The Influential Advisor

089: Why 70% of Advisors Lose Their Best Clients After Business Sales—And How to Keep Yours with Jeff Armstrong

• Paul G. McManus

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Episode Summary:

Your best client just sold their business for $8 million and calls to say they're moving everything to Goldman Sachs. This devastating scenario happens to 70% of advisors, but Jeff Armstrong has the antidote. As a former business owner who ran a company for 23 years, Jeff reveals the blind spot costing advisors their most valuable relationships. While most advisors focus on managing wealth outside the business, Jeff shows how becoming the expert on your client's largest asset creates unbreakable loyalty. He shares why 97% of business exits disappoint owners and the actions that transform you from replaceable vendor to irreplaceable quarterback.


About the Guest:

  • Jeff Armstrong built and ran a laser printer repair company for 23 years before joining Cultivate Advisors. He helps financial advisors avoid losing clients to "big league" competitors by becoming business optimization experts.


The Brutal Reality:

Devastating Statistics: 50-70% of business owners fire their advisor after liquidity events when investment banks suggest they need "serious players."

Hidden Epidemic: Only 30% of businesses attempting to sell complete transactions. Of those that sell, 90% disappoint owners. This means 97% of exits fail expectations.

Shared Blind Spot: 99% of business owners cannot answer: What's my business worth? What multiples apply? What drives value? Most advisors share this blindness.


The Cultivate Solution:

Target Market: Businesses generating $1-15 million annually, matched with former business owner advisors who've successfully exited.

Partnership Model: Cultivate functions as team extension, creating "alley-oops" for investment planning and tax strategies as business performance improves.

Process: Free business valuation, gap analysis, prioritized roadmap. Owners implement independently or engage ongoing support.


Creating "Stickiness":

Becoming Irreplaceable: Help optimize their most valuable asset, and Goldman Sachs becomes irrelevant. You're their strategic partner, not just money manager.

Personal Trainer Effect: Business owners need accountability and implementation. You become associated with success at the source.


CEPA Training Revolution:

Implementation Gap: Traditional training provides knowledge without application skills. Cultivate's immersion events bridge this gap.

Viral Success: November event sold out after going viral within Edward Jones's 1,400 CEPA network.


Implementation Strategy:

Start Small: Pilot with one client. Cultivate includes you in calls and provides quarterly reporting.

Full Integration: Real-time business metrics create natural wealth management conversations.


Connect with Jeff:

LinkedIn: Jeff Armstrong 
Email: jeffa@cultivateadvisors.com 
Website: cultivateadvisors.com

Bottom line: While other advisors wait for liquidity events, smart advisors help create them and build unbreakable relationships. 

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

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Speaker 1:

Imagine your best client, the one you've worked with for 15 years, calls you three weeks after selling his business for $8 million. Your heart races, thinking he wants to celebrate and plan his next chapter. Instead he drops a bombshell I'm moving everything to Goldman Sachs. I'm in the big leagues now your stomach drops 15 years of relationship gone in one phone call. Here's what nobody tells you.

Speaker 1:

This nightmare happens to 70% of financial advisors when their business owner clients exit. But the advisors who avoid it. They did one thing differently during the relationship they became the expert on their client's most valuable asset before anyone else even thought to look. Jeff Armstrong has cracked the code on this. As director of strategic partnerships at Cultivate Advisors, he's discovered why 97% of business exits fail to meet expectations and how smart advisors are positioning themselves as the indispensable quarterback throughout the entire journey. Today, on the Influential Advisor podcast, jeff reveals the blind spot that's costing advisors millions in client relationships and the specific strategy that makes you more valuable after the exit, not less. He'll show you exactly how to become the advisor they can't replace, even when Goldman comes calling. Tell us a little bit about one, who you are, your background, and then two who is Cultivated Advisors and what is your mission?

Speaker 2:

What do you guys do there? Yeah, absolutely yeah. My background is I'm an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 25 years old. I started business owners have because I'm a poster child for all that stuff. They don't really teach that in business school. It's a school of hard knocks when you're a business owner most of the time, and Cultivate Advisors is an organization that helps business owners like me like I could have used Cultivate Advisors when I had my business but they really help identify what are the blind spots.

