What Is The James Pollard Inner Circle?

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This is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On this episode:

Vendor name:

James Pollard Inner Circle

Vendor category:

Marketing

Episode host:

Brad Wales

Episode guest:

James Pollard

Vendor contact info:

Website

Full Transcript:

Brad Wales – I’m Brad Wales with Transition To RIA, and this is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series, where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On today’s episode, we’re answering the question, “What is the James Pollard Inner Circle?” And of course, there’s no better person to answer that question than James Pollard. James, thanks for coming on.

James Pollard – Thank you so much. I appreciate this. I love what you’re doing, by the way, not just with this podcast, but everything in general. I mean, you and I have worked together in the past, years ago. So this is not like a new thing right here. So it’s very cool to be here.

Brad – I appreciate those kind words. I will say though I’m at a distinct disadvantage in this episode because while I’m proud of my 150-ish episodes or whatnot, I know you’ve done significantly more than that. You’ve mentioned it from time to time, but how many episodes have you now made of your podcast series?

James – Who knows? I mean, it’s free. I started in 2018, so I guess at this point, 350, if I’m doing my math right. I mean, I had a podcast before that doesn’t even exist anymore. I don’t think you can find it anywhere. We did at least 50 episodes of that. So I guess 400 plus total. I just like doing it. I don’t know. I don’t really do many guests. I know you were a guest on the show. I don’t want people to listen to that and think, it’s a super common thing. It’s rare. So Brad was a rare guest.

Nearly all of them are just me talking and ranting and it’s an interesting experiment to say the least. It’s been a lot of fun. I enjoy doing it.

Brad – Yeah, 400-ish. I guess you just start rounding to the closest 50 when you reach around that number. So congrats on all those, of course. We’ll mention it again at the end so people can find that podcast to tune in. But on this episode, I kind of wanted to talk about two kind of macro elements to this.

First, and then I’ll let you introduce how you do marketing for independent advisors in general and then specifically what you’re offering with the Inner Circle, but just at that high level for that person that’s maybe come across you briefly or hasn’t heard of you and says “James, what what is it you do?” How do you answer that just at a high level and then we’ll kind of get into some some details here.

James – Well, with the Inner Circle specifically, it’s basically marketing campaigns and ideas and strategies specifically for financial advisors who want to get more clients and build a better business.

The value proposition tends to fall into two camps, like the thing that I do. Number one is obviously make more money. If you get a client, you’re going to make more money, you’re going to have more profit. Value proposition number two is just the sheer productivity. So there are lots of advisors who view me as the guy who can just help them save time.

So if they’re making, I don’t know, $300 per hour on average throughout the course of their business, and I help them save 10 hours per month, that’s $3,000 a month that’s added back to their business. They can spend time with their kids. All the cheesy marketer stuff that marketers say.

You can spend more time doing the things that you love and spend time with your family. That’s stuff that I actually do with financial advisors. So that’s the really big 30,000-foot overview. It’s just make more money and save more time.

Brad – We’ll get into the weeds on some of it, but that’s classic James. I like just the blunt list. Let’s not try to sugarcoat and use fancy terminology, whatnot. This is exactly what the goal is and what we’re trying to accomplish.

So one of the reasons I’m particularly excited about this episode it’s something that’s very exciting for advisors that are making the transition to the RIA model, which of course is where I help folks.

Clearly if they’re coming from a say a W2-type environment, like a wirehouse, some degree of marketing is allowed, but once you get into a more independent space a lot of those shackles come off.

I was actually on a call yesterday with a team that I helped do kind of a post mortem after the move to the RIA space.  The dust has settled and they’re now at that juncture where they came from a W2 world where wow it’s now we have a lot more flexibility here with how we can market our practice. So how are we going to do that going forward?

So what advice would you have for folks that are in that situation that they’re in a whole new world? They’re not new to being a financial advisor, but they’re in a whole new world as far as what they can do from a marketing perspective when there’s a gazillion different, in theory, ways you could go about trying to do something. Where’s a good starting point for those people that are just getting a taste of that freedom?

