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176: Five Good Ideas You Can Implement Today · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I have just a bunch of random good ideas to give you guys today.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: I have zero clue how to title this episode properly, but as I'm working with advisors, we're talking about their processes or how to streamline stuff that they're doing.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: All kinds of business things come up and I hear all the time, wow, that's a good idea, and usually it's for stuff that's really simple and super easy to implement.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: So today I've got just a random collection of good ideas.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: None of them are big enough topics to justify an entire episode all on their own and they're completely unrelated.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: It's just a bunch of good ideas, small tweaks, little additions, things that you can do and add to your business to make it even more exceptional.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: This will probably be one of the most tactical episodes I've ever done, with stuff that you can implement with little to no effort.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: So let's dive in and look, I know you're here because you know it's possible to have energy left over for your family and still have your dream business.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: You know the dream business that you are running instead of it running you.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: If you're new to the Efficient Advisor, I'm Libby Griewy, and welcome.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: I started from scratch, built and sold by age 37, a 100% referral-only planning practice that I grew to seven figures as a solo advisor, all while working just three days a week and taking off 14 weeks a year to lean into being a mom, a wife, a friend, a sister, a daughter and, frankly, a travel obsessed human who loved taking a month off at a time to take awesome vacations with her kids.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: And I'm here just to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same, to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: We are about to transform your practice, so move over exhaustion and get out of the way.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Advisor ADD.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: It is time to take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love If you are looking to really increase your tax acumen meaning not just understanding taxes, but how you can actually apply all of your tax knowledge to your clients in a way that's gonna help them save money on their taxes immediately prepare for a better tax future.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: I know a lot of advisors get tax returns from clients and then they sit there and wonder like, okay, what exactly do I do with these?
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Can I do more with them?
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Is there a way for me to utilize tax returns to actually add significant more value to my clients' lives and to their financial plans?
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: And the answer is yeah.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: And if you're wanting to do that, there is the Retirement Tax Services Summit coming September 26th and 27th of this year in Tempe, arizona, and yours truly will be speaking there alongside Stephen Jarvis, and we'll be talking about how to create processes in your practice that allow you to scale the tax planning side of things.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: So how do we start to make the handoff to our team?
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: How do we make processes that are scalable?
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: How do we utilize tax returns and tax planning as part of our entire client experience?
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: And even if you're with a broker dealer look, I was with a broker dealer for 16 years we couldn't even whisper the words tax services or tax efficiency planning without compliance, jumping out of the bushes and yelling at you.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: So there's still a way to do it.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: It was an integral part of my business and, I think, one of the key differentiators between a lot of the planners in our area.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: I think it's one of the things that our clients would say to us that they appreciated the most and found to be one of the most valuable components of the services that we offered.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: So if you are looking to just take your tax acumen to the next level whether you have no idea how to read a 1040 and apply it to a client, or even if you're a pretty seasoned advisor that has been using tax analysis, holistic plan whatever for years, you're gonna learn something new.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: So click the link in the show notes if you want more information.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: I've got a special link for you guys.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: You can also head out to theefficientadvisorcom and there's a little banner up at the top that you can click on to get more details.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: They are continuing to release the speaker lineup for the two day workshop and I know Matt Jarvis of the Perfect RIA is going to be doing a pre-conference event on September 25th, so you can hang out with all of us, live there and I'd love to spend time with you.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, so now that that is out of the way, let's just get into some of the things that have been talking about with advisors that are just I don't know, for lack of better terms just good ideas, and I will preface this with.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: They're not all mine.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Some of these are good ideas that I have acquired from other advisors over the years that I've worked with some of my mentors, some of my colleagues, so I am not taking credit for all of these.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: I don't know where they all came from, some are mine, some are borrowed, but they're all just really overall good ideas that anybody can implement in their business at any time.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: So let's just get started.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: So the first little good idea here, the first tip, is this comes up a lot when we're getting into advisors processes specifically related to ongoing client service, meaning, what are you doing for your clients year after year?
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: How are you strategically adding value?
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: And I hear advisors all of the time say, okay, well, what do you do for clients in the first year of planning with you?
