In this post: Chad Foster of Modern Woodmen of America explains his approach to recruiting financial advisors: hire entrepreneurs, not salespeople. He shows how early candor, managers grown from within, and layered mentoring build an agency team that stays.
Most recruiting pitches in financial services sound alike. The money is great. You help people. You make every recital and ball game.
Chad Foster, who leads a Modern Woodmen of America agency based in Orange County, California, says all of that is true. He just adds the part most recruiters leave out.
"What most people forget to mention is this career is not for most, and it's definitely not for everybody," Foster said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group.
That warning anchors Foster's approach to recruiting financial advisors and developing them across California, Arizona, and Texas. Host Alec McChesney described industry conference sessions full of recruiting tactics that worked for three months and then failed. Foster bets on the opposite of volume: Tell candidates the hard truth early and let the right ones choose you.
Foster grew up in Honey Grove, Texas, a town of about 1,500 people. He sold purple hull peas, umpired on weekends, and went on to play college football. His first great leader was his father, who rarely gave orders but kept pointing him toward the right thing.
The lesson that stuck was about reputation. In a small town, Foster said, a good last name is great "and a bad last name carries forever." A handshake meant something.
His father also talked him out of coaching college football. Foster's honesty, he warned, could end a coaching career: If a high-ranking booster asked why his son wasn't playing, Foster would tell him the truth. He felt destined to be an entrepreneur, he said, but had neither a million-dollar idea nor a million dollars.
He found his path at Modern Woodmen, drawn by the people who recruited him and the values of a fraternal organization that gives back. Then 2008 hit. While others fled the business, Foster used the crisis as an opener, asking prospects how much worse he could do than the market already had. "I wasn't selling a product," he said. "I was in the people business."
That insight now shapes who he recruits. "We're not hiring salespeople, we're hiring people who want to be entrepreneurs," Foster said. If a candidate does not want to build a business, the role is not a fit.
"If you're a person who wants a base salary and you want to have a corporate card, that's not what we do," he said. The grind does not have to last forever, he added, but the business requires sacrifice. Declining it does not make someone a bad person, just a poor fit.
Foster summed up the gap in one line: "Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur until they see the invoice." The invoice is the 6 a.m. phone call and the 9 p.m. interruption.
The candor works as a filter. Candidates who stay in the process hear from advisors living the model, who tell the stories of what success required. Foster models it himself. He is up at 5 a.m. for the gym and his devotion, and he comes back the next morning even after the days when, as he put it, "the day just wins."
"Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur until they see the invoice."
Chad Foster, agency leader, Modern Woodmen of America
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Honesty at the front door only matters if the culture inside matches it. "When your values are clear, your decisions are very easy," Foster said. He has grown most of his managers from within, and they are not copies of him. "These are not people who all sound like me, think like me, look like me, or talk like me," he said. What they share is an understanding of what the agency stands for.
That makes them "our best gatekeepers" and "our best advocates," he said. The best teams he played on, he recalled, were not the ones where the head coach laid down the law. They were the ones where the captains told newcomers the standard. When the same message comes from leader after leader, advisors believe it.
The payoff, Foster said, is that his top advisors are also better people, which he said is usually not the case in the industry.
He and his wife, Casey, reinforce the standard personally. They show up for weddings, baby showers, and funerals, and they host an annual Texas barbecue. Foster tells Casey to expect about 25 guests. The count usually lands closer to 75.
Relationships alone do not scale, and Foster's early playbook lived in his head. Casey, who has an operations mindset and a background in leadership development, pushed him to put it on paper, which produced a program, a guide, and a training manual. His executive assistant, Cindy Esquivel, built more processes. The agency added managing directors, a role Foster compared to a vice president, and senior financial advisors whose job is to mentor and train new advisors. He also hired Dwight, an executive MBA classmate at UC Irvine and a 22-year Marine, as an accountability coach.
The mentoring layers double as a retention tool. "It's easy to quit on old Chad because that's one person," Foster said. Walking away from five or six people who have invested in you is harder.
Shared language, call sessions, and accountability checks keep leaders spread from San Antonio to Northern California pulling on the same rope. The current work targets advisors past their first 12 to 18 months, to speed their growth toward year five.
Foster borrows freely. "If you're the best one in your circle, you gotta go find a new circle," he said. Ideas from study groups get "Woodmanized" for the agency.
Fellow Modern Woodmen leader Jason Nickles discussed how tradition meets transformation on Activating Greatness, and José Suquet explained how insurance leaders keep consistency at scale.
Foster's answers to the show's rapid-fire questions pointed at the same discipline. His underrated skill is reflection: He blocks a couple of hours each week to review what he could have handled better. The habit he wants leaders to drop is the Superman complex, rushing in to fix every problem. Letting a manager make the call, even one Foster would make differently, builds leaders who could run the business without him.
That is the real test of a recruiting model: whether the people you bring in can eventually lead on their own.
HOW VELOCITY HELPS
Foster's agency runs on managers grown from within, leaders who carry the standard and resist the urge to fix every problem themselves. Velocity's year-long Emerging Leaders program helps organizations build that bench through a 70/20/10 model with cohort coaching, reinforcement calls, and a Velocity Coach paired with every participant. New managers practice delegation, reflection, and accountability on the real challenges in front of them, so a culture stays consistent as the team grows.
See how Velocity works with financial services firms.
Foster's best leadership advice came from Modern Woodmen's president and CEO: Let a situation play out. That does not come naturally to a leader who, by his own account, goes "straight into the fire." He also learned to be "the thermostat, not the thermometer," and not to be afraid of having more talented people in the room than himself.
The lesson ties Foster's model together. Tell recruits the truth, surround them with leaders who live the standard, and then step back far enough for those leaders to shine. A team built that way does not need its founder in every room.
Hear Chad Foster's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Find it on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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This recruiting framework helps you test whether a candidate wants to build a business, describe the real invoice honestly, and stop overselling the lifestyle pitch.