As an estate planning lawyer, I was effective in acquiring clients through in-person workshops and web-based marketing. I had busy practice with lots of “activity”, but my cost of client acquisition was high, and those costs limited both of my margins - time-margin and money-margin, because retail marketing is very time consuming and very expensive. These low margins were limiting my profitability, my ability to scale, and my ability to enjoy life outside of the practice of law. While I tried to develop referral sources in the traditional ways, I was not very successful at it. I don't really enjoy one-on-one relationship building. But I do enjoy teaching. So, I gave up the daily “lunch-with-an-advisor” plan and started leveraging my time by meeting with multiple advisors at once over multiple days by providing them continuing education. My relationships with advisors grew quickly, and those relationships were more effective than my lunches and coffees ever were. I started acquiring new clients from new advisors almost immediately. (Some of my new clients were actually the advisors themselves). I quickly found that education was the way to ensure that I could get quality clients from reliable sources on an ongoing basis. That was 15 years ago, and I have been presenting my Advisor Bootcamp in my state at least annually ever since.

I find that referral–source education beats constantly “spinning your wheels” scheduling daily advisor lunches and hoping for the occasional one that “gets” how you can help them and their clients, as opposed to the typical ones that want to know if you can refer your clients to them, or how they can get you to reduce your fees.

Now, I know what you are probably thinking:

“This is a great idea. I’m sold … But why do I need your ‘Referral Avalanche’ system? Can’t I just do this myself?”

Yes, you absolutely can do this yourself. And this probably isn’t the first time that you have thought about doing so either. But the fact that you are still reading this also suggests that you have never actually done anything toward it beyond just “thinking” about it. Advisor education is nothing new, especially for estate planners. Lots of estate planners think about it; but very few ever get around to actually doing it.

What stopped you when you considered it before? More to the point, since you’ve been thinking about it but have not implemented it yet, what’s going to change so radically in your life and practice in the near future that will cause your future–self to do what your former–self would not? Or will you be looking back this same time next year planning on adding “advisor education” to your marketing plan in the next comming year? Yes, you can put this together yourself, after spending dozens and dozens of hours developing curriculum and learning through the school of hard knocks. Or, you can make a reasonable investment in yourself and your practice to ensure that this is will be the year that you finally add advisor education into your marketing portfolio.