Entrepreneurs are born out of a desire to fix, to innovate, to act. Conor Delaney, founder and CEO of Good Life Companies is entrepreneurial in all he does. Bold, authentic, and unabashed in his beliefs, he has persevered in health, family, and business by thinking independently.
In this series, Conor is joined by guests from the financial services industry as well as entrepreneurs, wellness gurus, community leaders, mentors, and others to share experiences that led to abundance, success, and wellness in the journey to a Good Life.
Conor Delaney:
Welcome to Thinking Independently. I’m Conor Delaney. I’m joined by financial advisor and founder of Cornerstone Financial Management, Ken Calcutt, out of Columbia, South Carolina. How you doing, Ken?
Ken Calcutt:
I’m good, man. How are you?
Conor Delaney:
Awesome, awesome. Thanks for coming on today. We bring Ken on today, he launched his independent practice in 2014. Before that, he was a financial advisor at Waddell & Reed. Ken, why don’t you share a little bit about how you walked into this career, what that setup looked like as you were getting out of college, and then just share with us what your desire and goals were as you were starting your practice?
Ken Calcutt:
Yeah, yeah. It was an interesting path for me. I went to college, studied finance, degree in finance, but while I was in college, I was working through college, I was working at a grocery store, I actually had an opportunity to be a department manager while I was in college. It was working out great. I was making good money, going to school, finished with my degree, start looking in the financial industry for a career, and was getting job offers making less than I made at the grocery store.
I ended up staying in the grocery business for a year. Got in the sales business with Pepsi-Cola for a couple of years out of college, and that was great when I was in my early twenties. You make decent money doing that, but that’s definitely a young man’s job. You can’t do that forever.
Ken Calcutt:
But then, three years out of college, my mom actually sent me an ad from the paper for jobs that were being posted and Waddell & Reed was looking for financial advisors, and so I sent the resume in. They called me in for an interview and gave me an opportunity there. T
hat was about three years out of college. And the goal there was I just wanted something that was going to be a place where I could grow, somewhere I could build a business, where I could make a good living, help people out with some aspect of their life with financial planning. I feel like that’s a lot of what we do.
Ken Calcutt:
Looking back, though, that was 20 years ago now, that was 2004, I had nothing to bring to the table for that job. I had no experience, I had no clients, I had no nothing, but the manager at Waddell & Reed at the time, he was willing to give me a shot and so he gave me a shot. He taught me what I needed to know about how to be successful in the business, and then it just became perseverance from there. It was a grind, but every advisor that gets in the business probably knows that.
Conor Delaney:
Ken, if you look at your business now versus your business that first couple of months, and even that first year or two, as you were becoming a financial advisor, is it what you thought it was going to be? Did it shape and take a different form along the way? Walk us through how your initial idea of what this business looked like manifested into what you have built today.
Ken Calcutt:
Yeah, it’s very different today than what I thought. I got in the business just oblivious, honestly, to what the business was all about. I wanted to help people with investing and planning, and that’s what drove me into the business, but when you first get in, there’s a large sales component to it. It’s great if you want to help people, but you got to find clients. And so the sales part of it, acquiring new clients the first few years, that’s always a challenge, and I didn’t really like that so much, but I was fortunate.
Ken Calcutt:
And then I shared a story with you before about how some things fell into place, but I was fortunate to get into some networking programs where clients were being referred to me consistently, and that’s where things really started shifting. Once I had consistent referral streams, networking streams that were sending referrals to me, now it’s morphed into this larger practice that’s way larger than I ever intended.
I just thought it was going to be me and maybe an admin, and now here I’ve got three licensed advisors, three admins, and we’re bringing on 50 or 100 new clients a year, and it’s all referral-based, from 20 years ago when I was just scraping and scrounging trying to find a few clients. It’s completely different than what I thought it was going to be just because of the scaling that’s occurred over the years, but, yeah, it’s a whole different animal now.
