This is pretty simple for me: My No. 1 prospect is somebody five years from retirement. My No. 1 client is somebody who’s retired. There are a lot of people who come in and don’t know my specialty. They say, “Oh, I’ve got this problem,” and I tell them, “Those are young-people problems. I don’t deal with young-people problems.” So, I’ll refer them to somebody who specializes in that area. It’s part of the process. If I don’t understand it, I don’t do it, and I send it to someone else.
Sometimes, early in your career, you take on cases you shouldn’t. You spend 20 hours working on it. You’re reinventing the wheel. You may or may not get the case because they’re dealing with somebody who actually is good at it, if you’re competing with them. There’s no winning this game. Do what you’re good at.
My staff know exactly the process the clients are going to go through. They know what reports we’re going to run. They know what advice we’re going to give once the reports are done. It’s so systematized, and I can’t be out-retirement-incomed, because unless there’s somebody who specializes it, I’m better at it because that’s all I do. That’s the phrase I always use with my clients: “The big difference between you and me is you retire once; I help people retire every day.” I’ve seen the good and the bad, both emotionally and financially, about retirement.
I want to work with people who fit into those either of two categories because I’m good at it. But if I had to do a disability policy, that would take me hours of research and study. The guy down the hall specializes in that and knows it like the back of his hand. I have no idea. If you want to go into a new specialty, then you sit in on meetings and you learn, but at the end of the day, you can’t be good at everything. And I have no idea why people try.
Clay Gillespie is a 23-year MDRT member from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Hear more in the MDRT Podcast:
