Executive TLDR
Labels do not define your potential in Primerica
The purpose of business is solving problems and building opportunity
Assets grow when people are developed and duplicated
Focus on teammate acquisition and full licensing
Teach profitability early to ensure retention
Simplify training into discovery, analysis, action, and referrals
Prospect for someone specific, not just anyone
Work with the end in mind — build million-dollar earners
Video Summary
Tom Forsch begins by addressing how being labeled an introvert could have limited his growth, yet he refused to let labels define his success. He challenges leaders to confront fear and stop caring excessively about outside opinions. He reframes business as opportunity rather than crisis and explains that the true purpose of business is satisfying demand by building capability in others. Tom dismantles common misconceptions about the investment side of Primerica, clarifying that success does not come from chasing assets alone but from developing fully licensed leaders who multiply results. He emphasizes teammate acquisition, licensing, profitability training, and promotion as the core pillars of growth. By simplifying training into discovery, financial analysis, action, and becoming referable, he shows how leaders can build trust and duplication. He highlights the importance of developing RVPs across different ages and backgrounds, reinforcing that growth is about building people, not production. Tom concludes by urging leaders to work with the end in mind — not chasing personal milestones but building million-dollar earners — and challenges everyone to decide whether they will give their full effort or simply give some.
FAQs
What does Tom Forsch mean by building people instead of assets?
He means focusing on developing fully licensed leaders who can duplicate results, rather than chasing personal production or assets alone.
Can introverts succeed in Primerica?
Yes. Tom shares that labels like introvert do not limit success when systems and discipline are applied.
What are the core pillars of building a Primerica business?
Teammate acquisition, full licensing, profitability training, and promotion to leadership levels.
Why is full licensing important?
Fully licensed leaders are positioned to build complete businesses and qualify for higher contracts like RVP.
How should training be simplified?
By focusing on discovery, financial analysis, taking action, and becoming referable to generate trust and referrals.
What does prospecting for someone mean?
It means being intentional about the type of leader you are looking to develop instead of recruiting randomly.
Why is profitability training critical?
If new teammates make money early, they are more likely to stay and build long term.
How do assets multiply in Primerica?
Assets multiply through duplication when multiple leaders build their own organizations.
What is working with the end in mind?
It means focusing on long-term leadership development and creating million-dollar earners, not just short-term milestones.
What separates those who “give some” from those who “give all”?
Consistency, commitment, and deciding to fully invest time and effort into building a large, capable team.
Glossary
Teammate Acquisition
The process of intentionally recruiting and bringing in new associates to build the organization.
RVP (Regional Vice President)
A senior leadership contract level representing strong team growth and production.
Assets Under Management (AUM)
Total investment assets overseen by representatives and their organizations.
Financial Needs Analysis (FNA)
The structured process of analyzing a client’s financial situation to create a plan.
Duplication
Teaching others to replicate systems and behaviors to create exponential growth.
Referable
Being trustworthy, likable, and valuable enough that clients willingly provide referrals.
Profitability Training
Teaching new teammates how to generate income quickly to reinforce belief and retention.
Transcript:
So, you know, we’re in a hierarchy between Otto, the Saffords, the Myers. It’s a very extroverted hierarchy. Right. I am the introvert. Now, just to kind of get painted, picture of this. We got the slide up. This will kind of paint. This is my son’s baseball game when he was 16 years old. Those parents are the parents of the team. And that red chair with the circle around it, if you can’t see it’s a little bigger. That’s where I sit. So, you know, I decided, like, I think a lot of us get labeled different things in our life. And introvert. I was always, he’s an introvert. He’s an introvert. I didn’t really know what that meant, so I decided to go. Now that we have AI, I figured I’d check AI out and see what introvert actually says about what an introvert is.
And this is the definitions of an introvert. And you can see right now that makes my life a little difficult based on those definitions. Right? But the challenge with being an introvert is we’re always labeled. And I think a lot of people read into their labels and they think, you know, these labels define who we are. So I decided to look a little deeper, and I decided to look at it and say, what does an introvert tell us we need to be in life? Or what can we not be in life? And it came up with all these career paths that it said introverts should not be in. I think when you look at those people don’t know. But I was a bartender first, and then I transitioned into this.
So everything I’ve done in my life has been the opposite of what today AI would tell us we cannot be. And, you know, we’ve developed a business over the years, and, you know, the things that have really propelled us in business was answering one of these two questions. And I think we all could sit here and say, like, why do we do the things we do? Or what’s preventing us from doing the things that we ultimately know we should do? And I just put these two on there because, you know, when you look at it, you know, our desire, you know, to want a better quality of life and overcome the fears that we have, I think is paramount. Most people are paralyzed by those. And the other one is, do you really care too much about what people think?
