including referrals or client dollars.

The invitation

LeadingResponse takes care of all the invitations and determining who they are sent to. With them, we use parameters of age, geographic location to the restaurant, investible assets, and income. If we put those parameters on this, these are the typical kinds of families that we see come and ultimately, have the opportunity to work with. In terms of the style of the invitations, I tell Lisa, the woman who works with us, to use whatever is working elsewhere currently. Lisa has told us that we have an above-average response rate to our invitations, being primarily a retirement community.

All we do is tell them to pick the invite and we tell them what we want to talk about. Then, we take a little extra personal step to critique and refine some of the points that will be discussed at dinner. LeadingResponse thankfully has all the data on seminars that have been at any restaurant in any area.

We send out about 10,000 invitations, and we typically see, and this is not every seminar, but we typically see a 1%–1.5% acceptance rate. So, we’ll do one invite and usually have two separate dates. I like doing a Thursday and a Tuesday, because it gives the folks who are traveling or out of town two separate weeks to prepare.

One thing I hate is a wait list of people. Because they are prospective relationships that are sitting there wanting to come hear what you have to say. You put them in purgatory, so I can’t stand that. So we’ve had as many as four dates off of one invite, so it really does depend on topic, timing and anything else that could affect it, so I like to temper expectations. We’ve seen, in a Covid environment, much more around a half a percent return on invites, but that can still be very, very, very profitable.

Here’s what’s important to remember. We’re only giving one presentation. We can package it and wrap it in any way you want, but it is the same presentation, and it is around helping families keep more through tax-efficient wealth management.

Invitations and Covid-19 protocols

Since Covid happened, we have done roughly 25–30 seminars between this year and last. On our invitations we put a little line that says something along the lines of, “Everyone will be socially distanced at their own tables with hand sanitizers and will be comfortably placed apart to make sure everyone feels respected, safe and healthy,” something like that. And less than 10 people have canceled due to Covid. But please remember that we, in South Carolina, have a pretty open environment in terms of what we’re able to do. And with Covid-19, our maximum seating has been a room of 22-28 people, while again, doubling the size of the room that we would normally use.

Seminars are part of a turnkey process for gaining HNW clients

Now we’ve birthed, over the last four years, a process that is more encompassing than just seminars, but it’s how to attract, retain and then, ultimately, build a practice of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families. So seminars are a piece of that, but it’s not the only piece, and we’re actually in the process with an organization right now of putting together a turnkey manual that quite frankly could be used by any advisor in any city in the country to successfully start. Tax and Social Security seminars are a big, critical part of being able to do that.

We have a turnkey process that our team follows including everything from when are salads brought out to what time we start. We typically start at 6:30 p.m. We have salads and bread put out so they’re not starving. Then, I give a 50- to 53-minute presentation that never feels that long, from the feedback I get. Then, we’ve got a protocol all the way through that has dinner come in directly after that. We use Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and they have been wonderful and it really makes a difference having a restaurant understand what we are doing. We use the same servers virtually every time.

Our success that night is largely dependent on: Does the steak come out hot or cold, is it on time? Those things matter. What we’re also trying to do is while one advisor may be a gifted communicator or presenter, another might not be. We want to eliminate the need to have a superstar present and let the system support the seminar experience. So, our appointment-request rate, we’ve been told by Bill Goode, is astronomically high. The cost of those 100 seminars is justified by our 77% appointment-request rate. We attribute that rate more to the system than me or somebody else being a phenomenal presenter.

The goal is to set up a first meeting

We don’t want to lose sight of what the goal of the seminar is. The goal of the seminar is not to get a new client, but to get them in for a first meeting. We drive all of our energy, activity, conversation, dangling enough carrots toward: “We have to get them in the office.”

The first win is we’ve got to get them to come to the event, right? So that’s why we pick the topics we do. We talk about things that nobody’s talking about. At the event, we’ve structured it so that we are trying to drive their interest in coming in to sit down because we know something that may benefit them. That’s not in an insincere or disingenuous way. We really are providing what we believe to be valuable, and so for Social Security, I end every seminar with a question almost exactly like this: “Are you 100% sure that you’re getting the most possible Social Security benefit and paying the least amount of taxes on it?”

