Kevin Michael adopted the teachings of the Bible to gain success in financial advisory
Born and bought up in Mumbai, Kevin Michael completed his graduation in Hotel Management from IHM Bangalore. In 1996, he got his first assignment in the kitchen team of a hotel in Mumbai. A few years later, he became manager in a pub.
His brush with financial advisory was completely by chance.
A friend who was working with Max New York Life Insurance insisted Kevin to attend an agent training program in 2001. He recalls, “Private life insurers had just started in India. Hence recruiting insurance agent was overriding priority for them.”
Kevin had no intention of becoming an insurance agent. He attended the program just so that his friend could achieve his target. Interestingly, he got fascinated with the concept of life insurance distribution and decided to take the plunge. ”Max New York Life had the best training program. I liked the concept of life insurance distribution. I decided to make it my full time profession,” he said.
A few days after becoming an insurance agent, Kevin got his first client through a referral who gave him a cheque of Rs. 1 lakh for a traditional whole life insurance policy.
From the beginning, Kevin wanted to operate in a niche market and decided to focus on his community members. In 2005, Kevin attended a training session on financial planning which was organized by Crown Financial Ministries. He learnt three things – stewardship, giving and educating from this training session and decided to apply these three principles in his practice. He explains, “Bible has 1320 verses on finance and possession. It was second most spoken topic after salvation. During the training program, I picked up three learnings which I decided to implement in the practice. The first is stewardship. It teaches that I own nothing and I am just a mediator who manages someone’s money. Second is giving back to society through donation. Finally, one needs to educate people on financial matter so that they could spend their money wisely.”
Kevin advised his clients to do charity and educated them on basic financial matters like budgeting, spending money wisely etc. The idea worked well for him and within a years’ time he qualified for Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT).
After tasting success in insurance, Kevin diversified his product offerings to take care of all financial needs of his clients. In 2007, he floated ‘Money & More’. Kevin wanted to cater specifically to Christian community as majority of his clients were Christian. In a short span of time, he built a niche in offering comprehensive financial plan to the Christian community.
His business was running smoothly till the financial meltdown in 2008. Seized by panic on seeing negative returns, his clients rushed to him to withdraw their money. He explained to his clients the complexities of markets and advised them to remain calm and stay invested. To provide safety he advised his clients to rebalance their portfolios by increasing exposure to debt funds and continue their SIPs in equities.
In 2010-2011, Kevin’s launched an equity SIP facility for his clients. Like an equity fund, this equity scheme invests in large cap stocks based on recommendation of research desk for a certain fee. Kevin claims that the scheme has delivered an absolute return of 18% since inception.
In order to increase his visibility and spread financial literacy, Kevin started educating college students about the importance of investing.
All these strategies along with his ethical practice adopted from the Bible helped him grow his business. Kevin strongly attributes his success to the wisdom he gained from the Bible.
Today he has 180 clients and manages assets under advisory of Rs. 40 crore. Majority of his clients pay fee to Kevin. He has a team size of 23.
Kevin has recently expanded advising in real estate, tax, education and venture capital. Recently, Kevin has helped two of his clients in fulfilling their entrepreneur goals.
Kevin is currently working on setting up a franchisee model. He is in talks for setting up branches in multiple locations.
In future, Kevin has plans to open his branch offices in Dubai and Singapore.