HOW TO GET EVERYTHING YOU CAN OUT OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE INTERVIEW
C
urtis Cloke has not only been a successful advisor for about 30 years, but he has been delighted to give away all his secrets to anyone who wants to be a better professional. That drive has taken him on the speaking circuit and inspired him to record videos to promote the concepts that made him a go-to professional for clients and other advisors. Being out front has also put him in the lead for important shifts in our business. For example, as he grew his practice beyond his home state of Iowa to cover the nation, he and his colleagues figured out how to go virtual long before the COVID-19 lockdown forced everyone to work with clients remotely. Cloke started in the business at a young age, when an advisor noticed that he was an industrious, financially disciplined man who would himself make a good advisor. In the mid-1980s, he started working for Prudential Financial and then struck out on his own. Since then, he grew a national practice and amassed many licenses and credentials. He is an unusual cross between advisor and actuary — he’s a sales guy who loves math. And he loves showing the proof behind the promise. He does that as a speaker and adjunct professor at The American College of Financial Services. His constant drive to improve positioned his agency to be ready when the COVID-19 lockdowns started clanging across the country. His agency has been able to thrive as a result. In this interview with Publisher Paul Feldman, Cloke reveals how other advisors and agencies can do well in this crisis as well as be ahead of the next one.
home office. And a little less than 50% are here in the tri-state area of Iowa, Missouri and Illinois. Consequently, we had to learn how to go virtual a long time ago. We were very lucky that we were so well prepared for what was going to happen.
FELDMAN: In expanding your company and territory, you were actually ahead of the game for the COVID-19 shutdown. Would you tell us about your company and how you were ready?
FELDMAN: How did you change your operation to work with those new prospects?
CLOKE: We have a multistate financial firm that’s represented on the East Coast, West Coast and here in the Midwest. Our office started here in the Midwest, and we have an office in Oregon. And we have an office over in Princeton, N.J. We represent clients in all 50 states. Today, a little more than 50% of our clients are outside of the region of the original
FELDMAN: So, what does that look like? How were and are you prospecting, and how do you close virtually? CLOKE: Quite a few years ago, when I started public speaking and then started working as an adjunct professor for The American College, I was invited to be on lots of different podcasts, in a lot of different studios around the country. I originally did 28 video sessions in the studio of The American College, and I’ve been back three times since then to update the materials. I’ve also spoken on thousands of platforms over the 15 years I’ve been speaking. And as a result, that’s just gotten me a lot of footage on the internet. I’ve spoken in a lot of internet studios that are TV programs for retirement planning. Just internet based. Most of all, the content that we’ve developed over the 15 years, including our work for my course called Thrive University, is on the ‘net. It was all designed for advisors, but we didn’t realize that consumers would locate those and watch them. And most of the clients or direct consumers that watch them are what we’d call high net worth, including doctors and lawyers. These are people who really don’t trust traditional planning, and they want to go out of the box. So they start digging around, and they find us.
CLOKE: We started out with GoToMeeting, which we used until two years ago. Then we started to see some of the Zoom calls and some of the unique features for video recording and a variety of things. So, we flipped to Zoom and we did the corporate account, which means that our whole staff is tied to each other all day, every day. Then rather than get up and go from one office to the next while we were work-
ing in the same office, we simply would Zoom each other. And it was very efficient. Or we could bring in another person without having them leave their desk for questions with the client we were speaking with. Zoom is on my phone. It’s also on my office computer and my home computer. We’ve been doing this for two years, and it was natural for us to be able to send everybody home. We were able to operate exactly as we had been, but remotely, although we’d never really tested it that way. But it worked beautifully. FELDMAN: You’re also getting a lot of value from the videos that you put on the internet. As the advisors’ teacher, you’re going to have more credibility. What about a person who is just starting to create some videos? What kind of topics should they be looking at? CLOKE: I think there are really three lowhanging-fruit topics that we all need to be talking about right now for clients. In our case, we’ve got investments, or allocations, in many products. Obviously, all of these particular items have compliance associated with them. So, if I could just put a little disclaimer in here that says we must be sure that anything and everything we do meets all compliance regulations, and whoever it is that oversees that says, “Make sure you don’t go out and just do all that on your own.” We certainly do not. But once you know and have confidence that you’re compliant, then the first item is going to be taxes. We have all kinds of unique tax changes that happened in December of last year that would’ve been applicable with or without COVID-19. A lot of folks don’t know about those changes. Now we have specific laws that are changed for 2020 only. For example, we have clients with IRAs and they’re automating their RMDs on a particular day and a month. They don’t have to take them this year if that will cause them additional tax for cash they do not need. We must tell every client with qualified assets that in 2020 they don’t have to take an RMD, and if they already have in fact taken their RMD, there’s a provision to put it back. There are also loan provisions, and excess provisions to our qualified accounts that allow us the ability to spread taxes over a three-year time frame if we need to
October 2020 » InsuranceNewsNet Magazine
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