Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 163: Common Themes Among Successful Practices & One-Page Financial Plans with Matt Jarvis
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: After being in the business for nearly two decades and rubbing elbows with thousands of advisors over the years, I have noticed that there are definitely trends, themes, common practices whatever you want to call them that a lot of successful advisors share or have in common.
- 0:18Speaker 1: My buddy, matt Jarvis, is back on the show today to talk about some of these commonalities.
- 0:23Speaker 1: He is what I would call a student of success, and he has been very intentional in his career about learning from advisors that he admires, and he has noticed a lot of similar themes and trends as well.
- 0:36Speaker 1: So it was fun to hear some of his take on what these commonalities are.
- 0:42Speaker 1: And as we started to talk about systems and processes that make things better, faster, smarter or easier for advisors, we landed on the idea of simplifying your recommendations, and Matt shares with us some tips and tricks for how he and his team use one-page financial plans and how it has made delivering advice so much easier and so much quicker.
- 1:05Speaker 1: And I really push him to give us some detail about how he creates them sort of what's on them, what they look like and how he utilizes them.
- 1:13Speaker 1: So let's dive in.
- 1:15Speaker 1: 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.
- 1:34Speaker 1: You know the business that you are running instead of it running you.
- 1:38Speaker 1: If you're new to the Efficient Advisor, I'm Libby Gray Welcome.
- 1:41Speaker 1: I started, built and Sold by H37A 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 so that I could be a super present mom, wife, friend, sister, daughter and, frankly, I liked taking vacations.
- 2:01Speaker 1: Shoot me, but I'm here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
- 2:14Speaker 1: We are about to transform your practice together, so move over exhaustion and get out of the way.
- 2:20Speaker 1: Advisor ADD.
- 2:21Speaker 1: It's a thing.
- 2:22Speaker 1: It is time to take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love.
- 2:28Speaker 1: So let's get into this conversation with my friend, matt Jarvis.
- 2:32Speaker 1: Matt, I'm so glad you're back.
- 2:34Speaker 1: I'm so excited to have you here.
- 2:36Speaker 2: It's great to be here, Libby.
- 2:38Speaker 1: Yeah Well, I love every time we talk.
- 2:40Speaker 1: It's funny because it's common that I will be talking to you advisors, or I'll be out somewhere speaking and they'll say I listened to you and Jarvis, I listened to Jarvis and you, I listened to you and Jarvis and it always makes me happy and I'll say, oh cool, and they're like well, and it's so fun because you guys are so similar in the way that you think about the practice, the way that you think about systems and processes and streamlining and templates.
- 3:05Speaker 1: And then they'll always joke that I'm the soft version of you.
- 3:09Speaker 2: I don't know why, but that makes me laugh every single time.
- 3:11Speaker 2: That's not how I would have said that I feel like I want to come on the call with you, libby.
- 3:16Speaker 2: I'm like man.
- 3:17Speaker 2: I really think I'm slacking off on systems and processes.
- 3:19Speaker 2: Like Libby would come to my office and die for how like unorganized it is.
- 3:25Speaker 1: But I'd be very soft about it.
- 3:26Speaker 1: I guess.
- 3:27Speaker 2: Apparently that is funny Because I was trying to think, as we were getting to record this, like how you and I even crossed paths it was something through a weird chain of events and we did podcasts together and of course you were on the Michael Kitts Show and all sorts of great things.
- 3:42Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know it's been.
- 3:43Speaker 1: Whatever it is, it's been fun and it's been a lot of fun.
- 3:45Speaker 1: I think the universe pulls together that kind of synergy and similar thought process and kind of our crusade to help advisors kind of get their poop in a group behind the scenes and be able to work a lot smarter and a lot less harder and really kind of streamline things and leverage a little bit better.
- 4:05Speaker 1: So yeah, so I think there is just a ton of synergy and it's just always a blast to talk to you, so it's always fun.
- 4:11Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there's always so many similarities between top practices and you and I were actually joking before we hit record that there's also a lot of similarities between practices that aren't at the top, like they're all doing the same mistakes, right?
- 4:20Speaker 2: They like answering every phone call individually, or they don't have a process for doing paperwork.
- 4:23Speaker 2: So, yeah, there's these common themes between successful practices and the opposite of that for unsuccessful practice, not yet successful practices.
- 4:31Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I like that.
- 4:32Speaker 2: See, you're so soft, what a soft way, I bet you're right, that's a good eyes guy, yeah.
- 4:37Speaker 1: I love it.
- 4:37Speaker 1: Well, yeah, okay.
- 4:39Speaker 1: So let's just talk about that for a second.
- 4:40Speaker 1: You're right, there's absolutely a lot of common denominators between really successful practices, so you had to kind of pick a few.
- 4:49Speaker 1: That in your experience, in talking to hundreds of advisors and thousands of advisors.
- 4:54Speaker 1: What would you say are some of the things that you see that continually separate sort of the cream from the milk?
- 5:00Speaker 2: Yeah, I think two things come to mind.
- 5:02Speaker 2: You've got to be brutally intentional with how you're spending your time and, libby, that speaks to a lot of your work, right?
- 5:06Speaker 2: This intentionality like hey, we're going to do things the same way every time.
- 5:09Speaker 2: And then the other is the ability to communicate complex topics in really simple ways, and that could be topics that seem simple like why should I hire you instead of somebody else, or why should I pay your fee instead of Googling, and your ability to articulate that in a way that resonates with a client or the prospective client makes all the difference.
- 5:26Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that and I think a lot of that comes naturally to really successful advisors or to sales people that just kind of have a way about them.
- 5:33Speaker 1: But really a lot of it is just kind of being prepared and having a strategy in place, knowing that those questions are going to come, instead of kind of constantly being taken by surprise, having sort of a few things in your pocket to pull out or, if you phrase his stories, of describing ways of explaining that kind of help facilitate that conversation.
- 5:54Speaker 1: I think it's always like I'm one of those people who, like I'm very quick witted and I can come up with a lot of stuff on the spot.