Conor Delaney:
You mentioned earlier the manager at Waddell & Reed. Share with me just a little bit of … a couple of questions. One, this business is very hard to get into. I think the numbers are somewhere in the 90th percentile first-year advisors fail. Those that succeed have a high probability of failing within a short four or five years thereafter. You’ve obviously been able to overcome those odds. You’ve built a great business that is, I think, extremely sustainable and is actually now giving back, not just to clients that you serve. But walk me through, I think it’s pretty cool, the story that you have about your manager and how you’ve come full circle with him over the years.
Ken Calcutt:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. He gave me a shot. Like I said, I didn’t have any experience, but he was honest with me upfront. I’ll give him credit, he was completely honest. He said, “Listen, you got to give it five years. You cannot quit before five years,” and I was like, “All right, why would you tell me that? Does everybody quit or what? What are we doing?”
And I didn’t realize the dropout rate, or the failure rate, in the industry when I got into it, but he told me, “You got to give it five years,” and he told me how to prospect and how to do financial planning. And so that was the thing that kept me going the first few years because I would imagine I’m not different than most advisors.
Ken Calcutt:
There was a lot of days in those first few years that I thought, “Man, I’ve made a mistake. I done got in the wrong business. I’m not making any income,” and it was just those days was really hard, but I would always remember he told me, “You got to give it five years,” and by the time you’re in the business, you’ve spent so much time and effort getting licensed and prospecting and at least getting started, you’ve got a lot invested in this. And so I kept thinking, “Man, I’m not quitting this far into it.”
Ken Calcutt:
I just kept persevering and kept pushing through, and literally, it was about year five where I started feeling like, “Okay, this isn’t as hard. I’ve got enough of a client base where this is doable.”, but it was a long push through. And then once things really took off, and I can circle back and share the story about how the Dave Ramsey thing came about, if you want me to, but now here we are, fast-forward 15 years beyond that, I’ve been independent 10 years now, and the guy that hired me at my first firm, two years after I went independent, he wanted to move to move his practice independent as well.
And so rather than recreating the wheel, he just joined up with Cornerstone to run his book under the Cornerstone umbrella. Now he’s actually part of the Cornerstone team running his book. He’s separate from me, but he’s under the same name and umbrella doing his thing, which is nice to be back together from day one, and now here we are. It’s crazy how that’s worked out.
Conor Delaney:
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. And I think one of the interesting things is, when you do have those full-circle moments, when you look at those people that have really planted seeds in your life that have manifested into this great career and great life that you now enjoy and to be able to give that back, one of the things that I think is interesting right now is what you’re doing with some of the other advisors that are in your practice.
With that high fail rate, so to speak, comes also the fact that most large companies have thrown the towel in on training new advisors, but here you have specifically picked different advisors to join your team who weren’t advisors before, took them through the licensing process.
Conor Delaney:
You have sought out a particular type of advisor, or really, agent that you would then turn into an advisor, inside of your ecosystem. Give me an example of some of the guys that you have working with you. I remember you telling me about the one friend of yours, a friend at the time, is now on your team, who was a swimming coach, and how you were able to draw those parallels. I think that’s super interesting.
Ken Calcutt:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The most recent advisor that’s joined my team, it was about three years ago, I knew him from church. We got to know each other. We met 15 years ago. We know each other quite well. He was Division 1 swimming coach for 20 years, very successful coaching on Olympic teams, guy was high-level swimming coach, and that’s a tough career. It is a demanding career. 20 years in, it was rough. And so I started talking to him probably five years ago about, “Hey, have you ever considered a career change?” He dismissed it.
Ken Calcutt:
COVID was the catalyst that caused him to really look seriously at it because, at that point, schools were shut down. When the football program isn’t running, there’s no money coming into the school, and some of the schools started cutting some of no-revenue-producing sports. And so there was a chance they were going to cut the swimming program at the school he was at. And so he started seriously looking at, all right, what other options are there?
Ken Calcutt:
We really started talking then, and I was telling him, I was like, “Man, what you do in coaching is not that different than what I do. You’re coaching kids on how to improve their swimming time. I’m coaching people on how to improve their financial situation. It’s the same thing. We’re both coaches. We’re just coaching different things.