Speaker 2:

We're really the co-pilot, along with that business owner, to help them grow, scale, get healthier, more profitable, more valuable. And so we do one-on-one advising with small business owners. I would say 80% of our clients do between a million and 15 million in annual sales. That's where we niche in Industry agnostic, but we pair them with an advisor on our team. All of our advisors we have 30, are all former business owners and so they've all scaled and successfully exited their own businesses and now they work alongside other owners and entrepreneurs who are looking to do something similar. So there's been there, done that experience and also we work within a methodology to help grow and scale businesses, and we work within a tech platform as well to keep everybody very organized.

Speaker 1:

Why do business owners come to you and what I mean by that is that I'm a business owner myself, so I fit into that category and what's typically the pain point or the desire that leads someone to your doorstep? Versus the other services, why not hire a marketing person? Or why not hire XYZ? What is it specifically that you find gets business owner interested and to your services?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would say it probably falls into one or two buckets typically. Oftentimes they're stuck at a certain revenue plateau. They can't seem to get to that next level. They don't know what that would entail or what they could do differently. They often feel overwhelmed in the business, and so it's a kind of a growth issue. The other issue is we meet companies that don't have a problem growing, but they have a people problem or keeping capacity. How do I have the right systems or the right people? And so that growth or capacity issue it's oversimplifying it, but that's typically one of the things that they want to solve. Also, we get introduced to a lot of businesses that are looking to transfer ownership down the road. Typically it's three to five years or they know the number they need to hit and they need help reverse engineering.

Speaker 2:

That Business owners are historic. They have a blind spot around the asset value, the enterprise value of the business. Businesses aren't being built to sell. The stats on that are pretty bad. Actually, only 30% of businesses that go to market actually do sell. The stats on that are pretty bad. Actually Only 30% of businesses that go to market actually do sell Really bad stats. That was our houses. We'd be turning ourselves inside out to figure out how to get in the top 30%. So oftentimes they'll come, get introduced to us.

Speaker 2:

We do a business valuation and then we build them a plan to increase their enterprise value, decrease the health and the value of the business. So that's another category. They come to us but it's hard A poster child again for all that stuff. I didn't have an awareness around my enterprise value. But most business owners get into business because they're technically proficient at something, or see an opportunity, they're passionate about something, or ideally all three right. And then they have to know financials. And they have to know financials and they have to know marketing and sales and leadership and recruiting all these different hats you have to wear. It's near impossible to be an expert in all those different areas. And so we identify hey, where's the low-hanging fruit, the way that we can optimize the business in pursuit of what the vision and goals are for the business owner. And then we play matchmaker. We match the right advisor to the right business, the one that we think would move the needle in the company the best.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, have you read Michael Gerber's the E-Myth? Oh yeah, I've listened to the audio. He has a great voice. I've listened to the audio multiple times and it just has a great. It just outlines it so nicely. Just, the technician becomes a business owner and it's a completely different thing that they're doing. So it's just a great articulation of that. Where does the financial advisor fit in with what you do? And I guess part of the question is do these business owners do they typically come to you directly, or do you partner with financial advisors who work with business owners to help with these things? Help us understand that a little bit better.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they both. They come to us directly and they also come to us as being introduced by financial advisors. I would say financial advisors is our biggest bucket for strategic partnerships and it's one that I'm fully niched into. So I spend my week, I probably talk to seven new financial advisors a week and I talk to five business owners a week that they introduce to cultivate the way it works with financial advisors. And we work with a lot of SEPAs Certified Exit Planning Financial Advisors who are niching into the business owner space. They want to expand into the business owner space.

Speaker 2:

We work with non-SEPAs as well that work with business owners. The idea is the business is the owner's largest asset Yep, by far, it's the big stock, it's the big mutual fund that they can directly influence the outcome over. And so a financial advisor that's working with business owners, trying to help them hit their financial goal and close the wealth gap. The big lever to pull is optimizing the business and where the opportunity is, most business owners don't know the enterprise value of their business. They're mostly guessing, or they just simply don't know the enterprise value of their business. They're mostly guessing, or they just simply don't know, or it's anecdotal evidence, like my buddy at the country club sold his business for this. They just don't spend a lot of time into it.

