Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Brent Hines, Co-founder and Chief Development Officer of the Foundation for Financial Wellness

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

What do you do when life’s advantages disappear? Brent Hines knows firsthand the overwhelm and frustration that comes from years of searching for the formula of a high-performing life.In July of 2008, Brent lost everything, and the worst part…it was his fault. His career, his dreams, his identity, and his future disappeared overnight.Today, Brent is an advocate for the financial industry, financial professionals, and especially the clients they serve, Brent is one of the industry’s most prominent voices in establishing a financial wellness standard, and a high one at that!Brent’s mission is to re-educate the marketplace on what is and is not Financial Wellness. Brent and his educational non-profit, Foundation for Financial Wellness are driven to improve millions of people’s lives with a values-driven purpose. Brent’s stance is clear: when he says Financial Wellness…he means both words.Learn more:https://www.foundationforfinancialwellness.org/ or https://ffwpro.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-brent-hines-co-founder-and-chief-development-officer-of-the-foundation-for-financial-wellness

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Brett Heinz, who's the co-founder and chief development officer of the Foundation for Financial Wellness. Brent, welcome to the program. Hey, great to be here, Mike. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So I think that financial wellness is such a huge needed topic. And I'm excited to learn from you. In fact, I think it would be so wonderful if, you know, every student and every, you know, school, probably starting around middle school would have financial, you know, basics taught to them because I know that's not the case. But boy, the older we get into our 20s and 30s and 40s and beyond, we need financial wellness. And that starts with education. I know that that's what you guys are doing. So let's get started with a little bit of your background. What's your story and how did you get into the

financial services industry? Yeah, you bet. Well, if you go back, I grew up a poor kid, single mom, living paycheck to paycheck, more month than there was paycheck, kind of lifestyle. And I knew I wanted out of that. And I was, you know, first kid in my immediate family to go to college, worked my way through college, decided, hey, I think the best way or the fastest way, shortest path out of this socioeconomic mess that, you know, I grew up in was probably to go to the business school. How do you get into the business school? Oh, well, I got to do a lot better and with my grades I am now. So, you know, it's kind of that like learn as you go and felt my way through that kind of land, that landmine field of, man, how does somebody break this, these patterns of,

you know, not just lifestyle, but what's causing it? And then as I began to look back, realizing hey, you know, there's a lot of thinking that is really, you know, good old Zig Ziglar, stinking thinking, like, do I have like self-limiting beliefs here? Or like, do I believe things that to be true that aren't necessarily true? And like, wow, am I falling victim? Am I falling victim to like victim mentality? And then realizing that's what's driving my behaviors. So how do I get out of this? So I had this weird introspective kind of aha in college that I wanted out and there's the path, got a degree in finance at the business school, University of Colorado, went to work for a high-end wealth management firm straight out of school, interned there first, learned how to

answer phones, file, you know, all of that sort of began. They allowed me to sit in on meetings, do some service work, learn the paperwork side. That was most people listening to your podcast, know that world. Until I eventually began building assets, I had, I was fortunate. I'm not that good at that many things, Mike, but right out of the gate, I've found a few different paths where I could put assets on the books. I could put planning fees on the books. I found insurance needs. And I was off and running. And one of the things that, now, later on a personal note, I drove that car right off a cliff too much too soon for a poor kid from Castle Rock. Yep. Yep. I know where you're going there. Because I probably did the same thing. I was told by my

parents credit cards are four littered dirty words and what did I do the first minute I got my first job. I'm like running them up and leased a car and bought it. It was like, oh man, I made all the mistakes I was taught to do. Exactly. So, hey, these things happened for a reason, right? So what did I learn from that? And one thing I realized was in those early days when I was young, I was watching the guys around me who were really good in the field. And they were out there doing kind of their speaking gigs, right? But most of them, this was the late 90s, early 2000s, they were doing the free steak dinner seminar circuit. And I was young. I couldn't afford $8 to $10,000 at Del Friscoes to feed strangers who probably won't do business with me.

