Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello. I hope you all are having a good week so far. This is Brenton Harrison of new money new problems, and your host for the new money new Problems podcast. This week's episode is a little bit different. I, um, have in the past, I believe, put, uh, a replay up of some episodes that we've done on other platforms that I think that you all would find interesting. Uh, and I've even shared my parents money story on this podcast to give you a little insight into, like, the people who made me technically and some of the things that make them tick, that, as a result, make me tick. But what I haven't done is given you some insights into why we started the firm, not in the sense of, like, money or anything other than just where I was in life, uh, in terms of family, the things that I valued, uh, when I was making the decision to set up things the way that we've done it. So, a few weeks ago, I was on the podcast of a new friend of mine, Virginia elder. She has a great podcast called reaching abundance, and she asked me to come on and share a bit about my journey from starting in this to starting both the firm and the podcast. And I thought that it was, uh, something that at least one or two people may enjoy. It's a little longer than we typically post on our podcast, but, uh, hopefully you find something in it that speaks to you, either just in terms of learning a little bit more about me and us, or maybe you identify with it, uh, based on where you are in your journey as an employee, a business owner, what have you. Uh, but after this quick intro, the next voice you hear will be my voice and Virginia's voice on the reaching abundance podcast. Hope you enjoy it.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, Brenton, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate your time.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, the show is called reaching abundance. And so I want to hear your perspective of what happened or what event occurred in your life that initially turned you on to the concept of abundance.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: I feel like it's very cliche at this point to say that the pandemic was a big moment for our family, but the pandemic was a really big moment for our family, besides the obvious of being in the house and with your family every day in really close quarters, we actually, for some reason, decided to move six or seven months into the pandemic, and we were building a home. And that process during the pandemic, because of not just the pandemic, but also lumber and all of that was delayed by three months. So for three months, we had to move in with my parents, and they live in a community that is much more walkable than where we live. We were right, you know, smack in the middle of the city, uh, and just a slower style of living than what we were used to. And every day I had the ability to kind of get up and take a walk with my wife or throw my son in a stroller and go on a walk and really live a life that was so different than what I was doing before. We were forced to slow down. And it really wasn't the financial idea of abundance. It was the freedom element of being able to structure your life in a way where you can choose and pursue things that you enjoy. And not waiting till 60, 65 to do it, that really shifted my perspective on there having to be a different way to work than what I was doing before I had to stop working.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: So talk to me about what you were doing before that you didn't realize was this crazy busy hustle that we were all doing, but describe that for you.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: So I came into financial services in 2009 so fresh off of one of the biggest recessions that we've had in decades. So not an ideal time to enter into financial services, but I loved it. But to build a business when nobody trusted financial advisors, nobody trusted bankers, I was having to really, really work hard to see as many people as possible. And I was using the methods of marketing myself that financial advisors use. That was the only experience that I had was learning from other financial advisors. So that method was cold calling. And when I first started, I had to do the 200 calls a week, and I had to do the hot 100, where you write out the people who go to your church and who grew up with you and go through that 100 list of prospects. And it really grew from there. Asking people for referrals and going to every networking event that I could possibly go to, joining every single board that I could possibly join, volunteering for everything. And that was the only way that I knew how to do it, because it was all I saw. And by the time the pandemic hit, I'm now eleven years into working that way. And the fortunate part of it was I had built a decent income, a decent business, a decent referral base. I no longer had to cold call any of those things and hadn't had to for a number of years, but you still had to put in hours the same way to quote unquote, market yourself. So in my mind, I was marketing myself I now know that I was not at all I was prospecting. And it wasn't until I started to observe people outside of financial services that I even realized the difference between the two.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Okay, so for someone who's just any business owner, maybe in financial services or not, what's the difference between prospecting and marketing? Like, take us there.
What's that mean?