Speaker 2:

So we do a business valuation.

Speaker 2:

We'll let a business owner know what we think the business is worth, what the multiple range is for their industry, what are some of the things that would drive the multiple to the top end of the stick.

Speaker 2:

If you're a managed IT company, you have a multiple range of two times profit or two times EBITDA, and that the best in class is 10. That's a large range between two and 10. So how do you move to the top end of the stick? What does the company look like now and what would it make sense to spend a little time and energy on via Michael Gerber's the E-Myth right sense to spend a little time and energy on, via Michael Gerber's the E-Myth right, in pursuit of working on the business, but in pursuit of increasing the health and value of the business. And so we work with financial advisors who want to quantify the asset value of the business and they're interested in increasing the asset value of the business. So we work on how do we increase the wealth inside the business, partnering with financial advisors who want to create the wealth outside the business.

Speaker 2:

And it can be a killer. One-two punch.

Speaker 1:

How do you ensure comfort, and what I mean by that is that, for example, financial advisor and a CPA when they have a good relationship, they tend to work seamlessly together and it benefits the client. When they don't work together, it tends to not be the best in it. The client might get confused in terms of advice. How do you manage in such a way that gives the financial advisor a high degree of confidence that what you're doing A is going to make them look good and B is going to help them build their own business, not siphon it away?

Speaker 2:

Great question and it's something that we, especially early on, seem to be addressing a lot more of. We're not doing it as much now that we have a bit of a name brand around, cultivate, especially in the SEPA community. We do a lot of trainings for that community. We want to be an extension of the financial advisors team. We're there, the quarterback, and we just stay in our lane.

Speaker 2:

In business optimization we also take a crawl, walk, run approach. Hey, let's pilot one of these. Let's have you come in on the discovery call, lay eyes on it. We'll share as this business owner comes through the free steps of our process. We'll keep you posted and looped in on all the communications because we're an extension of your team. We just want to make you look like a rock star.

Speaker 2:

And then if a business owner signs on with Cultivate, then we're as collaborative as the financial advisor would like us to be. We're pulse, checking what's going on in the business every quarter and rolling those stories, those metrics, up to the financial advisor, either on a quarterly basis or on two times a year basis, whatever they'd like to see. They can also log in, if the business owner is good with it, into the software that we use to keep everything organized so they can get a high level macro 30,000 foot view into what's going on in the business and they can get as micro as they want to. The business owner can share the login credentials so they can be as involved as they want to be, and we're very cognizant of the fact that they're spending relational equity with us by making introductions, and so we do everything we can to again make them look like a rock star and just deliver a world-class experience for the business owners that come through.

Speaker 2:

And the wealth advisor is going to get good data and deliverables from the free steps of what we do, and I can talk a little bit about what that process looks like. But the first deliverable is a business valuation. So it's going to we ask, hey, what does the business owner think the business is worth now? What do they want it to be worth? A lot of times this is the first time they're processing through that Then we give them the valuation, we give them the health score, what the potential value of the business would. So this is a lot of good data for the financial advisors that they can pull and use in their comprehensive planning.

Speaker 1:

Aside from serving the client. How does the financial advisor make money? In other words, the motivation is I want to help my client the best, but I also want to make sure I protect my relationship and, ultimately, I'm looking for ways to grow my own business and make more money.

Speaker 2:

We call those alley-oops and ultimately I'm looking for ways to grow my own business and make more money. We call those alley-oops. When we're alley-ooping for the financial advisor to make a slam dunk, financial advisors win. When a business is growing and scaling and getting healthier and opening up the cash flow pipe, a financial advisor wins. So we'll set them up for what we call alley-oops. We'll also advocate for things that the business owners should be doing that we don't do.

