Al L.
Secure Income Management not what it seems
Secure Income Management is not quite what it appears to be on the surface. When you first join the company, you attend a boot camp in Arizona where they put you up at a resort. After that, the training continues at the office. Unfortunately, I found that very little of what is taught during the boot camp actually prepares you for the reality and chaos of working in the field. The appointments are scheduled by a separate company based in California, and the appointment times are often inaccurate or inconvenient. When you arrive to meet clients, they frequently complain about the scheduling. Each client is generally scheduled for two appointments. You are not supposed to sell during the first appointment. Instead, you are expected to schedule time with your manager afterward to review the case and determine whether there are any sales opportunities for the second appointment. This is where the system becomes extremely difficult to manage. There may be only one manager for approximately 50 agents, while the company continues assigning you two or three appointments per day. Finding time to conduct a case study with your manager without interfering with your upcoming appointments can be very difficult. And because your manager is responsible for so many other agents, you can quickly see how the situation becomes chaotic. You can end up spending a significant amount of money on gas and a tremendous amount of time traveling to first appointments that never lead to a second appointment. I personally drove more than 100 miles in a single day for first appointments that never progressed any further. What makes this especially frustrating is that I had a client with approximately $1 million available to invest, yet I was never able to get a second appointment with that client. That was a potentially significant opportunity that was lost—not necessarily because the client wasn't interested, but because the process made it extremely difficult to follow up effectively. Overall, my experience was that the company has a lot of moving parts, but the system in the field felt disorganized and inefficient. The amount of driving, scheduling problems, limited managerial support, and difficulty getting to second appointments made the experience very frustrating and, in my opinion, not worth the time and expense.