Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Roy Snarr, Founder of Snarr Retirement Solutions & Annuity Producers.com

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Roy Snarr stands at the forefront of asset protection expertise, a nationally acclaimed figure renowned for his mastery and educational contributions.With a career spanning 14 years, Roy’s impact spans across both consumer and agent realms, where he simplifies today’s most complex safe money and protection strategies. Proficient in Annuities, Life Insurance, and Long-Term Care solutions, Roy’s guidance has empowered thousands of individuals and agents from coast to coast.His influence extends through various media platforms, including television, radio, webinars, and live speaking engagements. Consistently ranked among the Top 1% of financial professionals nationwide for over a decade, Roy’s dedication and wisdom have set high standards in the industry, as he continually inspires entrepreneurs to consider how they are giving back to their communities.Beyond his personal and professional aspirations, Roy finds great joy in camping adventures with his wife and cherished trio of children.Learn more: http://www.roysnarr.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-roy-snarr-founder-of-snarr-retirement-solutions-annuity-producers-com

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 Roy Starr, who's the founder of Snar Retirement Solutions and annuity producers.com. Roy, welcome to the program. Thank you. Hey, I'm looking forward to talking with you because I know that you have done a thing or two in your career,

and I want to dive into how you serve advisors. But before we do that, get us started with your story and background, and how did you get into the financial services industry? Yeah, I'd love to. Very interesting. I have zero background, and so does my family. We're a bunch of basically glorified hillbillies. I grew up doing construction, working on a farm,

commercial logging, pretty much anything but white collar stuff. I was all just hands on. And as I was going through college, I realized quickly that I didn't want to do the same type of physically demanding labor. And when I was about 14, what initiated my original interest in the financial services space was that my mother became disabled. And we lost virtually everything. And this happened during the dot-com bubble too. Now at 14, right, I don't know what's going on. I was worried about on cards riding my bicycle. But I saw our family lose virtually everything. I mean, we lost the house.

She lost the car in the accident. She lost her job. All of the savings were depleted. The investments were wiped out. We ended up moving in the middle of high school when I was in high school to a new location with my grandparents four hours away. Like my whole life changed because of one single car accident. And that always stuck with me. So when I was in college, I just started asking around, you know, hey, what are your parents?

I wasn't going to ask my friends for advice. We're trying to bum beer off of each other. I'm not going to get advice on them, but their parents were paying for their school. And I was like, well, what do your parents do for work? And long story short, I bumped into someone who had a friend that was in the financial and insurance industry. And I said, okay, let me go take a look. And I started working in insurance, selling life insurance and final expense and mortgage protection. And that was my foot in the door. And I was 22 when that happened. And today, I'm 37. Yeah. You know, so many times I hear those origin stories, founder stories, and it's like, you know, hey, when I was little, I fell, broke my arm, and this chiropractor, you know, fixed me when no one else could. And that started me down that path. And you had the same path, but the financial services world. And I know that the approach and the industry has evolved and changed over the years. What have you seen in the safe money, retirement, asset protection world in all of these changes? because I know that people turn on the news or look online and they see headlights coming at them 10 different ways.

What are some of those changes you've seen over the years? Yeah, lots of changes. I mean, I remember when I first started, I didn't even have a digital calendar. It was just like a paper notebook that had to call carriers and get rates. And it was a lot different world for sure. But to answer your question more directly, right now we're seeing some of the highest interest rates in nearly 20 years, right? And a lot of the safe money strategies, they're based on the current bond yields. And so right now, we're seeing some awesome income payout factor numbers for income annuities.

We're seeing some great growth potential. And this is all regarding the safe buckets of fixed index annuities. So we're seeing all these great rates. And we're also seeing a lot of market volatility. So it's literally a perfect storm for agents to help educate consumers on taking some of that risk, not all of it, but some of that risk off the table to reposition into an asset class that can still yield them. two to three times what the historical inflation rate is while preserving their assets and mitigating market volatility and also eliminating the majority, if not all, of the fees on the money in itself.