So I learned to talk my way into organizations, normally employers, but sometimes associations, trade groups, my local church, other churches, union halls. that they needed qualified speakers to come in and teach. And my whole business model, quite honestly, in hindsight, was, hey, Scouts Honor, I won't solicit, I won't endorse, I won't promote. It's pure education. If any of your people want to meet with me one-on-one, we will do that off-site. And it will not reflect on you.

That was the extent of our business model. And Mike, I don't know if it was just the right timing or the right guy, the right time, you know, it took off. And we had, we were inside of so many organizations. And we were teaching. This is like total geekdom. But I love behavioral economics and I love behavioral finance. I think it's because of my background.

Like, what is this? And I mentioned Zig because he was a hero of mine. He introduced me through cassette tapes. B-Doo have. And this methodology of B-Doo have in the vast majority, 90-95% of financial services professionals or experts, use big air quotes there, right? What that means to different people.

But they go straight to the X's and O's, the nuts and bolts of finance. And they wonder why they're not more effective. Zigg taught me, and I just applied it to finance, take a step back. That's the have. Go to doing. Those are the behaviors.

And most everyone knows Dave Ramsey, and I get it. I have a love, hate relationship with the guy too. But behavior, that's where those, that's the trenches, right? That's where most people win or lose with money. money. But one final step back, if you understand the behaviors, you got to go to the six inches between the ears. Our beliefs, our scripts, our thoughts, yeah. Thoughts, right? Like, that drives the behaviors, which drives the outcomes. That was our message. And that got us

into a lot of places. I'm sure we'll go there here in a minute, but one of them being NASA, of all places. And that changed our life forever. Well, I think what you just described was, do you want to go door to door and knocking on individual houses to sell your widget? Or do you want to go door to door to larger organizations that already have dozens and hundreds of your best buyer units there? And you sell that one organization so that they can bring all of the people in. That's what you did. And that's a really wonderful model because now whatever the industry is, people need to think about doing that. Why go one to one?

Let's go one to many. So at some point you decided, you know what? since we know that you have to really get that foundation set your thoughts, your beliefs, your education, how do you guide that so that the outcome is what we wanted to be? So when did you come up with and tell us about the foundation for financial wellness? In 2010, at the time, the brand new, fairly new, Obama administration announced they were going to mothball the space shuttle program and kind of think back to those days. Well, the old saying where there's chaos, there's opportunity. I have roots in Texas.

I'm in native Texan who loves and lives in Colorado. Right place, right time. We get invited in. I speak to someone in HR and go, hey, there's a lot of people here in a lot of crisis, a lot of stress, a lot of emotion. What are you doing to help them with all the decisions that they need to make while they're facing layoffs? Johnson Space Center alone was having 8,000 to 10,000 people laid off. in an 18-month window. Think about that.

Chaos, they couldn't handle it. The individuals couldn't handle it. And the organization, leadership teams, didn't know what to do with the angry mob, really. So we were fortunate. It was the right place, right time we get in. We deliver our class. I come from a behavioral economic standpoint. Hey, Scouts honor, we won't promote solicit endorse.

Okay, HR introduces us to the wellness program. Now, I could barely spell wellness, much less know what it was. The intricacies, yeah. Yeah, so it got introduced to the EAP Employee Assistance Program and then also got introduced to the Texas Workforce Commission, which was cool. They were helping people get reemployed, right, as they were coming out of NASA. Well, our life changed when we got introduced to the wellness director, the Johnson Space Center. And she literally was a rocket scientist. She had degrees and things I could barely pronounce.

But her background was, she had a clinical background, but also a background in behavior change modeling, which almost now we know. That almost makes her like a ninja of wellness. Wellness is about positive, healthy behavior change and understanding the science behind what makes adults make decisions and create change. So the very first class I taught, there's this behavioral finance approach to it. In her word, she has this epiphany in the back of the room, almost form tackles me after the class and challenges me and says, why aren't you building this on a wellness chassis? She's an engineer.

