Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Tracy Lownsberry, Founder of The Annuity Giants

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

A top-producing annuity-focused agent, global annuity trainer, and recognized as one of the most influential voices in the annuity space. He has sold millions in annuities virtually and in person.He continues to test new ideas, develop new tools, and stay on the front lines as a daily producer so the training advisors get is always current, practical, and built from real experience.What Tracy Brings to the Table✦ Actively producing an expert. Not just theory.✦ Creator of AG Simulator and AG Academy✦ Expert contributor to Aspire Mag., U.S. News, Insurance News Net, Forbes, and more✦ Knowledge-Based Sales Practice✦ Virtual and in-person sales experience across all markets✦ Known for an educational, client-first approachGod first.Father of 3 boys.Husband to wife Elizabeth. Been together 13 years.Learn more: http://www.theannuitygiants.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-tracy-lownsberry-founder-of-the-annuity-giants

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 Tracy Lounsbury, who's the founder of the annuity giants. Tracy, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Mike. Hey, I'm excited to talk with you because you are in the industry and you are training advisors on how to approach annuities. And I love the giant. You know, let's let's not just say, you know, the annuity guys. It's really the annuity giants. You stand head and shoulders above others. That's the connotation I get from that. So I'm excited to learn from what you're doing in the industry. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your background and story. How did you get into the financial services industry?

Yeah. It's great to be here. So I've been in the industry now since 2017, so coming up on a decade. And I came from a law enforcement and military background. The easy short story is just it didn't work out for me. And the big man upstairs had a different plan for me. And I stumbled across the insurance side and worked for an insurance company and then worked under a registered investment advisory firm and then started my own firm. And, And it has been a pretty wild ride since then. I changed my practice a couple times. About five years ago, I made this switch to focus specifically on annuities. I've been learning about annuities for the past 10 years, but wanted to make that switch because it's just I found that there was a lot more intricacies with them. And I was really passionate about learning them and then really kind of turned my practice from just insurance only to really diving into the finance world and the tax. world, the estate planning world, just because they all have, there's a symbiosis between them all. And in doing that, was very fortunate to have been one of the earlier adopters of Facebook groups

and growing them. And I had one. And that is what kicked off basically a training platform that I have. And now I teach in coach advisors and agents and RAs and FMOs and NMOs and carriers on. annuities, been in some product design meetings, which is awesome, as well as some index development through some investment banks. And it's just, it's been really fun. It's been really enjoyable. I like it. Yeah. You know, and no matter what, you know, like vertical within the financial services, people seem to take, you know, whether it's, you know, let's talk about money

management. Let's talk about, you know, annuities. Let's talk about insurance. There always are changes. And so I feel like too many times any, you know, if you miss out on a change or two or an update or two in the, you know, political side of things which impacts the industry or the tax side of things, which impacts the industry, there's always something to keep up on. And the fact that you don't try to become all things to all people is huge. So that when you're working with an advisor or a client, you know, your mind is wrapped around all things annuities. Why not take that traditional investment path like, you know, just let's let's manage your whole portfolio. Why is it, what was it that attract you to focus on just that one thing?

Because there is a big temptation is to go, well, we can also, why focus on just that one vertical? Yeah, it's a really good question. I've been asked that quite a bit because I actually refer quite a bit of business or referral partners that are financial advisors. And people have always asked me, why don't you just do it yourself or hire an in-house one? And so I, you know, it kind of started as, you know, I'm going to make this transition from insurance only to kind of like finance insurance products, which is, which definitely is a difference, Sarah. So, although it's still insurance. And I just found a lot of success in just doing that. And it was it was a lifestyle practice. It was also monetary. I mean, it was both. And I said, you know, if I don't have to take on more from a capacity standpoint, because now when you enter the space of managing assets and, you know,

full financial planning. It can it can kind of consume you where you're feeling like you're getting stretched in a lot of different directions. And you might miss some important intricate details within certain, you know, certain areas of finance. And so you know what? I don't have to do that. I can continue to dive deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the annuity world.

And just rely on partners for the things that I don't know. And I found success. And that was that was okay with me. I was like, you know what? I'll refer this out, this need out, and I'll grow other people's businesses. Why, you know, it was kind of like, why do I need to be greedy and taken on? Not to say that people are greedy that do that. But I just decided, you know what, let's have the, you know, the experts, the nights at

the round table, let it be all separate people instead of it being the jack of all trades. Yeah, I love it. And I feel like I know that in my personal career, 17 years ago starting a marketing firm, the temptation was there and I took it, which was wrong. which is, oh, I've got a family to support. I started a marketing firm. I need to do any kind of marketing for any kind of person. And it just, you were just a pebble in the ocean.

