Ever feel like you’re stuck in a rut, trying to build your Primerica business but not seeing the results you want? You’re not alone. Many reps struggle with finding the right balance between personal growth and team building, and it can be frustrating. But what if you could change that? What if you could unlock the secrets to building a successful hierarchy and achieving true freedom? That’s exactly what Joe Cardino dives into in this powerful session. He shares the blueprint for sacrifice, self-improvement, and success, offering insights that can transform your approach and elevate your business. This isn’t just about reaching regional vice president; it’s about creating a legacy and making a real impact. Joe’s experience and wisdom are invaluable, and his strategies are game-changers for anyone serious about winning. Don’t miss this must-see moment—watch the video below and discover the breakthrough tips that can propel you to the top.
Video Transcription:
”You’ve all come here, you took notes, you listened to everybody talk to how you can win, how you can get better, how you get to RVP, how you can do a bunch of stuff, and it’s a lot of things that you’re hearing, but the real reason you’re here is not just to get to regional vice president, it’s to build a hierarchy.Cause that’s where real freedom comes from.
If you’re just an RVP, you still have to run that base shop, right? The key is to run a hierarchy.
That’s where value ownership means something.
When you have a bunch of regional vice president, you’ve done something really big.
Okay.
So I’m going to do a couple of slides here on how to build a hierarchy.Okay.
Very simple stuff.
First, you got to build yourself.
First thing, if you’re not better, right, you’re not going to make things better for other, you have to commit that just means do what you say you’re going to do.
Most people never do that.
Just commit, commit to.
Showing up.
Commit to doing what you have to do.Making phone calls.
Commit to getting your license.
Just commit.
Number two.
Self improve.
Listen to things.
Read books.
Just get better.
Get better every day.
Do daily affirmations.
Whatever it takes.
I’m, I’m not giving you the specifics because you can figure that out how you want to do that but you gotta be doing these somehow and you gotta sacrifice.You gotta make some adjustments.
You gotta make some choices.
You can’t take, you can’t get to second base if you don’t take your foot off of first base.
Oh, I like that one.
Write that down.
That’s pretty good.
I like that one.
You can’t, I’ve made sacrifices.
My family made sacrifices.
I had a boat before I got to Primark.I sold it because I went on the weekends.
I was working on the weekends now.
I had season Nick tickets when they were good.
Now they’re good again.
But back then, they were really good.
John Storch, Patrick Ewing, all of that.
I gave those up because the games were at Tuesday and Thursday nights.
And I was on op meetings those nights, right?So you gotta commit, self improve, and sacrifice.
Watch, if you want things to change, you need to change.
Stop waiting for everything else to change around you.
You gotta change.
You’re the catalyst to everything.
Build a team.
Once you build yourself, you gotta build a team.
I heard this before.
You need people.
You want a team, go get some people.
Then you better teach them what to do.
And then you gotta build relationships so they like coming around.
And you can keep them.
Getting people is one thing.
Keeping people is another, right? You know what I’m talking about? Right? That’s what you gotta do.
Now watch.
Birds of a feather flock together.You decide what your team looks like.
Jeannie talked about being in the wrong market.
Hire people in the wrong market with 15 life apps.
They’re gonna bring in more people on 15 life apps.
And I’m not saying that’s bad, but it’s bad.
Anyway, I don’t wanna It’s just crazy that people even do that, right? So birds of a feather flock together.You build a team around you that you really want.
And then you need to build regional vice presidents.
How do you build regional vice presidents? Well, you gotta stay plugged in.
I don’t know anyone who promotes regional vice president that doesn’t show up, come around, do things, be at the leadership school, come to the convention.Those are just things that you have to do if you want to win.
Now, look, you don’t have, there’s no requirements here.
There’s no minims, no quotas, but go into the bathroom and look in the mirror.
Are you happy where you’re at? Are you happy with your income? Are you happy with your lifestyle? Are you happy with your roles?Canardly, you know, that car that rolls down one hill, can hardly get up the next one.
