It arrives on cardstock heavy enough to shingle a roof.
You are cordially invited to an exclusive dinner event at the kind of steakhouse you normally save for anniversaries. Complimentary, of course. There will be a brief educational presentation on an exciting strategy for protecting your retirement. Seating is limited, it always is, and you may bring a spouse.
If you have been retired more than twenty minutes, you have gotten this invitation. Some of our clients could wallpaper a hallway with them.
And here is where I part ways with a lot of people in my industry, because the standard advice is to toss the invitation and mutter something about sales tactics. Not me. I say go.
I am completely serious. Go. Wear the good jacket. Order the ribeye, medium rare, and do not feel one ounce of guilt about it, because that dinner has a marketing budget and you are the marketing budget. Have the creme brulee. Let them refill the decaf.
Just bring one question with you. We have been practicing it all week.
Why the dinner works
First, let me be fair to the steak dinner, because being fair is the whole point of this series.
The products pitched at these dinners are usually real. Often they are products we use ourselves, in the right situations, for the right clients. The presenter is usually licensed, usually personable, and usually telling the truth about the product's features. Nobody is lying to you over the filet.
The dinner works on a different mechanism entirely. It works because in that room, the product is the only thing on the table. The charts are compelling. The stories are moving. The numbers are real numbers. And not one thing in that ballroom knows anything about you.
Remember Monday's rule: a new medication is never judged on its own. It is judged against everything you are already taking. The steak dinner is a beautifully catered evening built on skipping that step. It is a specialist, with a microphone, and the intake form is a dinner reservation.
The question that ruins nothing and reveals everything
So here is your move, and it is polite, friendly, and devastating.
When the presenter, or the nice closer who visits your table during dessert, asks what you thought, you smile, and you say some version of this:
"It sounds interesting. How would it interact with what I already have?"
That is it. That is the whole play.
Watch what happens. A specialist cannot answer, and the honest ones will say so. They have never seen your annuities, your life insurance, your pension election, your Social Security timing, your beneficiary forms. If they answer anyway, confidently, without asking a single question about your chart, you have learned everything you need to know about the evening, and it cost them a steak to teach you.
And if they respond by actually asking about your full picture, genuinely digging in? Wonderful. You may have found a careful professional. Careful professionals are not threatened by that question. They are relieved by it. It is the question they wish every prospect asked.
Either way, you win the dinner.
The homework that makes the question honest
One catch: the question only has real power if somebody actually knows the answer.
"How does it interact with what I already have?" assumes that somewhere, there is a list of what you already have, and a person who has looked at all of it together. If that list does not exist, the steak dinner is not your problem. The drawer is. This week's earlier pieces walk through exactly that: the products bought one at a time from salespeople who never met, the death benefits nobody remembers owning, the funeral paid for twice.
That is the real reason I can cheerfully tell you to go enjoy the dinner. Our clients sit through those presentations with a kind of protective armor, and the armor is not cynicism. It is a current annual review. It is knowing that every piece of their money already has a job, that somebody they trust has seen the whole chart, and that any new idea, however good the creme brulee, has to audition against the plan.
An audition is fine. Auditions are healthy. Some new ideas pass them. But the audition happens in our office, with everything on the desk, not in a ballroom where the only thing on the desk is a contract and a pen.
So: go. Eat well. Be pleasant. Take the brochure with a smile. Then bring it to your next review and drop it on the desk with everything else, and let it compete fairly. If it is as good as the presenter said, it will survive the interaction check.
The steak is complimentary. The question is yours to keep.
Tomorrow: a love story about a cardboard box named Bob. I promise it will make sense.