Everybody has an origin story. Derrick Kinney’s starts with the Judy Zerafa book “Go For It,” which he read as a teenager during a difficult time making friends at school. So he consulted the chapter on becoming popular.
“I had nothing to lose. I was a nobody with the heart of a somebody,” Derrick says. “And I began to practice what the chapter said: saying hi to people, using eye contact, using their name, making them feel important. And before long, momentum was building. I was creating friendships.”
Derrick ended up becoming student body president, bridging the gulf between the many high school cliques by being that person who “made everybody else feel like they were valuable and seen and heard.”
Derrick went on to work as a financial advisor, build his own financial planning business, and become a media sensation across books, podcasts and TV. Now, as CEO of Good Money Frameworks, he helps financial advisors be their best selves so they can serve their clients.
“There’s no other professional that I think thinks about their clients as much as advisors do,” he says. “And so I want to make sure that they’re in a situation where they are revered, they’re adored.”
On this episode of Making the Ideal Real, we’re speaking with Derrick about putting meaning to money, discovering the power of purpose and passion, and how to own your problems.
How Going for It Has Shaped Derrick’s Life
Student body president wasn’t the pinnacle of Derrick’s life or the last time he brought people together by being authentic. In fact, helping people feel valued became the driving motivator when he went into business.
“People don’t care how smart you are. They don’t care about the car you drive or the house you own or how good you look,” he says. “They care about, ‘Do you make them feel valued and worthy and important?’ And when you do that, people want to work with you.”
Today, making the ideal real for Derrick means practicing goal-setting and goal achievement with his family, including his children. “We have 40 hours, essentially, of work in the week,” he says. “How do we maximize every 40-plus to make the ideal more real?”
The Power of Purpose and Passion in Business
Derrick spent more than two decades as a financial advisor, including regular TV appearances. The TV work went so well that he was offered a regular show. But his broker-dealer firm’s compliance department shut down the idea.
Derrick had to re-examine his purpose in life and what drove him to succeed. He certainly wanted to help financial advisors everywhere be more successful, but what else? During a sabbatical, he “wrote down on the list, ‘Write a book. Launch a podcast. Coach. Speak. Consult.’ And shockingly,” he adds, that list didn’t include “being a financial advisor.”
This realization changed everything — his purpose, passion and values had shifted. Derrick needed to sell the business to someone with that passion so he could pursue his: helping financial advisors in this rapidly changing environment.
It’s not just business questions about artificial intelligence or changing models. It’s also a matter of motivation. “They want to find out, how do they tie in a cause to their cash? How do they combine meaning to their money?” Derrick says. “And once they can figure that out, what that does is it begins to reinvigorate them. They begin to be a financial advisor with a purpose.”
Owning Your ‘Painful Problems’
Financial advising is unlike any other industry, Derrick argues, because no other field “handles people’s valuable goals and dreams in their hand, walks alongside them, carries those goals and dreams with them 24/7.”
This dedication and commitment means clients are alone with their “painful problems”; great advisors make those problems theirs, too. The challenge he finds is helping advisors realize this is their mission — and how to communicate it.
Don’t just say you’re a financial advisor, Derrick says — tell stories. Talk about the couple who came to your office, worrying about running out of money during retirement. Share how you understood those fears, made their problem yours and helped them solve that problem.
“When you own a painful problem and you care about what your clients care about,” he says, “you will become the unstoppable advisor, the sought-after advisor in your local community.”
People in This Episode
Derrick Kinney: LinkedIn, Company website
Transcript
Derrick Kinney:
I want the good people, the financial advisors, the business owners listening to this show, I want them to have all the money for all the good they can do. So, when they lay their head on the pillow at night, they know that they’ve impacted clients’ lives, their team’s lives, but finally, at last, they’re making an impact in the causes they’ve always wanted to, and their life was a day of meaning, and they want to repeat it again tomorrow.
Ryan Goulart:
That’s Derrick Kinney, bestselling author and CEO of Good Money Frameworks, where he supports advisors achieving success in a fraction of the time. We’re talking about putting meaning to money and your business. I’m Ryan Goulart, and you are Making the Ideal Real.
