Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
John Ruhlin
Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. Financial advice is a relationship business, and central to building relationships is gratitude and gifts. Do you have a gifting strategy, or do you give the same gifts to everyone at the end of the year like everyone else? How can you plan what, when, and how to give to have real impact on the relationships you have with clients, prospects, and centers of influence?
Our guest on this episode, Jon Ruhlin, founder of Ruhlin Group. John spends more than $400,000 a year on gifts to his own clients, and besides being in the very small category of gifting consultants, he may be the only one who deliberately never gives anything after Thanksgiving. John is one of the foremost experts at giving gifts, and his clients include major league sports teams, household consumer brands, as well as large financial institutions. He advocates a specific proven process for making gift giving an effective expression of gratitude that has the side benefit of creating real quantifiable results. John is also the author of Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut through The noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Client Retention.
On this episode we talk with John about the biggest mistake business owners make in giving gifts. We talk about the principles of gift giving, and what, how, and when to give, and why you should have a calendar of when you give gifts to specific clients. We even address the SEC limitations on giving. But a gift doesn’t have to be expensive to make a real impact. And listen through to the end, where we talk with John to get a link where you can download a list of the 10 biggest mistakes to avoid in giving gifts.
The advice John gives in this episode can have a dramatic impact on your relationships with clients, prospects, and centers of influence, and of course how actively how they all refer. It’s an amazing conversation that will probably change your perspective on something you’re already doing and making a big investment in, and make it vastly more effective. Please enjoy our conversation with John Ruhlin.
So John Ruhlin welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. Thanks for joining us.
John Ruhlin:
Hey thanks for having me.
Steve Wershing:
So you have a wonderful new book out, and we want to ask you all about the book and the principles in it. But let’s set this up for folks, let’s give them some background. So tell us a little bit about the Ruhlin Group and what you guys do.
John Ruhlin:
Yeah, so the Ruhlin Group’s been around for about 18 years, it started when I was in college, desperate to pay for med school. I went and interned with Cutco Knives, the cutlery company that’s had about a million and a half college kids and other people work with it. I really was fortunate, because I was dating a girl at the time, her dad was an attorney and he was a rain maker, he was a referral machine. And one of the reasons is he was the most generous person, probably top 10 that I’ve ever met in my life. And so he would find deals on noodles and buy like literally a semi load of noodles for everybody at church the next Sunday. And I’m like, “Paul that was 20 grand, why would you do that? Are you insane?” And he’s like, “I love the smiles. I love to love on people.”
And so I pitched him the idea of giving away Cutco pocket knives to all of his clients who are men. They’re like CEOs of financial advisor firms, and insurance companies, lumber yards. And he changed my life forever when he said, “John can I order 100 of the paring knives engraved.” I’m like, “You want to give a bunch of grown men a kitchen tool? That’s weird.” And he said, “John in 40 years in business the reason I have referrals coming out of my ears, and I have people that are actively loyal that are referring me and going out of their way to advocate for me is I found that if you take care of the family, everything else in business seems to take care of itself.”
So that was the lightening bolt moment when I decided med school was going to get put on hold, and I built a whole company around using gifts, and gratitude … And not swag, and trinkets, and crappy stuff, but real thoughtful gifts, like the knives. Even to this day 18 years later our number one selling gift, people are like, “Are you still doing the stupid knife thing?” And I’m like, “We sell millions of dollars in knives.”
Steve Wershing:
That’s interesting.
John Ruhlin:
Yeah. So we built this business around the idea of helping people. A lot of companies they’ll tell you what to do, there’s very few companies that will actually help do it for you. And so the Ruhlin Group at a core level is helping people, leaders, sales reps, advisors, you name it, be very strategic and very proactive about how they use gifting to drive, in some cases 100x ROI, and 100x referrals back to them by using gifting as a really strategic tool, and so that’s the core of the business.
Steve Wershing:
That’s fascinating. And so we wanted to ask you about the role that gifts play in that relationship, and I think you’ve really answered that. Can you tell us some of the principles that make for a good gift?
