Video Summary
Transcription:
Part of what I want to do today is kind of just explain what we’re doing. How many of you are brand new and not licensed? How many brand new, not licensed, driver’s license? Okay, brand new. How many have been here less than a year? All right, cool. How about less than 39 years? A couple of you? All right, cool. So for those of you I have not met yet, my name is Keith Otto. I’m a senior national sales director. I’ve been with Primerica for 39 years. I started when I was 22 years old and I was a plumber of a. I was a foreman of a plumbing company. I was teaching a taekwondo school, a karate school. I was actually trying out for the Olympic team for the 88 Olympics. And I was a young, kind of broke athlete trying to make money.
And financially was not in a good position because I grew up. My parents were divorced. My mom raised three kids like myself on public assistance. Three boys on public assistance. And we grew up on basically welfare. I lived in a garage for a couple of years. I’m telling you this for a reason. I had a poverty mentality when I took a look at Primerica and I moved out of my house when I was a junior in high school. So my last two years in high school, I lived on my own. And so I had a need, not just a want to make money. Everyone wants nice cars and nice jewelry and everybody wants nice things. I needed to make money.
And so when I looked at Primerica back in December of 1987, before some of you guys were born, I was making about $70,000 a year, which back then $70,000 was a lot of money for a young kid without an education. It’s actually a lot of money today, which is kind of sad. You meet a 22 year old kid in here and they’re making $70,000 a year. You go, that’s not bad, right? For a kid who didn’t go to school. That was 39 years ago. If you take the $70,000 and you use inflation for that’s 199,000 today. So picture someone sitting in a meeting right now making $199,000 as a 22 year old kid with no education. And I got invited down to a meeting and someone introduced me, which is Seacaucus, New Jersey, which is.
It’s not hell, but you could see caucus hell from Seacaucus. And someone invited me down to a meeting and I sat through a business briefing. And I kid around when I tell this story a lot. But four speakers got up. And the first speaker gets up and he’s like, man, we help people. We do good things for good people. I’m like, what the hell am I sitting in? And then the second speaker got up and he’s like, we help people. Now I’m in construction teacher. Correct. I got my work boots on. I got my hat on backwards. I had my earring because I was badass back then. And I’m sitting in this room saying, what the am I doing here? Right? And then the third speaker got up and started talking about helping people. And then the fourth speaker got up.
His name was Joe Ensor. And I was kidding around. I was the first man that ever talked dirty to me. And what he started talking about was overrides and what kind of car would you drive or what kind of house would you live in? And what would your life be like if money wasn’t an issue? And I remember for the first time in my life at 22 years old, I started dreaming and I started thinking, man, how cool would that be if I never had to worry about money, if I didn’t have to worry about how am I going to eat or how am I going to pay my bills, or how am I going to pay my rent or how am I going to pay my credit cards?
And I share that with you because every single thing that they talked about in that business briefing that I sat through in 1987 was this big compared to the real opportunity that we have. I remember thinking, if I could have a car that doesn’t break down, and now we’ve got 10 cars. I said, if I could ever own a home. And now we’ve got. I think I was saying to my wife, I think 12 right now, 12 different residents, it’s ridiculous. I’m getting rid of some of it, all right? But I was thinking about what could life be like? And so we started out part time for four years, made 18,000 our first year, 26,000 our second year, 75,000 our third year. And then our fourth year, we made 147,000 part time, and we quit our job.
And then I plateaued out from, like, for six years. And I tell that story when I do a business briefing, and people, that’s pretty cool. 147,000 Part time. And I don’t lie, but I leave crap out if it’s not motivating. And for the next six years, I stayed between 140 and 200,000. And I didn’t do it because I read the book how to remain average in ordinary in six straight years. Okay? I did it because I was young and I was single. I was partying and I was doing all stuff that young kids do. And you got to do that stuff too, okay? And then I got married. It screwed up my whole system. And what happened was what I started thinking is 15, 18, 20 grand a month is a lot of money.
And it wasn’t a lot of money when your wife spends 100 grand a month, right? So. And what I realized was, man, I got to step my game up. And what we focused on is I did not join here to sell financial services. I didn’t join here to sell life insurance. I didn’t join here to sell annuities, mutual funds. I joined here to build a company within a company. And I share that with you because what I did is we became an agent part time, then we became an agent full time. And then we focused on nothing more than building an agency. Because I heard you got to recruit, train and develop people. And I’m sharing this for a reason. Because what happens is those of you that are newer or been here less than a year, some of you aren’t fully licensed yet.
