Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Kevin Nuber Financial Advisor Development Consultant with Simplicity

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Kevin Nuber started with an IMO / FMO called LifePro Financial Services in 2004 where he worked for 20 years and helped the company build, scale, and ultimately capitalize the business. As a stock holder, he was able to experience the problems a business faces and what it was like to ultimately capitalize. Now Kevin partners with financial advisors who want to stop being product sales people and instead want to become confident business owners and build a business bigger than just themselves.Learn More: https://www.kevinnuber.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-kevin-nuber-financial-advisor-development-consultant-with-simplicity

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 Kevin Nuber, who is a financial advisor development consultant with simplicity group. Kevin, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Mike. Hey, I'm excited to talk with you because when we met a few weeks ago, I just really loved your mindset and mentality of how you serve advisors.

So I want to hear all about your background and story. So tell us a little bit about how you got into the business and what is it that drives you and why are you so passionate about helping advisors grow? Sure, great question. I think it's important for everybody to have a passion in their business, whether it's me or an, advisor that I'm working with. But I started in the business over 20 years ago. And as I got into the business, I was a brand new person, not really knowing what I was doing or where I was going, very much like I would think advisors getting into this business when they first get licensed and they try to try to all of a sudden conquer the world as a financial advisor. And the company that

I got to be part of, it was very much in like this build phase of building a company. I mean, they were just trying to pay the bills and get things together and actually run an functional company. And as the company grew over the 15 years that I worked for them, I grew too within the company and I got to watch this company mature and go through these different distinct phases of company growth. And by the end of this company, the, you know, I had moved up in my position within the company and I had become a stockholder in the firm. And I got to watch how the founder of this company was able to strategically set up his firm so that if something ever happened to him, then his business would live beyond,

you know, just himself. He was the personality of the company, right? Like he was the person up on stage. He was magnetic. Like everybody was attracted to him. But the problem with that is what happens if all of a sudden something to happen, if he goes away, right? How does that business continue? And unfortunately, you know, he ended up having ALS late in life. And it was a slow form of ALS that took a while to do what it does. And, you know, he was able to step away from the company, let us continue to run the company. And after he passed away, there was a plan put in place to allow us to become the owners of the company. And, you know, we were able to actually sell and capitalize the company. And we were able to get a really high multiple because we had set up a company that

will live beyond the founder. And it's interesting now because now I'm in a position helping financial advisors do a very similar thing. We might have advisors that I meet who are in that build phase, right? They're just trying to get their stuff together. I mean, the biggest problem they face is like, how do I get in front of clients or consistent client acquisition, right? And then they might graduate to that next phase where it's like, okay, I got consistent client acquisition, but now I need, you know, I need to be able to have a sales process. I need to be able to have technology in place. I need to hire people. I need to have a roadmap, build values, mission statements, things like that. And then some of the companies we work with or advisors I

work with are in that mature phase where they're looking like, hey, like, what am I in this for? Am I in here to build a bit, to, am I going to retire with this business? Am I going to sell the company. So setting up a firm so that it is in place that can command a high evaluation multiple so that they do choose to capitalize, that they're going to get the price that they deserve for the company that they've built their entire life. So, you know, in a way, I got to go through this experience with the company that I worked with. And now this is what I find passion in helping advisors do themselves. You know, it's really interesting. We could probably dig in for about three days on that process in that original company that you probably were just in the midst of it, like not even

noticing that frameworks and processes were being built in the middle of just trying to react and respond to what's going on in the middle of that. But yet, probably there was a time where you're like it started to come to fruition and codify and all of that kind of thing, right? I mean, at what point when you were going, was it after the sale? Like after, you know, at the end, you kind of take a deep breath and go, all right, now how do we do that? And then you started putting that together, were you taking notes along the way? Yeah. So here's the critical thing. Now, I was too young and immature at the time to really understand what was going on. Okay. However, once we started getting, and this is over a 15-year period, once we got into the last five years, it was obvious what was happening. But it was only then when

I looked back to the very beginning and I remember some of the very first things I did with the company in the first few years, it was already being set up. It was already being planned for all the way back then. I didn't know it. But all those things were being put in place in order to make sure that this transition or this succession plan or this business that was going to be built was going to be built the right way. But the reason why it happened is because the founder was working with a coach from that

very beginning who helped him set up all these different things into place so that it would happen the way that it happened in the end. Yes. You know, and I think a lot of people like, oh, coach, but you know, professional athletes have coaches. Coaches have coaches. You know what I mean? Absolutely.

