Derrick Kinney on Transformation: Four Turning Points and What Each One Cost

Cold open

Derrick Kinney: I walked to the center of the room and I physically laid down on my back in front of everybody, put my hands across my chest, and I said, “I’ve just had a medical emergency and I can’t see clients for the next three months. What are we going to do?”

It felt like I laid down there for minutes before anybody said anything. I’m like, okay, come on, people, we need this to be interactive. And somebody said, “Hey, should we try to resuscitate him?” So we all got a laugh out of that. But then someone said, “Well, okay, wait a minute. If Derrick can’t see clients, we need to figure out who can.” And the moment I heard those words, Aaron, I quietly stood up, walked back to my chair, and I sat down. And that was the moment of transformation for our business.

Intro

Aaron Klein: Welcome to Beyond the Meeting, the show about what happens after the room clears, where what gets said turns into what gets done.

I’m Aaron Klein. I run a company called Contio, where we’re trying to build AI that gives people more time with each other, not less.

Now, let me get something out of the way up front, because today it actually matters. My guest is Derrick Kinney, and Derrick and I are building something together: a coaching toolkit for financial advisors. I reached out to him because our values lined up. He says it was a quick yes. We’ll get into that at the end, but that’s not why this episode is worth your time.

Derrick bought a financial advisory practice in Dallas that was going to double the size of his business. And within a day, the advisors he had just bought were on the phone calling the clients he’d just paid for, trying to recruit them away. He’s hemorrhaging cash. It’s 2008. His wife asked him whether they needed to talk about bankruptcy. What he did next is the episode.

Stick around to the end. I’ll be back with my three takeaways.

The decision no one was watching: the Dallas deal

Aaron Klein: Derrick, welcome. Super excited to have you on Beyond the Meeting, and I’m super excited to have this conversation, because you’re one of the most dynamic, funniest, and most personable leaders I’ve ever met. But underneath that, I know that you’ve really walked your businesses through some hard challenges. And I want to start with: what’s a decision that you made when no one was watching that truly defined you as a leader?

Derrick Kinney: Well, Aaron, first of all, thanks for having me. I am a big fan of you and your team and Contio, so it’s a real honor to be with you today.

In terms of a decision, I think back to a moment. It might have been the moment I felt most misunderstood, questioned, and people were thinking, “Derrick, are you even sober as you’re making this decision, for goodness’ sake?” People questioned me at a deep, deep level. And it was to make my first major acquisition as a financial advisor.

I’ve lived in Arlington, Texas, where we’re broadcasting right now from, for almost my entire life. But a business in Dallas came available. It was going to double the size of our business, and I knew I should pursue it. I went to my banker. My banker said, “Derrick, even if you had to take money out of your 401(k), drain everything, the cash flow potential of this business is so good.” But the moment I bought it, people questioned me: “How are you going to do this, driving an hour there? You’re not local.”

And what happened, I did not see coming. What I learned was a contract is only as good as the person who signs the contract. I thought I had ironclad non-competes in place, that people would abide by them. The moment I bought the business, these other advisors began to solicit business back to themselves. So literally, I’ve got a payment I’m making now to the owner, who had bundled all these things together, and the advisors that they had previously bought and I then acquired were doing their own thing. I’m hemorrhaging cash from day one.

Just to be candid, this was probably one of the darkest moments of my life, because I’m faced with: I just put my name on a big IOU, and now I’ve got a decision to make. My wife flirted with, “Do we talk about bankruptcy? Do we throw in the towel? What do we do?” And my wife reminded me, she said, “Derrick, whenever you have faced hard things, you’ve not chosen to look backwards. You’ve chosen to go forward and run into it.” And that was the deal. We have no option. The ships have been burned. We are going forward.

What happened was I called one of our clients that I just acquired one day, and I was asking her, “Hey, how can we help?” And she said, “Hey, by the way, you know that the other advisor called me.” It was that call that tipped us off. I ended up having to physically move my office across the highway. We had court proceedings go on. But ultimately, in a personal services business, the only thing you’re buying from a person is their trust and their integrity.

But here’s what happened, Aaron. Here was the good news of all of that. I didn’t die. I didn’t lose a limb. I came out of it pretty well. And what it gave me was courage and boldness: if I did it once, I can do it again. We went on to acquire three other businesses, because I had to go through that level of hard-knocks MBA classes to then be better prepared to bet on myself, knowing that I’ve gone through probably the worst. I can do it again. And I want all of our listeners to have that same mentality as well.