John Ruhlin:
I think what’s interesting is that most people, they’re like, “Oh yeah I’m a good gift giver.” And when you start to talk to them, one of the things that most people do in corporate America, whether you’re a half million dollar company, or whether you’re a $20 billion company like Google, is that most people have confused what a gift is. A gift by its very nature is recipient focused. And yet in corporate America we’ve tried to blend a marketing tool, and a promo, a swag item, and try to blend that in as a gift and it’s not. When you put your logo on a product, whether it’s a trinket from China or whether it’s a Tiffany’s vase, or whether it’s a Cutco knife, you make the gift about yourself.
And when you’re gifting to affluent people, and there’s a logo on it, guess what? The likelihood of them keeping that and using that on a frequent basis, in front of other people that are potential referral opportunities, goes to next to zero. Because when they’re an affluent person, especially like me, my wife. My wife is never going to put something out that has some corporate logo on it, that’s tacky, that’s trinkety, that’s cheesy.
And so a lot of the gifts that we do, whether it’s a knife, whether it’s a hand made leather journal that costs a couple hundred dollars. Whatever it is, I won’t send out a gift … Like my personal gifting budget this year, just for John Ruhlin, is about 400 grand. I don’t send one gift out that has Ruhlin Group on it, or Giftology. And people are like, “But you’re ruining a marketing opportunity.” And I’m like, “No I’m not. If I give a Rolex to you, do I have to put my logo on it for you to remember where it came from? No way.” If you make the gift about the recipient, put their name on it, their family name on it, the personalization is a small detail that most people when they’re giving gifts they’re like, “Oh it doesn’t matter, just make it generic. Oh it doesn’t matter throw my logo on it.”
And what they don’t realize is that oftentimes the little details around the gift are just as important as the item itself. It takes it from being just something showing up from Amazon, which happens every day for people, to when we send out a gift for our clients to drive business, it needs to be what we call an artifact. Which means it has potential to be used daily for years or decades to come, and hopefully … In many cases with the knives and those things, they actually get passed down to future generations because it’s one of those items that people use every day for generations at their family gatherings, their bar mitzvahs, and their communions, and their Easter’s, and Fourth of July. Like it becomes woven into it. I’ve literally seen people in divorces fight over the knife set. And that sounds insane, but it’s because of what that simple, practical item represents.
And so I can talk to you about all the different little details, but the personalization is one of those things where, if you could just stop throwing your logo on crap when you give it out to people, like you’d be in the top 5% of gift givers because almost everybody ruins the gift with the logo.
Steve Wershing:
I’m sorry, go ahead Julie.
Julie Littlechild:
No I was just gonna say, I mean do you find, and we’re thinking about financial advisors here, I’m sure this applies to everybody. But for many I think the key is what is that gift. Like they understand that gift giving is good, and now it’s about what makes an effective gift. But do you also find a lot of professionals have to understand the need to give gifts in the first place?
John Ruhlin:
Yeah, I think that people, it’s been woven into our Western society to do things at the holidays, or at birthdays, or at Christmas. One of our rules is no ABC gifters, which is like nails on a chalk board for most advisors because they’ve been doing ABC gifting for 10, 20, 30 years. Which they give gifts or cards at anniversaries, they send birthday gifts, and they always do something at Christmas. It’s like the same most predictable playbook on the planet of sending gifts during expected times out of obligation. Giving a gift after a referral, dumb move. People are like, “Why wouldn’t you say thank you for a referral?” And I’m like, “You should write a hand written note and say thank you,” but everybody, especially financial advisors, wealth managers, family offices, they say they’re in the relationship building business, not transactional.
When you give a gift after a referral, what did you just turn that referral into? A transaction.
Steve Wershing:
Oh sure. That’s a really interesting point.