But when you start specializing and getting really good, then that whole, you know, Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours kicks in. You become known. You become really, really good at that. And so I love that you did that. And I know when you work in the industry, whether it's with your advisors or RIAs or IMOs you're working with or even clients, the word of, newity brings sometimes strong opinions and sometimes they're misguided, miscalculated opinions because of what

the media might say, you know, you hear the radio or the news ads like, oh, these are bad. Why do you think people have that misconception? Well, honestly, I always take this approach. And again, that's a great question. I take this approach of, I don't know if it really is, if it really is a misconception. I think there are a lot of newties in the past that, you know, there's kind of, twofold. It's the design of the annuity and then it's the implementation of the annuity. And so the implementation, that's the advisor's fault. The design, that's the carrier's fault. And so I think there

was a lot of annuities in the past and even now that have just a lot of design flaws. They have a lot of smoke and mirrors and it's unfortunate and it's really hard for a client or a prospect or just a regular senior to understand and work through those smoke and mirrors. It's like you don't know what you don't know. And I also feel like a lot of advisors and agents are really getting sucked into that where it's an ignorance issue and they really don't know what questions to ask to find out if that actually is a good product. But then the second part is the implementation behind it. I truly think that out of the thousands of annuities that I've probably audited, I could probably count on maybe two hands, maybe I got to get my toes involved, how many were appropriately positioned in my,

in my opinion, I guess. So it's rare. Most of the time, I'll be honest, it's not the fact that somebody didn't need an annuity. It's more they put too much in or sometimes too little in. They had the wrong expectation on what it was going to do for them and it was the wrong product or funded with the wrong money or on the wrong spouse or whatever. There's always like these details that were just missed, that should never be missed. Maybe it's just the standard that we hold, but that's normally where the problem is, yeah, and that means, and that reiterates to the point we were just making a second ago. If you're dabbling with annuities, you're probably going to not know all of those intricacies. If you become a specialist, then you're going to know how to,

you know, take the needs of that client and put them with that right annuity. Probably if we stopped 10 people on the street right now that had, you know, the appearance that they might need an annuity, you know, gray hair, you know, ha ha. But anyway, if you were to say, hey, annuities good or bad, all the people that would say bad, probably if you press them and say, oh, why is that? I feel like people would go, well, I just, I can't put my finger on it, but I've just always heard. And that becomes a problem. They don't know what they don't know. And they can't put their finger on it. But the ones that could might just point to some of those old, like, oh, well, high fees.

or, you know, the return you lose money, well, maybe back in the old days or in the older versions, you know, that was the case. But today, there can be the great annuities out there, but you got to know which ones are the good ones. So I really like your approach there in when you can have that specificity of your focus, it's going to really have that cream riced at the top. Exactly. And then I agree 100%. I think a lot of folks, they truly don't know why does they feel the way,

they do or they have the thoughts that they have. It's just something that it could be all of the negative negativity around like there's advertisements around it. There's interviews and podcasts around it. There's financial shows. There's financial, you know, companies that are very anti-annuities. And they just, they see that because it's in their face and they just start to believe it without ever asking a question.

And before you know it, they get to the age where they could be appropriate for one. And then boom, they never explore it. Yeah. So just like when we bought Shark Tank and it's like, like, oh, you know, I was looking for this solution to this problem and it just didn't exist. So I made it and here I am, right? That kind of thing. You must have seen some gap in the retirement planning world for a properly structured annuity for the right person at the right time.

So why did you create the annuity giants? What was that gap that you saw? Yeah. So essentially, I'm out there meeting with clients every single day and it's like constant. up against kind of like this this this this monster right which is you know we used to lead with this marketing that was kind of it kind of danced around the word annuity because we didn't want to scare people away and we knew that hey if we could kind of get you in the door then we kind of mention it and educate you on it we would have a better chance on you being more open to it

versus like if we did an advertising that was a nudity specific you know they're already not walking through the door and I changed my tune on that over time and I said you know in the early parts of my career, I found myself, honestly, kind of like, not bait and switching, but kind of. We would lead with one topic, and we would kind of try to bring in annuities,

and I just felt like that was the wrong way to do it. And that's like 99% of annuity marketing these days. And so I said, well, how can we just tackle this head on? So what we did is we found over the years that we can do annuity-specific marketing and educate advisors on it,

so clients and advisors, you just have to lead, with it a little bit differently. You can't lead with like a product benefit. You can't lead with, a product feature. It has to be let's talk about like the negatives of annuities first. And actually people are more interested in that. Well, the reason why I bring that up is because that's actually the same approach that we take with teaching advisors is we saw so many advisors through social media and also just meeting with clients and their advisors being very anti-annuity. We saw, okay, where is this, why is there a gap here? Right. And I started to interview.