James – Well, I would incentivize people to get a taste of that freedom. The classic example that I give is Coke and Pepsi. I want you to imagine that Coke is allowed to advertise on radio stations and billboards and TV and social media and everywhere, but Pepsi is only limited to billboards.

Coke would absolutely crush Pepsi and vice versa. If you switched them around, Pepsi would crush Coke simply because they have more options. Once you find yourself in that situation, I want you to realize that all marketing boils down to two things.

It’s how many people you get in front of and how many of those people say yes. That’s really all it is. I just had a young lady message me yesterday actually. She’s like a new financial advisor. All these people are telling her all these different things. What should she do? Who should she listen to? I was like, I don’t know, but I’m going to tell you this. I just told her exactly what I told you. If you can, assuming you have an offer that people actually say yes to, that’s kind of table stakes here. You need to have something worth offering.

But assuming you do, if you get in front of more people while keeping your conversion rate the same, you make more money. If you get in front of the same number of people while increasing your conversion rate, you make more money. If you can do both at the same time, you make absurd levels of money.

So that’s what you need to focus on is every day, every week, every month, you ask yourself, how can I get in front of more people? There is a total number. You need to figure out that number. Will it be exact? Probably not. You take into account your networking and community involvement, and the things that aren’t really that easily measurable, but there is a number. It is a real number that exists that you can point to and say, this is how many people saw my message in this period of time.

If you increase that number while getting better at having the sales conversations and discovery meetings and your marketing just converts better, you’re going to build a successful business. It’s almost impossible not to, if you do it right.

Brad – How do people first get started in that? A common theme, and this was again on my call here recently, advisors are not sitting around with spare capacity, right? There’s always busyness, there’s always seemingly overload of work, but generally all want to do what you just described and figure all that out.

A lot of them just aren’t, right? Now some of them can’t because of their Coke or Pepsi scenario and then some of them have it and they’re just not doing it because they can’t find the time. But the reality is, okay, well you need to find the time or make the time.

How do you usually coach those people? Is this time blocking on the calendar to focus on this sort of thing or what do you usually suggest?

James – Nearly every advisor has some time in his or her day that can be set aside for marketing activities. They just don’t know it. They can go through the classic outsource, delegate, eliminate kind of scenario where they look at everything that they do, they track their time, and they figure out what can be sacrificed or automated or done better in order to free up that time. That’s one of the ways that we increase productivity.

Another thing that I have discovered is going back to the two things, right? Getting in front of more people, which can take time, or increasing the conversion rate. If you’re an advisor out there who is already doing stuff, like you’re already setting aside, let’s say 30 minutes per day, that’s all you can do, you’re being truthful with me when you say that there’s absolutely no way you can do more than 30 minutes. Okay, I accept what you’re telling me at face value. Then what you need to do is to have better marketing itself, because then you increase the conversion rate and you go back to making more money.

So if you’re on LinkedIn, for example, and you’re doing stuff on LinkedIn, you’re posting on LinkedIn, and you only have that 30 minutes per day, then you need to have a higher quality output of effort in that 30 minutes. That could mean posting better content. It could be increasing the quality of people that you engage with. This is relatively easy to do. It could be leaving better, more thoughtful comments. In 2025 and beyond, I feel like that’s going to be the play for LinkedIn.

I’m personally getting more impressions from comments, and I don’t even comment. I leave like one a day. I’m not the poster child for this, but I get a lot of impressions on comments for some reason. that increases the converse rate.

It’s also a lot faster not to go off on a tangent about comments, but it takes 10 seconds, 15 seconds versus, I don’t know, a couple minutes to make a post. So if you’re really in desperate straits about your time, you need to start thinking in terms like that.

How can you get the most out of what you’re already doing? A lot of the marketing strategies that I talk about don’t take that much time. Email sequences, once you get it set up, you can get it set up in a day. It runs forever without your involvement unless you change it. Direct mail letters, yes, it’s hard to get a direct mail letter or two in place. That’s difficult, I understand, but once you have a high converting letter written, you can just mail it. You can go to a mailing house and say, I want 10,000 of these sent to engineers or architects or corporate executives, you find the list, you rent the list, you mail it out. It takes 30 minutes tops and you can just scale that way.