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: And that's pretty simple we walk them through this planning process.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: What do you do in year two?
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Typically it's well, kind of review whatever we did in year one and anything that kind of slipped through the cracks or we tried not to overwhelm our clients in the first year.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: So we're kind of implementing the second phase of our recommendations.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Then we get into okay, what does that look like for year three?
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: What does that look like for year four?
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: What does it look like for year five?
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: And are you having one meeting, two meetings, three meetings, one meeting and a check-in.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Now, whatever your cadence is, you do you?
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of, I think, obviously there's a lot of like structure and thought that needs to go around that, and understanding capacity and how much time it takes for you and your team to execute the meetings that you're going to be doing.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: But one of the things that I hear advisors say all of the time is oh well, you know, we get together and we do an annual review, and I just want to share some thoughts around the languaging of annual review.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Obviously, it makes sense.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: We did annual reviews forever and ever and ever inside of my own practice, and then we made a switch, and so the switch I want you to think about is the psychology behind the word review.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: It feels, or it implies, that we're really just looking at what happened to you over the last 12 months, 18 months, 6 months since we saw you last.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: It feels very reactive, very retroactive, very passive, if you will, and really more like a recap, like, yeah, here's what the market did your portfolio went up, it went down, your net worth went up, your liabilities went down.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: It feels very just like, hey, we're kind of letting things happen to us.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: I would encourage you to switch the language surrounding those meetings from this idea of annual review to strategy session.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: It's our annual strategy session, our semi-annual strategy session, our financial planning strategy session, our investment strategy session, whatever you want to call it.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: But the psychology behind the word strategy is that it feels more proactive.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: It encapsulates more of this idea of what are we going to be doing strategically for you in the next six months, 12 months, 18 months, whatever it is, until we see you again.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: So do you see the difference, right, versus like hey, here's what happened to you versus here's what we're going to be actively doing together over the next X number of months to move you closer to your big financial goals that you have?
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: And, as a super simple conversation with your clients, just explaining the hey, you know we call them this.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: This is really what we're trying to do, right?
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: We don't want to use the word review anymore, because that's just not cool.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: We want to use the word strategy, because what we're really doing for you is being thoughtful about the future, being strategic, being, you know, forward thinking.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: So I love that phrase and it's a simple one, right?
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: It takes like practically nothing to make that switch.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: I would describe it to your clients right, like anytime you have an opportunity to bring an elephant into the room and not that your clients have been sitting around thinking, oh my gosh, they use the word review.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: That's just completely insane.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: But anytime you have an opportunity to take something and address it, to share with your clients, like what you're doing for them or why you're agreeing, you know it's just reinforcing that you are an incredible financial planner who is being extremely proactive on their behalf.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Okay, another one that our group coaching program.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: So I was telling a group about this and they all laughed and were like that's a great idea.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: The chat was blowing up and people were cracking up, so I thought I would add that to this episode.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: So when you have a difficult client right and one of those clients that you want to eliminate.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: I don't know where the word graduating clients really came from.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: I'd be curious if anyone knows the background, kind of like who coined that?
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Where did it come from?
