Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Joseph Lukacs Financial Advisor Coach and Founder of the Magellan Network

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Since 1994, Joe Lukacs has coached only financial advisors, working with over 2,500 financial advisors and teams.He believes in sharing what he knows. That’s why he is offering his best strategies, tools, templates, and masterclasses as a coaching collaboration with firms and organizations.What do you and your organization get by partnering? You and your organization get to tap into over 30 years of coaching experience. In that time he has completed over 50,000 individual coaching sessions. Those sessions have resulted in adding more than $50 billion in new AUM and over $500 million in extra revenue. If you’re looking to improve your advisor’s strategic planning, marketing execution, team leadership, or just about any aspect of running a successful financial advisory practice, you’re in the right place.Learn more: http://www.coachjoe.guru/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-joseph-lukacs-financial-advisor-coach-and-founder-of-the-magellan-network

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 back with us Joe Lucas, who's a financial advisor coach and founder of the Magellan Network. Joe, welcome back to the program. Mike, it's great to be back. You know, it's been a while, and I'm glad to reconnect with you because I know that just everyday things change from regulations to compliance to opportunities in the industry.

So I want to get caught up on what you're doing. And I know that you're celebrating coming up in just a few days, 31 years of experience in the industry working with advisors. So catch us up to speed. What are some of the things that you are seeing right now if you were to look back, your 30 years of coaching. What are some of those highlights that you see that, that you see as maybe trends or opportunities? You know, that's a, that's a mouthful of a question there. So I'll try to be as succinct. Yeah, and we don't have a four days, like a three-day weekend seminar, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to unpack my, my 31 years in five minutes. So look, I think that

there's, there's some truths that are universal and immutable in this game. Then I think there's some things that are always evolving. I think some of the truth of the game, after 31 years is that this is still basically about a human being, man or woman, doesn't matter, coming into this and understanding, you know, what it's like to be an advisor, that this is still a very much a failure-based business, that your mindset and psychology matters most. You know, the key differences today versus, let's say, 30 years ago was 30 years ago, it was it was very much a sales culture, right? Stockbroker, right?

The buying and selling securities. Today, it is consultative and it's one more influence, not as much as selling, but at the end of the day, it's still about the advisor facing their fears. It's just that the framework that we operate under has changed somewhat, evolved, if you will. Then there's the obvious pieces of, you know, technology-centric now is an industry. versus the way it was 30 years ago and stuff like that. So if you look at, like there's an old saying in sports,

you know, an athlete in the 50s, would they still be, you know, champion in the 2020s? The answer is yes, because they have the mental makeup, right? You know, would Wilk Chamberlain still dominate NBA, you know, in this day and error? Yeah, because training was better and nutrition is better, sports medicine, better, stuff like that. So the advisor who was successful,

mentally in the 1990s, as long as they adopted their approach, would still be successful today. So the success laws are universal. The challenge, though, you know, you ask me a question like, what am I seeing out there? You know, we as an industry have this real big challenge where we just don't have enough young people in it right now. Yeah. You know, two-thirds of the advisors are going to be hanging it up by 23rd. That's the last numbers that I saw. And that's going to really put us, you know, so if you're a young advisor, it's a great place to be.

Just don't fail and they'll quit. You know, we're even with AI and a lot of people talk about, well, you know, artificial intelligence is going to come in. Yeah. And it's going to, and AI is going to come and have a profound impact in back office operations, analytics, all those things. But it's not going to replace the human connection. It won't. Yeah. It will supplement it.

but it's not going to replace it. And I think that's a message that I think our industry is not really clear on yet. You know, the larger, I'm not going to get into the names, the larger organizations would love to get rid of their advice or ranks because they're expensive, right? And they would love to bring technology and automation into it. And I think there'll be some attempts at that. But when you really, really think about it, I don't think anybody is going to go and go get an AI bot therapist or companion

or or so I still think we're very much going to be the people business for the foreseeable future going forward so I think that's that's the one thing you know I think at one level this business has gotten easier because of technology I think at one level it's gotten more challenging because the young people are coming to this business well let's face it they grew up on Xbox and social media and using their thumbs on their on their phones more and a lot of times they lack the interpersonal skills to connect with people when you have to do it real time. And real time also means like over Zoom or over a phone call or in the room together, right? And I think that's where the training as an industry has not really evolved to the level that it needs to in order to go ahead and meet the demands.

