An Entrepreneurial Life On Your Own Terms, With Ken Robinson

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast. We have a terrific transformation story today. I was very, very pleased to introduce our great interview with Ken Robinson because Ken is from Rocky River, Ohio. And in May of 1944, I was born in Rocky River, Ohio. So three things really occurred to me from Ken's interview as a financial planner and as an entrepreneur. He's got sort of like a triangle that I can talk about here. And the first thing is about Strategic Coach. The cornerstone of everything we do in Strategic Coach is your Unique Ability, something that we believe everybody's born with, but for the most part, they lose contact with it once they get into the educational system. Because the educational system wants you to be well-rounded, and you don't focus just on what you like doing. You don't just focus on what you're great at. You have to do everything.
 
And I think that entrepreneurs at a very early age, I've talked to thousands of entrepreneurs and generally what makes them an entrepreneur today showed up when they were eight years old. And what it is that they have a particular method that they have for making progress, they have a particular method for always learning more, always becoming more skillful. And they're very motivated to do it, not in everything but just in one particular area. Takes you a while to sort it out, takes you a while to know how you can make money with this, but we call that Unique Ability. And the story that Ken talks about of knowing he was going to be a lawyer, training to be a lawyer, and going into financial planning is an indication to me how strong his adherence to his Unique Ability was. And he wanted to be helpful, he wanted to be useful. But even in financial planning, he wanted to do it in, as he says, in sort of a holistic way, where you're taking the person's entire life into account when you're doing the financial planning, when you're setting the strategies and the various instruments that you need to carry out their dreams. And you could just see him light up when he was talking about that. And I find that whatever lights him up right now was lighting him up when he was eight years old.
 
The other thing he mentions, two other tools, which I think are fantastic and to put together, and one of them is the 4 C's. And the 4 C's is just a growth model in Coach that when you have a goal, it requires that you commit yourself to something where you don't have the capability yet to pull it off. Because if you did have the capability, you would be doing it. So the fact that you're not doing it means that you have to grow the capability. And in order to do that, you have to commit before you have the capability and go through a period of courage. And it's my suggestion that it's the multiplier between the commitment and the courage that actually creates the capability. And from that, you get a reward called confidence, which enables you to do it again. So commitment, courage, capability, confidence. Okay, rinse, re-lather, and wash again.
 
But the neat thing about it is he put it together with the Four Freedoms. So what I take from Ken's presentation is that he uses the 4 C's in relationship to Freedom of Time. So, he wants to have more Freedom of Time. He doesn't have the capability to do that yet. So, commitment, courage, then he gets the capability, then he gets the confidence, and then he goes after more Freedom of Time. And he does the same thing with Freedom of Money, does the same thing with Freedom of Relationship, and the same thing with the Freedom of Purpose in life. It's all about value creation. That was very, very strong in what Ken is talking about, just the value creation. He wants to create value for his clients.
 
And what was so interesting to me was his very rapid realization when he was in the law firm that to be the person he wanted to be in the marketplace, being helpful to people in the way he wanted to be helpful, he could only do this as an entrepreneur. He would not find it anywhere working for someone else. I can support everything Ken said with conversations that I've had personally, where I'm the coach of entrepreneurs, 7,000 times in the last 50 years. It's just a delight for me to hear Ken talk about his life, and I feel a great deal of pleasure that we have created a structure and a process in Strategic Coach that can support someone like Ken just to be the person he wants to be in life, but be the person especially who he wants to be in the financial planning world. So I really, really loved this interview that Ken was so kind to give us regarding his time in Strategic Coach.
 
Ken Robinson: I'm Ken Robinson. My firm is Practical Financial Planning. I'm a holistic financial planner in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. And I joined Strategic Coach about 10 or 12 years ago. It's become an indispensable part of my professional journey. My entrepreneurial motivation really comes from the fact that what I do, I did not see anyone else doing or not enough people doing when I started it. I opened my practice full-time in the year 2000. And I was working at a completely different field, discovered personal finance, became very enthusiastic about it, started writing a personal finance column for the employee newsletter. And I was intrigued enough by it that I started studying the professional practice of it and realized how few people were doing this in a way that would help me or my colleagues, and how few people were doing it in a way that focused on anything other than just investments.
 
So I saw a need out there and I felt a real sense of mission to try to fill that need. If I could have found someone to hire me and allow me to do that, I probably would have gone that route, but I didn't find anything like that. So I had to create it myself. I was not a natural entrepreneur. And every so often I still get this flash of, wait, what do you mean I make my own paycheck? How does that happen? Because I always imagined I would be working for some other firm and they'd be putting money in my bank account twice a month. But to do what I wanted to do, to influence the world and help people the way I wanted to help them, I had to be an entrepreneur.
 