Of course, she says chassis. I'm like, what's a wellness chassis? And I'll consider it. And she said, I love what you're doing with the behavioral side, but wellness is about behavior change. And the science, the core theory behind behavior change, get this, it's a mouthful, is the trans-theoretical behavior change model, which was created by Dr. James Prachaska, an MD doc.

And he came upon this. this behavior change model by he would give somebody bad health news. And that person would walk out and it would change their life forever, right? Rattle their cage. Scare him into healthier behaviors. The very next person that came in his office got bad health news would walk out and light one up on the way to the car. And he was like, why you know better? Why aren't you making healthy change?

There's more to it than just knowing. There's more to it, hear this financial professionals, than just educating or just telling. If it was all about the information, we've got that literally in the palm of our hand. Because knowledge is power is a fallacy. Knowledge is potential power. You got to do something with it and put it into action and implement. Amen. We say education without action is of little value.

Yeah. Love it. That's exactly right. So she, her name is Karen. Karen Myers begins volunteering her time because she's so, she has the, epiphany she had was, hey, I'm like, she's an expert in the corporate wellness world, right? And she's like, year in and year out. The number one stressor of employees, finance. How much, right? So, but wellness looks at finances being, hey, that's not, we got to stay in our lane. That's not our thing.

We've got our 401k advisor. We've got our benefits broker. Yeah. We've got our financial advisors down the street, right? Like, we don't get in those waters. So it's like stove piped. Now, finance doesn't understand wellness principles, behavior change theory. Like, monitoring and measuring the data, what's working, what's not. Unfortunately, those of us in this industry or from this industry, like I feel like I can say this safely, like we're so busy listening to ourselves wax off philosophical or sound smart. We're the furthest thing from paying attention to what's working or what's not

or what's going on between the ears of the people we're in front of. Wellness is doing that, but doesn't know how to bring in finance. So this gap, that void is where, Karen had her epiphany, and we came in, fast forward, and we mashed the two principles together. Actually, a third. We brought in coaching principles as well. So we got wellness, we got finance, and we've got coaching principles. So that we're not trying to be something.

So that you learn what you need to do and then get coached and held accountable to make sure that it gets that. It changes the relationship with the prospect and the client forever. They just know you're different. This guy's different. Like that's the comment we hear most of whether in front of the room. room or one on one. Because you're not pushing this and pushing that because it's the hot thing to sell. You are teaching me why I should make that decision. You're guiding me to understand it because people like to buy, but they don't like to be sold. And then once they understand that,

then, then, then you're ready for, oh, well, you mentioned this as an option. Yeah, that makes sense. Yes, yes. Bigger and healthier pipelines by slowing down and going about it from a different angle. Like stop trying to be like a comment we hear, you know, with all of our financial professionals is I'm just fatigued by being like looked at, thought of, treated like everyone else. And the tough love it response is, then stop acting like them. Yeah. Stop trying to be better at what they do. Why don't you be something different? Blue ocean, red ocean. There you go. There you go. And we do believe in a thing called healthy pipelines, Right.

The opposite of a healthy pipeline, we would call pipeline bloat, which we've all seen, we've all experienced. There might be a lot of names in the CRM, but they're not advancing. There are a bunch of eventual nose or eventual blowoffs. Well, it reminds me of what you just said. There reminds me of like, haven't you ever been in a situation where you're walking down the hall and you see someone walking towards you and this pit in your stomach and you roll your eyes and you're like, where's the next room I can jump into? because it's just like, oh, they're going to, whatever, whatever it is. And so you don't want to be that financial professional where it's like, oh, they're email and a calling because they want me to, no, you want it to be, oh, please take my call.

I want, I want, you know, what else you have to teach me? And everything that you say is feels so different than what I have been told because I'm being told the reasons and the methodology behind making the financial decisions out there. And I think that is really such a, you know, it's not an immediate like speedboat 90 degree turn. It's a big old, you know, a cruise ship that's going to make the turn eventually, but it's going to be a solid turn. It's right. Yeah, very well said. We couldn't agree more.