- 6:01Speaker 1: But when I'm being like questioned or like if I'm, like you know, at somewhere and there's a little bit of like a tussle, I'm one of those people who, like hours later is like you know what I should?
- 6:10Speaker 1: have said I should have said this, and I'm always like, okay, I'm kind of glad I'm not that person that can come up with some of those, like you know, comebacks or whatever, right on the spot.
- 6:17Speaker 1: But I always like kind of ruminate on that a little bit and then keep it with me and I'm like, oh, I have used that.
- 6:23Speaker 1: Like in future, like you know what I wish I would have said, maybe from more of the softer, nicer side, right?
- 6:26Speaker 1: Well, you know what I wish I would have said I should have said X, y or Z, and then it's a matter of documenting for that for myself or documenting that for my team, for bringing it back to business here.
- 6:36Speaker 1: So why don't we dive into?
- 6:40Speaker 1: So in thinking through some of these kind of common denominators of successful practices, you know one of the things, obviously, that I talk about a lot is systems and processes and templating.
- 6:51Speaker 1: In your kind of professional opinion, what do you see as in the most successful practices?
- 6:59Speaker 1: What are the things that advisors or are templating, or maybe even for you in your own practice, like, what are some of the things that you have created that have just totally revolutionized, changed the way that you approached business, made things so much simpler, smarter, faster, better, easier?
- 7:15Speaker 2: cheaper.
- 7:16Speaker 2: Yeah Well, it's interesting.
- 7:19Speaker 2: The things that come to mind right off the top are things that I insist on never doing again.
- 7:24Speaker 2: So, for example, I never schedule things on the calendar ever.
- 7:27Speaker 2: I just don't.
- 7:28Speaker 2: In fact, actually, I have to confess, last week I almost made the mistake.
- 7:31Speaker 2: I was doing mini-surge and I met with a client and Colleen happened my relationship manager of 13 years happened to be out of the office, and so I said, hey, great news.
- 7:38Speaker 2: What we can do is we can meet at this time.
- 7:40Speaker 2: And then I stopped myself and I said actually, you know what, whenever I get in the calendar, I mess it up.
- 7:44Speaker 2: Colleen's going to follow up with you tomorrow and she's going to schedule.
- 7:46Speaker 2: So I never schedule anything in the calendar which prevents me from breaking the rules.
- 7:50Speaker 2: Right Cause, Libby, if you called me, if you texted me, you and I text all the time and you said, hey, like Matt, are you available for a podcast Sunday at 2am?
- 7:57Speaker 2: I'm like Libby, for you, I'm on, I'll wake up at 2am and I'll be there, but that's not a scalable business, right?
- 8:01Speaker 2: Whereas Colleen's going to, like Matt, does his podcast on Tuesday from this time to this time.
- 8:06Speaker 2: Same with clients, right?
- 8:07Speaker 2: A client calls me up.
- 8:08Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll come at Friday night.
- 8:09Speaker 2: Sure, why not?
- 8:09Speaker 2: I'll skip my kid's birthday party to meet with you.
- 8:12Speaker 2: But Colleen will adhere to the rules.
- 8:14Speaker 2: So by saying like I never schedule meetings, that forced a lot of systems to come into place.
- 8:19Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think too.
- 8:20Speaker 1: so I'm a big fan of ideal weeks or model weeks or whatever you want to call it and I always looked back and whenever I left the office so I worked a Monday, wednesday, thursday schedule whenever I left the office on Thursday, if I felt stressed, overwhelmed, frustrated, 99% of the time I could point it back to the fact that I went outside of my model week or what I said I was going to do, and pretty much 100% of the time it was my fault when those things happened.
- 8:50Speaker 1: And yeah, there's something definitely to be said for empowering your team, which you know comes with giving them the right templates for the right language, equipping them with the right phrases or ways to kind of push back kindly on clients.
- 9:05Speaker 1: And it's so hard.
- 9:07Speaker 1: So I'm recording this podcast today in my one of my best friends who's an advisor's office in Minneapolis.
- 9:13Speaker 1: And it's funny because I'm just listening.
- 9:15Speaker 1: I'm sitting out here and I can hear her team talking and using some of the scripts that I have given her over the years and it's like, oh, it just sounds so much nicer.
- 9:22Speaker 1: And like when she gets off the phone and then she says what she's really thinking, you know you're like, ah, that's so perfect, but yeah, I think that's a really, that's a really great idea.
- 9:30Speaker 1: So okay, so never touching your calendar a lot of the tasks that you either mess up.
- 9:35Speaker 1: Don't enjoy passing that off.
- 9:37Speaker 1: What else have you found to be kind of a commonality or a common thread amongst successful practices, or for kind of your practice in another self?
- 9:45Speaker 2: Yeah, never touching paperwork is another one.
- 9:47Speaker 2: I'm not very good at it.
- 9:49Speaker 2: Usually, advisors, we don't have great attention to details, so we shouldn't be doing paperwork anyway, so I never, never, touch paperwork.
- 9:54Speaker 2: The other one, and you kind of highlighted, as you mentioned, you could hear kind of outside the room what they were saying which is the top advisors are always asking other top advisors how they handle situations, which I think, libby, is why you and I hit it off so well, like right at the gates, like, oh, you ran into this, how did you handle this?
- 10:09Speaker 2: And we ended up handling it very similarly, but you had a little bit different spin because we all learned things differently.
- 10:14Speaker 2: Like, oh, I'm going to start saying it this way, right, whether that's like, how are you graduating a client or how do you raise their fees, or how do you quote their fees, I'm always asking other top advisors how are you doing this?
- 10:25Speaker 2: A good friend of mine, michael Henley, phenomenal advisor, he always says I'd rather copy genius than reinvent mediocrity.
- 10:31Speaker 2: And and all these top advisors are like hey, listen, what are you doing when a client says like, hey, I want to hire a flat fee advisor instead of an AUM advisor, what are you saying If you launch it to some kind of diatribe lecture about the new one, like you're going to lose them.