Are you happy with that? I saw some in the parking lot, the doors don’t even match.
Identify the 20% ers.
Those are the people who really want to win.
20 percent of people do 80 percent of the work, right? You gotta cheerlead them, encourage them.There’s only so much you can do to get someone to R.
V.
P.
To me, I think it’s like, It’s like planting an oak tree, right? In the beginning, when they’re brand new, you put them in the dirt, you water it, make sure the lawnmower doesn’t cut it off, and you protect it a little bit.
But once it gets to about three or four feet high, there’s nothing you can do to influence that.It’s either going to grow or it’s not going to grow, it’s up to them.
Right? So you get people, the district leader, go back to another district leader, once they know how to do that, they know what they need to do, just keep them in a winning environment along the way.
And then, be the example.
Do you want a team of people just like you? Some of you are like, ah, I wish I had a team of people just like me.
Some of you are like, oh, I wouldn’t want a team of people just like me, I don’t want a team of people.
You don’t want that to happen, okay? So, all this stuff seems like friggin hard work.
That’s a lot of things all day I’m hearing, things to do.Schedule your hour, make some phone calls, read books, do this, get up early, leave late, come to this, come to that.
Look, it’s hard.
I’m letting you know it’s hard to be successful.
It’s hard to win anywhere.
It’s hard to win here.
I think it’s easier to win here than in other places, but it’s still hard.
It’s still hard.See, people see this.
Oh, by the way, the speed of a leader is the speed of a team.
Don’t ever think that your teammates are going to take you farther than where you’re at right now.
Your team has taken, uh, I know I was going to want to hear this, but, your team has taken you as far as it can right now.
If you want to go farther, you need more people, a bigger team, more leaders, okay?But this is what most people see when it comes to success.
Success.
You see these RIPs up front here, they’re like, oh my god, they’re so polished.
That’s not how David Kim was when he was slurping in the projection unit into into the New York Hotel.
Keith Adam went to his first meeting with capezios on an earring and a little ponytail.
Oh, you bet you didn’t know that, right? I think that’s spandex pants, but I’m not sure.
But right? So, you look at the, this is a byproduct.
When I speak up and I talk, this is 31 years.
Of being in this environment, of self improvement, of learning, of going to leadership schools, of going to conventions, of going to training.See, this is what really is people don’t see.
I’ll make it a little bit bigger.
Hard work, persistence, late nights, rejection, sacrifice, discipline, criticism, doubts, failures, risks.
You gotta work hard, but I’m telling you, it’s worth it.
Because one day, if you do all of this, you’re gonna turn around and, well, let’s talk about hard work for a second.
Kobe Bryant said, I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for the lack of success.
Great things come from hard work and perseverance.
No excuses.
Listen, there’s a thousand million quotes about hard work.
How about this one? Hard work is the price that was paid for success.
Vince Lombardi.
Right? There’s no secret to success.
The result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
That’s Colin Powell.
How about this one? To succeed, work hard, never give up, above all, cherish the magnificent obsession.
Thank you.
Listen, no one’s ever gonna tell you you can be successful without hard work.No one’s gonna say, work half ass, and that’s how you be successful.
Every successful person, you ask them, how did you do it? They go, worked hard.
I saw a special on Ted Turner, right, when he was creating, uh, CNN.
He was, he said he was working 18 hour days, so what he did was, he had an apartment built in his office building, behind his office.He goes, I couldn’t waste time driving an hour and a half back and forth from home to back here in traffic.
So I slept there for three years.
He worked 18 hour days, slept for six hours right in the office and came back, became a gazillionaire doing that kind of stuff.
Built something big, right? So every way you see that, but if you work hard like that and you can do that stuff, you can have something like this.
Now this isn’t even the whole team.
We have a, we have a bunch of people that make up the Crusaders.
I’m really proud of them.
I want to mention just some of the RVPs.
The Salernos, The Pox, Amadeo Velasquez, Jenny Escobar, Nalita Flynn, Katia Argueta, Ed Conway, Magan Ralph Padilla, Bob Gerby, Dennis Cortez, and Steve Rizza.
