High character will create success in the annuity industry | 7FAS | Ep. 326

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Seven Figure Annuity sales podcast. I am Chad Owen and this is Cactus Jack, otherwise known as Caleb North. On. I don't know what you're doing right now. You look like you should be coming out of some sort of Mexican movie in Arizona.

No, but it's okay.

I love this shirt. This is my new favorite shirt. It's my new picture taken shirt.

I'm not the one you need to impress, so, you know, and then you got like the little. The little hippie necklace thing going on and. Oh, yeah, way too many. Way too many buttons opened up.

It's only one. It's only one's open.

You can see the three hairs on your chest.

There's non visible.

Don't worry, son. Once you get above eighth grade, you'll have more.

Oh, man, I think I got my. I think I got my grandfather's hair genetics. Like, he had a full head of hair all the way up until the day he died, but the guy could not grow chest hair to save his life. He had like four, and all of them were about five inches long.

Oh, my gosh. At least he had something to braid. Yeah, do those centipede braids. At least you're not like your Uncle Rodney.

Oh, that. Well, that's his brother. So the irony of that is that. But they're just complete opposites. Rodney looks like a silverback gorilla.

Does that mean Tanner's gonna be the Rodney?

Maybe my brother, he might.

He's gonna go, oh, oh, no.

He's two years young. I am. And quite a bit hairier than me, so I don't know.

Yeah. Okay, Cactus Jack, what are we talking about?

Oh, man. Let's just recap the week. I mean, I. I had the privilege of going up to Missouri for the first three days this. This week and got to participate in a. It's a retreat for the big top offices of one of our partners on the FMO side of things with retirement Realized financial. But it's a big. Primarily they're selling Medicare and it was their top Medicare offices and they kind of partnered up with us, brought us in to help train their agents and get their agents up to speed on the annuity side. And man, I'll say. I'll tell you this, a couple of things that for me were the highlight of that whole deal from this week. Number one, just a reiteration of the generosity of agents, by and large. Quick story. There's an individual who is on staff at this company that we're. That we're partnered with that's battling cancer for the second time. And this big Medicare, imo, has done a program where basically for every, for they take the office that sells the most cancer insurance plans and then how ever many they sell, they'll donate. I think it was like $25 per plan to the charity of that agent's choice.

That's so that size of organization, that's.

That'S a huge donation. So at this, you know, retreat, they announce which of the offices sold the most cancer plans. And the owner of that office goes up and asks if he can share a few words and he does it. So he, he asks the president of the marketing organization. So just to clarify, like the donation can go to wherever I, you know, want to send it. And she said yes. And he said, I'd like to donate it back to your, to your team member that's battling cancer for the second time. And then he says, and I'm going to double it. He's personally doubled it. And then two other agents matched the same donation.

I'm telling you, I. It's fascinating about our industry. We have, I've said this so many times, some of the most generous people I've ever met in my life. You know, we do very well financially and it's very expected, quote unquote, that when we go out to dinner with people, we pay for everything. And there's people that, you know, obviously family, things like that, good friends, that doesn't matter to us. But we've had people invite us out to dinner and then end up paying them. And we don't even have that great a relationship with them.

I've tried to pay for my own dinner with you before and you won't even let me.

You've always, yeah, you've always, you're always like that. You, you're, you've never been a moot and so you've been really good. But I find it fascinating though that in our industry, so you have people that expect to be given things while our industry is almost like people expect that you get, you know, that you're not being given to that you get. And every time I see that, it just blows me away. It just. I love what we do and I love what you guys are doing. I mean, this organization has over 9,000 agents and we are truly trying to help with the cross selling of Medicare to annuities. Because I'm telling you, this is just my gut feeling. There's no facts behind this, but there is a lot of heavy studying behind this. If you're a Medicare agent, and you're not doing annuities, you're in trouble. You're in trouble because I think the Medicare world will eventually end up like the health insurance world, where more Medicare things will be able to be done online and the agent won't be needed as much. Now, that being said, as long as the government's involved, there's always going to need to be a translator. So that's one of the biggest things Medicare agents do, is they translate what the government actually puts out there and then how does that apply to me? But I, I'm telling you. And then it doesn't make sense too, that when you're already in that target market, why wouldn't you pick up annuities? Why wouldn't you just spend extra time studying how to do it? Because it's not that complicated. Especially if you go through our training program, we have cross selling modules, but you learn the system in the process and all of a sudden you're going, oh, annuities aren't as crazy as I thought they were. Because they're not. The annuities are complicated by ignorance or someone trying to overprove themselves. In other words, they way explain. So you take Chad, that knows how to explain annuities in the simple way, then you take Cactus Jack and he's going into every nuance of every little detail and the client's more confused and they don't even know what annuity anymore. So fortunately you just deal with agents because hopefully that helps a little.

