How Financial Advisors Can Grow Through Referrals With Bill Cates

Quik! News Team
4 hours ago
28 min read

Bill Cates is the Founder of Referral Coach International, a company that helps professionals grow their business by generating referrals and personal introductions through proven relationship marketing systems. He is a bestselling author of several books on referrals and business growth, including Get More Referrals Now and Radical Relevance. Bill has spent over 25 years helping thousands of financial professionals and business owners move from incremental to exponential growth by improving client engagement and communication. He also hosts the Top Advisor Podcast and founded The Cates Academy for Relationship Marketing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:50] Bill Cates discusses why referrals and introductions still drive the majority of advisor growth
[4:46] The negative perceptions advisors and clients have around referrals
[8:10] How money mindset affects even experienced financial advisors
[13:32] Why wealthy clients often struggle to enjoy their money
[16:05] The story behind The Hidden Heist and its literal bank robbery plot
[19:09] Bill shares the loop between money beliefs, education, and financial behavior
[20:24] Core money mindsets that help people build lasting wealth
[25:18] Why money follows value and how to get into the flow
[27:59] How Bill uses AI for content creation while staying authentic

In this episode…

Many professionals struggle to grow through referrals without feeling awkward, pushy, or inauthentic. At the same time, deeply held money beliefs — often shaped by fear or scarcity — can quietly sabotage both personal finances and client relationships. How can leaders overcome these hidden barriers to build trust, growth, and lasting wealth?

Bill Cates, a referral expert, bestselling author, and coach to financial advisors, explains that referrals still dominate how people choose advisors — but only when handled with empathy and intention. He emphasizes shifting from asking to creating natural introductions, planting referral seeds through service, and aligning growth strategies with how clients want to connect. Bill also highlights the importance of understanding money mindsets, recognizing the emotional stories behind financial decisions, and transforming fear-driven behaviors into confident actions through education and awareness.

In this episode of The Customer Wins podcast, Richard Walker interviews Bill Cates, Founder of Referral Coach International, about growth through referrals, money mindset, and client trust. Bill discusses why introductions outperform leads, how scarcity thinking affects advisors, and how storytelling can reshape beliefs about money.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments:

“It’s old school if you want, but it’s still the way most people want to meet their advisors.”
“You can’t become what you resent, and a lot of people grow up with weird thinking around money.”
“Money is not a scarce resource. It might be in your pocket right now, but that’s not how money works.”
“Clients aren’t just bringing their money to you, they’re bringing their hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties.”
“Money follows value, and the way you get into the flow is by helping other people.”

Action Steps:

Shift from asking for referrals to creating introductions: This reduces awkwardness, builds trust, and aligns growth with how people actually prefer to meet advisors.
Address money mindset before giving financial advice: Understanding emotional money stories builds empathy and increases the likelihood clients will follow sound guidance.
Educate clients on how money really works: Teaching principles like compounding and cash flow replaces fear with clarity and empowers better financial decisions.
Model a healthy relationship with money as a leader: Self-awareness prevents scarcity thinking from influencing clients and team members while reinforcing confidence.
Use storytelling to reframe financial beliefs: Stories make money concepts relatable, reveal limiting beliefs, and encourage lasting behavior change.

Sponsor for this episode...

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Intro: Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Richard Walker: Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Molly Pierce of Track That Advisor, Dan Zitting of Nitrogen, and Brian Portnoy of Shaping Wealth. Today, I'm speaking with Bill Cates, the original referral coach, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using Quik!.

You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit forbes.com to get started. All right, before I introduce today's guest in full, I want to give a big thank you to Colleen Bowler of C&J Innovations for introducing me to Bill. She was a prior guest on the show and has a great episode, so go check that out. But she also has an awesome website at thepassportpackage.com.

Where you can learn how to build better relationships. All right. Bill Cates is a successful entrepreneur, Hall of Fame speaker, best selling author and adventurer. Built, built and sold two book publishing companies and has spent over 30 years helping financial advisors acquire and serve more clients. Bill is the author of eight books, including Radical Relevance and The Language of Referrals.

