Hicks Grant W. - Guerilla marketing for financial advisors: secrets for making big profits from your financial advisor business

GUERRILLA MARKETING FOR
FINANCIAL ADVISORS

Secrets For Making Big Profits
From Your
Financial Advisor Business

By Jay Conrad Levinson and

Grant W. Hicks, CIM, FCSI

Copyright 2003 Grant Hicks and Jay Levinson. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hicks, Grant, 1967

Guerilla marketing for financial advisors / Grant

Hicks and Jay Conrad Levinson.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-4120-0399-7
ISBN 978-1-4122-1256-4 (eBook0

1. Financial plannersMarketing. 2. Investment advisorsMarketing. I. Levinson, Jay Conrad II. Title.

HG179.5.H52 2003 332.60688 C2 003-902 8 76-3

TRAFFORD

This book was publishe d on-demand in coo peration with Trafford Publishing.

On-demand publishing is a unique process and service of making a book available for retail sale to the public taking advantage of on-demand manufacturing and Internet marketing. On-demand publishing includes promotions, retail sales, manufacturing, order fulfilment, accounting and collecting royalties on behalf of the author.

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Contents

GUERRILLA MARKETING FOR FINANCIAL ADVISORS

MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS AS A FINANCIAL ADVISOR-FOR STOCKBROKERS, INSURANCE AGENTS, INVESTMENT PROFESSIONALS, AND THEIR ASSISTANTS

BY

THE AUTHOR OF THE BEST-SELLING GUERRILLA MARKETING SERIES, JAY CONRAD LEVINSON,

AND

GRANT W. HICKS, CIM, FCSI

No matter what business you re in, Jay Conrad Levinson shows you how to grow sales and profits beyond your wildest dreamswithout spending an extra penny on marketing costs!

-Robert Allen, Best-selling author and world-renowned lecturer

In the marketing world, no one knows how to use the weapons of the trade better than industry expert Jay Levinson. He is living proof that his unconventional marketing ideas work.

-Entrepreneur Magazine

Guerrilla Marketing books are among the best marketing books our reviewer has ever read.

-Seattle Times

Every book by Jay Levinson is worth reading.

-Jane Applegate, author of Succeeding in Small Business

Dedications

Grant:

Kim, Madison, and Austin. For their love and support.

Jay :

Bill Shear for doing what it took to build a brand.

I could not have completed this if my wife, Kim, didnt support me 100%. The roadblocks disappeared once I teamed up with Jay. His encouragement to get it done was nothing short of inspirational; he is a great author, guerrilla marketer, and person. To Denis Rochon, who believed in me when I entered the investment industry. To individuals along the way who helped me and gave me inspiration and ideas, including Michael Wolfond of Partners in Planning and Carol Hagel, my assistant. To Bruce Batchelor and Trafford publishing, an awesome person and company to work with. To my clients, for placing their trust and confidence in me to manage their financial goals and dreams. A special thanks to my top client supporters, Bob and Sheila Smith, for their help at seminars and referrals and for their genuine business support. To my parents for their confidence in me. To the fund companies and wholesalers for their support and teamwork. And finally, a big thanks to you, the reader, who is like me and wants to learn more to earn more in this great industry for years to come.

Jay Conrad Levinson is the author of the best-selling marketing series in history, Guerrilla Marketing, and 29 other business books. His books have sold 14 million copies worldwide. His guerrilla concepts have influenced marketing so much that his books appear in 39 languages and are required reading in many MBA programs worldwide.

Jay taught guerrilla marketing for ten years at the extension division of the University of California in Berkeley; he was a practitioner in the United States as Senior Vice-President at J. Walter Thompson and in Europe as Creative Director and Board Member at Leo Burnett Advertising.

He has written a monthly column for Entrepreneur, articles for Inc., and online columns published monthly on the Microsoft web sitein addition to occasional columns in the San Francisco Examiner. He also writes on-line columns for several Internet web sites, including Netscape, America Online, Fortune Small Business, and Hewlett-Packard.

He is the Chairman of Guerrilla Marketing International, a marketing partner of Adobe and Apple. He has served on the Microsoft Small Business Council and the 3Com Small Business Advisory Board. His Guerrilla Marketing is a series of books, audiotapes, videotapes, an award-winning CD Rom, an Internet web site, and a breakthrough on-line marketing advancement called The Guerrilla Marketing Association, a marketing support system for small business, a way for business owners to spend less, get more, and achieve substantial profits.

Visit www.gmarketing.com for more information.

Grant Hicks has been successfully selling business-building ideas since 1989. These ideas are based on his everyday experiences as a financial advisor and business builder. He managed a financial planning firm and built it up over 3 years from 20 advisors to more than 70 advisors. That firm was successfully merged into Partners in Planning Financial Services.

He then went back to managing clients and as a Retirement Planning Specialist rapidly built up his business from $1 million to more than $40 million under management in just over two years. His innovative marketing ideas won the best ideas for Canadian financial advisors contest in 2001, and he was featured across Canada at the Advisors Forums and in Advisors Edge, Canadas magazine for financial professionals. His ideas have also appeared on www.advisor.ca , a Canadian advisors marketing and business-building web site. Grant speaks to audiences of financial advisors, mutual fund wholesalers, and insurance professionals on a regular basis about how to build business through his marketing ideas. His promotional web site, www.financialadvisormarketing.com , is a virtual search engine for marketing for investment professionals and the financial industry with hundreds of links to the best marketing ideas and speakers in the industry today. He holds the Canadian Investment Manager (CIM) portfolio management designation from the Canadian Securities Institute and is a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FCSI), the highest mark of professionalism in the Canadian Securities Industry. Grant is a long-standing member of the Canadian Association of Financial Planners (CAFP), The Canadian Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (CAIFA, now called Advocis), and the Federation of Independent Deposit Brokers (FCIDB). He is a shareholder of Partners In Planning Financial Services, Canadas largest independent financial advisory firm. He owns Hicks Financial, a fixed-income-management company.

He is also President of Hicks Financial Consulting, a marketing and consulting firm to the financial services industry. Grant writes a weekly column on financial topics in his hometown newspaper in Parksville, British Columbia. He is married with two children. Grant played professional hockey in Europe before starting his career in the financial services industry.