Yeah, the people I talk to can usually, can usually hang with the conversation.

I disagree. I think they can kind of, kind of get an understanding. But your level sometimes even confuses me. You know, it's just going, I thought I knew this after 21 years of doing annuities. And then Caleb comes on and I'm now confused.

So, you know, what's. What I've found to be my issue or why?

Why? I think, which issue are we talking about here? Because.

We don't have. This is like a 15, 20 minute podcast, so we don't have time to go through.

So for me, the other three, the issue I'm thinking of is the complication of things and communicate. Communicate, trying to communicate things. But then they come, they come out complicated, seemingly. And it's. I realized it's because I care so much about the accuracy of what I'm saying that I will use the exact words and terminology as opposed to kind of layman's terms. And so I, there's like this weird thing in my head where I care so much about the accuracy of what's being said. So then I'll use the actual words. And if you don't know what the words are, what they mean, then it creates more confusion. So I need to get better at analogies.

Yeah, and you can. That's exactly it. But you can also be accurate with less information.

Oh, that's fair.

I mean, a car is going 75 miles an hour on the road is accurate. A car going south for 36 minutes and such. And such. And it has a V6 engine in it, and it has this amount of torque. That's all accurate. But all they wanted to know how fast is the car going? That's funny. So, okay, so there's an analogy for you.

Point being, agents sum it up.

Yeah. Keep it up. It is. It is true. And remember, Medicare can. Now, to me, Medicare is actually intimidating because I've never really dug really deep into it. Could I learn it? Absolutely. Do I want to? No. And that's no reflection on the Medicare industry. That is a great, incredible lead source. There's actually a lot of times I wish I would have gotten started through the Medicare industry versus the life insurance industry, because I think the Medicare industry, it's already your target market. You can get leads for very reasonable prices. They already. You're already figuring out something that is what. What's perceived as incredibly complicated to the client. And then you simplify it. Unless you're Caleb. So you simplify it. And then they go, okay, well, if they can simplify this Medicare, that. I was confused on what they can they do for my retirement. And so it is a phenomenal place. I've had people say, well, now that I'm doing annuities, should I stop doing Medicare? I'm like, oh, yeah, go ahead, give up your life. Give up your life source or your leads. You know, it's like, no, you keep doing it. And now what I would like to see Medicare agents do is somehow figure out how to minimize the amount of admin you have to do when the.

Renewals come to the challenge is.

I mean, it's.

It's a. It's a systematic issue from a regulation standpoint. Like.

No, it's a stupidity issue from a regulation standpoint.

That's fair.

Why. Why? They only give you that little window to do all the renews, renewals. Doesn't make sense to me. Why don't you just let it done throughout the year and then you don't have Medicare agents working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and Then by the end of that, they're so worn out. It's. It's just crazy to me. It's so stupid for any organization to say, let's just have this tiny little window. And here's why I think it is. The government agency just says, well, we only have to work for four months out of the year, so that means we can coast the rest of the year. I don't know. I'm so beyond. I'm a DOGE guy to the core. And it's just because there's so much waste. I wish there was a DOGE type thing in every city, every state, every county, every. Everything to where you can now, not overreaching. I don't think they should have a say in, you know, how funds are necessarily spent from the standpoint of if you have a program and it was voted on, it was voted on, so you should spend the money. But if you have money, that's being San Antonio, I'll use that example. San Antonio was given $13 million a year for an immigration facility that was empty. Empty. There's nobody in it. And so all that wasted money. And you and I both know taxes, property taxes in Texas are insane. So if we could get some organization like the Medicare organization to where they can just trim the waste and just say, hey, let's not kill the agents. Let's make sure they can have a little bit more time during that. It's kind of like Christmas for me. When I used to work retail. I knew from Thanksgiving on I was working 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I just knew that. So I think, you know, what you guys are doing there. And I don't know, maybe I should speak at one of those things. Sometimes I, I think, you know what, maybe next big one, let's go ahead and try and set that up. I'll go there too with you guys because, I mean, that organization is phenomenal.

Well, they are.

I've heard nothing.

I got to speak with the president for a while and I told her, I said, you know, guys are doing a ton of business. I mean, you check all the boxes from, you know, the number standpoint. But the thing that I love about your organization is that the character of every single person that I've interacted with is top shelf character. I mean, they are, they are cut from the same cloth. And so when you bring, when you bring in two organizations that are successful in their own areas, but different areas that complement each other extremely well, and then simultaneously you tack on top of that your Heart and your desire for the industry and the agents you're supporting and the clients that they're working with is the same. Oh, now you've got synergy that, I mean it's gonna, it's gonna go crazy. So I'm super excited for that. I agree. And I tell agents all the time, Chad, I've told Medicare agents this. You guys should be selling annuities for a couple of reasons. Number one, if you're not, somebody else is. If you're not talking with your clients, somebody else is. And simultaneously, are they also health licensed? Is that other person that's talking to them about retirement? Could they also kind of capture that on the Medicare side? So you have a retention, you know, a retention standpoint retention aspect to consider with your Medicare clients. But simultaneously, one of the biggest issues on the annuity side for annuity only agents is the lead flow. And we're talking about that here in just a little bit on our, on our mentorship call that we do every week. It's like this is such a prevalent issue.