LinkedIn, as you build your network, it becomes more and more efficient. It’s kind of like a plane. As it flies and burns fuel, it becomes more efficient. As you grow, you become more efficient. Podcasting, YouTube, all that, it grows with you. Somebody listening to this episode, you said you had 150 plus. I guarantee you someone listening to Episode 150 and going back is going to convert or is more likely to convert than someone who started at episode five and went back. It’s simply because of this, the enormity of what you’ve done and the ability to spend time with you. But the individual unit of podcasting, you recording something with me takes no more effort than the episode two that you recorded with whoever it was, or maybe it was by yourself. The actual effort does not change, but the conversion rate does.

Brad – You’ve mentioned the numbers a couple of times here just in the last 30 seconds alone the, right? You’re talking impressions, conversion rates, different strategies. I know from following over the years and sometimes you’ll share screenshots on LinkedIn stuff. By the way, I’ll remind everyone, everyone’s got to follow James on LinkedIn and he puts a lot of great content on there.

Obviously I know you feel it’s important, and I’m a believer in what you don’t track won’t improve, but you could probably articulate it better than I can of not just coming up with some marketing strategies to implement, but the importance of tracking it as you keep reference. I’ll let you articulate how that plays into a successful marketing strategy.

James – It is absolutely critical, but with one caveat. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters for a financial advisor or a marketing campaign in general is dollars in and dollars out. It is very easy to get trapped into. I’ll give you a specific example, chasing email open rates.

I have, in the past few months, I think it was June, we’re talking about the Inner Circle, okay, so with the June Inner Circle issue, I believe, is I went through 2700 plus emails that I have personally sent to my personal email list. I analyzed what made them work, what made them not work, all the stuff, the open reads and the click through reads and all the things that marketers want to learn about. Unequivocally, one of the most common patterns that I saw, again, 2700 plus emails, so this is not 10 or 20, emails with the higher conversion rates tend to have lower open rates.

Hmm. Why? I’ll give you the actual reason why. The technical reason why is because in the subject line. I call out a specific type of advisor. When that specific type of advisor opens the email, that advisor is far more likely to convert. So if I say, I’m just making this up, but if you’re a 35-year-old advisor, read this, that’s going to get a horrible open rate because everybody who’s not 35 years old is going to delete it and archive it and all the things that they do to not read your email.

But the 35-year-old who opens it and reads the message is far more likely to convert. Again, we’re increasing that second number here, the higher conversion rate. So marketers and advisors alike who chase these vanity metrics, which again, all else being equal, increasing your open rates will increase your profitability. But in reality, it’s almost never equal.

I’ve noticed the same thing on LinkedIn. I have probably lost more followers than I have on LinkedIn. I see the number go up and then down and up and down. I don’t know for a fact, but I have a pretty good feeling that I’ve made more from LinkedIn than 99.9 % of all users on LinkedIn. That comes from this type of messaging that I put out. It resonates with the right people. It doesn’t resonate with everyone. It doesn’t get me tens of thousands of followers. In fact, it gets me unfollowers. But again, dollars in versus dollars out is the North Star. So those are two specific examples. If you want to go deeper we can, but that’s really the gist of how to make it work.

Brad – Yeah, I echo that. I know some people get caught up or I don’t even want to say jealous about some other person has more followers or they get more likes on their posts and that’s the classic case of the person driving the fancy car. We don’t know if that person is in the situation where 90% of that car is a loan right now or did they pay cash for it. It’s the same thing that just because someone has a lot of likes and whatnot doesn’t mean that’s actually turning it into business for the money in as you say and at the end of the day, that’s why we’re doing this. So I love that framing to it.