If you’re a successful college swimming coach, there is no reason you can’t be a successful financial planner or financial coach. You’re just coaching a different topic.” And so, if you have that teaching ability and you have that coaching ability, you can translate that to just about any topic. And now he’s been on board for three years and he’s seeing that’s exactly what it is.
Conor Delaney:
That’s awesome.
Ken Calcutt:
I literally just had a client walk out of my office that had to meet with him because I wasn’t available just a week ago, and they were talking about how great he was, because he’s got that energy of a coach. That’s just in him, that’s who he is, but you can translate that into financial planning and be really, really good at it, which is what he is.
Conor Delaney:
For sure, for sure. I always said, if you can bring that athlete mentality, that blue-collar work ethic, to a white-collar job, that your chances of success go up. For me, when I was younger, our manager used to have the old way of doing things. You come in, you just grab that phone book, and you start dialing.
Well, you and I got into the business right around the same time, when do-not-call lists and all this stuff was starting to become a thing. You couldn’t make calls to people that were on that list. And so the formula for what worked in the past, what got the firm to where it was, wasn’t going to get us going forward to the same spot. And so I just remember thinking to myself, “Look, if I can just get involved in the community and start to do things that I enjoy and have a passion for anyway, things will manifest and happen.”
Conor Delaney:
And I took the same approach. I was coaching high school girls basketball, and I remember the parents would ask me, “What is it that you do?” And it gave me the opportunity to take a different type of elevator speech to them, where I was able to say, “The same way that I’m drawing up plays and we’re strategizing through the game for your daughter on the basketball team, I do the same thing in real life, except I’m doing that for folks like you that have old IRAs and old 401(k)s and are trying to take this hodgepodge of products and develop a strategy that’s going to be meaningful for whatever the goal is, whether it’s retirement or saving for a second home or whatever the case is.”
And so it’s cool when you can take those things that you’re excited about and passionate about anyway, translate that into something that’s going to make sense, and really help out in terms of growing this business.
Conor Delaney:
You overcome the odds in the early days. You’ve now built a team of guys that you’re manifesting some of these and raising some of these folks through a process that you and I and so many others have had to carve out in a different way from the way it was done in the past. What’s an example of how your current conversations with clients have evolved? Because I don’t know about you, but when I started we had a script, and it was, “What’s the value of money to you? And tell me your BOCA, benefits, obstacles, consequences, are those acceptable?”, those type of things, and over time, you make your own thing.
Conor Delaney:
But what I noticed is that the conversation started to become more about life and less about the financial strategy or the financial product. It’s like, once we have validated that we can help the client walk out a better execution of their plan and develop a plan for those that don’t have one, we’re far better off as a trusted advisor to them, which brought us into this other periphery of helping them with things that sometimes don’t have anything to do with finance. Do you have any experience in that same regard?
Ken Calcutt:
Yeah, 100%. I think it’s twofold. Here’s what I’ve noticed over the years, the initial meeting with people, prospects, so when you get to a point, and it took me a long time to get here, if you can get here quicker, I think it’s better, but when you get to a point where you don’t go into a meeting thinking, “I need this person to become a client,” and I don’t mean this in a cold way.
I don’t care if they become a client. I’m not going in here to sell something. I’m just going in here to meet with this client to see the situation, if I can help. And, when you go in with that attitude and you literally are trying to help, you’re not trying to sell, the client can see that immediately, like, “All right, this guy’s not trying to sell me something. He’s literally just trying to figure out if he can help me or not.”
Ken Calcutt:
Number one, that helps a lot because it lowers their guard and they trust you a little bit more inherently if they don’t feel like they’re being sold, and so I never go into a meeting feeling like I need to close this client. I don’t care if I close the client, I don’t care. If they become a client, great. If they don’t, fine. I don’t care either way. And I don’t have that pressure. You know that pressure, you feel like, “I got to make this deal,” that doesn’t exist. I don’t care. I don’t go into meetings with that. When you don’t go into meetings with that, you initially create trust quicker.
