Coach Pete for the Win — with Pete D’Arruda

One of Pete D’Arruda’s fondest childhood memories is of when his family would pile into the station wagon and take vacation trips to a national park. While spending hours driving to and from their destination, the family would be entertained by listening to the radio — and one particular radio personality sparked something in D’Arruda.

Bruce Williams had a nationally syndicated advice program that ran for nearly three decades. He was known for offering practical, sometimes blunt advice on listener problems, earning the nickname “America’s Answer Man.”

D’Arruda was inspired by Williams to take to the airwaves after launching his insurance and financial services career. D’Arruda is president and founding principal of Capital Financial, with offices in North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. 

But he is best known as “Coach Pete” and “America’s Wealth Coach,” dispensing advice about annuities, life insurance, tax planning and retirement issues in the 20 books he has authored, the most recent one being “Tax $avvy Retirement.” His multimillion-dollar production and broadcasting company, Broadcasting Experts, produces more than 80 weekly radio shows and long-form video and audio podcasts heard and seen nationwide.  His national show, “The Financial Safari,” can be heard at FinancialSafari.com. He has won three Emmy Awards.

He founded Capital Financial to help his clients “cross the street of life.“ His goal is to help clients take the worry out of living in retirement.

But although D’Arruda seems to be everywhere in the world of financial communication, his 32 years in the industry had a modest beginning. 

D’Arruda told InsuranceNewsNet that he became a mortgage broker when he was newly graduated from the University of North Carolina. He soon realized that he wasn’t helping people the way he wanted to in that career. He thought about his former girlfriend’s father, who sold 403(b) annuities to teachers, and he began to do the same. 

“My mom was a teacher and my dad was a college professor,” he said. “I knew that each school had a room with little cubbyhole mailboxes for each teacher. So I designed a postage-paid card for the principal to put in each box, saying, ‘You’re entitled to your tax shelter benefits, and your enrollment agent will be here in the next two weeks. Send this back.’”

A new way to get out there

As his teacher clients eventually retired, D’Arruda pivoted to retirement planning, doing dinner seminars as a way of prospecting. But he eventually became dissatisfied with the turnout and response to those dinners, so it was time to try a new way to get his name in front of the public.

He walked into each of the radio stations in Raleigh, N.C., and asked the staff whether they would sell him broadcast time to do a show about retirement planning. “And they all laughed me out of there,” he said. “They had never thought about selling radio time for someone to do that.”

D’Arruda made his way to a smaller radio station in Aberdeen, N.C., where the station manager offered him a time slot and recorded the show for him. The show began to pick up steam, and eventually the radio staff in Raleigh who had laughed at him were asking him to be part of their programming lineup.

“So now I have seven hours every weekend on the biggest Raleigh station, doing a live call-in show,” he said. He began calling his show “Money Matters with Coach Pete,” but now calls the show “The Financial Safari.”

His popularity caught the attention of other advisors, who asked him to help them get started with on-air shows of their own. D’Arruda found himself branching out from advising clients about life insurance and retirement to producing radio programming for other financial professionals.

“We have about 80 advisors that we do weekly shows for,” he said. “We also do TV shows and podcasts for advisors, and we do them for ourselves as well. I’m on the local TV news every week. They have a segment on planning, but also whenever anything happens in the economy, they call on me to do some commentary, so it has been a big credibility builder.”

What listeners want to know

Questions from listeners run the gamut from how to pay off a mortgage early to what to do with the money in their 401(k) accounts. D’Arruda said some of the hot topics from his audience include concerns about market risk, how to generate lifetime income in retirement and whether to invest in cryptocurrency. He also has interviewed a number of personalities, including Barbara Corcoran of TV’s “Shark Tank” and former NBA coach Dick Vitale.

The need for information on what to do with money accumulating in retirement accounts led D’Arruda to devise what he calls the “financial fill-up strategy.” When he discusses it on his radio show, the conversation is accompanied by the “ding-ding” sound that used to be heard when a car drove up to a full-service gas station pump in years past. He even has an antique gas pump in his office. It’s all part of his branding efforts.

“We all want something. I call it ‘gratisfaction,’” he said. “We want immediate return. Especially insurance and financial professionals, we want immediate return for what we spend. But you have to take a longer-term approach and build so you become known as somebody people can trust.”

Don’t be too ‘salesy’

Advisors who want to use media to build their own brand have a few steps they need to follow to be successful, D’Arruda said.

“You have to figure out what you’re going to say, and you need to say it the right way,” he said. “You must make sure you have calls to action. You must make sure you don’t come across too ‘salesy’ — you don’t want to come across as someone from a late-night infomercial. You want to be educational, and you want to give people ways to contact you.”

D’Arruda also has developed the Financial Speakeasy, a website that will offer 24/7 multimedia content on everything from mortgages to real estate to a show called “Bucketing on a Budget” that describes ways people can check off experiences on their bucket list without breaking the bank. D’Arruda has lined up a number of experts to present the programming, which will be produced in his studio that includes seating for a live audience of up to 20 people. The site is scheduled to go live later this year.

Airport billboard advertising is another avenue D’Arruda has used to get his name in front of people. He has airport billboards in his home community of Raleigh and also has billboards in the departure terminal at the airport in Aruba. Being in the departure terminal costs him far less than in other parts of the airport, where hotels and tour operators pay a premium for advertising to tourists. 

“But if I have some people from Raleigh who are in Aruba and they see my advertising, it’s another way to build recognition and credibility. Do I expect immediate return? No, and if you expect immediate return in this business, you’ll be sadly disappointed,” he said.

Protecting against market risk

In his years of advising, D’Arruda said he sees consumers making several bad financial decisions, and the most common bad decision revolves around market risk.

“People are way too impulsive. Everyone thinks they can take on a lot of risk until they experience the downside of risk. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I can take that risk,’ but when you look at it in real dollars, can they really take that risk? 

“Let’s say someone is two years away from retirement and they have $1 million saved. But maybe it’s exposed to risk, so you ask, what’s their goal in keeping that money at risk? And sometimes they say they want to make another 20% on it. All right, so 20% of the $1 million is another $200,000, and now they have $1.2 million when they reach retirement. Is that really going to change their lifestyle, going from $1 million to $1.2 million? Not really. But when they realize if they lost 20% and now they have $800,000 instead of $1 million, their whole attitude changes.”

The financial fill-up strategy

That’s where D’Arruda’s financial fill-up strategy comes in. 

It’s a guaranteed lifetime retirement income plan where clients receive another “fill-up,” another payment, every month for life.

“The people who have this fill-up are the happiest people in the world because they don’t care what the market’s doing anymore,” he said. “They keep some money in the market, but even if they lost that money, they still have their lifetime income plans together. And I can sleep a lot easier at night knowing I’m not putting people right in front of a train coming toward them.”

D’Arruda calls himself “a multitasker extraordinaire” and said he wants to inject some fun into a business that deals with serious topics.

“I like to have fun doing what I’m doing. And if you’re not having fun, you’re in the wrong business. Life’s too short to not have fun. We only have a certain number of minutes here on Earth, so we need to make sure we’re having fun.”

Susan Rupe is editor in chief, magazine, for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].