We still have a very high failure rate. You know, you start looking at firms and insurance companies hiring young. people out of college. And I know back in the 1990s, it was, you know, 80 to 90% failure rate after two years. I don't, I think slightly improved a little bit. But it's still way over 50% drops. Wow. So that just tells us that either A, which I think is partially, we're bringing in the

wrong type of people or we're bringing them in and not putting them in the right chairs is probably more accurate. And those that are more in the advisor chairs, yeah, we're developing them. from a C, you know, colleges are spitting out CFPs, which is great. Firms are hiring them, which is great. All that tells me is that you're a good student and you can take a test and pass it. That's all that tells me. It doesn't tell me to be successful in the business.

And this is the gap that I've noticed the last couple of years. You know, yeah, you said a mouthful there and we need to unpack a couple of those things because I think that there is just massive opportunity to go deeper on what you said, relationships. I feel that whether you're, you know, air quotes, young or old, right? Because if you're a newer advisor, it's like you said, you grow up on technology, you do business on your phone with your thumbs, and you want anything you want right now because you're used to everything just fast. And I also feel like the seasoned advisor that goes, you know what, I'm noticing shifts in my business and people are, you know, using technology more. And I'm noticing

that I need to jump in with this and they do like a spray and pray. Let me just go buy some leads. Well, I feel like that there are some great things with technology, with buying leads, if you do it the right way. But I really want to ask your opinion on how do you really get it through an advisor's mindset that that foundation of having a deep relationship. with your, yes, your clients, but also the relationship attempt to develop a prospect into a client goes way past a quick text, a social media message, or buying a lead and spray and pray. All great questions. So, you know, there are a lot of, and look, everything works for somebody.

So the question is what works for any specific advice. So whether you're doing seminars live, seminars online, you know, one of these lead gen programs, are out there doing internet leads, stuff like that. You know, I've got, you know, I've got clients to do it all. And, you know, if you really think about it, all that, all those things are designed to do, all those systems, if you will, design to do is get you in front of a qualified person. It's all designed to do. Yes.

And a lot of times what happens is then the advisor is not equipped to convert that, you know, prospect into a client. And why is that? Because there's a fatal flaw in all of our industry training. which is let's just make our people really smart and bright, technically proficient, and logic and information will, and you know this, you know, Mike's better than I do. You know, human beings are emotional decision makers, and you just can't logic your way into that conversation.

And that is the massive gap. So, but here's an interesting part about this. So you do something, you'll invest in whatever program you want to, the system we want to invest in. It doesn't work. Does the advisor look in the mirror and say, I suck? Or do they go, oh, the system's solve. Yeah, these leads were never that good.

Or that's some of our program didn't work. And I know, look, I know everybody in the space who's doing stuff. And like, I got, I have two, I can have two advisors. One person's, like, and we don't get to think, but there's one massive online league game. Everybody knows the name. If you, you know, it's dominating. And I've got, you know, an advisor can do it, invest in it for three or four, five months, get absolutely nothing out of it.

And then I can have an advisor, do the exact same program. and raised, you know, $25, $30, $50 million out of it, right? It's kind of like the Glenn Gary Glenn Ross conundering, right? Yeah, where are the leads, right? Exactly. And so I think, you know, if you're an advisor today and you're looking to grow your business and so like that, I think the first step is, you know, looking in the mirror, are you the best version of you you can possibly be?

Because at the end of the day, this is still a personal self-development business. Yeah. And if you're not, I mean, if you're sitting in front of a couple, I don't care if it's on Zoom, it doesn't matter modalities. And you're talking at somebody and you're doing a presentation and you're just, you know, just kind of throwing stuff at them. All you did is tell you told them everything about you, you know nothing about them.