His latest book is The Hidden Heist: Stop Robbing Yourself of Lasting Wealth. Man, we gotta talk about this. He also hosts the Top Advisor podcast, ranked in the top 5% of podcasts worldwide. Bill's mission is to equip people with the mindset and the tools to have a better relationship with money to achieve financial stability, independence and lasting wealth. Bill, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Bill Cates: 02:04

Hey, it's great to be here with you. And just in case anybody misheard, it's not Bill Gates. Yeah, I missed it by one letter and a few bucks. But look, Mr. Gates has a lot of money. My goal is to help advisors make more money by, you know, in the spirit of service to their clients and customers.

So thank you.

Richard Walker: 02:26

Well, let's see if we can add some zeros to the back of the name there. Amen.

Bill Cates: 02:29

I'm all for that.

Richard Walker: 02:31

All right. For those who haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges of growing their own company. Bill, I'd love to understand how you're helping so many advisors win more customers. So how do you help people?

Bill Cates: 02:50

Yeah. So forever. And you kind of alluded to it as referrals. I mean, I've been known as the referral codes, the original referral coach, the OG people, all kinds of things. I've been at it for over 34 years with financial advisors.

Now, when I say referrals, it's more than that. It's being more referral through your service, it's promoting, it's asking. Lately we've been focusing on introductions, not just, you know, the willingness to refer or word of mouth, but actually getting connections, which are so important. And, you know, a lot of people see referrals as kind of old school. I'm sorry, it's not old school.

It's new school. It's still the way that most people want to meet their advisors. So call it old school if you want. It's actually in this noisy environment that we're in with all this social media and stuff. It's even more important now than it ever was before.

So that's been my main thing forever. You mentioned my book, The Hidden Heist. We'll talk about it later. You can see I got $1 million in a briefcase behind me. Because I like to talk about money stories and and I've been working with advisors lately around their money stories and, and their, their staffs, their teams, money stories and then ultimately their client's money story.

So there's more empathy there. And it's not just about the numbers, it's about the relationship to money and helping advisors build better relationships through that. So that's kind of my newest thing. That's that's the gist.

Richard Walker: 04:23

So I, I don't want to go too far into the referral side because you've been doing this forever. But there is a question that has been bothering me, because I think there has been somewhat of a pushback on the whole idea of asking for referrals. And maybe it's the social media side. Maybe it's that I feel like I'm taking advantage, I don't know. So do you recognize that?

Is there negativity associated with referrals?

Bill Cates: 04:46

Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, on both the clients and the advisor side. So first of all, some clients have had bad experiences. They've had people that have been too aggressive around that, and it's left a bad taste in their mouth.

Sometimes they feel like the only reason the advisor talks to them is to get more referrals. That's that on one side. That's pretty aggressive when I get called for coaching from advisors for individuals and teams, they often say to me, and I have fun with this. They don't want to look like one of the three, let's call them Disney characters around referrals. They don't want to look sleazy, pushy, and creepy.

And so, you know, that's the advisor side, right? They don't look needy. They don't want to look like businesses down, like they're begging. They don't want to push people to feel uncomfortable. So I don't want you to feel that way either.

I mean, no one wants to feel that way. It's all in knowing how to do it. So because there's been a lot of bad experiences out there or people have tried it, it hasn't worked. Whatever. You know, a lot of people say, stop asking for referrals.

Your clients don't want to give you. Your clients aren't thinking about introducing the others. Well, that's bad advice. Yeah, your clients aren't necessarily thinking about introducing to others, but when you bring it up in the right way, many of them will. And so it's just the right way.

You know, Michael Kitsis, a lot of folks watching this know Michael and his research. And I've got a report I put out kind of based on that. It's like for high net worth wealthy individuals, 50% are meeting their financial professional through a referral from a friend or a family member or a colleague. Another 20% through centers of influence like accountants. So that's almost 70% are meeting their advisor through an introduction and another 15% through social stuff in person, social stuff like social events, like seminars.