interviewing advisors just like, hey, would you mind hop on a phone call with me? I saw this post of yours, or it was literally a prospect we were meeting with and this was their advisor and I would just reach out to him offline and say, hey, listen, I'm not trying to, you know, not trying to take your client, whatever, you know, but I'm just curious why haven't you to explore these options? And believe it or not, a lot of them were pretty receptive and open to having a conversation as long as they knew that your intent was not, there's no malice behind it. And it just, it was this reoccurring a thing where it was just ignorance. It was ignorance upon ignorance upon ignorance. They were putting these negative connotations and features around every type of annuity. Oh, like all these fees, but did you know

there are annuities that don't have fees or all these, you know, surrender penalties? Did you know there's annuities with no surrender penalties? Or they take your money if you die. Did you know there's annuities that have death benefits? And it was just this educational overview with them that brought them to kind of the light, so to speak. And I said, man, there's a, there is something here. And so I just basically started to dive into that and doing a lot of outreach and marketing around advisors and creating my course. And it's just been a lot of fun. And you've mentioned a couple times both on the retail side of research and also researching the actual annuities and with advisors. Research is important to you, right?

Absolutely. Yes. I think that's pretty important because if you didn't spend that much time in research, searching your points of view, then it's just your own personal point of view. And then people are out there just, you know, grabbing on sound bites. And speaking of sound bites, you've already mentioned that some financial professionals criticize annuities, whilst others consider them a cornerstone of retirement planning. Why do you think that is? You know, again, you've touched on the fact that, you know, you hear a radio show or you click on something online or a social media post and it's like,

oh, he's bad. Why? Why? Why do they very? those organizations or people or big companies cast some shade on annuities? So I think there's a lot of reasons why I think some of the main ones are they truly, truly believe that their practice without annuities, they can service a client, a client's needs better through their own practice than adding an annuity to it. I do think there are organizations like that. And I also think that there's ignorance involved. I think, again, they're grouping a bunch of annuities into one, you know,

that whole high fee stuff and, you know, illiquidity and all this stuff. They're grouping it into one and they're just not, they're not exploring it more. And I think the third category is that in some organizations, it's been a cornerstone of how they've built their practice. There's a couple of them out there that are very anti-annuity. and that's their stance and has been their stance for decades and decades. And if they were to ever turn on it, that would just obviously blow up their entire kind of marketing ploys that they put out there. So I think that's just one of those things where they're too deep in the hole already.

I could never go. And honestly, it's working for them. So, you know, from a business standpoint, whatever, it works for you, works for you. Do I think it's honest? No. But do they think it's honest. And maybe they do. Maybe they truly don't like it.

But whatever, that's, I mean, they're going to, they're going to. That's their, that's their, a road that they've hoed. Yeah, that's true. So in annuity giants, what is the training and support you give advisors? Because I'm sure that any carrier would say we give training and support, but what do you do differently in annuity giants? Yeah, so I think the big part here is that I'm not owned by a carrier. I'm not owned by a marketing organization.

You know, I am, it's a subscription only. You can come and go as you please. we don't promote anything out there. You're never going to have a, you're never going to have a bias on it. Because whether you sell an annuity or not, it doesn't affect me, right? Your membership does,

which actually means that I need to be, you know, on my game when it comes to training advisors. So when somebody comes in as a member, we really focus on, let's start from the beginning, make sure that you have the right grounding and structure,

just like you're building a house. Let's build that foundation. We've had guys that come, in and gals that come in that are, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 year veterans. And then their first three, four, five videos that we, we, we, we have in there, they're, they're already learning a lot that they haven't, they haven't learned before. And so it's kind of like a rewiring. So whether you're a veteran or, or not, we start with that foundation. And then we're just going to build from there and kind of meet you where you're at. The entire course is designed around, um,

kind of like documents and structuring around, um, video series. And it's all the way from foundation to, prospecting systems organization through also what we call like virtual ride-alongs where you can actually go watch client meetings that I've had and recorded. And you can see exactly how I'm treating that relationship, how I'm going through annuity education, how I'm handling objections, how I'm working through the entire lead to client journey so that you can take those pieces and make your practice better. And then we also even take it a step further and we help you with things like marketing through some courses that trial and error that we've had. And as well as we have a pretty cool tool in there where it's like, it's kind of like a Monte Carlo and it's a simulation tool