John Ruhlin:
It’s a tit for tat. And so your client, or referral partner isn’t giving the referral because of the gift. They can afford their own gifts. But if you could take your top, as an advisor, you could take your top 50 or your top 100 relationships that are clients, and reinvest a percentage of profit back into them, and do it at times that it’s not expected. I think most advisors, they do it because they think they have to. They don’t realize that if they did it well, and they did it strategic, and they did it at times that nobody did it, and they did it in ways … A lot of the advisors that are out there, it’s a bunch of married white dudes gifting to a bunch of married white dudes. Well if you would start including the inner circle, the assistant of these executives and business owners, if you would start including their spouses in the gifts, and not just do bourbon, and golf, and cigars, all that kind of stuff that’s normal, it’s old boy’s club stuff.
So a lot of the gifting that we do, 80% of my $400,000 budget … And I don’t care if your budget’s four grand a year or 40 grand a year, or four million dollars a year, these principles still apply. But if people would focus on including the inner circle. So the reason that the stupid knives still work, and we still send out … My $400,000 budget, $300,000 of it was knives. And people are like, “You sent $300,000 in knives.” And I’m like, “Yep. I send it to pro sports executives. I send it to CEOs of billion-dollar companies.” Because guess what, they’re all married, they all have families, they all break bread. Even in 2019 people still eat. And most kitchens are getting bigger because that’s where everybody hosts. So a lot of the things that we do are very counter intuitive in any industry.
And what we do for advisors is the exact same thing that we do for the Chicago Cubs, it’s treating human beings like human beings, and not tying everything to some sort of business theme, or business element. It’s tying into the humanity of people. And when you do that it’s amazing the things that happen.
Steve Wershing:
There are a couple things I want to follow up with you. One is that you’ve brought up the number, how much you spend on gifts every year. But let’s put that in context. So for an advisor thinking about this, what proportion of the revenue, or what proportion of the net income would that kind of translate into?
John Ruhlin:
First off, if anybody ever wants to have a conversation about FINRA, SEC rules and regulations…
Steve Wershing:
We’re getting to that.
John Ruhlin:
MDRT, top of the table. I covered that right from the stage. I’m like, I’m sure everybody in here’s like, well what about… I’m like well we can have a conversation and walk you through how you’re able to invest in relationships and still stay within the rules.
John Ruhlin:
But let’s just take the rules out of the equation for a second. Any client that we’re working with, whether they’re a solopreneur, or whether they’re a billion dollar business, they should be reinvesting a percentage of net profits back into … So the clients are really buying the gifts themselves. This isn’t create a new budget, this is take … And for us it’s 5-15% of net profit from your business. I don’t care what your revenue is, I don’t care what your gross is, what’s your net, reinvest it back in to keep the client, to grow the client because most of the time you don’t have all their assets, and to … this is the secret sauce, when you can inspire them.
And most people have passively loyal clients, they have a loyalty problem. And they don’t think they do because they have clients that stick around, but ask yourself how many of your clients are going out of their way to refer you, and that will tell you whether or not you have loyalty or not, and what I call active loyalty. So, when you can inspire them to advocate on your behalf that doesn’t happen on accident, that happens because they’ve been inspired to want to reciprocate. And that’s the secret sauce of what we do. I had the Cleveland Indians refer me to 38 teams in one day, one on one. That happened after seven years of gifting, of loving on them once a quarter.
Steve Wershing:
And that brings up something that we also have to coach advisors on periodically, which is not just doing a gift as a transaction, but having that transaction mentality. Some advisors really need to get used to the idea of you’ve got to make deposits into that bank for a while before you get a withdrawal. A lot of people still think of those actions as transactional as opposed to, these things are not perfectly linked up. They’re going refer you, and that’s not necessarily going be connected to those activities like gift giving or thanking them or those kinds of things. But you brought it up so let’s just deal with it. So let’s talk about the FINRA regulations, and the FINRA and SEC $100 a year gifting limit. So what have you found in dealing with financial advisors in regard to how you-
John Ruhlin:
Engage them?