So you got a whopping 85% of the people you want to meet want to meet you through some sort of a relationship format. Referrals, introductions. So doesn't it make sense to build a business based on how people want to meet you? I had a guy talking to him just yesterday. They're bringing me in to speak to their large area, and he says we're very proud of the lead process we have in place.

We generate a lot of leads for our advisors, and they're closing at about a 1 to 2% ratio. They're burnt out. They you know, they want the leads, but the leads don't convert. Well because they're not meeting people the way people want to be met. So they're bringing me back to get back to the basics, old school, whatever you want to call it.

Let's build a business based on how people want to meet us.

Richard Walker: 07:32

You know, it sort of feels like if you watch a YouTube video and at some point the guy says, hey, don't forget to hit that subscribe button or like and then you're like, oh, yeah, I should have done that. Okay, I'll click it. So it's more like, you just want to remind people like that's a possibility. I'm referable. In other words.

Bill Cates: 07:50

That's part of it. I call that promoting, encouraging, planting seeds. It's not an ask, but it's definitely part of the conversation.

Richard Walker: 07:57

Yeah. All right. Let's get to the money mindset. So this is a different type of question I have. Sure.

When you think about financial advisors, I think there's a natural tendency to think they have the best mindsets of money. But do they?

Bill Cates: 08:10

Well, they certainly have a better education than the average person. And that education will often lead to a better mindset. That's how I developed a better mindset. Is I just being around helping thousands of advisors bring in billions of dollars? I learned how money worked, people listening to the show know how money works.

And so what that does is it exposes some of our, you know, lessons that didn't serve us when we were young. Or, you know, our parents never taught us about compounding or any of that stuff. Right. Money is a scarce resource. No.

Money is not a scarce resource. It might be in your pocket right now, but that's not how money works. So advisors are much further along, certainly than the average person, because they've been educated and they've been hopefully confronted and have taken a look at their money mindset. All right. So that's true.

No question about it. What is also true is advisors are human. Advisors grew up with weird thinking perhaps, you know, like I'll give you an example. One advisor I was coaching, his father was very resentful of wealthy individuals and thought they were, you know, they cheated, they lied, they were grifters. That idea.

And the truth is, you know, some are, but most aren't. And but he couldn't become what he resented, right. And so he had to realize he had to get past that. Other people grow up with a scarcity mentality. And I actually just interviewed a neuroscientist that confirmed what I thought.

We are actually born into this world with a bit of a scarcity negativity bias. It's part of our survival mechanism. And so no one's immune from that. And as advisors get anxious when the market goes down, or they get anxious when they're losing a big client or they get anxious, you know, they're human. All that.

And sometimes that stuff transfers to their staff, consciously or unconsciously. So it's important for advisors to take a look at their own money mindset, their own stories. A lot of that stuff, that anxiety, that scarcity, that whatever it may be for them, it almost never goes away. I liken it to a song that plays on the radio that you don't like. You just got to turn the volume down.

Right. Now you can rewire. There's ways to make it go away, but it's not easy. And so I think for advisors to understand that clients aren't just bringing their money to them. They're bringing their hopes, their dreams, of course, they're bringing their humanity.

They're bringing their anxieties. They're bringing their fears, their fear of losing all of that stuff. Yeah, that we see and we wonder why they don't just follow our advice. Because our advice is so logical and really is the best, makes the best sense for their money, etc. but if they don't take the time to understand what's going on behind that with their clients, what lessons did they learn? What stories do they have to turn the volume down on?

Then they're not really serving the client as well as they could. And so first of all, for the advisor and their team to become aware of that, then build that empathy muscle and then bring that to their client. So with The Hidden Heist, we're selling a lot to advisors. One just bought 75 copies yesterday to give to prospects and clients as a way to bridge that conversation, a way to get into that money mindset conversation and kind of a soft way. Here's a book.

Tell me what you think you know. Let's talk about it. And yeah. So that's a long answer to your question.