[00:06:14] Speaker A: The most simple analogy that I use that I did not create, uh, came to me from one of my business mentors, my business mentor, Marcus Henderson, and he says, prospecting is putting yourself in a position to catch a fish. You go buy a fishing rod, you get the bait, you get in a boat, you get out on the water, and you're trying to find the best spot where you can cast a line and have a fish bite on that hook. So that is the joining the boards, the going to the networking events, the calling people. You're positioning yourself to pursue marketing is doing things that make the fish want to chase the boat. So I'm putting something out in the water where when I leave, or even if I'm not in the water, there's something that I left that's making them want to come back to my boat.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: So then would you say your time home from the pandemic and that whole shift where you had to slow down and you were forced to take a step back, really, is what most of us did at that point. Did you kind of cue into, oh, I've been prospecting. I need to market.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: I started looking around and realizing two things. The first is there are other industries where they don't do it this way. Right? Like, I, uh, have friends who are in marketing, my wife is in marketing. And the way that she looked at me building my business as compared to what she did for her clients and her employers, was so markedly different. So it's like I have the understanding of the fact that it doesn't necessarily have to be that way without the knowledge of how to make it not that way, but the other part of it was looking at. So by the time the pandemic hit, my son was two and some change, and we were six months to nine months away from making school decisions and really having this realization that if I don't figure out a way to make a change, I'm not going to be able to go to the basketball games, to help with homework, to do all of those type of things, because those are like prime prospecting hours. So it was necessity. And also just feeling like there just has to be a different way because there's no way that financial services is just this one field where it's impossible to figure out a way to market yourself without burning yourself out.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Right, right. So talk to me about, like, the hours that you were putting in prior to the pandemic and really that freedom shift and walk us through, because I know you don't just, like, cut your hours and then, like, your life is great. Right. So walk me through that transition. Of course the pandemic's in there and that was a whole thing for all of us. But how did you initially start to change the way you worked and the hours that you worked? How did you approach that?
[00:09:23] Speaker A: So I would say that I would typically get to the office around nine.
I would probably be doing something client related, even if I wasn't sitting down in front of one. I'm taking calls, I'm returning text and stuff like that until seven. Uh, so that's a ten hour day. And then after dinner, you fire up the laptop and you're sending off emails that you hadn't gotten to because you'd been in meetings all day and you're doing that while you're watching tv. So you're processing it as not that big of a deal, but then you're doing that till 1130. So you're like, okay, so that's, you know, maybe you're not doing hardcore work for 12 hours, but you're kind of on the clock for 12 hours. And then there's the expectation for a financial advisor that you meet with the clients when the clients are free. So if someone wanted to meet at 08:00 or if someone wanted to meet on a Sunday, you feel like you can't turn down the business, so you're doing everything you can to, like, make it easier for them to work with you. That was life before the pandemic for eleven years.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And not to mention during the, you know, after dinner hours until you decide to go to bed, your spouse is probably just sitting there watching the same show you are, but you're not really present because you're in the laptop, you know, plugging away. And so, uh, you know, and then, of course, you weren't there before dinner. Like, there's all these nuances within that that are unsaid, that are truly taking away from that presence and freedom component that, you know, it's turning out that we all crave. So talk to me about this shift. Like, how did you change that? What did you do initially? Was there something that worked or didn't work as far as time blocking or how did you make this shift?
[00:11:23] Speaker A: My sister is a pediatric physical therapist, and she also does a lot of Dei work for equity and inclusion in the healthcare space. And she came with me to a conference. You're familiar with Fincon, when they were in DC, and I invited her, and it doesn't have much of a connection to pediatric physical therapy, but she said something. She said, you know, you sometimes get a lot more value stepping out of your industry and seeing how other industries do it, because you can just become so insulated with the way that your industry works. And that stuck in my mind. That was, like, 2018, and it stuck.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: In my mind for, like, I was gonna say, that was a while ago.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: But, uh, it just. It. You know, there's sometimes that people say things. You're just like, huh, that's interesting. So it wasn't relevant until I was looking for another way, and I started paying attention to course creators, and I paid attention to them because these are people who have a product or a service that in many cases, doesn't change. They might add, like, uh, an addendum to the course, or they might do a 2.0, but the premise of the service is still the same, but they have to market themselves in a way where they're continuously driving people to a product that doesn't change.
