Michael Y. (00:00):
It’s really mostly the month of August, which you would think it would be a slow month overall. But it, it, I, my calendar is probably never been this busy in the last five years. I literally have five to six appointments a day between all the different pieces, but in terms of prospect opportunities that the others probably still looking at 40 to $50,000 in new business, you know, so three to five K a month of new business if everything works out, I’m looking at basically March being probably almost a hundred thousand dollars ahead of the game I can forecast into by next March seeing an extra 8,000 in my monthly numbers. And if we get the, we get the big one, which I’m still partnering with somebody on because there’s a little outside of my my ability to service that size of an account. We’re still gonna make, I mean, I’m still going to bring home, you know, a lot of money on that

Jeremiah (00:59):
First Michael. Thanks for being here and being willing to share your story and your journey. Thanks so much.

Michael Y. (01:04):
Yeah, my pleasure. Good. Looking forward to talking.

Jeremiah (01:07):
So, Michael, you know, you’re currently, you’re doing pretty well with the social selling strategies that we teach on LinkedIn, but I was just curious if we go back a little bit in time, what was it that you were doing prior to, you know, using a service like this for using LinkedIn to try to set up appointments? How are you trying to grow your pipeline?

Michael Y. (01:28):
I mean, in the past, you know, pre COVID, and even before that, most of it was through networking groups and you know, referral sources and things of that nature. I actually even tried a different type of LinkedIn connection type of company a few years ago without success due to the fact that we didn’t understand what workflow really was and meant and how to execute it properly. So it didn’t really go anywhere. I’ve got thousands and thousands of connections in my LinkedIn system that never really were ever touched or evolved anywhere. So that’s kind of how we were doing it. You know, I was doing some sporadic social media campaigning, you know, whether it was myself, I would grab a piece of article, put it up, but nothing consistent. So advisors has brought a lot more consistency to my business over the last two months.

Jeremiah (02:20):
I certainly appreciate that. Can you can you make, maybe share with us, what is it that made you reevaluate? Like obviously you’ve tried LinkedIn, you tried other stuff. What is it that made you rethink about this now? Particularly?

Michael Y. (02:36):
Well, a couple of things. So, you know, we started this during COVID, so it was an opportunity to know that more people were probably going to be at their desks and this whole new zoom world or video chat world was another way of getting out to people. Plus what I’ve come to realize is a lot more effective actually, because I’m not driving around where I’m losing a half a day to go on one appointment that was, you know, not even a good appointment sometimes. So now I’m banging out six, eight appointments a day, some are networking opportunities, some are prospect opportunities, you know, some are partnership opportunities. So I’m actually utilizing my time a lot better. And you know, ironically, the way we came to you was my wife who was my business partner literally is on LinkedIn about it for a hot second. And she got hit up by by Chris to have a call. And she came to me and said, this looks like a good idea. So I said, you know what? It never hurts to listen. And once we listened, we realized this was a good idea and basically kind of took off from there.

Jeremiah (03:44):
Great. What can you say about, you know, the onboarding process? What was that like for you now? Obviously you knew you had done it before. You hadn’t maybe done it all the way through. Maybe didn’t have a workflow, but what was different about this time for you?

Michael Y. (03:58):
The biggest, it really, the biggest difference actually was about three weeks into it. When I was actually floundering again. I was getting all these information was coming in. I didn’t really understand what sales navigator was. And all of a sudden I realized that I needed help, that I just personally couldn’t do all the, all the connections and all the follow-up and all the new stuff by myself. And it just kinda aligned where I actually brought my son into the business. It was in high school and basically through the assistance of working with Brianna and Kelly and Chris and all the scripts that we’ve adjusted and worked with, I’ve taught my son, max, basically how to respond to people. It sits in my office. We go over things. We strategize, we talk about how big is the company? What do they do?

Michael Y. (04:54):
Where are they located? You know, what did they say in their response? You know, and based upon that, we have objection handling and everything. And he’s been doing that every day. Now, no more than an hour to an hour and a half a day. But what it does is it keeps the momentum going. And we’ve also learned that less is more which is a great lesson to teach a kid that you don’t have to feature, dump everything under the sun to get a meeting. It’s really, Hey, I want to talk to you. 15 minutes is Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon, work for you. If it does shoot me your email address, and I’ll send you a meeting request, it works almost every time somebody says they’re interested. And then he basically asked me what works. I send up the meeting request. And then from there, you know, I take it over from there, but it, but the big thing.