Richard Walker: 11:43

No I love it though, because I think about my days as a financial advisor. And I loved financial advice, but I think my own mindset is what made me get out of it. I mean, aside from the fact that I have a software company and I had a choice, do I pursue software or do I pursue financial advice? And the truth was, I grew up really, really poor. And so I think I had a scarcity mindset around it when I would say to a client, hey, to hit your goals, you've got to save, I don't know, $20,000 a year, sorry, make it 21, because you got to pay me $1000 a year.

And I felt like I was pulling away from their goals and their ability to get to those goals by paying me.

Bill Cates: 12:20

Okay.

Richard Walker: 12:21

Right. And it's a bad mindset.

Bill Cates: 12:23

Mindset. Bad mindset. Yeah. I mean, look, the fees that a client pays to an advisor, you know, is an important part of the conversation, because that does pull away from the ultimate assets that are being invested, etc. but there's a way to make sure that value is well invested. So of course.

Richard Walker: 12:43

Of course, if I believe in my ability to help them grow their assets, it's totally worth it.

Bill Cates: 12:48

And protect their assets as well. Yes.

Richard Walker: 12:50

Exactly, exactly. But anyway. And the irony is with software, I have no guilt about that. They pay me for the software.

Bill Cates: 12:57

Well, okay. Good. You know, I mean.

Richard Walker: 12:59

It became an easy decision.

Bill Cates: 13:00

There's different ways around that mindset, right? You could plow through it or you could just start a different company.

Richard Walker: 13:06

Yeah, exactly. But I do think it's really I think, you know, you hit on something that's really important because every client has their own mindset of what money means to them. I remember having a client who was very wealthy, but they spent like they had no money and we had to tell them, hey, you're wealthy, you can spend your money. What does that mean? Buy first class tickets.

Now, don't ever think about not flying first class like.

Bill Cates: 13:32

It's a common thing. They get into the habit of saving and investing. It could come out of fear of never having enough, which in that case is a good motivator for them to do it. But then that fear comes back to work against them, right? So yeah.

Richard Walker: 13:53

Enjoy what they have.

Bill Cates: 13:54

Yeah. So if I were in that situation, if I was coaching an advisor in that situation, I'd say, look. Don't just tell them they have enough money. Don't just show them the numbers. Ask them where that's coming from.

You know, you're not the therapist, you know, but you're a little bit of a coach, and you know, you know, tell me, tell me. You know, tell me more about that. What's driving that feeling? And get them to reflect on their own money story. And sometimes all it takes is for them to.

Well, you know, my parents would tell me this or my, You know this. And then they become aware, which is the first step. And then they open up to your logical account. Right. But if your logical account won't necessarily get them through that funky story they're telling themselves, it can sometimes, but it won't necessarily do that.

Richard Walker: 14:53

Well, it was fascinating with them because they were Depression era babies. They grew up with money in the mattress, right? Everything was scarce and they had not been able to shed that kind of feeling.

Bill Cates: 15:04

My parents were like that. I and my Ted talk, I did a Ted talk recently, and in that I say that my parents had a very cautious money story because they grew up, they were children of the depression, and so they saw money as something to guard, not something to grow. Yeah, right. And so that growth part was hard for them. I remember it wasn't until my dad was like 50 that I got him into a mutual fund that actually did very well.

And he goes, oh, okay. You know. So yeah, I mean, so we just have to deal with the whole person these days or, or as advisors. We will be frustrated that they don't take our advice or that we have these difficult emotional conversations with them. If we don't attend to that part of the relationship, then that'll always be a frustration for us.

Richard Walker: 15:54

Yeah. So I love that you said you can use the The Hidden Heist book as a tool set with clients as an advisor. So what is the heist? If you can spill the beans a little bit?

Bill Cates: 16:05

Here it is. Spill the beans on the heist. Everybody loves a good heist, right? So we know that one. One great way to learn things is through stories.