- 10:43Speaker 2: But if you can make some witty comment like hey, if you can find someone who does a better name, because I'll hire them to work for us which is something I use with prospects all the time Like if you find somebody who does a better job than we do for a lower price, please give me their name and I will hire them.
- 10:58Speaker 2: Really, yeah, of course I would.
- 11:00Speaker 2: Why wouldn't I?
- 11:00Speaker 2: Yeah?
- 11:02Speaker 1: I love it.
- 11:03Speaker 1: So when you were kind of giving up the paperwork side, of the business, or when you are kind of then taking these ideas from other top advisors, how are you taking it so right?
- 11:14Speaker 1: So you're the guy that's talking to the other successful people, you're the one copying genius.
- 11:18Speaker 1: How do you take those ideas and translate them down to your team and then ensure that they're being executed the way that you kind of envision it or want it to go?
- 11:28Speaker 2: Sure, sure, it depends on how big the changes.
- 11:30Speaker 2: So sometimes I can just come back and I can say to the team hey, I was talking to Libby, remember Libby?
- 11:35Speaker 2: She's totally awesome, she does this crazy thing in her practice.
- 11:38Speaker 2: I think we should try.
- 11:39Speaker 2: And then what I've done is like I've got third party credibility, like oh, libby, she's the soft one, like she's really nice, it must be a good idea, right.
- 11:46Speaker 2: And then if it doesn't work, I also have somewhere to sort of point the proverbial gun.
- 11:50Speaker 2: So I've got that credibility.
- 11:52Speaker 2: I've kind of deflected a little bit.
- 11:53Speaker 2: If it's a bigger change, like my team's not buying in on, like it took us a long time to go to Calendly because our team had a lot of hesitation, hey, we like to talk to clients, we like to schedule it with them.
- 12:03Speaker 2: And so I had my team talk to other teams that were using Calendly and let them talk back and forth.
- 12:09Speaker 2: So small things, I just come back.
- 12:11Speaker 2: Hey, listen, I was talking to Libby.
- 12:12Speaker 2: She said we should try this.
- 12:13Speaker 2: Let's give it a try.
- 12:14Speaker 2: Let's try it 10 times, see how it goes.
- 12:15Speaker 2: Bigger things if I'm getting more pushed back, great, why don't you talk to Libby about it?
- 12:19Speaker 2: I'll hire her, she'll talk to you.
- 12:21Speaker 2: Or why don't you talk to another team that's doing this successfully?
- 12:25Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think what I heard in that is some kind of co-creation, when there is pushback in giving the team some ownership and perhaps some ability to kind of help structure how that process is initiated or implemented.
- 12:38Speaker 1: All right, so, okay.
- 12:39Speaker 1: So what else?
- 12:40Speaker 1: I know there's one in particular I wanna ask you about.
- 12:42Speaker 1: So tell me.
- 12:43Speaker 1: So obviously we spoke together out at the pre-con before XYPN like oh my gosh, over a year ago now.
- 12:49Speaker 1: That's hard to believe, and what happens in Colorado stays in Colorado.
- 12:54Speaker 1: We'll keep it there.
- 12:55Speaker 1: But yeah.
- 12:57Speaker 1: So we talked a lot about distilling stuff down into simple to understand, taking those complex ideas and strategies and concepts and making them simplified.
- 13:07Speaker 1: Thus kind of this idea of a one-page plan and our practice is called it like a planning synopsis but tell me a little bit about kind of the evolution of what your recommendations used to look like to what they look like now and what your learnings in that transition over time really are.
- 13:27Speaker 2: Yeah, I think probably like most advisors I suppose tens of thousands of advisors I originally used whatever expensive financial planning software you wanna name.
- 13:34Speaker 2: I probably used all of them, by the way, because every time I couldn't get one to work, I'd do the next one and what would happen is I would have 50 or 100 pages of printout and I still couldn't answer the client's question which was like how much money can I have in retirement, or can I pull out $10,000 to take this trip?
- 13:48Speaker 2: Like, well, you're at a 78% probability of success.
- 13:51Speaker 2: And now you'll be at a 77 and they'll say, well, can I take it or not?
- 13:54Speaker 2: And so there wasn't like.
- 13:56Speaker 2: Then it was also the same thing that every other advisor was giving them.
- 13:59Speaker 2: So if they were interviewing multiple advisors, they all gave them a hundred page stack of papers.
- 14:02Speaker 2: They didn't understand.
- 14:03Speaker 2: It wasn't until I met Tom Gao may he rest in peace that I realized like, oh, we can boil this down to one piece of paper and have specific actions.
- 14:12Speaker 2: Now, does it have to be exactly one page?
- 14:14Speaker 2: No, I don't think it does.
- 14:14Speaker 2: But it's a good forcing mechanism to say if I only have one page or two pages, I've got to only focus on the things that are going to move the needle for them, not all the other noise like the 10,000 Monte Carlo illustration.
- 14:27Speaker 2: And then it was just a lot of trial and error what verbiage made the most sense for my clientele, for my particular niche, which ones was I most comfortable saying, which ones were prospects most engaged by?
- 14:36Speaker 2: Sometimes I would think a bullet point was really important and they would gloss by it.
- 14:39Speaker 2: And so I would just kind of refine that meeting after meeting, after meeting after meeting.
- 14:44Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're still probably continuing to refine.
- 14:46Speaker 1: You know, I think there's this for whatever reason in this industry, like we love paper, like we love paper just in general, papers like the world's greatest thing, and I think there's this idea that like if we give them more paper, that, or if we're like the guru that goes up to the mountaintop and communes with God and comes back down with this like big stack of paper, right, and that we are then like bestowing our financial planning wisdom through all of this analysis, and I mean we use MoneyGuide Pro and we use.
- 15:19Speaker 1: E-Money and all the things too, that there's this like some sort of like a Schwadivive around the amount of papers that we actually like.
- 15:29Speaker 1: if it fit in a half inch binder, you were good, but if it fit in a one inch binder, you were not at all oh leather but, yes, leather bound, but instead kind of switching to that idea of that we're more of a Sherpa and that we're kind of doing this together and we're coming up to the mountaintop and working through ideas and workshopping and maybe giving these like smaller bite size along the way recommendations.
