It’s Like Printing Money: How I’ve Gotten Virtual Workshops to Work for Me

Editor’s note: In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Peter Hafner, who struggled to get new business from webinars, but kept at it and eventually succeeded.

The following article includes edited excerpts of this conversation, or you can watch the full interview below.

Initial disappointment

The first thing I did during the pandemic is just really ignore the whole situation. I am in Buffalo, New York, and when our state locked down, you just couldn’t do public workshops anymore, rightly so. At first, I didn’t know what to do. I’d heard about people doing free webinar public workshops, but I was really reluctant to do that because it’s so expensive to pull them off.

I had been using White Glove&v=iamrf2nxml3qqiw2wnap5xo1 to help me put on my live public workshops. They were great. They did everything they were supposed to do. People showed up, and they were mostly qualified. It was really good. So, if there was anything going wrong, it was me and my abilities to close and get people to come see me.

I had heard “Taxes in Retirement” was the webinar topic that was really drawing people, and they were converting. But I was really reluctant to do it because I was afraid I’d spend a lot of money, and it’s really expensive to use White Glove. It might be $6,000 or $8,000 for a virtual workshop. Then I did it, and it was an abysmal failure. I got nothing—not one person signed up for a meeting or a call with me.

It’s not White Glove’s fault. It’s all on me as the advisor. If we can’t get people to come see us, we’ve got to look at ourselves. So I worked with a coach, Michele Trent, through Phoenix Public Speaking. It was really great. She helped me to craft my message and get better and better at converting people into meetings and ultimately clients.

Trying a new service

I was really gun-shy after spending all that money on that first web event. I reached out to the people at White Glove, and I said, “Hey, I need your help. I just spent a lot of money. If I’m going to keep doing this, you have got to work with me a little bit,” and it was just crickets, unfortunately. They did get back to me, but it was six weeks later, when I’d already started working with Eight Digit Media.

I had heard about them through my network; people were starting to use another company that offered services very similar to White Glove. The way they structure the cost is just so different. They charge $1,500 a month. I could do as many workshops as I wanted during the month, but I had to pay for the Facebook advertising on my own. They recommended a maximum of $100 a day on ads, or $1,000 per workshop minimum.

So I started doing one workshop a week. I switched to the Horsesmouth presentation, “How Tax Planning Changes Through the Four Stages of Retirement,”&v=iamrf2nxml3qqiw2wnap5xo1 as opposed to the one from Covisum. Working with my coach, we pared down the presentation and used the Ultimate Speaking System From the Success Comes in Cans Guy, Joe Weldon.

Trying a new topic

I got great attendance at my first webinar, which was “Taxes in Retirement.” I hadn’t really liked doing Taxes in Retirement before. I’m much more focused on the Bucket Plan sort of retirement income planning, but I figure I better do what other people are doing. I just decided even though I didn’t really like talking about that topic, I’m doing it because this is what works.

The funny thing with that, of course, is the more I did it the more comfortable I was and the happier I am to talk about taxes in retirement. And it stretches me as an advisor. I went to the Horsesmouth Savvy Tax Workshop last fall and got all kinds of ideas. It was a lot of information. Really so much I couldn’t take it in, but I kind of knew there were all these things out there. I knew where to go to get questions answered when they came up.

The Good Fit Call

When I did “Taxes in Retirement,” I would have 60 or 70 people registered. And of course, you’re not going to get that many to show up, but I was having 20 or 30 people show up. And I was becoming able to get about 25%–50% of those people to sign up for what we call a “Good Fit Call” that lasts about 20 minutes.

That name is something I got from my friends at Clarity 2 Prosperity. It’s just, “Here’s two reasons why you want to do this: Number one, this gives you an opportunity to pick the brains of the expert, and we can answer any questions you’ve got. It also gives you an opportunity to see if working with a specialist like me might be good for you. You can find out more about what we do, how we do it, what we charge and so on.”

So, my assistant makes the phone calls after the meetings. She calls everybody. We got better at telling people how to sign up online. And now I’m getting 25%–50% of the people to schedule a Good Fit Call. It goes back and forth, but sometimes, it’s a really good number of people who want to work with me.

After I did the Retirement Income Planning workshop, the people who contacted me afterward, it was like they already knew me. It was really weird and cool. “You are exactly what we’ve been looking for,” is what I heard from these people, which is great.

From June 24, when we began using Eight Digit Media through today (September 21), we have done seven workshops; 77 households have attended; 17 met with us (22%), and five are either clients now or in the financial planning process with us. It’s happening. People are signing the applications.

Ads

Eight Digit Media creates the ads. They’ve got a library of different workshops with advertising already in the can. My assistant coordinates with them. In my practice as much as possible I delegate so I can focus on talking to clients and prospects and doing these workshops.

They set up the campaigns and they’ve got my credit card number, but Facebook bills me. They also set up the reminder emails and texts that go out to people who have signed up for the webinar. Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing really great as people are showing up.

Seetting up a cycle of webinars

The other nice thing about Eight Digit Media as opposed to White Glove is that White Glove wanted to charge everyone who showed up the same rate, and that included my clients and my own prospects from my stable. What I’ve learned from you guys at Horsesmouth is I really want to be known in the community as a financial educator, and since my specialty is people making the transition from working to retiring, the topics I cover are Retirement Income Planning, Taxes in Retirement, Social Security and Medicare.