Then, I’ll pause. Of course, the answer is “No.” Everybody’s like, “No, we’re not sure.” I say, “Do you want to be sure? We’ve developed a Social Security audit that we provide at no cost other than some time and effort.” And I come back to that two, three, four, five times after my presentation as we go around to the tables.

So after I present, we bring the steaks in and then, myself and another advisor go to each table and answer a personal question. I don’t take questions during the presentation. I set that stage from the beginning, by saying “I’m the only thing standing between you and those juicy steaks. I haven’t eaten dinner either, so let’s hold all the questions till the end.” I’m answering their questions, certainly, but I’m saying, “That’s something we discuss in our audit. That would be a great one-on-one conversation in our audit.”

It’s all about helping them be 100% sure. I make it clear that, “Listen, whether we engage in an actual relationship or not has nothing to do with whether we provide the audit to you.” Then, I address the elephant in the room. “So what’s in it for us? We are a for-profit business. What’s in it for us is that I want you to leave so impressed with our competency, our professionalism, and who we are that you become walking billboards for Pyle Financial Services in this community, and that is actually more valuable to me than whether you become a client or not.”

Our ‘Keep More’ audit

So I end my conversation and say, “Are you 100% sure that you’re keeping the most amount of wealth and income possible? Do you want to be 100% sure?” That’s what we designed our “Keep More” audit for. We actually have a copyright attorney trademarking that phrase. So, we just say, “We want to help families keep more.” Keep more of their wealth and more of their income.

We don’t do a bait-and-switch; we’ve actually got something that will identify all of the areas where they have leaks in their boat, right? Then, separate from that, if they want us to talk about how we would solve those leaks, that’s when we come back for a second appointment. What we typically find is most of the families that we want a second meeting with, we get it. So we’re fortunate enough to be in that situation as a firm.

We are really, really selective about who we work with. I know people say that, but we have a motto around the office that if you see a client’s number pop up on the phone and you cringe, something’s wrong. Either it’s time for them to rotate out and us to help them transition, or something’s off. In a business where we get to select who we work with, we want to actually work with people that we like and can see long-term relationships with.

Presenting 5 strategies, but the audit offers more

Our presentation is built around five strategies to help preretirees and retirees reduce or eliminate their taxes in retirement. We identify, from the beginning, that these are not the only strategies. There are roughly 24 strategies we’ve identified that apply to preretirees and retirees for tax mitigation, reduction or elimination. That is the point of our audit, to see which of those two dozen strategies apply, but we’re only going to cover five today.

We tell them in the dinner, we require information prior to the Keep More audit, so that we actually have something to go over. We tell them, we respect your time, and I know you respect ours, so we will not meet with somebody unless they provide everything from Social Security benefits, any corporations, entities or businesses they own, previous year’s tax return, a portfolio, retirement, and non-retirement investments. We’ve got a whole list of items we require, or we will not meet with somebody.

Because the reality is, if somebody is not willing to provide you basic information, you can’t do much—and we have a confidentiality agreement that we have ready to sign if they feel more comfortable with that. But it is as if you go to the doctor and you don’t let them do any tests, but you wonder why you feel bad. We’re not going to waste our time to meet with folks who aren’t going to provide data for us.

Our target clients

The terms “high-net-worth” and “ultra-high-net-worth” are always relative to the location that you’re at. We probably have the highest minimum account balance requirement of anybody within a couple of hours of us which is $1 million.

Again, we’re in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and so where the typical wirehouse advisor may have an average account balance of $400,000, $350,000, $500,000, we are different in that way. That is not about us being pretentious, but it’s about us realizing that the weight for us to truly deliver what we’re saying we can deliver on helping families keep more through tax-efficient wealth strategies, that effort takes the same, whether you have $10 million or $2 million.

We’ve seen the critical mass for us in terms of where we can use the most planning tools. And where do we find we add the most value? It’s at that million-plus point. Do we take on families below that? Yeah. Have we turned away families with more than that? Yes, because that’s a starting place, but it’s about more than that.