We are here with Derrick Kinney, a Forbes financial advisor, someone that has been a practicing advisor, has built a business and had this moment in time where he decided that he wanted to sell his business and is now educating the financial services industry on how to be successful faster. Derrick, welcome to Making the Ideal Real.
Derrick Kinney:
Hey Ryan, thank you for having me. I am super excited about this conversation.
Ryan Goulart:
I am, too. And from our previous conversations, I know our audience is going to get a tremendous amount of value when it comes to what are the things that they can do to make their business and themselves more successful. So, let’s start with our first question, Derrick. Our audience knows exactly where I’m going with this. What does making the ideal real mean to you?
Derrick Kinney:
Yeah, so let me tell you a quick story. So, one of my favorite movies is a movie called “Braveheart.” And there’s courage, there’s family, all the things I believe in at a deep level. And at the end of the movie, there is a scene that I find myself replaying in my mind almost every day. And it’s the person laying there on their sick bed and they recount how they wish they would’ve done life differently. And I call it the could’ve, should’ve, would’ves. And I say to myself, “One day, when I’m in that situation, I don’t want to be thinking about what I wish I would’ve done. Instead, I want to be thinking, ‘How do I have more time to think about all the investment I made and the things I cared about?’”
And so, when I think about making the ideal real, we just had a family goal session with our kids just about two weeks ago. We all wrote down note cards of five goals: spiritual, physical, financial, a business goal, a family goal. And to see all of our kids writing down goals, even my wife and myself included, and basically, it was describing what is the ideal year look like and writing it as though it had already happened. It was a powerful exercise. And so it just guides me and my family that were focused on. … We have 40 hours, essentially, of work in the week. How do we maximize every 40-plus to make the ideal more real?
Ryan Goulart:
Love it. I love the word that you… It’s acting. It’s that action sport of goal achievement, which I know you’re very familiar with as a former financial advisor. Tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, as you are now a speaker, wrote a bestselling book, host a podcast. How did you get to where you are now? And maybe, it was one of those goals that you wrote down one year and you were trying to think, “It’s time to do something about this, Derrick.”
Derrick Kinney:
I think it comes down to two things. It’s really goals and God are the two guiding factors in my life as I think back to the success I’ve had. It’s funny when I mentioned family goal setting, so I went back and I pulled the folder out of our closet — and we’ve been setting goals as a family now for about 14 years — and so it was funny to go back and see my kids’ handwriting on the note cards. Now, keep in mind when we started doing this, my kids would yell at me, they would throw things at me, they would say, “You’re the worst dad ever for forcing us to do this.” And now they love to do it because they see the results. And so, always setting goals has been paramount to me. Even when I was young, I would set goals, and I would write down, “Here’s a school goal.” I wanted to start a business in high school.
The problem I had though, I have a really big nose, Ryan. OK, I’m just going to be candid and just call it out, and people let me know about it. And so we moved six times before the sixth grade. My dad was a metallurgical engineer, would either lose a job, take a new job, whatever happened. And so, in the sixth grade, I find myself here in Arlington, Texas, where I live today — this is really my home now — but from junior high through high school, I was teased mercilessly. It really led me to a very dark place. And I had an epiphany one day. My mom gave me a book, and it was by a woman named Judy Zerafa. The book was called “Go for It,” and in the book was a chapter called “How to Be Popular.”
Well, I had nothing to lose. I was a nobody with the heart of a somebody. And I began to practice what the chapter said: saying hi to people, using eye contact, using their name, making them feel important. And before long, momentum was building. I was creating friendships. And so, the crazy idea was I was going to run for student body president of my high school. Now, there were five other people running, and I had a bit of a disadvantage in that I didn’t come from the gene pool of the popular kids. So, I was really sort of swimming upstream, if you will. And what I did is I had this idea that as I looked around the school, there were all these cliques of students. There was the rock-and-roll crowd, the country and western crowd, the band crowd, the honor society crowd, and they all would congregate in certain areas. And I decided to get a picture taken with myself and the leader of each of these groups shaking their hand, and I would put that picture on a poster board and hung it where they hung out. And a quote would be something like, “Hey, let’s rock the vote for Derrick,” or, “Let’s support Derrick.” And what happened was suddenly all the other people who felt like nobodies became somebodies. And when the microphone crackled at the end of election day and they said, “Your student body president is Derrick Kinney,” it wasn’t just me that won, Ryan. It was the whole school because suddenly somebody made everybody else feel like they were valuable and seen and heard. And it was that principle that then guided me to launch my business, founded on that simple principle. And that was, people don’t care how smart you are. They don’t care about the car you drive or the house you own or how good you look. They care about, ‘Do you make them feel valued and worthy and important?’ And when you do that, people want to work with you.