Speaker 2:

But if it's a partnership agreement, do you have a buy-sell agreement? Is it funded at the appropriate level? No, you should go talk to the financial advisor, right? Whoever that referring partner is. Oh, you've got a big cash flow pipe, you've got a repeatable recurring profit and we got to take a look at tax mitigation strategies. Maybe you should look into a cash balance plan. Go talk to ex-financial advisor. Those are. We've got this money that's sitting in the checking that's not being used to support the growth of the business. Let's look at diversifying and stripping some of that wealth out of the business and diversifying it. We're creating those alley-oops for the financial advisor and also for tax and legal too. There's implications that we see. We'll advocate for that. Again, we don't do those things, but we typically will send it to the financial advisor. If we don't have somebody at the table for that, then sometimes we can pull a party into it. But we really look for the financial advisor to be the quarterback make those decisions around. Who do they want at the table?

Speaker 1:

Additionally, I think, the business owner, especially the growing, more successful business owner, if the financial advisor doesn't bring in the resources, such as yourself, or have those resources internally, what's the likelihood that the client may outgrow the financial advisor or feel that they're outgrowing the financial advisor. That's part one. The other part is that I think part of the payoff could be is when they actually sell their business, ideally for a higher amount, and then now they have a great problem of what do I do with all this?

Speaker 2:

money. Yes, thank you, paul, for bringing us back to that, and that's why financial advisors get their SIPA right, like they want to get connected to that liquidity event and it is that pot at the end of the rainbow. That's the big prize for sure. The alley-oops are like little things that we can do along the journey, and the research that I've found says 50 to 70% of business owners leave their financial advisor when they have a liquidity event. I've got plenty of stories from financial advisors where that actually prompted them to look into certified exit planning and how can they provide more value to a business owner around the entrepreneurial journey. So if that data is correct, those are more scary stats right. 50 to 70% of business owners outgrow or move over to another financial advisor when they have a liquidity event. A lot of times that comes from the investment bank or the M&A advisor or the business attorney saying, hey, congratulations, you just joined the big leagues. You've got to have a player that does this.

Speaker 2:

What we found is that if a financial advisor is adding value along the business owner's journey, as it relates to the value of their business, ie what is it going to sell for If they're looking at through the business through that lens From my perspective. I think they should be, because it's an asset and they're managing assets that they should be looking and quantifying what is the asset value of the business. If they're providing value along that journey, they create that stickiness where that business owner isn't going to go anywhere because they've been the guy that's helping them understand what is the value, what are the things I can do to increase it, and they're along with that journey. So it creates that stickiness where they won't move.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'll just share just from personal experience. So I've hired my own financial advisor just in the past year and it's really resonated with his. So he's a client of mine, he wrote a book with us and I just really resonate with his message and so I've been working with him for a year and it's been fantastic, and I don't call it an issue. But my only place where I'd maybe be a little bit dissatisfied is that even he's viewing me through more of a lens of simply the traditional metrics or at least that's how I feel right, how much have you saved in retirement, et cetera, and which is great. I'm making progress there and that's fantastic. I'm diversifying all those good things.

Speaker 1:

However, there's not enough conversation about what's the valuation of your business, how does this play a role and how do we increase that? There's really none. I've brought it up several times. I'm like you need to add this into the overall pie so that we actually have a more accurate picture, and because I don't think that's the sweet spot of what he and his team do. Those tend to be overlooked, and that's probably my only point of dissatisfaction, and so if I were to leave at some point, it would likely be because of that right Is that I need an advisor or a team that more carefully delivers on my biggest asset, which is my business.

Speaker 2:

The interesting thing is, the biggest blind spot that business owners have is the biggest blind spot that financial advisors have, in my humble opinion, and that's the enterprise value of the business. Business owners aren't thinking about it, financial advisors aren't thinking about it. This is the big opportunity for financial advisors to step into this new awareness and shift the paradigm of the business owner around. Hey, my business is more just than a job and an income. There's asset value to it, or what would it take to create asset value in the business. But before a financial advisor can do that, they often have to shift their own paradigm around enterprise value. And so I think the challenge is like they're not just they're just not getting trained this way, like it hasn't been a thing. Therefore, it's like this hidden epidemic that businesses aren't being built to sell. Nobody's thinking about it.