The other headline that we have is the age group, right? The demographic shift of these boomers and more people turning 65 and really needing these services. You know, if you name the date and time and say, look what the market is doing today, then two weeks later, it's going to be doing something different. Two months later, something different. We know that markets move and risk of volatility. But in the times when the markets are doing great, it could be a little bit more difficult

to say to a client, you know, hey, let's mitigate that risk and volatility because they're like, it's been going up, up and more up. Yes. When it's choppy, that becomes so much easier because here comes now the headline to their portfolio statement, the call from the advisor going, hey, your portfolio took a big hit. Well, now when you start talking about some of these guaranteed or safe money buckets, that conversation becomes so much easier, right? Oh, it does for sure. I mean, even during the high times, I mean, people have a short attention span and a very short memory span because if you recall 2001 and 2008, that wasn't too long ago.

And when I bring that back up, I said history may indeed repeat itself. Obviously, there's no crystal ball, but statistics and math and history shows that it will. And even when markets are really high, one of the quick analogies I use with folks that I go, look, my accounts are up high too. And they'll say, yeah, my advisor or my person or institution's doing great. I go, everyone's doing great. My daughter, seven, can invest and do just as well. I mean, everyone's doing it when all tides are rising, right? But one of the analogies I use to help share that is like, imagine if you're at Vegas and you're at the casino table and you're just knocking out of the park. You're playing blackjack. You're up on your chips. You're just doubling your money.

Things are great. Do you ever think it's a good idea to take at least some of those chips off the table? just to preserve because you don't know what the next hand is going to be. And they go, yeah, that makes sense. I go, well, that's another way to look at this. Let's take some of the appreciation that you are receiving right now and have received and just take a small portion of it and just reposition it. And that's how we phrase things because I think a lot of agents, they get too aggressive and they want to try to move too much money of a client's portfolio.

I go very small. I go, hey, look, let's just take a small portion, maybe 10 or 20 percent and just park it to something safe while it's still yielding these types of returns. Would that make sense to you? And then oftentimes they say, yeah, that's total sense. And then I start low and then they usually end up putting more in than I even initially spoke about. I like that approach better than, hey, you have a million dollars.

Let's put 900 of it in here, which you shouldn't do anyway. But that's what a lot of agents do. And then people are like, no, I don't want anything to part of it. I just take a very small, slow step approach and it's worked very well for us. You know, and when you realize that so many other people are going for, you know, the grand slam, let's take it all and put it right here. All of a sudden, when you are taking that approach, you just mentioned, like, well, would it make sense and feel pretty safe to take just this little piece of it?

It engenders trust. And I feel like that approach right there is just a tip of the iceberg of how you are advising your team, your advisors to work with your clients, being that trusted advisor, teaching, educating them, because all of a sudden now, the next piece of advice you bring up is going to be more well received. Is that what you found to in kind of that human psychology? I have. And I like the approach because a lot of us in this space, you know, we don't want to be seen as the salesperson, the used car salesman. And unfortunately, it is a sales practice, right? But we take it from an educational perspective and we just show folks, hey, look, this is what you

could do. Here's some options. And you know, you don't have to do everything, maybe just a small portion of it unless you really want to put 100% at risk. If you're going to go all in on your poker hand, go for it's your money, it's your life. You can do what you like, but perhaps you safe hold just a little small portion of it and park it over here. And that type of conversation makes it very easy for them because I even tell people, I was like, now look, this may be a much different conversation than what you're having with other advisors because guess what? Everyone wants your money. The banks want it. The brokerage houses want it. The advisors want it. The agents want. Everyone wants it. Let's be real. They go, yeah, that's true. My position here,

I just want to help you with a small portion that I think there's a level of need for. Let me educate you on what it can do. And if it makes sense for you, great. I just want to help you with that small portion. I'm not here to try to take over everything. And they really appreciate that. And by taking that approach, it's almost like the takeaway. Like they want more of what I have to offer and want to work with me even more because

I didn't come at them at the approach of let me take everything, give me your tax returns and, you know, your mother's made a name and passwords. I just, I do a very slow approach. and it takes longer. And could we close bigger deals and more deals by being aggressive? We could, but it's just not our style. And it makes life money easier too. Well, and it's kind of like you are not closing a deal.

