Vanderwolf: Very naively I thought when I first attended the Annual Meeting that there must be a secret formula for people to be successful. The more people I spoke to, the more I began to realize that successful people worked harder. They worked harder than me, they saw more people than me, they had more appointments than me, and they built a reputation of excellence in a particular field.

I saw a quote the other day that seemed to sum it up perfectly: “Revenue follows reputation. And if you have a very good reputation for doing a particular sort of work or if you have a very good reputation for looking after clients and having quality clients, revenue will follow.” It’s a slow burn. But that’s what I think stuck with me, that I just had to keep doing the best I can for myself, manage my time as best I can, and, more importantly, do the best I can for my clients. And that will lead to more success.

Hanna: Between 1982 and 1996, when I attended my first meeting, it was only three years before I had gone from MDRT-level production to Court of the Table. Three years later I was at Top of the Table and never not Top of the Table since. Since 2000, I’ve been Top of the Table every year. I attended every meeting every year, both MDRT and Top of the Table, and I was involved with PGA (Program General Arrangements) and then the Top of the Table Advisory Board and had opportunities to spend significant time with other volunteer leaders who had very successful practices.

I think if I had to distill it down to one concept that stuck, it was that the most successful individuals in the Round Table, which is almost always those in the Top of the Table category, are no longer identifying as salespeople, but are identifying as professional businesspeople, and they are running a practice that generates a recurring stream of prospective clients and recurring revenue and a business model that you can actually lever up in terms of capital investment back into staff and software and tools and environments and the things that give you presence in the marketplace. So I stopped thinking about myself as a life insurance salesman, although that part of me is always here, and it comes alive when I’m in a client meeting. But what happened was that I thought about the process of the business, about the pipeline of clients, and that took me to Top of the Table and then multiples of Top of the Table because I focused on the horizontal growth of the business, not just the vertical growth.

Vanderwolf: Over the years I’ve certainly seen a lot of advisors become complacent. They think they’ve reached the peak, and when they stop growing, they just go backward. So it’s a matter of continual improvement, continual study, and, more importantly, I think it’s just client relationships. Most of the work I do, probably 90 percent, is referrals from existing clients, and it’s keeping in contact with them, making sure I understand where they are in regard to their planning, their life, etc. And it’s the strength of the relationships that I’ve built that means every year I know I will qualify for Top of the Table.

Banks: Staffing obviously is a key thing. Don’t do something for $25 that somebody else could be doing. You need great support. The way we are paid in the U.K. has evolved over the years. We are effectively a fee-for-service provider, and our regulator is currently doing the rounds to make sure we deliver the service that we said we would. We have a recurring income stream from our financial planning practice. I think I’ve always worked on the basis that it’s much easier to keep looking after the clients you’ve got than to keep finding new ones. Now, that doesn’t mean you stop taking on new clients. Everybody needs new blood in the firm, but you get to a point where to do the job properly for people, you can’t take too many on. In my firm, our website says we only take on referred clients. So, if you are a stranger trying to get in to see us, we’re not going to talk to you. And that’s how we limit our niche in the market.

Hanna: We are constantly focusing on process refinement, how we do what we do, but there is a rainmaker element in my mind, always in any successful practice. You have to have at least one rainmaker who enjoys making rain, who actually wants to meet new people, identify challenges and find solutions for those challenges, and attract new business into the firm. For right now, that’s me; although, I do have two young advisors who I have grown from getting out of college to where they are now. They are just coming into the rainmaker stage, and I’m mentoring them to be rainmakers. We’ll see how successful they are; it takes a while for that to materialize. But if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking. People who accumulate wealth for retirement eventually defund their retirement, so the assets shrink, and people die. We’re fortunate in the corporate practice; we get a couple hundred new clients a year through that. And that’s been a longstanding niche we carved. Back in 2006 was when we started those programs, and our peak year was 2015. We added 800 clients in one year. That was horribly difficult, but we did it.

But the 200 is nice, steady-state new business in the practice, and we are still able to find referrals from accounting firms, law firms and other close nests of referral sources to bring in estate planning, business continuity, estate equalization or specialty kinds of planning work that we do. I’m always looking for that new business, and I’m not afraid of areas in which I may not currently be fully proficient. I want to say yes to everybody and then come back and figure out how to execute against the yes if they say, “OK, let’s work together.” I like being a rainmaker.

Banks: Obviously, the actual source of referrals is our clients’ families. If they’ve got executors on the will or trustees on the policy, we need to meet those people, but we also need to meet the generation down. We need to meet the children because otherwise, if I lose an elderly client, that money that may be invested through my firm is not going to stick unless I’ve already got a relationship with the next generation. So that is an important thing I wanted to add.