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Because I think that I don't know why that term just cracks me up, because it makes it sound like they have achieved something and are moving on to the next level, something bigger, better, greater.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: When I hear most advisors using the term graduating clients.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: They're actually talking about eliminating them from their book, so AKA firing them, which I think is the exact opposite of graduating.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: I don't know if graduating makes you feel better, but straight up firing clients often made me feel better.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: So if you have a difficult client that the entire office is sort of not sad to see them go and you eliminate the client from your book, whether you fire them, graduate them, give them a Viking funeral, I don't really care.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Something that you can do for your team to celebrate that, because it's really hard.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: Firing a client, asking a client to go somewhere else, off-boarding, whatever word you wanna use it's difficult and I have these conversations with advisors all the time who are trying to reduce their book.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Really following that Pareto principle, we get into construction and capacity of their ongoing financial planning and their service model and there's just not enough time to service everyone well, or sometimes you just get some of those PETA clients, some of those clients who are real pain in the butt when you get rid of them and your team.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: It's so important for your team to know that you're showing up for them.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: So I can remember we had a client in particular who was just very rude and disrespectful to my staff and, honestly, not cool.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: I was not okay with it.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: He was kind of a nightmare.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: I personally saw his name on the calendar for upcoming meetings and was filled with dread and not excited.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: And you know what life is too short to have a book full of clients like that or to have really any clients in your book like that.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: So when you get rid of that type of a person who is disrespectful to your team kind of a challenge, hard to work with, maybe kind of a little bit of a compliance nightmare have a pizza party, throw a party to celebrate the fact that you eliminated someone who was a drag on your business emotionally.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: And this is a great way for you to show your team that you are standing up for them, that you've got their backs, that you are committed to making it a fun work environment and a place that people wanna be, and that their mental health right, their, the culture in your office, the environment of your office, is significantly more important than one client in particular.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: So have a pizza party, go out for margaritas, have some sort of ritual that you do when you eliminate clients.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: A it shows your team that you love them.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: And B it's so good for you, mentally, to be able to celebrate doing something hard that improves the overall quality of your business.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: And you've heard me say it before that there are three E's for every business we want it to be efficient, right, but we want it to be effective and, most importantly, we want it to be enjoyable.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: This job is just too dang hard to work with people who don't appreciate you, who don't take your advice, who are difficult and who I mean this job.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: I guess it's hard enough on its own that we don't need anybody adding any bad mojo or bringing us down.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: What we really need is a book full of clients, ideal client avatars that we just love working with, that we feel like a million dollars when we help them, who appreciate the work that we're doing.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, throw a pizza party, live it up.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: And who doesn't love pizza?
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: This next one came from a advisor in Canada that I was coaching recently and I just love her.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: She's one of those advisors who when you're like, oh, you should do this or try this, she just takes it and implements like a freaking boss.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: And we were doing a recap in one of our coaching sessions and she said one of the most game-changing things for me has been this little piece of advice that you gave me, libby.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: We were talking about Model Week and Case Prep and how do we get ahead of client questions, how do we show prepared?
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I think the topic we were really talking about was how do we reduce trickle-over meetings, meaning we've all had that experience where you're sitting across the table from a client, you've got your agenda, you're rolling through your content and then at some point in the middle of the conversation, the client throws a question at you and you're like, oh my gosh, I wish they would have brought that up at the beginning.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I wish I would have known ahead of time they were gonna ask me that I could have been more prepared, we could have realigned the meeting to address the concern that they had.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: Let's say, halfway through they're like, hey, do you think we need long-term care?
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And you're like, oh my goodness, that's a really large topic to get into with 15 minutes left or whatever.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: So maybe you're thinking, okay, well, we'll just have to schedule another appointment for that Now.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Had you known that you could have showed up prepared to discuss, maybe had some different illustrations, maybe updated their eMoney or their MoneyGuide Pro and show them if they can self-fund or whatever it is that you would normally want to do to prepare.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: So here is the solution to those problems we in our office if you go back to episode number 12, designing your perfect week in my model week we talk about this in the episode that I would prepare for my client meetings two weeks in advance so that I had ample time to do any research, do any illustrations, to run any figures, numbers, update any software, anything that I could potentially need to address client questions.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: So we had a process in our office of emailing clients, and so what this woman did is she was like okay, so we integrated this, where my admin would send them an email two weeks prior asking if they had any questions, specific questions that they wanted to make sure that we addressed for the meeting.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: And so my advice to her right was like, okay, just send out an email and ask them to give it, you know, to give you these questions now and tell them it's so that you can show up prepared to answer, so that you can do any research, run any illustrations, update any software, all of the stuff that I just said.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Tell your clients like, hey, I want to know what your questions are in advance so my team and I have adequate time to prepare for our meeting so that I can fully answer your question there.