And I knew course creators who just didn't work that much or, you know, the way that they worked was completely up to them. It wasn't dictated on other people's time. We do two webinars a week. They are at these times. It does not matter what time you want it. Like, if you want the course, you will be at that webinar at this time or this time. You know, we're doing a live launch. It is at this date. There is no option for an alternative date. You will be here at this date or you will not. I looked at them because they had figured out a way in my mind to shape the business around the way they chose to live their life without feeling like they had to kowtow to their customers schedules, which is how financial advisors do it. And when I was on that journey, I came across a guy named Thomas Stovall. And Thomas had helped multiple course creators scale their annual revenues to seven figures or more. And he just so happened to have gone to Tennessee State. And I'm based in Nashville. If you live in Nashville, it's a very, very small professional community. So I found him. I decided I wanted to reach out to him, and I think I sent texts to three friends who went to Tennessee State around the time that he went there, and two of the three said, oh, yeah, I know him, here's his number. And I reached out to him.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Wow. Wow.
Talk about, um, for one, reaching out to a mentor of someone who was very involved with where you wanted to go, and then talk about the seven levels of separation. That is huge. Clearly that worked for you in this case. And I think so often we are intimidated by those bigger figures to say, oh, well, they helped these businesses do this, but I don't know if he's going to help me. I don't know, think to text some friends, like, hey, do y'all know him? That's so smart. So tell us your thought process there. And you, uh, know, hopefully people listening can be encouraged to go ahead and take that step as well.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: This is a bit of a longer answer, but there are actually three elements to it that I feel make me much more inclined than the average person to reach out to someone that is a hard person to reach or is a famous person, or whatever the case may be.
I went to a, uh, college, Oakwood College, that is, uh, a 7th day Adventist school, and it is well known for its music, and there are several famous gospel artists who have gone to that school who also, at some point in time, came to Nashville to record and live there for a while, and as a result, went to my church.
So I grew up around people who had a really big profile, but to me, they were, you know, Alvin or Cedric or this person that just goes to my church and is infinitely accessible and kind and don't have to feel like I have to put on airs to reach out to them. So from a very young age, I did not have that, like, oh, here's this person over there. They're so big that you shouldn't approach them. That's very random, but truly just kind of growing up around people where you go in spaces and you see other people kind of fawning over them, and you realizing this is a very humble person who is very approachable and you don't have to feel like you can't. Was helpful. That's number one.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, they're just normal people, too.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Yeah, they're normal people too. The second thing that kind of guides me is, again, quotes stick with me. And I don't know who said it to me, but at some point somebody told me, if you don't ask, the answer is already no.
So, in my mind, that is one of my guiding principles. If I need a favor, if I don't ask. I try to make sure it's appropriate when I ask, but if I need something and I don't ask, well, then my answer is already no. So I might as well ask. And the worst that can happen is I had the answer I had before.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: So that's the same spot where I started.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Right where I started. So that's the second. But the third is, uh, I have a friend, his name is Frank Miles. He's a realtor here. And Frank, whenever he travels somewhere, he finds a person, typically a famous person that he admires in that city, and he sends them an email asking if they would want to grab a cup of coffee. And a lot of times he has to do some digging for the email address, or he has to take a stab and kind of hope that it's the right email address. You, uh, know, first namesite.com, or whatever the case may be, gets a lot of bounce backs, gets a lot of, hey, this is not a good time, or no responses. But his philosophy is, will anybody ever respond? Probably not. But if they do, then I get to go to coffee with somebody that I have admired for years and years and years. So I did that with Malcolm Gladwell.
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. And I was going to New York to visit my cousin and I sent him an email and he responded.
