My Talk at the 2020 Nelson Nash Institute Think Tank

Every year, David Stearns, Bob Murphy, and Carlos Lara — the Board of the Nelson Nash Institute — invite current member-Practitioners — called Authorized IBC Practitioners — to Birmingham, AL. It’s called the Think Tank.

I wrote about this year’s Think Tank on this blog back on February 9. David was kind enough to pick up that article for republication in the monthly newsletter at the NNI called BankNotes. You might want to read that first in order to understand the context of my talk.

I was hesitant about releasing this to the public. There are a couple reasons.

First, the audience is primarily financial professionals and their guests. The guests may be prospective financial professionals, family, enthusiastic associates or clients, or a combination of the three. The audience is not representative of the general public.

Therefore, it could happen that you hear something that doesn’t quite make sense. I thought about chopping the video up and adding explanation, but opted to just keep things as they are.

Second, while the conference in general is about the IBC, in this talk I speak to the idea of mentorship. The NNI offers a program through which a current or prospective financial professional can pair up with an established professional to learn the in’s and out’s of working in the world of the IBC. You can read about it here.

This talk is intended to provide a framework for how current and prospective mentees and mentors might consider approaching that relationship. Of course, it’s difficult to talk about mentorship in this business without also referring to my philosophy on the IBC and life insurance in general.

Third, while this talk was delivered to a room of financial professionals, current and prospective practitioners (with a small “p”) of the IBC, who have purchased or are in the process of purchasing policies for use with the IBC, will enjoy it too. Everything that goes for a strong mentee-mentor relationship, goes for a strong adviser-client relationship.

Finally, this was the first Think Tank since Nelson Nash’s passing. You might not be able to catch it, but if you hear me choke up, that’s why. Also,I had a laser pointer during the presentation. At one point there’s a picture shown, full-screen of me kneeling next to Nelson. That was last year when he gave me his NNI logo pin to which I refer at that point in the presentation. That might not be clear without seeing the laser dot.

Enjoy!