Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels trying to recruit, but nothing seems to stick? You’re not alone. Many reps struggle with building momentum and finding the right approach to attract new talent. But what if you could change that? What if you could learn from someone who’s been in the trenches and come out on top? That’s exactly what Joe Cardino shares in this powerful session. It’s packed with real stories, practical tips, and the kind of motivation that can transform your recruiting game. Joe’s journey from a hesitant start to a multimillion-dollar success is not just inspiring; it’s a blueprint for anyone serious about making it big in Primerica. Don’t miss this must-see moment where Joe reveals the secrets that helped him and can help you too. Watch the video below and get ready for a breakthrough that could change your business forever.
Video Transcription:
So I have a presentation, but I’m not going to do I just want to tell you a story, and I’m going to tell you a story.
There’s like a lesson in almost every sentence.
And by the way, you should have our tools.
Listen, if you’re a plumber, what are your tools? Wrench.
Pliers.
If you’re a carpenter, what are your tools? Hammered nails.
Right.
Electrician, maybe.
Screwdriver? Right.
In primary.
Your tools are a notebook and a pen.
I just see too many people without a notebook and a pen.
So see if you can figure out the lessons.
Each one of these lines here it goes.
I don’t have this written out.
This is from memory from 30 years ago.
In 1992.
JointA was in a restaurant in Tampa, Florida, and he notices a guy at the bar who looks like he’s an important person.
And he says to his wife, kim, do me a favor.
Ask that gentleman if I could buy him a drink.
The gentleman’s name was Jack Quinn.
I’ll tell you a little about him in a second.
Jack Quinn came over.
He says, Hi, how you doing? Joe went to, says, Hi, my name is Joe, and put his hand out.
What do you think Jack did? He said, Hi, I’m Jack.
He put his hand out.
Joe started asking questions he knew the answers to.
Where you from? I’m from New York.
Joe answer says, do you know anybody in New York? What do most New Yorkers say at that kind of question? I know everybody in New York.
He goes, I’m looking for some young people who might be interested in making over $100,000 a year.
Do you know anybody? He says, My son Jay just got out of college.
He says, great.
He goes, Give me his number.
Takes his number and they leave.
By the way, jack Quinn is a multimillionaire from Oyster Bay, Long Island.
He heard that Computer Associates was looking to build a building in Long Island.
He went and bought the property and built the building and then sold it to them on spec.
He does big multi million dollar, very successful.
So he gives him his son’s phone number.
So Joe Enza calls up his son and says, listen, I’d like to meet with you.
Your father said you might be a candidate for what I’m looking to do.
And he says, all right, what do you want to do? He goes, I’m doing a big event at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, this Saturday from nine to .
It was a leadership school.
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania is about 3 hours away from Oyster Bay.
So Jay tells his dad, he asked me to go to him, but I said I couldn’t make it.
Why? Well, our sister Debbie’s graduating from graduate school.
Her graduation’s on Saturday.
He says, Your sister sees you plenty.
She’s not going to miss you.
He goes, But dad, it’s 3 hours away.
He goes, I don’t care.
The man’s offering an opportunity.
You get in the car and you drive there.
And he drove to the meeting and he sat in the back and he watched the leadership school, not really understanding everything that was going on.
And he came back and he got excited about the business.
And it took a while, but Joe said, I’m going to start doing meetings in New York.
And Joe rents a hotel room, and Jay brings a few people.
One of the people Jay brings is a guy named Rob Antonucci.
Rob was a fraternity brother of mine and a client of mine.
I was an attorney at the time.
I did some work for Jack Quinn.
I did some work.
I knew them all.
And Rob invited me.
He said, I’d like you to take a look at a business I’m taking a look at.
Can you meet me at the Uniondale Married Hotel? And you know what I said, sure.
I didn’t say, what is it? What’s it about? How long is it going to be? This is a guy rob, at that point was a million.
He made a lot of money at that time, too.
We’d done things before.
I didn’t know what it was going to be.
So I just showed up there and he sat me in the front row of the opportunity meeting.
Little things sat me in the front row of the opportunity meeting.
The meeting goes on.
I’m listening to it, and I’m feeling like crap.
I got the wrong kind of investments, the wrong kind of debt, the wrong kind of life insurance.