Trust was a bust: what he learned about people

Aaron Klein: That’s such a fascinating story, because the fundamental of financial advisor M&A is that when you create value, you’re creating a book of business that is based on trust. And the transaction of allowing it to be acquired is you’re agreeing to transfer that trust to the new advisor who’s going to take over. I’m just shocked. Maybe the clients just didn’t understand what was going on, but for crying out loud, I would have serious questions about the ethics of the financial advisor who sells their practice, I’m now a client of a new firm, and then comes back and immediately begins to say that I should come follow them. If there’s one service provider I want in my life with really good ethics, it’s probably my financial advisor.

Derrick Kinney: That’s right. In this case, truly, trust was a bust. And there’s a psychology piece that I learned through this process, and that is people crave comfort. Even though they may not have even liked their previous advisor, and I was a better advisor, they still chose to say, “Well, if I can go back with that person, I will, because it’s safe and it’s predictable.” So it wasn’t even an issue for most people, thinking about the value judgments or the integrity, because ultimately, in these decisions, people get to make the decision of what they do. The advisor does the transaction, but the people decide what they do.

So what I learned through that process, and it’s one of the reasons now, having sold one of the top businesses in America within financial planning a few years ago, I’m now teaching advisors: if you want a business that’s booming, focus on the human. Ultimately, all you’ve got is a game you’re playing of how fast you can build rapport and relationship in every interaction. And the quicker you do that, the advisors that know how to do that fast and with trust and with empathy, they win the clients. Most other advisors wonder, well, how do they get those clients when I should be working with them as well?

Kara, Chick-fil-A, and betting on yourself

Aaron Klein: What I find really interesting about that story is that you were able to translate, I started to say the learnings, but holy cow, the punch in the face, the kick in the stomach, into the experience necessary to continue to go do M&A in the financial advisory space. I would say most people would go through that experience and say, never again. I will never again do a transaction like that. What was it that led you, on the second one, to say, I think this one’s going to be different? And more importantly, what led Kara to believe that it was going to be different the second time?

Derrick Kinney: Well, my wife Kara has been a rock. She’s been the one, and luckily, in God’s provision, I met her at Chick-fil-A. So we go way back, before we had anything.

I graduated college, got a job as a marketing director for a startup software company, but I realized they’re the ones telling me what my value is. And typically it’s going to be a 2% raise every year. And I had a decision to make. Do I let someone else tell me my value every year, or do I put the chips on Derrick and give the wheel a spin and place that bet? And she was with me every step of the way, and is still today.

One of the things that I learned in buying that practice, first of all, it took me out of my comfort zone. But I learned a very valuable lesson, and this is what often holds advisors back when they know they are better than what their current revenue numbers say. They know there’s more potential inside of them, but they feel like it’s bottled up. They want to wait for the perfect transaction. Well, once this is here, and the price has to be perfect, and once that’s in place. And another advisor’s already scooped it up and said, I will make that deal perfect, and moved on.

So what I learned is you have to get into the arena. That famous Roosevelt quote, the man in the arena. Once you do the deal, once you sign your name on the line, you say, “I’m in.” Now you can take whatever imperfections are in that deal and you just make them perfect. Now you’ve got to make it work. And what I learned was I could make things happen.

2009: 30 pounds lighter, still buying

Derrick Kinney: Once you go through such a dark period, I mean, literally, financially, it almost crushed us, and you come out of that, you realize, you know what? If I did it once, I can do it again. But Aaron, here was the cool thing about this. This was 2008, 2009. And if you remember right what was happening in the economy then, total wheel spin.

Aaron Klein: It was very, very calm in the markets during that time. That’s what I remember. Just sunflowers, daisies growing, no problem.

Derrick Kinney: That’s why they called it the global financial crisis. Yes.

So one of the things that I did, and this is going to sound crazy, but I had ballooned up to like 235 pounds. Now I’m at about 207. I lost 30 pounds during that time period, because I’m like, you know what? I have nothing to lose. I’m going to focus on becoming a better version of me through this crisis, because I can’t control that. I can control what I do to my own body. And then what I said is, I’m going to keep investing big time as the market keeps dropping. So even though I’m losing clients, I’m losing weight, and the market’s losing, there was a way to win, which was just keep adding money. This was around March of 2009. Go back and check the date. That’s when the sun came out on the stock market again. And suddenly all those people questioning, “Derrick, what are you doing? Why are you investing? What are you thinking?” became, “Derrick, you were a genius. You kept buying when there was blood in the streets and people were questioning.”

