At 19, Terry Blackburn was knocking on doors trying to sell life insurance to strangers. He’d previously worked as a builder and candidly admits he just couldn’t build. He had no qualifications to speak of and no background in finance and certainly no obvious route into business.
But within a month he was the top protection salesperson in the Northeast for Combined Insurance Company of America. Within a year, he had sold his tools, abandoned construction for good and committed himself entirely to financial services.
He might not have been able to build walls or houses but now, 18 years later, Blackburn has both built and sold brokerages, assembled and pared back a property portfolio that once ran to almost 50 units, raised more than £1m in angel investment and launched what he describes – without hesitation – “the UK’s number one community for financial advisers, mortgage brokers and protection specialists who want to sell more, generate more leads, earn more and build real wealth”.
That community, The Wealthy Advisers Club, now has close to 1,600 members and runs three live training sessions a week, alongside quarterly in-person conferences that Blackburn initially funds largely himself before clawing the outlay back through sponsorship and member fees.
The pitch is unapologetically commercial: better questions, better sales processes, more leads equal higher revenue.
But Blackburn insists the mission is broader than simply helping advisers make more money.
“The objective of a broker is to protect the client first,” he says. “If you do the right thing and you sell protection properly, the byproduct is that you earn more commission.
“Wealth should be the result of doing the job properly – not cutting corners.”
FALLING OUT OF LOVE
Blackburn’s defining moment did not come at the start of his career but after he had already built one.
He joined the Primis network in 2014 and over time founded Bespoke Financial, initially as a protection-only firm before adding mortgages and later estate planning. By his mid-twenties he had also launched Mortgage Genie, a more mortgage focussed firm that also sold protection. At its height, Bespoke had more than 100 brokers across numerous offices with over 50 reporting directly to Blackburn.
And while the scale certainly brought status it also brought strain.
“When a business gets to a certain size, you’re just getting hit from every angle,” he says. “Somebody’s off sick. Somebody’s leaving. Somebody’s complaining. I started to fall out of love with it.”
By his late twenties, juggling multiple firms, a growing property empire and a young family, he felt stretched thin.
He sold Bespoke in 2023. And while his expectation might have been freedom the harsh reality was boredom and dislocation.
“Within two weeks I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’” he says. “Bespoke was my identity. I thought I’d sell, chill out, focus on property. But I missed the industry almost immediately.”
It was around this time that he began coaching other firms informally. One broker asked him to train their sales team. Results followed. Word spread. Blackburn began to research the training market and saw what he believed was a gap.
“There were people teaching sales who hadn’t sold for 25 years. Or people teaching sales who had never built a business,” he says. “And sales in the UK is almost treated like a dirty word. In America it’s celebrated. Here it’s not.”
After Covid he says training within large networks became increasingly compliance driven.
“It became more about what you can’t do than how to grow. Bacon sandwiches and CPD points. That’s not business development,” he says.
The Wealthy Advisers Club was his answer: a hybrid of sales training, lead generation strategy, mindset coaching, AI integration and, crucially, peer community.
HARD WORK, NOT WEALTHY
Blackburn often repeats a line that has become something of a slogan: advisers are “working hard but not getting wealthy”.
The critique is not that brokers lack income. It is that some brokers lack strategy.
“Most brokers are under pressure every month,” he says. “‘Start of the month, back to zero. How do I cover my bills?’ That’s a stressful way to live.”
For years Blackburn advocated a simple formula to his advisers: generate surplus cash through strong protection sales, then deploy it into assets.
Blackburn himself began buying buy-to-let property at 21, fuelled by early earnings of around £80,000 a year at the time – even now a striking sum for a teenager in the North East. Inspired by Rich Dad Poor Dad, he accumulated buy-to-lets, HMOs, Airbnbs and even a couple of hotels. At one point, his portfolio approached 50 units.
Today, purposefully, it is closer to 20 and still shrinking.
“Property isn’t passive,” he says bluntly. “Especially not AirBnB. It became a daily headache. Maintenance, tenants, legislation. I didn’t sign up for that.”
Tax changes, tenant rights reforms and the administrative burden have led him to offload much of his residential stock.
He continues to do refurbishments and property flips – often funded through bridging finance – but prefers projects without long-term tenant exposure.
The lesson he carries into financial services is not that property is easy money. It is that advisers need assets beyond commission.
“Active income from sales is great. But you don’t want to be selling forever just to survive. Get your money working for you. Whether that’s property, equities, whatever – just don’t leave surplus cash sitting in the bank.”
He acknowledges that younger advisers face a different housing market from the baby boomer generation. But he also rejects the fatalism.
“If you believe it’s impossible now, that becomes your reality. People are still building portfolios. You just have to buy right.”
THE ANATOMY OF A SALE
If wealth is the outcome Blackburn promotes, questions are the gears that get advisers over the line.
In 2021 he wrote 1,302 life policies in a single month as a business – a figure he cites precisely after I’d suggested it was a mere 1,100.
That sales process was less about charisma but all about structure.
