THE FELLOWSHIP

Simple. Once you sign up, you will get an invitation to log in to an online Web Portal where all The Fellowship material lives. You will also receive one email a day for 23 days, with links to videos and essays in your Web Portal. You’ll interact with the content via email, video, written content, and downloads.

Because this isn’t a course. It’s the Anti-Course. It’s a credo, an initiation, a mindset forge, a philosophy. I’m not here to teach you tactics. I’m here to dig deeper than that, all the way to the bottom, to get to That Thing that allows those outside tactics to actually be effective in the first place.

Actually, that’s how it started out. At first, it was just a book. But countless advisors pleaded with me to make it something more than a book. Books are ubiquitous. We all have books. What advisors, just like you, told me they wanted was something bigger, something deeper, something that left them nowhere to hide. This isn’t just a book for the same reason that Christianity isn’t just the Ten Commandments and Buddhism isn’t just the Four Noble Truths. The 21 Declarations are just the start… the hard part comes next.

The short answer is… YES! As one alum from Session #8 said, “I’ve read Carl’s books, but this was still very useful.”

If you are new to the financial services industry, The Fellowship is especially right for you. Consider a ladder analogy. You may have already climbed one or two rungs. Wouldn’t you rather hop down and lean it against the right wall now instead of waiting until you’re five steps higher?

If you've been around the block a few times, this is for you, too. I’ve had grizzled, old veterans come up to me in tears saying, “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that my whole life.”

The Fellowship is 21 Declarations of Real Financial Professionals. So whether you actually give advice for a living or work with, supervise, or train people who do, The Fellowship will be helpful.

There are alumni of The Fellowship who are mutual fund managers. The material helps them understand how they can help the advisors they serve to deliver better value to their clients, be more confident in the work they're doing, and reignite the fire in the belly again.

There are alumni of The Fellowship who are L&D folks at various firms. They use The Fellowship to help generate topics of discussion with the people they're training.

There are even firms that have taken groups through The Fellowship. If you have a study group every month, it can be challenging to come up with a topic. You can plug The Fellowship into a group discussion and review a Declaration each month to help provide a core curriculum on what it means to be a "human" and a Real Financial Professional.

The Fellowship costs $500. It’s a one-time fee. It’s not a deposit and not a membership. And no, there is no money-back guarantee. Why? Because The Fellowship is a community for the committed, and money-back guarantees are hiding places. If we give you your money back, it takes the burden of doing the hard work off of you. We want you to hold yourself accountable. The whole point is to change the industry, and the world, by first changing ourselves.

If The Fellowship was an expense, we never would have created it. The Fellowship is a long-term investment in your future as a financial professional. That’s the whole point of it. But don’t take it from me, take it from The Fellowship alum, Jeremy Walter. “I went through The Fellowship, and I’ve described it to others as the single best professional investment that I’ve ever made into my career…”

That really depends on you. Each day for 23 days, you’ll get an email reminder telling you to see that day’s lesson. The lessons are intentionally short, so you don’t spend all of your time reading. This is not so much a textbook as a collection of parables. The point is for you to think about each day’s lesson, reflect on it, and then implement it into the way you do business. That said, all the material is available the day you sign up. So in case you can’t make it 23 days in a row, you won’t miss anything.

As long as the internet exists! Seriously, once you sign up for The Fellowship, all the videos and essays are there for you in perpetuity. That means you can go through the content as many times as you want. We intend for it to be a touchstone for you whenever you need it, so when crazy things like pandemics happen and offices close, there’s always somewhere for you to come back to. 

Yes… and no. Yes, there is a group of us out there… inside The Society of Advice. No, The Fellowship itself is not a group experience insofar as everyone can go through the material at their own pace. Think of it this way: Whether you’re an independent RIA or work in a major firm in Germany or a bank in Australia, these principles will apply to you.

You are free to share the knowledge and insights you gain from The Fellowship with others at your firm. However, if you're finding that people are passing around a shared login, then it's time to purchase another seat.

So here's the deal:

Sharing knowledge = Great!

Sharing logins = Not so great.