Episode #606 - Cold Calling For Happy Clients with Jonathan DeYoe, Senior VP of EP Wealth Advisors

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

So when you're saying what, what was your opening hook to basically, here's who I am, here's what we have. Interested or not?

What was the script? Wow. Yeah, I mean, we, I, I learned how to cold call on Cisco Systems, so it was my first.

People are going to have to. That start business are not aware of this. You got to sell. You got to start a business. Yes, you got to sell.

You gotta sell.

If you hit a plateau or if you're introducing a new product that's in a little bit different groove or niche than you've been, you're gonna get off your, your butt and you, you know, sell. You got a prospect. You know, everybody's got a prospect. And so that's why I spend a little time on this.

Yeah, no, of course. So we, we would, the way I would start, and I wouldn't do it this way today if I started over, but I would just, you know, smile and dial. I would pick up the phone, I dial the number if somebody connected, you know. Hi, my name is Jonathan Dio. I'm with Dean Witter. You know, we're an investment firm. We got an office downtown San Francisco. We've got some good research that suggests that Cisco Systems is a good buy at this price. Do you invest in stocks? Yeah, I invest in stocks. Well, great. You have a second I can tell you about Cisco Systems. I own some Cisco Systems. Great. Well, then I have, you know, two different stocks I could talk about that are good diversifiers for Cisco Systems. Oh, I, I don't own Cisco Systems. Oh, great. Let me tell you about Cisco Systems. Or you know what? I don't own stocks. Well, let me tell you about this municipal bond we're offering. So you'd have a, you know, you just have a list of things you didn't care. Like, you didn't care if somebody bought or didn't buy. You wanted a connection, somebody could call back with the next idea. And if you've seen the movie, what is the movie with. Oh, my God. What Wall street movie. Leonardo DiCaprio.

The Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah.

Wolf of Wall Street.

Yeah.

That is so the stuff they talk about is, is actually how you're trained. Like, you have to have the backups. You have to do this. You're very, you know, it's, it's it's very interesting process, but today you still got to reach out people. You want to make connections and so.

You have to make connections, you got.

To make the connect. You got to meet people, you got to talk to people, you got to get them to talk to. You got to get up to respond. So back in the day it was phone. Today it would be networking, it would be going to the Rotary Club, it'd be going to. And that's kind of how, you know, the second iteration of the business. When I finally did start my own company, that's how I built it. It's just by building relationships in my local community. And I have a, it was a, it was a pretty good sized, medium sized practice by the time I merged it, but it was still very local. We're 85% Oakland, Berkeley, California. I mean, very local.

Yeah, it's amazing also today the, the explosion in entrepreneur type groups in these different areas where they'll get in, you know, new budding entrepreneurs will get in and share ideas and network. You know, it's a little more, more specific. Like they have, you know, like mastermind type things. But if you, if you get out and you check, you can find there's probably a lot of those going on in your area. Oh yeah. And it goes back to what Proverbs says. If you want friends, you've got to show yourself friendly, you know, and you gotta go in with, you gotta go in with a smile on your face. You know, if you're a happy guy, put a smile on your face. Cause other than that, people don't know, you know.

Right. And so this, and this is the core, this is the lesson I learned from five years at the bigger firms is I didn't get referrals. Like it was all cold call. It was cold call, cold call. It's hammer out every day, cold call, cold call, cold call. But if you network and you treat people right, you get referrals and that whether you're a painting contractor or a carpet cleaner or a wealth advisor, it's the referrals that you want. It is happy clients. So how do you make happy clients? Well, you treat them like kings and queens. You take care of them, you make sure that you're honest, you make sure you follow up, you make sure you do what you say. And if you do those things and.

You do some extras.

Totally. Yeah.

