That was far from the beginning. I graduated college, moved to California, and got hired at Abercrombie & Fitch in the shoe department. First week on the job, I walked into the back room and the shoe closet was completely in disarray. Nobody had touched it in a long time. I thought, if I don't know where anything is, I'm not going to be good at this job. So I spent the first three days in a suit and tie, sweating in that back room, organizing everything. Nobody told me to do it. The store manager saw it and it caught his eye, which opened other doors. But I didn't do it to impress him. I did it so I could function. That early lesson has never left me. You have to have your closet in order before you can sell anything. From there I got my MBA while working full time, then followed a manager I respected from a lighting company called Sylvania over to Cigna, where we were selling 401k plans. That was my first taste of conceptual selling, where the product isn't something you can touch or hold. And that changes everything about how you sell. 💡 Get your closet in order before you try to sell. Preparation isn't a step in the process. It is the process.

The irony is that my boss who brought me to Cigna lasted six months, because he couldn't make that shift. A product you can touch, see, and feel sells itself in a demonstration. A concept has to be told through story and example. You have to make something invisible come to life. That's a fundamentally different skill. And there's a reason conceptual salespeople are generally paid more. It's harder. Financial services, software, anything where you're solving a problem that isn't physically in the room with you, the sale lives or dies on whether you can help someone feel the value before they can see it. For me, that became learning the art of storytelling. Not to entertain, but to make the invisible feel real and urgent. 💡 Conceptual selling lives or dies on storytelling. If you can't make the invisible feel real, you can't close.

I call it sawdust. When you cut wood, the main job is to cut the wood, but it creates a byproduct nobody valued. They used to dump sawdust into rivers until it was polluting everything. Then Henry Ford's brother-in-law, Kingsford, figured out how to turn it into charcoal. What was overlooked and undervalued became a product used in every backyard in America. 401k plans have the same byproduct. When employees leave a company and their balance is under a certain threshold, the employer can move them out of the plan entirely. That money and that person gets pushed somewhere else, and almost always it doesn't go to the advisor who spent years building that relationship. My tagline is simple: where did the money go? Because the advisor created this, they earned the right to it, and most of the time they simply weren't aware there was another option. That's the opportunity I'm helping them see. 💡 Every plan has byproducts. The advisors who pay attention to them build revenue streams their competitors don't even know exist.

I'm 100 for 100 because I ask three questions. First: what do you do with small balances when a participant leaves? The answer is almost always "nothing, I never thought about it." Second: do you have a wealth practice, and how much does someone need to get into it? Most say half a million, a million. Then I ask: what do you do with everyone else? And they say nothing. In fact, most of them actively help those people move their money somewhere else. Out of a lack of awareness, they're helping those people move their money elsewhere, not intentionally, just because no one told them there was a better option. Third: have you ever had a 401k plan terminate entirely, because a company was bought or closed? Almost every time, the answer is, "actually, I have two of those right now." And their instinct is that they're going to lose those clients. But the opposite is true. When a plan terminates, every dollar in it has to go somewhere, and the advisor is in the best position to control where. They just didn't know that was an option. Every single call ends with a lightbulb moment. Sometimes it flips on fast. Sometimes it takes longer. But it always happens. 💡 Three questions beats a pitch deck every time. Uncover what they don't know, and let the aha moment do the closing for you.

What's changed is that I'm now relearning everything I thought I knew. I spent almost four decades selling 401k plans and looking at the pile of money inside the plan. I never really paid attention to what was leaving. That lens has completely shifted. Now I see the whole picture, and it's made me realize there's always more to it than meets the eye. What hasn't changed is the art of being a student of whatever you're doing. Just when you think you know it all, you wake up and realize you didn't know anything. That's not a setback. That's the job. The best salespeople I've known are the ones who stay curious, stay uncomfortable, and keep reinventing. The moment you stop being a student, you start becoming irrelevant. 💡 Stay a student. The day you think you know it all is the day you start falling behind.

The most difficult thing in sales is earning someone's trust. That is the job. You cannot make a sale until that moment has happened. There is a line you cross when you go from being an outsider to an insider. I tell college classes: your goal is to get invited to their house for dinner on a Friday night. That's how you know you crossed the line. Very few salespeople ever get there. The way you do it is by learning what matters to them. Not your product. Are they trying to grow? Do they have a job opening? Do you know someone you could recommend to their team? None of that is about what you're selling. It's about helping them get bigger. And the other thing: treat everyone the same. Treat everyone like a piece of gold. You have no idea who they know, who they're related to, or where they came from. An old leader of mine told me I had the capability to build what he called blood relationships. I never forgot that. You can't fake care. As soon as you fake it, the trust is gone and you're done. Pour into people genuinely, keep showing up, and the results follow. Sometimes it takes 30 years. But they follow. 💡 Your goal isn't to close a deal. It's to get invited to dinner on a Friday night. Everything else is a byproduct of that.