In our Bass Shop, people are getting ready to go, SB Devin Carroll is going to be an RVP, the next RVP out of our Bass Shop.
You can clap for that.
Followed right behind by Martin and Elias, ready to make that happen.
We have new rising stars coming up through the Bass Shop.
Ruth Vieira, so proud of her, came on board, my administrative assistant, got licensed, writes a business every month and competes.And a little shout out to Mike Ravelli.
Mike Ravelli, in the last two years, he didn’t do 5, 000 in premium.
He did 5, 000 in January, 5, 000 in February.
He’s going to commit to do 5, 000 every month for the rest of the year.
That’s adjustment, right? He made more money in January than he made all year last year.And he’s making big stuff happen.
But, the crusade is much bigger than that.
I’m fortunate of that in this room.
We also get to override Alerte’s army, you guys.
You’re awesome.
And the Visionaries.
And Jessica Gordon.
And Maria Marino.
And Ray Costello and Roy Lipson and Chris Aitjung.
We have a little piece of everybody over there, which makes life a little bit cool.
But we paid the price.
I remember when Ray Costello came to his first art meeting.
I remember driving through the Bronx with Roy Lipson to talk to people to come to the meeting.
I remember when Chris Aitjung never said a word.
He just followed Ray wherever he went.
And he wore Ray’s suits cause, and it was like way too big for him.It’s like, it’s But he showed up to everything.
He showed up everywhere.
I have so much respect for that guy and what he did.
But I saw the hotel, the meetings we did at the Gregory Hotel, uh, in Brooklyn.
The meetings we did in Westchester, in Albany, the Mar a Lago I’m not talking about one meeting, I’m talking about for a year, two years, three years, these locations.We did meetings in Greenport.
You guys know where Greenport is? It’s the last exit before Europe, if you’re heading east.
That’s how far that is.
We did meetings in Boston, we did meetings in Albany, in Middletown.
We drove, there was no Zoom, there was no GPS, there was no cell phone.
We had to have hatch to match for every county we went into.We had to pull over and page somebody if we got a call, right? We had to do that stuff.
Today, I wish we had what we had today.
I had a bunch of RVPs that didn’t stick around in the beginning.
I’ll tell you why.
Comp sucked.
They got paid 70 percent with no bonuses.
I had people making 80, 000, 90, 000.
Today’s company making 180, 000, 190, 000, and everyone left.I just started building a business just before we got New York straightened out.
But still, we’ve done something huge.
Our little team has 3.
5 billion of coverage in force for people.
You understand what that is? How much, how much that is? Our little team paid 41 million in death claims since I’ve been here.
Those are 41 million dollars to people who lost a family member.
You don’t think we had an impact on people? You don’t think people are happy we went to the house? We have 280 million dollars of assets under management or hierarchy.
You know what that is? That’s retirement plans.
That’s college savings.That’s educational IRAs.
That’s all the stuff that people need.
We’re making an impact on people’s lives.
Why? Because we worked hard.
For about 5 years.
For 5 years I was on appointments every night.
That’s all.
Saturday in the office.
And I mean, five nights a week, I did op meetings.
Bob Savage used to yell at me.You got to be in the field more.
Johnson said, don’t listen to him.
Just keep doing the op meetings.
And then Sunday was my day to close business.
And I never had huge, huge numbers, but I did do four by 4, 000 consistently for four and a half, five years.
And from that, I built this here and people go, when are you going to retire?I go from what I kind of been semi retired for like 25 years.
And while I’m semi retired, my income has been going up.
How crazy is that? Let me tell you what it is.
We have, we, we are so blessed.
And I thank the Crusaders and everybody else’s name that I mentioned.
Everybody here in this room, because you bring something to the table to make that happen.
December.
I didn’t write one life app.
I didn’t hire one person.
They paid us 64 grand.
In December, when people go, No one does business, it’s Christmas.
So I really cranked it on January.