A few other marketing things in general and then we’ll get specifically into the Inner Circle. Spoiler here, we’re going to talk about how the Inner Circle gives advisors ideas and strategies to consider implementing, but there’s a lot of different ways. What do you typically suggest for advisors, again, with a kind of clean slate, they’re starting new. Do you start with one thing and do one thing, one strategy only for six months before you try to layer on a second thing? Or how do you approach that?

Because I certainly see that some advisors say, wow, they have all these ideas and they try to do everything at once. Of course, that just is a failure. They don’t commit the time or resources to any one of them. So how do you typically coach folks on that?

James – Well, there’s a saying in personal finance that the best financial plan is the one that you actually stick to. That’s true of marketing as well. I can give you the right answer, and I know the optimal thing to do, and financial planners do too. This is the optimal allocation. This is the optimal strategy for you, but if you’re not going to do it, it doesn’t really matter. So the right answer is that you should have multiple marketing strategies.

That’s the number one thing that I’ve noticed. It’s easily the most important thing that I can impart to financial advisors. When you have multiple marketing strategies, number one goes up. Remember number of total people that see your message, that goes up for sure because if you’re on LinkedIn and email and have a website and everything, more people are going to see you.

Number two, the conversion rate also increases because let’s say somebody is on your LinkedIn and they see your post and you share something new on your website. So you say, go to my website. Well, now you have two marketing strategies that are working in your favor. If they go to your website and they see that you have a way to opt in for a lead magnet or something to join your email list, that’s marketing strategy number three.

There’s a psychological effect. I don’t know the name of it off the top of my head, but basically the gist is when people are moved from place to place to place, they feel like time is passing faster. That’s kind of like a dark psychology thing. If you take people on dates and you go from bar to movie to restaurant, people are more likely to fall in love. Crazy, but true.

If you are able to do that with your prospective clients, the ability for you to build rapport skyrockets simply because they feel like they have known you longer. Most people have no idea that that’s even a thing, that that’s one of the reasons why multiple marketing strategies work so well. That’s the right answer, but it’s intimidating.

So if you just start where you are. There’s another old saying, just get in where you fit in. If you have a personality type that loves to talk with people, maybe podcasting is your thing. And you’re going to be better at it than most people because you’re naturally wired to do that thing. If you’re an extrovert, get out and do community events and networking and call people. Maybe you’re one of the rare types that loves to cold call people and just talk to strangers.

If you are more of an introverted financial advisor and you want to be behind the scenes and you feel like time alone is your superpower, like me, kind of. I mean, I’m right in the middle, but most of the time I’m more introverted. Writing is your thing, and emails, and content marketing, and making YouTube scripts for eventually when you make a YouTube channel, whatever you want to do.

You want to start there, because you definitely want to have something that you stick to. Remember, the best financial plan is the one you actually stick to. That’s more important than the right answer.

Brad – I like that analogy, which obviously resonates with what advisors are telling their clients. So, great perspective. Before we jump in, I have two more questions.

I’m not continuously kicking the can on diving into your specific offering, but, and certainly we won’t name names, there’s a lot of folks out in the marketplace from a marketing guru perspective or whatever we kind of want to frame that, whether specific to this industry or just in general. I think there’s a lot of bravado. There’s a lot of folks that maybe don’t necessarily have experience and they’re given the impression they have experience in helping stuff out.

We’re about to lead into how you specifically help people with your Inner Circle, and hopefully the last 15 minutes has given folks an impression that you obviously know what you’re talking about. But what would you say to that person that says, wow, I’ve already used three different “marketing companies” and I’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars and nothing ever came of it. Why should I believe this James guy?

How do you yourself try to separate yourself from some of that noise that’s out in the marketplace? I assume it’s the great content you put out. But what would you say that advice might be for someone skeptical of just yet another marketer because they feel they’ve been burned in the past?

James – I would say don’t let a bad decision burn you twice. Come to your own conclusion, do your own research. I could go either way. If someone is super skeptical and they’re constantly going to nitpick and they’re constantly going to be a pain in the neck, please stay away. That’s okay. I’m good. I don’t really want you as a client, but it’s good to be skeptical. The financial advisor market is probably the most skeptical in the entire world, simply because they’re trained to be. I know that.

