Hey, Friend! I’m Eric Bond, an entrepreneur and leader in the Financial Services business from Buffalo, New York. Over the last decade plus, I have risen to become an award-winning, industry leading recruiter at two Fortune 100 companies. I’m also a business coach that has helped individuals overcome perceived roadblocks to double and triple their production while still allowing plenty of time for the important ventures in their lives. 

HOW IT STARTED. YOU WANNA FIGHT??

No one is born knowing how to sell…or recruit for that matter. I was no different. 

I got my start in sales back in 2004 in the car business after I got fired from my job as an assistant manager at a store that sold art prints in the mall. Don’t laugh. 

As an overly confident twenty something that was fresh off the college soccer field, I thought I could do anything. NCAA student-athletes think they’re invincible if you didn’t know. How could I fail at this, right? WRONG!  

I was immediately thrown into the deep end of the pool with three others that were hired at the same time. I received 2 days of training, a pat on the backside with a “Go get ‘em kid”. I failed over and over again in my early days. Then I failed some more. When I thought I was done failing, I failed in an even more spectacular way than I did in prior failures. 

I was on 100% commission with a $250 weekly draw. For those not familiar, if your commissions don’t exceed $250 in a week (say you sell two cars and the commission is $100/each…This happens), the draw rolls over to the next week. Then if you don’t do $500 in commissions that week, it rolls into the next. Then if you don’t do $750 in commissions…well you get the point. 

My first year in the car business was turning out to be a miserable existence. Hardly making any money. Low confidence. Head trash. You name it. Something had to change fast. I was never wired to quit or give up but I was questioning everything about my life choices that led me to that point. 

The change came in a somewhat unexpected way on a cold, early December night. I stepped outside for a quick mental reset wondering how I was going to afford holiday gifts. I was literally saying to myself, “if I only put $10 dollars in my gas tank, I’d have $25 to start my christmas shopping.” My sales manager saw me outside. He decided that was the best time to air his grievances with me. It wasn't even December 23rd! Seinfeld fans will get this. About a minute later, we were nose to nose as light flurries fell to the ground on the car lot. I was 9 months into the business and he was challenging me to a fight.

This had been building over the last month. The tipping point was me taking exception to the shady way he wanted me to present numbers to a customer earlier in the day. “I know you don’t like me, so let’s get this over with,” he said. “C’mon, Eric. Punch me!”.

I knew I was getting set up.

"I don’t care enough about you to hit you,” I said while every bone in my body was telling me to break his jaw right down to the clenched fist I had for a right hand. This all ended anti-climatically. I walked away. The prior short-tempered, less strategic version of Eric had that ending much differently. I walked over to the adjacent building where our General Manager’s office was and told him “Boys will be boys but I can’t work with THAT guy.”

My General Manager, Chuck Miller, after a short conversation, put his arm around me and said “I got you” and “I believe in you”. Having someone believe in me was all I needed to hear. Chuck became the first business mentor I ever had. Lessons I learned from Chuck over the next 4 years I worked for him helped shape me into the leader and coach I am today. Some of those lessons were of the tough love variety but always came from a place of wanting the best for me. Chuck and I are still close to this day and he is like a second father to me. 

COOL STORY ERIC, HOW’D YOU GET INTO RECRUITING?

Fast forward 3 years after a spell in business to business sales for a subsidiary of Xerox Corp, I took a job at Supplemental Health Care, a staffing company that places traveling nurses on temporary assignments around the United States.

This is where I fell in love with recruiting. This is where I realized I love helping people pursue the life they wanted. I also realized the work I was doing had a trickle down effect. The ability was there to touch and impact many people I would never meet all because of one relationship I was able to build. 

One issue…I didn’t love the travel nursing industry. 

Wanting to continue in the recruiting space, I reached out to my network to gauge opportunity. An amazing one presented itself in the financial services industry at MassMutual. Perfect fit. Let's get to work.

DRIVING MASSIVE IMPACT

When I started at MassMutual, I was tasked with building the college recruiting program from the ground up in Western, Central and Upstate New York. It was non-existent. This meant developing new relationships with every college within a 3-4 hour radius. If you’re familiar with New York State, Northern Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio, that’s a ton of colleges. This also meant creating a college internship program for financial advisors from scratch. It was a smashing success. 

Using my background as a college athlete, I was able to connect with a target market I was intimately familiar with through a talk I developed called Life After Sports. College after college would bring me in for keynotes with their student-athletes. The keynote focused on taking the habits that made them good athletes and replicating that in their chosen career. Here’s the catch. I didn’t show up to these keynotes selling MassMutual.

At the end of every single talk, student-athletes would come up to me and ask the same question: “Do companies like MassMutual really value these things?” Why yes they do, amigo. “Could we have a conversation?” Sure can. As you can imagine, this did wonders for our candidate pipeline. By not selling MassMutual, I was actually selling MassMutual. The strategy worked so well that numerous MassMutual firms around the country implemented my process. This also led to national speaking opportunities on stage at industry events.

I eventually grew into the role of Director of Recruiting in the territory overseeing a team that recruited colleges, career changers and advisors in the industry at competing firms. We grew the firm advisor force from 87 to a high water mark of 172. We won the MassMutual Chairman’s Trophy 5 times during my time at the firm. Revenue and recruiting are big drivers behind winning a trophy. We had a great team. All good things must come to an end though.

Leaving MassMutual was a hard but necessary move to grow. Everything became comfortable and I had a desire to get uncomfortable. To have a new challenge.  

I decided to launch my own coaching business while transitioning to Prudential Advisors a couple years ago. I’ve had the honor of coaching some incredible entrepreneurs to new heights in addition to working for Prudential home office in advisor recruiting. 

New company, same results. I finished top 3 out of 118 people that have a “sourced hire” responsibility to their compensation structure in 2023. In my coaching business, many of the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with have double or tripled their income after working with me.  

Now, I have taken my coaching journey down the path of something I'm passionate about. Recruiting.. It’s a combination of mindshift and tactical recruiting practices. You can’t have one without the other. Trust me, I’ve tried…and failed. 

Whether recruiting has been a part of your role for 9 minutes, 9 months (I promise I won’t try to fight you), 9 years or 29 years, I have something that will make you better. 

I have a phrase I live by. Own Your Moment. Life is about moments both big and small. Most come at you when you least expect them. Be ready by being prepared.