“Lead generation first,” he says. “You can have the best sales process in the world, but if you’ve got no leads, it doesn’t matter.”
His brokers were trained to self-generate; friends and family, referrals, structured follow-ups and such.
On average, he claims, each client produced seven referrals. With a conversion rate of roughly 50%, the mathematics became self-reinforcing.
But the decisive difference, he argues, lies in the fact-find.
“What moves the needle most in protection is the questions you ask,” he says. “Not just the application form questions. Proper questions. Uncomfortable ones.”
He describes asking clients directly how their family would cope financially if they died or developed cancer.
Would the mortgage still be paid? Would children stay in their school? Without those conversations, he believes, protection remains an abstract concept rather than an urgent need.
“You’re not creating a problem. You’re identifying it. There’s a difference,” he enthuses.
The approach contrasts with the caricatured “sell me this pen” bravado of old-school sales culture, popularised by The Wolf of Wall Street. And Blackburn is quick to dismiss those kinds of manipulative theatrics.
“Some of the old school sales technique still works. Some of it doesn’t. The principle of identifying a need still applies. But fabricating one? No.”
SELLING IN 2026
Technology has reshaped sales delivery but it hasn’t reshaped the fundamentals that Blackburn first picked up at Combined Insurance.
When he first started out sales were almost entirely face-to-face and social media was non-existent as we know it today. AI was non-existent.
Today, Zoom, Teams and Google Meeting and the like have normalised remote advisory work with digital footprints being scrutinised before any conversation begins.
“Clients can check you out instantly,” he says. “Reviews, testimonials, Companies House. You have to be – as you should always be – squeaky clean.”
Surprisingly, to me anyway, Blackburn is sceptical of purely telephone-based sales, preferring video or in-person meetings where body language and tone remain visible. But he sees AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement.
“I don’t think AI is fully there yet to generate leads on its own,” he says. “But it’s 80% there for efficiency – it’s really about how you use AI to benefit both your client and your business.”
Within the The Wealthy Advisers Club, advisers are shown how to use AI for drafting emails, structuring social media ideas, research and administrative automation. The goal is not to outsource judgement but to free time for higher-value activity.
“If you reduce low-value tasks, you can focus on lead generation and conversion,” he says.
Social media, he believes, remains underutilised by much of the intermediary market.
“Every ideal client you want, whether that’s landlords, first-time buyers, high-net-worth individuals, they’re all on socials. And the future ones even more so. But posting the same stock photo of keys in front of a house doesn’t work anymore. You need a personal brand.”
COMMUNITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The Wealthy Advisers Club runs three live video sessions weekly and holds quarterly in person conferences costing, Blackburn says, up to £50,000 each to stage. Speakers have included high-profile entrepreneurs and figures from television business shows.
His last event in January saw Piers Linney MBE, best known as a former Dragon on Dragons’ Den, and Brad Burton, a business speaker focused on sales and growth strategies, both take to the stage to address a packed room of advisers.
The next Wealthy Advisers Club event, scheduled for 16 April 2026, will take place at the Kensington Conference and Arts Centre at Kensington Town Hall in west London.
Blackburn has already secured the services of Tony Gordon, a life insurance veteran with more than 50 years’ experience in the sector and former UK president of the Million Dollar Round Table.
He will be joined by Sarah Willingham, entrepreneur and another former Dragon as well as Timothy Armoo, founder of a business that achieved an eight-figure exit and a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrant.
It’s undoubtedly a big spend to secure a million-dollar line-up but Blackburn says he sees the investment as strategic.
“In a technological world, in-person connection is even more important,” he says. “Covid made people introverted. A lot of brokers now work from home and barely see anyone.”
Unlike network-specific events, his conferences are open to directly authorised firms, appointed representatives and sole traders alike. The audience ranges from newly qualified advisers to veterans of three decades plus.
“The fundamentals are universal,” he says. “Everyone needs leads. Everyone needs better questions. Everyone benefits from being around people who are growing.”
Some join, he says, simply “to be part of something”.
THREE CHANGES
If a broker reading this were to implement three changes in the next 12 months, Blackburn’s advice is direct.
First: increase or improve lead generation. “Add a new strategy. Double down on what works.”
Second: overhaul the fact-find. “Questions are King. That’s where the revenue difference lies.”
Third: build a distinctive social media presence. “It’s free. Your clients are there. But you have to be unique.”
It is a pragmatic formula, stripped of jargon. Whether it amounts to an industry revolution is open to debate.
Financial services has weathered regulatory waves, technological shifts and cyclical property booms before. But Blackburn’s energy is unmistakable. He speaks quickly, references metrics without hesitation and frames growth as both a moral and commercial imperative.
“I’m arguably coaching more advisers than anyone else in the country,” he says. “Whatever we’re doing – it’s working.”
For a man who briefly believed he had finished with the industry that conviction seems less like a sales pitch and more like a reawakened identity.
Long may it continue.
Find out more about The Wealthy Advisers Club HERE.
