Financial Representative, Northwestern Mutual

>> My name is Steve Sarolli. I'm a college unit director at Northwestern Mutual in our West Hartford, Connecticut office. In addition to working with our, mentoring our internship program in West Hartford, I have my individual practice doing holistic financial planning, and that involves a lot of insurance and investment based planning for individuals, families, and businesses. So I started as an intern with Northwestern, and every intern has a mentor. [Inaudible] control is probably 20 to 1. So I have about 20 interns that I mentor any given semester, spring or fall or even during the summer. It's a year round internship, and when I interned in '07, 2007, I decided that I wanted to continue this career into a full-time position, and one of those first steps into leadership could be mentoring our internship class. And training, developing, coaching, working with them to build their practice is during the internship as a college student you have the ability to say that you're a business owner and helping to do financial planning for anybody that they might know and care about. So after the five to ten hours or so a week that I spend meeting with interns on an individual basis to coach them and track their activity because it is, obviously, a sales-based career, I have my own practice where I'm seeking out to work with existing clients, servicing those people on a daily, weekly basis, and then, obviously, prospecting and meeting with new potential clients as well. So I guess a lot of different things from networking with existing clients to meet new clients as well. We spend very little time on cold calling, knocking on doors, and I think in the industry it can be done, and not to say one way's better than the other, but what we found in the system that Northwestern trains us on is to meet clients through personal introductions from people that value my work already and promote in a light that for somebody new that's, you know, in the event that there's somebody that they know that might benefit from my work. They just, they match us up, and, you know, if somebody wanted to work with me, that's up to them, but that's how our process continues to perpetuate such that my career can continue to grow and continue to help other people. And the system that we follow is not indicative of any success or failure, but, you know, it puts us in the best opportunity to succeed based on years of studying the data that we now follow for making phone calls to a new potential client, to repeat sales from an existing client, what have you. But I think a lot of the freedom and flexibility that comes with this career is earned, even though if I started today I could take tomorrow off because I didn't schedule any appointments. I'm just going to go play golf, for instance, but, again, it's to, I think your earlier success is based on how much you put in to the career in acquiring, working with more and more clients over the long haul, and then as time goes on, as your practice is, evolves, you can definitely I guess pick and choose how and when you want to work.