that kind of shows you the impact of annuities historically. Neat. So I like how you said that you don't get compensated for if and when they close an annuity. You just want them to succeed better because you've got skin in the game because you want them to stay in your membership, but you don't care if they choose this carrier or this annuity over the other. So that's really helpful. And I like those tools that you mentioned. You know, you mentioned trial and error and things that you've done that have worked and not worked. And maybe you would even say to someone, you know, this one didn't work for me, but let's explore if this, you know, whatever, initiative or outreach would work for you because. And so I think that's neat. And I really resonate with that right along because where, where back in the day in the late 90s, early 2000s, I was in the mortgage industry. And I remember there were some top producers that would say, hey, come out and do a site visit to my office, pay us whatever it was, X number of dollars, and fly out, we'll host you for the day. You can watch everything we do. You can sit on our meetings. We'll give you documents. And these days, and that was, you know, before the advent of, you know, virtual and Zoom, you know, was prevalent. These days,

it's so much easier to do what you just said and go, hey, here's my exact, you know, here's the recording and here's what I do and I think that kind of like behind the scenes behind the curtains look is really really powerful for people because they see you putting it into action not just plain you know here's this PDF or here's this video to watch exactly yeah it's it's powerful and that's that's a big part of actually why people stay in because we're constantly recycling content in there as well so people really really like the you know hey how has how has my process change from like my earlier videos to my videos now. And it's just this ever evolving. I'm out on the field doing it every day. I'm dealing with the same issues everybody else is dealing with. Only I'm

now regurgitating, hey, I did this. Don't do this. This sucked. It didn't work for me. Or hey, I did this. This worked super well. Try it out. And if you went back in history a year or two, it doesn't mean that that particular approach was wrong. It just means that times have changed. You know, it's really interesting how we as humans and consumers, you know, we have different ways we consume information now. Did it mean that before it was the wrong way? No, that was right for then. And now you have to stay up with the times. But to your point about those companies that just stick with, you know, we've already done it this way, you're looking at it going, hey, you know, I've pivoted a little bit.

Here's what's working for me now. So let me just tell the group and come along with me and this is what I'm doing. And here's what the reason I made these changes. Exactly. Yep. Hit on the head. So kind of wrapping up with this thought, think in the future, what legacy or impact do you hope the annuity giants will create and leave in the industry in the lives of your clients and advisors that you work with? Yeah. So this is a big push for me. It's changing the industry in a way that is just going to move it into a positive direction. because I do feel that most of the products, and I do, I'm very strong in that, most of the products and annuities that are written and implemented today are often some way, shape, or form. Sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot of it.

So I think what I would like is for people that come into the annuity Giants Academy, that they leave, if they do ever leave, that they leave knowing exactly how to problem solve appropriately. for annuities. And right now we're just seeing a big gap there. You know, it's either on one hand, it's your way to pro annuity and you're trying to put them in every single person's situation. And you're not, you're not actually, you're not in a position to, to explain to somebody that they shouldn't be an annuity. Whether that's because of malice or not. I don't know. And then there's the other side, which is they never use annuities. And again, I could understand that. somebody's practice was, you know, targeting 20 to 40 year olds. But anybody in the retirement space, that, to me, that just shows some level of a fiduciary

breach if they are not using annuities, unless they have 10 clients and they targeted super high net worth people or something. So, yeah, I want to have that legacy, that impact that, you know, we, we are changing the industry for good. Yeah. And, you know, the phrase comes to my mind, real is rare. And it just is so rare that people are real to go, here's the real truth. Let's educate on it. Let's show the words and the spots and help you navigate through and past and over and under that so that we're presenting quality products to the right people and they understand it. They don't feel like they're confused. And that's just such a great mission, Tracy. So if someone is interested in learning a little more about annuity giants, what's the best way they can do that and reach out and connect with you? Yeah, so pretty big on social media. So you can always find me on LinkedIn.

That's my main social media platform. It's just Tracy Allen-Lounsbury, the second, I believe, on there. And then you can always go to The Annuity Giants with an S.com. Check out our website. We also offer free trials as well right now if somebody ever wants to explore it. Or you can email us and set up a demo or a conversation with me. The email is support at the annuity giants.com. Excellent, Tracy. Thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure

chatting with you. Thank you, Mike, and thanks for having me. 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.