- 15:52Speaker 1: So when you're delivering a one page financial plan, tell me a little bit about how that fits into like the overall process.
- 15:58Speaker 1: So if I'm a client, I call up, jarvis, I'm lucky enough to make it through the gatekeeper to get to see you Tell me a little bit about what that process looks like, from prospect to okay.
- 16:08Speaker 1: we are now in it to win it and we're in an ongoing, like longterm relationship together.
- 16:14Speaker 2: Yeah and I talk about this a lot in my book delivering massive value.
- 16:16Speaker 2: But we have a couple of step process, right.
- 16:18Speaker 2: So I'll do, I'll go through really quickly.
- 16:20Speaker 2: We do an initial phone call to make sure that they're potentially a good fit, right, that's to filter people out Also.
- 16:25Speaker 2: Then I set the stage how is the rest of the process gonna work?
- 16:28Speaker 2: We then do an initial meeting where I do full intake, ask them all my questions, answer their questions.
- 16:33Speaker 2: Really, what I'm doing a lot there is making them aware of problems they didn't know they had.
- 16:38Speaker 2: Now, not in like some kind of manipulative way.
- 16:39Speaker 2: But I'm saying like, hey, libby, what's your strategy for claiming social security?
- 16:42Speaker 2: And then I pause and I have my pen ready.
- 16:44Speaker 2: Oh, I don't have a strategy.
- 16:46Speaker 2: Okay, you know what?
- 16:47Speaker 2: No worries, that's why we're here.
- 16:48Speaker 2: What's your strategy for making sure you don't overpay the IRS in retirement?
- 16:51Speaker 2: I don't have a strategy for that.
- 16:53Speaker 2: Or if they're working with an advisor but I know you love this one I was like hey, what did your advisors say about Roth conversions in retirement?
- 16:59Speaker 2: They didn't say anything about that.
- 17:01Speaker 2: Huh, all right.
- 17:02Speaker 2: Well, you know what?
- 17:02Speaker 2: We'll make a note of that, right?
- 17:03Speaker 2: So I'm setting the stage for all that Second meeting, I'm gonna present the one-page financial plan.
- 17:07Speaker 2: I'm gonna warn them, though.
- 17:08Speaker 2: I'm gonna say, hey, listen, I used to draw out these really long, elaborate financial plans and I gotta tell you I really loved them.
- 17:13Speaker 2: My pocket protector, I had my green visor.
- 17:15Speaker 2: I really nerded out on these things.
- 17:16Speaker 2: No one else wanted to read them except for me.
- 17:19Speaker 2: So, with your permission, we're gonna boil it down to a one-page executive summary.
- 17:22Speaker 2: Is that okay with you?
- 17:23Speaker 2: And this, like this wash of relief, comes across their face because they didn't want a hundred pages.
- 17:27Speaker 2: They don't know what it means.
- 17:29Speaker 2: And then we go through it and say, hey, this was just, this was the low hanging fruit.
- 17:33Speaker 2: This is what we found on our first pass.
- 17:34Speaker 2: Imagine what we could find if we worked together long-term.
- 17:36Speaker 2: And it goes from there.
- 17:39Speaker 1: I love that.
- 17:39Speaker 1: At that point have you charged?
- 17:42Speaker 2: You know I don't, I don't, and a lot of advisors do, and I'm not opposed to it either.
- 17:48Speaker 2: I just have a system that's worked really well.
- 17:50Speaker 2: When I first started doing it that way, tom Gowen, he taught me he didn't charge, and so I thought I'm just gonna do it just like Tom does and I wanted to take away that barrier of entry.
- 17:58Speaker 2: But I'm not opposed to charging, it's just, I have a system that works really well.
- 18:01Speaker 2: I don't wanna change it.
- 18:03Speaker 1: Yeah, well, no, I mean, and like we were talking about this before, we hit record too that there's no less than 5,000 ways to do this business so incredibly successfully.
- 18:13Speaker 2: It's right.
- 18:14Speaker 1: There is no one perfect formula or one right way, and anybody who tells you that you know otherwise is just full of baloney and trying to sell you something Like there's 1,000 ways to be successful.
- 18:23Speaker 1: And that's just why I asked you, cause I feel like there's a lot of kind of discussion in the community about do I charge from the get go, do I not charge?
- 18:32Speaker 1: Do I do a mini plan for free and then charge for the in-depth stuff?
- 18:35Speaker 1: And I always just like to ask people when I have the opportunity, like just to provide some additional color or commentary of what and how they're doing it, cause I think that's really important for advisors to hear that there's a lot of ways to be super successful.
- 18:49Speaker 1: Okay, so we're doing a discovery call.
- 18:52Speaker 1: We're asking.
- 18:53Speaker 1: I always call it asking questions.
- 18:54Speaker 1: I know they don't know the answer to, and I love that.
- 18:56Speaker 2: Yes.
- 18:57Speaker 1: Then we're gonna do like a data gather of some sort.
- 19:01Speaker 1: Maybe is it pretty in-depth of what you're doing to create the one-page financial plan.
- 19:06Speaker 1: Or tell us, like, how much data are you truly capturing from a client in order to prepare the one-page plan?
- 19:12Speaker 2: Yeah, good question.
- 19:12Speaker 2: For that initial meeting, I want them to send in advance, or bring in, copies of all their investment statements, copies of last two years tax return and there are any estate documents that they have, and that gives me enough information to go from there.
- 19:24Speaker 2: I do wanna highlight, I guess, because I'm not charging in that initial phone call I am screening to make sure that they're gonna meet our requirements for an ideal client and I'm also making sure that they're not just coming for free information.
- 19:34Speaker 2: So I say, hey, this process is really designed for people that are seriously considering hiring a financial advisor but need to find the right one.
- 19:41Speaker 2: Does this sound like you?
- 19:42Speaker 2: And if they say, actually, you know I'm always gonna do it myself, no matter what, Okay, cool, this process isn't really a good fit for you.