And I think we could all ask those questions either one way or the other. But the fight is, what are we going to do about it? Let’s see if this is coming up here. So if we analyze the purpose of business, right. We’re all in business now, like, what’s the purpose? Why are people in business? Well, the Japanese language has the word crisis. And crisis in the Japanese language can mean one of two things. It can mean crisis or opportunity. And a lot of people focus on the crisis end and not really the opportunity that exists. You know, what was just covered? Talking about the transference of wealth. None of us can really comprehend that when trillions of dollars are thrown around, we really don’t know what that means. It’s too big of a number. Right.
But when we look at business, it’s supply and demand, it’s satisfying, it’s looking at what people need and to be able to surface what people need. So when we go through these and we look at the investment world, I think there’s a lot of misconceptions with the investment world. The first one being we’re looking for advisors. If you ever run an investment business, I don’t believe that’s true. I’m not looking for advisors. I’m looking for people just like me. When I got started, did we necessarily turn into somebody that does a lot of investments? Yeah, but that’s not how we started. The second thing is, you know, we hear the word advisor. All an advisor is a fully licensed person. I would argue if everyone in here that’s a vice president could raise your hand, are you fully licensed? You have to be, right?
Can’t get the contract unless you are. People look at and say, we want. All we want is people to get. Is to get assets under management. I don’t believe that’s true. You know, I personally. We have like 70 million of assets under management, which some people think is high. A lot of people think that’s very low. But because we built people and we built others, our assets are just under a billion. That would never happen if it was just me. Right. So the idea is we got to go find people and develop them into vice president. Right. And you’re going to hear about this for the next two days. You know, the second one is we just want investments. You know, the idea is we used. We chose to lead our conversations with investments, Whether it stems around clients or it stems around teammates.
There’s so many different ways that we can build this thing, but it still has to have teammates and products, which you’re going to hear a lot about today, which pertains to life insurance and investments. Right. When we look at the people all say that people in the investment business don’t want to recruit. I don’t think that could be further from the truth. You know, we recruit what we want and what we’re looking for, and we all do that. It’s just we tend to work in that one world. People, you know, people in the investment world don’t want to override others. They just want to override assets. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You know, I’m a firm believer that none of us can override anybody unless they make money. We override money, Right?
So the idea is, how can we simplify the business that we’re in? So keeps going off here. So let’s. And I’m not going to go through this because I think it was kind of already covered. But I want you to look at and think about these two things. Most people look at how big our market is in everything that we do, and they focus on, how can I go get that? How can I take advantage of that? And the word in there is I. It’s not about what we can go get, but it’s about what can we build to go get more. Right? And, you know, our philosophy has always been, you know, we want a business where others make good money.
And the hardest thing, I think a lot of times for me coming into the business over the years was how can I figure out my personal philosophy? What do I want my business to look like? And these are some of the things that we’ve adapted over the years. We wanted a business that led with investments. I talked about that. And we wanted to do the complete job for our clients. We wanted things to be balanced. And everybody we worked with, we wanted to teach them that. We wanted that to multiply. The other one is we wanted to find and train RVPs. Now, being an introvert, that didn’t happen as fast as I would like it to. Right. It took a little bit of time, but it doesn’t mean we stopped and tried not. And we moved, pivoted, and went another direction.
We kept working on it. So this is our financial independence team right now. These are all the RVP’s that work in our hierarchy. I just wanted to highlight a couple of them that I’m really excited about that will get recognized throughout this event. The first one is Scott and Mary Jo Webb, who I think might be sitting up front. Last month, they just clicked over $400,000 of income. Give them a hand, Joe. And Colleen Medica just got promoted to RVP in September. They’re $200,000 income earners. As Regional leaders Joe and Colleen will click over 250,000 tonight and will be invited to the senior leadership meeting this year. And then AJ and Lex Molteer, they’re our youngest RVP that we’ve promoted. They’re third 30, just turned 30 years old, and there are $100,000 income earners. And, you know, they’re just getting started.