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And she told me she's like we implemented this a couple months ago.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: And she's like, oh my gosh, it's amazing to me, our clients will answer these questions.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: She's a lot of the time my admin can actually just email them back and get it out of the way like yep, here's the answer.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Oh, change this beneficiary.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Yep, here's the form, here's the thing.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Go here, go there.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: She's like so a lot of it actually doesn't even hit my desk, but the stuff that does.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: It's been exceptional to be able to prepare for those meetings in a way that allows me to show my clients that I'm prioritizing what it is that is on their agenda over mine and that I can show up to do it most efficiently.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: She's like I'm not having these trickle-over meetings.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: I'm not having these meetings, you know, fall into VIP time slats, which we'll talk about next.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: She's like it's just been so amazingly efficient and effective.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: So there you go, doing a, having it be part of your process, right to email your clients two weeks prior to the meeting to ask them for specific questions and telling them why you need this information now, versus them showing up to the meeting with those questions.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Okay, and I mentioned VIP time slats, so this is something if you listen to that same episode, number 12.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: I don't get into that in here.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: This is something that we came up with for an advisor.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Actually, my best friend, jen, is a financial advisor and I don't remember why or how, or I don't think it was my idea.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure where this came from, but anyway, we were talking about model weeks, right, and we were talking about having set time slots for your clients and filling them with reviews, and the problem that she was running into was that she's booking everything a couple months in advance.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Right, per my recommendation.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: I loved booking strategy sessions, quote-unquote annual reviews.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: I loved booking them two months in advance, so we had adequate time to get any data from clients that we needed to update a money guide, pro or depending on what the content or theme of that meeting was that we could get their beneficiaries if we were doing a beneficiary audit, like, we wanted plenty of time to be able to get the information and what Jen was running into issues saying, well, okay, but what happens?
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: And when I have a client, we're doing a meeting and they say, you know, go to the back to my last example.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: They had asked about long-term care.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: I should prepare to talk about long-term care and they're like, yeah, we want to do that.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: My next available appointment isn't, for you know, a month to two months away and they're gonna lose interest.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: Right, we're gonna lose that momentum.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: What do I need to do?
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: So we talked about restructuring her week to add in a couple of VIP time slots is what I think she ended up calling them.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: But basically, let's say you typically run 11 appointments a week.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: You might have nine of those slots filled for your quote and overviews, slash, strategy sessions, data gathers, plan presentations you know kind of the typical meetings that you're doing and you might leave two spots open every week for things that trickle over.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Right, people that call in hey, my grandma died and left me some money.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: I need to do something with it.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Hey, our benefits package at work just came out and it's totally different.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: I need your help.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: I just got an offer from my company for a pension buyout.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Or you met with clients and they say, yeah, we want to do the thing and you need an opportunity with them to do the paperwork and go through it with them.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Take the application, explain maybe the different fee structures of the accounts here, whatever.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Whatever, it is right.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: So these are the meetings that need to happen relatively quickly in order to be servicing our clients really well, and I think that's why she called them VIP clients.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Right, it's only her best clients or clients who are in the process of doing business with her get them.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: So adding some VIP time slots is really helpful and if they don't get used, great, you have time to do more things.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: I don't know that anybody I mean all of us right, you get a little bummed out when a good meeting cancels, but then you're like, oh, I have five million things I could do to fill that anyways.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: So consider adding some VIP time slots to your model week, okay.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Another just good idea is surrounding this idea of content creation for your meeting.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: So if you work with me, you know I'm a huge fan of theme-based planning.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: It's a whole thing can't get into it here, but we talk about what are you actually doing in your meetings to add significant value to your clients lives.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: So if you are just doing kind of a quote-unquote review, right, we're just showing them like, hey, here's, your net worth went up and this went down and your money guide pro says that you know, your probability of success in retirement really hasn't changed since last year.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: You know, I can remember a moment in my career where I was looking across the table at clients thinking, oh my gosh, they could have looked this all up online.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: Like this meeting could have been an email.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: Is that actually valuable?
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: You know, I want to make sure that if a client is driving 20 minutes to my office, spending an hour with me driving home or maybe was one of our executives that took an hour out of their day to do a zoom call with us like I want to make sure that they're leaving that meeting thinking, oh my gosh, that was so worth it.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Wow, I'm glad we went right.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: So how do we build content for meetings?