- 19:48Speaker 2: Now, Libby, could someone lie about that?
- 19:50Speaker 2: Sure, that's never happened in my career, but it could.
- 19:51Speaker 2: But for me, screening that out, that takes care of it.
- 19:54Speaker 2: So I'll do that.
- 19:55Speaker 2: Intake meeting and then I spend my team probably spends two hours getting the stuff ready, putting it in a spreadsheet, whatever else, and I spend about an hour working on it and then we meet, I present it and then that's the end of what they get at no charge.
- 20:07Speaker 2: At that point we're either parting ways as friends because it's not a good fit, or they're becoming a client.
- 20:12Speaker 2: I'm not gonna do meeting after meeting If they say, hey, I'd like you to run 15 different social security analyses.
- 20:17Speaker 2: Cool, when you become a client, that's something we could do.
- 20:20Speaker 2: Like could you tell me the exact dollar amount of the Roth conversion I should do this year?
- 20:23Speaker 2: Yep, that's something we do for clients Become a client.
- 20:25Speaker 2: I'll be glad to do that.
- 20:26Speaker 2: So if you're not gonna charge you, you have to have some kind of like screening mechanism and some way to force them to take action or incentivize them to take action.
- 20:35Speaker 2: A fee is one way to do that.
- 20:37Speaker 1: Right, so I love that.
- 20:38Speaker 1: So you're giving them enough information that they could take some action.
- 20:41Speaker 1: They become aware of the problems that they didn't know that they had.
- 20:46Speaker 1: That they're now at least aware of.
- 20:47Speaker 1: And you're giving them enough kind of to bite or sink their teeth, in that they could theoretically go do it themselves or go figure it out, but it's high level enough that they're going to want to say, okay, tell me more.
- 21:00Speaker 1: Is that fair yeah?
- 21:03Speaker 2: and I always let them know.
- 21:04Speaker 2: I say, hey, libby, at the end of this meeting.
- 21:05Speaker 2: I tell them at the beginning.
- 21:06Speaker 2: In fact it's funny, but I always say, when we walk into my conference room or a Zoom room, but my conference room, I look over at the door and I say, hey, you may have noticed there's no lock on this door.
- 21:14Speaker 2: And they're really puzzled by that.
- 21:15Speaker 2: And they look and I say it's because this is not a timeshare presentation, it's not gonna buy, there's nothing to sign up for.
- 21:20Speaker 2: I'm not gonna ask you to buy anything, I just wanna get that out of the way.
- 21:23Speaker 2: And there's this big relief.
- 21:24Speaker 2: But I say, hey, libby, at the end of this meeting you're gonna have a choice.
- 21:26Speaker 2: And there's three choices, three options there.
- 21:28Speaker 2: You can say, hey, this was great information, I wanna do this myself.
- 21:31Speaker 2: You can say, hey, this is great information, but I don't.
- 21:33Speaker 2: I'm not really big a fan of Jarvis, I'm gonna hire somebody else.
- 21:35Speaker 2: Or option three, which I'll confess is my favorite.
- 21:38Speaker 2: You can say you know, I wanna work with Matthew and his team, and people love that.
- 21:42Speaker 2: Now, by the way, that was always their choice.
- 21:43Speaker 2: Like I didn't give them a new permission, but by me restating that, now I am again.
- 21:47Speaker 2: I'm someone who's helping them, not selling to them.
- 21:50Speaker 1: Yeah, and I love that you can make light of it, because there is gonna be a choice at the end.
- 21:54Speaker 2: Of course there is, yeah.
- 21:55Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you said if you always start comparing yourself to a time share person, then, like you, there's no way you can look bad after making that person Absolutely absolutely Okay.
- 22:05Speaker 1: So the one page financial plan is it pretty much a template that you guys are using and reusing with ever like?
- 22:12Speaker 1: Is it pretty much the same stuff?
- 22:13Speaker 1: So your team knows what to prepare.
- 22:15Speaker 1: They're kind of knowing.
- 22:16Speaker 1: Hey, these are the 10 things we tend to pull out for our clients.
- 22:19Speaker 1: Or tell us a little bit more about how you templated that process.
- 22:23Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 22:23Speaker 2: So again, my niche is just retirees in my geographical area, usually $1 to $3 million of investable net worth.
- 22:28Speaker 2: The one page financial plans are probably and I hate this is gonna people are gonna be disappointed by this or not they're about 80 to 90% the same one to the next.
- 22:35Speaker 2: Now, this is not for a lack of trying, but for that demographic the advice is about 80, 90% the same, for it's like when you go to the doctor, diet and exercise Okay, that's the same advice they give everybody, but it's good advice, right?
- 22:46Speaker 2: So we have there's four sections in there, there's three to four bullet points here, so there's 20 bullet points on the whole thing and we probably have 30 bullet points.
- 22:54Speaker 2: We rotate between depending on the person and what they're trying to do.
- 22:57Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
- 22:58Speaker 1: I always tell advisors like, hey, if 80% of what you have is templated, that still leaves 20% for customization and kind of the same thing.
- 23:06Speaker 1: If you and I were to go to Five Guys and order burger, you might get yours with.
- 23:09Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess I would be the one that would get it with like bacon and avocado and some sauteed onion.
- 23:14Speaker 1: You might get like tomatoes and lettuce, but regardless, we can still customize it to our individual preferences and needs.
- 23:20Speaker 1: But it's the same burger, it's the same bun, it's the same process.
- 23:23Speaker 1: They're gonna put the toppings on in the same order and they're gonna follow the same point of sale system.
- 23:27Speaker 1: It's gonna go to the cook in the same way and it's gonna come out it's all the same, with that opportunity for customization.
- 23:33Speaker 1: So I got you.
- 23:34Speaker 1: I think having a massively templated practice is significantly huge, and I think you mentioned something that is worth calling out too is that you have an ideal client avatar.
- 23:45Speaker 1: You have a typical customer and when you have, when you're doing the same process for the same type of person, you can get deeper, I think, on your education for that particular niche, that for your team can become experts in that category and area and they're not having to mess around with, like, how to pay for preschool or college funding or stuff that's just kind of outside of the wheelhouse of your ICA.