And so unlike my other books, which are very straightforward, the language of referrals has radical relevance beyond referrals. Very straightforward. This is a parable book. So with a co-author, Jeff C West, we created an interesting dynamic. So it takes place in a bank in a bank robbery.

First line of the book. Everybody is face down on the floor. Right. That's not your typical money education book. And so there's tension, there's suspense, there's twists and turns.

There's also a lot of comic relief because these robbers are bumbling. And in fact, the main character of the book describes him as Moe, Larry and curly, like the Three Stooges. And bank robbers. But all in that, as the robbers are trying to figure out how to get past Swat and the hostage negotiator. And by the way, we interviewed real hostage negotiators.

We interviewed real bank robbery victims. I've done over 100 money stories. So all of this is based on truth stuff in a sense. With a lot of poetic license. So now that the characters are stuck in the vault, Aldan Beckett is a financial advisor.

There's a lot more to Aldan I want to reveal because it's some nice surprises in the book, but they're starting to talk about money and we start talking about what are the mistaken beliefs. And money is a scarce resource and rich people are evil, and poor people are lazy and apathetic. And all the stereotypes and all the stuff that keep people back from achieving what they could have. So the subtitle, you know, stop robbing yourself of Future wealth. And so now I'm the straightforward guy.

Jeff C West is a storyteller. So he's brought these characters to life. And the audiobook is tremendous because we hired a real professional book reader, book actor to bring these characters to life. But we also have a few appendices. It's like, in case you missed it through the story, here's what we were telling you.

So it's a nice combination of story and entertainment and good lessons. So the advisors that are giving it to their clients are, in a lot of cases, giving it to their older clients to give to their young adult children. My personal trainer bought three copies for his three children for Christmas to give to them, for them to read. So a lot of it's kind of geared to that, to the millennials and the older Gen Zs. They still have time to do something different with their money.

So that's a big part of what's going on with it.

Richard Walker: 18:50

So it is a literal heist in the story, which is awesome.

Bill Cates: 18:53

Yeah, it's a heist.

Richard Walker: 18:54

I love that. But let's bring this maybe full circle here. Yeah. How much of the idea of a heist is mindset versus education versus just practice of how you deal with money?

Bill Cates: 19:09

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. And it's all three of those right. And so one of the things that I say is that as you learn how money works, then as I mentioned this earlier, you become a little more aware of your own stuff around money and maybe what you were taught or not taught that wasn't working for you. So it's kind of a continual loop of awareness, education and then better action. And so you'll learn how money works and you become aware of your mindset.

Then you're willing to take a little bit of action. And that reinforces. So it's an ongoing loop of growth if that makes sense. All of those are important. Ultimately the action is right.

The most important thing is that you're doing the right thing for yourself, but in a way that feels right for you too. Yeah. So yeah.

Richard Walker: 19:54

So, Bill, I want to ask you and I don't know if you can codify this or not, and I'm going to preface this. I've written a book on how to change your beliefs, how to create any behavior you want and become a better person by changing beliefs. So I also understand in asking this question that not every belief matches every person is not appropriate for every person, even if it's empowering for me, it doesn't mean it's empowering for you. So my question is, do you think there are any top 3 or 5 money mindsets? Everybody should try to adopt.

Bill Cates: 20:24

Yeah. Let's play with this a little bit. I've not asked that specifically, but here's what comes to mind. I think first of all, understanding that money is not a scarce resource is a big one. And so yeah, again, it may feel scarce in your pocket or your wallet, your bank account, but money flows.

Money flows through an international economy. And so how do we make more money or bring more money into our life? We get into the flow in my Ted talk, which I invite people to watch. I think you'll like it. It's only 11 minutes.

It's kind of fun. I say that one way to rethink this is that money is an abundant resource that flows like a river. And I'm jumping into the currency now. I make the pun currency because actually the Latin root of currency is currency, which means flow like a river. So I think that's an important mindset.

I think the whole idea of paying yourself first, right. Pay yourself first as a person in terms of your personal finance. And then also pay your business first in terms of a profit account. There's two ways to pay yourself. First, I think that's a universal belief principle that pretty much everyone will adopt.