Didn’t write a life app, didn’t hire anybody, paid us 54.
It’s frigging crazy.
So what does that do? What I’m telling, the point of what I’m saying here is it’s hard work, but it’s really kind of worth it.
It’s not hard work for 50 years.
Hard work to me is the guy on the side of the road with a shovel digging a trench and he’s 40, years old, still doing it.
The guy, I went into a, uh, a diner the other night.
It’s kind of scary.
I was with my wife and this old man comes and he’s serving us.
I’m like, Oh my God, I feel so bad for this old guy.Like, he should just be at home somewhere.
He’s just, he can hardly even walk.
And I go, and he was good as a, I go, Hey, you been doing this a long time? He goes, Yeah, I’ve been doing this and this.
We started talking about it.
He was the same age as me! I was like, Holy crap! Life will beat you down if you have that kind of a job.He’s working, carrying trays, dishes, this and that.
This is what I do for a living.
Hey.
Hey, let me introduce the next speaker.
Let me get something done.
My life is awesome.
for listening.
And I wanted, I couldn’t thank Prime Minister.
Let me tell you one thing.
My only regret is that I didn’t come full time sooner.
That I didn’t buy into it a little bit more in the beginning.
Because everything they say comes true.
And all I have is McCoy.
I went to grab a couple of picks, I didn’t even know what to pick.
So I just grabbed like the first handful of them here.
We’ve done fun things.
We’ve met great people.
We’ve gone on great trips.We’ve been all over the world.
We have fun with people in our business.
I golf with all over the best golf courses with guys that got much better than me because I’m in Primerica.
I got a trip next month.
I’m gonna go with Jim Meyer, Mike Presley, Jim Penn, Keith Otto.
We’re going to Arizona to golf.And that never would have happened in Primerica.
I never flew on a private jet to Primerica.
I never swam with sharks.
I didn’t hang out at places like this, get recognized at a convention, go to do things like that.
I didn’t just take our teammates in a limo to a vineyard.
Woo! Woo! I was scared with that thing.
But all of the stuff that you see here, and this is just, I have tens of thousands of photos.
This is a handful of grams.
This all became possible because of Primerica.
Primerica’s paid me 8 million dollars since I’ve been here.
And sometimes I, I think, sometimes my mother’s son Steve brought a friend over to, yeah, I don’t know, I heard this thing didn’t work.Didn’t work.
My kids all went through private school.
It was a thousand a month for each one of them.
All three of them at the same time.
I couldn’t do that on my, on my, uh, lawyer, that was just crazy.
They all went to law school, guess what they never did? Never one of them did they pay a student loan.
Never did they pay one payment, not one dollar, nothing, towards the student loan.
Because of Primerica.
Because they, I got an F& A in the beginning, I followed the system, I saved my money, I bought into what we did, and I went and I helped other people along the way.
And it did, the pictures get crazier and crazier.
From the early days with Joe Ensor and Keith Otto, to today with the team right here.
I can’t even imagine where we’re going to be in five years from now.
I don’t know.
10 years from now, 15 years from now, Oh, aren’t you going to retire, Ben? I love what I do.
People ask Bob Safford that, he says, I’m going to keep going until I drop dead.And then he dropped dead.
But, but until then, he was making a lot of money.
You better cut that out, Jason.
I’m sorry I said that.
I have mad respect for Bob Safford, and Tom’s a good friend of mine.
But the point is, you don’t have to quit.
Like, I know people, they, they make a lot of money, they do tile work.
They’re like, they’re 50, they go, I can’t bend down anymore.
I can’t work anymore.
It’s impossible for people to do that kind of manual labor forever.
But here, you do this as long as you want.
And you do this any way you want to do it, as long as it’s legal and moral and fits into our program.
And what happens is, after a while, it’s not about the money, it’s about the legacy you leave behind.The RVPs you created, the families you helped, and the people you influenced.
I want to tell you guys, I couldn’t be more appreciative of everybody in this room, and I love this company.
I’ll see you guys at the top.
