A person wrote the following foreword: no artificial intelligence was involved.

That statement, just a few years ago, would have been weird. But in just a few years, artificial intelligence came of age, and it is like a petulant child that can’t be told what to do and is spreading like wildfire across the business landscape, and the financial services industry is not immune. Some services that are done by people today won’t be very soon.

We have all heard of the “buggy whip manufacturer” that was eliminated by the automobile. But the person who realized they were in leather goods, with one product being the buggy whip, could pivot to leather steering wheel covers and driving gloves and would have done just fine, maybe better.

Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.”

Consider the famous picture of 1900 NYC with one car surrounded by horse-drawn carriages. Thirteen years later is a picture of a horse-drawn carriage. You can see it here¹.

On the flip side, AT&T hired McKinsey & Co. in the mid-80s to forecast cell phone adoption; by 2020, they figured (and probably got paid a small fortune to come to this conclusion) approximately 900,000 subscribers.

They were off by a factor of 120X by 2017.

We know inevitable change is coming, and it will not look like predictions because those are generally wrong. But you can look for the rhyme. Predictions aren’t linear; no one would have predicted Blockbuster Video’s downfall, and no one is complaining about the lost jobs of the VHS manufacturers because they got jobs somewhere else, probably Uber or Amazon, and other companies no one saw coming.

Would you prefer to enjoy the changes that come with technological upheaval versus being part of the hand-wringing or, worse, being spectacularly wrong like McKinsey & Co.?

I suspect some businesses will be gone, like anything that is repetitive and can be easily programmed. For example, a lot of legal and accounting work will be converted to robots (it is already happening) in the coming years. So will many functions we as financial advisors all do regularly today, even if it seems too difficult to replace (there was a time when a machine that washed dishes was unfathomable, and now it is standard in houses and apartments).

Three items will help you in the coming years:

1. A business model that is resilient to “robots.”
2. A game plan for execution.
3. Grit.

This book will help you with the first two. The last is on you. It is a word that is not used as often as it should, but you will need it to succeed. If you don’t think you have it, stop reading and work on that before proceeding.

If you think you have true grit, you have a map on the following pages. That is not conjecture; it is proven and being executed today in the business the author is running and I founded.

If you are reading this, you recognize that what got you here is not what will get you to the next level. I am like you. I created a business, and I executed it but got stuck. Scott Winters has built and exited a multi-billion dollar financial services business before. I was working with his previous firm and tried to recruit him to take over my firm and get it to the next level. He said yes to my recruiting efforts six years after I asked. My timing was perfect (luck, not skill) as he took over in September 2019.

He took over a stagnant and struggling but top 5% financial services practice and implemented the structure in the following pages. Despite some pesky “issues” that came up in 2020 (9/11 has the motto of Never Forget, 2020 should be Let’s Forget), we moved from low seven figures into eight figures during a time only a handful of small companies grew, and many disappeared.

Scott went through the trouble of documenting exactly how he did it before and how he is doing it now! Better than that, he has made it available in eight steps you can follow.

Complete with all the tools you will need to execute those steps.

If you have the grit, you hold that road map to 10X your business.

John Pollock

Financial Advisor