If I was in it purely for the money, I would not choose financial advisors as a niche because holy moly, it’s a lot harder than like selling shoes or building on Shopify. Even, for marketing reasons, there are a lot more tools available to build retail businesses and in commerce than there are to do the stuff that I do. Like I don’t have a lot of access to tools.

It’s just that I love the financial advisor market. I think the same way that they do. I read personal finance books. I’m obsessed with that sort of content. Like truly I had personal finance websites and whatnot long before I even helped financial advisors. So that should say something. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that publicly, but I did.

I would say if you’re worried about being burned, having a bad experience at like a restaurant and saying you’ll never go out to eat again is kind of silly. Or getting into a fender bender and saying you’re never going to drive a car again is kind of silly. That’s really what you’re doing.

You’re limiting your options. You’re letting the bad decision that you made control your life. It’s robbing you of potential opportunity. When you think about Marketing Guru, a marketing program, and how it was so bad, and it limits what you’re doing in the future, that program is still costing you.

It’s not just the initial investment or the thing that you purchased or the mastermind or whatever it was. Let’s say it was $5,000. It’s not just $5,000. Every time you let that rob you of your opportunity, let’s say that something like what I offer or something like someone else offers could make you another $50,000 per year, that bad decision that you thought was just $5,000 has now cost you a total of $55,000 because it’s still influencing your decision.

I know that’s easy to say, it’s hard to do, especially when there so many bad actors out in the help financial advisor space. I know it’s extremely hard to do, but if you can try to do that and think about it that way, I feel like that would help.

Brad – Yeah, and the hurdle you kind of referenced, you know, getting a client or whatnot. Because of how our model works, the financial advisor model, just getting one reasonably-sized client per year out of a strategy can more than pay for the cost of that assistance multiple times over. It’s not like you have to get ten clients a month out of something to justify a cost. So when you think of it that way, it could certainly be worth the expense.

But we’ll dive right into your offer. So if someone has liked what they’ve heard so far and maybe has seen you elsewhere and just isn’t familiar with how you help and someone says “This James guy seems to know what he’s talking about. Wow, I could use his help.”

What exactly is that offer? What do you do for people? I believe the answer is primarily if not solely the Inner Circle, but I don’t want to take anything else away from you of what it is. But am I correct that the Inner Circle is the main way people can access you as a resource? Could you kind of give us an overview of what that is?

James – It’s the way I want them to access me as a resource. I have like 20 plus different products. I mean stuff about LinkedIn and your first year as a financial advisor and all of these other things ranging from, I believe, $49 to $2,495. I could be wrong on that. Prices change all the time. But huge range of products, right? In order to build a profitable business, that’s one of the secrets.  You need multiple price points and ranges and things that people can do to do business with you.

The Inner Circle is primarily a private community of financial advisors. It is first and foremost a paper and ink newsletter. It is a real newsletter, like actual paper. It’s real paper that goes to people in the mail every single month. On the first of every month, I mail it out to financial advisors all across the United States and multiple countries all around the world. It shows up, they read it, they highlight, they take notes, they implement the material.

What’s interesting about the Inner Circle specifically, the actual newsletter, is I write it in what I call a buffet style. I would be doing financial advisors a disservice if I tried to get them to do everything in the newsletter. I don’t want them to do that. The buffet is you go, you choose a couple of things that you like, you go back to your table. You do not try to eat all of the food at the buffet with one plate. You go back, okay? That’s what I want.

That’s why it’s been successful with financial advisors from all walks of life, like Edward Jones, Merrill Lynch, and RIAs, and fee-only, and fee-based. I mean, you name it, I’ve got them simply because of the scale. I’ve been doing it since 2018, writing the newsletter since 2018. So I don’t know how many issues that is, 90 plus, maybe 100. I think 100 is July 26. I think that’s when it’s coming up. So a lot of issues, a lot of financial advisors.