So what we’re helping identify for families is what structures and things that they’re currently doing are actually having a negative impact on their wealth-related taxes. An example is the difference between an ordinary dividend and a qualified dividend, which is pretty substantial. Sometimes, families have ordinary dividend investments in their own accounts, so we call that asset location. Forget what you own, but where you own it might make all the difference in the world.

So the audit is simply identifying all of the items in our proprietary process that would constitute potential tax reduction mitigation. We say from the beginning, we are not CPAs. We are not tax attorneys. Before you do anything, we would only do these things if we could bring in your tax planning team to help execute in the most efficient way. But we know that these are the immediate years, based off the information you’ve provided us that there could be some potential for a huge benefit. “We’re not telling them to buy Google or sell Apple.”

The advisor understands how it all works together

The frustrating thing we’ve run into is whether it’s eMoney or MoneyGuard Pro or Holistiplan or RightCapital or Risk Alive, all of the software is really good at usually one or two things, but none of them talk to each other about how it all works together. Meaning, how does doing a Roth conversion affect my IRMAA? How does a qualified charitable distribution from my IRA impact my Social Security taxation that year? But all of that matters and it works together and you and I didn’t talk about this.

I would highly recommend the one or two-day tax planning workshop that Jeff and Debra do. It is fantastic at the beginning to get advisors who don’t think this way to start to see how truly delivering to high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families is the ability to understand how it does all work together. So I highly recommend that.

I’ve done it myself, but we actually built our own software. We hired somebody to build via the Excel platform how we can model what this three years’ worth of Roth conversions do? Again, this is not something we give to the clients. This is an in-house for our decision-making purposes how that all works together.

What we say in the first meeting

Interestingly enough, I would say less than 10% of people actually ask for the audit. We have it, right? It’s a two-pager with the 22 or 24 items we think are potential ways to mitigate, reduce or eliminate taxes. We assess their personal situation against those two dozen items. But yet, less than 10% or 15% of people actually ask for it. What they’re more concerned with is, “Tell me how to fix it.”

We say from the beginning, “Listen, our only aim here in our meeting is to honor what we started with conversation-wise, and to simply identify some of the biggest opportunities that jumped off the page given the data you provided us.” So I just want to talk through those items.

Separate from that conversation, you’re going to be able to decide—and we’ll mutually decide together at the end of our time today: “Is this something you want to go try to execute on your own? Is this something you’d like to take back to your guy or gal that does your stuff and get them to do it, or do you want to talk about what we would do to solve these problems?” Inevitably, if the heart doctor is the one telling you that you have a problem, you’ll likely want to go back to that heart doctor and figure out what he would recommend.

Closing presentation

I close my presentation with exactly what I’ve already mentioned, which is, “Are you 100% sure?” I think the way I say it is, “Let me end our time together in this part with asking you two questions and then it’s, ‘Are you 100% sure?’” So then I say, “All right, let’s bring in the steaks.” We’ll eat dinner together, I and one of my colleagues will go around and we’ll answer every question. After we finish answering questions and we’re finished with dinner, we’ve got a little giveaway that we’d like to do, and we’ll have dessert and coffee as we end our evening together. Somehow, we’re letting them know dinner’s not the end; there’s more to come. Then, I’ll take a quick bathroom break or grab something to drink, and then we immediately start going around to tables, because at this point, you’ve got somewhere between eight and 12 tables, and people have been writing down questions.

So we provide them a folder that has in it an appointment request and feedback form, and some loose-leaf paper on our letterhead to take notes on. So I’m setting that stage from the beginning and I will regularly have people ask me personal questions in terms of, “Hey, you talked about this strategy. Here’s my situation. What do you think?” I’m always driving to the audit. “Hey, that’s a great question. I can give you a high-level view,” but that’s something we really dive into during the audit, right? So I’m not being vague or dismissive of the questions. I’m answering them, but I’m letting them know, “If you want all that that might entail, it’s about the audit.” So I get back up. At this point, the steaks have been cleared, and I’ll make a little joke or something.