And it makes sense. So that's another one. And then from a mechanical standpoint just, you know, the power of compound interest and time. I mean, you know I talk about that in my Ted talk, I talk about in the book, everyone listening to this knows this, but most people aren't taught that, you know, why didn't my father teach me about compounding when I was 20 years old or 22 years old? Well, he couldn't teach me what he never was taught, right?

And so this cycle of bad knowledge is perpetuated in our society. Now, some people catch up, I caught up. I could have done even better had I known about that. So those are a couple that come to mind, if that makes sense.

Richard Walker: 22:25

No, actually, I'm really fortunate because back in college I was part of the finance club at USC, and we brought in a speaker. And one of the things he said to us was, pay yourself first. And he said, you got to think about it. Paying yourself first is to benefit your life. It could be your retirement.

It could be saving for a house. It could be whatever it is. You need to be the person you want to be. Bills are secondary, but the way he then couched it was, you know, pay yourself first and then afford what those bills are. What's left over can afford not work into it higher.

And I'd love your take on paying yourself first.

Bill Cates: 23:03

Well what what's a belief that you think is universal? You ask me, what do you think is one of those guiding principles that virtually everyone can agree on or might follow?

Richard Walker: 23:16

So it actually follows the scarcity one. And my mentor said this to me if I need the money, it'll be there. And that has served me so well. That has served me to the point when I had $5 to my name and I needed another $5, I was able to get it because if I needed the money, it would be there. I don't know if this is a good one.

I'd love your judgment on it. Which is, I think of money as a tool. It's a tool to help you achieve the things you want to achieve. Sure.

Bill Cates: 23:41

Yeah, that's what it is now. It's a tool that intersects every aspect of one's life. So this is a belief I think that's good for people to adopt. And I talk about this in my Ted talk in the book. There isn't a part of one's life that money doesn't intersect in some way. Right.

And so and in my talk, I say, change your money belief, change your money story. You change your life because it intersects every, every aspect of our life. So when we have that awareness and we see that and we see the relationship, we can start to make a little different decisions. I want to go back to this idea of it's not a pushback, but it's another way to think about there'll always be enough, because I think I think that's a good way to think. I think it can be a good or abundant mindset.

As long as we are taking action, that will put us in the flow. Yeah, because I used to think I had an abundance mindset. I used to think there would always be enough, but really what that was doing was that it was fiction. That was a story that was fiction in my head. It was.

I really had a constant fear of never having enough. So it was for me, it was money denial. So sometimes these abundance thoughts that we think are abundance thoughts are actually money denial thoughts. And if we don't really self-reflect, we may be deluding ourselves. So yeah, they'll always be enough, as long as I understand.

Here's another principle: money follows value.

Richard Walker: 25:17

I love that one. Yes.

Bill Cates: 25:18

Money. And so for me, you know, the way I've gotten into the river, into the flow, is I help other people make more money. That's only what a lot of advisors do. They help, you know, grow and protect. If you're an employee of a company, how do you bring more value?

Right. How do you, you know, educate yourself, bring more skill, bring a better attitude, or maybe go to a place where that value is perceived better? Maybe it should be. Money follows perceived value right by the person who's buying, investing in that value that you bring. So yeah, I believe and there'll always be enough because I believe that I'm always putting myself in the flow.

Yeah, I would put those two together, if that makes sense.

Richard Walker: 26:03

I love that, I love that Bill. And I have to remind myself that when my mentor gave me that advice, that if I need the money, it'll be there. When I was very, very poor and I was having a scarcity, you know, problem. Yeah. And it taught me that I could take the actions to find the money.

I could consider the options for how to find my way into the flow, as you say. And I did take those actions. I did improve my life. Yes. But I also want to give credit to a recent guest whose episode hasn't quite yet been published yet.

But I don't know if you know Ellen Rogan. Oh.