Speaker 2:

Now the SEPA in the EBI community, the Exit Planning Institute and the accreditation has done a lot of good work creating more awareness with financial advisors around this, but in my opinion, there's still a gap. They come out of the SEPA. They realize how important it is to leverage the business to hit financial goals, but there's a bit of a gap. And how do I bring this to business owners. What do I say? What's my new strategy? What's my new talk tracks around this? And so we've met so many SIPA financial advisors that we identified this. We've worked with EPI and we've created what we call the SIPA immersion event, which is and you don't have to be a SIPA, but it's really a it's an in-person learning event that we've done here in Chicago. Our third one is going to be in November. It's already sold out, so it's a hot topic. It's proving to be a hot topic of how do you become a business owner specialist as a financial advisor, like, literally, what are the tools, strategies and talk tracks that you use to connect with business owners around this?

Speaker 1:

If I'm not mistaken, just in terms of how you help, is that you not only. For example, they get certified with what was it called the Exit Planning Institute.

Speaker 2:

Exit Planning Institute.

Speaker 1:

Yep, and they work with you. You have training, but you also just underscore. You go that extra step where you work with them hand in glove in terms of helping their clients. In other words, it's, it's not just this certification Great, you got the paper, go out and do good work, which I think you said it but I think that's the biggest block is having my name on a piece of paper really is meaningless until I actually put it into action and develop the skill and the muscle.

Speaker 1:

There's some great adult learning statistics. I believe, just off of memory, it's 10% come from books and training courses and learning and I think it's like I forget the exact numbers, but it's 20, and then 70 actually comes from implementation and coach, or 20 comes from coaching and then 70 comes from implementation. But if you never get from point A to point B and you don't have someone that can really confidently guide you and you can trust with your business owner clients to collaborate with, you're going to be stuck just with that piece of paper without a lot to show for it would be my guess. Is that what you're saying? Spot on.

Speaker 2:

It's spot on. Yeah, there's four letters behind their name now C-E-P-N-A, but they need action-based learning, right, they need those reps. We do really two things with financial advisors. Yeah, we help their businesses and their portfolio grow and scale and increase the asset value to help hit their financial goals. But we're also training them and educating them on how to work with business owners so they can make this accreditation work for them, so they can become business owner specialists and create more awareness around the enterprise value.

Speaker 2:

They don't have to go deep. I got a guy for that. Right, they're not going to do their estate planning. They're not going to do their taxes. You've got a guy for that. So a lot of what we do is and then we have them along for the ride where they watch us do it, and we get a lot of great feedback of oh, that's so helpful that there's such a good training and educational component allowing me to ride shotgun and observe what you're doing.

Speaker 2:

And so, yeah, it's two different pieces, like helping the business owner clients and we just saw this gap with SEPA financial advisors or financial advisors that work with business owners Like, how do they connect with business owners in a new way? Nobody's training or educating them on that. So we said, hey, we'll do it. I'm more than 3,000 businesses since we've been around, so we'll open source everything that we've learned and everything, and even the tools that we use to quantify the health and the value of the business on the front end. We raised our hand. Epi gave us the blessing to run these training programs for financial advisors and we're off and running and, like I said, the November 20th event is already sold out. We're at max capacity.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know from a previous conversation that you work with financial advisors across the board, but there's one company in particular that seems to be really excited about what you're doing at a high level. Tell us more about what's exciting and you can share names if you want. I don't want to do it on your behalf, but what has them so excited about collaborating with you to help their advisors?

Speaker 2:

So we have run three SIPA immersion events and this is training for financial advisors. The first one was in April. We did it in Chicago for 13 financial advisors we know in Chicago and so they came in. We said, hey, we want feedback. We got great feedback. They seemed to think it was really valuable and really helpful. So we got a lot of positive feedback. And then we got feedback on what we could change. So we went into July and we did that in our office. The one in April was in our office here in Oak Brook Illinois. Then we went offsite to a training facility in Rosemont, illinois, and had SEPAs come in from around the country financial advisors Again some non-SEPAs, but primarily SEPAs and then we ran this training program and by all accounts it was a home run. Financial advisors saying, hey, this is the best two-day training I've had ever. This is the best training I've had in 15 years. I wish I knew about this sooner. They were just like it was awesome to get this feedback. And then now we're doing the next one in November.

