The Fellowship
I put The Fellowship together for you as a reminder of the massive value you provide to the world. Get access to The 21 Declarations—each Declaration comes with a video, essay, and PDF download.
I put The Fellowship together for you as a reminder of the massive value you provide to the world. Get access to The 21 Declarations—each Declaration comes with a video, essay, and PDF download.
–Jeremy Walter, CFP®
Greetings, Carl here.
My guess is that you're really good at helping people define their goals and reach their financial dreams.
But what about you?
Are you creating the type of business you'd hoped for?
Are you working with clients you love?
My passion is helping people close the gap between their current reality and their dreams. That's why I created this—to help reconnect you to your values so you can get clear on the kind of business you want to build and then go do it.
Each day, you will get an email containing The 21 Declarations, essays, sketches, and videos designed to coincide chronologically with the lifecycle of a client. All to help you be the best Real Financial Professional you can be, from bringing in prospective clients to first and second meetings to keeping clients happy for life.
The Fellowship is for anyone who works with money and humans. It’s for experts and people just starting their careers. It’s for someone working at Merrill Lynch and someone just starting their own firm. If you’re reading this, you didn’t just magically stumble upon this page… chances are, it’s for YOU.
Read on, my friend.
Simple. Once you sign up, you will get an invitation to log in to an online Web Portal where all The Fellowship material lives. You will also receive one email a day for 23 days, with links to videos and essays in your Web Portal. You’ll interact with the content via email, video, written content, and downloads.
Because this isn’t a course. It’s the Anti-Course. It’s a credo, an initiation, a mindset forge, a philosophy. I’m not here to teach you tactics. I’m here to dig deeper than that, all the way to the bottom, to get to That Thing that allows those outside tactics to actually be effective in the first place.
Actually, that’s how it started out. At first, it was just a book. But countless financial professionals pleaded with me to make it something more than a book. Books are ubiquitous. We all have books. What financial professionals, just like you, told me they wanted was something bigger, something deeper, something that left them nowhere to hide. This isn’t just a book for the same reason that Christianity isn’t just the Ten Commandments and Buddhism isn’t just the Four Noble Truths. The 21 Declarations are just the start… the hard part comes next.
The short answer is… YES! As one alum said, “I’ve read Carl’s books, but this was still very useful.”
If you are new to the financial services industry, The Fellowship is especially right for you. Consider a ladder analogy. You may have already climbed one or two rungs. Wouldn’t you rather hop down and lean it against the right wall now instead of waiting until you’re five steps higher?
If you've been around the block a few times, this is for you, too. I’ve had grizzled, old veterans come up to me in tears saying, “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that my whole life.”
The central focus of The Fellowship are The 21 Declarations of Real Financial Professionals. So whether you actually give advice for a living or work with, supervise, or train people who do, The Fellowship will be helpful.
There are alumni of The Fellowship who are mutual fund managers. The material helps them understand how they can help the advisors they serve to deliver better value to their clients, be more confident in the work they're doing, and reignite the fire in the belly again.
There are alumni of The Fellowship who are L&D folks at various firms. They use The Fellowship to help generate topics of discussion with the people they're training.
There are even firms that have taken groups through The Fellowship. If you have a study group every month, it can be challenging to come up with a topic. You can plug The Fellowship into a group discussion and review a Declaration each month to help provide a core curriculum on what it means to be a "human" and a Real Financial Professional.
The Fellowship costs $500. It’s a one-time fee. It’s not a deposit and not a membership. And no, there is no money-back guarantee. Why? Because The Fellowship is a community for the committed, and money-back guarantees are hiding places. If we give you your money back, it takes the burden of doing the hard work off you. We want you to hold yourself accountable. The whole point is to change the industry, and the world, by first changing ourselves.
If The Fellowship was an expense, we never would have created it. The Fellowship is a long-term investment in your future as a financial professional. That’s the whole point of it. But don’t take it from me, take it from The Fellowship alum, Jeremy Walter. “I went through The Fellowship, and I’ve described it to others as the single best professional investment that I’ve ever made into my career.”
That really depends on you. Each day for 23 days, you’ll get an email reminder telling you to see that day’s lesson. The lessons are intentionally short, so you don’t spend all of your time reading. This is not so much a textbook as a collection of parables. The point is for you to think about each day’s lesson, reflect on it, and then implement it into the way you do business. That said, all the material is available the day you sign up. So in case you can’t make it 23 days in a row, you won’t miss anything.
As long as the internet exists! Seriously, once you sign up for The Fellowship, all the videos and essays are there for you in perpetuity. That means you can go through the content as many times as you want. We intend for it to be a touchstone whenever you need it, so when crazy things like pandemics happen and offices close, there’s always somewhere for you to come back to.
Yes… and no. Yes, there is a group of us out there… inside The Society of Advice. No, The Fellowship itself is not a group experience insofar as everyone can go through the material at their own pace. Think of it this way: Whether you’re an independent RIA or work in a major firm in Germany or a bank in Australia, these principles will apply to you.
You are free to share the knowledge and insights you gain from The Fellowship with others at your firm. However, if you're finding that people are passing around a shared login, then it's time to purchase another seat.
So here's the deal:
Sharing knowledge = Great!
Sharing logins = Not so great.
–Gregory Young, MSAFP, CFP®, EA, ChFC®, CLTC
–Georgie Loxton, CFA®
–Dan Johnson, CFP®
All over the world, if you ask people to describe the way they're feeling about their relationship with money, the word they often use is “anxious.” We've got more news, more apps, more fancy-cool-kid-toys, more books, more podcasts than we've ever had before, and people are still feeling anxious. It's not getting any better for them.
The only solution I can find (believe me, I've looked) is the work of a Real Financial Professional.
The challenge is this: People don't know you exist.
I get hundreds of emails from people telling me as much. They don't know where to find you.
The only way that will change is if we raise our hands one by one and say, “Here, I made this thing. I hope you like it, it's for you.”
So the reason I built The Fellowship is to give you the ideas, the confidence, the energy, and a flag to rally around so you can raise your hand and say, “I'm here! This is real financial advice. And this is how I do it.”
That's why I built The Fellowship. And I have no doubt The Fellowship will help.
It will become a flag you can stick in the ground.
It will remind you why you got into this business in the first place.
I hope you'll join us.
