The City Agent and The Country
Agent
(Website Exclusive)
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By Chuck Jones
The high-tech, high-touch route appears to be paying big dividends for many big-city advisors.
Aesop tells the tale of
the town mouse who invites his country-bred cousin to visit his fancy home
downtown. There, the country mouse is offered fancy foods he's never tasted
before, having had only barley and grain to eat on the farm. But the city
elegance comes with threatening dogs, humans and mousetraps. Dreadfully frightened,
the country mouse runs back home, telling his baffled town cousin, "Better
to eat barley and grain in peace than have cakes and ale in fear!"
The town mouse was baffled because, apparently, he had grown used to the dangers
and pitfalls of living in the city and had adapted his lifestyle to suit his
surroundings. It might be said that financial advisors who work in America's
urban areas have done the same.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 54 percent of America's population live
in metropolitan areas with at least 1 million people. In 1999, the bureau
reported that 218.6 million Americans lived in such concentrated areas. Clearly,
financial advisors who work in cities have a lot of people to call on, but
then they also have a lot of competition.
City work
E. Dennis Zahrbock, CLU, ChFC, CFP, 54, an independent agent in Wayzata, Minn.,
works the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, which has a combined population of nearly
2.9 million. Like the country mouse, he was born and bred on a farm and worked
on one. His farm was in western Minnesota and he moved to the big city. Unlike
the country mouse, however, he stayed to work in the city and has adapted
to its fast-paced, high-tech ways.
At first, Zahrbock did business the way so many insurance agents do in the
beginning. He'd make 50 telephone calls and 10 appointments a week and watch
in frustration as one by one, those 10 appointments were reduced to three.
He would make perhaps one sale. And he worked a lot of nights.
The transition
This routine began to change in 1976 when he joined a tip club and "began
to operate my practice as other business people do," he says.
"I made a planned transition," Zahrbock says. "I started working
toward becoming an innovative advisor to small-business owners." And
he adapted his practice to the ways of the city--hiring staff to handle service
work, investing in up-to-date office technology, moving to locations central
to the people who make up his two-city client base, and, not incidentally,
training his clients to conduct business on his terms.
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"That's not hard
to do," he says. "Clients like dealing with people similar to them.
For us, that means dealing with highly efficient, high-energy people."
Zahrbock says he has up to 300 small-business customers, but he considers
50 of them to be "good clients." These include the owners of nurseries,
data processing companies, manufacturers, carpet and linoleum businesses and
law firms. He says he "oversees" between $80 million and $90 million
in assets a year. "Our average client has about 35 employees and has
a net worth of $2 million to $4 million."
Zahrbock adds five to eight new clients each year, and with each new client
comes a period of adjustment--for the client. "Basically, they're trained
not to talk to me," he explains. "That's what I have a very professional
staff for. They can take care of nearly everything." Typically, Zahrbock
will meet with a new client face to face and explain that his staff handles
the details--from service to renewals to delivering the policy.
High-tech tools
"They don't need to see me," he says. "It's not that I'm unreachable.
I don't have a problem talking to clients on the phone or having them come
to the office, but I urge them to contact my staff for most things because
they are the ones who are going to do the work." He also keeps in touch
with clients through newsletters, emails and his website. The essential business
tools in Zahrbock's office include computers, laptops, email, fax and Internet
capabilities and cell phones. "Everyone on my staff has a cell phone,"
he says. "For the business I'm in, I've got to be able to reach people.
"When clients are working with me, they're buying a whole concept and way of doing business," he says. "I'm not going to change the way I do business for one customer. Clients decide to work with me for the very reason that I do business the way I do, and I pick clients who do it my way. I don't want any headaches. Things have to run smoothly in the big city, small-business market."
"It doesn't matter whether you're selling to people in the city or in the country. The suspicion people have of salesmen is universal, across the board," says Michael Reagan, CEO of the National Association of Sales Professionals (www.nasp.com), a sales-certification organization in Scottsdale, Ariz. "Having said that, I hasten to add that people generally like to do business with people like them."
Reagan says that the qualities that make country people suspicious of salesmen in general-fast-talking, sharp-dressing and abrupt manner-are the same qualities city folks want to see when they deal with salesmen.
"City salesmen are more sophisticated," he says. "They get to the point fast, they're quick to identify needs and they're usually up on whatever's new on the market.
"And it's no secret that successful salesmen dress the way their clients expect them to," he adds. "City salesmen dress up in a conservative suit and tie. You show up in a suit and tie in some parts of the country and they think you're going to the funeral parlor."
