Letting my free leads expire and advances

I noted in a former post about GR advancing weekly and people thought I was mistaken. I'm through Anthony Agoglia and they do indeed advance Golden Rule weekly just like Assurant. If you want his contact info just email me.

So let's talk about advances since there's two camps; advance vs no advance. With either system if the client drops off the books you don't get paid. With either system if you have a rather large amount of cancellations you'll be quitting - and quickly. And actually, if you're that worried about a lot of clients canceling, or have experienced clients canceling this is not the career for you. Out of 500,000 in volume you should have 1, maybe 2 cancellations per year.

That being said there's a saying in Vegas "Always play with the houses money." And actually, in business it's the same - never play with your own money. If you have $300,000 to your name, and a business costs $250,000 what do you do? Take a loan for $250,000.

However, some insurance companies are asking you to do just that - use all of your own money. So somehow, some way you're supposed to pay all your bills and all your marketing expenses for almost a solid year? If you open a business with $200,000 of your own cash you at least (hopefully) have immediate cash flow from the business.

Just imagine opening a restaurant. Then you pack the place for a month and generate $60,000 in sales. Visa calls: "Listen, we know you earned $60,000 but these people put it on credit and it takes them years to pay us back. So obviously we can't advance you the whole $60K when we haven't even got a payment yet. You'll get $4,000 this month." Right - and you'd go BK.

When I sold cars I got finance reserve - 10% and it was a significant portion of my pay. If the buy rate is 5% and we sold the loan for 8% we held 3 points and got commissioned by the finance company. But wait...the client hasn't made a payment yet! And it's a 5 year loan! The client could default and cost the finance company thousands. The client could BK. In any case, we got the commish the next week.

How do mortgage brokers get paid? As-earned over 30 years? Lol. Just look at how hard the mortgage companies are getting slammed now over ARM loans. Yet all those brokers who sold those loans have been paid. If the finance company has to foreclose, loses $50,000 at auction and the client BK's they're screwed. But the COMPANY takes that risk!

Don't listen to these agents who probably have working spouses or happened to come into this biz with a lot of cash talking about "go as-earned." I've never heard worse advice. If I could get advanced hourly I would. I'm a salesman and proud of it - a deal gets approved? Pay me!

The bottom line is the advance allows you to pay your bills and market. It also makes this job fun - unless you think it's fun to close a deal, wait 3 months then get $22.35. No - it's exciting to get $2,600 in a week.

Don't let anyone tie ethics to advances. Again, there's not a sales job in this country where you sell and close a deal, and wait over the course of the next 12 months to get paid. Not one. The sales industry would collapse. I have no idea how ethics are tied to me selling GR and getting paid next week, or me selling GR and waiting 12 months.