I get it now.

Whew. Finally got the USP for my financial planning business. I am working towards a Jan 15 2007 launch date for the business which so far is to be called newworldfinancial.ca.

I founded New World Financial (NWF) in November 2005 with the intention of targetting new immigrants to the Greater Toronto Area. I later expanded this to include anyone with financial dealings in Canada and one other country (from my point of view the services to be delivered to the target markets are identical.). The strategy at first was primarily Customer Intimacy and secondarily Low Cost Provider: to do something client-centered for the Philippine-Canadian community in the GTA, and keep things low-cost by outsourcing most lead generation to my call centre in Manila and fulfillment to London Life (my Financial Services Provider). Then the idea was to franchise the systems and sell coaching to planners whose natural markets were the other major ethnic communities - Chinese, Indian, Italian, Hispanic, and Eastern European.

Life is what happens while you're making other plans, says John Lennon. True to form, as we began selling financial planning services to the general population, I began to realize that the ethnic affinity micro-niche strategy was making money, but the differentiation was insufficient. In multi-cultural Toronto, most sales professionals use ethnicity as a differentiator - they just didn't market the benefit like we did at NWF. I didn't mind at first that our image tended to put off Anglo-Saxons, the majority ethnic group in Toronto, but some of my Anglo friends did so I did a rethink of the whole USP and worked on providing something more compelling and which did not exclude large bunches of the population outright.

So I began looking for a product/service differentiator to headline our marketing campaigns, and to use the ethnic affinity card to help sub-agents in their lead generation instead of putting it up front and centre of our strategy. That way I could get Anglo and French sub-agents selling our Unique Sales Proposition side by side with the other ethnic sub-agents without losing the "downtrodden minority" pitch to the smaller ethnic communities.

Small business is a whole different kettle of fish from the corporate world. A small business owner like myself cannot create systems - he doesn't have the time or the resources. I had to scour the environment for a turn-key USP I could re-engineer for the GTA market. And I am happy to say I have found it!

New World Financial's Unique Selling Proposition:

New World Financial is Canada's Authority on the PYF! System for converting bank interest and tax payments into savings.

The Personal Savings Rate in Canada was an abysmal 1.6% in the Firt Quarter 2006. But what is really alarming about that is how much in tax and interest payments (around 30% respectively) Canadians are paying without even questioning whether there is a better way.

The PAY YOURSELF FIRST! System increases the money going into a consumer's Personal Savings by taking cash from the interest and tax payments the consumer is already making. Most Financial Planners tell their clients what to do with their 1.6%: a PYF! Advisor tells clients what to do with their 60% and the 1.6%.

What a PYF! Advisor does when a client visits our office.

1. Explains PYF! goals and benefits to the client in easy-to-understand, non-financial language.
2. Interviews the client to estimates how much of a client's paycheck is going to tax and interest.
3. Uses PYF! methodology to determine goals to convert those payments into savings
4. Explains in easy-to-understand, non-financial language what the client needs to do to make it work
5. Reviews implementation yearly.