Steve Wershing:
How you handle that, how you deal with that guideline.
John Ruhlin:
Well first off it’s a $100 per client. So if you have a husband and wife, which most people do, that’s $100 per person, that’s $200 per couple. And one of the reasons that advisors hire us is, we don’t make any money on the gifts. I charge a very healthy consulting, coaching, execution fee, and then we go and use our buying power to buy millions of dollars of gifts.
And we sell the gifts to the advisor at wholesale, at our actual cost. And so it allows for somebody, now I can’t have somebody come and say, “I want to buy Rolex’s for everybody, can you charge me $50 for a Rolex?” That doesn’t work. But it does allow you to go and leverage buying power, and pay somebody like us to actually execute the … You know it’s hard, when you’re going to send 50 gifts out to 50 different people and have them be packaged well with handwritten notes and all the little details, we do all that for the advisor. And they are able to buy a nicer gift, twice a year typically, at times they’re not expecting it. And so $200 goes a lot further when you’re buying at wholesale versus when you’re trying to go out and buy from Harry & David or some company that has consumables and the same crappy gift basket that everybody sends, or bottle of wine.
So a lot of people will hire us to basically allow them to do nicer gifts more frequently, take it all off their plate, and focus on the things only they can do. And so we play within that $200 per year regulation really, really well. Like I said before, it’s not just the item itself, it’s did you personally engrave it, was it packaged well, is it something that they didn’t even know exists, did you include their spouse. All of those little things are just as important if not more important than the item itself.
Julie Littlechild:
When you, go ahead.
Steve Wershing:
No, go ahead Julie it’s your turn.
Julie Littlechild:
If we can talk a bit about tailoring the gifts. So we’re presumably talking about finding an incredibly unique gift that could be sent to multiple clients here. So how do you tackle the idea of tailoring a gift with the idea that there are many different clients receiving potentially the same gift?
John Ruhlin:
Yeah. Well what I’ve found is that I can send, so the knives are a great instance, I’ve had literally days where I’ve sent 100 knife sets to 100 different people in 100 cities. But because it showed up on some random Monday in the middle of April, and based upon it being personally engraved to them and making sure that their spouse’s name was included and spelled right, and their family name was on it, and maybe their favorite quote, or maybe their favorite sports team was engraved on there somewhere, and it was packaged well, and the hand written not that went with it was really thoughtful. And the fact of tying in their entire family with what they’re going to be doing for the next 30 years, which is breaking bread, and celebrating, and those sorts of things. It’s the little details around it.
So if I’m going to send something to somebody, the other thing is when you’re dealing with affluent clients, nobody needs more stuff. If you look at most people’s homes, the book Essentialism and there’s all these different things out there. At my house there’s this box that’s constantly filled that’s going to Goodwill. We’re constantly purging. But when you send something to somebody, I use a luggage tag as a great instance. Most people when they send out a luggage tag they spend five bucks on it and it’s this cheap, crappy, imitation thing from China. When I send a luggage tag to somebody, it’s a $75 luggage tag. I would rather get a $75 luggage tag than a $100 watch.
And the reason is, is a $100 watch for most affluent people is a significant down grade. You spend $100 and you’re proud of the Fossil watch, but your clients are all wearing Breitling’s, and Rolex’s, and Omegas, or whatever. It’s like you’re proud of it, but you didn’t send a best in class item in that particular category. Whereas if you sent all of your clients a $75 luggage tag, that’s probably something they’re never going to go buy for themselves, but most of your clients are affluent, they travel, they would love something like that. It’s a fun little detail, it’s a fun little thing that’ll actually get used.
And so I see a lot of people waste money on, “Well we want to send headphones to people.” And I’m like, “You’re going to send Bose headphones to a bunch of dudes that already have Bose headphones.” You feel good about it. Or you’re going to send Apple to a bunch of people that already have Apple stuff. So finding a category … That’s one of the reasons the knives work, or if I’m going to send leather goods I love sending a $150 leather folio that’s handmade with their initials on it. Because they already have a stack of folios that they got at conferences with logos on them, imitation crappy pieces that are 30 bucks.