What I’m able to do with Eight Digit Media is in the regular emails we send out to our people and on our website, we can show the calendar and say, “Look, Social Security is coming up. Medicare is coming up two weeks later.” That’s what we’re doing, every two weeks, we’re doing a different workshop. And we’re starting to get this all grooved now. We’ve actually got one other one called “How Covid-19 Changed Retirement” that I got through the Clarity 2 Prosperity guys. We’ll have a four-workshop rotation going.

As I said, we started out doing one webinar every week, but the problem was once we started scheduling the Good Fit Calls in along with the regular cycle with clients, it was really causing problems operationally. Whenever I do a meeting with a client, I have one of my assistants in there with me taking notes. And there was no time for anyone to do any sort of prep work for anything because of all the meetings. So we’ve purposefully scaled it back to two a month.

Logistics of the webinar

Eight Digit Media dictates that I use Demio, which is easier for webinar attendees to get into than Zoom. You click the link, and you’re in. There’s none of this stuff where they can share microphones. They can’t share cameras. It’s just me sharing my screen. (Demio is really good. It is a separate charge from the Eight Digit Media fee, just like you have to pay for a Zoom subscription.)

You typically have someone introduce you when you’re doing this stuff in person. I wasn’t sure with webinars, but I decided, “Let’s just do it the same way.” So, my assistant Sam is on screen at first. She says a few words and introduces me.

Attendees can use a chat panel in Demio. When I was first getting started with this, I was talking to one of my friends in Massachusetts, and what he did, which I thought was brilliant, is he had canned questions he created himself, and he answered them to direct people to, I don’t know, different services or whatever.

We let people know that they can type questions in the chat, and “if Peter has time at the end of the presentation, he’ll address them, or he will get back to you quickly by email.” And honestly, all my workshops, the best I’ve done is maybe 50 minutes, and I feel like they shouldn’t go more than an hour. So I’m not answering any chat questions. I’m recommending the Good Fit Call to get your questions answered.

Recorded or live?

Demio is great because it automatically records the presentation, so it records me. It records the screen just the way that people are seeing it. It also keeps all kinds of stats on every person who shows up. It shows at what minute they got in, when did they go out. It’s got some kind of focus percentage so you can see if you’re losing people at different times.

The question is, what about in the future? If I did “Taxes in Retirement” and I nailed it and I got it recorded, then every time the upcoming webinar is “Taxes in Retirement,” I can just have Sam start the presentation and hit play. We’re not taking any questions, but even if we did, it wouldn’t matter because we just answer the questions we asked.

The only thing Sam needs to do is push a button at two points in the presentation where I say, “And this is why you should set up a Good Fit Call with us.” She’s got to be there to make that happen in the middle and at the end.

Getting signatures and sharing documents

Since the state of New York shut down, I have been working from my home office. So one thing we have had had to grapple with is access to DocuSign. I think it might be harder to use than with other organizations. It was just so much work that it wasn’t worth it.

So we started sending documents by secure email and regular mail. I tell them, “We’re going to email you the complete documents. Everything you’re going to sign, you’re going to find complete documents in your email box. But if it’s OK with you, we’re going to peel out the pages where you need to initial, sign, or where we’re looking for information, and we’re going to mail those via the U.S. Postal Service to your house with a return envelope just to make it easy for you. You can sign, initial, do whatever you need to do. And then you’re not going through all these documents.” That has worked out really well.

A lot of times when we’re sending that stuff out, we need things back from them anyway like statements. This is one of the biggest problems of doing business remotely. People aren’t good with scanners. People often can’t fax from their homes.

After the first Good Fit Call, I’m offering to mail them a folder that I would normally give them if we’re meeting face to face. It’s got information on my broker-dealer, Pershing, on our service structure, all these different kinds of things.

We mail that out to them, along with a book that outlines our process. And we include a return envelope for them to mail back their statements and maybe their tax returns. Whatever we talked about and whatever they need. We just want to make it as simple as we possibly can for them to keep the information going back and forth.

A personalized book to get started

The book we send is The Bucket Plan by Jason Smith of Clarity 2 Prosperity. It’s a No. 1 bestseller in personal finance on Amazon. It’s a great story. It’s an allegory about a couple approaching retirement and how they go through the financial planning process.

If you’re my new prospect, what I’m saying is, “These are people just like you, and they’ve got the same concerns and fears that you’ve got. This is a super easy read. You can read this whole thing in about two hours, maybe three hours, and it’ll give you such a great insight to the financial planning process that you can expect to have by working with me.”

And also you get to personalize the books that you send out. I worked with the publisher to write a preface and then my picture is printed on my paperback copies of the book. I bought about 500 copies and I don’t remember the exact figure, but it’s not very expensive.

When you’re working with Clarity 2 Prosperity, you can go through their certification process, and then you can be searched through a database, just like a CFP^®. And if people happen to read this book somewhere, they can search in their area and find you in their region as an advisor who offers this process.

A license to print money

So, it is so cool to be able to put these things out there. It begins with the webinar, or actually a while before the webinar—I start my advertising a week before the actual event. And I can check Demio a few days before to see the people signing up. And I know a certain number of those people are going to do Good Fit Calls and some of those will even become clients. It feels like just a license to print money. We’re just getting started with all this, but it is just working so well. I couldn’t be happier.