Sometimes you've got to have that outside perspective because you cannot see the forest for the trees because you're in the middle of it going, oh, I got to answer that email, that phone call and that appointment. And you don't see that bigger plan. So having that coach and holding yourself accountable. And it actually that now becomes the role you are in helping advisors. and you are not focused on, you know, the minutia. You know, hearing you talk, you're not focused on, oh, I've got this great product that pays this or provides this to clients.

You're focused on something bigger. Talk a little bit about that elevated mindset. What is it? And then why is it that you feel like you focus on that? Why can't you focus on the products and knowledge to get to that level? But you seem to focus on. You got to focus on the higher level and then everything else falls into place. Yes.

So this is very analogous to the journey that advisor goes through too. I mean, when you first get into business, when I first got in the business, I thought the most important thing was product, knowledge, expertise, all the letters behind my name, this show how smart I am, right? And if I just accumulate all this knowledge and expertise and I have the best product that's out there on the market, then magically it's like I'd open up an office, I put up an open sign and people just show up to your office because you have the best product and you know the most. But that's not how reality works. Like that is not what advisors do. That's not what. And I went through this phase of being the product expert as well.

And it wasn't until I learned how to move past that and helped advisors move past that product expert phase to become, you know, a competent business owner. Then all of a sudden their business went and, you know, they broke through that first barrier that they felt like they were stuck within because they realized that there's something more important than product and price and things like that. that really, you know, a client, their ideal client that they're trying to market to, they are looking for help and solutions and change and looking for a person to solve their problems. They don't care about the products so much. And so once you get an advisor to like

breakthrough and stop focusing on that and instead focus on actually creating transformations for clients, regardless of what product it is, what they find, what they realize is it doesn't matter what product they sell. Like they sell any product. A client's going to say yes no matter what, because they have a great process that they're taking a client through. And now all of a sudden, they're like, well, product's not as important. Product at the end of the day is important. We have access to every product on the planet, so it doesn't really matter. But that's just, like, that's just the anti nowadays. Like, everybody has access to product, right? So, you know, how do you differentiate yourself? You know, it's funny you said the word transformation,

because in marketing, I've heard it said two things. You need to sell the futures, not the features, and you need to talk about or sell the transformation, not the transportation. So if you articulate fully the transformation, you'll get when, whatever, like in this case, you know, you're helping a client, what does retirement look like to you? Let's articulate that. Let's paint that picture, the transformation. Well, to your point, it doesn't really matter per se what it takes to get there. They just want to get there. Now, yes, it matters because you want smart, you know, fiduciary-minded, you know, advice and all of that.

And that should be obvious. But it really is the case of where do you want to go? Where are you now? And that transformation is what people resonate with because facts tell but stories sell. Absolutely. I think that the industry has a problem in that, especially with insurance products, is that, you know, insurance companies come out with products. They come out to us, the IMO, and they tell us about all their product features and their new calculators, reports, and we go out to the field and tell our agents about it.

And then the advisors go and talk to their clients about it. The clients don't care about those things. That's what the insurance company cares about, but somehow that trickles down to the advisor. And the advisor thinks this is the most important thing. Like, oh, let me tell you about this new volatility control index or something like that. Yeah. Clients like, I don't care. Like, I don't, I don't not care about this.

And so then the advisor wondered why they can't their strolling closing sales. So you hit the point perfectly. the problem is advisors are focusing on the vehicle they're not focusing on the place that the vehicle is going to take them and so that's the first big step that advisement needs to take is to get stop selling the car and instead sell the destination yeah that's huge well let's talk a little bit more about that that that mindset and mentality and and i think that you know in personal development it's like oh thinking big and and setting big goals and the be hag the big hairy audition goal all of that cliche, but what does that look like in practice for an advisor? How do you start working with them

to help them really elevate their thinking? Because probably you've seen in your career working with advisors like, oh, yeah, I want to hit X production. But in reality, if you start challenging that thinking to go, ooh, we need to like add a zero to that or triple that, then when they really buy into it, they might not hit it year one or two or three, but they're going to get darn close. Well, the wrong way to do it is to go. in and just establish some sort of goal and not really have a plan on how you're going to get there. But the good advisors who have kind of broken, who've gotten into the second phase of what we call the scale phase is that, you know, they have at this point, they're going to have a few different