You're opening a relationship. And the only way to properly open a relationship is creating that rapport. And, you know, our sales commission breath fires up when we start going, ooh, we need to do this and that. But that teaching educational approach is huge. Tell me a little bit about why your focus on long-term care training is such a vital part when you're working with advisors. Is that something that really spikes up the need in their clients? Oh, 100%.

So I actually have a seminar training program, and we do it on Social Security, okay? But during the Social Security seminar process, I talk about long-term care. And here's why I talk about it. Number one, I'm passionate about it. wrote a book on it too, because I went through it with my grandparents. It was terrible. Yeah. And I quickly realized after a few years in this industry, once I gained some experience,

like, why isn't anybody talking about this? Like, there's no one really going after long-term care. I was like, this is crazy. The client should at least be educated on it, whether or not they're going to buy it. That's up to them. But it should at least be educated on it. And it is by far the best door opener we've ever experienced. Because I'll tell you what, the biggest objection that we're going to get in this industry

is not because of the product or the rates, it's because they already have a pre-existing relationship. And you have to find a way to either partner with that other person or drive a wedge. Long-term care is the perfect door opener. And I tell people, even during my seminars, we train our agents on this too, we tell them, look, even if you're working with somebody right now, and they are your best friend, you used to babysit them, they're your advisor, you love paying fees, whatever the story is, that is okay with us. Let us at least help you with the long-term care. all your advisor, we'll all meet together because we have a specialty in asset preservation that they may not have. Their goal is to asset accumulation where we are asset preservation. And that

has opened us up to tons of opportunity. We build relationships with a client. We respect the fact that they have a preexisting relationship. And then what it does is that now that advisor that's working with them, they are referring their clients to us for long-term care. And we're we just have an agreement that we're not going to cross-sell any annuities or anything. We're just going to focus on the long-term care. And now I have another referral partnership. So I would say that out of every workshop that we do, about 25% of the room on average, is this going to come sit down with us purely for long-term care?

And the main reason why, no one's ever asked them the question. No one's ever showed them the options. But at the same time, isn't it a really high percentage chance that someone will need long-term care, meaning if you ask 10 people off the street, won't eight or nine of them go, I've got a friend or a family member in long-term care, and I know it's super expensive. Yeah, very true. I mean, it's going to affect the majority of folks, and it's what Medicare does not cover, right? Medicare covers zero days for custodial care and only 20 days fully of skilled nursing.

And so if you look at the statistics, depending on which one you read, it's between 50 and 70% of people that are going to need some form of care. I mean, I tell people that too. It's like a lot of agents market on the 70% because it's scarier. But that's, if you really look into it, it's not quite 70. But the reality is like, it's a coin toss. But 50 is huge. It's huge.

I said, and then people are like, well, I'm going to self-insure. I'm like, yes, I'm the biggest proponent of self-insurance. There's two ways to do it. Your own money, which is unleveraged, not necessarily tax advantage and unguaranteed. Or you can have it where it's leveraged, guaranteed, and income tax-free. What self-insurance bucket would you? rather be in. And then they're like, oh, I never heard of that. I was like, yeah, you think these insurance companies are just going to give you free insurance because you're nice? No, you're

still self-insuring. You're just doing it a much more intelligent way. And some of the kind of original long-term care policies worked similar to like car insurance where you pay your premium, you drive for a year or two. If you had a wreck, they're going to cover it. But if you didn't, they don't send your premiums back. These days, there's a lot more opportunity with these, the, the, the policies you're talking about like with some annuities or some types of life insurance where there's long-term care in there. And if you need it, it's there. But if not, it's not like an expense. Talk a little bit about those doors that get opened. Yeah, because the traditional model, a lot of people have a negative connotation around long-term care, and for a very good reason, too. I mean, there's just