What this meeting is today is we take every year we do a big event. We had an event in Atlantic City in November with some of our team, not all of our team, but some of our team. We have 12,000 licensed reps in our business. Fast forward now. We have about 14 billion of assets under management, which is pretty cool. And yet I was security. I didn’t have a securities license for four and a half years in the business. All we focused on was building distribution. And I share that with you because as you’re sitting in this meeting, you’re going to hear from a bunch of different speakers. So we did a school in Atlantic City like this. I think we had close to 4,000 people there in November. This is our Southern school.
So you’ve got, I think you’ve got four different million dollar income earners that you’re going to hear from today. Plus a ton of regional vice presidents that make six figures and strong six figures. And the reason I’m sharing this as I kick off right now is because you’re going to hear from a bunch of different people that every single one of them started at position called the beginning. And what they did is they choose and chose how they wanted to build their business. And we have people that are part time and spare time for 30 years. I have guys that work with me in my base shop part time for 30 plus years. We have guys that come in here and they start building huge distribution centers. You look at the Costello’s right now, they’re building a huge distribution center.
Then we, then we’ve got guys like, then we’ve got guys that come in here and we have guys in our organization that have four or five licenses that are working part time or spare time and they make $2 million a year because they’ve built a big securities business. We’ve got people like the Narens that have produced RVP’s and have been paid tens of millions of dollars in this company which is crazy. Making 200 next month they’ll make almost 500,000 for the month. So there’s so many different ways. So the reason that we do a meeting like this there’s not one way that you need to build your business. There’s one way that you need to build your business. If you want to get to where you want to go. There’s a lot of different paths that you could take.
Like if I was going to go to California right now, I could walk, I could drive, I could take a skateboard, I could fly. Don’t use spirit, they’re out of business. You can fly commercial, I’ve got a plane. You can take a plane, a personal plane you could do. There’s so many different ways to get from point A to point B. And so this meeting is designed for you today and you’re going to hear, as you hear people speak, what I want you to do is you’re going to have commonality with some of them. And I do want to share how the business was created. Okay, how the business. Real quick as I introduce the first speaker. Wilma, you could put that slide up for us right now.
And the reason I’m doing it, some of you invited some people down, never even heard of Primerica. So I just want to kind of give you an example. Our company was founded in 1977. How it was found, it wasn’t founded to go take on the industry. It was founded because there was a guy by the name of Art Williams whose father died and had the wrong kind of life insurance. The problem is no one knows they had the wrong kind of life insurance. And he had a policy called cash value life insurance. And there’s a lot of different terms. Whole life, universal life, variable life, appreciable life, iul, go get a life. Where’s your wife? They got tons of different policies. Any type of life insurance that has an investment in it makes no sense financially for you.
It makes a hell of a lot of sense. And dollars for the person selling it, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for you. Thank you. Hold on. Thank you so much. All right. And I saw that in a club one night where you give out dollars. So it makes a lot of sense, right? And so when you think about. When you look at the system. When you look at the system, what Art Williams realizes his father died and he had a kid cash value policy. And I’m not going to get into cash value right now, but he had a cash value policy when he passed away. He had a small policy, like fifteen, twenty thousand dollar policy, and he had cash value policy which is 80% more expensive.
And what he realized after his father died is he was at a PTA meeting and his uncle was there and he says, art, what kind of life insurance you got? His uncle was an accountant. He goes, I got life insurance. I don’t know what kind of. It’s like saying what kind of auto insurance you have? The kind that covers your auto. And he goes, well, is it the kind your dad had? Because your dad had the wrong policy, you should have a term policy. He says, yeah, I got the same policy that my father’s. My father had. He goes, well, how’d that work out for your pet, for your mom? Not so good. And he started researching it and he said, go to the library. How many. Remember what libraries are. And books. Remember books.
So what he said was, go to the library and read this book called the games and scams of cash value life insurance by Arthur Peppin, which I read that book when we first started. Second book, he says, go get a policy by Arthur Milton called how your life insurance policies rob you. And he started researching. He got a madonn. He got pissed off and he said, wait a second. And he realized he could have had like 200,000 in life insurance for the same premium that he was spending for 15,000. And Art Williams got a mad on and he was a schoolteacher and a football coach and he said, I need to get licensed so I could show people how not to get screwed like this. And it started off from a pissed off little bald, chubby guy from Macon, Georgia.
And what happened was he started replacing policies. He’d say, what kind of life insurance do you have? Does it have a savings program? I’m coming by tonight. What kind of life insurance? He went around all the teachers, all the coaches, all the people that he knew in his warm market, and he started helping people and Every time he saved somebody money, he had more places to go than he had time to. What happened was he started recruiting people because he couldn’t handle the business that was coming in. He was making like 10 or 15,000 as a school teacher. And he started making 100,000 part time in the summer. So he quit his job and he started selling for Waddell and Reed and ITT Financial. And when he did that, he started making more money than the president of the company.