We are working, but the Medicare agents.

Have the, have the right demographic right in front of them.

Yeah, we are working on that. We're trying to figure that out. And I have no doubt we're going to crack that code. I have no doubt. But as far as on my end, boy, I had five weeks in a row where I literally just. I had five of those five weeks. I had two full weeks that I was completely gone. Then the other three weeks I was gone either three to four days. So my annuity business got hit really hard. I mean, I still, I don't even know what I did. Caleb, you'd probably know, but it wasn't a ton.

200,000, I think.

Yeah, it wasn't much. And so it felt so good to be back in the reins this week and now building up my week. I only wrote a hundred thousand this week, but I have some really good things building and May is a pretty long month, so I should have five full weeks total. Last week doesn't count because once again I was gone. So we've been doing some incredible events. I went to David Green event which was. Is the founder of Hobby Lobby. And to watch a billionaire give the way of money, I mean they, I think they profited like 1.8 billion last year and they gave half of that away. And it's just insane to me. And they're incredibly generous with all their employees and how they do things. And then we met with Tom Bilyeu, which is the founder of Quest Foods, and then he sold it for a billion dollars. Because what I want to do is I want anybody in our organization, and Josh is the same way. We want people to become millionaires. That's really what our deal is. Because of what you just talked about, Caleb. If this was some crazy gambling industry or whatever, an industry I just knew had no ethics, no integr. I don't care about other people becoming millionaires. But when I consistently see incredibly generous people, what if we turn all of our agents into millionaires? What will that do to the charity industry? Because I know people, including myself, you're incredibly generous. Josh is incredibly generous. Jesse's incredibly generous, Kristen, Eddie, they're all. Everybody in our organization and leadership is incredibly generous. And I see that replicated through a lot of different industries or, excuse me, a lot of different organizations. So that being said, if we can help agents become millionaires, what will that do to the charities? And that's. That's. I just love that side of it. So to do that, though, we got to find people like a Tom Billy that literally went from, you know, nothing to selling this company for a billion dollars in a phenomenally different, difficult industry. I mean, the food industry, if you ever watch Shark Tank, that you always hear food and clothing are just incredibly. Food, clothing and restaurants, those are the things that they get the most pushback on. And he builds and sells it for a billion dollars. Now, this guy's worth probably about 450 million now. And what is he doing? He's trying to spend all of his time and resources to help people get where he is. But number two, he wants to reach the mid the teenagers from 14 to 18. He's trying to make a video game that helps him learn how to become entrepreneur.

That's awesome.

In other words, how to. To not have this cycle of living in your mom and dad's basement, you know, and unfortunately, we're also seeing this too. The younger generation is predicted to be some of the most entrepreneurial out there, which I find quite fascinating. So it's, you know, all that being said, I've been spending five weeks trying to get all that kind of stuff done. I'm working on a ton of things. I'm revising the stress and rocking chairs book. I'm going to create a workbook based off of that. I have a lot of different minds going through it. As you know, I just redid the virtual seminar for the stress and rocking chairs. I have a long and a short version. So the long version would be for people who want to actually have seminars or if you have someone that needs a credible amount of detail. So I went into caps, participation rate spreads. I went into trying to decide between the higher income or higher death benefit or how to balance it out. I went through all these on the long presentation. And then of course, if you're part of our organization, you do get access to that. I'm also going to fully record that as well. So I'm going to do a full blown recording of how it works. I'm going to try and figure out some how to do a whiteboard or screen share. I'm trying to figure that one out. I mean, I could probably just do it on like zoom and then I have a shorter version that is going to be just the main virtual presentation. In other words, anytime you're doing a zoom, you do that. Because I think it's still like 13 pages long. So it's still fairly long. But you're going to have to put it to your, you're gonna have to change some slides out for your personal information and bring it your way. And once again, if you're part of our organization, we can help you with that. So, yeah, that's my week in a nutshell. It sounds like I find it fascinating. Out of the four principles, all of us are busy all the time, you know, now it's not all work, you know, I mean, it's. You have your second job, which you're building the ranch. Josh has his mentoring program, he's Jesse, Jesse has bedwise. I have 15 billion other things. So it's like, you know, we're, we're all pretty busy. So I hope this helps you guys. I appreciate your time and of course, as always, happy selling.

Sam.