nothing but bad news about it, about rate increases, big companies jacking up rates 600 percent. And it's just, it's very unfortunate for the consumer who's done the right thing and paid their bill on time and all of a sudden an insurance company says, sorry, we miscalculated and now you've got to pay for it. And so we focus on, and I've been doing this for 15 years, I've never helped anybody with the traditional long-term care policy. Again, there's nothing wrong with them per se, but their contracts read that they can increase the rates. And I don't want to deal with that. So I tell people, you can find this cheaper today, but what's it going to be in five years or 10 years? Who knows? We focus on asset-based LTC, which has an opportunity to refund the money back,

if not more than what they actually put into it to the family if they never use it. You can even design these policies where they're 100% liquid. Not that's the real purpose of the money, but at the same time, for some people, they like the idea of just getting their premiums back. And I just relate to it to home and auto. I was like, imagine how long have you been paying for auto insurance? Oh, man, I've been paying it for 40 years. Okay, how many actions have you been in?

A lot of people say none. I'm like, okay, are you ever going to get any of that money back? No. Okay, so why are you complaining? Like, it's more likely that you're going to need long-term care. than it is, you're going to exercise the dwelling contract of your homeowners insurance, right? And so, but people have no problem at all paying off paying homeowners insurance on a house that's paid off, even if they don't have to. So when I relate that to them, they go, wow, that's a very

interesting perspective. So the whole point to what you said earlier, it's all about relationship building, sharing stories, having them to talk about their experiences, and just being real with folks. Like, this is just reality. You don't have to get it, but do you think it's more likely that you're going to utilize your homeowners insurance policy or you're going to get older and eat assistance. I mean, I'm not encouraging you to cancel homeowners. I'm just saying, like, there's a different perspective here. I want you to see that. And when people see that, then they generally move forward on the LTC.

And so once an advisor sees that that is such a huge honeypot, you know, a big opportunity where it's not being really focused on, what are some of those trainings that you provide them to kind of get everything congealed into a nice system? I know that you've got trainings and you mentioned the book, but talk a little bit about that support that you provide. Yes. What makes us unique is that we have the only 100% focus asset-based long-term care training platform and annuity platform that's not IMO driven.

It's not recruiting driven. It's purely education. We have roughly 100 to 150 agents every single week from all over the country, join our weekly live Zoom calls. We host a national annual conference where we have a few hundred agents come out here in Austin, in Texas and get to learn in a two-day boot camp. There's no sales pitch, no recruiting, no motivation, rah-rah. It's all peer information.

That's what makes us really different. And what we do is we actually show on each week's call, hey, look, this is how we utilize this long-term care structure. Here's the objections. Here's how we did the case design. We show the illustration. We walk through the entire process. And we've been very fortunate now through these calls to be able to impact hundreds and

hundreds of agents on a weekly basis, but also thousands of potential clients. clients get coverage indirectly. So it's really rewarding and self-fulfilling for us because long-term care is something that is just dramatically underserved. Yes. And then also you have a revenue share kind of partner program and that benefits the advisors like you were saying where it's like, okay, you handle everything else. So talk a little bit about that relationship. Yeah, it's pretty unique because there's lots of IMOs, broker dealers. You know, everyone wants your contracts. That's just, you know, just like everyone wants the client's money. Everyone wants our contract.

We get called all the time, right? And so the difference that we do is, number one, we're just real. We're actually agents out in the field producing in our office. And we offer a unique program called the Accelerator Program. And there's two ways to take advantage of it. One way, we have some really big partnerships with large firms and then also just individual agents that they don't want to write long-term care. They're focused on just purely annuities or life insurance or Medicare.

But they also don't want to leave money on the table and they want to be able to serve their client. so they refer it to us. And so we basically become a division of their agency. We're all independent. But they just say, hey, look, we have a long-term care specialist team. They're going to help you with it. And then we put them right on the application.