I think to make that switch, it really did come from passion for this sense of mission for what I have since come to call holistic financial planning. And I'm certainly not the only one who refers to holistic financial planning, but that's the best description. How was I able to do it is simply that I didn't know I couldn't. It's like they say that a bumblebee doesn't have wings big enough for it to pull its own mass up into the air. It shouldn't be able to fly, but it doesn't know that it can't. So it flies all the time. And that's how I started my entrepreneurial journey. Had I understood what I was getting myself into, I would have needed something like the 4 C's to tell me, oh, it's okay to be terrified because you have no idea how on earth this is going to work. But that's the courage part of the 4 C's, and knowing that it's possible to get somewhere even though I don't know what the map looks like, it's not something that comes naturally to me. So having it explained to me in Strategic Coach has been really valuable. I now have that image of the 4 C's in a frame in my office because it's a constant process of saying, well, the next step requires us to do things we don't know how to do yet. And having the skill to be able to say, "Okay, I'm about to acquire a new skill" turns out to be one of the most important things.
 
Well, we usually think that we're ready to move ahead with something once we know we have the capability, but a decision and a commitment to do something is what really comes first. And then there's the courage step where you have to move ahead even though you don't know how you're going to get there. That's what develops the capability. And then when I recognize I've got the capability, now I have the confidence to do that over and over again. And that's, in a nutshell, the 4 C's. I say that it's a way to understand that it's okay to not know how you're going to get there. And that doesn't mean you won't get there. You can get there. And most of the time, we find that we don't know everything we need to know quite yet to get to a place where we know we want to be. So it's like the analogy we hear quite a lot about airplanes, at least in theory, being off course 99% of the time, but they're constantly making course corrections. And they usually land on time or, well, I don't know. They usually land safely. But they usually get to their destinations.
 
So, law practice was not something that I was temperamentally suited for. I always knew from the time I was quite young that I was going to go to law school, that I was going to be a lawyer. I got my first job. And as I walked across the street from the parking garage, I thought, I may take this exact walk every workday for the next 40 years. And one year later, I was in a different firm. And two years after that, I was out of law practice. I was in litigation. And I'm someone who prefers people to get along. I don't like conflict. I didn't know that about myself until I started practicing law. I love debate, but I don't like conflict. And some of the things I had to do to be a good lawyer, I didn't want to be known for. An opponent once shook my hand and said, "You're a tough lawyer." And I didn't feel good.
 
I fled law into anything I could find that would use some skills that I had. And that was risk management in the public sector for 10 years. And while I was there, I discovered financial planning. And I always say I ran from law, but I ran toward financial planning. And I ran toward financial planning. I studied for the Certified Financial Planner designation while I was still working in the public sector. And took time off work to go take my exams, took time off work to get my basic training from my financial planning alliance and how to actually make money at this. And right after we wrapped up a project for the year 2000, I submitted my resignation to my employer and started on my own firm.
 
Within a month, the dot-com bubble burst. And it really didn't matter because there are always going to be ups and downs in the economy. So, it sort of doesn't matter that that's when I start looking for clients. Turns out maybe it was an advantage because as some clients are unhappy with the guidance that they've gotten before, maybe they're looking for somebody new. And I didn't have any clients to lose. So, I worked out on the better side of that. But it was a journey to figure out what part of the process of serving clients did I like best? What was I good at? What did people appreciate and what would they pay for? So, eventually coming to the process of figuring out what's my Unique Ability really points to where I add the most value. And that's the focus of what my next chapter is going to be in financial planning, is spending more of my time and more of my energy where I can add the most value for clients. And it happens to be Unique Ability for me, which is about teaching and storytelling. That's about the face-to-face client relationship. That's not about the administration of compliance law or something like that. So, I'm in the process of getting out of the business of doing the compliance pieces and the other administrative kinds of things and focusing more on the client relationships and helping people feel serene and content and not worried about money so they can focus on all these other things that are more important than money.
 
So, once I got my business set up in a way that I was serving the clients I wanted to work with and doing the kind of work that I want to do... What I want to do is ongoing, holistic financial planning. I don't want to just manage a portfolio of savings and investments. I want to help people see when they don't have enough auto insurance. I want to help people make the right choice about when to begin their social security benefits, because for many people, it matters. I want to help them focus on what's important to them. What's all that money for in the first place? It's not to build up a bigger stack of colored paper. That's not the point. The stack of colored paper is a tool. So, once I had identified those things, I could weed out the clients or the potential clients who would say, "I just want someone to manage my portfolio." "That's great. Let me refer you to someone who can manage your portfolio. That's not what I do." When someone comes to me and says, "I just want to beat the market," you're welcome to try. I will not enter into a relationship with you because I do not believe that's possible. And there are others who think it's possible, so I will let you go find them.
 