Young family, you know, so the question becomes, yeah, but Tom, I’m not young. Well, go find some young people. You know, what I love about it is, and I didn’t, you know, this isn’t a dig, but Joe’s our oldest promoting RVP. AJ’s our and Lex are our youngest promoting RVP. Doesn’t matter where you’re at in life. What matters is what you want to get out of it, right? These are some of our future rvps. And what I get excited about is this next wave. You know, I say that we have promoted our youngest rvp, but we have young people here today that are in our base shop that are looking at that saying, I want to be the youngest rvp, right? Who’s going to be next? You know, it’s not about what we’ve done, but it’s about what we’re going to go do, right?
So, you know, to build our business, obviously, these are things that are pretty simple. Like we need people, we need teammate acquisition, I call it, right? We got to license them. I believe we’ve always believed we’ve got to get them fully licensed. You know, I don’t know anybody that can not get fully licensed to become an rvp. It’s got to happen. Does it happen sooner or later? Doesn’t really matter when it happens. We just would prefer it happen sooner, get it out of the way, right? We got to train them. We got to train them to be what I believe profitable. Hector talked about in the RVP me, I love everything he said because, you know, listening to him when I first got started, I didn’t have any direction on what this message was going to be.
But I truly believe that we had to teach people how to make money, right? If they’re not making money, they’re not sticking around. And then we got to promote them, right? And the hardest thing we do in business and we all have to do here today is take all this information that we’re getting today and simplify it, right? And I think those four points do it. This is just an example. I figured I’d just throw this up here as an example of what we believe simplification. Of training should look like. Like this is what we teach. You know, we teach people to do discovery. Whether it’s discovery of a new associate and what they want out of our business or it’s discovery for a client. It’s figuring out what they want their financial plan to look like. We have to analyze it.
That’s creating the plan. That’s our F and A. So many of us get so complicated with the process, and then most people can’t learn it. And then the third thing we teach is teaching people how to take action. I firmly believe when we sit down with a client, they have three options. They can DIY it, they can use us as a second opinion, or they can use us. And if you become good at what you do, you become, like Hector said, a professional salesperson. They’re gonna choose a third option almost every time. And then the last thing I think that people miss and we don’t train enough on is how to become referable. Right? And referable is being likable, it’s being trusting, and it’s being valued. Right? And these are just things we train on. We try and keep things simple so.
So that we can teach people how to become profitable in business. Right? So as I wrap up on the last couple things here, I’m a firm believer that we gotta work with the end in mind. You know, if all we’re focused on is where we’re at, it becomes very frustrating. You know, there’s nothing worse than being frustrated in business. So look at where you’re going. Be excited about the journey. You know, we just clicked over Friday night, going over a million and, you know, I fell asleep trying to check the cycles to see when it was going to happen. My business partner Larry texted me at 3am I saw, went over, I started checking, couldn’t go back to sleep. And then all the phone calls start coming in the next morning. It was overwhelming. 100% overwhelming.
The end in mind isn’t getting to a million. The end in mind is how many million dollars can we develop, right? And I think you just gotta look at it from a different perspective. I believe this is the problem in Primerica, right? So many people, they focus on everything and they never get good at anything. At the end of the day, we gotta get good. And it’s not at a lot. There’s just a couple things. So let’s get focused on those, you know, and this is a big one for me. I don’t prospect for anyone. I prospect for someone I know what I’m looking for. If you were trying to put together an NFL team, what would that team look like? Right. It wouldn’t just be anybody. You’d be pretty specific about who you’d want to be in business with. Right.
And it’s not about what you can do, but it’s about what can get done. At the end of the day, we’re all individuals. There’s only so much we can do individually. But when you surround yourself and you build yourself an army of trained, competent, profitable people that also want to do the same thing, what could that look like 5, 10, 15 years down the road? So there’s this saying that every. I mean, I see it every week when we drive down to our beach house in Maryland as you’re going through the Dover Air Force Base. It says, all gave, some gave all. And we’re not here. We’re not in a war. Right. Some of us, maybe we’re in the insurance war, the investment war, the opportunity war, whatever you want to call it.
But at the end of the day, like, I always looked at it and I said, you know, when I look back 5, 10, 15 years down the road, do I want someone to say, tom Forsh gave it all, or do I just want to be part of the masses that gave some? The question that I constantly ask myself now is, will time benefit me over time, or will I regret not putting in the time? And at the end of the day, time’s going to go on. We’re going to get a lot of stuff in these next couple hours or next couple days that we’re spending here together. But at the end of the day, what are we going to do with it when we get back? You know, we don’t all have all the time that we. It’s not infinite in number.
Our days are ticking. We got to get as much out of it as we can. And the only way to do that is to build the biggest team that we can. Proud to be your teammates. Thank you, guys.