Ryan Goulart:
I love it. It definitely speaks to a lot of the things that here on this podcast we’ve talked about, whether it’s the empathy, understanding how to get unstuck, goal achievement and the whole “what do you want for yourself” process, WDYWFY. As you kind of fast-forward your life and you look at, you started off, you became a financial advisor and then you sold it to pursue this career path. What was that moment in time like for you? Because I’m imagining a lot of people have that thought in their back of their mind of, “What if I did that and what would it take?” And it’s always nice to hear stories of people that make the leap. And tell us a little bit about it.
Derrick Kinney:
Well, there was a moment where I was on television quite a bit. And I was one of the top people on Fox News talking about money topics in an easy-to-understand way. And at one point, they wanted to offer me a show. They wanted me to come on a regular basis. And I love television. All of us listening, there’s probably something that just makes you feel alive. And as odd as it sounds, TV is that way for me. I love being on live television, helping take complex topics and making them easy to understand. Well, working for the broker-dealer that I worked with, which was great, they had a very strict compliance department, and they said, “No, you can’t do that because the approval process would take too long.” And so that was a pivotal moment for me when they said no. It was like part of a dream I had was crushed that day.
And I realized if I’m going to fulfill what’s in my heart, and that is to go bigger and help more advisors and help people all across the country, as I like to call myself “America’s favorite financial educator,” I’m going to have to think differently. And so, I go on a sabbatical every single year. So, I take about five days completely by myself. I pick a spot of the country I want to go to, typically it’s around water or the beach. And I ask myself three questions: How do I be a better husband? How do I be a better father? And how do I be a better business owner? And those three questions guide what I’m going to do that next year because I realized as A personality, I can run really fast, but oftentimes without a plan, I look up and I realized I just ran really fast in a complete circle, and I’m in the exact spot I started at.
And so, this particular sabbatical, it was July of 2019, I was in Boston. And I felt just the need to write down on a list the things that I would enjoy doing. And I wrote down on the list, “Write a book. Launch a podcast. Coach. Speak. Consult.” And shockingly, Ryan, absolutely brought me to my knees, was not being a financial advisor. And I had to just take a step back, take a deep breath and say, “Why is that not on the list?” Because I loved my clients, I loved my team, I loved the act of serving people, helping them achieve their goals, but I realized I wasn’t in it like I used to be. It’d been 25 years.
You know those athletes you watch on TV and they’ve had their prime about two years earlier, and you say to yourself, “Boy, they should have retired back then when they left at the top”? The question I had to ask myself was, “If I’m not feeling all into this right now, I’m actually doing my team a disservice because I’m not going to be the leader they need me to be, and my clients. If I’m not the advisor that I can be the best to them, I’m not going to be giving them the best advice. I’ll be doing them a disservice.” And actually, the decision was easy because I realized I need to sell my business and give it to someone else who has the fire and the passion for what I once had, so I can then go do what I now have a fire to go do.
And I got to tell you, one of the goals that I set for myself when I transitioned my business is I was going to call every client personally. We had about 300 clients. And I got to tell you, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done because if you call, it’s like I’m pressing a videotape of our past relationship together. And some of the people cheered me on. They were like, “Derrick, this is the best news ever. You’re practicing what you’ve helped us do.” Some people were actually upset with me. They said, “Derrick, I can’t believe you’re bailing on us before we retire. That’s not right.” And I had to walk them through my passion and what was in my heart.