Opulence on the Oregon
Trail
The Dalles, which sits on the Oregon side of the Columbia River about 75 miles
east of Portland, was once known as the end of the Oregon Trail. It was there
that pioneers loaded their wagons onto barges and rafts and followed the river
and its branches to Oregon City, Portland and the Pacific Northwest.
Today, The Dalles is a combination farm community and resort town with a population of not quite 12,000. According to promotional literature, the area averages just 10 people per square mile, and the average household income is just over $38,000 per year. Still, Wayne Von Borstel, CLU, ChFC, CFP, 46, a fee-based financial planner who last year was named one of America's Top 100 financial planners by Mutual Funds magazine, stays headquartered in the one-time frontier town.
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Von Borstel, who spends the bulk of his time "financially coaching" clients who are worth between $1 million and $2 million, has three offices. One is in Portland, and one is in Redmond, which is about 80 miles south of The Dalles. His headquarters, however, is in The Dalles proper. Although he says only about 10 percent of his clients live and work in the small town, he keeps his office there because, like the country mouse, that's where he began. "Working here keeps me in touch with where my roots are and what's really important about life," he says.
A farmer at heart
"I was born into a farm family," Von Borstel explains. "Our
closest neighbor lived three miles away. We had a 12,000-acre farm to grow
wheat and raise cattle, but 6,000 of those acres were nothing but sagebrush.
We called it the Desert of Oregon because it was dryland farming--no irrigation,
just rainfall."
In 1984, Von Borstel became an insurance agent to escape the hardscrabble life he, his wife and children faced as farmers. "Farmers are great," he says. "Farmers have lots of land, but no money. Farmers are always broke." Still, farmers are the people he called on when he began selling insurance. "I went farm to farm, door to door," he says. "I got in my car, stopped in at the barnyards and called on all my farmer friends. You know, the guys in the bib overalls.
"It was easy to just stop in at the barnyards and talk," he recalls. "Farmers are easy to talk to. And if they were busy, I'd just watch them work and talk while they were doing chores. We'd eventually get around to mentioning life insurance, and I'd make a sale."
Moving to the city
About 11 years ago, Von Borstel got a taste of how profitable working in the
city could be when he looked at his existing clientele of farmers and tradesmen
and decided to "kick it up a notch." He began "collecting education,"
as he calls it, earning designations and attending seminars. Before long,
he was teaching insurance and financial and estate planning to people who
lived and worked in the big city of Portland.
"I looked at the people who were attending my financial planning classes--retirees, business owners, people with money," he explains. "And I thought about the clients I had then, mostly farmers, who never bought insurance that cost more than $25 a month."
Von Borstel made the decision then to upgrade his clientele from people who had little money and no desire to part with it to people with lots of money and eager to pay someone to help them manage it. "Now, I work with people who are willing to play the game," he says. "They have the money but don't know the risks or options. They're paying me to be their financial coach." In addition to planning, Von Borstel sells retirement plans, mutual funds, life, DI and LTC insurance, which makes up 85 percent of his business.
Country and city
Although about 20 percent of his current clients are still local farmers,
80 percent are of the big-city, wealthy variety. To serve that book of business,
Von Borstel has had to limit his farm visits and invest in office technology
that allows him to create complicated financial strategies and access detailed
product information. "My clients realize that where my office is located
[in The Dalles] has little correlation to what we can accomplish together
if we're both committed to the same goals," he says. "Office technology
allows me to do that.
"I used to use only a yellow legal pad and a pencil to help me make a point with a client, but things are too complicated nowadays to rely on that," he contends. "Now, my best friend is my laptop. All my stuff is there--the Internet, Morning Star, planning software. But with all that, I still use the legal pad and pencil.
"Clients don't really care about how much technology you use," he adds. "I have a ton of technology; I just don't put it in front of them. They trust that I know what I'm doing and can make sense out of their world. They rely on me so they don't have to deal with technology themselves.
"Clients don't want to talk to a machine," he says. "You can't use technology to hide. Clients want to talk to you, to look into your eyes and believe that you care about them. It's a big mistake for a client to call your office and get a machine."
At the start of his insurance career, farmers made up 100 percent of Von Borstel's client roster. Today, only about 10 percent are in the farm trade, largely because this country mouse went to visit the town, liked it and stayed. And though he is now a town mouse by profession, his heart still tugs toward the country.
"I miss the old ways," he says with a touch of longing in his voice. "I miss not being on the farms, stopping in at the barnyards and talking with the people who stuck with the [farming] business even though they can't make any money at it. There's just something about the country you can't replace."
THIS ISN'T THE END
OF THE STORY!
You now know how urban agents do business in the nation's metropolitan areas,
and how some agents take those big-city ways to the country. But do country
agents serve their clients just as professionally? Go to page 46 of the April
issue of Advisor Today to get the rest of the story.
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