I felt like I had two donkey ears sticking out the top of my head.
I was, like, staring down at the ground, hoping nobody would notice.
I looked at the other people in the front row.
They were staring down at the ground too.
We didn’t know what we didn’t know.
So Joe answered the end, says, Listen, if you’re interested in working with us, all you got to do is go raise your right hand and say, I’m in.
And I said, I’m in.
And he said, what do we got to do? He goes, Just come back next week and bring some people.
So that point, I said, all right, I think I’ll bring some people back.
And I was getting ready to leave and goes, no, you got to meet Mr.
Enzer.
And I was like, intimidated by the guy.
He was like a presence.
And I go, no, it’s okay.
I’ll be back next.
No, no, you gotta be and he brought me up there, and Joe wentz goes, oh, I heard all about you, Joe.
You’re the attorney.
You went to school with Rob, right? You ran for Congress.
Yeah.
He says, you know, everybody here.
And he started really stroking my ego a little bit.
And he said, man, a guy like you could break the company record.
I go.
What company? Record.
He goes, with guests back the very first week.
So he started challenging me.
He said I said, what’s the record? He goes, 32 people back the first week.
You ready to take that challenge? And he shook my hand in front of some people and dared me, and I said, okay.
I said, what the hell did I just do? And I went home that week, I invited 50 people to the meeting, and I came back the next week a little bit early, kind of cocky.
And he says, you got anybody coming? I got 50 people coming.
Remember used to think that if they invited them, they’d all show? Well, 29 showed.
I was a little depressed.
You think Joe was depressed? Joe grabbed me.
Let’s go have a drink.
This is incredible.
You’re going to be unbelievable.
This is going to be tremendous.
I go, Joe, really, honestly, don’t BS me.
How much can I make next year if I do this thing? He goes, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you can make 600 grand next year.
What would it be like making 50,000 a month? And meanwhile, 99.99% of me said, this guy’s so full of shit.
There was this little one voice on my shoulder go, but what if he isn’t? What if he isn’t? And listen, he said, if you keep doing what you’re doing if I kept bringing 29 guests every week, I probably would have made 600 grand the next year.
It doesn’t take any genius, nothing like this at all.
So Joe answer didn’t let us do any business.
Well, I hired 18 of those people out of that meeting, because all they had to do was this.
They were in.
We had to go to license school.
We went to Pose Institute.
It was Monday through Friday.
Nine to five.
Had to take a week off.
I went to class with 18 people in me was the whole class.
Everyone passed.
Joe, we’re licensed.
He goes, yeah, we’re not going to sell anything.
We’re just going to focus on recruiting for the next four or five months.
I’m like, Joe, I got everybody licensed right here.
I got my life insurance.
I had six whole life policies.
I was paying $625 a month.
I go, Joe, I got to switch these.
He goes, Listen, I ain’t come here to sell life insurance.
And he just focused on recruiting and recruiting, and it was just Wednesday night out meeting.
Wednesday night meeting.
One day.
He goes, we have training on Saturday.
I go, did we do something wrong Saturday? I don’t work on Saturday.
It was so weird to me.
And Mike Purnell was the speaker, and he told this story where we got his first promotion to senior rep.
He was so proud.
He brought home showed his father, and his father thought it was a scam.
He took the plaque, and he threw it against the wall, and it broke.
And Mike still has that plaque in his office.
Broken.
He keeps that to remind him of that.
I remember that story.
And then a week later, he brought Vance stay out, and we’re going to do art meetings, and we’re going to do a training at the same time, which was all I knew, was five months of just art meeting.
Have to opt.
That’s why sometimes we have a new person.
I go, they don’t have to see the op they’re already in.
They need to see it.
That explains our business over and over again.
So Vance, day after the meeting, they start filling out Ibas.
Now, I have 18 people.
I hired a few people since then, went to licensing school, did everything, and one of my people saw advanced stage people filling out, and they go, what’s that? Well, that’s how you get into the company.
And they came over to me, oh, my God, we’re not even in the company.
We’re not even a company.
With the school and everything.
We’re not even a company.
I go, Relax.
Don’t listen.
Just calm down.
Relax.
I’m going to go talk to Joe.
Joe, we’re not even in the company.
How can this happen? We went to licensing everything like that.