Michael Y. (05:47):
And I’ll never forget when I was looking into references for, for advisors, I spoke to a Michael down in Texas and he said the same thing me. He goes, I didn’t really know what I was doing in the beginning. I was getting all these contacts and leads. He goes, and then one day something hit me over the head and I realized I needed to respond to these things. And he said, he put a process in place. And he said, he’s been doing it ever since. And then he’s been with you guys for a few years. And it was almost the same type of epiphany with me once I brought him into the business. And then eventually when he goes back to school, he may have to give up some of that, but he he’s going to teach my wife how to do the response part of the business.

Michael Y. (06:30):
And then we’ve coupled that together with my other son who has gotten involved in the social media aspect, where we’re much more consistent now in doing LinkedIn Facebook and Instagram posts on a weekly basis, he’s learned how to use HootSweet. He took a class on social media marketing. He’s learning how to write content. You know, obviously everything gets checked through me first, but he’s writing the content. Now he’s adding the hashtags is adding the taglines. He’s finding the pictures. So he’s getting a whole education on what social media is really about. And it’s so putting the whole thing together, it’s been very successful in in getting us a lot of opportunities.

Jeremiah (07:13):
That’s great. I want to commend you as a father, bringing your boys into the business and teaching them real skills, like, think about how much far advanced they’re going to be when they graduate. Just having those skillsets, you know, that they can take into other industries.

Michael Y. (07:27):
Yeah. And it’s been, it’s been actually an interesting experience. Cause my, my, my youngest son who’s doing most of the response stuff. He laughs sometimes at the responses that we get from what he considers professionals, you know? And I was just like, max, they’re just people at the other side with fancy titles sometimes. So you just have to laugh and then you got to figure out how to counter it with the right response. And look, we’ve, we’ve talked to 20,000, 30,000, you know employee companies, you know, and we’ve talked to the 10, 12 person company. Each one has a different thought process. And you know, just yesterday, even today, actually I met with a recruiter. I couldn’t tell from her LinkedIn you know, or her LinkedIn title, what she did. So we met with her in 10 minutes. We realized that we weren’t really going to be able to help each other out initially.

Michael Y. (08:19):
Since then I’ve met with cheapest staff who worked at, I think JP Morgan chase and a CFO of a biotech company, neither of them have anything to do with me. I I’ll probably never talk to either of them again, but I introduced them to the recruiter. And I think that recruiters are going to be able to place both of them because she does executive CFO type recruiting. So that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about connecting people and you know, and I believe a lot in karma, you know, do the right things for others and eventually stuff happens for you too.

Jeremiah (08:52):
Yeah. Well, I think you’ve tapped into something that not a lot of people appreciate is, and we’re going to talk about, you know, true appointments and, and, you know, deals that came through from this and just a moment. But I think that what I commend you for is you, you get deeply that this is not just about you taking from the community. This is about you connecting in the community. And we’ve seen that the advisors that succeed at the highest level long-term are the ones that see themselves almost as power connectors. And LinkedIn really allows you to do that. You know, if you’re just open up and you’re willing to just help people and not try to sell them right off the bat, but truly approach it from a place of service where, Hey, I don’t even know if we can do business together, but I’m open to hopping on a call, human to human. Let’s see what you’re doing. Let’s see what I’m doing. Can we help each other out maybe down that maybe I can’t help you today, but maybe tomorrow. So I want to commend you for that.

Michael Y. (09:46):
Doing that a lot with like, you know, I be getting a lot of financial advisors reaching out to me and I’m very straightforward with them now. I’m like, look, I’m like, I’m not going to be sending you business. I’m like, I have my own portfolio of, of financial advisors that I work with. But if you want to tap in to your client base and have somebody service and sell and take care of your, your companies from a benefit perspective, I will work with you and we will share in the revenue and I’ve gotten three or four advisors who’ve reached out. And he said, I don’t have anybody like you. And you know, I’d like to have you in my back pocket. And I’m sure over the next 12 months, if I keep those relationships going, that’s going to lead to a few deals and I don’t need a hundred.

Michael Y. (10:30):
I get a few deals from 10, 12 people. You’re very active in a year. So that’s the other part we’ve been doing as well is you know, is, is having conversations with people who aren’t dry, who are prospects there, opera there, opportunities to grow with, but I’m very, very, very succinct with them and telling them don’t expect business to directly from me in terms of an account. But if you have clients that you want to tap into, we can work with them and then you’ll get paid as well. And within that, normally other things come out and that’s where your new sales will come from. So when the people get that, then there’s a huge opportunity within their own circle of clients that they never knew about. And that’s where we really can make a difference. I I’ve gone into companies where they didn’t know, they didn’t have key man insurance. They didn’t have a defined benefit plan in place. You know, these are things that I personally don’t sell, but if I had let my partner know, he can go in there and make he, or she can go in there and make a kill it. So that’s kind of the other way we’re using advisers as well.

