About Us
Hi, my name is Andy Hickman and I'm honored that you would consider Cumulus for your College Planning interests. My business partner Todd Kelly and I have committed our lives to developing our own expertise in College Planning over more than a decade. We've used every ounce of our commitment along with the tremendous support of our family and faith to get us to the point of being able to help other financial professionals in their pursuit of college planning excellence.
What you'll find in every element of training and ongoing support that we provide, is the culmination of our walk through our own careers as college planners. We already understand the motivation behind your interest in college planning; to provide great solutions to your clients, attract new clients through a unique and valuable offering, and to earn a great living in the process.
At the outset of our own careers, what we discovered was a fractional environment full of pocket expertise. We also found out that everyone wanted a part of our individual success. It seemed as though if we expected to integrate college planning, we were going to have to give up part of our fee, part of our production, or had to commit to reselling someone else's solutions and thereby put our own reputations in someone else's hands.
That wasn't a path we were comfortable with, so we created Cumulus College Planning and our newest parent offering, Online College Planning which we are making available to independent financial professionals as well.
At Cumulus, we provide training. We've already made the mistakes and corrected them in our own practice - our competence becomes your confidence when you simply take our training and implement. It works. We've proven it. Now it's up to you to simply apply what we teach.
Your production is yours, if you charge a fee, that's yours. There's no catch.
Outside of our training, you have two additional options.
1) College Quest Alliance, which is how we promise to keep you in the loop and relevant to your clients on an ongoing basis. Every week we provide a 30-40 minute webinar about a current topic that you can take to your own clients to further differentiate yourself and your value. Additionally, CQA hosts a members only discussion board where you can share success stories and challenges and gain feedback from other college planning professionals including Todd and myself. Finally, resources...CQA hosts a private dropbox where any member can both deposit and check out presentations, articles, spreadsheets, letters, advertising and just about anything else, which are shared among all other members.
2) Online College Planning, gives you an ability to offer to your clients all the "academic" elements and reporting that every parent of a college-bound student might need. ACT/SAT training, forecasting reports, college selection tools, scholarship reporting, career and major determination help, essay and application writing. All provided through individuals and organizations that we've deemed to be the best-of-the-best over the course of our many years in the industry. These are providers on who we are glad to stake our reputations. And the best part is this: their services are at a price point that is LOWER than anywhere else and every client you refer who opts in for any of the services, will benefit you!