Because if you’re in sales, it’s unlimited income. I hear that all the time, but that’s bullshit. If you’re in sales, you have unlimited income in a limited period of time. If you’re selling cars, you’re not selling cars at 4 in the morning, right? The only thing you’re selling at four in the morning is weed. Okay? You’re not selling. You’re not selling cars, you’re not selling investments, you’re not selling houses at 2 in the morning. So you have unlimited income in a limited period of time. And what he realized was he started recruiting people and training people and he started building this little sales force. And every time he built a salesforce, they would cut his territory. Said, you can’t do business here. You can’t do business here. Because he kept growing so big. So he left and he said, this is bullshit.
I’m going to start my own company. And he realized, he said, man, I don’t want anybody putting their thumb on me. And he started a company with 85 people. And he said, what are we going to call, let’s name it after you. His name was Arthur Lynch Williams. We’ll call it Al Williams. And he started this little company called Al Williams at 85 people, which turned into hundreds of thousands of licensed reps. Took on the largest industry in the world. And since that, it got so big. But they needed financial backing. So when I started in 87, I worked part time with Al Williams and all my friends used to bust my child. How you doing with that insurance thing? Oh, you al Millions, right? All right. They’re sparky. Payback’s a bitch, right? So I said, okay.
And then all of a sudden, in 89, 90, we merged. Primerica Corporation was this Wall street company. Bought 50% of aoliums and changed the name from AOMS to A. Williams, a Primerica company. And then Primerica had a goal to go build Sandy Wall. As the CEO, said, man, I want to go build the largest financial services supermarket with home delivery. So what they did is they said, but nobody knows who we are, how are we going to create a brand? There was no Google. There was no, you know, Tiktoks, where people posting shit that they eat. It was just. There was none of that. There was no Internet. How do you create a brand? It takes years. So they said, let’s buy one. Number one brand at that time was McDonald’s.
That big yellow M number four, five in the world was the Travelers Insurance Company had the big red umbrella. Now, they weren’t doing good. They were fledging at the time. But they had a great brand name. Everybody knew them. So they bought this company called Travelers Insurance, and they changed the name from Travelers Insurance to Travelers Group. Then for a while, were Al Williams, part of Travers Group. We had red umbrellas. Like people, what do you do? And I go, I sell umbrellas, right? So we had red umbrella. And then all of a sudden, right, were part of Travelers Group. And then Travelers Group merged, really took over Citibank. They took Citibank and Travelers Group and they merged them together, which became Citigroup. Citigroup up until 2008 was the largest company in the world. Not by a little, by a lot.
There was no Google. There was no Facebook. There was no Elon Musk back then. There was, but nobody knew him. And what happened was were the largest company in the world. So it was Primerica Financial Services that was a division of Citigroup. Under Citigroup was Smith Barney. How many? Remember Smith Barney? Everybody with no hair or white hair. Everybody else. What the hell’s that? Is that a neighbor of yours? Smith Barney, Right, Smith Barney. So Smith Barney did. They were the upper income. And then we had Travelers Insurance. We did our auto and home through Travelers Insurance and homeowners. Then we had Primerica. Was the Wall street coming? We had Citibank, Citi Mortgage, and we kind of that little financial services supermarket. The reason they bought us, he said, is because of us, the distribution system.
You could have the greatest anything in the world, but if it can’t be distributed, it’s useless. So he said, this is where we’re going to take that concept. And what Primerica did is it created a system. We could take Wall street to Main Street. And we built this huge distribution. Well, 2008, Citigroup was the largest company in the world. Stock was at like $60 a share. Within two months. The world went upside down. In 2008, if you remember, Citigroup overnight became Shitty Group. And it went from 50, 60, $70 a share to under a dollar. Smith Barney lost Money City Mortgage lost money. Credit card companies, the credit cards lost money. Getting 18, 20%. Every company lost money except one company, Primerica Financial. That year we made 750, $750 million net profit after taxes. Why am I telling you this?
Because you’re going to speak to people. Who. I was speaking to someone yesterday. Go. I talked to someone and this lady said, oh, it’s a scam, folks. Before they purchase us and spend a billion with a b dollars for us. You think they checked us out? You think they looked under the hood, under the skirt? See, what happened is they did the research and what they realized was not only is our company good, our company’s phenomenal. And what they did is they said, man, we’re going to go out there and build this distribution company. So that year we said, we want out. It’s like owning an apartment building with 10 tenants and only one’s paying their rent. You don’t want that dude or dudes moving out. We were that person that was making a profit. Why? Because we do good when things are good.