Jeremiah (11:35):
Yeah, fantastic. So you’ve got a net, you’ve got a networking cadence going, you’ve got a referral stream, you’re building up which, you know, I’ll be Frank. Most people don’t come to us for those two things. They come to us for appointments like, Hey, I want to talk to business owners that are interested in what I want, or I want to talk to affluent professionals. So let’s talk a little bit about that. You know, we’ve successfully generated referral, you know, you’re building a referral network in less than 60 days. You’re building a a network that’s just continuing to put, you know, Michael at the very center of all these really great people that you want to be connected to. But you know, at the end of the day, you want to get, you want to grow your business. You want to get more appointments. So tell us a little bit, what’s that look like for you in the, in the first 60 days of being in the program?

Michael Y. (12:24):
Well, again, I I’ll admit the first 30 days, not a lot went on, so it’s really mostly the month of August, which you would think it would be a slow month overall. But it, it, I, my calendar is probably never been this busy in the last five years. I literally have five to six appointments a day between all the different pieces, but in terms of prospect opportunities we’re working on a 1500 person self-funded company just from an introduction, you know, we, we emailed out the guy responded back, do you do self-funding? We said, of course we do. And and then basically now we’ve just recently gotten the claims information and we think we can do some really good things with these guys. So you never know, but that was one I’m working on a second one right now a, a small clothing company 40, 50 people currently on Tri-Net very unhappy with Tri-Net and we’re now shopping around for them.

Michael Y. (13:24):
And we explained some of the other benefits that we believe we bring to the table, because besides just doing Tri-Net, which we’ll do, and we’ll become the liaison in between, we also provide through either ourselves or our partners, financial wellness trainings, and nutritional training, because we’re a big believer in accountability, not, and the accountability has to come from the member. If your employees aren’t taking care of themselves, they don’t know the right things to do. They’re uneducated on how to eat, how to drink, how to sleep, how to save for college, whatever it might be, then they’re not going to be productive. And that makes them less productive as well. So it’s a soft dollar benefit, but it’s part of who we are. And I have at least three others that have told me that to basically contact them again, probably in the next 10 days to again, look at January 1st starts.

Michael Y. (14:18):
Those are the ones just off the top of my head that I can think of. And there’s probably a few others sprinkled in there that are coming our way. We actually, one of the referral partners. Unfortunately we were three days late to the pit to the party, but he’s like, do you know, do you have anybody who can handle a 2,600 person company in Europe? So it’s a pharma company. That’s got 2,600 employees all over Europe. And if anybody’s ever tried to deal with international healthcare, they’ll know, it’s like a complete disaster across multiple countries. Like the rules are just crazy. And unfortunately, so I found him somebody by the time I got to him, they had found somebody else already, but that was another thing that came through an advisory role, not even a prospect directly. So as I said, it’s, we had a lot of activity there’s more going on on a daily basis. And you know, as I said, I have three to four, so there’s five appointments a day, just back to back to back.

Jeremiah (15:17):
That’s amazing. I mean, and it’s still early days, like, I’ll, I’ll tell you that we tell people strategically, you want to think in terms of quarters in this program, because at the end of the 90 day cycle, most of the people from, you know, month one have been cycled through the campaign and then month, two campaigns start to kick in and so forth. And like this snowball just starts to grow and grow. And the real power comes in after 90 days, but we’re so excited that you’re getting results right away, like in short term. And I, and I think it’s because of your mindset Michael you’re, you see yourself as a connector, you’re there to serve. You’re not just there to show up and be like, can I make money off of you, but rather, how can I serve? How can I connect? How can I put people together? So it’s early days and already, you know, you’re seeing all of this, just you know, this is a wild gut check and I apologize for the right, you know, the, the question just flying out of left field here. But if you were to put a number like maybe a potential commission, or if you want to talk in premiums, whatever of just what you’ve seen so far, what do you think that might be that might come in from this program?

Michael Y. (16:26):
Well, I mean, if we get the, if we get the 1500 person one, it blows everything out of the water, cause that’s an easily you know, opportunity, a hundred, $200,000 type commission. Without that, the others probably still looking at 40 to $50,000 of new business, you know, so three to five K a month of new business if everything works out, I’m looking at basically March being probably almost a hundred thousand dollars ahead of the game. Well, so eight, eight, eight grand probably is where I think I can forecast into by next March seeing an extra 8,000 in my monthly numbers. And if we get the, we get the big one, which I’m still partnering with somebody on because there’s a little outside of my my ability to service that size of an account. We’re still gonna make, I mean, I’m still gonna bring home, you know, a lot of money on that case.