I send somebody a $150 one and it’s more effective to me than spending $500 on a watch because it’s a category that most people have a cheap version of. And when I can go best in class, world class, and make it something that’s a practical luxury that they’ll use, that’s personalized to them, now all of a sudden magic happens. And they’ll actually use it. So even somebody that’s worth seven or eight figures, if you pick the category correctly and do all the details well, that’s where you get the home run.
Julie Littlechild:
So how much would that gift that you select change from one advisor to the next? I mean what is involved in understanding who their clients are and what really makes them tick?
John Ruhlin:
In most cases we have our top 10 list that I could go to 100 different advisors and 98 out of the 100 advisors I’m able to plug and play our Giftology system. We have a recipe, people are like, “Oh I want this blah blah blah.” And I’m like, “Is the gift for you or is the gift for your clients? Do you want the recipe for Coca-Cola or are you the gift expert?” And so oftentimes it pisses people off for a little bit, and then they realize, I’ve been thinking about gifts for 17 seconds. Most people have a tendency to shop with their own eyes, versus thinking about the client, and their spouse, and their family. And thinking about longevity, and cost per impression. Like how often do I want the client thinking about me. I give them a really cool gift, but if it only gets used once a year, I’m only getting one impression out of it. I want to give something to somebody that they’re thinking about me daily, at least weekly if not daily.
So a lot of the things that we’re doing for advisors, they’re the exact same gifts that I’m using for my manufacturing clients. Because we’re tying in to people’s humanity. Now there’s always anomalies, there’s always instances where it’s like an advisor might say, “I only work with widows, and I only work with this type of clientele.” Well we can customize it to that, but oftentimes the foundational gifting that we’re doing where you’re just trying to stay top of mind, build some loyalty and some trust, and give them something that’s practical and unique, what I call mass customization. If you want to do, like we’ve done some crazy stuff like Brooks Brothers, right, $7000 worth of clothes waiting for somebody when they went into a hotel room. Those are awesome, and those are fun, but they’re not oftentimes from a budget perspective, or from an execution perspective … Everybody wants to start with the Super Bowl. And I’m like, “How about you just learn to throw the football and catch it a few times. How bout we just learn how to get a few base hits.”
Then in years three and four if you want to and do the crazy one off, like hit the home run in the World Series, we can do that, but let’s build a foundation first, and most people don’t want to start there. They want to start the other end, and it doesn’t make sense financially. And once you’ve done that, like what do you do after you’ve won the Super Bowl, what’s your next gift going to be? It’s only downhill from there.
Steve Wershing:
You sort of threw it out there, but I want to highlight it for a second. That $7000 worth of Brooks Brothers is a great story that’s in your book. And two things from it, first everybody needs to buy the book to read that story because it’s fabulous. And the other thing is that the punchline of that is you ended up not actually spending any of that money on it right? And so we’re not going to give it away, we’re not going to tell people the story because they need to go buy the book and read it because it’s a great story. But you talk about the power of gifting and things, you went out and got $7000 worth of stuff, but you didn’t actually in the end have to pay for it.
John Ruhlin:
It cost me zero, yeah it cost me nothing.
Steve Wershing:
Exactly. But the other thing I want to bring out is, we’re talking about getting really nice things and personalizing them to the client. But one of the points that you’ve made in your speaking, and in the book, and something that I heard on your interview with Michael Port was, a really effective gift doesn’t even necessarily have to be really nice or really effective. If it’s personalized to them specifically, so in Michael’s case he likes boating and spends a lot of time on his boat. And you gave him a gift that was, it was a coffee mug or something like that, but it was personalized to his boat. And so he uses it all the time, and it doesn’t cost very much but it really made a big impression. Can you talk a little bit about that?
John Ruhlin:
Yeah. I tell people even that are working with Fortune 500 companies, if you can’t buy somebody a pencil or a cup of coffee, what you can do is write the nicest hand written note on the planet, and go read it to them. And your gratitude and happiness will go up and so will theirs. Oftentimes the note is just as important as what the item is. The item is just the tangible trigger that reminds them. For Michael, it was a $40 of $50 tumbler, and knew that his boat was really important to him. The boat actually caught on fire and they lost everything. And so he gets a new boat, still the same name if I remember right. But we personalized the gift to … It was a cool tumbler, it was beautiful, but it’s still 40 or 50 bucks, it’s not like it was a Rolex.
But the fact of taking the time to figure out the boat’s name and personalizing it, and making it so if he’s on the boat, or even not on the boat, obviously if he’s into boating that’s a positive memory every time he thinks about the boat. So we personalized the tumbler to him and to the boat. Obviously a guy that can afford his own tumbler, he’s super successful and done amazingly well.
Steve Wershing:
Exactly. But he’s a perfect example of that because he’s very successful, he can afford whatever he wants to buy. And so making a gift meaningful does not translate into a price tag, right, it translates into the personal thought that went into it.
John Ruhlin:
Yep. The thoughtfulness, the energy to go into it to make it all about them versus all about yourself, it’s a hard thing to break from a habit perspective, but yeah. Michael’s great and that’s a perfect example of it. It’s not the dollar amount, it’s the thoughtfulness, the timing, all of those sorts of things that make it impactful.
Julie Littlechild:
Which I think is a particularly important point for this industry because one of the challenges I think we would all agree in the industry that we have is that many advisors aren’t investing enough money, a high enough proportion of their revenue back into, never mind client appreciation or whatever we want to call this, and marketing. So getting them to a higher dollar point can be tough, but this idea I think of making something really, really personal … And the note, I guess the note’s an interesting thing, because you could technically send the same gift to several different people, it would be meaningful to several different people, but that little bit of personalization must make a huge difference.
John Ruhlin:
The note is part of the secret sauce. I won’t send out a gift, myself personally, or for our clients, unless a handwritten note can come with it. If it feels like it’s automated from Amazon or some auto pilot thing, it doesn’t resonate. At the end of the day people are like, “Oh I want to sign it from the Jones team.” I’m like, “The team doesn’t send the gift. A relationship takes place between two human beings.” So the gift has to come with a note, and it has to be signed by one person. Because people don’t buy from companies, they buy from individuals, and in financial services that’s more prevalent than ever. There’s a million different, what is there, 470,000 financial advisors, or people that call themselves financial advisors. And they all speak the same buzz words, and language.
The gifting is one of those areas, and how you show personalization is one of the few areas that you can show that you actually walk your talk, you actually do invest in your relationships, and that you are different. Because everybody says they’re different, but yeah I don’t see very many people saying, “Wow, I netted three quarters of a million dollars last year, or a quarter million bucks last year. What am I going to reinvest back into the relationships that actually provided me that opportunity to make that money and that revenue?”
Those people have a scarcity mindset unfortunately, and it becomes self-perpetuating. They’re like, “I don’t understand. I offer great service, why am I not getting referrals?” Well, what are you doing that shows people that you’re different that’s not just talk? And it’s rare for people to walk their talk.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting. So go ahead Julie.
Julie Littlechild:
I was just going to say. I know you talk about having a gifting plan. I’d love to maybe break that down a little now. I think a great step, as you said, you’ve got the book which maps this out, which will be a great resource for advisors as a starting point. But what are the components of that plan? What do they need to think about?
John Ruhlin:
The first thing is who. I see a lot of people that try to treat all of their clients the same, they’re like, hey I got my book of businesses, 100 or 500 people or whatever else and they send the same card, and the same birthday cake, and the same whatever out to all these people. For us, it’s narrowing down and focusing, the who is just as important. People want to start with what are you going to send, I’m like I don’t care about the gift you’re going to send, if you haven’t identified the right relationships, and their inner circle, then it doesn’t matter because you’re going to waste your money on sending it out to the wrong people. So identifying who the top 20-30% of your relationships are that are likely producing 80% of your revenue, and investing all of your resources there.
I also see people investing in relationships that they don’t even like. If you don’t like working with a client why would you want to duplicate them? They might have a lot of assets under management with you or whatever else, but do you want to work with a bunch of A-holes? No, then don’t duplicate them. Take them off the list.
Steve Wershing:
That’s hilarious.
John Ruhlin:
I see a big gap in people understanding … there’s a lot of lawyers and accountants and other people that could be sending you business, and are you waiting for referrals to happen with those 10 or 20 people or are you being proactive and building those relationships, and inspiring them to be loyal to you, or inspiring them to go out of their way. Because they have a lot of people they could refer the deals to. And if you’ve got 10 or 20 referral sources out there that are going out of their way to advocate for you, your pipeline would probably be full. But most people are not willing to invest in those relationships, they’ll send the $200 Ruth’s Chris gift card after a referral. But that completely negates what you’re really trying to accomplish which is building a trust and a relationship.
So for me the who is way more important than the what. And identifying that list, and having the details of kids’ names, and pets’ names, and spouses’ names, and all that kind of dialed in. And then it’s figuring out a math equation. What’s your business net, and what percentage are you going to reinvest so you can be proactive with it? And then laying out, I’m going to do this client event in person here. And I see a lot of people when they do their client events, it’s the same like we’re going to do a wine tasting. Great, so does every advisor in your city. How are you going to make that wine tasting a once in a lifetime experience? How are you going to make it something that they tell their friends, and are begging to bring their friends that are also referrals to come to it because it’s so special. I see so many people have events that are lame.
When I do a wine tasting, I did one in Nashville last fall, I brought in the America’s first master somm to come in, his name’s Eddie Osterland. We flew him in and he created a food and wine experience that even people that were somm’s that were in the room were like, “I’m so honored to be here. I wish I could’ve brought this person, this person, this person to this event.” It was only for 20 people, and people were clamoring to get in and now there’s still buzz about it six months later. So I see a lot of people doing the same dog and pony dinner shows, dinners and steaks, and golf, and how do you make that client experience. Because it’s not all just about tangible gifts, there’s time for face time. But I see people doing a lot of vanilla stuff, versus going all in on one or two things, whether it’s gifts or whether it’s experiences, to where people are begging to be a part of it versus feeling obligated to come because they’ve been invited.
Steve Wershing:
So let me ask you sort of a logistical question. We’re trained to do things at end of year, around the holidays, and those kinds of things. And it’s a really good point that you don’t want to do that because you want to stand out and you want to do something meaningful to the relationship. What should you do at the end of the year? Let’s assume you’ve got a gifting strategy, and you’ve put it on a calendar, and you’ve mapped it all out. What if anything should you do at the end of the year?
John Ruhlin:
Nothing. You should be the Grinch. I know that sounds cold. I mean personally, I have three daughters, they’re eight, six, and three. We did six different parties, and Santa gatherings. I love Christmas. From a faith perspective, Christmas is really important to my Christian faith, and I love celebrating, and we do advent every night. But from a business perspective, nothing. And the reason is, is that people are eating and drinking themselves to death, they’re feeling obligated to go to all these parties, they’re stressed out with family, and travel, and personal gift buying. My budget for 400 grand, I don’t spend one dime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not one dime, and I own a gifting company.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting.
John Ruhlin:
The other 11 months out of the year is when you say thank you and show gratitude, and that’s when it will show up and matters. Now I’m not saying you can’t send a note to people, but with Christmas cards, it’s just noise. If you’re really looking for an ROI to your relationship building and your marketing, have your party. If you want to do a party make it a blowout party, and do it in the middle of February when nobody has anything going on, it’s cold as heck in the Midwest or whatever. Do it at a time when people are available, when people are like, “Oh I can’t wait to go to that party in February” versus, “Wow I got 13 different things I’ve got to do in December.”
