Nobody went and found those people for you.

What you are really up against

There is a suit in a closet that only comes out for funerals.

And for one meeting that keeps getting rescheduled.

Everybody has a version of it. The thing you are going to get to. The paperwork you are going to sort out. The person you are going to call.

Money is the worst one, because nothing bad happens if you do not. Nobody sends a notice. The account just sits there being quietly wrong, year after year, and it never once inconveniences anybody.

That is what you are actually competing with. Not another agent. Not another company.

A closet with a suit in it, and somebody who means to get to it.

How I know

I spent six years filling databases like the one your last order came out of.

That was the job. Work out what somebody types into Google at eleven at night when they have finally had enough of not knowing. Buy that word. Build the page. Write the line that gets them to hand over a phone number.

Then they went into the database, and the database went down the list of who gets what.

The agency with the biggest monthly commitment gets first look. Automatically, before a human being touches it. Then the standing orders. Then the good customers. Then you.

Nothing crooked ever happened. Nobody sold that name twice. It was exclusive, exactly like they promised you it was.

It was also weeks old by the time it reached you, and bigger accounts had already passed on it.

Nobody sat in a meeting and voted to let somebody cool off. That is simply what a database does. A database does not know it is Tuesday.

I was very good at that job. I made a lot of money for people whose names are on the buildings.

So I built mine backwards

Nobody exists here until you order.

You order Monday. I start buying clicks Monday. And everyone who comes through from that minute forward was found for you.

There is no list to be at the bottom of, because there is no list.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not. It took years to make it work, because running ads for one buyer at a time is a much harder problem than filling a warehouse, which is exactly why nobody else does it.

The part I am proud of

Every word I buy has annui in it. 35,725 of them.

Annuity. Annuities. Annuitize. Annuity calculator. Should I roll my old 401k into an annuity.

Across Google and Bing, and I read every single one before it went in. Not a plugin. Not broad match, quietly spending my money on how much do I need to retire. One at a time, by hand, me, at a desk, for longer than I care to tell you.

You learn things doing that.

You learn that after ten at night people stop typing like they are talking to a search engine and start typing like they are talking to a person. Full sentences. Some of them say please.

And you learn which words belong to somebody who is shopping and which belong to somebody who has already decided. They are not the same words. They are not even close.

And then I throw almost all of them away

Volume is what you get when nobody had the discipline to say no.

• Fifty-eight years old with thirty thousand dollars. Gone.
• Wants a rate to hold up next to a CD. Gone.
• Already has an advisor they like. Gone.
• New York. Gone.
• Just looking, maybe next year. Gone.

What your order actually is

You are not paying me to learn.

The learning is finished. It was bought with fifteen years and every dollar I had, and it is the one part of this you get for free.

This account is not an experiment. It is tried and true. Every one of those words is in there because it earned its way in, and the ones that did not are already gone.

So your first order is not a practice run and your fifth is not better than your first. Same machine either way. It runs the day somebody buys gas.

Which is what your order is. Not a fee. Fuel.

You order 40 on a Sunday and Monday morning that money is out in the market with my hands on it, buying clicks in your states, off words I picked one at a time, pointed at people who do not exist yet and will exist by Wednesday.

Which leaves one reason to do this every month

Somebody makes up their mind every single night.

One tonight. Another one tomorrow. Another the Tuesday after that. It never stops and it never slows down.

The only thing that ever stops is the buying.

A month you do not order is not a month you saved money. It is a month where everybody who made up their mind went to whoever was buying.

Who you are dealing with

It is Sunday night and I am writing ads.

That is not a figure of speech. That is what is happening right now.

The companies you have bought from have a meeting Tuesday about the quarter. There is a brand person. There is a legal review. Five weeks to change one headline.

I changed four of them tonight. If one of them works better by Wednesday, you have got better people to call by Thursday.

I am not smarter than those companies. I am just the only one here, so nothing waits on anybody.

Proof, since everything else on this page is a claim

Open my menu and look at what is in it.

Sign up. Alert preferences. Unsubscribe. Report a bad lead.

Two of the four links in my navigation are ways to quit me, and they sit above the buy button.

Everybody else buries those. Grey type at the bottom of an email. A number that rings a desk that closes at four.

Mine are up top because that is the most expensive space I own and I handed it to the two things that cost me money.

Go on. Click one. See how fast it happens. Then think about the last outfit you bought from, how hard they made it, and what that told you.

What I want out of it

You should know what a man wants before you give him money.

What I want is to build one thing that works without me standing over it every day, and then hand it to somebody who will keep it running.

That is not a humble ambition and I will not pretend it is. But here is why I am telling you instead of keeping it to myself.

Nobody would ever take a thing like this off my hands because of what it earned last quarter. They would take it because the same agents were still ordering three years later. That is the only question anybody asks about a business like this one.

Not how many I signed. How many stayed.

Which means you are not my customer. You are the thing I am building.

If you quit me in month two, I did not lose an order. I lost the only reason any of this was ever worth anything.

So I cannot shave a corner to make a month look good. Everybody else in this business is chasing a quarter. I do not have that option. I am chasing what is still true in three years.

The part I like thinking about

Everything I sell you goes bad. What you sell does not.

The search term I bought this morning will be worthless by spring. The night somebody finally made up their mind is gone in a couple of weeks. My best campaign this year is going to embarrass me in three.

None of it keeps. Not one piece.

But on the third of every month a check goes out to a woman in her seventies. It comes whether the market fell apart in March or not. And she has never once had to call her son and ask for money.

That does not go bad. It is the only thing in this entire business that does not.

And you are the one who does it. Not me.

I find somebody on the night they make up their mind. That is the whole of my contribution and it has got a date stamped on it.

You put the floor under somebody's old age, and it holds up after both of us are gone.

Here is all I want you to do

Order once. The small one. 20.

Then get on the phone with me and tell me the truth about what happened when you dialed. What closed. What was junk. What you wish had been on that form.

If it stunk, say so. I will have it fixed inside a week. There is no committee here to run it past. There is me and the ad account.

Then do it again next month.

I am not looking for a hundred agents. I want a handful of agents, licensed in a few states, ordering every month, telling me what is broken so I can fix it before some outfit with a Tuesday meeting has even heard about it.

“If you can really do all that, how come you do not just work the leads yourself?”

An agent asked me that straight out. It is a fair question. Two answers, and both of them are true.

First: I do not want your job.

An annuity client is not a sale. It is a marriage. Twenty years of statements and phone calls and the daughter who has questions after the funeral. That is real work, and it is decent work, and I would be mediocre at it on my best day.

It also never ends. I am building something I can hand off and walk away from. A book of business is the opposite of that. A book of business owns you.

Second, and this is the one nobody I compete with can say. I am licensed.

The people running the big lead companies are marketing people. That is all they have ever been. Hand them an application and they would not know which end to sign.

So let me be straight with you, because you would find out anyway. This seat is real, and it is not permanent.

I would much rather hand these clients to somebody who does this for a living and does it well. That is the plan. That is what I want.

But I spent six years watching good clients cool off inside a database and I know exactly what that costs. If the people I hand them to will not work them, will not call fast, will not call back, will not take the ones that are not easy, then they do not get the next one.