revenue levers, which is what we call them. And these are revenue levers. Like, they can go pull a lever and they can spend some money on something and get a consistent client acquisition, right? So whether it's workshops or whatever. So, you have to back up and say, okay, like if I know my numbers and I know that I'm spending a certain amount of money on some sort of revenue lever and it's going to generate some sort of number of new appointments and some number of new clients, then I have to go back to the beginning and figure out, okay, well, if I'm going to hit some sort of goals, here's how many events I'm going to have to do, here's how many workshops I'm going to have to do, here's my client events. And you need

to actually plan the calendar out for the entire year and set aside a marketing budget, set aside a the plan and actually go and execute on that plan. And if you start from the beginning and plan out your year that way, you're going to be much more likely to actually hit your goals at the end than if you just go in, you know, without a clear, without a clear plan. Yeah, it's, you know, it's like the old, you know, Stephen Covey begin with the end in mind. You know, you got to start with that and they work backwards and go, okay, if I want to, if I want to land here, then, you know, a year before there, I need to be doing this.

and six months before that, I need to, having that plan in place is critical. And I would even say this, challenging the mindset of that certain end goal is not unnecessarily a matter of Yahoo, I hit it, and now I'm done, you know, wipe your hands and then I'm kicking back. No, it needs to be like, okay, cool, let me take half a beat, take a breath, celebrate for a day, and let's recalibrate. And so what do you advise advisors to do when they kind of create that plan, hit a pretty substantial goal?

What do you do then? Great. So every time that they, so as a, as an advisor is growing and scaling, right, every time they hit certain benchmarks, there's going to be some additional things that are going to have to happen going into the next year. They might have to add new staff or new employees or they might have to go search for different revenue levers. So that's part of the planning process, right? It's important to make sure that you have different places that you can go to in order to generate revenue, not just having one specific thing that you do or else you're at risk of having that funnel break and all of a sudden your business is completely gone, right?

Like think about people who are just doing nothing but dinner seminars and also COVID happen and now they can do dinner seminars, right? So having that planned out. But I think that once you start hitting your goal over and over and over again and you're in the scale phase, something's going to happen that's really critical for an advisor. In order for them to grow to now the next phase, they're going to have to, an advisor can only run so many appointments a week, right? I mean, and you're going to run into a barrier. There's only so much that you can do. So the next critical phase is they're going to have to hire people and they're going to

have to hire other advisors. And the best way is to clone yourself essentially and create another person just like you in your office now that can run more appointments and do more sales. But you can't do that until you actually have all those systems in place. And you have a written sales process that you can that you can coach other people to that you have a company, a brand and staff and support and all those types of things behind it. So, you know, you can't get to that point of scaling and hiring new people until that all that is in place. Yeah, you know, that brings up a good point. So it's kind of like, you know, at some point in, if we would look at the bell curve of the advisor's career, like at the beginning, you're striving and grinding and building and

growing and then you're kind of leveling off and then it's like okay i'm going to go to that scale phase that last phase of the practice a the advisor needs to know what does it look like for me to exit am i going to totally exit am i going to just be the face of the brand be a rainmaker and come in once a month and kind of do some high level things but one one thing that i would say is you brought up a point about you know dinner seminars or seminars or seminars or we can fill in the blanks with a lot of marketing things that advisors do and i would venture to say that you have seen this in your career same as me working with advisors that one advisor goes, oh my word, I'm not going to out of the park with dinner seminars.

The next advisor, you know, four states over goes, I can't get anyone to show up at all. So what works for one might not work for another, but you've got to make it your own, but the proof of concept, meaning once you have tried this one, you know, avenue, lever and really gave it the old college try. You didn't try it for 10 seconds. You really, really tried it. And then this didn't work. Okay, so you move on.

but you find X number of levers that are really, really moving your business. At that point, you then can go, now let me talk about scaling and pour some grease on the fire. What do you advise your advisors to do to discover the right levers? How many levers should they be having to grow and scale? And then how do you really focus on those top two or three to really amplify things? Yeah, great question. So it's very important to have multiple levers to pull from. And you're right, just because I can have.