Freeing myself from the expectations of someone who's paying me to do something that's not really in my wheelhouse, it's my responsibility for taking on that client. So, over the past several years, I've been weeding out clients who are not the best-fit clients. They coincidentally turn out to be the clients with what we might call the highest friction factor: the people who require the most effort, who need the most handholding that's outside of the scope of the handholding that I'm happy to do. And it's an iterative process. There are layers to this where you get rid of the client who's obviously the wrong fit. Great, now I have more energy for all these other clients. And when that awful distress is gone, now you realize, oh, and these two clients over here, they're not as bad as the ones who have just left, but they're not really that great a fit either. So, you can go through this in stages—I certainly went through it in stages—till you get to the point where you say, well, I guess there's no such thing as the perfect client. I actually have one who is. I tried replicating them, and it didn't work. Asked for referrals from her, and I got referrals, but they were not as ideal as she is.
 
And you get to the point where you say, well, of course, human beings are imperfect. Just like me. I know, I'm a human being so I'm imperfect. So, we're not going to line up exactly. So, what's the degree of imperfection that I'm comfortable taking on? And is anybody falling outside that range? It's sort of like tolerances in engineering or something, but that tolerance is getting narrower and narrower as the years go by. And I now have no clients that I'm not delighted to see. But it's not a process that happens overnight to experience more of those Four Freedoms. Improving on the Four Freedoms is something that I'm still working on, and I'm okay still working on it. I have more time. Do I have all the time I want? No. Am I getting there? Yes. Am I taking more time off and do I have plans to take even more time off? Yes. Will I have to give up any revenue to do that? Not any revenue that I want.
 
One of the things that I've learned about myself is that I am not particularly skilled at assembling a team of people. So, that's something that I need to outsource. And as I outsource that and get other people to do more of the things that at the moment are still on my plate- I've outsourced a lot of it, but there's still some left. As I continue to do that, there's going to be more time and the same revenue and more capacity for more clients if I decide I want them. Right now, I'm being extremely picky about new clients, and my expectation is we will intentionally turn away about 80% of the people who come to our door, and we'll attempt to establish a relationship with the other 20%. So, if I add four clients this coming year, that's fine. I don't think I want to add more. And as I add more clients, the focus will return to ever-increasing efforts toward more efficiency as well so that I'll have more time. But money is not the issue.
 
If you were to summarize my story, I think I'm going to be really interested to see what the answer to that question will be five years from now. But right now, I think you'd summarize my story as someone who worked really hard at strengthening his weaknesses and ended up with a bunch of strong weaknesses and eventually surrendered to his Unique Ability. It was not that long ago that I was willing to admit that my Unique Ability had nothing to do with assembling teams or assembling processes or designing workflows. My Unique Ability is directly with people, teaching, storytelling, and listening. And I thought I was supposed to be the leader of a business and had these expectations about what that meant. But none of the things about assembling a fantastic team of people are ever going to be my Unique Ability. Like people talk about their religious conversion as a moment of surrender. I had to surrender to my Unique Ability. And then the path forward became crystal clear. And it meant that I needed to find a way to have the right kind of collaboration with people whose Unique Ability is about building awesome teams of people and making wonderful work processes and doing all those things that are not my Unique Ability.
 
I had a vision for where I wanted my practice to go as I get to what most people think of as retirement age, where I said, I want to scale it down to 20 clients because I don't want to work any harder than that. And now I realized I'd said that because I was still assuming I had to do all the administrative stuff that I dislike. And if somebody else is doing that, I'm fine with the 45 clients that I have. Maybe I'm fine with 50 clients. Maybe I'm fine with 60. I don't know. But if I'm not having to be the chief compliance officer anymore, because someone else is doing a better job of that than I ever did, that's part of the adventure that I get to figure out next. And I know that it's something I want to keep doing because if you want to hear a highly energetic response about anything to do with personal financial planning, I still provide that without even trying. So, I'm sure I'm still interested in this, and giving it all up now would be absolutely the wrong move.
 
What I'd say to Dan, I think, is how important it was to hear him talk about progress, not perfection, and how liberating that is. What I need to know more than anything else is that it's okay for me to want to improve my experience as an entrepreneur. And Strategic Coach makes that easy because the fundamental tools in the tool kit, they're not something that we need an advanced degree to understand. And that's what makes them so powerful and so practical because you can look at the tool and with just a little orientation to it, you can use it over and over and over again in so many different situations. And that the insight to say, let's not make this any more complicated than it needs to be. That's what I've needed. If you want to complicate it, I'll believe you. So, knowing that the expert has straightforward ways for me to make important decisions and do things like get myself out of "The Gap," that's been really transformative for me. I can't say enough about my fellow entrepreneurs. They're just such a supportive group. It's something that I can't imagine not being in my life now. So, I expect to keep coming to workshops for as long as I possibly can.