Joe Jordan: The Emotivator

I sat down with Joe Jordan at the GAMA LAMP conference in Orlando — where he delivered a rousing general session speech to thousands of managers, despite having just gotten off a plane from London — to talk about his experience; the book that came out of it, "Living a Life of Significance"; and his message for insurance professionals today.

Life lessons

In 1952, just days after cashing in his $100,000 life policy, Jordan's father, a successful attorney, was killed in a car accident. Jordan was only 9 months old and the youngest of four children his housewife mother now had to support.

The family adapted to its new reality. Jordan's mom went to work full time as a secretary, and the Jordan kids got used to living without the luxury of new clothes or a family car. They took the train or bus to visit their wealthier relatives, who refused to visit the Jordans at their Bronx apartment. And his sisters held off on going to college, so the boys could go first.

Jordan and his siblings took the changes in stride at the time. It wasn't until later in life, around the age of 54, that he realized the impact of his dad's life insurance cash-in. "Do you know how much $100,000 was back in 1952? It was a lot of money," Jordan says. "Our lives would have been different."

Instead, at 13, Jordan got his first job working at his neighborhood dry cleaner. His paychecks went straight to his mother, who used them to pay Jordan's high school tuition. He eventually worked his way through college at Fordham University, where he played football and rugby. During his summer breaks, he landed a $7-an-hour job with the New York Iron Workers, building skyscrapers in Manhattan. Despite an intense fear of heights, Jordan spent every day working 700 feet above the ground and helped build 1095 Avenue of the Americas — the MetLife headquarters — where, today, he has an office on the 40^th floor.

In college, Jordan also volunteered with Catholic Big Brothers of America. While wrapping up his schooling in 1974, a New York Giant turned Home Life rep who served on the Big Brothers board suggested Jordan look into a career in insurance. "If a New York Giant says you should do something, you do it," Jordan says.

So Jordan joined Home Life and, despite being named the company's "Rookie of the Year" and making the MDRT by 1975, experienced the humiliation that often comes with a career in insurance sales. On his first sales call — to a family member, no less — Jordan was ridiculed, called a garbage peddler and had his documents thrown in his face. "I had plowed through linemen and defied gravity on a sliver of steel, but I did not expect the body blow my own family members delivered that day," Jordan writes in his book.

Despite his bruised self-esteem, Jordan stuck with insurance — mostly out of fear of failure. "It was the same thing that had me walking on those steel beams when I was terrified," he says.

A changing business

Jordan eventually took his insurance knowledge with him to Wall Street, where he worked as the resident insurance expert at a boutique investment firm — mostly because it was the '80s, and that was the thing to do. "I wanted to be on Wall Street — the pinstripe suit, the 'yeah, look at me,'" he says. "I wanted to be a cool dude."

In 1981, he took a risk and interviewed for the position of national sales manager for insurance products at Paine Webber. He got the job, and at the age of 30, found himself newly in charge of 4,300 brokers.

Jordan now had a front-row seat from which to witness the pitfalls of the '80s investment culture. Banking and insurance companies were merging, and life insurance morphed from a protection product into a fancy tax shelter. Insurance agents started calling themselves "financial advisors" and "investment representatives."

"People began to aggressively sell insurance as an investment product, and they really pushed the envelope," Jordan says. "The Wall Street folks understood investments, not liabilities, and a lot of these companies went bust."

In 1984, when insurance commissioners froze the assets of Baldwin United, a piano company/insurance conglomerate that had sold annuities at too-good-to-be-true rates, Jordan had to deal with the fallout — and realized he was getting sick of all the Wall Street chaos. "That was my first disenfranchisement with being cool," he says. "We really weren't selling insurance anymore."

So, in 1988, Jordan joined MetLife to help the company set up its annuity business. Jordan's main challenge was in getting insurance agents to start focusing on their clients' wider financial plans. Agents accustomed to collecting income — in the form of premium — from their clients now had to become comfortable with the asset gathering required when selling annuities and a broader spectrum of products. When the new model went into action, things went well. But Jordan felt like they could be doing even better — how, though, he wasn't yet sure.

Behavior's role

Around 1998, Jordan began asking himself two questions. First, if clients had all the information they needed about creating a solid financial plan, why were they slow to implement one? And second, why weren't agents doing all they could to help them? Jordan had a feeling both problems had to do with behavior.

Jordan started researching sales methods and the buying process. With the advent of the Information Age, agents had started bringing spreadsheets to their presentations, making their sales case with loads of cold hard facts. The emotional side of things, Jordan found, had fallen by the wayside.

"It was all by formula, all these spreadsheets," Jordan says. "And that's just not the way people behave. But no one was talking about it."