And the thing is like this and this. Since we're on this, we might as well nail this down. The reason to co call is to get yourself into referrals you know, that's the way the smart people move. You know, they're like, I gotta brutalize myself for a period of time to where I can build up a client base, a friend base or whatever that know me, feel good about me to where I can get referrals. And once you get into referrals, your percentages go up because it's, it's warm, not cold. And so let's talk about now. You started your firm and was that. What's the nastiest thing that happened to you before you started your firm? You're on your, your, your time up the lot kind up there the most, you know, the, the one that got you to the bone, you know, or, you know, you come up where you like, oh, this is a different world. This is not grad school anymore. And everything that people say to me is not necessarily. I can't necessarily take that at face value. People, they say they're going to do that. The company says they're going to do this for me or whatever. You've already mentioned one of them where the company, you found out the ugly underbelly, they weren't going to change. But what, what were things that, Was there anything that shook you early on that forced you to like, I better get real now. I'm not in school, I'm not a professor. And this is the thing now that I want to bring out, Jonathan, why I'm such a maniac with the people that work with me on these calls about getting people who have done real things, because this is the stuff that makes entrepreneurs, you know, they get hit in the face, they go through that thing. And professors don't do it. You know, employees don't do it. If you're an employee, I don't care if you're CEO, you are an employee and, you know, you face the challenges, but it's not like, you know, it's all going to come tumbling now. You know, you're going to come down as a CEO and walk away with your $100 million in options and this, that and the other that you've been salting away for the last five years, or, pardon me, $500 million in options now in this economy. And so an employee, I mean a CEO, anybody works for a corporation is not an entrepreneur. And so they can tell you a limited type thing, but going through this, the guy who starts the business and goes through that thing, you learn that stuff. But you get a lot of exposure early on because you're on commission when you work in there. You're on commission. And so that's what's different as you were working in there rather than being on salary. So did you go through any of that? I saw a little flash in your eye like you, you, you. Something came back to you.

Yeah, there's two, there's two stories of like, you can't believe, you can't even, you can't believe it. One of them I already mentioned, and that's the, that's the overpriced, you know, the, the, the, you're. We're actually charging 1.2%, but we're telling clients we're charging 1%. Like that. That actually happened at a Wall street firm. And, and we tried to report on it and everyone, everyone lined up to defend it. And I was just like, this is, I can't, I can't deal with that. But the big one, this was the first year, maybe it's my second year in the business. And I kind of alluded to this. But there was a darling of the firm and he had come to the firm from one of the local banks. And when he came to the firm from the local bank, he brought with him a cd. And the cd like a disk, you remember the disks you used to put in the computer, that disk that had data on it. And the data had on it, the data it had on it was all of the CDs that were maturing at the bank that he left. So that's, I know that. So this is, I knew that this is what he used to build his business. So I knew that he had sort of illegal data to help him build his business. And as a trainee, I was, I went in with him and I listened to him and I cold called for him and I listened to him sell when he had a meeting. So he was like a training person for us. But then you fast forward like six, eight months and I'm, you know, I'm working Monday through Saturday and a half day on Sunday. Right? You work. We work 90 hour weeks. It was ridiculous how much you work. But I'm in on a Saturday and there's like five of us that come into the office on a Saturday and it's busy. It is crazy busy. And they're shredding papers and we're like, what the hell is going on? And you know, you got to just kind of ask some questions. You peek under the hood, you're trying to figure out what's going on. Turned out that a lot of the investment recommendations that had been made by this guy, you couldn't back up the recommendation with the paperwork that was signed. So they were altering the paperwork after the fact. Movies are made of this stuff, right? So it was kind of sick. That was the first indication. And I left that firm like six months, within six months of that little activity, trying to find a new place to go. But what I discover after five of them, they're all the same. Or at least they were five years ago. They're all the same.

And no offense, folks, but when you turn these things into the regulatory environment, they don't want to see it. They don't want to bring this stuff up. And it's usually, you know, if you're going to be a whistleblower, you're going down, you know, show me of a place in any industry where the whistleblower, it turns into. They build a statue for him in the lobby. No, no, doesn't happen. And so, you know, it's great to be a whistleblower. Somebody's got to do it. Try and find a way to do it anonymously and get out of there. Get yourself another job or get your own company like Jonathan did. And so one choice you said is, I'm not going to fight it. I'm not going to try and reinvent the industry. I've been to five. This is the way it is. Be a waste of time to go to the regulatory people. It would only hold them back for a little bit. You just podcast. I can say what I want is kind of like making the Bidens stop taking corrupt funds. But it's like, yeah, you might stop the next million dollar payment. But anyway, anyway, just kidding. We all love the Bidens. But you know, there's a certain, you know, you know how the river is roaring now, the Amazon river, it roars in a certain direction. And you, you're smart enough to realize one person can only do so much and you try and do what you can. If you're in a position where you can disrupt the world, go ahead, try and do it anonymously, though, as much as possible so you don't get the vengeance down on your head from. Because there's a lot of people. What we found, there was one thing in our company where we found out that they were accepting processing during like hurricane. This hurricane went through South Carolina and it just went right up through. It destroyed South Carolina. And after that, there was a boom in business in the life insurance side. And there was like 14 Marilyn Monroe's at one address on Mockingbird Lane. She bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of this year. And Clark Gable, he bought a ton of stuff and there's all of this business turned out, you know, it was like what the crap is when they finally the persistency thing came crashing down. Because it's funny that those Marilyn Monroe's defaulted on their payments. You know, he says they were fantasy anyway. And so eventually all this started to unravel and the guys who were in charge, they lied through the lied under oath about the things they said. We talk, we did this. We'd never allow that. And it's like, well, I couldn't believe the lies that people will do. So anyway, you did the smart thing, started your to protect themselves and it'd be your best friend will lie against you in that situation to save their butt, you know, so you have to look out for yourself. And you did that. You found that and we spent a lot of time on that because you're a hardworking guy, you know, you were working and you were doing well, I imagine. But that's not good enough folks. It's not good enough. You got to have the right environment because eventually will bring you down.