Bill Cates: 26:36

Ellen. Yeah, I interviewed her for my podcast, and we correspond from time to time. Absolutely, yes.

Richard Walker: 26:41

Yeah, she was great. She actually reminded me to talk to money in the right ways. So I used phrases like stupid money or silly money to refer to a lot of money. She said, no, no, it's savvy money to have that kind of money. It's not stupid.

It's savvy to get there. And I'm like, you know, you're right. How we talk about money reinforces and or builds the mindsets that we have equally as well.

Bill Cates: 27:07

Filthy rich. Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, how are you? How do you talk about it?

How do you think it will shape up? You know what? You attract your actions. You can't become what you resent. You can't become.

You know, if you want to rewire your thinking and you can do it, it's through. It's through constant actions and speaking and thinking that is taking you in the direction you want to go. But if you're using language and and and delving into or entertaining beliefs and thoughts that are antithetical to where you want to go, then guess what? You're not rewiring that brain. It's stuck where it is.

Richard Walker: 27:49

Yeah, yeah for sure. Bill, I often talk about artificial intelligence in my shows, and I don't know what you do with artificial intelligence. If anything, do you have much experience with it?

Bill Cates: 27:59

Yes. In fact, you've been speaking to my avatar for this entire time. Right now, I just, you know, if you want me to bring in the real Bill Gates, I can. Yeah, well, yes, I use AI a lot. Not in all the different ways.

For me, mostly it's in content creation. It's spurring ideas. I also use it very simply and how to do things like if I'm trying to figure out something, sometimes I go to YouTube, sometimes I'll ask ChatGPT, how do I make this post on LinkedIn? And it'll tell me exactly what to do. But it's mostly content creation and helping me think through my own thoughts, but giving me other ways to think about it.

So I may even say, here's a title to a talk, or to a podcast, or to whatever. Give me other ways to title it, give me other ways to think about it. And what's happened is, and I use mostly ChatGPT, I use perplexity a little bit. It's taught me so much. It knows my books.

All my books are loaded into my special bot, all my videos. It just knows me. And so it can give my voice. And so then when I use it, I go, yeah, this is pretty accurate. I would say this, I always tweak it.

The challenge is that we have to be careful around content creation. And there's lots of other ways to use AI of course, in process flow and all, you know, in structuring, you know, calendars for ourselves and all that is the authenticity piece, right? We've got to be careful. So, for instance, I get comments on my LinkedIn posts that I can tell were written by an AI bot.

Richard Walker: 29:34

Yeah, for.

Bill Cates: 29:35

Sure. I had one guy, he was commenting a lot and I said, oh, you know, it looks like you're using, you know, AI to do this. No response. A couple of those, right? And then I go back.

I said, so tell me, what made you decide to use artificial intelligence rather than just, you know, posting a comment, you know, to make it more authentic? No response. Right? Eventually he stopped commenting. But you can tell if it's authentic or not.

And so that's a big part. So that's how I'm using it.

Richard Walker: 30:04

I'm curious if you have any perspective or vision of how AI could impact money mindsets in the future and how clients and advisors interact with money terms?

Bill Cates: 30:15

Well, yeah, I mean, we used it a little bit for creating the appendices in the book. I've learned it a little bit. I've used it for. So I've probably taken the top 20. I think most of them are in the book Money Mindsets That Don't Serve Us well.

And given kind of another way to think, and I used AI to help me think through that a little bit, right? I mean, I came up with mine, I said, make this better, make this tighter. So yeah, yeah, we can use AI for that. AI is a tool to help us gain clarity and especially in terms of content creation, a tool to help us gain clarity, gain perspective, stimulate our thinking. It can actually give us new ways of thinking that we hadn't considered before.

So yeah, it can be used for all of that. The key is to take whatever creates and then put it through your own mind and fine tune, tweak it, make it yours, make it natural, make it authentic. But it's a tremendous time saving tool. And what it does, it'll. So a lot of advisors wish they could create more content.