Michael Y. (17:22):
So yeah, we thought it was an 800 person case. Then we started talking to them and they’re like, no, no, no, no, we have 1500 lives. And I was like, Oh, wow. Okay. so, so yeah, I mean, I got a call, I think next Friday with a 20,000 person French company that has a large contingent of adhere in New York. I mean, you know, it’s just, it’s crazy. Like how people who’s, who’s saying yes, and who’s saying no we just keep plowing through it. You know, that’s the whole thing, it’s all about the consistency. You have to continue to write it back. Like I’ve taught my son, he has a calendar in front of him now he’s writing people and he’s got to follow up with in the future, you know? So it’s, it keeps it fresh and it keeps it real.

Jeremiah (18:07):
Oh, that’s awesome. What a great setup, you know, and you know, one of the advantages, I think that adviser Stauffers is, you know, we, this was built by agents and brokers and advisors. So, you know, Chris expertise having been in the trenches, like you having had a lot of frustration was his advice useful to you at all? Like outside of just the technical, we did it for you, but the fact that Chris is on the team and was he able to offer you some helpful advice on how you navigated a case?

Michael Y. (18:37):
Yeah, I mean well, unfortunately one of your employees had had a job problem, so she couldn’t speak very much. I had a broken jaw. So from the dentist, by the way, for everybody out there you know, so unfortunately she was able to communicate with me via email, but when I’ve had serious concerns or questions, Chris actually gave me a cell phone. He jumped on calls with me. And the biggest thing that he basically sent to me more than anything was keep it simple. Like don’t throw up all over these people. Don’t give them too much information, get them on the call. If you get them on the call, then you have an opportunity to have a discussion. If you give them too much information up front, they have an ability to say no based upon what you wrote, even though that may not even be what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Michael Y. (19:26):
So and then I moved to 1500 person group you know, that he sent me the question, do you use self-funding? And I was like how do I want to answer this? So I went to my partner and my partner wrote up a whole big five paragraph dissertation, you know, asked me all these questions. And I said it, I said, cause it sounded intelligent. But what I realized was was that it sounded intelligent to me. That’s not necessarily the audience and they may not even, even if they know it all, that may not be what he was asking. And I ended up then just sending a follow-up like three days later just saying, let’s just get on a call and discuss things. And he wrote back, let’s talk next week. And we then an hour now we’ve had two full meetings with them and they sent us all the data.

Michael Y. (20:16):
And now we’re in the process of talking to vendors. So the, the worry about the biggest two things out of this that come out of it, one, you’ve gotta be consistent. You have to respond quickly to these people. And two, you just gotta keep it real simple. The only time I tell them at all, what I’m doing is when I go to send the actual email requests in the meeting request, I’ll write to them. Cause you know, I’m handling it for two businesses. I’ll write introductory benefit call with, and I’ll say Gates premium benefit plan and Jeremiah, and I’ll put advisors there. So it’s right there. That’s why they know I’m calling. And that’s it. If I’m meeting with like a networking person, I’ll say biz development, networking icon call. So that’s the only time I even give them a little bit of a sense of what the agenda is nobody’s ever said nobody’s ever come back with a problem.

Jeremiah (21:10):
Oh, that’s great. That’s a good reminder. Cause people agree to meetings and then they forget, who am I talking to? Why should I be on this call? But the fact that that’s a really nice golden nugget there put the purpose of the meeting as the name of the meeting. Don’t just put Michael and Jeremiah. They’ll be like, who, who, who am I meeting with?

Michael Y. (21:26):
I have that. I went back, I was looking for somebody to connect to connect recently. And I went back and I found this guy, Brian. And I was like, who is this guy? Did I meet with them? I had to go back into my notes, go back into LinkedIn and put the dots together. After that guy. That was way back at the beginning. Now I write the name of the company and everything there. So it’s very easy to remember who it is. If I’m not putting it into Salesforce.

Jeremiah (21:48):
Yeah. Smart hack. I like that. Well, you know, rounding the bases. I know that you’re busy. So I’m really grateful for the few minutes you spend here, what would you say to an agent or a broker and advisor that’s, you know, thinking about doing this, but might still be hesitant because maybe like you, they had a bad experience in the past or they think it’s a bunch of hype. Like what recommendation would you or encouragement would you give them

Michael Y. (22:11):
Look? The biggest, the biggest reason I got into it was you had a nice promotion going and it made it financially viable to take the chance on it. And obviously it looks like it’s going to pay for itself. And then so so you know, if you’re still doing that, those are it’s well worth. The three month investment. You know, if not ask them about it and they’re finding out they insane that, but it’s the reason it brought me in. It was not a huge financial commitment, but it was enough for me to say that I have to invest in it and do it. So anybody who’s on the, the cost of something like this, I highly recommend trying it because the worst thing that’s going to come out of it after three months, you’re going to come out with thousands of new context in your LinkedIn system. And now you’ve just got to figure out how to get to them yourself.