But one lady, Ryan, I think really summarized it the best. She said, “Derrick,” and she was very serious, she said, “If you’re going to have a midlife crisis, why don’t you just buy a Corvette instead? It’s a whole lot cheaper.” But I got to tell you, it took about 45 days to make all those calls. And it was right after Valentine’s Day when I finished. I remember the last call I made — I get emotional thinking about it now — I just broke down in tears. I just broke down. It was like all this emotion came flooding through that I had done something really hard. I made a hard decision to sell my business, and I made a hard decision to call each of these people individually. And then, when I finished it, I was actually very proud of myself for doing something that made me feel really uncomfortable, but I know I needed to do it to be the best version of myself.
Ryan Goulart:
Love it. That’s such an amazing story. And again, it’s a leap of faith that many often think about but rarely do. And I love your emotion there because it makes me think of “We can get through hard things,” and when you have the passion and the fire to go pursue it. And it made me smile because I went to my second really hard workout this morning of the year, and I got through it, and I was really proud of myself.
Derrick Kinney:
There you go. I love that. Yeah.
Ryan Goulart:
I was like, “Oh, my gosh. That’s a really big, hard thing. And Ryan, you made it through a 45-minute class, that’s…” I digress. Anyway.
Derrick Kinney:
What I would add though, Ryan, is what’s hard is what’s hard in front of you right now. You see, I don’t think there is any sense of comparing your hard to my hard. It’s just wherever you’re at right now and whatever is hard in front of you, are you going to lean into it or run from it? And I think both of us can celebrate in this moment that we both ran into what was hard for us in that moment.
Ryan Goulart:
Hey, listeners, Ryan here. Derrick talked a lot about goal achievement. Goals are wants that pass the acid test. And the acid tests are, “Can I and will I afford it?” If we can pass the acid test, we got a goal. If we can’t, we have a dream. Using the acid test will help you formalize your plan to achieve your goals.
Continuing with hard things. So, you made that transition. And then you fast-forward a few years now and you have a podcast, a bestselling book, appearances on TV regularly. What are you noticing with your clients now — financial advisors, financial practices — that are really causing them some pain right now? How are you solving for those?
Derrick Kinney:
Well, one of the things that I feel like is a sort of secret weapon that I’ve got is having walked in advisors’ shoes, I know how they feel. And one thing that we know is there’s new threats in the marketplace. There’s, “What does artificial intelligence mean? What does enhanced compliance mean? What does commoditization of financial advisors mean?” And as I talk to advisors around the country, there’s a couple of key concerns they share. And one is a lot of them wonder why are other financial advisors attracting the high net worth clients and they’re not? They see themselves working equally as hard, equally as smart, but other people are getting what they want, and they don’t know why.
Also, they realize what worked in the past is no longer working now. Sometimes the client seminars or the rehearsed referral scripts or putting your logo on a coffee mug. Well, those might have gotten prospects excited back in the day, they no longer do that now. And also, people are wondering, “What else is there? Is it just filling my bank account with a lot of money? Is that really the motivation I’ve got?” And when I get there, I’m not as content and fulfilled as I thought I would be. And so, they want to find out, how do they tie in a cause to their cash? How do they combine meaning to their money? And once they can figure that out, what that does is it begins to reinvigorate them. They begin to be a financial advisor with a purpose.
They’re not just helping their clients, which is great, or guiding their team, providing jobs and so forth, but now they’re motivating themselves to make a real impact in the causes they care about. Maslow had this right, and there’s a lot of psychological pyramids out there, but whatever you do to get to the very top pyramid is typically this concept of self-actualization or meaning, fulfillment. And I think coming out of COVID, everybody, especially hardworking financial advisors, who incidentally I believe are the best professionals that clients work with. It’s the most noble profession of all because there’s no other professional that handles people’s valuable goals and dreams in their hand, walks alongside them, carries those goals and dreams with them 24/7. There’s no other professional that I think thinks about their clients as much as advisors do. And so I want to make sure that they’re in a situation where they are revered, they’re adored. And when high net worth clients have a painful problem that I often talk about, they think of the advisors listening to this podcast right now as the people that can provide that solution at a high fee because they’re worth it. And those advisors then go on to make quite a bit of money because they’re impacting the lives of people, solving painful problems for high net worth people, but they’re making a difference in the causes they care about all at the same time.
