On a recent coaching call, one of our advisors, I’ll call her Sally, told me about an idea she’d been sitting on for months. One of her longtime clients and centers of influence runs women’s retreats, the kind with breathwork and journaling and a guest list that skews far more spiritual than spreadsheet. Sally wanted to co-host a retreat with her. She also wanted to bury the idea, because she was convinced it was “too woo-woo” for her book of business.
I asked her the question I ask every advisor who tells me what their clients supposedly can’t handle: have your clients actually told you this, or is this a story you’re telling yourself?
She didn’t have an answer, because nobody had told her anything. She’d written the whole script herself, and then cast her clients as the audience who’d hate it.
Here’s what actually happened when she stopped rewriting the story and just went to one of these retreats in Mexico: she met a woman there, built a real friendship over a few days, no pitch, no deck, and that friendship turned into ten million dollars in assets moving to her practice. Not from a seminar. Not from a cold LinkedIn campaign. From being fully, unapologetically herself in a room she’d almost talked herself out of entering.
This is the whole game, and it’s simpler than most financial advisor marketing advice makes it sound. Enthusiasm is enrolling. When you’re in an A activity, with A people, in an A place, you burn brighter, and people are drawn into that glow whether or not the specific thing you’re excited about is their thing. Water your idea down to make it palatable to everyone and you get a room nobody’s excited to be in, including you. Go deeper into the actual niche, weird edges and all, and you get a room that filters itself. The people who aren’t a fit self-select out before you ever have to have an awkward conversation. The people who are a fit lean in, hard, because authentic enthusiasm is rare enough that it reads as trustworthy the moment they feel it.
I’ve written before about why “salesy” behavior repels people: it’s what happens when you’re closing before there’s trust. I Don’t Want to Be Salesy is the fear of being that person. Niching down solves it from a different angle. You’re not selling anyone on a retreat. You’re just being visibly, specifically yourself, and trusting that the right people will want to be near it. That’s not a sales tactic. It’s what I’ve called being interested, not interesting, in Cultivating Relationships: show up for real, and the business follows the relationship instead of the other way around.
Do the math before you talk yourself out of the next one of these ideas. If you ran two or three of these a year, whatever your version of the retreat is, and even one of them produced a client like Sally’s, would it be worth it? Once you frame it that way, it stops being a “nice to have, if I ever get around to it” and becomes one of the highest-leverage moves available to a financial advisor coach or advisor at any stage of the business.
This is really just the eight people, eight places, eight activities principle showing up in the wild, the same idea I laid out in The Game Changer: pre-designate the rooms and the people who are worth dropping everything for, then go further and faster with less fuel by actually showing up in them. Sally’s center of influence was a game changer. The retreat was the room. The friendship, not a pitch, was the mechanism.
Here’s the exercise. Name the idea you’ve been talking yourself out of because it feels too niche, too weird, too much you. Ask the real question: has a client actually told you it’s a problem, or did you write that story yourself? Then go do the hard stuff of showing up in it anyway, and let your own glow do the enrolling.
Not sure if your practice is actually built to capitalize on relationships like this, or if you’re still heads-down in the weeds? The Advisor Practice Health Scorecard will tell you in about five minutes which of the four stages, Survival, Thrival, Mastery, or Purpose, you’re really operating from, so you know whether it’s time to niche down or shore up the foundation first. Take the Scorecard here.
Be wonderful.