One of the things we’ve come to say, which is probably cheesy, but we’ll say, “Listen. We’ve talked a lot about tax-free, let’s talk about calorie-free. We’ve got some calorie-free dessert coming in, in just a minute. But what I’d like to do, I had some great conversations at each of the tables. A couple of things came up.” What I’ll do is typically find one or two things that kept coming up over and over because chances are multiple people are asking that question. That’s what resonated with a lot of people.

So sometimes it’s, how do you get paid? Other times it’s, what’s involved in the audit? So I’ll answer one or two of those, and then I’ll say:

Listen, in about two to three minutes, we’re going to have dessert and coffee come out and we’re going to end our evening together, but here’s what I’d like you to do: Open up that folder and you’ll see a feedback form.

What you’ve seen tonight is the product of some very helpful and honest feedback. We welcome that, but let me point your attention to page two at the very top. That’s where you can request your Keep More audit.

Let me make this very simple for you. If you are 100% sure that you’re keeping the most amount of wealth and income possible, just check, no, you don’t need your audit. But if you are not sure and you want to be, check yes. Somebody from our office will call you before lunchtime tomorrow. We’ll set a time that works.

And that’s the ending. I say, “Listen, as you finish, fold those up, we’ll come collect them. We’ve got a little giveaway.” So we do a little $50 giveaway to the Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and that’s it. That’s our close. That’s my second close, if you will. From that, we’ve got a 77% appointment request rate.

Whereas, you’re just setting it up, “Yes. I want this meeting. Check here,” and then all the particulars will be dealt with later, the next day when people are a little fresher as well. I think about if I’m in their situation, I want the decision to be a very yes or no, very black and white. So if you’re like, “Listen, come see me if your big toe hurts. If your big toe does not hurt, do not come see me.” It’s that simple, or whatever the driver is. We just want to make it as clear as possible who should see us. Admittedly, we’re framing the question in such a way that we believe everybody should then, want to come in. That’s part of the craftsmanship, I think.

Turning prospects into clients

We are pretty selective with who we work with. So we are regularly referring folks out; we use that first meeting to see if they’re a good fit and whether we’re connecting. I think the fit is just as much financial as it is a relationship. If we’ve got a family coming in and telling us, “Look, this is what we do. This is how we do it. How can we do better?” Then you’re not our type of family. I believe we only end up bringing on about 25% of the families we meet with.

So we’ve got it tracked down. We’ve got a master sheet across years’ worth of data that says out of how many people come, how many become clients, out of how many? Then, you just back into if we want to grow our practice by 10 million this year or 30 million or whatever the number is, you’re just able to back into how many seminars we need to do, and then it just becomes a self-propelling process into play.

Bridging the gap between first and second meeting

I’m trusting my gut and our other advisors, which means sometimes you miss, right? So if it’s somebody we’re not working with or not interested in working with, we’ll just end the meeting and say, “Listen. I really appreciate your time. I hope you found what we’ve offered to be valuable. If there’s any one of your friends or neighbors that you know is not 100% sure if they’re keeping all they can, please do keep us in mind. We treat them the same way we treat you.”

Then sometimes, you get people to say, “Well, so how do we work together?” I say, “I really appreciate you asking that. We had to make the decision some time ago that we’re not the right fit for everybody, but everybody we do sit with, we want to add value to. I don’t feel like we are going to be able to add the kind of value to you that you need in a long-term relationship, but I hope you found this to be valuable.”

We simply say, “Listen, we’ve obviously covered a lot of ground here. My aim was to touch it at a high level. Really, the next step for us before we could ever evaluate and decide together whether we were a good fit in a relationship, we’ve got to clearly be able to articulate how we would address each of these problems and for you to have a very clear vision about what it would look like to engage in a relationship with us. So if you’re willing to put in a little more time and I actually do need a few more pieces of information from you, from some of the things you’ve said today, if you’re willing to engage and get back together, our team is going to put together a clear and distinct roadmap so that at the end of our next meeting together, you know exactly what we will do, how we do it, what problems it would solve, and then we go into our decision with very clear eyes.”

As I said before, the only win out of the seminar is a first appointment. So we try to keep that in front of us, I’ve made some instinctive, in-the-moment moves, like I’m sure everybody has, and closed people in the first meeting. But that is the exception and not the rule.