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Pyles has built his highly successful practice at Cambridge Financial by specializing in working with small businesses and their owners on business succession planning strategies, developing employee benefit packages and personal planning. "His ability to provide comprehensive financial advice to these clients through his extensive knowledge base and sound ethical principles makes Eric one of Penn Mutual and HTK's most successful advisors," Stevens says.

Pyles says he knew when he first started that he wanted to work with business owners for a couple of reasons. First, they thought like he did, as he has always thought of himself like a CEO of his own company and ran his practice that way.

"One of the biggest mistakes I have seen from many new advisors that have failed in this business is they came in with an employee attitude and not with an employer attitude," Pyles says, noting that with an employer attitude you had to be willing to spend money in the beginning years of your practice just as you would starting up any other type of company. "Those agents that were not willing to do this never made it."

The second reason he wanted to target small business owners is because he needed to stop working evenings so he could be home with his family. Pyles had one child and another on the way when he started this business, and now he and his wife Kim have six children. "I knew working with business owners they would want to meet with me during the day," he says.

To accomplish this, Pyles started by researching companies within 20 miles of his home that met different criteria he was looking for, including owners he thought he could relate with and had the demographics he was looking for. "I came up with a couple hundred of these. I put 120 of them on a spreadsheet and committed to visiting 40 of them each month, so I would stop in each company at least once a quarter," Pyles says. "Of course I had many rejections, but unless they told me not to come back I kept on going every three months. If they told me not to come back or if I knew there was no chance of doing business with them I would take them off the list and replace it with another company on my original master list."

He still needed an idea to get the owners to want to see him, so he began doing a monthly golf outing – pretty easy to do in Arizona. "I would come in with an invite to this as I visited each company. I would pay for their golf and breakfast, and during the breakfast I would speak for 20 to 30 minutes or I would have another professional, such as a CPA, attorney or real estate agent, speak."

This idea did not become an overnight success, but within about six months Pyles says he started seeing some great results. Another key to building the practice? Partnering with those other professionals.

"The best thing we have ever done with our practice is to align ourselves with CPAs and other professionals, and this is now where we get the majority of our new clients," Pyles says. But it wasn't easy.

"My partner and I would go lease space for months and even years from a CPA. We have done this with several CPAs until we found a few that we really worked well with and believed in what we did, too," Pyles says. "We have even bought office buildings together now with some of these CPAs and house together or put other agents in some of the CPAs offices. This long-term approach really has paid off and has allowed the CPAs to get to know me and to know of my ethics and high morals that I have, and thus have the confidence to refer any client to me."

Natural migration to employee benefits

Moving into employee benefits was only natural for Pyles after developing a client roster full of small business owners. He now does employee benefit plans for a majority of his clients.

"I have since hired a staff to focus just on that," Pyles said. "My partner and I have also started a totally independent property and casualty company with access to over 30 companies, and have staff in place to do this. So this allows us to also offer our owners their business insurance, workers comp, etc., from us."

He says employers today are really looking for plans that can help reduce their taxes. "As our current government believes in taking from those that work hard and are successful to support others, the business owners I have been working with are feeling this pinch and are very interested in strategies to reduce that burden," Pyles added.

Meeting with clients

Pyles goes into every meeting trying his best to get to know the person and their business. He doesn't have a formal process, and while he has a short questionnaire, he usually doesn't follow it. "I just try to talk to them and get to know them, and through the process I understand their concerns and things that I can assist them with.

"Before I have even talked about what I do, I have walked and toured their plants. As I show an interest in what they do, it will gradually come out what their concerns are and then I know how I can come in and help them, be it with business succession, tax savings, awarding key employees, etc."

It's safe to say it's working for Eric Pyles.