an advisor in Southern California doing a particular workshop, right? And then we can have somebody just a county away doing the same one. And one can be successful and the one other one can't. Every funnel and success is going to be very much driven based on that advisor, their personal preference, who they are, their unique skill sets, things like that. So it's not perfectly, you know, you can't just copy it perfectly and expect results. An advisor has to stay committed to trying to do a funnel for an extended period of time. You can't just do it once and call it quits. You know, the best advisors out there that you, they get put up on stage and they talk about how much production they do, they've been doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over

again. And that's why they're so darn good at it. So you have to stay committed to it. You can't just go jumping around all the time and getting that shiny ball, you know, syndrome and like chasing a shiny ball off in some direction because you heard an advisor did something and they made some money on it, right? You have to really stay committed and own and make it not just a dinner seminar or whatever, make it like an experience and a client experience. It's something that's unique to you that they're not going to get anywhere else. If you could do that and then once you get one in place, then move it to another place. And sometimes advisors can be like, hey, I'm going to do this in a dinner seminar. Now I'm going to do this in an educational workshop format. That counts as two. Now I'm going to

take it to a webinar. Now that counts is three. Right. So you have different ways you can do it up. I really find that too many times people have shiny object syndrome and they try something like that lever for 10 seconds and go, that didn't work. I remember talking to an advisor once and he goes, yeah, I started doing, you know, he named a lever, you know, a thing he was doing. And it's like, oh, how's that working out for you? And he goes, I don't know yet. I go, oh, really? What do you mean? He goes, I never tried to quantify or assess until after one year. because I want to be all in in both feet, do it, do it well, refine, tweak, polish, and then I look back and I thought, that's the attitude to have because too many people try that dinner seminar once. And it didn't work, well, it didn't work what?

So I think that's huge. And then to your point again about, you know, different, once you find one that actually does work, how do you innovate? Because really the definition of innovation is taking something that works and maybe put a little unique twist to it. One time I heard of an advisor, I forget his name, but he really had a penchant or a talent for stand-up comedy. And some coach worked with him and goes, hey, why don't we come up with some stand-up comedy routine or a one-man show or whatever that it was, all talking about, and I think it was like a one-man show. And he would invite people into like a little movie theater and do his one-man show all around the story about retirement.

That's great. And it just was gangsters. So there's a lot of love. You can't just pick one. You've got to pick some that work with you. But what do you then do when you're working with an advisor that goes, okay, got it. I'm working on these proofs of concept. I want to be that rainmaker in my business. So that I've got, you know, mini me, me 2.0. And I'm just the face of the brand. What does that look like when you're working with the advisor? Perfect. This is when we get into what we call the capitalization phase. This is when now you have a group of people that are that you have a company in that's, running itself, whether you're in there or not. Now, with the brainmaker model, I would say that typically a buyer is still like the face of the brand and still maybe doing workshops and all that. And that's fine. But you have to keep the end in mind once you get to this days because just like

the experience I went through with the company that I worked for before, you know, ultimately that person who's the magnetic person of the company couldn't be anymore. And, you know, you do have to have, make sure that you plan for that end stage where the business that you're building and that you own, it's going to be worth something in the end. And how much that company is worth is very much dependent upon how well that company runs without you. Because if you were ever to capitalize or sell or anything like that, you would effectively be removed from the company at some point. And if that company can't run without you, then it's not really worth anything. So that is a fine model to do with the Rainmaker model, which is very common. But you have to keep them,

you have to keep in mind that you need to be a little plan for the end stage, which is you not being there. Yeah, 100%. There's a whole lot of things that go into that. Of course, it's not just, oh, check the box. So it's a processing. You might need that coach and that outside perspective, and that's what you do working with advisors. So if someone is interested in connecting with you to kind again, a little bit of that picture painted for them, that transformation. What's the best way that they can learn more and connect with you? The best way would be go to my website, which is Kevin Nuber.com. And one example would be for the advisor that's in that end stage, we have a 10 point of valuation checklist that we use in order to audit advisors business and use 10 different factors.

And this is how we would grade you, either red, like, red, yellow, green, as far as, your score. And the more green scores you get in this, the more your company is going to be worked in the end. And so part of our coaching process is to transform that advisor from being a business that's not transferable to one that's going to have a perfect valuation scorecard. Love it. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes,

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