Ryan Goulart:
There’s a lot of thoughts that are running through my head right now because it’s definitely something that we, too, have observed in how people are beginning to try to do something different. How do I go into my next meeting and still have that fire? And you’ve often said, too, just that people purchase passion. So, talk to us a little bit about that as to when it comes to these trends that you’re observing in your clients and these pains that they’re doing, how do you help transition them to that place where they have purpose and passion, so that all of a sudden they’re having a different conversation with their 30-year client and it feels fun again?
Derrick Kinney:
Yeah, let me tell you a story about a guy named Dave. So, Dave was a longtime client, and you know those relationships you’ve got where you can just tell without any words being exchanged how a person is feeling? That’s how Dave was that day. And I could just tell he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. And I said, “Dave, what’s wrong?” Well, as he slumped back in his chair, he just unloaded. He said, “Derrick, I’m just not feeling excited about going to my office every day.” He was a local business owner, well-respected, very successful. But he said, “Derrick, I don’t feel it anymore. I’m going through the motions.” And for some reason, the words shot out of my mouth. This was about 15 years ago. I said, “Dave, what is a cause that you care about?” And he sat back again, took a few seconds to gather his thoughts, and he began to tell me a story.
He said, “Derrick, a couple years ago, I took my family overseas on a trip.” And this particular village they went to, he remembered the guide talking about how there was abject poverty in this area. And he said, “But if they had a school building, it would revolutionize this entire generation of young people. It could cause it to be more prosperous.” And he remembered exchanging a glance with his wife in that moment as if to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool to fund that school?” Well, the trip ended, they got back, life got busy, they were putting out fires again. But my question brought this all back, and I said, “Dave, what if you did this? What if you set a sales goal or a revenue goal for the next 12 months, and you said, ‘I’m going to increase sales by 20%, and I’m going to take half of that increase and I’m going to use it to fund that school.'”
His eyes got as big as saucers, and suddenly we began to dream together in that moment, what could this look like? And we talked about what if he mocked up a picture on his website, and he sent an email to all of his clients and said, “Hey, part of our service to you is not just adding value and helping you and your business, but we want you to be part of something bigger. And this year, every time you work with us, a portion of our profits are going to help build this school.” And he let his prospective clients know this. Then he let his team know that, “Hey, you’re no longer just working for a company that helps other people. Now, we’re helping make other people’s lives better because the work you do matters. We’re helping build this school.” But ultimately, what happened was that Dave himself got completely reinvigorated.
Now, he wasn’t just going to his office just to increase sales and pad his bank account. He tied meaning to his money. And what happened was he came back in the office, not six months later, but three months later, he was already up 20%. And it was because he was reinvigorated, re-motivated. And it taught him when he tied a cause, when he had meaning and purpose, he was making more money. But now, we had more money to do more good with it, which surprisingly motivated him to then make more money to keep doing more good. And so, one of the concepts in my book is that in culture today, there’s this vibe that says, “If you have too much money, well you’re bad. You’re a bad person if you have too much money.” And I come against that really hard because I say, “You know what? Money is not bad. And the good people listening to this show should have more of it to do more good with it.”
We know what does a bad person do with money? Well, they do more bad things with it. Think about the bad dictators we’ve had in our history or people in different parts of the world. They suppress people, they do bad things to people. So, I want the good people — the financial advisors, the business owners listening to this show — I want them to have all the money for all the good they can do. So, when they lay their head on the pillow at night, they know that they’ve impacted clients’ lives, their team’s lives, but finally, at last, they’re making an impact in the causes they’ve always wanted to, and their life was a day of meaning, and they want to repeat it again tomorrow.
Ryan Goulart:
I love all of this and where my mind went is when it comes to growth, and you’re inspiring growth for individuals and both whether it be people listening to this podcast that are leaders at an organization, or a financial advisor, or a business owner, would you say then that when it comes to the pain that you’ve observed in clients today, your client’s financial advisors, of wanting more high net worth clients but not getting as many at-bats with them, kind of frustrated with the status quo and where everything else is going, would you say then that the most important part of their journey right now to help understand these questions is to find and attach a cause or purpose or something bigger than themselves to accelerate their growth and to get to that success that they achieve or make their ideal real?