Yeah. I often wonder what would have. What would my. What would the size of my business be had I just put my head. Ignored all the crap and put my head down and just kept going forward like I just had momentum. Just kept going forward, kept learning how to do the business better and ignored the environment. And I'm sure, I'm sure I would have, you know, I ended with like 350 million before I merged. I'm sure I would be at a billion dollar, you know, thing if I just because I moved, I moved a whole bunch of times and every time you move you got to repaper accounts, you got to bring clients with you. You got to. It's every time it's a do over. You gotta learn new systems, you gotta learn, you know, what does this company offer? You got all that stuff is brand new. So starting over five times. But it's the right thing to do. And at the end of the day my clients are better off, my family's better off. And I am proud of what I do. I'm happy.

Yeah. And so talk about launching your company. What was that all about? And what went well? What didn't go well? Because you had some pretty good assumptions about how to do this thing.

Now I like how you called it a company. It wasn't really a company at that point. It was me in a basement.

It was an idea.

It was a concept at best. You know what, what I joined Was I joined the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. I was like, dad, I know how to cold call, but I don't know how to run a business. I got a computer, I got a laptop computer. I plugged it in at my house. I joined the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce, actually hired a guy to cold call for me. And we cold call with each other, right? Just, we had a little bit of. We ended up not doing the work and talking about other stuff.

Right?

He was a genius. He was literally a genius. Like, he's founded a couple companies now I'm an investor in one of his companies. I'm really excited about that. But we talked and we just shoot the shit. We wouldn't really get a lot of cold calling done. But it was through the networking at that point and talking to people and treating them well. And I found this, this group called bni, Business Networking International. I. There were no chapters available in my area, so I started a new chapter and, you know, gathered 15 other business people in 15 different professions and we started a chapter and we met every single week. And we, you know, we all pooled our networks together. And, you know, I know somebody that does cleans pools. Do you. Oh, you need this person? Great, Let me introduce this person. I know someone that does insurance here. You want some insurance? Great. I know, I. Realtor. Here's a realtor, right? So you just introduce people across with these small business people. And I got, you know, my first five years from zero to probably 75 clients just by networking and working with that. And that's when. That's when things kicked off. I mean, that's when really you started getting momentum, started getting referrals. Those referrals started to be to more complex cases, you know, and by the way, wealth grows. So if you have it and it grows, it grows revenues. So these clients got bigger. They inherit, they retired and rolled over in an Irodo or 401k into an IRA. So it's just, you treat people well, they stay. You treat people well, they introduce new people. And for me, that's what made it work.

Did every single client stay with you?

I have lost more clients to death than I've lost to leaving. I have lost, probably, I can count them on one hand how many clients I've lost in my career who've gone someplace else that has happened. One guy, oh, my God, it killed me. He was a client for 11 years. His name was Larry. I love Larry. Larry and I had lunch together. He was a great guy, but he was, you know, he was sensitive to the fees that advisors charge, which is smart. I get it, right? We're not cheap. And his wasn't a very complex case, but we were friends.

It was so.

And then he said, you know, Jonathan, I'm really sorry. I just, I just can't. I can't justify the fee anymore. I'm like, all right, I get it. You know, I love you. You have a, you know, have a great, Have a great life. Let's go to lunch some other time. That was the only one that really stung when that one. When that one left. But it happens like it's. It's gotta happen.

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