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: That actually matters?
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: And one of the questions so this is the quote good idea here is asking yourself what is the goal of this meeting, what is the goal of each of these agenda items?
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: What am I really trying to do for this client?
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: And then rating your agenda on.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: You've heard me probably mentioned this before.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: If you coach with me, we talk about this a lot, but we talk about the impact scale.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: So, on a scale of one to four, each agenda item, how impactful is it actually for your clients?
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: And the goal is to really push that number upwards.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: So let's say you have five agenda items and you know some are one, some are three, some are five.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: Like, if you have five agenda items and you're averaging, let's say, 18 impact points, your goal is for the next time you have a meeting with them to try to get to 19.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Whether it's fewer agenda items with higher impact or you know you do, you but basically wanting to go in with intention, so not just like, hey, your net worth went up, right, your net worth went down.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Your income distribution strategy is just rocking a roll and things are doing good.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: Your term insurance death benefit hasn't changed since the last time I saw you.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Right, how do we actually build an agenda that moves our clients forward?
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: So if you work with me, we talk a lot about ideal client avatars and having your ideal client avatar story built out.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: I keep my ICA sitting next to me on my desk.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: So when I am creating a podcast, any kind of content for social media.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: Doing an interview, right, I am always thinking.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at my ICA, which is you, right, you the listener thinking how will this move their business forward?
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Does this actually matter to them?
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Do they care?
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Why would my ICA Her name is Katie why would Katie give a crap about what I'm talking about right now?
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Like, how does like her spending five minutes of her life watching this video, listening to this snippet?
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: How does this actually move her business forward and make her life better?
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: And so be thinking that kind of same thing, so being really intentional.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: So I've, you know, I've had advisors show me like, okay, this is what I'm doing for my next theme.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: I like to work you know, anywhere from 12 to 24 months out on themes.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: So we start building out the theme for the meeting and then, once you have the theme established for the meeting and the agenda right, then you can start working backwards from a timeline perspective.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, we're going to be doing estate planning one on one.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: We're going to be updating beneficiaries.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: We want to make sure beneficiaries match people's wills.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, cool, we got to get all of their beneficiaries.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: We got to get all of their wills.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: So we want to start working in advance to do that.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Right, if we are going to be doing surge meetings, let's say, february, march we might need to start collecting this data in December so that we have it in plenty of time we can circle back with clients, get all the details, put it into whatever software spreadsheet that you're doing yada, yada, yada.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: But really, when we're looking at it, what is the goal?
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: How does this move the client forward?
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Is this impactful to them?
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: And if it's not impactful, right, like, if you're looking at this going, I'm charging these clients a bazillion dollars a year and I'm getting ready for these meetings five minutes in advance.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: Like I'm literally opening their money guide program, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Like, right before they walk in the door.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: Consider that your agenda might not be as impactful as it could potentially be.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Right, and one of the best ways to build a referral-only business is to do a really great job at your job, to add a lot of value to your clients.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Like for them to leave your office going oh, wow, we learned something today.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: Or, wow, that was really helpful.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Or we hadn't heard that, or learned that before.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: That's something new to us, a new topic.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: I didn't realize he or she does so much for us between meetings.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: That's the kind of stuff we want our clients to be thinking.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: So, again, if you coach with me, we talk a lot about, like what is your client feeling coming into this?
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: What do we want them to be thinking and feeling when they leave this and that applies to meetings what are they thinking coming into this meeting?
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: So, if the market's been crazy, maybe they're thinking like I'm disappointed, I'm dissatisfied with my returns.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: Like, how do you build content then to move them psychologically through the transformation that you're wanting them to have to the hey, this is how I want them to feel leaving the meeting.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: I want them to feel like, yep, the market's crazy, but Libby's got us.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: She's not making knee-jerk reactions.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: This is what they've been doing, this is how they've been handling it.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: This is what their proactive strategy is for the next six to 12 months.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: So asking yourself what is the goal of each of these agenda items and how impactful is it actually to our clients and how can I make it more impactful?
