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"It has absolutely revolutionized my business practice, and it's touched every aspect of my life," says the 41-year-old native Minnesotan. "It's made me a better dad, a better husband, a better friend, a better churchgoer, a better golfer, a better everything."
Wait a minute, Dean -- a better golfer?
"I say that because one of the tenets of the LEAP System is that we want to achieve maximum for our clients and ourselves," he says. "But when you say 'maximum,' can you put that in terms of a dollar amount, or a number? Not really. What's 'maximum'? It's as good as we can do. Usually a number is an inferior gauge of maximum.
"I want every experience I'm involved in to be the best it can be."
LEAP stands for Lifetime Economic Acceleration Process, and the company that markets it, LEAP Systems, Inc. of Bridgewater, N.J., defines it as (quoting the firm's Web site) "An individual process by which you employ proven financial strategies that help you to better realize your dreams and desires." The heart of the system, created by Robert Castiglione in 1980, is the "Protection, Savings, & Growth" model. It's a three-dimensional matrix that organizes a client's entire financial life, "with the purpose of achieving financial efficiency and effectiveness toward financial independence." Dean is one of about 5,000 licensed LEAP practitioners across the country and one of 58 LEAP users affiliated with OneAmerica Financial Partners, Inc., the Indianapolis-based parent company of American United Life and State Life, and other subsidiaries.
Dean has used LEAP for the past six years and has qualified for OneAmerica's Chairman's Council (top 12 producers nationwide) every year. He is quick to note that more than half of OneAmerica's top 20 producers are LEAP users, who characteristically write significant amounts of whole life. "A lot of people who don't understand LEAP say it's just a system to sell life insurance," Dean says. "That couldn't be further from the truth. When my clients purchase life insurance or other financial products, they understand the role those products play with the other financial decisions they are making.
"The system is unique because it's built on economic principles, not around selling products.
"LEAP simply allows me to help my clients know that today, we will be as efficient as possible with the money we have, and build wealth efficiently with strategies that allow us to enjoy our wealth. With LEAP, we can fully integrate, coordinate, and verify all money decisions together, rather than piecemeal and compartmentalized."
In describing his wholehearted belief in the process, Dean's eyes light up with an evangelical zeal stoked by the rugged determination he inherited -- along with his blond hair -- from Viking ancestors. "When I have a strong conviction and belief in something, knowing it's built on truth," he says, "I can't not bring it up in conversation with people."
Sticking to the Profile
Process requires structure, and few agents have as much structure in their practices as Dean does. It starts with his two precisely defined target markets: first, married couples, ages 35 to 45 -- basically five years on either side of his own age -- with children, a home mortgage, and annual income between $80,000 and $400,000; and second, individuals age 55 to 60. He rarely works with any prospect outside those two profiles. (The older age bracket, he says, is "just a little niche that's opened up for me.")
Dean lives and works in the same rural community he was born into, the town of Mountain Lake, Minn., population 2,000, a two-hour drive southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. The surrounding county only has another 8,000 residents, so he racks up about 20,000 miles per year with frequent drives up Highways 60 and 169 to the Twin Cities. His sales divide fairly evenly into thirds -- a third from the Mountain Lake area, a third from the Twin Cities, and a third from everywhere else, including joint work he does with LEAP agents in other parts of the country.
The commutes up to Minneapolis-St. Paul are valuable work time for Dean. "You know what I do in those two hours?" he asks. "I'm working. I make phone calls to keep in touch with people, to make appointments, and talk with my mentors. So those are two of the best hours I can spend. I also practice my scripts.
"I have a verbatim script for most everything I do. When I get on the phone to talk to someone I've been recommended to see, I can tell you in my sleep what I'm going to say. When I have that first meeting with a client, I know what I'm going to cover; I know what my central objective is."
He does vary the terminology somewhat to fit the client. "If I'm talking to a 42-year-old farmer who's been farming all his life, it won't be the same as talking to a 42-year-old CFO who lives in Minneapolis," he says. Rehearsing the dialogue in advance helps him establish a deeper level of communication and rapport with a client.
"In the past five years, I've spent a lot of time focusing on psychology and communication. The reason I use the scripts, and plan what I'm going to say, is so that I can watch the client react to what I say. If I'm sitting there with the client and thinking, 'What am I going to say next?' I might be looking at the client, but actually it's more like I'm looking through him. I'm not observing. Real communication occurs when you and the client are emotionally and intellectually engaged."
Part of his rehearsal process involves envisioning what the ideal meeting would be like for his next client appointment. It's a business variation of a technique athletes use called "visioning" success, and Dean first learned it in a sports setting.
"In high school, I played guard on the basketball team," he remembers. "Guards, especially, are supposed to make free throws. I was a horrible free throw shooter. So my coach, Tom Doyscher, gave me a copy of the book Psycho-Cybernetics, which is how I first understood the power of visioning. I trained my mind to understand the ideal shot. I actually imagined my arm going up, and watched my fingers come down with perfect rotation on the ball, and then saw the ball pass cleanly over the rim. By my senior year, I was a 91% shooter."
Dean builds further structure with a strict adherence to a four-day, no-nights, no-weekends work schedule. He books up to six client appointments per day, Monday through Thursday, with a minimum of 15 appointments for the week. "This schedule forces me to make those four days count," he says. That leaves Fridays as personal catch-all days, and weeknights and weekends to be with his wife Jackie and sons Andrew (age 14), Lucas (12), and daughter Paige (10). He believes agents, especially those with families, hurt themselves by making appointments outside normal business hours.