His assistant, like, forwarded me a, uh, response from her, but she blacked out his email and just said, just letting you know that Malcolm saw this. Not going to be able to meet you for coffee, but he appreciated you reaching out. And to me, I'm like, I just sent a random email to Malcolm Gladwell and he saw it. And I'm sure he gets a ton of emails a day, but he probably gets less than you think of people who are willing to step out on a limb and say, can I take you for a cup of coffee? So those, uh, three things have really stripped any fear that I would have of if I have a person's contact information, reaching out and seeing if we can connect.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. That's really, really helpful because I think so many business owners initially, sure, you build your business word of mouth, then you get into prospecting, then you get into marketing. And often, even though you are this successful individual and you have all of these things that you can provide as proof, like, I'm doing well, you're still going to have that thing where you're like, uh oh. But they are so and so. They're up on this pedestal. And so even just to see them out somewhere, right. Just let's say you do circulate the same type of events and you see one of them. It takes a little bit of gut sometimes to walk up and introduce yourself and say hi as if you're peers, even though you are, but you just view them as on this pedestal for some reason.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, that imposter syndrome, it can be hard to overcome. You also have to remember that when I started, I had to call 200 people a week, so I was on the receiving end of many rude, do not ever call me again. So to me, that builds up your muscle as well. So now if I met Michael Jordan tomorrow and had two minutes to talk to him, I would ask him to be on the podcast. Why not?
I will likely never meet him again. So if he says no, what's the difference?
[00:20:43] Speaker B: Yeah, shoot your shot. You know, what's holding you back? What's the point, you know? Yeah, that's awesome. So let's circle back to the abundance concept. How has, um, kind of these bold moves created additional abundance in your life that you may not have expected?
[00:21:07] Speaker A: I, um, am, um, now infinitely more confident in standing on the value that we provide, the price that we charge for that value, and how we deliver it.
There are some things that are non negotiable because I've seen the freedom that it gives me, and I don't want to give that freedom back. So it makes me so much more confident to say, no, I will not meet with you on a Sunday. No, I will not meet with you at eight ah pm. Um, these are my working hours. You would not tell your physician, hey, can you see me at my house at 08:00 p.m. or on Sunday afternoon at 04:00 they have working hours. So that's what has done for me. It's given me the freedom and the abundance to be more convicted in the way that I got the abundance in the first place.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. I love that. So talk to me a little bit about your schedule now, because we heard about your schedule pre pandemic. Talk to me about how you use your time in an abundant way. Now is essentially what you're doing.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: On Mondays, I do content creation. So I film podcasts, I edit, uh, our director of operations. We meet to go over what we're going to post for the week and how we can repurpose content and the like. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I meet with clients.
Fridays I do administrative work.
And if there's a client who just couldn't meet Tuesday through Thursday, but can meet during business hours. You know, maybe I slide them in on a Monday or Friday. But there has not been much pushback to just setting boundaries. Clients don't mind boundaries. It's just we're afraid to set them. So now my days are much shorter. I still work a lot, but I work on terms that are my own. And it's just a much more fulfilling way to work, because I can know for sure. For example, our son, he does speech therapy, and his speech therapist, who he loves we more, so do it for the tutoring element of it. When we started, he needed it. But now the person who we use actually lives on our street, and our son loves her, so we've just kept doing the sessions.
She was unable to meet with him for a few months, and a, uh, spot opened up on her schedule again, and she said, hey, you know, the only time that I have is 09:00 on Monday mornings. Well, I would have never been able to make that work pre pandemic. But now, with no question, I can say that's actually perfect. You know, I can restructure my week because I'm in charge of how I structure my week. My clients are not.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, we don't have to have a pandemic to kind of come to this realization. But for so many of us, that was the forced perspective, uh, because we had to time out and we had to step away and look back at what we had been doing and try to decide, like, am I happy? Do I like what I'm doing? And for a lot of people, no.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: I think that humans have an unreal ability to make themselves comfortable in terrible situations for fear of change.