And so when it comes to gifts it’s the same way. If a gift shows up, even a lame gift showing up in the middle of May is better than an awesome gift showing up in the middle of December. And it’s just because as human beings, when the conference table is ready to collapse from all the candy, nuts, chocolates, wine, bourbon, whatever, it’s just overkill. And so if you want to be strategic with it and actually get a 10x ROI, put a dollar into the ATM and get $10 back out, from a gifting perspective you have to do it at times that are unexpected. The timing to me is just as important as what you’re sending. And so the Christmas, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, all that kind of stuff.
If you could just avoid that and do it at times that are unexpected, once again you’ll be in the top probably 2% of gift givers because everybody follows tradition. And if everybody’s doing something, that’s the time to zag. If you’re an entrepreneur and you really want to get an ROI … Now if you work for corporate America and you just want to check the box, great, go do it. But you’re not going to get any impact from it, you’re just going to feel good because you said, hey I did this, but there’s no real impact to it long term.
Steve Wershing:
Right. Sure and well that’s not our audience. In terms of the timing, in the book you make reference to planned spontaneity, and I’ll just highlight that you talk about doing things at unexpected times. You can plan all this out for the whole year, and for you it can be perfectly planned and carefully timed, but to the client it’s unexpected and so it’s a surprise. You can have that planned spontaneity that you talk about.
John Ruhlin:
Yeah. Being proactive is huge. I’m not saying wait to do something, I’m saying lay out the next 12-36 months in advance by far.
Steve Wershing:
Well just in the way of wrapping up. John as people digest this and they go through your book and figure out what their gifting strategy is going to look like, what would be the one thing you think advisors should do today to get started on this?
John Ruhlin:
Don’t buy the book. I have a thing that we take all of our clients through, and we do a loyalty planning session, which we offer for a lot of our tribe for free to go through that plan. But before they even sign up for the loyalty planning session they should go … there’s a 10 Worst Gifts to Avoid Giving. And a lot of times when people get that PDF they’re like, “Oh my gosh it’s like my entire playbook. I do every single one of those things for the last 25 years, like it’s embarrassing.” But if your tribe wants to go download it for free they go to thegiversedge.com. They can download the 10 Worst Gifts to Avoid Giving if they want to be referable. And from there, you give that to your marketing team, and if you just avoided those 10 things you’d be in the top 10% of gift givers.
John Ruhlin:
If you want to learn more, twice a week we publish our tips and tricks, and behind the scenes of what we’re doing. But that 10 Worst Gifts to Avoid Giving is a great place to start. If you love that, and you love some of the things that we send after that, you’re happy to go to Amazon and buy the book and dive into it. It’s a quick 90 minute read. A lot of people when they read it they’re like, “John is there a Giftology two coming out, because it seems like you gave everything away in the first book.” And I’m like, “Yes. It’s our entire playbook.” There’s no but wait there’s more. It’s our entire system that we use for all of our clients for the last 18 years is in the book. But starting at The Giver’s Edge is a great place to go and start.
Steve Wershing:
Okay. And so is there any place else that people can … We’ll put The Giver’s Edge in the show notes. Is there any place else where people can find you and keep track of what you’re doing?
John Ruhlin:
I mean I’m on Twitter. I think we’re up to 25000 or 30000 followers there. So Twitter, all the social media stuff, and there’s a bunch of websites. But to keep things simple, thegiversedge.com is a great place to start with, and then if they want to follow us on Twitter we do publish our thoughts daily on there as well.
Julie Littlechild:
Perfect.
Steve Wershing:
That’s great. Well John this is such great advice for financial advisors, and thank you so much for spending some time with us today on the podcast.
John Ruhlin:
Thanks for having me guys.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, thank you.
Steve Wershing:
Take care. Bye bye.
Julie Littlechild:
Hi it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really does help. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.