About Don Connelly & Associates

Don Connelly & Associates’ corporate mission is to help Financial Advisors, Managers, Wholesalers & Financial Product Distributors maximize their potential to achieve greater success. Providing keynote speeches, workshops, webinars, video training, newsletters, and a state-of-the-art online training – all programs offered through Don Connelly & Associates are geared toward perfecting the conversational and soft sales skills necessary for exceptional performance.

As a 45-year industry veteran, and co-founder of Don Connelly & Associates, CEO, Don Connelly shares his wisdom and ideas to tens of thousands of financial professionals around the globe. Providing fast-paced, provocative, and energizing keynotes and workshops along with practical Business Development Tools, Don Connelly focuses his message on mastering the conversational tools and soft skills that allow financial professionals to communicate to their clients in a totally confident, straightforward and understandable way.

Our Mission for Investment and Insurance Product Distributors is two-fold:

To assist in the professional development of wholesalers and sales support staff.
To assist in providing valuable Advisor training tools and events for the firm’s key accounts.

Our Mission for Financial Professionals & Wealth Management Firms is very similar:

To help Advisors become more effective at gathering assets and building long-term relationships and to lead them to greater productivity, profitability and success through ongoing training, idea sharing and professional development.

► Check Don Connelly 24/7 Learning Center for Financial Advisors

About Don Connelly, Co-Founder

Don Connelly is perhaps the financial industry’s most successful speaker, story teller, motivator and mentor to Advisors. His career on Wall Street spans more than 45 years and includes positions as stock broker, financial planner, branch manager, wholesaler, national sales manager and for nearly 19 years, company spokesperson, Senior V. P. and Senior Marketing Officer for an internationally renowned money management firm.

Don has lectured to tens of thousands of investors and financial services professionals in large cities, small towns, boardrooms, and universities. Audiences at England’s CambridgeUniversity, Harvard, Wharton School of Business, ChapmanCollege and Pepperdine have all benefited from his presentations. He’s shared his wisdom with Investment professionals abroad in New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Canada, England, Ireland and South Korea. In the past few years he has given several presentations to the prestigious Million Dollar Roundtable as both a main platform and workshop speaker. Each of his audiences is left with great ideas and a memorable experience.

As co-founder of Don Connelly 24/7 (www.donconnelly247.com), Don’s timely and provocative sales ideas are offered through an extraordinary learning center and mentoring program available to financial professionals 24/7. Don is a guru on managing client relationships and inspires financial Advisors to achieve great accomplishments. He educates, entertains and motivates audiences with an extraordinary flair, using compelling storytelling and anecdotes.

Don’s mission for financial professionals is profound, yet simple:

The more successful we become the further we get away from the basics that made us successful in the first place. Learn to do something right and then do it right every single time.

Don Connelly - Bio

Meet our team

Rebecca Saggau

Managing Partner & Co-Founder

Rebecca Saggau is a 27 year veteran of the financial services industry. Specializing in the marketing and distribution of investment management products and services since 1986, she began her financial services career as a Regional Vice President and Mutual Fund Wholesaler for Colonial Funds. (Both Don Connelly & Judi Lloyd were her mentors at Colonial Funds.) After managing territories for Putnam Investments and later, American Capital, in 1992 she became Director of Marketing for Round Hill Securities, an Independent Northern California Bay Area Brokerage Firm. In 2006 she co-founded Don Connelly & Associates LLC as the Managing Partner.

Prior to the financial services industry, Rebecca specialized in management development, employee relations and human performance management as a Human Resource specialist for Rockwell International and later as Founder of Saggau Training and Consulting, a management consulting firm.

One of Rebecca’s great passions is photographing wildlife in Africa and collecting African Art. While living in Northern California she owned and operated an African Art retail store and gallery, J.R. DAVID LLC.

Catherine Hartsock

Administrator & Customer Service

After working for the local Pac Bell phone company in Northern California for 24 years, Cathy Hartsock took an early retirement nearly 22 years ago, when she was only 42! (She must have had a good Financial Advisor!) For the past 15 years she has maintained a robust bookkeeping business, including keeping Don Connelly & Associates and our speaking company, Midnight Pass Consulting on the straight and narrow. An integral part of the team since our beginning in 2006, she is responsible for ‘all things financial’ as well as maintaining and managing contact lists, maintaining the Don Connelly store and facilitating store orders, and coordinating information technology and customer service. In addition to all of her work responsibilities Cathy finds time for her beloved family dogs, Koi fish pond, vegetable gardening, and serves as the Treasurer of Northern California Practical Shooters Inc. and is on the Board of Directors for Carmichael Canine Corral Association. (In case you didn’t notice the picture above, that’s Cathy sitting on one of the quads at the ranch. Don’t mess with Cathy.)

Diana Marinova

Marketing Consultant

Diana Marinova is a freelance marketing consultant with extensive marketing and multi-cultural experience. She makes sure that the company’s message is clear and consistent. She helps bring the company to the new era of integrated marketing communications and social media networks where it is the customer who matters the most.

For the last 20 years she’s been working online and offline in different industries, including office supplies, insurance, advertising, tourism, nutrition, and more. Realizing a traditional 9-5 job was too limiting for her talents and desires, she’s been involved with freelance work since 2010. Now, she enjoys working with people all over the globe as long as honesty and good communication are part of the deal.

Diana puts her heart in her job and is a very passionate traveler. Armed with her laptop, she changes the meaning of “work from home” where home is anywhere around the world. She moves around a lot and her drive to get close to different cultures helps her when crafting marketing strategies and campaigns.

That’s Diana’s picture above, enjoying a moment at the Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey.

Judi Lloyd

Weekly Newsletters Editor

Judi Lloyd is a long time veteran in the financial services industry. She began her financial services career in 1980 as a stock broker for Dean Witter. In 1985 she began wholesaling mutual funds for Colonial Funds, where she stayed until 1997. She’s been instrumental in managing the Weekly Focus and Weekly Tip Newsletters for Don Connelly’s subscribers for the past 3 years.

She and her husband, Warren, moved to New Bern, N.C. in 2009 to be close to family and coastal activities. Originally from Vermont, (where she got her “green” roots) she has been interested in environmental issues for many years and writes semi-monthly articles on those topics for the local newspaper in New Bern. Her approach features more realistic things we can all do to keep the area where she lives and the environment clean vs. a “Mother Earth-type” attitude.

She is involved with 2 local garden clubs as well as Craven County Master Gardeners, Craven County Clean Sweep, Coastal Women’s Forum and the New Bern Yacht Club.

Judi is passionate about gardening, especially her vegetable garden and adores her 2 kitties. We’re pleased to have Judi as a part of the team here at Don Connelly & Associates.

About Us