So in other words, you had nothing that you can work with, right? And I think that's part of the problem with even, you know, seasoned advisable. This is like young advisors. Look, and I was telling somebody this the other day. And I'm guilty of it too.

My kids are all my adult. children are all in their late 20s now. And I call them the marshmallow generation. We let them be soft. They got participation trophies. You know, Mike, you and I, man, we grew up, man.

It was kill you. You got to win. Like, there was no. It was like, win or lose. That's it, man. It was like a very binary, right? And that's the game of business. And I think a lot of young people are not mentally equipped for that.

They just don't understand it. And so this is where the training programs just, it's a massive blind spot. They're training their advisors how to present, how to, you know, run financial plans, how to do reviews, hopefully, right? But they're not teaching them how to be resilient. It's like it's assumed, right? Because the advisors who are running those, lead those companies, those from whether it's a small RAA to multi, multi-billion dollar shop, doesn't matter. They came out of our generation, right? So there's a massive bias that said, well, this is the way we did.

it so therefore that's the way you do it but they're not mentally wired to do it that way and there we got the massive disconnect right and i see it over and over again this industry is still taking really good young people and just misallocating them into roles and chairs that they're ill-equipped to be successful at and two or three years later that's you know the difference today though is you know you brought something into a rookie training class within 90 to 120 days you knew they were make it or not, here they come out of college. You're giving basically three-year salary. You're going to have them completely finish their hours for their CFP.

So you're going to have between $150,000, maybe between $150,000, $250,000 as an organization invested in this young person with maybe a 50% success rate. I just don't think that's good business. I just don't. That's a great point. You know, and I think part of that prep or training needs to be. dialed into the concept of confidence, trust, credibility, words like that, meaning this. Yes, you want to get in front of qualified people, whether you're seasoned or younger in the

industry. You get in front of that qualified person by whatever means. And like you mentioned, there's so many means to get in front of that qualified person. But you need to be equipped to close. And guess what? I almost would say to you, it's air quotes around. the word close because it's not closing a deal, it's opening a relationship. And in order to do that, you have to understand whether they need where they want to go,

what are their fears, asking the right questions. So getting in front of that qualified person and then understanding how to dive into what they're looking for so that now your job begins, which is presenting your knowledge in a proficient way in the most credible way so that you're trusted. And sometimes that confidence comes from taking it on the chin and then also sometimes that confidence comes from dealing with your clients for year after year after year and having them give you the accolades. Thank you so much.

This is this is exactly what I'm looking for. But talk a little bit about getting that confidence to being proficient in the industry so that once you get in front of the qualified person, you're now ready and able to communicate properly. So if you think about where the term confidence comes from, right, it really comes from the fact of that you've done something in the past and you have a belief set that you'll be successful with the same or similar tasks in the future. So, you know, if you had enough wins under your belt, then, you know, okay, I can do this. Well, how would if you don't have those wins under your belt, right? How do you, how do you compel yourself to be the best version of

you? So I think step one is number one is, you know, you. You have to make sure that there's a version of you showing up in that meeting, not showing up and hope it goes well, right? Like I hear this all the time, well, hey, like in the intro meeting, and I teach this, right? Hey, what is your goal in the intro meeting? And most people say is to get to a second meeting. I said, no, it's not to get to a second meeting. The goal of the first meeting is to build massive amounts of rapport, get them to open up to you,

get them to trust you so you can see if you can help them to qualify them emotionally and economically and then make a determination should we go to a second meeting, right? That's not just getting to a second meeting because then you're just wasting everybody's time at that point. But the challenge is that to really build massive amounts of rapport with another human or couple that you've got to like, okay, who do you have to influence? Well, you have to influence yourself first. Like what version of you showing up inside that meeting, right?

Is it the uncertain? Because if you're uncertain about yourself, it's going to show up in your body language, your voice quality, you're going to play it safe, you're probably going to let that person dictate the meeting, not you dictate to me, especially if they're a high-end-net-worth person, and you're dead. Like, you're done. Like, nothing will happen out of that. They're going to pump you for information.

And then you're going to walk out that, you're going to leave that meeting. Live virtual is irrelevant. And you're going to know that you did not accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. They did. So this is where the disconnect in the industry is. We're not teaching people skills. We're teaching technical skills to the Kalskommone. which is cool. I get that. You have to have that. But by no way, shape, form measurement,

do I think that technical ability without people ability is going to make a successful advisor? It won't. And quite frankly, you know, and the reason why I've been on this whole thing last couple of years is that I took a look, because I've got clients everywhere, which is a gift. And I took a look at everybody's like rookie training programs. And to affirm, they all stink. They do, let me phrase that. They do certain things really well, but there are massive holes in what they're doing. Okay. And so I didn't want to do this, quite frankly, but, yeah, I'm very blessed that I've got clients that have been with me

my entire journey, so, you know, 20, 30 years. And it's kind of cool, but a lot of them are bringing their kids in the business now, right? Wow. And they're, you know, they're coming out of college that are, you know, with their older CFP courses and ready to get going and stuff like that. And they said, Joe, you know, can you train my son and my daughter? I said, no, that's not my jam, not what I do. Be damn expensive. But after a while, I got four or five of them, and they said, hey, why don't you put a

program together for us? And I didn't want to do that, quite frankly, because I did, you know, I just like, why, but I decided, you know what, let me, let me look into it. So I did. And we've had two years of beta now, two years. We mean, you know, I took, I think we took a total of 10, and we did it for two years. And we've had amazing results. Like, we, like, we figured, we figured out where the gaps were.

and we basically closed them. And we're really now minting very highly proficient young advisors. So I decided beginning of this year that I would actually now deploy that program out to the industry starting this year. Because I just felt there's, I know there's an absolute need for it. And the reason why I also know that is I have having to coach some of the most successful people in this world in terms of, you know, size and scape barons people, fastest growing RAs. And they all said the same thing. Like, yeah, we don't really have, when we bring a younger advisor in or somebody wants to bring their kid into business, one of our advisor teams.

Like, we don't have any infrastructure to train. We just don't. So it's a massive issue. And I even talked to some recruiters who recruit young people for advisors, second chairs, servicing advisors, human advisors. Heim advisors. Same issue. They don't have the time to train their people that know how to train. there's no training resources out there for.

And training goes way beyond studying for the CFP or being qualified for. Yeah, yeah, plenty places for that. We're talking about doing it the right way. So, so thinking about this, knowing that we have to develop relationships and we know that technology is coming at us at the speed of light, what gaps did you see in this and how do you close that gaps to help these younger advisors integrate the two? because you can't just use technology and you can't just, you know, go and meet and greet people in person. You have to have an integration.

No, that's correct. So I'm in a bit of a unique situation because back in the 90s when I worked for Tony Robbins organization, you know, we did, we were not the personal power division. We were the corporate training division. And we actually, through a couple of partnerships with Dr. Robert Cheldini before he was really Dr. Robert Cheldini. We created this really high-level influence course, and we taught it on Wall Street back in the early 90s. And all it needed was really an update into kind of our world.

So what we teach now is really a little, there's some NLP base about building rapport and liking. We take a lot of Chaldini stuff about liking, you know, you know, scarcity, authority, and reciprocity. and we deploy that inside of a model now. And what we do is we teach young advisors how to build massive amounts of rapport with people, even online, even over the phone.

We teach them the art of effective questioning. See, here's the thing. Most advisors, when they think sales, they think presentation. And the reality is that's the furthest thing from the truth. It's now about consultativeness. And the way you become consultative is you ask great questions with rapport and empathy

and you get the truth. So now we train that. And then at that point, it's just kind of connecting the dots. If you know what a person needs, what they want and what their wounds are, coupled with their six human needs and the hierarchy of those six human needs and their vehicles, you basically have an emotional roadmap on how to persuade, influence, and coach that person to get them to their desired outcomes with you. And that's the framework that we teach. It's very sophisticated. I love it. So the neat thing with what you do with the younger advisors is you don't have to worry about teaching old dogs new tricks.

Because trying to teach an older advisor how to do that questioning consultative approach could be hard. You know, well, I've just always done it this way. So a younger advisor, they're like almost like a blank slate and you're able to go, hey, look, research shows and studies show that, when you are asking questions, you're the one that is seen as that expert, and then now you listen. And then you use strategic silence, you know, the old shut up. So I think that that's an interesting opportunity you have, which is you've noticed gaps out there. But now you're working with these same people that if they are willing to say, you know, teach me, O'B.O.B. Wan Kenobi, now they're learning the right way, that right foundation without doing it wrong.

And they're saving that. We're saving a lot of careers. And I think the other thing is now they come as successful. They get their confidence back. But I do want to do real, because I know we got time here. So, you know, one of the things like the older advisor, old dog, new tricks, it really depends how much pain that the old dog's in, right? So in other words, if they're blowing through a ton, you know, $50, $75,000 worth

of the internet leads, a seminar marketing and stuff like that, and they're not producing the result, hey, guess what? You know, they're all saying you have a you problem. It's not a system problem. And so you can't do that shift because at the end of day, it just amazes me, you know, how I'll say this way. This is a simple business that's not easy, right? That's the way I've always been framed it.

And it just requires people to just learn people. I mean, when I say this is, I've been saying it's for 30 years. This is the ultimate people business. You've got to master yourself. And once you master yourself, then you can create mastery of others. That's not a negative term, is that you'll have the power to really sit down with any human being and influence them. And that to me, when you take, when I can take a younger advisor and I can put them in front of a, you know, a couple who's in their late 50s, early 60s, looking for, looking for retirement planning. And that advisor now is totally armed on how to connect the questions to ask, how to reframe, you know, we do reframe, pre-frame, debrames, right?

elegant objection handling, all those things, you know, scope that inside the framework. Not that we're turning them to salespeople, that's not the goal. The goal is to turn them into really good influencers and really good coaches. And trouble solvers? Yeah, well, at the end of the day,

that's what a good coach does, right? So, well, you know, you see around the corner before the client does, so you anticipate the problems. And then when they, and if a problem does present itself, you handle as elegantly as possible, right? That's what a great coach does. So that's my mission now is I'm still, you know, I still love what I do.

I'm going to do it to the day I die. But now I have a certain affinity and affection for really wanting to help young people. I want to take my 30 years of wisdom and I want to transfer it to young people so they can be rock stars in their career going forward. Otherwise, if you didn't do that and if there weren't more people focusing on that, the whole industry could crumble in a sense because you've got these people that are coming in, trying it, failing, failing. and then all the old guard are now aging out.

And so you're looking at this as a macro going, I want to do my part to save the industry and bolster it and make it remain successful. Yeah. Well, that's the byproduct. The initial thing was I want my client's kids to be successful. So how do I need to train them, right? And that's what we've done for the last two years. And we just, you know, and the more I dug into it, the more I realize that, you know,

my clients are not in a very unique situation at all. it's a very prevalent situation and problem in the space. And for firms, like I said, it's $150,000 to $200,000 delta. If somebody fails out, then you get no return on that investment, ZRO, right? And time suck, you know, you put all the time into recruiting and doing your version of training, right? And then they saw the way I position it is, look, this is like an insurance policy on your young advisor's success. We're going to increase the probability and not guarantee it. but we're going to increase the probability of them being very successful,

which means you're going to get a very good return on that person over a longer period of time. That sounds like a win to me. It does as well. Well, Joe, it's been a real pleasure catching back up with you. You're doing great things in the industry. If someone is interested in diving it deeper, connecting with you, what's the best way they can do that? I would say my website is probably best. Coachjo.

There you go, right? So C-O-A-C-H-J-O-E dot G-U-R-U. Find me there. Awesome. And we'll make sure to have that in the show notes as well. Joe, thank you so much for coming back on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Mike.

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