So the takeaway of all of that is, when there’s opportunities, there’s that moment that all of us have in our lives. Like, for example, when you and I met for the first time, Aaron, I knew I need to meet with this guy named Aaron Klein. It was clear. I just needed to do it. Or, for example, last week I felt like I need to call this one CEO of this major firm and pitch this idea. And he was like, “Derrick, I was just thinking about you.” We don’t take action, but we know action leads to satisfaction. Opportunities close. So the moment you feel it, do it. You’ll be dramatically more successful.

Playing dead in the all-hands

Aaron Klein: Wow. I love that. Now, I heard that once you laid down on the floor in the middle of a team meeting and you told everybody a medical emergency was going to keep you away from clients for three months. Take me into that moment. Was that actually happening, or were you just trying to wake them up and get them to change their mindset?

Derrick Kinney: Well, I’ll tell you the story and I’ll let you decide what happened. This was a couple years before I sold my business, and I wanted to go and grow, but I felt my team was hesitant and slow. So we had an all-hands meeting, and I remember standing up, and it’s like, Derrick, you’ve got to make a visual point here. I walked to the center of the room and I physically laid down on my back in front of everybody, put my hands across my chest, and I said, “I’ve just had a medical emergency and I can’t see clients for the next three months. What are we going to do?”

It felt like I laid down there for minutes before anybody said anything. I’m like, okay, come on, people, we need this to be interactive. And somebody said, “Hey, should we try to resuscitate him?” So we all got a laugh out of that. But then someone said, “Well, okay, wait a minute. If Derrick can’t see clients, we need to figure out who can.” And the moment I heard those words, Aaron, I quietly stood up, walked back to my chair, and I sat down. And that was the moment of transformation for our business, because we went in that moment from the me show to the we show. And then the team felt empowered to figure out how we could make every system Derrick optional. Because the goal was, if we wanted to scale, I was the bottleneck.

They came back to me a week later. They said, “Derrick, we’ve got some bad news. Are you sitting down?” I said, “Just spill it.” They said, “Actually, you’re the one causing us not to grow.” It hit me like a punch. They said, “Because you have to approve every system. It has to be exactly like Derrick would do. You’re the one having to make sure that you’re with every client, and we feel hamstrung. So if you are willing, Derrick, to not have it be 100% the way Derrick would do it, but maybe 70% the way Derrick would do it, we can do just great without you in a lot of these pieces.”

That was the moment that allowed us to build more of a franchise model that was replicable. So I told you about the Dallas debacle that almost crushed us, but then came back. We then expanded and bought into Houston. We bought into other parts of Texas, eventually down into McAllen, right there on the border. Cool area. And so we ended up, first of all, building and scaling a regional practice.

Scheduled spontaneity

Derrick Kinney: But the game we were playing was, if we’re in Dallas and we’re a two-hour flight from McAllen, how do we make them feel like we are right next door to them? So we developed, I call it strategery, famous word, but a strategy to contact them. I call this scheduled spontaneity. It’s something that I use with all of our clients. And that is taking your top clients, and in your calendar it’s scheduled for you, but it’s spontaneous for them.

It might sound like, Aaron, if you’re my client, and you’re hoping to get their voicemail. The reason this works is because, psychologically, if you haven’t heard from your advisor in the past 30 days, as shocking as this is, most people begin to wonder, what’s my advisor doing? Are they thinking about me? Are they on top of things? Because of social media, news is so free-flowing. You want people always in their mind thinking, “Derrick just called. Aaron just called me.”

So I would call the person and say, “Hey, Aaron, this is Derrick. Hey, real quick. As you know, we’re working behind the scenes to monitor your portfolio. The change we made last time about the S&P 500, it’s volatile, but I like it. We’re going to keep an eye on it. Just wanted you to know that we’re watching things behind the scenes. Appreciate you.” Click.

That took probably 35 seconds, but it bought me 30 days of mental ownership of that person saying, “Derrick and his team are always managing my money.” So that simple strategy, executed well, even executed messy, the key is it’s executed, caused us to grow, and people felt like, man, Derrick and his team, it’s like they’re right next door.