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, this episode's getting a little long, so I'm going to give you one more good idea and then I'm looking at this list here going, oh my gosh, I'll just have to do a second good ideas episode.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: So this last one is a very rudimentary exercise, but also super easy, super impactful.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: So when we're building out processes, emails, templates, anything that's touching our client, any interaction that our client has with our office, we want to measure that with a smiley face.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Let me explain so right?
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: So picture like a smiley face, a sad face and one of those like meh faces where the mouth is just like a straight line, right?
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: And I want you to go through, like the last several email interactions that you've had with your clients.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: Maybe your team or your support staff's email interactions with your clients Maybe you listen spend a day kind of listening in the eavesdropping on how your team is answering the phone.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: What are they saying to clients?
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: How do we make sure that every single interaction that your clients are having with our office is a smiley face, right?
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Obviously we want to avoid sad faces, but we really often don't think about how meh most of our client interactions are.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: And, again, one of those things that makes working with you exceptional is that every interaction your clients would rate a smiley face.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: So, whether it's them calling in and talking to someone on the team, whether it's how you deal with a mistake or an issue inside of your business, whether it's a voicemail that you're leaving, if it's the automated email from Calendly to remind your clients of their upcoming appointment.
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: How do we take things from a sad meh and turn them into a happy face?
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: How can you infuse a little personality or infuse a little brand into your client experience?
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: So, when we talk about client experience as a process, it's its own process, but it's also really genuinely weaved into literally every other process that your business has.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: So your onboarding process, right?
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: What is the process of your docuSigns Like?
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: How do we take these things that could cause friction or literally could just be kind of regular, mundane experiences and actually amplify them and make them exceptional?
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: How do we infuse a little personality?
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: How do we like, let's say, you're sending an email with ADVs attached?
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: How can you take an ADV email and make it from a meh to a happy face?
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Can we add some fun language in there?
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Can we um, you know, expose your personality a little bit?
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, can you write something like hey, you know, here's what these documents are.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: I'm required to give them to you.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Here's some things I want you to take a look at or highlight.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: If you have insomnia, you know, feel free to read them cover to cover.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how can we add a little?
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: I had an advisor once who was like I added at the end right, we were talking about how do we make this a happy face?
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: And he's like look, hey, I know most of these attachments are pretty boring, so I've gone ahead and added a really cute attachment picture of my adorable new puppy, daisy.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Right, just so you can smile.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: The other one's boring, this one makes it happy Kind of a thing.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: So how do we take every single touch point that we have with our clients and turn it from a sad or from a meh into a happy?
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: So that's creating scripts or guided responses.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: There's an episode on guided responses um, for your team, so that you can kind of again put your flavor, your brand I don't want to say control, because I hate the word control Like you want to control every word that comes out of your team's mouth, not like that, but we want to reiterate, or reinforce perhaps is a better word.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: They're like hey, this is what we're trying to do.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Um, I had an advisor who told me once that she kept a mirror on her desk like a little, you know, like a little mirror, and everybody in her team had mirrors sitting next to the phones so that when they were talking to clients they could make sure that they were smiling, because that comes through, right, like you smiling on the other end of the phone really shines, or comes through when you're talking.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: What do they call it?
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: Smocking, smile, talking, smocking, it's a thing, anyways.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: So how do we smock more?
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: How do we make sure our clients are feeling enthusiasm?
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: How do we make sure that we're addressing?
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: It's like the whole Chick-fil-A my pleasure thing, right, they never say yeah, cool, or yeah sure, no, worries, right, it's, oh, that's my pleasure.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: So how do we take the meh or sad to a happy face with every single client interaction?
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: All right, that's enough of that for today.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: I've got another episode of just good ideas coming up for you.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: I hope these were helpful.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Most of them, again, super simple, really easy to implement, don't require a lot of time, energy or effort.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: They're just those things that are just little good ideas.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Anyways, I'd love to know which of these you thought was most helpful.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Connect with me over in the efficient advisor community on Facebook or feel free to DM me, connect with me over on LinkedIn.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: You guys know those are the two places that I hang out.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much and hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week.