He goes, you want to fill out Ibas? You want to do that? I said yeah.
He goes, all right, give me a stack of them.
And we hired, like, 27 people that night.
They already were in.
They already went to licensing class already.
So we did all that stuff here that night, and I kept bringing my stuff every day.
I said, Joe, I have to change my policies, because I was going to get twice as much coverage for $500 a month, less.
This is month after month.
I’m like, Joe.
He goes, Well, Rob brought you in, and Rob’s not licensed.
I go, but I’m licensed.
He goes, yeah, but he brought you, and he’s got to write your policy.
Me.
I said all right.
I called up Rob.
I said, Rob, come on, let’s get together so we can help you study.
So I helped my upline study so he could pass his test.
And then he said, But Jay’s not licensed.
And then the next week, I helped Jay study pass the test.
So he finally got licensed.
And Joe I said, Joe, can we please do this? I carried to every meeting.
Can we please replace these policies? He goes, all right, I’ll tell you what.
Does your wife know how to cook? I go he goes, do you think she make raviolis and meatballs next Thursday if I come by? I said, yeah, Joe.
My wife did not like Joanza because she’d tell me, Pick up my socks.
He’d say, meet me in Connecticut.
I’d show up in five minutes for no.
So she goes, there’s a limousine outside our house, and let’s see what time it is.
Let’s make sure there’s a limousine outside our house.
I go that’s Joenzer.
What that’s how he rolls.
And he came in with Jay Quinn and Rob Antonucci and his driver Krusty the Clown.
Some of you guys remember him, don’t you? Don’t want to leave your kids in the same room with this guy.
But that was his driver.
So he sits down and I go, all right, Joe, come on.
We’ll sit in the dining room.
Take care of yourself first.
No, we’ll eat first.
So he must ate 27 meatballs.
He was a great recruiter, better eater, and he ate a whole bunch of stuff.
And then we go into the other room, and I’m so excited.
I’m finally going to get this done and see it work.
And he’s there with Jay and Rob, and he opens up this presentation book.
I’d never seen like, we never saw anything.
There was no pol, there was nothing to see.
It was like a flip trip.
And he opened it up and he goes, this circle represents your income.
And I’m going, wow, like upside down.
He’s reading upside down because you normally do that.
He’s not even reading.
And he goes through the whole I go, Joe, I’m ready.
He goes, no, I want you.
He goes through the whole thing.
And I’m like, I just read to sign the papers.
I got my checkbook there.
I’m ready to do.
So he goes through the whole presentation.
He closed it up.
He goes, So, Mr.
And Mrs.
Cardino, if I come back next time and I bring back a plan that beats yours in every way, you be the sole judge.
Is there any reason we couldn’t do business? I go, Joe, there’s no reason right now.
I’m ready right now.
There’s no need that we got to do.
He goes, thank you very much for dinner, Mr.
And Mrs.
Cardino was very nice.
Come on, Krusty.
Jay and Rob.
Let’s go.
And they got in the limousine and they pulled away.
And my wife goes, what happened? I go, I don’t know.
She goes, I thought were doing life insurance tonight.
I said, I thought I was too.
And about five minutes later, front doorbell rings.
I open up.
It’s Joe.
Enser.
He goes, mr.
And Mrs.
Cardino, do you remember the last time I was here? I said, if I came back with a plan that beat yours in every way, I said, yes, Joe, come on in.
So he sat down and he said, I didn’t come here to write life insurance.
He slid the thing over to Rob and Jay and had them sign off on the policy.
And I wrote the whole thing, which was great, and I was happy, and he left, and I got my plan in place.
And the next morning at A.m., I got a phone call from Roy Lipson.
Hey, Joe, this is Roy.
I just got off the phone with Joe Enser.
He says, you’re field trained and now you have to do my field training.
And I was taught, never show doubt, never show fear, never show hurt.
I’m like, all right.
What do you got? He goes, I have this guy, Bob Perez.
He’s a vice president of NBC television.
He lives in a mansion in Scarsdale.
It’s all set up for tonight at .
I’m like, I’ll be there like, what the hell? Oh, Joe left that footshot thing.
Whatever.
So I took a look at that.
I got a look at it, and Roy was my guy, because a lot of the people I hired got licensed.
They started drifting away.
