March to a Million Mission Update: 8 years in 4 to Go

Eight years ago I made a commitment that would end up shaping everything I’ve done since. I called it March to the Million — a commitment to help one million people prepare for the future. Eight years in, four to go, roughly two-thirds of the way through in time, and half-way there in impact.

I want to mark that milestone here because the last four years won’t look like the first eight. They can’t. The math doesn’t work.

The First 8 Years of March to a Million

The first eight years were largely me. Travel, meetings, hand-to-hand conversation about the mission with attorneys, advisors, and prospective clients across the country. COVID hit within months of the commitment and shut down that model for a year and a half. The mission didn’t change. The circumstances did, and the operational answer had to change with them. That’s when the network started evolving into what it is now — the platform, the training, the podcast, the book library, the WSN membership itself. Last year alone we published five books, one of them the March to the Million volume that captures the heart of the whole thing.

None of that scales to a million lives through me. It scales through us.

The Next 4 Years of March to a Million

The belief that has driven this from the beginning hasn’t changed. I’ve called for a major market correction in the not-too-distant future for years, and I’ve talked about 2030 in particular because that’s the timeline that keeps resonating when I study the Great Depression alongside what’s happening geopolitically now. I see no reason to expect we’re going to avoid it. And the people I chose to serve when I started this mission are the households that can least afford to watch it happen unprepared — pre-retirees and retirees, households in the distribution phase where there is no recovery window.

The pattern I keep picking up in conversations with those households is what I’ve come to call the increasing awareness of a lack of awareness. People sense that risks are in front of them. They don’t know how to prepare for them. They don’t know who to ask. Many of them have had an advisor for twenty-five years and still land at retirement scared, without ever having had a conversation about what actually changes when the accumulation phase ends. That gap is the thing the mission exists to close. It closes one household at a time, and it closes fastest through professionals who already have the relationship.

That’s why the next four years are the network’s.

The lever I haven’t really pulled through the first eight years is the readership of this newsletter. If you’ve been in WSN long enough to have this issue in your hands, you already know the work. You already have households in your book who are exactly the people the mission was written for. You already have the process, the training, and the specialist partnerships to move them from the accumulation frame into the distribution frame with real integration. What we don’t have — yet — is enough of it happening at the local scale across the country to get the math to a million.

It starts at home. I’ve said it about my own practice and it’s true for every one of yours. Even while we’re talking about a national mission, the way we actually get there is by protecting our own backyards first — the families in our own communities, the introductions from our existing clients, the relationships we’ve spent years building. If each of us moves the households in our own book from unaware to prepared, the number gets to a million faster than any national campaign ever could.

Eight years down. Four to go.

The mission continues, and with the network doing what only the network can do at the local scale, we can reach more households and make a bigger impact in the next four years than we did in the first eight.