"People in this business compromise to the point where we come across as unprofessional," Dean says. "My family time is precious to me. That's not a line; that is me. If I'm sitting with a client at 7:00 at night, while my kid is playing in a football game, my mind is at the football game. When people make compromises, it costs in their relationships and in their production."
First-Attempt Failure
Dean entered the insurance business in 1998, but had a brief stint as a part-time agent 10 years earlier, during his senior year at the University of Minnesota. It was, as he politely puts it, "a very difficult experience" that seemed to wipe out any possibilities for that line of work. He sold two policies -- one on himself, the other on then-girlfriend Jackie -- in six months. "If you had given me a list of 100 career choices, that would have been right at the bottom," he says. "I'd have been a mortician before I'd do that again."
He graduated with a degree in agricultural education, and taught one year at the high school in Marshall, Minn. Then came marriage and moving to Minneapolis to start a new career as a development officer for the Courage Center, a non-profit agency supporting people with disabilities -- "helping them find their abilities," Dean says."During my five years there, I did a lot of the same things I do now. I was selling an intangible, and just building relationships with people. They would give because they wanted to see people be helped.
"It changed my approach to life. I went from wanting to make millions of dollars and be highly successful, to wanting to make a difference in people's lives."
One such opportunity arose in 1994 that would alter his life's course again. His father Donald, a lifelong farmer, needed a kidney transplant, and Dean donated one of his. Around that same time, the senior Harder encouraged Dean to come back to the family farm and help take over the business with Dean's older brother Phil. "I wasn't looking to leave Minneapolis, but that door swung so wide open, I just had to walk through it," Dean recalls.
His father passed away in 1997, and by then both Dean and the farm had fallen on hard times. "I left the farm abruptly, and I had no idea where I was going in life at that point. Jackie and I had just had our third child, my dad had died, and I had no job. I was asking, 'God, where do you want me to go?'"
A relative who ran an insurance agency recruited Dean into the business and equipped him with a sales system -- the Cotton System, created by Wayne Cotton, CLU. "The Cotton System got me in front of people," Dean says. "My work ethic just took over from there. I just put my mind to it and developed a business practice that's going on 10 years."The system taught Dean to focus only on prospects who fit the desired profile and establish a relationship with them that starts with a 20-minute meeting. The initial meeting can go one of three ways, toward a product opportunity, a planning opportunity, or no opportunity and a quick exit. He still follows that model, expanded to 45 minutes with some variations for LEAP techniques.
Another important element of the Cotton System that Dean still uses is obtaining "prestige introductions" from clients -- a kind of super-referral. In the initial meeting, Dean asks the prospect several questions, and listens carefully for any names the prospect mentions. Dean even tells the prospect up front that he wants to learn who is important to the prospect and that he will write down names to make a list.
After he has finished working with the prospect -- now a client, having done some business over several meetings -- Dean will present the list of names and ask the client if there are any people on this list that the client would not want Dean to call on. Then he takes it a step further and asks if the client would be willing to contact people on the list, by e-mail, phone, or mailed note, and recommend Dean's services. These prestige introductions readily turn into appointments on Dean's calendar. "I have no problem filling my days with appointments," he says. "I have gotten up to 50 names from one client using this approach."
Dean qualified for the Million Dollar Round Table in his first year, 1998, and has every year since then. His early success convinced him of the value of a good system -- and a good support staff. "I qualified for MDRT in that first year because of an article I read, about three months after I started, that said, if you ever want to qualify for MDRT, you need to have an assistant. So I hired Janell Bargen, and she's been with me ever since."
His early success, however, also created a problem so serious, "it almost took me out of the business," Dean recalls. "It seemed so easy. All of a sudden you're recognized, people pat you on the back, and it makes you feel good. It doesn't take much to lose sight of why you do what you do. But life has a way of bringing you to your knees.
"I felt like I had to ask myself, 'Am I really helping people, or am I selling product with the idea that I'm going to tell them it's helping them?' It wasn't necessarily that I wasn't helping people; I didn't know if I was helping people, and that bothered me."A fellow agent, Jerry Maier, invited him to spend a morning at an introductory presentation on the LEAP System. "By noon, I was at the edge of my chair, writing as fast as I could," Dean says. "I couldn't get it fast enough. The instructor that day, Art Sanger, is the national LEAP trainer and has become a real role model for me. He gives me a lot of valuable insight."
Dean paid $3,000 to become one of the first LEAP licensees in the OneAmerica organization. He mentors other agents who use LEAP, and also credits more experienced OneAmerica agents who have mentored him, especially Ed Thauer, a longtime MDRT Top of the Table producer.
The Value of Practice
A classic overachiever, Dean has chaired the boards of the Mountain Lake Public School, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Mountain Lake Area Foundation, and he and his family are active in the local Christian Missionary Alliance church. His recreational passions center on singing, golf, and running; he completed his first marathon in 2006.Once a year, the golf has a higher purpose, as he and Jackie organize and underwrite a tournament for the benefit of the Bradley Behrends Memorial Fund. The fund has raised more than $100,000 so far and provides scholarships for local high school graduates. The fund's namesake, a close friend of Dean's, was born with spina bifida and confined to a wheelchair, and died in 2000. "Brad lived more life than I've ever lived," Dean says. "He was the essence of what the Courage Center was all about. He discovered his abilities. He played baseball, basketball, and golf. He could hit a golf ball 220 yards, sitting in a wheelchair."
In all pursuits, personal and professional, Dean keeps his goal simple: be the best he can be. Practice makes perfect -- or at least gets you closer. "Taking time to practice, and then getting feedback from yourself, and from other people, is paramount to becoming better.
"Tiger Woods not only reshaped his entire swing, but he practices and studies the game more than anybody in golf today. And he's the best in the world. I want to be that kind of guy."