There are other things. I told you I'm a big quote person, but I don't mind having uncomfortable conversations. That's never been a fear of mine. But I feel like, for most people, they're very conflict averse. And I will say, like, people will walk halfway around the world to avoid the awkward conversation right in front of them. Right. Like, I'd rather do all this work to avoid just saying something that causes a little bit of tension in the room. And I think the same is true when it comes to how we work, to how we eat, to how we live, to how we sleep, to how we engage with the people who are around us. It's like, if we could change this and life would be so much better, but we are so afraid of that change that we would just rather make ourselves comfortable in the mess. And I think things like the pandemic didn't give us that option. And if you can find a way to do it without being forced, it would save you a lot of time, money and stress.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. M well, and I think so many people will say, oh, you know, I'll fix my schedule when something, you know, when I hit a certain revenue or when my kids go to middle school, or when some arbitrary thing. Right. In the future, I will help XYZ, I'll donate to this organization, win, uh, whatever it is. We have these aspirations that if we wrote all those down and looked at that list, and if we were able to put them into action now or sooner rather than later, we would feel so good about the way we were living our lives and the things that we stood for, but we naturally put those off to this future arbitrary accomplishment that when I do that, then I can do this.
Do you have some other ideas or ways that we can step into the idea of living abundantly now rather than later? And maybe how some of the people around us might, could even help with that.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Uh, it's not that I'm a vision board person, but I am a person who believes in putting some thought to how you want to live your life and being transparent about whether you're on the path towards it or away from it. So the first question that I would ask is, what does your ideal life look like? And that doesn't have to be financial. It could be freedom of time, you know, freedom of schedule, whatever the case may be, and understanding that there is truly a way now to at least start building towards it. So, for me, it was time with family, it was travel, it was flexibility of schedule. And if you don't see that example in front of you, you're just looking in the wrong place. It's out there. There's just too many people doing it to say that your ideal life isn't out there. And if that ideal life isn't in your field or industry of choice, it can be amended so that it fits your field or industry of choice. So start writing out those ideas, start figuring out how you would implement them in your world, and start, most importantly, don't have this idea that it will somehow be easier five years in the future. It will be harder if you stay in a job that you hate, but you do it well. Eventually you'll get promoted and you'll start making more money in that job that you hate, and it will be even harder to change the way that you live your life now. The best time to do it is now.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Thank you. That really does help. So share with me a little bit about your own, um, personal development as youve gone from working. Gosh, what was it, like, 14 hours a day, I would say, combined with your day time and then the after hours emailing in front of the tv time, and that shift to boundaries with your schedule, to learning the difference between marketing and prospecting and shifting more into this intentional marketing piece, and then even putting more boundaries around your time as far as how people come into your business. So I know there's a lot inside that goes on behind the scenes there. Talk to me about you and your personal development.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: So I primarily serve minority, first and second generation high income earners, and that is a group of people who typically have not had access to a, uh, financial advisor. It's very community oriented in the sense that you're working with people who know you or know your parents, or know just anybody around you. And there is a feeling of obligation to that type of community that, like a lot of business owners feel to their client base or even employees feel to their, you know, employers. Whatever the case may be, people are familiar with the idea of, like, feeling like you're letting someone down if you kind of change the amount of availability or access that they have to you. And before making the shift, I think that a big part of it was feeling like I might be abandoning them or feeling like I might be seen as too good for them or, you know, who do you think you are for telling people, you know, no, you can't have my personal email address. This is the channel that we've chosen for you to reach out to me for business reasons. And there's still a little bit of that that's hard to articulate or say without feeling guilty when someone asks, oh, what's your cell phone? I don't give out my cell phone. You know, what's your personal email address? If you're reaching out for business purposes, here's the link that you can use for business purposes. We do not give out our email address to people, um, who are not clients.
Those types of things feel really awkward when you first do it. Still feel a little awkward, but less awkward now.
But what you realize the more and more you do it is that a lot of things that people would make you treat as an emergency are not emergencies.