So this really without sounding too, you know, warm and fuzzy, we've seen it. We've experienced it. Now, for over 12 years, this is a lifestyle. This is a lifestyle change for us. as the professionals, right? Like, we're not trying to just do it bigger, better, faster than what everyone else is doing. You're on a crusade, literally. I mean, yes.

Like, do you remember A.L. Williams way back in the day, I heard him being described as he was on a crusade, you know, sell your whole life and invest the difference and get turn, all these kind of things. But the point is, you're in a crusade to go. you know what, there's a better way. We're going to teach you the better way and it's not immediate. It's not going to take that pipeline and make 14 sales a day. It's going to be something where you know it needs to be done. And there's a book that I just love, love, love called the ultimate sales machine by Chet Holmes. And back in the day, he would take the approach of don't be that salesperson that goes in with the order for me and go try to sell it. Be the salesperson that goes in and teaches and educate so that that prospect goes, wow, you didn't even ask for

the sale, but now I fully understand all of the things I need to understand, and then they're coming to you. So this crusade, this mission that you're on is to help the public understand better, but you're giving these tools to financial professionals to help them stand out from the competition and be more attractive to their audience. Yes, this really is like servant-mindedness. Yeah. If you show up to serve. And here's two huge differences. One is, we've learned through the years. We're proud to say we're the financial wellness partner of the National Wellness Institute. National Wellness Institute is kind of the gold standard and corporate wellness programs.

And they were missing the financial component, just like NASA was. So they have a model. Their model of total well-being includes six dimensions. Now, there's a lot of models out there. But the point is, we all know, like when we slow down enough and think about it, we, us, us as humans, we are complex, right? It's extremely nuanced. Um, our physical health, our emotional health, occupational wellness, spiritual wellness, and along with financial wellness. And they don't live in, they don't live in a vacuum, right? They're not isolated from one another.

They permeate. So if, if is there a component in your life or in total well-being where if you're not experiencing financial well-being, like does, is there, of those that are immune from what that permeates into? No, like they're all impacted. So finance doesn't live in a vacuum. And it's not the intellectual brain. It's the emotional brain that's driving those those things. So yeah, you know, like you're a financial professional. You're sitting in front of a client and the process and the model, you know, we've got, of course, have all those built through through the years of how this is impacting their total well-being, their total life, that's different, right? Like, we're not just there to go,

hey, you know, I'm just like sniffing around. You got assets under, you got assets I could man, you got an insurance need, you got a plan. Yeah, let's talk about stockspons, mutual funds, and insurance. It's like, let's talk about the core foundation. Let's talk about the things that need to be learned and understood and implemented so that when we make financial moves, they're the right financial moves. Right. And those are really the reasons under the surface, right like yeah good old sales train like the pain the prospect brings to the table is rarely the real problem you know i've said this now three times this week in conversations um and it reminded me what you just said you know in sales we need to talk about the features and the benefits well no

we need to talk about the benefits but more so we need to talk about the benefit of the benefits and that's going deeper deeper deeper well what you just said there is like yeah we need to get so deep that when we have this, you know, clients, prospective clients, have a problem that they might not even recognize. And once it is unsurfaced or surfaced, un-earth, and then talked about and solved, now all of a sudden, you are seen as that

trusted advisor that is going way deeper than just trying to sling some product or get someone to do this thing. It's now like, hey, man, you really, you really care. You've got that heart of a teacher. That's it. That's it. Exactly right. Huge.

So let's talk about then this, if you're a financial professional going, okay, got it. I know I need to teach and educate. It's not really my wheelhouse. You know, I know all my numbers and all the things on the financial side, but how then do you come alongside the financial professional to provide support for them to achieve all of these things without them having to go back to school for 14,000 years and, you know, relearn all kinds of things to then shift in their mind. Is this like a plug and play like, hey, we got you?