We do gooder when things aren’t good. We’re recession proof. I bought my first house in Naples, Florida in oh two. I came down, everybody was in the mortgage business. Real estate was booming. Everybody was in then everyone was in a title business. Everyone was in real estate. And then everybody was a consultant, which means they’re out of work. And I’ve seen cycles in the last. I’m 61 years old. I’ve seen cycles go up and down and up and down. And what I realized was our business is recession proof. It’s frigging depression proof, it’s political proof, it’s warproof. We’re frigging Covid proof. I don’t know what the hell Covid was. We’re. We made $4.1 million in 2019. That’s what our 1099 was, part time. And all of a sudden, Covid hit in 2020, March, we shut every office down. 497 Regional Vice President offices.
We shut every office down. And we zoomed people. I never zoomed anybody, never wanted to thought about it, right? But never zoomed anyone. All of a sudden went 100% on the Internet. I was concerned what’s going to happen. Our income went from $4.1 million in 2019, shutting every office down to 100% over the Internet, my income went from 4.1 to over 5 million. Oh, no, don’t. Bread. I didn’t do shit. And what Happened was. And last year, close to 6 million. Last five years paid us almost 30 million bucks. Why? Because when the market’s up, we do. When the market’s down, we do better. We have no seasons. There’s no fads with a D. There’s no fads. There’s no, like, what’s in style. This week my wife says, oh, you know, Taupe is back.
We’re redoing an apartment, this Ritz Carlton unit we just bought. She goes, oh, Taupe is back. I thought it was gray and white. She goes, no, that’s out. There’s no fads. Everybody, every. How about this? Every human being we come in contact with needs what we do. Think about this for a second. Everybody needs to get out of debt. Everybody needs to save money. Everybody needs to retire in dignity versus poverty. Everybody needs to protect their assets. And so this company right here, when you look at since 1977, 5.7 million lifes insured, 2.9 million investment clients. When we January. So when we left, it took us two years. January, excuse me, April 1, 2010. We’re going to take the company public. We’re all excited. Some of us are in the city. I was on the floor when they rang the bell that day.
We’re all stayed at the Waldorf. Oh, it’s going to open at $10 a share, $12 a share. I was like, holy shit. We’re going to have our own company with a stock. All of a sudden, it opened at $17 a share, then it went to 20, then it went to 25, then it went to 30. Just boom. It kept boom. It closed at almost $300. This year, was one of the fastest growing stocks on Wall Street. And I got friends that I heard of that heard it’s no good right there. Spanky. You don’t think about what we’ve created as a company within a company. And you don’t have to get caught up in that. We have to realize is when I started at 22 years old, didn’t go to college. I was a plumber and I taught a karate school.
When I walked into somebody’s house. Next slide, please. Wilma. No. Okay, I’ll do it. Thank you. No problem. When you look at these companies right here, when I walked into somebody’s house, I didn’t walk in as, you know, some broke kid who was making 70 and spending 100. I walked in with the greatest financial minds at my back. I walked in with the resources. You know, I belong to a bunch of country clubs and I. And I’ve done well financially. And when, you know, you surround yourself with other people that are successful in it, and the more people I meet that are entrepreneurs, what they try to do is they try to do what we have. And I don’t mean in a financial service business. They try to make money. Then they go, I’m going to open a restaurant.
Oh, I’m going to open up a car wash. Oh, I’m going to buy some real estate. I’m going to buy a commercial building. I’m going to. And what they do is they try. And you know how many times my accountant or my tax attorney says, man, the thing about you, Otto, is you stay in your lane. I said, I got no other lane to go. And what I realized is because of these companies, we have MSI’s, multiple sources of income. We used to make $800,000 a year in overrides in mortgages. And when 2008 hit and Citi Mortgage shut down our mortgage in one day, 800,000. Shut off that spigot. Shut off. I have a buddy, had a mortgage business with three offices with 300 employees. Florida, New York and New Jersey. He’s making millions of dollars. You’re a good friend of mine.
One day, shut it down. He was out of business. So our mortgage income went to zero in one day. And my life insurance business went up 900,000 that year. Then all of a sudden, our life insurance business plateaued out and our investment business went up. It’s like a piston in the car. We got more. See, there’s people that you’re going to meet that sell life insurance. What do you do? I sell life insurance. What do you do? I sell life insurance. There’s people. What do you do? I sell annuities. What do you do? I sell managed accounts. What do you do? I sell auto insurance. What do you do? I sell mortgages. How about we do all of it? You and I could sit down. We have one. Thank you, both of you, thank you. We have one system with multiple sources of income.
And what you’re going to hear from today is people that came on board and used the system. They started at the same position where they were making a million bucks a year, where they were broke, ass broke. Where they were a college student, married, college educated, doesn’t matter. Everyone starts at the same position called the beginning. And what you found is some of these leaders you’re going to hear from. All of them have built a company within a company.