The reason they love it, again, going back to saving time, I make them money and I save them time. One of the ways I save them time is I want them to pick that one thing, and I stress it again and again just pick one thing, implement it, and move on. Don’t obsess about me or the marketing or the newsletter. Just move on with your life. You have other things to do. Just have the newsletter pay for itself and do something else.

I feel like so many other gurus and experts and whatever you want to call them, they’re trying to make themselves like the idol of the financial advisor’s life. It’s like, don’t do anything unless you consult me, or I’m going to run your marketing for you. I don’t want to do that. I just want to help you. It’s purely an investment, right? So $199 per month is what it costs. That works out to be $2,388 per year. Financial advisors can easily look at that and say, well, my average client is worth $3,000 per year. Something like that, whatever, $3,000, $5,000. I’ve got Inner Circle members who charge $8,500 for a financial plan.

Now it’s complex and it’s based on complexity, but $8,500, one client pays for the newsletter for what, four years almost? So that’s how they think about it in terms of just sheer ROI. So they don’t need to squeeze everything out of it. That’s the main thing that is the newsletter. Like I said, I’ve been doing it since 2018. Financial advisors love it. When you join the Inner Circle, you get a bunch of bonuses to help you recruit that $199 per month right away.

So I’m not going to go through everything in the bonuses, but they’re there, they are helpful. They help financial advisors generate leads and improve their marketing, and I give split test results and everything. So that’s pretty cool. There’s more that goes into it. I’ve got two more things, but if you have any questions for me or like anything you want to know specifically, I can address that first.

Brad – I like your point on how they can pull one thing from it. I’m a fan and a lot of things I’ve done with my own business, I could listen to 20 hours of different podcasts and maybe only get one nugget out of those 20 hours, but that one nugget could absolutely be the needle moving in a big way and that’s sometimes just how it has to work.

Or if you go to industry conferences, you might be spending days there and hours in conference rooms, but if you just get one good thing you can take back and implement that moves the needle, it makes the whole thing worthwhile. There’s no shortcut to that, right? Sometimes you have to just kind of sort through it all to get there. I do love that it’s paper and ink. I can vouch for it. I’ve seen James sometimes, he’ll throw a photo up on LinkedIn showing you kind of dropping them off or sending them off. So it’s definitely there.

What’s the backstory there? Just you feel that will resonate better with advisors or that they’re just more likely to actually read it and hopefully act on it or how did that come about?

James – Well, everything in the newsletter, actually everything in the Inner Circle, is 100% intentional. Nothing is accidental. So the paper and ink reasoning is this. So printed documents are easier to read. Researchers from the University of Montreal found that people are far more likely to engage with printed materials than digital ones. I could easily, it would cost me a lot less money to do digital, right? Like I’m paying to ship all this stuff out.

Now sure, people understand $199 per month. It does cost me to ship that. Yes, there’s a big spread, so on and so forth. I get that. But if I wanted to, I could just email it to people. They could read it as a PDF and move on. But the engagement is not there. I want people to engage because if they engage and implement, they get results. If they get results, they’re more likely to stay. That’s like my big secret master plan.

There was another study from the University of Maryland which analyzed 171,000 documents and they found that reading comprehension was higher reading on paper. It was actually highest, not just higher, it was highest. Reading comprehension does not increase any more than with printed material. So when financial advisors read an actual paper and ink print newsletter, they’re more likely to remember the stuff in said newsletter.

If they, again, going back to my master plan here, they remember it, they implement it, or at least they internalize something when they see it. I get this a lot. Financial advisors will see something on LinkedIn or on the website and they’ll say, I remember the thing that you said months ago or last month and then I’m going to implement it now. That’s exactly what I want. I want them to remember the stuff and implement it when the opportunity comes.

Stuff on LinkedIn. If somebody is going to leave a comment on LinkedIn, they remember a certain way that I say to comment and that improves their life that way.