Ken Calcutt:
And then, when they become clients, they’ve never felt the pressure of you trying to push things on them and make them do things and whatever, and so then they do start looking at you, to your point, they start looking at you more like a trusted advisor in things even beyond finance, just life.
Because when they come in, like now, an existing client, they come in, a lot of our meetings, we’re not even talking about money, we’re not talking about financial stuff, because the meeting always starts out with, “Hey, how have you guys been doing? What’s going on in life?” And sometimes there’s a lot going on in life and we end up spending most of the meeting talking about that. And so it ends up being more just like a relationship with people that’s just living life together, not all business. You know what I mean?
Conor Delaney:
Yeah. Yeah. When they know who you are and you don’t need to force or foster a particular type of attitude or a product or something that you’re selling, not only does the relationship happen more organically, but it also lasts a lot longer too. It took a lot longer to build those relationships because it wasn’t a transaction that we had to close in 30 minutes or move on. There wasn’t some weird formula around how to sell that.
But I can say, even in my own practice, I have one of my first clients from the time I was 19 years old, and I just remember thinking, from a marketing standpoint, I couldn’t even go out and take this guy out for a beer, but what I could do is I could always outwork him. I didn’t have the knowledge, I didn’t have the experience, but I knew the guy that was currently trying to serve his needs wasn’t doing it with the amount of effort and intention that I could bring to it. That was a little bit my differentiator early on.
Conor Delaney:
I think one of the things I noticed about your office, just when you come in, the cool thing about being in this independent space is that you have the opportunity to create your own culture. And culture’s a word that gets thrown around so much nowadays, but it’s like we have this opportunity on day one to say, are we going to be, what’s the show on Showtime, is this going to be like Billions, where the clients are coming in and we’re selling them all kinds of crazy products in and out, and we’re wearing the fancy suits and driving the Jaguars and all this stuff, or is this going to look like something else?
Conor Delaney:
And I think one of the cool things about your office, Ken, is that you’ve created this great culture that really embodies a culture of service. It’s bringing that servant’s heart to the business every day, not just from you but from the people that are around you. And I think, when you do that as well as you have, it brings the guard of the client down.
The client’s coming in with all this anxiety and all this apprehension. Next to the doctor, we’re probably one of the higher priority and higher stressed areas of the client’s life. And when they can walk into an office and feel at ease and know that they’re speaking to a friend more than they’re speaking to a professional, so to speak, I think that that goes a long way. And you guys have done a great job in curating and creating that type of culture in your office. That’s pretty cool.
Conor Delaney:
You’re at your former company there for 10 years almost before you decided to take this leap to independence. Do you remember when you and I got connected? If I recall right, I reached out to you, and it was probably six, seven months before we actually wound up connecting. And I’m looking at you on paper and I’m thinking, “Man, this guy is hugely successful. He’s built this great business as fast as he’s built it. I’m offering to meet with him. He’s going to want to meet at a country club or some fancy place downtown. This is going to be a steak dinner.” Do you remember the first time that we got together?
Ken Calcutt:
Yep.
Conor Delaney:
I feel like it was off of a desolate road at some barbecue joint. Am I recalling this correctly?
Ken Calcutt:
It’s close. It just depends on where you’re from, Conor. That was the small town where I live and I thought it was a great little wing restaurant. But, yeah, I could tell that you were a little caught off guard with where we were meeting, but, yeah, I distinctly remember that. It was fun. I knew we were some somewhere nobody would see us.
Conor Delaney:
Yeah, I remember texting my wife and being like, “I’m going down this dirt road, and-“
Ken Calcutt:
That was not a dirt road.
Conor Delaney:
“… this is my exact location. If they’re looking for me, this is where you can find me.”
Ken Calcutt:
There was not a dirt road involved.
Conor Delaney:
We get together, and we wound up walking this out. And I remember one of the things you said to me is, “If we’re going to do this thing, I want us to have the opportunity to break bread together with my family,” and I’m thinking to myself, “I love this guy. This is who I want to be when I grow up. I’ll go and have dinner with him and his wife.”