- 24:08Speaker 1: Okay, and so we deliver the one page financial plan that of course, they fall in love with you and they wanna work with you forever and ever and never.
- 24:14Speaker 1: Amen.
- 24:15Speaker 1: Are we doing new one page plans for them on an ongoing basis, or what is that kind of planning?
- 24:21Speaker 1: Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure what I'm gonna quote look like on an ongoing basis.
- 24:24Speaker 2: Yeah, so we'll use that existing one page financial plan for about the first year to year and a half, depending on how much heavy lifting, right?
- 24:29Speaker 2: Like if they don't have any estate documents and they haven't done their tax returns in three years.
- 24:33Speaker 2: We have a lot of work to do.
- 24:33Speaker 2: If they're mostly caught up within the first year, we're gonna get them up to speed and then we're gonna drop them into our quarterly value add rotation that we're doing for all of our clients across the board, right?
- 24:42Speaker 2: So we're doing beneficiary reviews for everyone at the same time or Roth conversion reviews for everyone at the same time.
- 24:46Speaker 2: So it'll take about a year to drop them into the rotation, just to get caught up on things, and then we're just gonna work from there going forward.
- 24:53Speaker 1: Okay, so you're kinda working in like what we would call themes, or you're kinda not like yes themes, yeah, we're gonna focus practice-wise on a particular topic and we're gonna run everybody through that and then, as we meet, we'll still make sure we're checking things off.
- 25:04Speaker 1: The original plan, Of course yeah, so are they getting when you're doing your value adds?
- 25:08Speaker 1: Are they getting any sort of deliverable?
- 25:10Speaker 1: I'm just so curious, like what that shows.
- 25:13Speaker 1: So you mentioned software earlier.
- 25:15Speaker 1: Do you use any software?
- 25:16Speaker 1: Are you using any projections?
- 25:18Speaker 1: Tell me what's in the secret sauce.
- 25:20Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, let's commit some more blasphemy here.
- 25:22Speaker 2: So I don't use any financial planning software because for retirees it's just a cash flow game, like there's nothing to project forward and they don't care about averages, they care about them right.
- 25:32Speaker 2: So we use guardrails, dynamic distribution rates that I just run out of Excel, and then we mail merge our value adds because I like to keep them really simple.
- 25:38Speaker 2: I do physically mail them to everybody each quarter.
- 25:41Speaker 2: I keep thinking about stopping that, but me and Ken Fisher and he's got all the money in the world, so I'll keep following his lead and mail things, and the extra $1,000 I pay in postage a year is probably worth it.
- 25:51Speaker 2: So, yeah, I physically deliver it, and then that becomes our talking point, or our theme, if you will, for the next surge meeting, right?
- 25:59Speaker 2: So when we get together twice a year, we're saying, hey, here's the big thing we just chatted about, there's no change needed, or there is some change needed, let's take care of it right now.
- 26:07Speaker 1: Yeah, well, so it's interesting.
- 26:08Speaker 1: So I'm gonna ask you this too, because we talk a lot about theme planning and getting into themes and the one question I always get and I'm so curious to see how you answer that- is always like well, but like what if my client has a question that's not related to the theme of this round of meetings?
- 26:24Speaker 2: Then they have to wait forever.
- 26:26Speaker 2: You can never.
- 26:26Speaker 2: No, of course we're gonna start, libby, I know you do this.
- 26:28Speaker 2: You and I can laugh about this.
- 26:29Speaker 2: Right, I'm starting every single client meeting, every prospect meeting with Mr and Mrs Client.
- 26:34Speaker 2: I have several things I wanna go over with you today, but first and foremost, please tell me the questions and concerns that are on your mind.
- 26:39Speaker 2: And, libby, you and I have both had cases where they come in and they say, yeah, I just found out, I have stage 4 cancer.
- 26:43Speaker 2: Cool, let's just slide everything else off the table, that's all we're gonna talk about, right?
- 26:46Speaker 2: A client coming like, hey, my son was just arrested last week for a DUI homicide, all right, well, let's clear everything off the table.
- 26:52Speaker 2: Like that's what we're gonna talk about.
- 26:54Speaker 2: Now, short of that extreme of a thing, if they have a smaller question like, hey, with interest rates being the way that we are, should we do something else?
- 26:59Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about that.
- 27:01Speaker 2: We might only talk about beneficiaries for just a minute instead of the 10 minutes I had planned, but that's fine.
- 27:06Speaker 2: So, yeah, of course we're gonna talk about whatever's on their mind, right?
- 27:09Speaker 1: I love it Well, because then I saw so okay, so we obviously feel very similarly about that.
- 27:13Speaker 1: A lot of things, and then I'll have them say but like so then do you just not do any beneficiary review for them until like it comes around again in four or five years or whenever the next time you go through that that theme is.
- 27:26Speaker 2: Yeah, here's something nine out of 10 times it's the dishwasher rule.
- 27:28Speaker 2: Like we're reviewing it because it needs to be reviewed.
- 27:30Speaker 2: It's very seldom that people need to change their beneficiaries.
- 27:32Speaker 2: And if we looked and we said, hey, for some reason, like custodian has two of your three beneficiaries, hey, we need to take care of that, like that's a priority.
- 27:39Speaker 2: But there's in an hour long meeting you have so much time there's like nothing that's gonna come up, that takes more than an hour to cover or you're covering it wrong, right?
- 27:47Speaker 2: So it might just be like hey, libby, there was two things that came up on your beneficiaries.
- 27:50Speaker 2: I'm gonna send you a follow-up email.
- 27:51Speaker 2: We're gonna need you to sign a form.
- 27:52Speaker 2: Just keep an eye out for that one, and it might be that simple.
- 27:56Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
- 27:56Speaker 1: So it's that simple, huh.
- 28:00Speaker 2: It's pretty rare, Like in some maybe like once a year, I have one where I say you know what, we're gonna need to schedule another meeting to cover this one.