Two other things. People who have received the newsletter will ask me, “Why is it written in this specific font?” Even the font was chosen for readability and reading comprehension. It’s a weird font. I mean, if you see it, if you go to the page, the Inner Circle newsletter page, you’ll see photos of the newsletter itself. It’s Courier font. It’s like an old typewriter. That was chosen intentionally. I know it’s weird, but it’s because people comprehend that font the best. For readability, it scores off the charts.

The paper. It’s like a yellow. It’s not a white. It’s like a beige-y. I forget what it’s actually called. I forget the like Sherwin-Williams-type name, but it’s not white. It’s like a yellowish color. That black ink on that specific color is the highest readability. I want financial advisors to be comfortable when they’re reading it. I want them to be able to take in the information with ease. I don’t want to have anything that makes it harder for them to implement the material.

The paper itself is 28 pound paper. What that means is it’s heavier than regular paper. It is higher quality. It is just better paper. There have been psychological studies that were done where people who were handed heavier objects assigned more importance to those objects simply because of the weight. Controlling for everything else, having something be slightly heavier means people will assign more importance to it. That’s what I want financial advisors to do, is to assign more importance to this.

This is how much I care about it, right? So everything is, as crazy as it sounds, everything is optimized from the ground up to maximize results with financial advisors. No stone is left unturned. The way it’s delivered, the way it is constructed, the way it’s put together, the way you interact with it is all built specifically to maximize that.

I think you’re the only person to ever ask that question and I just gave away all the secrets. But the cool thing is if anyone tries to do the same thing, it’ll be obvious where it came from.

Brad – Yeah, I love the passion you have over even the smallest of details and so hopefully that reflects for people watching. If James goes to this level of kind of scientific depth on his own approaches, imagine how he can help you learn how you should be doing similar strategies whether it’s a newsletter or not with end clients as well. So I appreciate you sharing those details, but I think it’s also instructive of how much this is both an art and science and you absolutely dive deep on the science of that.

So for people that are interested and say, okay, wow, maybe I need to take a look at this. You mentioned it’s a monthly cost. Is this something where folks have to sign up for a full year at a time or is this you subscribe and you can cancel if it’s not for you or what’s kind of the commitment?

James – It is monthly and I’ve had marketers tell me that I should do yearly and they’ll specifically say this. They’ll say because that way your subscribers don’t feel the pain. Like when they get charged every month they feel that pain and they say, oh no, I’m getting charged. But I don’t want people to stick around if they don’t want to be in the group, right? I say group also because there are two other elements of the Inner Circle that I haven’t mentioned yet.

Element number one is the ability to ask me questions directly. So all Inner Circle members get a secret subject line that they can use to email me that gets flagged in my inbox. I also flag their email addresses. So every Inner Circle member who joins, I flag their email address. So either way, even if they forget the subject line, again, this is optimization, right? I’ve noticed that some people just don’t know the line. They forget it. They don’t want to use it. Whatever, cool. I make it so I still get their emails, right?

If they ever have a question about what’s in the newsletter or something that they’re wondering about in their business, they can just ask. Like there’s literally no excuse whatsoever not to get results from the Inner Circle when you can ask directly.

I’ve had all sorts of weird things happen over the years where financial advisors will say, I’m having this particular hardship or whatever, I’m going to have to cancel. At no point ever, sometimes in months or years, did they ever ask a single question. That breaks my heart because they could have easily said, James, this is a landing page. What can I do to make it convert better? James, this is my LinkedIn. How can I get better results with this LinkedIn? Now, they would need to be a little bit more specific than that, but you get the idea. There’s legitimately no excuse whatsoever not to get results.

Element number two, I recently added this in August of 2024, is office hour sessions. So every single month on the second Tuesday of the month from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, I will hop on a Zoom, turn my camera on, turn my microphone on, just like this, and anyone who wants to swing by and talk shop, we can do it.

I’ve done LinkedIn critiques and direct mail critiques and entire marketing walkthroughs and advertisement breakdowns and analyses. I’ve done a whole bunch of stuff. People can legitimately hop on a Zoom with me right there in the room and ask whatever they want to ask, whatever they want to talk about. I can help them. I can help them right there on the spot, do the thing that they want to do. That’s why I keep stressing like there’s no excuse whatsoever not to get results.