From Chief Irritation Officer to Chief Energy Officer

Aaron Klein: That’s amazing. What I think is so interesting about that, and I’m presuming a little bit here, is that 30% that you were going to go Derrick optional on. I’m guessing that you had a couple of things there. Number one, you knew which things those were, and you had some comfort that you could let the team try and maybe fail in those areas, and you could course correct without a lot of damage. And the other thing I’m betting is that you had ways to monitor and just make sure that things were headed in the right direction.

I say that because I feel like for founders it’s so difficult to figure out the balance between completely letting go and keeping tight editorial control over what is happening in their name and in their business. I’ve got so many mistakes I’ve made over the course of my career, but I can remember several where I did not let go enough, and I can remember one doozy in particular where I let go too much. Both of those exist. So how did you think about finding that balance and making sure that that 30% was going to end up in the right place?

Derrick Kinney: Well, I redefined my role as CEO. Because the reality was, when I was honest with myself and asked my team for feedback on me as a leader, no holds barred, they actually said I was the CIO. I was the Chief Irritation Officer.

See, that’s a problem, because I’m basically putting my standards and my expectations, but more importantly, my perfections, onto them. So I like to work with people with a sunroof mentality and not a lid mentality. I was placing a lid on their potential and their vision. I wanted to create a sunroof, so I could still close that window anytime I wanted to, but it opened up to let them have more ownership. So I went from the CIO to the CEO, which was the Chief Energy Officer. My goal was, I’m here to energize you. Ultimately, I’ve got full ownership. I’ve got the vision.

Two commas and the revenue ceiling

Derrick Kinney: But one thing I learned early on as a young advisor who was struggling: my motto was, I will outwork everybody, Aaron. Nobody’s going to work as hard as Derrick. I’m going to get this thing done. I’m going to charge the hill. And a wise mentor pulled me aside and he said, “Derrick, I need to tell you something. You can probably get to two commas. You can probably do a million dollars in revenue by yourself. But you’re going to keep hitting your head against a revenue ceiling year after year until you lead through others.” And he said, “It’s going to be the least favorite thing you like to do, because you probably left your last job because you just wanted to have your own business, right?”

But the truly transformational advisors, leaders, people who are the difference makers, they embrace their imperfection, but they also embrace their humanity. I’m not here to be the perfect leader. I’m here to be the relatable leader that makes people say, “Boy, this guy is probably as messed up as I am, but he cares about me. Let’s go change the world together.”

Coaching now: the two kinds of coaches

Aaron Klein: That’s awesome. So you built that advisory business into one that could operate without you, and now you’ve sold that company, and now you coach financial advisors. And the demand for that coaching is, again, exceeding your personal supply. So what are you doing differently the second time?

Derrick Kinney: It’s interesting, as I coach advisors now. At first, I was hesitant to do that, because I have had coaches myself in the past, and there’s often two types of coaches. There’s the coaches who have actually been where you are at and want to be, and have come down the mountain, who can then tell you, here’s the game plan: if you do what I tell you to do, you’ll make more money, you’ll avoid mistakes, and you’ll be happier. And then there’s the coaches who say, “Well, I’ve never actually done what you’ve done, but these principles I’ve got, I think, are going to work for you.” And I’ve had both.

What I found was the advisors who have been where you want to be are the better coaches, because they can speak directly from experience. But then the even better coaches are the ones who are actually doing something right now in growing their own business, so they’re facing similar struggles as you are as an advisor.

Here’s an example of this. People ask, “Well, Derrick, why do you still do local and national TV on a regular basis? Why do you guest on so many podcasts? Why do you do all these events?” It’s because I’m teaching you as advisors how to do this exact same thing. I wouldn’t be worth my salt as a coach if I wasn’t putting myself in the arena every single week, struggling, figuring it out, so that I can burn the energy on me and other people, so that I give you a really good, effective, fast coaching experience.

The advisor who felt like a fraction of himself

Derrick Kinney: What I find is there’s many advisors right now that on the outside, they look like the picture of success. I was at a recent big event down in Florida, and people said, “Okay, we see you on LinkedIn. We love your content.” And they tend to be more vulnerable with me. I’m sort of like their hairdresser sometimes.

Aaron Klein: People share which shirt you were going to wear to Florida.