It absolutely can be. It's as easy as, hey, follow us. Like, just let us be a thought leader in this space. Lean into us. Don't be someone interested. Go ahead first like I did. It just struck something in me in those years. So I know that people are, well, behavior change model, right?

From advisors. Some guys are going to be like, this is what I want. right now. Well, they're ready to make a change. They're ready to add this to their existing processes and methodology, right? And others are a little skeptical still. I think that's great, actually. So just follow us. Like, watch the work that we're doing. We're speaking all, I get invited to speak all the time at, you know, industry conferences and online. We have absolutely no cost options if people want to come in and say, well, what are you guys doing? Well, we serve organizations, some of the biggest employers on planet Earth.

We also work with associations, trade groups, unions, churches, that kind of thing too. But just think organizations and their people. And the way that we do that best is by coming over and being an advocate for the financial professional so that they can show up for these people. We've tilled the ground. They're ready. That soil is rich for financial wellness. We need real financial wellness professionals.

to go in there and plant these seeds, grow those crops and harvest, quite honestly, to do it correctly. So you've got all the content, the teaching, the, you know, that advisor doesn't have to now go start writing this and learning this. You've got that. They come in with just layering in what you guys have done to what they currently do with their clients and prospects. And it brings that educational arm to their practice.

And by being a part of your organization, it gives them a little piece of added credential. Yep. There's the training like the knowledge for sure. Of course. You know,

the credibility of partnering with a nonprofit in this space. And let's be candidly, growing your practice and growing it in a way that is much more fulfilling

and a lifestyle that you really want. So we created the certified financial wellness professional. It's a certification, but it's really more than that. We wanted to create a community.

That was the one thing I took out of, the COVID era was that, hey, I'm not wired to be alone, even though I would have probably, you know, my pride would not have said that prior to COVID. And I realized I'm better with, with others and especially others that are making me better. My dad has all these old blue collar sayings, the Eagles fly with Eagles. And then he follows it up with, you ever see an eagle fly with the turkey? Yeah.

So, right? Like, that's what we're, that's what we have been creating, put a stake in the ground. Here's the certified financial wellness professional. with that comes all of the resources and the community of how to go out there and the training. Now, you've got the certification. Now, what do you do with it? How can you go out there and grow your practice, grow your influence, improve your clients' lives?

Use this as a door opener or partner with us, bring our programs in, have us be the door opener and that you brought in. You can lean in as much or as little as you like, but it's, you know, communities like this, Mike, that you've created. It's just getting the word out there, starting with what is financial wellness? Why does it matter? Why should I care? That's an honest question. People are probably asking, why do I care? And here's why, right? And then, yeah, you can actually partner with us. And it's not all or nothing. You're not moving your licensure or your contracts anywhere. No, we want to come beside you and be an advocate, be a champion and help you because we have aligned interest. I love it.

Well, this has just been so great. I just love the approach that you guys take, the teaching approach. You give a smorgas board to advisors to go, hey, if you want as little or as much as little involvement, a lot of involvement, you want us to come do it for you on your behalf. You want to do it and learn how to do it all of these options. But the whole bottom line is this. You care about your clients and prospects. You care to teach them the reasons and methodology about financial wellness because it is one

of the biggest stressors in life, marriages, and all of that. So if we can teach how to solve that and then advocate and coach how to implement all these things, which then leads to some of the financial recommendations being better, well received, love all of that. So I think this is just spectacular, Brent. If someone is interested in learning more and then reaching out connecting with you, what's the best way they can do that? Great. I appreciate it. So the name of the foundation is Foundation for Financial Wellness, and that's a dot org, or let me give you a link to go straight to that certification information page. If you want to see some resources and dig deeper into that, you'd go to ffwpro.com, Foundation for Financial Wellness, FFWPro.com.

Excellent. Well, Brent, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. I loved it. Thank you, Mike. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders to learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. www. influential entrepreneursradio.com.