If you can join that zoom meeting, whatever problem you’re having, if I can’t solve it, somebody else in the room probably can because there are other financial advisors ranging from new advisors, even though the Inner Circle is probably not the best for new financial advisors, all the way up to people making multiple millions of dollars per year. There are people with one year of experience to 30 years of experience. There are people who work with all sorts of niches. They have far more experience combined than I ever could dream of having, right?

So it’s not even just me, it’s everyone else in the room. So you have the direct email access, you have the ability to ask questions, and you have the office hours where you can ask questions there, too. So that’s really cool. How much does that cost? $0.00. I could very easily take the office hours and make it a separate mastermind and charge for it and maximize revenue that way. But I don’t really want to.

I want to reward the people who are serious enough to join the Inner Circle and be part of that and help them get results that way. So that’s really the whole thing of the Inner Circle and how it’s been optimized to get results.

You ask about how many people or you ask about the cancellations, is it every month or is every year? Like I said, it is every month and here’s a really cool stat I want to share with you. So this is all 100% verifiable. This is from my Stripe page. Stripe is my payment processor. So I share screenshots of my payment processor all the time.

So from February, 2023 to January, 2024, my annualized monthly churn rate was 2.94%. From February, 2024 to January, 2025, it was 1.2%. So that means on any given month, 98.8 financial advisors out of 100 will stay in the inner circle.

Keep in mind, the cancellation rate includes expired credit cards, failed billing attempts, all sorts of wonky stuff happens. American Express might say don’t honor, Visa might decline a charge for some reason, credit card might be maxed out accidentally. There are all sorts of reasons why people fall through the cracks. 1.2% includes all of that, plus the people who voluntarily leave. So you have involuntary churn, which is credit cards, wonky stuff, and you have voluntary 1.2 % per month annualized over a year. That’s insane.

So I don’t expect your audience to know anything about churn, but Netflix is higher, Amazon Prime is higher, Audible’s higher, Disney+, Hulu, they’re all significantly higher. New York Times. So 1.2% for an entire year. This is not a fluke. That’s the number of people who choose to stay. So I personally think that speaks for itself, but I’ll let your listeners be the judge of that.

Brad – Yeah, I’d concur. Stats speak for themselves, but also the fact there’s no, hey, prove James wrong, sign up, and if you don’t like it, you can cancel, but you’re not committed to 12 months just to test the waters kind of thing. Yeah, congrats. And you have got to earn it every month. Every episode has to be worthy of renewing the next month kind of thing.

So for folks that want to get started with James, let me throw out there, obviously, number one, super easy, you should connect with him on LinkedIn. Number two, I’ve been a long time listener of the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast. As I talked about earlier, hundreds of episodes, all kinds of great content that goes out there. But for folks that are liking the Inner Circle, everything we’ve been talking about here, how do they actually go about signing up for that?

James – You can go to theadvisorcoach.com/coaching or you just Google James Pollard Inner Circle. Either way you want to do it but theadvisorcoach.com/coaching is the direct link that will take you there. You’ll see photos of the newsletter. You’ll see people holding it. You’ll know you’re in the right place because it’ll be this again yellow newsletter with that weird typewriter font.

Brad – Hopefully we don’t see an abundance of similar mailers going out, but as is the case with starting a business, it’s not the idea alone, it’s the execution. So there’s a lot more to it than just knowing the facts, you gotta deliver on it.

So James, with that, I think this has been very helpful. I appreciate your comments at the start of the episode here, just in general, and then kinda walking us through the Inner Circle offering. I appreciate all you do for the industry. Again, you put out a ton of content. I’ve learned a lot myself just with my business from your content. So thank you for that. I appreciate your time today. So thanks for coming on.

James – Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you to the listeners. Everyone who made it this far, God bless you. If you haven’t tuned out by now, then you are a trooper.

Brad – Thanks, James.

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