Speaker 2:

So one of the firms, Edward Jones. All different firms were represented there, but Edward Jones has the most SEPAs. They have probably 1400 SEPAs and so it's very they've got a good population. They have a monthly call where all these SEPAs come in and they do learn, they do best practices and they're really just trying to like raise the tide with that. And so, following our SIPA immersion event in July, their call was all about that event and they had people share their feedback, what they thought of it, and the feedback was very positive and glowing and it went viral. It literally went viral within their 1400 SIPAs and, like they sold out we sold out all the tickets in August and they're all 99% of them are Edward Jones advisors.

Speaker 1:

Good problem to have. It is Sold out. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So they're really an early adopter.

Speaker 1:

That's fantastic. What's your vision for the future, whether that's the next six months, year, five years? How do you see yourself partnering with financial advisors and helping them over the upcoming years or so?

Speaker 2:

I'll go back to what I call the hidden epidemic with business owners. I've talked to a thousand business owners in my role here at Cultivate over the past four and a half years, almost five years. 99% of them can't answer all three of these questions what's the value of my business, what's the multiple range for my industry and what drives value in my industry and in my particular business that can't? 99% of business owners can't answer those three questions. And what's funny? We were talking about AI earlier. You could literally plug that into AI and get it in a better setting.

Speaker 1:

Well, I was going to push back just a little bit because I've had those thoughts and I put it into AI and it gives it spits out some information. It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything with it necessarily. It just means that I have a heightened awareness because of AI.

Speaker 2:

Yes, we just want heightened awareness. Awareness is the precursor to transformation. So you've got to start with awareness. You've got to understand what is the current state in order to understand where can I go for the future. Say, like a GPS right, like you're never going to get to where you want to go unless you plug in where you're at right now or the GPS is reading where you're at right now, then it can give you a path around. So just knowing where we're at, with the businesses not being able to sell, only 30% of businesses that go to market are able to sell.

Speaker 2:

I've stress tested that number because when I first heard it I was like this is insane. This is true, this is insane. So I was asking M&A advisors, business brokers, even at the immersion event. They're like, if anything that is generous, that's rosy, it's a rosy number. I was like, oh my gosh, we had an M&A advisor at the last immersion event. He goes yeah, I put it more around 10, 15%, at least the ones I talk to. So you've got that right. And then you've got they do go to market, they do sell.

Speaker 2:

Of the businesses that do sell, what's the number? 90% of business owners sell don't feel like they got the value they expected. You do the math on it, that's 97% of businesses aren't going into the sunset the way they thought they would. This is such a massive opportunity for financial advisors to orient themselves around this. It's what we do at Cultivate. It's a very successful formula and nobody has a better commonly aligned goal than the financial advisor and that's hitting the financial goals for this business. So that's where the opportunity is. That is. And so where you say where do I see the future is like, how do we make those numbers better? Those are hidden, epidemic numbers and nobody's talking about it.

Speaker 2:

And we hear a lot about the great wealth transfer. Right, big part of that is transferring business ownership. Most of these companies aren't built to sell. They're not going to sell. And EPI talks about how do we get more significant companies out there Successful versus significant. Where successful is, hey, it's a profitable business, it's employing people, it's good for the community, significant business is all those things, but it's a business that's able to transfer its ownership to somebody else.

Speaker 2:

That's the difference between it and business owners. 50% of businesses, business owners, just get separated from their business due to involuntary reasons. I talk about the five Ds death, divorce, disease, disability disruption, and so life throws you a curveball. Right, life throws you a curveball. If you don't have, if you're not building your company in a way that you can transfer ownership, chances are you're not going to get any money out of it. Or if this offer comes out of the sky and then you go through due diligence with somebody and they beat you up over the value drivers and it ends up being pennies on the dollar. Business owners get a little jaded when they go through a real long process and the number isn't what that was initially posed as the point is that I go to AI for everything.

Speaker 1:

Right, so I can okay, value, I can go get detailed stuff, great thought partner. However, I think it's like it's like I recently hired a personal trainer. I can go to AI and be like, okay, what should I do to lose weight and build muscle? And it's going to be like you should do this and this. I'll be like that's great, and then I take no action, right, I just sit there and say, okay, that was good information, I did nothing with it, but I hired the personal trainer.