And so you invite me over to the house for dinner. And I remember I walked in as a newly married guy, and I walked into your house, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were kids everywhere. You’re elbows deep in making dinner and in doing all the stuff that is required of the father as soon as he walks in the door, and I just remember thinking to myself, “Oh, my gosh, here’s this guy that has …” how many kids at the time, four, five?
Ken Calcutt:
10 years ago, we had three. No. No, we had four.
Conor Delaney:
Oh, there was definitely more than three.
Ken Calcutt:
Four, yeah. We had four. Yeah, had four.
Conor Delaney:
Okay, so four. I remember the youngest one is crawling up into their own seat, at two and a half years old, and just being completely overwhelmed, like, “I can’t believe how much this guy does, and he runs a successful business as well.” Then, come to find out, you’re doing marathons, you’re taking care of that aspect of your life as well, and I’m like, “Man, how does he do it all? Who would ever run marathons, have five children, and run a successful business? I want to be like this guy when I grow up,” and here we are, 10 years-
Ken Calcutt:
Now you don’t think I’m so crazy, right?
Conor Delaney:
Yeah. 10 years later, 10 marathons, and about to have our fifth kid in a couple of days. I became Ken Calcutt when I grew up. It’s awesome. Ken, what were some … if you had to say the two or three people in your life, or two or three things in your life, that you would highly attribute to the reason why you are as successful as you’ve become today?
Ken Calcutt:
Simple, so faith in God, number one, and my wife. None of this works without those two. I’m a firm believer that God lays out a path for us, and if we just follow the path God has laid out for us … it doesn’t always end like this, like I’ve got a successful business. That was never the goal. That’s where I’m at, but I wasn’t striving for that. It was just the direction God was pushing me all along and I just was trying to do what God was calling me to do.
And then, my wife, to handle all of the things that she handles for me to be able to run the business, there’s no way in the world I could have built the business to this if she wasn’t supportive 100% the way she’s been. Faith is critical. A supportive spouse been critical for me. There’s people successful in different ways, but to me, if you ask me top two things, 100% that’s it.
Conor Delaney:
That’s awesome, that’s awesome. And you and Missy have been together from the beginning of the practice?
Ken Calcutt:
Yeah, we got married in ’01, started in the business in ’04. And that’s why, when you and I started talking, I had been talking with the recruiter for the independent company for two years and the guy was getting frustrated with me because I didn’t understand what he was talking about. He was trying to get me to understand independent lingo, and I’m coming from a small broker-dealer, I don’t understand what he’s saying, so he gets us connected. But in that whole process, it was one of those things I felt like God was telling me I’m supposed to move, I’m supposed to be independent, but not yet, not yet, not yet. Through this whole process, it was like, not yet.
Ken Calcutt:
And that’s why I wanted you to come meet my wife because she had to believe it was the right move too. Even if I felt like this is the right move, if she didn’t feel like it was the right move, I wasn’t going to move. I wanted you to come talk with her and see how she felt about the whole situation, because we were basically trusting you to lead us into this independent world and not destroy the business, because I didn’t know what in the world I was doing, and so that’s why I wanted you to meet her. I was like, “If she’s buying into it, then we’re good.” But we both felt like, at the same time, all right, God’s telling us this is the time to move. She felt good about it, I felt good about it, and that’s when we moved. That was 2014.
Conor Delaney:
It’s a big leap of faith.
Ken Calcutt:
Huge.
Conor Delaney:
And it’s interesting because, for me, when I started this business back in 2012, I wasn’t sure that the people that were going to come into my life, like you, like Bob, like so many others that are in the ecosystem, were going to have the impact that you guys have had. Not just in the Good Life story, but in my story as well. And so tons of gratitude and appreciation for all the stuff that you are doing both professionally within the Good Life network, but also as somebody that so many people look up to. Kudos there. Any big races coming up?
Ken Calcutt:
I’ve got a goal. Did I tell you about Badwater? I didn’t tell you about Badwater.
Conor Delaney:
No, I think you mentioned it, but I didn’t know if that was still on the table.