There was no office.
Nobody was making money.
Nobody was getting paid.
It was, like, so difficult to get people in.
But Roy just hired him.
He was pumped up and excited.
He had a bunch of people on his team.
So I meet him in front of the guy’s house, and we get out of his car.
He gets out of his car.
He’s got a shopping bag.
Like, a big shopping bag.
I go, what’s that? He goes, Tape recorders for my team.
I go, Roy, I don’t can you bring that in there? It’s a goes, no.
He’s a friend.
I’ll talk to him.
He goes, hey, do you mind? We go, Hi, Mr.
Perez.
How you doing? He goes, this is my friend Joe.
Nice to meet you.
How’s everything? And Roy goes, do you mind if cord this for training for my team? And the guy goes, not at all.
And he took 25 walkmans, and he put them on the table.
25 of them all on the table.
He put them up there.
And I’m, like, nervous.
I’m ready to take a crap.
I’m nervous.
I can’t believe I got to do this.
I’m sweating.
It’s my first time.
And so I go, all right.
I open the thing, go the name of our company’s primary.
Wait, hold on.
He’s got to turn them on.
Click, click.
I’m sitting here.
Click, click.
And I open up the thing, and I go, this circle represents your income.
And I can see Roy looking at me like, wow, he can read upside down.
I probably did the worst presentation ever in the history of Primerica, but I didn’t let the guy know I did the worst presentation.
He didn’t know what he didn’t know.
So I go through the whole thing at the end, he goes, I’ll take it.
I go, you take it? He goes, yeah.
A million dollar coverage.
I go, Great.
Got the policy.
Now I don’t have to fill out a policy.
I just saw one get filled out the night before.
I just signed it.
I go, Here you go, Roy.
I signed it right over to Roy.
Roy fills out the policy, and when we’re done, we shake hands, everything.
He goes like this.
The shopping bag just goes like this.
And he knocks all the walkmans into the shopping bag, and we leave.
He goes, oh, my god, where’d you learn how to do it? That was so unbelievable.
I go, yeah, I’ve been working on it for a know I’ve been doing my studying, practicing, trying to do that.
And what happened was, John says, okay, guys, we can now write life insurance.
And I was like a district leader at the time, based upon the people we had written that we had hired.
And we did 30,000 in premium that month.
I wrote 15,000 personal because I was a great writer of business.
No, that’s not why.
Because Joe Winter said, whoever hires you gets to write your business.
So were at a training the next week, and he was telling a story about the Roy lipstick, and everyone was waiting to get their life insurance, and they said, hi.
Joe says, you can do life insurance now.
I go, I didn’t come here to sell life insurance.
I came here to build a business.
Like an idiot, I said, that right, because that’s what Joe said to me.
And Joe over here, he goes, all right, listen, everyone sit down, grab a table.
The hotel.
He goes, here’s the applications.
He goes on the top where it says name, write your name, write your address, write how much coverage you want.
And this is how I write one.
I go, let me sign this one.
Let me sign this one.
Let me sign this one.
The reason I’m telling you this is if you hire a lot of people, the rest of the business truly becomes easy.
It really does become easy.
And my life been totally changed, and there’s been a lot of ups and downs over the years, but, boy, it’s been some ride.
It’s been fun.
It’s been challenging.
There’s been times I wanted to quit a million times.
There’s times I wanted to stick pins in my eyes.
There’s times I want to stick pens in other people’s eyes.
But overall, it’s been an awesome experience.
I got to create great friends.
These people like family to me, the RVPs and the people in our base shop and all of you.
I mean, this is something special that most people don’t get.
So the thing that I got out when I first took a look at that first opportunity meeting, I never wanted to go and just become a writer of business, okay, see how much time I got here.
I got five minutes.
I wanted just to build a team.
Jones has said every RVP is worth 40,000 a year.
Today it’s worth 50,000 a year.
I said, how do you get an RVP to go first? You got to go to RVP first.
I never want to be the number one district, division, or regional lead.
What do I got to do to get to the next step to get the vice president so I can start promoting regional vice presidents out.
So I had a presentation here, but I’m going to go just to the last slide of it.
If you guys look, read fast, you can get it really good.
This is great stuff I put together.
It’s really incredible.
And this is unbelievable.
It’s really good.
