I don’t care what your budget is. Whether you are starting out or you’ve been in the business like me for a bunch of years, this is so much fun: Coffee Connection Wind-Down Wednesday. We invite four to five centers of influence. Or sometimes we will do prospective clients or invite clients. Just make sure they are noncompeting. We invite them in for some quality coffee, snacks and healthy stuff in the morning, or in the afternoons it is adult beverages, kombucha and other fun things. Everybody gets eight minutes. I put them on a timer: Tell your story. Who are you, what do you do, whom do you do it for? And, most importantly, what is an ideal referral? As they go around the table and talk about referrals, it’s so much fun because oftentimes everybody leaves with at least one referral, including me.

People are booked up ahead of time. And when you go to those networking events and you get all those business cards, what do you do with them? For a while I used to put them in a plastic container and put it on a shelf. I never did anything with them. Now I hand them to my marketing and event director and say, “Go book something with it.” We book a couple of them out ahead of time. Because of COVID-19, we’ve been doing virtual stuff, but now it is fun because we are getting people back in the rooms again. So that one is super easy to do.

I have my business coach call in to events for 15 to 20 minutes. He has a wonderful book that he cowrote that talks about successes being a state of mind. We have 15 to 20 minutes of solid content, and then I get 12 to 15 minutes to tell my story about Wealth Legacy Group. One time I had a group of four women in different professions. I said, “Ladies, I am so sorry, but I have got to work.” They said, “That’s OK.” They went out to the parking lot and talked for another 30 minutes. It was so much fun to see how I brought new friends together.

Use handouts. This one has all the tax rates, capital gains rates and the estate tax numbers; it has everything. [visual] This is the best, most cost-effective marketing tool I have ever found and used. On the backside, it has all retirement plans, long-term care, how much is deductible and Social Security stuff. On the far right-hand side, there is a number, 70. If you had 1,000 70-year-olds, what would be the age by which half of them would be dead and half of them would still be alive? I show that to them, and they are just like, “You are kidding me.” Nope, it’s 97.4. What are the implications of that? No. 1, buy life insurance that lasts longer than you do. No. 2, buy real estate. No. 3, have equities in your portfolio for the rest of your life.

Social media. I never thought I would get any business from the internet or LinkedIn specifically but here are some examples of clients that we acquired through social media. We had a business family in Los Angeles reach out to us for help with their business succession plan and building their family unity. We have a managing partner of a national engineering firm. It is a little tedious because he really wants to know the details, but he is in a great family. He reached out to us from his summer place in Greece through LinkedIn because he saw all the articles we were writing on succession, philanthropy and tax mitigation. And then a CEO up in Orange County, which is just north of San Diego, reached out about a liquidity event that he had coming up. Again, he’s interested in philanthropy and doing what we call a “critical actions road map.” Use social media because you will get business from it.

This is such simple technology: Quote Actions. [visual] For $27 a month, we can automatically send out hundreds and hundreds of these weekly. The only work we have to do is put in the name and email address, and that is it. It might be a quote from an author, or in this case one of my favorite quotes from the legendary UCLA coach, John Wooden: “ ‘You can’t live a perfect day until you do something for someone who will never be able to repay you.’ Your action for today is to do something. Make an anonymous donation, or do something nice for someone without their finding out that you did it. Have an extraordinary day.” Now, what you do not see is, it has my picture, it has our office address — it has everything. It goes out every single day. I do not have to stalk that center of influence. My Quote Action is stalking them for me, and it can do it for you too. They get it every day or twice a week or once a week. They can change it up or down.

A monthly newsletter. You could hire a writer or communications firm to create a newsletter or use an off-the-shelf product and just put your logo and branding on it. I’ve got to say, it just does not work for me. “Control the controllables.” I know the topics that I want to have. We lay out our content for the year. We have created so much content that now we are in our second or third time around. We just tweak it and modernize it.

We put this stuff on LinkedIn, and we tweet it out every day. We use Quote Actions, tweeting that out every day. So, we have a big social media presence. And guess what? A lot of it is on autopilot. Yes, I have a marketing and event manager, but I did not always. She is amazing.

What else can you do? Well, podcasts, interviews. The gentleman whom I am interviewing here is Denny Sanford, the multibillionaire philanthropist out of South Dakota. [visual] He has already given away over $2 billion. I approach these people with the purpose not of making them a client, although oftentimes that does happen, but of simply understanding how they became so successful. Where did they stumble along the way? How did they overcome challenges in life? People flock to hear those stories. Now, mind you, there are also people who flock because they want to get a donation from Denny Sanford, but it’s an amazing thing to listen to, and people are so gracious. So, why aren’t you doing that? We used to charge a fee to do that. Actually, I co-created and ran a nonprofit for 12 years. We put it on the shelf earlier this year, just because we ran out of time, but we do a series, Leadership Insights Forum, with breakfast. Denny was speaking at one of our breakfasts where we interviewed terrific business leaders and science leaders. One of the gentlemen I interviewed was the one who unpacked DNA, Dr. Craig Venter. It was so much fun to be able to understand how he unpacked the human genome.

The other thing about podcasting is that you can get studio quality equipment for less than $1,000. Just do it there in your office. I had a radio show for three years, and I realized, Why am I doing that in a radio show? I can just do it in my office. I do not have to go to the studio. You record the content, and not only can you get some really interesting stuff, but you get it on your website, they get it on their website, and you can blast it out to clients or prospective clients.

I thought I would do a video. Well, 12 videos later, I hired a videographer, and it was just like being in the newsroom. All my scripts are right there on the camera. I am just reading the script right for the camera. It is so easy. And then we use and post these on LinkedIn. We post them to clients. We are doing one right now for women, a 30-day program for women specifically about money, finance and wealth. I am so excited about it.

Here is another one that folks have said, “How did you do that one?” It was easy because I had been doing all these other things, and so it kind of all fell together. When COVID-19 started back in March 2020, and none of us knew what was going on, in 10 days I organized a media event. We had 17 subject matter experts, and we did 1 to 1½ subjects a day. It was directed toward business owners. We had over 250 unique email addresses that came to the event to just talk about “How do we overcome COVID?” We did not even know what it was, but we estimated that we saved about 10,000 jobs in San Diego alone. Just go to our website; you will get some of the content, and you will hear, “Wow, that’s good stuff.” Amazing. You can do things like this, and we did it really fast.

R.J. Kelly, AEP, MSFS, is a 41-year MDRT member with three Court of the Table and four Top of the Table honors and the founder and chief visionary officer of Wealth Legacy Group Inc., a company in San Diego, California, USA, that specializes in the diverse needs of closely-held business and professional families. Creator of the Wealth Legacy Assessment and the Critical Actions Roadmap, Kelly and his team develop comprehensive plans that maximize investment and asset growth, mitigate risk, create clarity in family legacy and issues of philanthropy, and facilitate business succession and exit strategies.