But it takes time and it takes thought and it takes energy. And maybe they're not inclined to do that in the first place. Well, AI can help you get through some of those barriers to make it more efficient for you. Again, just make sure you make it human. I've often given a prompt to ChatGPT.

I said, this is great, but it sounds like it was written by artificial intelligence. Putting my voice in it. Make it more playful, make it more human. Make it more real. And indeed, it will come back with something that's more real.

Richard Walker: 31:57

It really helps to have a body of work for it to reference. Like all my podcasts have been run into my AI so it can speak my language, my style, etc. so well because of that.

Bill Cates: 32:07

So the more you use it, the more it will learn that. Yeah, and you can also use other people's content and you could say, you know, here's the book by Brian Portnoy, right. Here's what Rich Walker says about this is, you know, pull from them, but let's make it mine. I don't want to plagiarize. I don't want to steal their ideas.

I don't mind quoting them in my work and attributing some of these thoughts to them. So it's all in the quality of the prompt. And it.

Richard Walker: 32:36

Is. It is, in fact, one of my biggest lessons of the last year with AI. Your greatest limit with AI is your ability to ask the right questions or the best questions. It's amazing. I just realized I'm enjoying talking to you, but we're getting to the end here. So before I get to my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you, Bill?

Bill Cates: 32:56

Yeah. So referralcoach.com is my main website for advisors. referralcoach.com thehiddenheist.com

Is the book thehiddenheist.com. And then if you want to watch my Ted I love it. You know the algorithm loves it when people watch it. Like comment share it is BillCatestedx.com Bill Cates Ted comm so that or find me on LinkedIn I reach out tell me you found me through Rich Walker.

We'll talk. We'll have fun. Yeah. I'd love to connect with folks. Thank you.

Richard Walker: 33:30

Yeah. Go check out Ted. It's a good one. Thank you. All right, here comes my favorite question to ask.

Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Bill Cates: 33:42

Yeah. So here's what comes to mind for me. There's so many people that have impacted me in my business and all this, but I'm going to tell you a guy, he's deceased now, he passed away actually not that long ago. Great friend of mine. And I think there's a lesson for everybody in this.

When I first got his name was John Hurley. And when I first got started in this business, I sold a couple of businesses and then I, you know, was starting to get into this business of maybe speaking, coaching, training. And I was nervous about it, I doubted myself. And he said, Bill, you would be good at this. I know that you would be good at this.

And that's like what I needed to hear to tip the scales into action in that direction. Had I not heard that from him, I wonder, would I have actually gone in the direction I went? And so sometimes we need those people. Newton's first law of motion. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

A body in motion, you know, at rest, stay at rest. The body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. John Hurley. Was that outside force? That's the power of coaching.

That's the power of reading a book. That's the power of hearing a speaker. Sometimes we need that outside force to nudge us where we maybe fear a little bit, or we doubt ourselves a little bit. So that happened probably 40 years ago. And so I give John Hurley that credit for jumping into this.

Richard Walker: 35:16

That is an awesome reminder of just how valuable it is to tell people what you see in them, especially when they don't see it themselves.

Bill Cates: 35:23

Yeah yeah yeah yeah, absolutely. And to be open to sharing fears, vulnerabilities, uncertainties about ourselves and letting them reflect back because, you know, we can't see ourselves. You can't see the picture if you're in the frame. Right. And sometimes people see different things in us that we don't see.

Or we may sense, but we need acknowledged for us to, you know, are we self sufficient? Yeah. And can those other people come in and nudge and help and. Yeah. Absolutely.

Richard Walker: 35:52

Yeah. Oh, man. It's awesome. Okay, I gotta wrap this up. Yep.

All right. I want to give a big thank you to Bill Cates, author of The Hidden Heist, The Original Referral Coach, and so many other things that you've been doing, TEDx speaker, etc.. Thank you for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. So go check out Bill's website at referralcoach.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easy.

I hope you've enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Bill, thank you so much for joining me today.

Bill Cates: 36:28

My pleasure. Thank you Rich.

Outro: 36:31

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