But this is what I want to do.
This is jointo’s compensation system.
And it changed since he taught me this 30 years ago.
It changed because it got easier.
And he talked about making a million dollars a month.
And there was nobody in the company making 4 million a month back then.
Now we have a bunch of people doing that.
The Naranjos are probably going to hit a million a month in the next ten years.
It’s crazy what they got going on right now.
Let’s take a look at this.
He said, if you want to make a million dollars a month now, it might be hard to fathom, but if you want to make a million dollars a month, you have to get eight people making a million dollars a year.
Now, I used to be twelve, but the compensation has got so much better, you need eight people.
Eight people making a million.
That might be hard to fathom that, but let me tell you who makes a million a year.
Chris Haychung makes a million a year.
Tony Shell and Rain make a million a year.
Glenn and ZMR Lee make a million a year.
Our guest speaker, I would not be surprised in the next five or six years be making a million dollars a year right here.
Fritz Squire.
Right here, Squire.
You get eight people making a million dollars a year and you’re making a million a month.
But how do you make a million a year? How do you make a million a year? Watch this.
It’s not complicated.
You get eight people making 100 grand a year.
It’s funny.
I did this presentation at Keith Oto school a few years back and John Lavin was the guest speaker.
I don’t know if you guys remember.
John Lavin was the speaker.
And afterward, John goes, yo.
Can I get that? I go, what do you mean? He goes, I want that presentation.
I go, Why? He goes, Because I’m trying to get over a million and I have seven people make over 100 grand a year.
And I just want to focus on that.
If I get the last one, that’s all I got to do.
Now, this is me talking to John Lavin, who taught me all the cocktail napkin presentation I’ve ever learned in my life came from John Lavin.
So I go, okay.
And he called me a month later.
He goes, you’re not going to believe it.
The same day my 8th guy went over 100,000 the same day I got my million.
So that worked.
It works, right? So how do you make 100 grand a year? Now watch.
There’s a bunch of people here make 100 grand a year right now, okay? You see them with the Super Bowl ring I was going through customs in Italy a few years ago, and the guy goes, what’s, in a ring? I go, Super Bowl, 1986.
He goes, oh, American football.
Luigi joe Montana, American football.
Now my wife is like 50ft away from me with the luggage I wear, late to get somewhere, and they’re all wanting to take pictures with me.
And I’m trying to explain to them I was just kidding, but I can’t get across in Italian to them, and they just want to take so I went with them, like, hey, opposing all right, but hey, people making 100 grand a year, it’s just three people making 3000 a month.
Listen to me.
If you want to make 100,000 a year in Primerica, you need to get three people who make 3000 a month.
So how do you make 3000 a month? This is doable here.
Watch it’s.
A division leader doing five X 5000.
You get three division leaders doing five X 5000.
You’re making 100 grand a year.
You make it six, you’re up to 200,000 a year.
You promote an RVP out, add another 100,000 to that.
That’s how this business grows.
If you can stick around long enough to give this thing a shot, great things will happen to you.
Listen, look, believe in yourself.
You can do more than you think you can do.
You can read upside down.
You could take notes.
You could push buttons on the thing.
Joe Enter asked a guy, he said, I’m going to buy you a drink.
His prospecting periscope was up at all times.
He spent money when he offered to buy the guy a drink, some of you guys won’t buy you guys a glass of water.
He spent money on his business.
He closed the guy.
Think about Jay Quinn, successful, tells his son, you don’t have to come to your sister’s graduation.
That’s way more important than that, because he understand.
Opportunities come by.
Sometimes we have people like, oh, I was going to come to the leadership school, but I have a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday and I just need to start getting ready.
We have people came pretty far here.
If you came from Virginia, stand up.
All right, cool.
Very good.
If you came from Maryland, stand up.
You guys can sit down right over here.
Who came? Anyone come farther than Maryland? Florida.
Stand up over here.
North Carolina.
Christy Betts.
What do we got? Stand up.
Where you from? South Carolina.
That’s south.
You’re north.
She beats his father.
How many people came from New Jersey? Anybody come from New Jersey? Hey a.
How about Connecticut? Anybody come from Connecticut? All right, massachusetts.
Anybody come from Queens? Anybody here from New York? New York in the house? All right, listen.