So they get a revenue share and we get a revenue share. And we do all the work, A to Z with the client. They don't do anything. I mean, some of our partnerships are making a few hundred thousand dollars a year. They don't even know what's going on. They just get direct positive commissions from the insurance carriers. And they book people on our calendar. So it works really well that way.

And then for the agents that want to sell long-term care, they really want to learn, they hop on the Zoom calls or the in-person meetings with the client and I or our team. They see how the process is done. They do that for five or ten times. And then they can go off on their own and get 100% of the commission and not share with us since we're doing the work. And so we have agents that want to learn. They do that. Or we have agents that like, we're not even want to mess with it.

We're just going to refer it all to you. You guys take care of it. And so it works out well for everyone. Yeah, that's awesome. So let's wrap up with this thought. I know you have paid your dues put in the hard work over the years to build your personal and business brand. What advice would you give advisors looking to really dig their own spot in this in this world to get some of that national recognition you've earned and then turn that into production? Yeah, I think one of the best ways you've got to get education.

Okay, this is what I tell people. It's like you can read 100 books and watch YouTube videos on how to ride a bicycle. But until you get on, you're not going to learn how to do it. Okay, so you have to just jump in and actually do it. And so what we always offer, it's a free training call once a week. They could just hop on, learn. There's no contract commitment or anything. It's just, like I said, we have hundreds of agents every week to hop on.

And so that's one way. You've got to get some education from somebody who is not a wholesaler. These wholesalers at IMOs, they've never sold anything because if they were selling insurance, they wouldn't work on an IMO, right? And so you need real life experience from someone, whether it's us or somebody local to you. find someone that actually has a track record of success and take advice from them. And if you don't have anyone in your sphere of influence, start doing your own research. There's only about five top LTC asset-based companies out there.

Just call the companies, get your appointment, read about all the products, practice running the software illustrations, and then start talking to people about it. I mean, the number one reason why people don't buy, just the same story of life insurance, they were never asked. And so it doesn't hurt to ask and educate people. And you can become a long-term care expert with probably, in two weeks. I mean, you don't have to know that much to be an expert compared to everyone else. And I would suspect that you're finding that there's false, I don't know, what do you think of

it as, you know, unrealistic misconceptions. People hear long-term care and they go, oh, well, I've heard this or I assume that. And once you get that good, solid, careful education and you can communicate it, now all of a sudden that sets you head and shoulders above the rest because when there's confusion, there's opportunity for clarity. That's correct, exactly, because there's a lot of negative connotation out there, but it's rooted in misinformation. They actually just take the time to research. What happened with long-term care?

Why is it having issues? What are the rate increases? I mean, literally within the few hours of Googling, you could find out all this information, but agents and advisors are naturally lazy, right? And so they have to take the time to actually dedicate. Like, even ourselves. I mean, we're top producers. We're number one with most.

carriers in the nation, but we still spend a few hours every week reading about plans, reading news articles, just to stay relevant and current. And that's what it takes to become an expert and to be successful. I mean, if you just want to pedal your way through and just buy online leads or do some mailers every now and then, you can still make it. But if you really want to excel in this industry, you've got to become an absolute expert and be able to answer questions. And you've got to be able to hop on the phone with a top-in advisor. Like, I had a call with an advisor that manages a billion dollars, and now they're referring long-term care to us. And I never thought they would do that, right?

You guys obviously know how this all works, and we need to fulfill our fiduciary duty. We don't really deal in long-term care. We'll just use you as our partner. You need to get to that level where you can have those conversations because it'll really help you win. Love it. Well, Roy, thank you so much for coming on. If someone is interested in learning more about all of your support and programs, what's the best way they can do that? annuity producers.com. They could just check out that site, join the Zoom calls, get free information,

check out our annual conference. That's the best site. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Roy. I appreciate your time coming on today. Hey, thank you, Mike. That's fun. 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.com.