Ken Calcutt:
As I get older now, I’m 45 now, so as I get older, I’m thinking I need long-term goals. And so I ran Kiawah Marathon with a buddy three months ago, and that was awesome, first marathon I’d done in probably five or six years, but so this ultramarathon thing has caught my attention. I’ve never done an ultra. Have you done an ultra yet?
Conor Delaney:
I did. You probably wouldn’t expect anything different from me, but my first ever race was a 50K.
Ken Calcutt:
Of course it was. I’ve attempted one ultra. It did not go well. But this Badwater 135 race is in California, Death Valley. They run in July, 135 miles across Death Valley in July. And I’m thinking, “These people are crazy, but I think I’d like to try that.”
Conor Delaney:
Yeah, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Ken Calcutt:
“I think I want to try that one day.” I’ve got this goal, and this is a loose goal, it’s not a hard goal, I think it’d be cool to do that if I try to get into that race by age 50. It’s five years out. I need to do some serious training and ultras before then to get in some semblance of shape to do it, but that would be a goal.
Conor Delaney:
Do you do the full 135, or do you cut that up with a couple people?
Ken Calcutt:
No, no, it’s just you. This is not a team relay. This is you.
Conor Delaney:
Oh. Oh. I was about to say, “I’ll join you on that.”
Ken Calcutt:
Come on, man.
Conor Delaney:
I may join you. I’ll be watching from the side.
Ken Calcutt:
No. That would be cool to do, but I’m speaking out of ignorance. I’ve never even done a 50-miler and I’m talking about 135 in Death Valley.
Conor Delaney:
My first one, the first ever race … I had done 5Ks here and there. And a friend of mine, actually a client, maybe it was a prospect at the time, said, “Hey, for my 50th birthday, I want to do a 50-mile run, no, no, a 50K,” and I said, “Okay.” I’m doing the math in my head. I’m like, “Well, a 50K, I’ve done 5Ks before, how hard can this be?” And it was at least 10 times as hard as the 5K was. And I remember, at one point in this race … the first seven miles, I was, I think, in third place, fourth place, young guy, thought I had figured it all out. And it was a trail run too, which are never treats. And I went from third or fourth place to dead last. I was like Tom Hanks in Castaway. They’re closing the place off and I’m puttering into the aid stations, and at that point I vowed I would never walk fast again, let alone run.
Conor Delaney:
But then, due to you and a few others, I wound up taking that journey through the Abbott World Majors in Boston, Berlin, Tokyo, Chicago, New York, and now it’s just become a part of the DNA. And I think it’s important, especially in our industry, if you’re looking across the table as a client and you’re not seeing people that are disciplined and at least have the aspirations to be healthy, I would think that leap of faith is a little bit wider because you don’t know what’s going to happen to the guy sitting across the table from you.
Conor Delaney:
And, obviously, none of us do, but for me, that’s always been a big driving force is to try and make sure that the nutritional health, the physical health, the spiritual health, the financial health, of our whole ecosystem, our collaboration of advisors, is in a place where people are tapping into that for the reason of either, “Hey, I’m here and I want to be a part of an organization that cares about this stuff,” or, “I want to get there and I feel like these guys can help me out,” because you’re a product of the people you hang with, and I think both you and I have seen that with your running groups and with the different things that we’ve been able to do.
Ken Calcutt:
Definitely.
Conor Delaney:
Really cool, man. Well, I appreciate you spending some time here today.
Ken Calcutt:
Sure. Appreciate you having me.
Conor Delaney:
This has been fun. Yeah, we will definitely continue to build this business together, and it’s definitely something that we’re excited about, having you and your team be a part of the team, and thanks for joining us today.
Ken Calcutt:
Yeah, absolutely, man. I appreciate it.
Conor Delaney:
Thanks for listening. I’m Conor Delaney. Please join me next time for more of Thinking Independently.
Disclaimer
The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual to determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you. Consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. The economic forecast set forth may not develop as predicted, and there can be no guarantee that the strategies promoted will be successful. All performance referenced as historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly.