Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Pete Mussoni, Founder of Income Security Associates

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

He has lived in Charlotte since 1987 and has been protecting families and businesses since 2003. After 19 years of corporate industrial sales (and associated travel), He wanted to be more impactful and serve the concerns of the people who matter most, the people closest to home. His commitment started with health and life coverages and grew from there. He has a son, Matthew, who works for the Oakland Athletics.He is active in his community and has been highly involved with the St. Gabriel Men’s Club (SGMC) for the past 27 years, including three years of leadership as President and three more years in other leadership roles. He is proud to be a part of the SGMC which raises money every year for those in need including, but not limited to, Little Sisters of the Poor, Charlotte Men’s Homeless Shelter, Alexander Youth Homes, and this year, Ukrainian Refugee Relief.Under his leadership, Income Security Associates designs strategies for the protection of families, retirements, and businesses. They assure their clients that they are protected from financial disaster should the unthinkable happen.Their planning strategies protect families when the breadwinner dies too soon or becomes sick and cannot earn to provide for them. They work with business owners to hedge many types of ownership risks and ensure that the business works for the owner. They work with retirees to keep them free of concern from market fluctuations, constantly changing interest rates, unpredictable tax environments, and most importantly, running out of money before they run out of days.Their clients KNOW their future will be protected and free from anxiety. Income Security Associates is committed to the highest standards of integrity and professionalism. They engage with their clients to know and understand their current financial situation and ambitions. They work with only the highest-ranked carriers and organizations to guide clients to reach their financial goals. They are independent and beholden to no one company. This assures clients that they can be flexible to provide the best possible planning solutions for their specific needs and goals.Learn More:https://www.incomesecurityllc.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-pete-mussoni-founder-of-income-security-associates

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 Pete Mousoni, who's the founder of Income Security Associates. Pete, welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here.

Hey, so I want to learn all about what you do and how you do it and how you serve your clients to preserve the security of their income for retirement and wealth planning and all of the things that you do. But get us started first with what's your story and your background and how did you get into the industry in the first place? Well, I had been involved, Mike, with corporate industrial sales for probably 15, 18 years, something like that. that after college and travel got to be a little bit crazy. Right after 9-11, it just got to be nuts. I covered the southeast and the Midwest for a company. And, you know, there comes a moment there when your plane's not going anywhere or doing whatever you think there's got to be a better way. And then you realize that, you know, you can have relationships and help people write in your own zip code. and I got involved looking to do something a little bit closer to where I lived and didn't have to travel two nights a week, three nights a week.

I still travel. I still go lots of places, but not every week. And that's great. So I made a transition and trying to get started with health insurance back in. the day because by God everybody needs health insurance. Yeah. Over time, learned, studied, developed my skill set, my knowledge, and as it turned out, many of my industrial clients that I used to have from my previous industrial sales career

followed me over here for their own personal family protection and planning needs. And in many cases, sometimes I went back in and worked with them on some benefits. You know, you said a couple keywords that I think are really important study. You know, too many times people hear, oh, look, this industry is really lucrative. I'm going to get into that, make a bunch of money, and then they don't want to put the work in. But you said study. You know, you got into an industry and you learned and you studied, which makes me think you also make sure that your clients will understand what you're recommending to them. So as a heart of a teacher, I'm sure that you teach and educate and show.

pros and cons and this choice and that choice so that they make an informed decision, right? I do. I do. And education is so imperative. It really is because whatever we do today are in this endeavor to protect you and your family is, I'm going to work with somebody else tomorrow. You can always reach me. If I don't answer, I will call you right back.

However, your life may change. your kids may grow. Things may go on. And I need to educate you now today to just be aware of how powerful our plan is today that we put together for you. But if there's ever a moment where you think you forgot or something else or you don't remember what we've spoken about, feel free to pick up that phone and do it again. And on top of that, in staying in touch with my clientele, I'm pretty good about putting a touch on them a couple of times a year just to find out that everything's okay and there's no concerns. But then you find out something's happened.

They've gone back to work or they've left work or they're thinking of leaving work or they want to deal with another matter in the family. It's so important. Relationships are so important. You know, that we could probably talk for nine and a half hours on that one thing, relationships and relationship marketing and relationship building, because it really isn't closing a sale. It's opening a relationship. As I tell people, I'm going to be your financial person and your insurance agent until one of us dies. Yeah.

That's it. Because you're going to earn the right to keep that. right and to be candid it could be me it could be me that goes first we don't know what tomorrow brings but yeah to one of us dies um you know i'm not starting out in the industry uh i'm not your nephew or your niece that's just trying to sell everybody in the family just to try to preserve their job for another week i i managed to start in this industry without having to sell my car family that's that's strong and then some but we're going to be oh go ahead uh we're we're going to be together we're going to hold hands and walk into whatever the future is going to be together

you can always call me the worst that i can say to you is i don't know but i'll see what i can do yep huge you know you started off you mentioned in health insurance um how did that proceed with adding in different types of insurances or how did that progress in how you then started learning and finding out opportunities to serve your clients with different type of financial tools? Well, to be painfully candid about that, I did not anticipate that the future that was coming at that point with nationalized health care was going to be tremendous. I just didn't feel like it was. going to be able to deliver people. Good news moving forward.

I left the industry. I left individual health insurance and still managed to build a falling on just good old-fashioned life insurance, permanent life insurance, and start to help people get out of market risk with annuities. And, you know, there was some thin years there,

08, 2009. I have a son in California. I made a transition up to California. I work with federal employees by getting them out of government benefits. I went there from 2012 to 2015. And male men and male women are some of the hardest working people, you know, in America. Yeah. When you're dragging the mail for 10, 12 hours a day, never mind Christmas, but that's hard work.

And I was able to certainly make a living for myself there. I stayed in touch with my East Coast customers. I had the advantage of a three-hour time differential. I came back at least quarterly to see my client tell here and so what. And the opportunity to remain in California change. My son transitioned into college. And it was time to come back to the Carolinas. When I came back to the Carolinas,

I let people know that I was back and I was local. And is there any way that I can help today, I got a lot of call. Can you help us with Affordable Care Act? And I had to go back and study up and get educated and get credentialed and get going again. Now, what that did was just continue to open doors. People did not have awareness of some of the options that were available on that. And to be candid, my earlier predictions of not delivering good news on affordable care,

what was wrong. And many times, because of what's gone on in that program, I can get some families very affordable coverage and get them the things they need, particularly if there's some type of chronic disease in that family. And to that point, I will never forget. I had met a real estate agent in a new development in Charlotte, and we sat out there in one of those general electric trailers

on a construction site. And she was referral. And I went there and I was starting to enroll her and this and that and everything else. And Mike, I look up and she's sobbing. What do you do? I had no idea what was going on. Well, it turns out in her family, her mother and her sisters had a number of cancer episodes with uterine, breast, ovarian, this and that and everything else. And she hadn't had health insurance for four years.

Wow. She'd lived in a car for one year as a real estate agent. She was in an abusive marriage, abusive relationship. She left that guy and was just now like she felt she was a whole person by just having health insurance. Wow. It was never going to have to tell her mother or her sisters she didn't get a checkup or a mammogram or anything else. And Mike, what we do every day, you know, we're writing policies. We're doing this.

We're taking care of people. We're going through the struggle of reaching out and so on and so forth. But it was that moment. It was overwhelming for me. I almost went out in the car and cried myself and I still can't tell you why I would have done that. You know, it really does bring home the fact that you're not selling policies. You're not selling insurance. You're not selling financial products.

You're providing peace of mind. You're providing self-worth. You provide all of these things like you just described. I think that the more we as business people figure that, out and can figure out how we can serve our clientele and provide to them those, you know, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, the protection and accomplishment and achievement and recognition and all of those things. Now all of a sudden they see you as someone that's that trusted advisor, not just some insurance salesperson. Right. You know,

somebody one time asked me what makes you stay in the business. And I got to tell you, It's a tremendous source of satisfaction to know that you're able to get the individuals, the financial resources they need at the time they need it the most. With the right resources available, families can spend their mental energy available on the things that make them feel whole again and good again. you know, the issues that come up in the fields that we talk about, you know, life, death, these are just chapters in life. And people are going to pass. The ones we love are going to pass.

We've all lost somebody. If there wasn't protection in place, it's a financial calamity when you should be mourning that person's life and celebrating that person. way. And the kind of coverage is. Yeah. Or loss of work or you can't work for two years or all of those things. And we're talking about specific incidences like, oh, you need health coverage, here you go. You need life insurance.

Here you go. But I think that you then pull back the curtain and look from a further perspective, like 30,000 foot and look at retirement planning. So think or tell us a little bit about what you then started doing. to go, okay, you need these things, yes, but this piece of the puzzle fits into a bigger picture, and we need to start seeing how this fits into your retirement plan. How do you serve your clients that way? Well, I saw in my own family and in the family of friends and acquaintances, just a fear of the

unknown, a fear of what's coming, and a fear of not having enough financial resources. you know, in retirement. And what happens with that fear? It winds up going into missed opportunities for reunions, missed opportunities for family trips, missed opportunities for just enjoyment of life. It's retirement, man. We have bust-dirtail for all of these years, and you ought to be able to have some peace of mind in retirement. And in the specific memories that are coming to mind now,

fear of not having enough money is one issue. The other concern is health problems. And it may happen that a health impairment can be such a huge stressor on the entire family that it takes over all of the trust of the trust of the family. I mean, it can be a huge stressor on the entire family. The kids, and when I say kids, I mean, my generation, I'm 61 years old, have become really the sandwich generation. We're all taking care of our kids trying to launch them into the world, but then all of a sudden our parents become impaired and we become the caregivers of those parents. It's a huge stressor on the middle sandwich generation. And even in a city like that I'm sitting in right now, Charlotte, North Carolina,

or Raleigh or Atlanta or Knoxville or Richmond, you can have a pretty much intact family and just getting from one side to the other side of town just to check on a family member. That can be an afternoon. Yeah. And families are machines. Families are rhythm.

Families are things that happen with expectations. And when you throw in something that, put such a stress around like that in a family, it becomes, you know, really disruptive. It can lead to divorces. It can lead to not good family relations and everything else. By talking to families and talking to people as they transition into retirement, you ask them, how would a significant health impairment affect you and affect the multiple generations in your family? When they start to realize, you know, it's not just me getting sick, it's a whole thing for the family.

We can talk about that and see if there's a solution. We'll never completely eliminate it because we love those people. We want to remain close to them. But we can try to put some things in where we can use resources, financial resources, to put some of the care demands, take that off other folks in the family, and let them be the case manager, so to speak, for mom or dad, and not have to be the actual caregiver. Yeah, that's huge.

And seeing that happen and seeing that happen, even my own family, I don't want to go into too much, but my mother was an LTC for 12 years. And I had written a policy on her that went four years. And then she became quite a burden. I mean, I don't know, we might need to edit, we might need to edit this out. But she wasn't nice to people. and it was something, but we don't have to necessarily go that way. So, you know, in our business, Mike, we have something called normalcy bias. It hasn't happened to me, so therefore it won't.

It's one of the biggest concerns that we have to get over. And we have to tell people you're suffering from normalcy bias. Of course, we have to find a nicer way to say it. But it's when something happens to a family relative or something like that that suddenly they start thinking about, oh, my goodness, what would happen to my family were this to happen to me? Well, let's have that conversation. That is a good faith, ethical conversation to have to see how we can improve family life, even if somebody is impaired in some way. And so much of the time, isn't it true, Pete, that when you plan. the right way. Then when things do come up, because like you said, you might not wish that this

or that or the other would come up, but things happen. Long-term care needs. Maybe it's, you can't work for four years. Maybe there is a deceased family member. But if you have your financial house in order, now you know the moves to make right there. So doesn't that give just a huge amount of peace of mind to your clients when you lay out that plan and say, okay, if these things happen, here's the solution. We pray that they don't. And then it just gives people like that. breath, peace of mind. I think not only does it give them peace of mind, but honestly, they are, we're entitled to peace of mind.

It ought to be a natural, it ought to be really out there as a natural right. We shouldn't have to worry or have fear. There's going to be life problems that happen. Things will happen. But if we can take care of it today on the impossibility that it does happen, that we know that you're going to get the best care you can get. your family will have the best care you can get. And most importantly, you'll be able to maintain the dignity and standard of care,

standard of comfort that you like that you're accustomed to. You won't have to make difficult decisions. Perfect. I think that's here. It really is. And it's just a gift that the family members give to the rest of their family. And it's a gift that you give to your clientele just to make sure that every box is checked. So Pete, it's been so neat learning about what you do and how you do it

and what drives you? And if someone is interested in learning more and also reaching out and connecting with you, what's the best way that they can do that? Well, it's Incomesecurity LLC.com. It is Pete at Incomesecurity LLC.com. My number is 704-236, 8145. I'm reachable just about every day. I've spent time with clients over the weekend.

my job isn't a straight 40 hour a week job so I will call you right back. I am available and right there. And it is a question of being as responsive to customers as we can be. People have got made and it's really kind of the way we operate. It's a different world. We're not showing up and coal anymore. You know it. Well, Pete, thank you so much for coming on.

It's been a real pleasure talking with you today. Well, Mike, thank you very much for your time, and look forward to chatting soon. 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.influentialentrepreneursradio.com.