Derrick Kinney: That’s right. That is true. So people walk up and they share things with me, and there was one advisor in particular, well-regarded name, one of the top in the country, and he said, “Derrick,” and he got his voice really low, and he said, “I’m struggling with my family. My numbers are off the charts, but I feel like a fraction of myself as a human, because I’m not connecting the dots.” And so we talked offline and began to do coaching with him.

But on the outside, Aaron, see, people would say, well, he’s the picture of success. That’s who I want to be. But what you want to be careful of is, the person you want to be is just like you and me. Same struggles, same frustrations, same fears.

So the coaching that we do now is not just about, we’re going to help you grow your business. We’re going to help you see pretty big revenue gains because of the strategies and the simple model that we have. But more importantly, we want to tie a cause to your cash and purpose to your profits and meaning to your money. That way, you’re not just making money, you’re making good money, so you can do more good with it. That way, you feel a sense of accomplishment as your head hits the pillow at night. You feel like, I worked hard helping people achieve their goals. I can feel good, because now I’m helping make a difference in a cause I care about, and I’m making an impact in my family. This advisor, we’ve already seen some pretty rapid improvement, just focusing on communication with his family and with his team, and becoming the leader, the relatable leader, that he wants to be.

If you want to make it rain, connect with pain

Aaron Klein: Love it. As you’ve worked with advisors now for these years, tell me, what’s the biggest mistake that you see them make?

Derrick Kinney: Well, I laugh, because the mistake that comes to mind was born out of my own pain as a young advisor, but I see this now across the board. So many advisors, especially those watching and listening right now, that want to move up market, they’re like, “Well, I want to work with a higher net worth client. What do I need to do?” And so many people think that they need to impress that person with the features and the benefits of their products and services. “We’ve got this special private equity access fund that I think you’ll like.” And you think that’s going to make the person say, “Oh my gosh, you’re the advisor I’ve hoped and dreamed for my entire life,” right? And they don’t.

Let’s be honest. How many times does somebody call your office and say, “Now, do you have this tech stack? And tell me about the Claude prompts that you use. And do you have access to this specific mutual fund? And if so, we want to become your next client.” Nobody does that.

So what I realized was, if you want to make it rain, connect with pain. If you want to make it rain, connect with pain. And here’s how this plays out. You’re at a social event. Someone walks up and says, “Hey, what do you do?” The mistake I used to make is, “Oh, I’m a financial advisor.” Oh, Aaron, it was like a slow-motion movie. It was like somebody opening up their checkbook and writing a check at the grocery store for their groceries, and you’re in the express lane. What is happening here? People’s eyes glazed over. They start to walk backwards. They murmur something like, “I have enough insurance already.” And I’m like, okay, this is terrible. I’m debating my title and not going anywhere with this person.

So instead, I tested something one day. When I had my business, we focused on people who were about five to ten years from retirement, or already retired, and their number one pain point was not running out of money. They did not want the embarrassment or the frustration or just the anxiety of running out of money after their entire life. That’d be terrible.

So somebody would say, “So, Derrick, what do you do?” “You know how so many people worry about running out of money in retirement? We help them fix that.” And suddenly people were like, “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.” Or, “Now, are you a financial advisor?” “Right. So we have a five-step process where we custom-tailor a financial strategy for each client so they don’t run out of money and they feel confident. We specialize in retirement income planning.”

You see, those three sentences, said in a very conversational, empathetic way, it was like opening up a door to the vault where all the good clients had been hanging out, and suddenly I had the combination. What I realized was, when you name an instantly relatable problem that they instantly relate to. As I like to say, if you tell someone something new, they don’t always know what to do. But when you tell someone something true, it draws them closer to you.

For example, Aaron, if you and I both have teenage daughters and I say to you, “Aaron, you know how it feels like when you talk to your daughter, what you say goes in one ear and right out the other,” you’re going to say, “Yes, absolutely.” There were no brain cells burned to understand that problem. It’s instant.

So the mistake advisors make is they talk about features and benefits, or they try to overcomplicate what they do. If that person said to me, “I’m a daughter management consultant,” I don’t know that I would really want to deepen my conversation there. So the goal is the least amount of words wins. Can you communicate it so that a third grader would understand it? And the key is, when you do that, it makes people lean in and say, “Tell me more,” instead of, “Close the door.”

