Paying for college can be an immense financial obligation for most Americans. Fortunately, there are financial vehicles available you can offer to help families cover the costs of the potential burden.

In this episode of Money Script Monday, Gabriel discusses the benefits of adding College Planning to your practice to both increase revenue and create lifelong clients.

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Video transcription

Hello, welcome back to another episode of Money Script Monday. My name's Gabriel Lindemann, and I'm very excited to be here today.

Today, we're going to talk about how you can offer college planning services right now, today, into your practice.

With that in mind, let's get started. Too often people always come up to me and say, "Gabe, what can LifePro do? What can you do to really incorporate college play into my practice? I want to talk about college planning.”

That's great. Everybody wants to add college planning because it results in very big cases.

The average case is anywhere from $12,000 to $15,000. That's pretty good commissionable premium that you get to take home, but there's a lot of work to get to that point.

People have to realize college plan is one part, and then there's college funding, two different parts.

The most important part is getting a kid into school, and you can do that by either you becoming a college planner or outsourcing what your college planner would do to a student service center or taking on the staff internally. It's up to you.

But why would you want to do that? What's the point of offering student services?

Why Offer Student Services?

The most important thing is trust.

You can't expect to go up to a family and have them give you $300,000, $400,000 of their hard-earned income to possibly shelter it or come up with a college funding plan if you haven't earned their trust.

The only way you earn their trust is by one, most importantly, getting their kid into school, getting them into their top school of choice.

A lot of student service centers are very reactive. We chose to take an approach where it's very proactive.

The student service center reaches out to the family, gives you accountability, and updates.

It helps strengthen relationships, so when it comes down to college funding, you already have the families trust.

More importantly, you gain access to all the financial forms and everything they have.

The one problem we get in traditional financial planning is you meet with the family, "Hey, can I see everything you have," and they're guarded.

You know, bits and pieces here, they might forget. With college plan, you get access to everything. It's part of the process.

If you really want an opportunity to see what you can do with the family, college planning is a great opportunity for the families to trust you, but to open up everything so you can review it.

And lastly, it's a new demographic.

The way that we really promote it, is not for people to become a college planner and to give seminars, it’s to look to their current database to see what they're currently doing, and how to offer it, how to get in front of new people, but more importantly how to offer it for lifelong clients.

Too often, people are only focused on the sale today.

College planning and college funding, when done correctly, you can have a legacy of clients forever.

Think about this. You got a student, you got their family into a top tier school.

Student is going to USC, going to become engineer. When they're done, they're going to be making $200,000 or $300,000, and maybe $500,000.

Who are they going to ask to reinvest their money and get financial advice?

Well, that college planner, that financial planner that helped them get into school, that made it affordable, that helped their family throughout the whole way.

That's why college planning is a great legacy transition for family planning that you can have a family forever.

You can have the grandparents get involved, you can have the students eventually get involved, and then when they have kids, again, it's a cycle, so people that do AUM business, think about that.

When the kids are done, they're going to reinvest that money. They're going to most likely reinvest that money with the college planner, the financial planner, that helped them get into the school.

It's a great opportunity. It's a new demographic that we're very excited to help and teach to our advisers that have current books of business.

Another common question I get is, well, how do I get in front, what's the marketing, how do I get in front of people?

Traditionally in college planning, people do seminars.

We're not advocating that right now just because honestly, it cost a lot of money and two, to get access to a college planning PowerPoint presentation and seminar system is very costly.

There are some systems out there that cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000.

We have a great program through our CollegePro for $500. Brian Safdari will teach you A through Z how to do it, and it's all prerecorded.

You can do it over a weekend, you can do it one night, you could do it over a couple of weeks. It's up to your own pace.

Some of our top producers have done it and added I to their practice, and after attending that program, they're dating college planning.

A lot of our producers are doing an extra $100,000, $200,000 a year just by learning the basics and by utilizing a service center and with our coaching, it's a win-win experience.

But other than doing seminars, which we don't advocate right now for new people who're trying to put it into their practice, email campaigns, we've created copy and paste templates.

Email Campaigns

All you have to do is use a template we designed, customize it, and if you're not good at that or if your team's not good at that, give us a call.

Our marketing department is fabulous. They'd be more than happy to show you how to do it. Set up some mail campaigns, do it all for you.

If you're not getting paid, we're not getting paid.

Marketing is one of the things that we really take to heart that were really bending over backwards to get it out there.

Another option is, once you send that email campaign, call your FSR, get them involved with you.

Call Campaigns

Have them teach your staff how to do outbound phone scripts, how to do follow-up campaigns.

How to call, “I sent you email campaign, or I sent you a video about college funding, cost planning and I thought about you. My rep, my friend, my boss wants to make an appointment."

We have scripts for every situation.

Call your FSR, give me a call so we can teach you guys how to go through the script and how to make those appointments, and how to make those appointments better.

Once you have that appointment, call me, call your FSR, or call your coach, and we have a foolproof system from A to Z on how to close that appointment and what the process looks like afterwards.

Educational Videos

These videos that we have right now, this is more of agent-based videos, but most of the videos we have on Money Script Monday are tailored to give out to your database.

That includes college planning and college funding. Use those videos. Use those videos to get people to call you.

Use those videos during the meeting to explain “how do you explain the five ways to pay…”

You can explain it and then play the video or tell the clients to watch the video when they leave. That reinforces everything you talk about.

Use the videos, use the stuff that we've done here at LifePro to make your 2019 the best year ever.

Branded landing pages. This is another great thing. We can do landing pages to make your company, to make everything look more cohesive as one total brand.

That's one of the advantages of working with LifePro.

We have a great marketing system and a great marketing team that has had great success and doing this for other advisers.

We'd love to do it for you in 2019. And lastly, we have great marketing flyers that you can give out.

Marketing Flyers

Some of our advisers are getting little business cards with a QR code so they scan it, which links up to an educational video.

That seems to be very popular. We have different materials out there in the marketing world to help you.

Like I said before, if you’re not making money, we're not making money.

We're a team. We work together.

Let us see what we can do in 2019 to increase or to add college planning to your practice, so we can add another $100,000, $200,000 you didn't do in 2018.

Thanks again for your time. I'm looking forward to 2019 being the best year ever. Thank you. Bye.