Speaker 1:

So I'm actually in the gym three days a week doing stuff that I would rather not do, and I think that analogy that stands out to me is that, however, awareness is the precursor, and I think it's talking about it. It's one way to create awareness. Ai can play a role in that, in terms of creating awareness, but, at the end of the day, for a business owner and a financial advisor, you actually need the analogy that personal trainer, who knows what they're doing, can give you specific advice and hold you accountable and, over time, you're going to deliver the results in a way that just being aware of it is not going to happen.

Speaker 2:

Totally. I don't know this to be true for a fact, but I think the vast majority of business owners are hiring us to be their accountability partner. Yes, it's strategic. Yes, we have templates that we can plug in and customize for their own thing and make it a lot easier. But they just need that accountability. They need to know they're going to meet with their advisor two times a month for two hours a session and we're going to do this work together and they're going to be responsible for some things. We're going to be responsible for some things and we're going to hold each other mutually accountable to hit these goals faster and ensure it happens. That's a big reason. They just need the accountability, because they put out fires, they pulled kittens out of trees, all this stuff right Like they got all the shiny objects and a lot of entrepreneurs have ADHD anyways and so it's just like they get easily distracted. It's like how do we stay on track, how do we follow the plan and how do we ensure that these goals and these initiatives are being accomplished?

Speaker 1:

Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think is important for this conversation?

Speaker 2:

You know what I think is funny I'll just mention this because this is happening more and more. Financial advisors are business owners too, you know. So they can relate to business owners as being a business owner like peer level relatability. And so a lot of financial advisors will go hey, I want to go through your process, because we have a complimentary three steps of our process. We'll do a business valuation, we'll do a gap analysis and then we'll create a prioritized roadmap for them. They can take it and run with it, make it a DIY project, or they can hire us for the accountability and the strategy.

Speaker 2:

So a lot of financial advisors will say I want to go through this process for my own practice. I want to do the business valuation, I want to meet with a strategist and a business advisor to create a tailored business plan. We'd always go yeah, sure, that makes sense. We wouldn't really advertise it, we would make it available to them. Yeah, you can go through it. The funny thing is about 50% of the time they ended up signing up with we're now working with financial advisors as clients to help them grow and scale their practice, and so I put that out there, just because the way that we're not really marketing it that way, but maybe we should.

Speaker 1:

I think it's fantastic. It's. I've started just kind of in a similar vein. It's like one of the things we help our clients do is, once they have a book, it's need to go get on podcast as a guest to promote the book and your message and et cetera. And everyone comes with different skill sets, right, and so one of the things that we've done is that we now person our team, that we have them do a practice session with before they come on my podcast typically and it's an hour, etc and then after that we give them options. Hey, we have a paid service that you can do more if you want to, and half of them end up doing it because now that they've seen the process and they've been exposed to it, now the gap between where they are and where they want to be is more clear, whereas if they'd never done the initial thing, then it'd be like they wouldn't be interested because there'd be a lack of awareness, and so I definitely can see how that's actually, whether it's intentional or not, is a powerful way to get people to sign up. That's kind of like an interesting byproduct I listened to back in the day there was I forget who did this, but I think it was Brian Tracy, if you know who he is, but he called I think it was him.

Speaker 1:

He called it the puppy dog clothes, and it's the kid and the dad go to the, go to the pet store and the kids I want the puppy and the dad's like we don't need the puppy and the pet store is like, hey, you can just take it home for the weekend and don't like it, you can bring it back and oh no, we're getting a puppy.

Speaker 2:

Once, no way.

Speaker 1:

I've enjoyed the conversation. Where can people find you If someone's interested, whether it's a financial advisor, who mostly are listeners where can a financial advisor go to either connect with you or to learn more about Cultivate Advisors?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think. Connect with me LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, jeff Armstrong, and then my email is Jeff A, because I'm not the first Jeff at Cultivate, jeff A at CultivateAdvisorscom, and you can also go to CultivateAdvisorscom to check out what we're up to.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. All right, Jeff, it's been a pleasure. I've enjoyed the conversation. Thanks, Paul.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for having me on.