- 28:05Speaker 2: I need to do some more research, or this is more than we can cover.
- 28:07Speaker 2: Short of that, there's always plenty of time.
- 28:11Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's perfect, I love it.
- 28:13Speaker 1: So I always.
- 28:13Speaker 1: It's just so funny because I always, like I can see where advisors get like overly concerned, or I think we tend to think that our clients are more rigid than maybe we give them credit for, or that like, hey, if I'm going to do this process like this is like I have to stick to it and I have to be super rigid about it, without, you know, just kind of giving grace and flexibility to kind of just handle whatever, whatever pops up.
- 28:40Speaker 1: So okay, so I love this, I love, I love everything we've talked about so far, particularly the one page financial plan, and I'll leave all the details about the masterclass.
- 28:49Speaker 1: I think that's so cool that you guys have built something around that.
- 28:53Speaker 1: It's something you know we use in our practice like a different variation.
- 28:56Speaker 1: We were still required by our broker dealer and my eyes are rolling, you know, I know no one can listen and can see that but we were required to give like the big fat document behind it and we just always distilled it down until a one page synopsis and it was once we kind of figured out that hack.
- 29:12Speaker 1: It was such a, it was such an easier conversation, it was such a game changer and I don't know that anyone ever looked at the big, fancy, you know ginormous binder that we were originally required to give anyway.
- 29:24Speaker 2: So I think that's a really cool service that you guys have kind of built out for advisors, so I love that, yeah, I was super fortunate to have randomly met Tom Gao and he showed me how he did it, and so I thought, yeah, I'm just going to keep passing this forward because you're right.
- 29:37Speaker 2: In our industry, the default is like let's do 100 pages and no one knows why it just that's like what we've always done, like the 11th commandment from God or something is like no, it doesn't actually know.
- 29:47Speaker 2: Where does it say that?
- 29:47Speaker 2: If your compliance requires it, maybe like you mentioned, cool, then do a one page abstract ahead of it, but don't lead with 100 pages.
- 29:54Speaker 2: There's no value there.
- 29:56Speaker 1: It is.
- 29:56Speaker 1: That's it.
- 29:57Speaker 1: I think it is like the I have to be the smartest person in the room, I have to be the guru that went up to the mountaintop and brought down like this totally justification of what you're paying me for, yep.
- 30:06Speaker 1: And I think advisors tend to miss the point that it's not the plan that they're paying for, it's the relationship and the ongoing advice that's coming out of that relationship, versus like the thing.
- 30:18Speaker 1: Cause if it's just the thing, they are going to be able to go find somebody who can do it maybe just as well for a whole lot less.
- 30:24Speaker 1: Cause far too many advisors are really genuinely undercharging.
- 30:29Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a whole episode we could do dramatically undercharge.
- 30:32Speaker 2: But think about it as a consumer.
- 30:33Speaker 2: They'd be like when have you ever wished that whatever you received was longer?
- 30:36Speaker 2: Like when you went and saw your doctor.
- 30:38Speaker 2: You're like I wish I wish this, you know, health exam report was 50 pages longer, Cause I don't know what the first 20 paid like.
- 30:43Speaker 2: Never what we really want as a doctor to say, like here's all your blood work.
- 30:46Speaker 2: What you need to do is take more vitamin B12 and you should be good.
- 30:48Speaker 2: Oh, okay, In fact, here's the script for it and actually I already ordered it.
- 30:51Speaker 2: It's out front and come back in three months.
- 30:54Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 30:55Speaker 2: Awesome, Thank you.
- 30:56Speaker 2: That's literally what I pay my concierge doctor for.
- 30:58Speaker 2: Put all the crap.
- 30:59Speaker 2: Just tell me what I need to be doing differently for the next three months and let's rock and roll.
- 31:03Speaker 1: Yeah, perfect, I love it.
- 31:04Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and I'd much rather see him on a consistent, ongoing basis and get a little bit of like bite size, tolerable, easy to implement doses than the big giant like.
- 31:14Speaker 1: We need to spend the next, you know, 47 hours completing all of the things to get this financial plan put in place and in order.
- 31:22Speaker 2: So well, cool.
- 31:23Speaker 1: Well, thank you again for coming and just kind of sharing your expertise, and I always ask this and I do for it this time.
- 31:29Speaker 1: But at the end of every episode I always like to ask for one or two little kind of tips, tricks, hacks, things that you're currently doing inside of your business that help you operate more efficiently.
- 31:41Speaker 1: So it could be a mindset thing, it could be a scheduling thing, it could be an actual tool or software that you're utilizing, but anything that you kind of started implementing, maybe in the last year, that has really just truly improved the operational efficiency of your business.
- 31:56Speaker 2: Yeah, biggest thing, libby and I just endless advocate of this is no message in between team members right Short of the buildings on fire.
- 32:04Speaker 2: Don't send me an instant message, don't send me an email, don't send me a text message.
- 32:08Speaker 2: We have a document, just like a rolling document, where we get together once a week and that's where each of us puts anything we need to talk to the other person about.
- 32:15Speaker 2: Now again, the client calls in their spouse died.
- 32:17Speaker 2: Yep, go ahead and call me for that one.
- 32:18Speaker 2: Short of that, put it on our weekly agenda so that we can chat about it.
- 32:23Speaker 2: It saves so much time and so much focus and so many interruptions by just having it, and I'm tempted to let me just message Colleen real quick and ask her this thing Okay, is it really so important that I need to interrupt whatever she's doing, or can I put it on our list so that when she and I have time, we can take care of it then?
- 32:37Speaker 2: So that would be my number one Never, never, message your team unless the building's on fire.
- 32:41Speaker 1: Okay, I love that.
- 32:42Speaker 1: So you're reviewing this.
- 32:43Speaker 1: So if I ask a question via the document, I'm getting an answer at the same time, every single.
- 32:48Speaker 1: It's like Monday's at 2pm, like we all go through this thing together, or are you updating it and answering questions like throughout the week.
- 32:55Speaker 2: So if I have a question on.