The toolkit: an “AI Derrick”

Aaron Klein: Well, I’m so excited about how we’re bringing the brilliance of this coaching for advisors into the new Derrick Kinney Elite Advisor Plan, powered by Contio. Talk about what we’re putting in advisors’ hands and what this is going to make possible after every client meeting.

Derrick Kinney: This is big. And I’ll tell you why it’s big. Because several people over the past probably 18 months have said, “Derrick, you need to have some sort of an AI Derrick. You need to take the frameworks that you’ve got and make them more readily available to people. You’ve got this body of LinkedIn content and podcasts and interviews and coaching. How can we make this information and this conversational framework easily accessible?”

And so, Aaron, when you reached out, you personally reached out to me and said, “Derrick, I like what you’re doing. Our values align. Could we partner together on this?” It was a quick yes, because you have built something with past companies. You have built relationships. You’ve modeled all the things I like about this industry. So it made it easy to partner with you, because I get pitched a lot of opportunities. I know you do as well. But I am a sucker for good culture, and I am a sucker for solid, integrity-based, visionary leaders. It makes it easy for me to say yes.

So advisors right now that are thinking to themselves, I know I’m better than what my current revenue numbers say. This might be somebody who is at 250 and they want to get to 500,000. It might be the firm, we’re at a billion, and why can’t we get to two billion? The principles are all the same. They’re all scalable. Or it’s the advisor that says, “Why is that advisor getting all the best clients when I should be getting them as well? What do they know that I don’t? Or is it something easier than what I’m doing now? Why is it so hard to grow?”

As I like to tell advisors when I’m on the stage speaking, I’m not here to change your life. I’m not here to change your entire business plan. I’m here to give you the simple steps that lead to big results. And these are things we test on a weekly basis with my top 1% clients I coach. So there’s no theory. There’s no theory allowed at all. Only what works right now to help advisors attract the clients they want and grow the business they want.

Aaron Klein: I love that. And I’m just super excited based on the experience that advisors are going to have, being able to take Contio behind the scenes in that white-glove, no-annoying-bot-in-your-video-call or in-person meeting kind of experience, and have a conversation with a client. And then when the meeting is over, it’s as if Derrick Kinney has been sitting in their meeting the entire time and pops up and begins coaching them on what they did great in that conversation and what they can now improve.

The power of that on every single call. Because, as we know, I can get really pumped up reading your book or listening to you on LinkedIn, or maybe even being a client and doing a coaching call with you, and learning from you. And then I have to go implement that work. And that’s hard, because as we all know, we need reps to be able to learn something new and really put it into practice. So now, not only do advisors get to take reps, but they get to do it with game film, with their coach looking over their shoulder and saying, “Let me tell you what could be a little bit better about that rep. Now let’s go out and do it again, and we’ll learn the next time.” I’m super excited about that. It’s going to be amazing.

The summer surge

Derrick Kinney: Well, thanks, Aaron. That’s the vision here. And to be candid, the challenge is, how do you take my coaching voice, like we’re talking right now, and make that where people can easily implement it and plug it in? My wife jokingly said, “Derrick, are you sure people want you sitting right next to them, all around the country, coaching?” I said, oh yeah, they’re going to love it.

But the bottom line is, we’re seeing results. As an example, we just did a five-advisor test on a 60-day coaching. I called it the summer surge. We took five advisors through this. All of them, I was even shocked by the quick results they had, both in terms of identifying their messaging, what their ideal client’s pain point was, how to say it. They tested it. They began to have more prospects coming in to visit. They converted to clients quicker. One charged the highest fee he’s charged to a client before, because now he knew what to say and really how to state his value. So all of these pieces, five different advisors, five different stories, five different sets of goals, but all of them saw growth.

So what that informed me was, again, no theory. It’s got to be proven for us to bring it out to our great audience here and these advisors. This works. This is a simple framework. It works. But it’s really going to appeal to people who think differently. If you’re sort of that man or woman that’s like, you know what, it seems like everybody thinks this way, and I kind of think this way, and often my way is the better way, then you’re going to love working with this Contio-powered product. It’s going to be great. Perfectly tailored for you.

That’s what we do in our family

Aaron Klein: That’s awesome. Well, this has been such a great conversation. I want to end by just asking you a closing question that gets right to your heart and soul. When the meetings are over, what is the one value that you most want your leadership to be remembered for?