So if someone, you know, sends you an email and you set the expectation with them that you're going to reply to them by the end of the business day, then that's the expectation. When in reality, if they sent it to you on Monday, replying to it on Wednesday would have been just as fine. Now, obviously, there's, you know, there's a line, but there's just. There's pressures that we put on ourselves for what will happen if we put those boundaries up. And I have just come to realize that the more I strip them away, it's not that big of a deal. It's not that big of a deal to tell someone I don't give out my email address. It's also not that big of a deal to see a networking event at 07:00 and decide I can market in a way that will draw in ten times as many people that will be at that networking event. And do I need to go to some of them every once in a while? Sure. But if I put out content consistently, if I market it in the right way, you're going to reach more people than you can, one to one. So the combination of all of those factors, once you start to see the results of it, will make you lean in harder to it and just make those barriers even more enforced.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And this is kind of the concept that a lot of times, your actions and the results that you get justify your belief in the first place, which m was why you put those actions in place anyways. So it's this circle of justification, belief, action. Justification, belief, action. So talk to me about when you started to see traction, and then talk to me about how specifically you have named your show and really been thoughtful about targeting your ideal client and that shared passion there and why it's taking off in that way.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So I tell people. So the name of our primary podcast, our general finance podcast, is the new Money New Problems podcast. And we could have done Harrison Financial Services podcast or anything that. No disrespect to anybody else's podcast, but there's nothing about that that arrests the listener. Right? You want something that speaks to your listener immediately. And again, the people that we serve are first generation or second generation high income earners. They are people with new money who are confronting new problems.
That name turns off as many people as it attracts, but it turns off people who don't have new money and new problems, and it attracts people that do. So the name doesn't need to be generic. Even the name has to speak to your target audience. The episodes that we release are based on the calendar of events that happen in those people's lives each year. During tax months, we talk about tax planning. During employee benefits months, we talk about employee benefits. When it's time for kids to go back to school. We talk about private school choice and college education planning. So everything has to be very intentional so that you're not just putting out an episode, you're not just picking a name, you're not just picking artwork. It has to be something that has some thought in mind to your end user. And will this appeal to them as opposed to just appealing to broader society?
[00:35:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you so much for outlining that. And, um, I immediately cued into the name right away because I thought, well, yeah, when you suddenly, you know, you're the first one who went to college, you're the first one with this great career, and you're the first one that makes over six figures a year from your new career.
Uh, nobody in your family can help you, and you almost feel bad coming to them with questions about what to do with all your money. It's like you feel like you're bragging or something and you're not. You're just like, literally, I don't know how to do this. Nobody taught me. What do I do?
[00:35:56] Speaker A: Another quote that, you know, again, stuff sticks with me. Another quote. My mentor said, you will, uh, reach the .1 day where your biggest problems are things that your friends would kill to be dealing with. So think about trying to have a conversation. Cause we have to talk about the things that are going on in our life, even financial.
But you're right. If you're trying to figure out, oh, I just don't know what to do with this bonus money that I got. And you're talking to a family member who is truly scraping by, by the skin of their teeth. Not only can you not talk to them, it would offend them if you talk to them about it.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And then it becomes this awkward thing. Well, then what can I talk about? Or, uh, I'm gonna park my car around the corner because I know they've wanted a new car and. And I got one. And so, you know, it's just. It becomes awkward. So you immediately need to seek out that new network of other high income earners or of other first gen, you know, people in your same boat that you can share these problems with, that you can problem solve together. So, yeah, I love what you did there. And I immediately saw it and I was like, damn, that's good.
So, um. Well, I'm going to let you go. Thank you so, so much. Talk to us really quickly about where we can find you and, um, how to connect because, yeah, you got some great stuff going on.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Thank you. So we are everything new money new problems. We are the new money new Problems podcast. Our website is new money new problems.com on YouTube. We're new money new problems. Uh, so anything, if you just type in new money, new problems, we have hopefully structured it in a way where you can see all the different ways that you can find us by just typing that in. And then our other podcast, which, again, is a different industry, is escape student loan debt on all platforms as well. So podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcast, uh, Instagram. Same handles across the board.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Excellent. And all the links will be in the show notes. So thank you so much, Brenton. I really appreciate your time today.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.