- 32:56Speaker 1: Tuesday when do I get my answer?
- 32:58Speaker 2: Probably not till next Tuesday, right, because Tuesday at 9am is when we have our meetings.
- 33:01Speaker 2: Now, when I go in there to add my notes, when I have things to add in there, sometimes I'll see Colleen's questions and I might just type in an answer real quick, if I know it.
- 33:07Speaker 2: But yeah, we're going to wait till the next week.
- 33:09Speaker 2: Now we need to manage client expectations accordingly and again Colleen has that that liberty.
- 33:13Speaker 2: Like the other day she called me and I'm like this is really weird, why is Colleen?
- 33:16Speaker 2: So I answer the phone she's like hey, listen, series of events.
- 33:18Speaker 2: I need you to talk to a client this afternoon at 2pm.
- 33:20Speaker 2: Okay, cool, that was her discretion.
- 33:22Speaker 2: Like she has that get out of jail card, but she's not going to text me and like, hey, what do you think we should do about Bob and Sue?
- 33:27Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't want to be interrupted about that.
- 33:29Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- 33:31Speaker 1: So tell us, what kind of format is this document Is it like?
- 33:34Speaker 1: Is it like a Google doc or what is the actual like thing that you're using?
- 33:38Speaker 2: Yeah, it's literally just a Google doc and we just we just keep scrolling down to add new sections and then when things get marked done, you just cross a line through them so everybody knows that they're done.
- 33:45Speaker 2: If it's a client specific thing, it has to link over to the CRM, because that has to be tracked in the CRM and then if there's any resources, the link to that resource.
- 33:53Speaker 2: So like, if Colleen wants me to review the client newsletter, there needs to be a link to that so I don't have to go and find it.
- 33:58Speaker 2: But yeah, it's just a, it's just a rolling document, it's really simple.
- 34:02Speaker 1: I love everything.
- 34:03Speaker 1: I love everything about it.
- 34:04Speaker 1: Cool, well, good, well, thanks for that.
- 34:06Speaker 1: I know I know somebody listening will be like oh, thank you, thank you, god, for giving me permission.
- 34:10Speaker 1: You don't have to have 47 huddles a day.
- 34:13Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I will not.
- 34:14Speaker 2: If team members email me, I just delete the email.
- 34:16Speaker 2: I will not respond to a team email ever.
- 34:17Speaker 2: That's just one of my rules.
- 34:18Speaker 2: Never you email me, I'm just going to delete it.
- 34:20Speaker 2: In fact, actually you're going to have to delete it because I don't go in and do email.
- 34:22Speaker 2: So if Colleen emails me, she'll just have to delete her own email, so she's not going to bother emailing me.
- 34:28Speaker 1: How long have you been doing that?
- 34:29Speaker 1: Like the document, like that.
- 34:32Speaker 2: A few years now.
- 34:33Speaker 2: So I know you said something recently, but I always just go back to that Cause it's so like we're so addicted to instant messaging, right, like there's a whole dopamine nation thing going on.
- 34:40Speaker 2: But I don't want to be subjected to that.
- 34:44Speaker 2: Like I'm not beholden to my phone, I'm beholden to clients and productivity.
- 34:48Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely Well, awesome.
- 34:49Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for being here.
- 34:50Speaker 1: I really appreciate, once again, all of your just energy and expertise and, like I mentioned, I will link the masterclass to the one page financial plan in the show notes and share a little bit more about that in the interim after here.
- 35:03Speaker 1: But thank you so much for being here.
- 35:05Speaker 2: Yeah, lili, thanks for having me and thanks for all the great work that you do helping advisor systematize things.
- 35:09Speaker 2: It's just incredible.
- 35:10Speaker 2: I talk to advisors that work with you all the time and they all are raving fans, so thanks for the work that you're doing in the industry.
- 35:15Speaker 1: Yeah, hey, I'll ship rise together.
- 35:17Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
- 35:18Speaker 2: I love it.
- 35:22Speaker 1: Okay, I just love talking with Matt, and one of the reasons why is I love that there are so many ways to do this business.
- 35:29Speaker 1: There's no one right way or one right compensation structure or one right business model.
- 35:36Speaker 1: One of the things that I'm obsessed with is that there's so many different ways to be successful, even if there are commonalities and common trends and common themes, and I love how Matt and I we have very similar philosophies about how to operate a financial planning advisory firm, but such different personalities and different styles and different ways of doing it and ways of teaching it, and I just think I don't know.
- 36:01Speaker 1: I just love it, I love being in this industry and getting to know people like Matt and others, and it's just, I don't know.
- 36:09Speaker 1: There's just.
- 36:10Speaker 1: Please do not let anyone tell you that the way that you're being compensated is wrong or that the structure that your business is whether you're with a broker dealer and RA or a hybrid or a PT, like if you're AUM only or your fee based plans only, or if you have commissions there is no wrong way of doing this.
- 36:29Speaker 1: So release all the things and know that you can build an exceptional business wherever you are, and that there are clients praying.
- 36:38Speaker 1: They're literally out there praying for someone doing what you do in the actual way that you specifically do it.
- 36:45Speaker 1: So, anyways, if you are interested in learning more about the OnePage Financial Plan Masterclass, I have partnered with Matt and the Perfect RAA and I have got a link for you guys and I believe it's special pricing, if I'm not wrong.
- 37:00Speaker 1: I will link that for you in the show notes and I will have that linked out on the resources tab of theefficientadvisorcom if you guys wanna find out and learn more.
- 37:09Speaker 1: I think OnePage Financial Plans are just a really solid arrow to have in your quiver, a really great tool to have in your arsenal.
- 37:18Speaker 1: Depending on how you do business and what your offers are, might be worth something exploring for you and your team.
- 37:24Speaker 1: Anyways, hope you guys have an amazing rest of the week.
- 37:27Speaker 1: As you know, I hang out on LinkedIn and over in the Efficient Advisor community on Facebook.
- 37:32Speaker 1: Have an awesome week and we'll talk to you soon.
- 37:35Speaker 1: I'll see you guys next week.