Derrick Kinney: Well, I’ll base that on a question I asked a coaching client yesterday. This particular client, she put a risk. She’s been struggling, and she said, “Derrick, this investment of coaching with you, it’s a financial sacrifice for me.” And I said to her, “You know, you didn’t have to do this, but was it worth it?” And without a beat, she said, “Oh my gosh, you’ve been the best coach I’ve ever had. This has gotten me results faster than anything.” And she’s more than made back that coaching investment over just 60 days.

I take that, and I don’t want to get emotional here, but sometimes you can easily think as a professional, hey, we’re just performing a service. We’re just doing stuff. People pay us, we do it. But we’re in the impact business. Whether as a coach, you as a founder, the advisors, the leaders who will be part of our new Contio family as we roll this out, you are impact difference makers.

So what I fall back on is, we have four kids. And my daughter, you’re asking questions that pull out the emotions here, and thanks for that, for goodness’ sake. But about three years ago, my oldest daughter, and all four of my kids are entrepreneurs now, they’ve all started their own businesses, my oldest said, “You know, Dad, if you hadn’t had the courage to launch your business as an advisor, we wouldn’t have had the courage to start ours.” It was like somebody punched me in the stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I had never thought. I just knew I was unemployable. I had to work for myself. I had to build it. I didn’t realize I was teaching my kids.

So then my youngest son, this was about a year ago. Two of the kids went to college, two didn’t. And we’re at a stoplight in the Jeep, going to his favorite burger place. I learned with boys, you want to just stare straight ahead, listen to good music. The good stuff comes out at the stoplight. He says, “Dad, I think I’m going to start my own business.” And I just flippantly said, “Why?” And he said, “It’s because that’s what we do in our family.” It was like a punch in the stomach again. Because Lauren, my oldest, she just saw Dad do it. Dylan, our youngest, saw all of his other siblings do it, and he decided, well, that’s just what we do in our family.

So the point of all of that is, it may be the simplest conversation you have today with your kids, with a client. But secretly, and you can’t convince me otherwise, people are watching you right now, and your actions, your boldness, your courage are silently encouraging them to make a bold and courageous move that they wouldn’t have done if they didn’t see you do it first. Courage.

Aaron Klein: That’s awesome. Thank you, Derrick Kinney. What a great conversation.

Derrick Kinney: Thanks, Aaron. Great to be with you.

Aaron’s three takeaways

Aaron Klein: I hope you liked that. Derrick got maybe a little emotional there. I think so did I. Three takeaways.

First, you’ve got to make every system optional, starting with you. I love that story where, a couple years before selling his firm, he walks into that all-hands meeting and he lays down, folds his hands across his chest, and says, “I’ve just had a medical emergency. I can’t see clients for three months.” His team came back a week later, after thinking about that, and told him he was the reason that they couldn’t grow. Everything had to be 100% the way Derrick would do it. And the fix was that it really only had to be 70%. He called it going from the me show to the we show. As somebody who thinks that a founder should really edit and be very hands-on, I think it’s a good challenge. It challenged my perspective on some things, and I learned something from that.

Second, and this one is just free money for anybody with clients. Derrick called it scheduled spontaneity. It’s on your calendar, but it’s a surprise to them. Thirty-five seconds on the phone. “Just wanted you to know we’re watching things behind the scenes. Appreciate you.” Click. Thirty-five seconds bought him 30 days of what he calls mental ownership. I just thought that was so powerful. The thing that has to worry you if you’re in a relationship-driven business is, gosh, if a client hasn’t heard from you in a month, they might have started wondering whether you’re thinking about them. And his line about it is the one that I would put on the wall. It works, he says, even when you execute it messy. The system beats the polish. Steal that.

Third, if you want to make it rain, connect with pain. That is Derrick’s line. He loves those lines. And it is the best communication advice in the episode. Nobody calls your office asking about your tech stack. They call because they have pain. They’re afraid of running out of money. His test is whether a third grader would understand what he says. Least amount of words wins.

Now, the reason Derrick and I are working together: everything he just told you is a system. And systems die in the gap between hearing about them and actually running them. And Derrick said it himself: how do you take my coaching voice and make it something people can actually plug in to their day-to-day work? That’s the thing we built. The advisor gets to have the client conversation with Contio. No bot in the room, nothing recorded. And then when it’s over, it’s as though Derrick has been sitting there the whole time, telling them what landed and what to do differently next time. Coaching with the game film. It’s live this month.

So the second half of the work starts now. We’ll see you next time.