People have a picture of what insurance advisors do. It usually involves a lot of coffee shops, a lot of persuasion, and a car with a company sticker on it.
Some of that is true. Most of it isn't. Here's a real week, roughly as it goes, with nothing polished off.
Monday: the admin nobody sees
Monday mornings are paperwork. Following up on applications waiting for underwriting. Chasing a medical exam result. Checking which clients have premiums due this month, and which ones are already late.
That last one matters more than anything else I do on a Monday. A missed premium can mean a lapsed policy, and a lapsed policy is protection that quietly disappeared. So I message people. Gently. Repeatedly. Nobody thanks you for this part, until the month their policy would have lapsed and didn't.
Afternoon: content, planning, and the calls I've been putting off.
Tuesday: first conversations
Most first meetings aren't sales meetings. They're listening.
Who depends on you? What would happen if your income stopped for six months? What already covers you? What are you worried about that you haven't said out loud?
I'd estimate I don't recommend anything at all in a good share of first meetings. Sometimes the person needs an emergency fund first. Sometimes they're already well covered. Sometimes they just needed someone to look at their situation calmly. That's still useful work, even when it doesn't pay.
Wednesday: reviews
Existing clients. Someone got married. Someone had a baby. Someone's parent got sick. Someone's policy is ten years old and was bought when they were single and earning a third of what they earn now.
Reviews are where the job really is, and it's the part that people imagine least. Selling a policy takes an afternoon. Making sure it still fits someone's life takes years.
Thursday: the hard calls
Every week has at least one.
A client's diagnosis. A claim that needs documents from a family that is grieving. A policy that was sold years ago by someone else that doesn't do what the client thought it did, and I'm the one explaining it.
This is the part of the job that nobody puts in recruitment posters, and it's the part I'm proudest of. When a claim pays and a family doesn't lose their house, that's why the job exists.
Friday: rejection
I want to be honest about this. A lot of the week is people saying no.
No to a meeting. No to a recommendation. No reply at all. Some weeks it's most of the week. You learn not to take it personally, or you leave the industry. A large share of new advisors leave, and this is a big reason why.
What helps: remembering that "no" is usually "not now," and that the people who say yes later tend to be the ones you didn't push.
The weekend
Weekends are when a lot of clients are free. So some weekends are work: a family meeting, a couple who can only talk when the kids are asleep.
And some weekends are mine, on purpose, because burnout in this job is real and nobody can sell their way out of it.
What I'd want you to take from this
If you're a client: your advisor's job should look more like Wednesday and Thursday than Tuesday. If you haven't had a review in years, ask for one.
If you're thinking of joining: it's not a coffee-shop job. It's a long, slow job of looking after people, with a lot of rejection at the front and a lot of meaning at the back. Come in for the second part. The first part is the price of it.