Derrick Kinney:
I think it’s vital but also, I would say, this may surprise you, that it’s not enough. The cause will be what motivates you and refocuses you and gives your life new meaning. Because now you’re tying in the hard work you do, and you’re making a real impact in a cause. And we know high net worth people love to work with businesses and individual professionals who are a part of something bigger. When I sponsor a teacher of the month or a student of the month, or I recognize a nonprofit and I post about it, clients love it because people are busy. And if you can open a doorway to help them walk into that by working with Derrick, by working with Ryan, by working with the other advisors on this podcast, and they know that I could invest with anybody, but I can invest with Ryan, and Ryan’s also part of the community and he cares about what I care about, Ryan’s going to get all those clients.
But let me tell you why I say there’s more, and that is you have to own a painful problem. When you own a problem, you own your success. Now, let me give you an exercise that every advisor listening can do that will help identify the problem. I believe in a concept I call the focus group. For example, when my kids were younger, my sons would ask their sisters, “Hey, do I look good in this?” And their sister would say, “Yeah, you look great.” And they would say, “I don’t think I look good.” And I would say, “Son, it doesn’t matter what you think. If your sister thinks you look good, if the other girl will think you’ll look good, you’re good. So, wear the outfit.”
So, the point is, right now, ask yourself of your last five clients that you brought on, identify why did they come to you. What was the problem that they asked you to help them solve? And what you want to do is identify your last five clients and also your top five most profitable clients. So, you’ve got two lists. The five people who selected you as their advisor most recently and the five who pay you the most. Why did they come to see you? And you want to go into detail, even if you had to ask your team or go back in their file, it was because I’m worried about running out of money in retirement, or I’m worried about how to diversify, or I don’t want to lose my job, whatever it may be. And you’re going to begin to see a pattern, and it’s called your focus group feedback. And that is the five most recent people are telling you right now what you’re attracting. And then, your five most profitable clients are telling you, “I’m paying the most money to you because you’re solving this problem.”
And what happens then is… Let me give you a quick translation as to why this matters. How many of you have been in a social setting before and someone walks up to you and says, “Ryan, what do you do for a living?” And most people say, “Oh, I’m a financial advisor.” And you can just see, you can picture the eyes roll back in their head, they go into this comatose state, they get totally bored, and they walk off. I want to come against that, and I want to give people tools and say, “You know how.” And you want to say, for example, if you’re an advisor that specializes in retirement income planning like I did, Ryan, you know how many people worry about running out of money in retirement? And you’re kind of nodding your head as you say it, and the person you’re talking to says, “Yes, I get that.”
Well, we have a proven framework that helps people know how much money they need to retire and not run out of money. And they’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s great.” Then you could say, “Let me tell you a quick story. I had a couple come in my office.” So, what you did is you have the “you know” statement, which connects them to what I call a relatable problem that they immediately relate to, and they’re like, “Yes.” So, what happens is you’re now memorable. And what we know is memorable people make the most money. Because I believe, this is my belief, is that when financial advisors walk in the room, they are the superstars and not Taylor Swift, and not Kelce, it’s the financial advisors because they have the solution to people’s painful problems. The problem is advisors do themselves a grave disservice because they’re not communicating how they can solve a relatable problem.
Ryan Goulart:
Love it. And you already answered my next question of what are some things that our audience can do? I’m even thinking about it even for our own business as well. We’re not a financial services business. For even those of you that are business owners, think of those questions as well. Any closing comments, Derrick, before we depart?
Derrick Kinney:
Again, I have a belief, a deep-seated belief that advisors should be paid what they’re worth. And what we know is that if you charge too low, people actually question you, and they may decide not to work with you because they think, “I would say he’s worth more than what he or she is charging.” So, if you do two takeaways from our time together, No. 1, identify what is the painful problem that your most recent clients and your highest-paying clients you solve for them, and select a cause that you care about. When you own a painful problem and you care about what your clients care about, you will become the unstoppable advisor, the sought-after advisor in your local community.
Ryan Goulart:
Beautiful. Thank you again, Derrick.
Derrick Kinney:
My pleasure. Thank you, Ryan.
Ryan Goulart:
As we wrap this episode, we’re committed to helping you make the ideal reel. If you found this program helpful, share it and help someone else make their ideal real, too. Until next time, for think2perform, I’m Ryan Goulart. Take care.
