Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 194: Ideas to Implement - Do I Need To Wine and Dine My Best Clients? My Unpopular Opinion

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194: Ideas to Implement - Do I Need To Wine and Dine My Best Clients? My Unpopular Opinion · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome back.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Every week, I try to create an episode that is a follow-up to the longer podcast that typically comes out on Tuesday.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Right, I want something that is short, sweet and all about the action steps, the super tactical stuff that you can literally implement tomorrow from the longer podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: So every week, my objective is to distill the episode down into a couple of bullet points that I want you to act on immediately to make a big impact in your business.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: I want you to take what you've learned and actually finish it, go do the thing.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: And if you're new here, welcome.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: I am the host of the Efficient Advisor, libby Grawey, and I built 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 so that I could be a super present mom, wife, friend, sister, daughter, community member, church member all the things and all the hats that we wear and I'm really just here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do the exact same thing for yourself to help you take immediate action on the most tactical strategies for scaling, organizing and, let's be honest, the most important creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: We are about to transform your practice and it's time to take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love, a business and a life that you love.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: And before I dive into kind of wrapping up or distilling this episode down, I just wanted to remind you of a couple of things.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of people doing the donation for the St Jude family tree that we've created for you.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: So if you don't know what that is, you can go back and listen to previous episodes where I talk about creating a family tree and, to be clear, it's episode 146.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: I don't know why I said go back and find it Like hello, nobody has time for that.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: It's episode number 146 and it's called how to use a family tree template to stay organized and deepen your client relationships.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: And in that episode I dive way into kind of the how, the what, the where to store it, how to use it, all of the things.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: And then the feedback from the episode was so strong that we decided to.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Normally I reserve most of my templates for clients that coach with us or advisors that are in our group coaching program, but we decided to make it available for a donation to one of my favorite charities, which is St Jude.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: So that still exists.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: You can head out to the website and go to the resources tab and you can make a donation to St Jude and receive a template from me.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: That's the family tree template with all of the things that you can type over it in a PDF.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: You can print on it and write it in hand.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: You do you boo boo whichever way makes the most sense to you, but go ahead and listen to that episode one 46 as kind of a companion piece to that template.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: But that template is still available and 100% of the proceeds go to St Jude's.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: So thank you, thank you for your support.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: The other thing I wanted to just give you a quick reminder is, if you haven't already, now that tax season is over, it's not too soon to start preparing your processes and up-level your tax acumen for the rest of this year.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: So we want to be integrating tax planning into our financial advisory practices and build processes around that, and I'd love to invite you to attend the Retirement Tax Services Summit in Tempe, arizona, this September.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: You can find a link for that in the show notes.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: You can also go out to the website and right there at the very top of the main page of my website, there's a little banner where you can click on it to get more information and if you're clicking through my link to book the event, of course I'll be speaking there.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: We are also tracking everyone who comes in through me and we're going to do a special event for you guys while we're there.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: So we're going to.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: I don't know what it's going to be yet.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: In fact, I keep saying that and now I'm like, hmm, we actually probably need to sit down and really figure that out.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, not that September's here, but it'll be here before we know it.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: Does anyone else feel like summer's already over when it literally just started?
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Uh, as of the day I'm recording this, my kids are officially out of school and I feel like I'm already looking at August and booking things and it's feeling kind of crazy.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: But anyways, I digress.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: So if you're really wanting to increase your tax acumen, become a better tax planner, hang out with me and we'll do some sort of whether it's speed coaching or just a hangout general Q and a.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I'd love to get together with you in Tempe, arizona, so make sure you check out the link and it's one of the most.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: In my opinion, it's one of the most affordable conferences.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: It's super affordable and I don't get paid to speak at it.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: Like, I think it's that great of a conference that I am willing to go out there to spend my time to speak to you guys about tax planning, because I really, really support what Steven is doing over at RTS, and it would have been like such a blessing for me when I was running my advisory practice, so I'd love to invite you to join us out there for that.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, enough of that, so let's dive into recapping this week's episode.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: So my main objective with this week was really just to take some of the freaking pressure off right.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: There's so much pressure, I think, as an advisor, to be doing all of the things, and I've said this before but you know we're all on the inside right, we're on LinkedIn, we follow other you know kind of celebrity advisors, if you will.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: We are in study groups and masterminds.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Our broker dealers or RIAs are highlighting best practices of some of the top advisors and there could just be so much pressure to do all the things and to feel like, if you're not doing all of the things, that you're doing something wrong or that you're running a subpar client experience.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: And, as a expert in the area of client experience, we are wanting to build interactions with our clients that are really, really meaningful and they can be done within business hours.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: And it can be done from just a professional standpoint.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: You do not have to be best friends, you do not have to wine and dine, you do not have to do all of these things that sometimes can feel like the extras that just drag you down and overwhelm you.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Now, I'm not saying those are bad, right, I'm not saying those are bad things, but what we're wanting to do, and kind of what we talked about inside of the episode, was this experience that I had with my own mastermind and feeling like gosh, the the season of life that I was in just felt big and heavy and hard.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: And having small children, trying to run a business, you know, trying to be intentional about my marriage, like there was just a lot going on that I didn't feel like I had lots of nights and weekends to be doing.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: You know, one-on-one dinners with my clients, or taking out my best clients to dinner and having them invite a friend.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: While those are all wonderful things to do, and I'm definitely, definitely wanting to reiterate that if you are doing those things, I'm not saying stop doing them.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: They're wonderful, wonderful things to do.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: I'm speaking to the advisor that's feeling like they just can't do it all and that they can barely do the things that they need to get done on a daily basis, including soccer practice and baseball games and volunteering at school, like literally all of the things.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: And what I realized for myself was that I didn't have to do those things.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: They were great, they were beautiful, they were extras, and you can build and I did it, so I can say this right so you can build a 100% referral only planning practice without doing those things all the time.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Now, of course, like we want to have a client experience that's strategic and thoughtful, but really the absolute best form of marketing and the best form of referral getting is to do an absolute killer job at the thing that your clients hired you and engaged you to do so being an exceptional financial planner with intentional client interaction, with an ongoing service model where you are serving your ideal client avatar in the way that they need to be served, doing it consistently and having a team to help you scale.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: That is enough, and you know in the episode I get into a couple of different exercises how we talk about every interaction with your client being an opportunity to deepen the relationship or being an opportunity to detract from the relationship.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: We talked about measuring things on an impact scale and I want to introduce one more exercise to you today.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: So this is a very rudimentary exercise, but thinking about every interaction that your client has with you or your team, can you put it next to okay?
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: So picture like three smiley faces.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Right, there's the smiley face, there's that meh face that has just like a sideways, like a sideways mouth, you know, like a straight line, and then there's the sad face.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And if you look at and what we do inside of our group coaching program is we really go through every single task and we look at every single email that goes out to our client, the templates that are we're using for pre-meeting emails, post-meeting emails, calendar reminders, uh, client follow-ups application, like every single interaction you have with your client, if you had to give it a smiley face, a meh face or a sad face, we want to move all of our interactions into the smiley face category.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: So what can you do with each client interaction to make it a smiley face and honestly, doing a great job, being a great financial planner, delivering exceptional value to your clients, can be done without all of the whining and the dining and the extras.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: And I share that because, you know, at the beginning of the episode I shared, you know, just kind of that story where I was feeling super defeated and frustrated and like I wasn't enough, like my clients were getting a subpar experience because I wasn't taking my top 10 clients out to dinner twice a year and I wasn't meeting everybody for coffees and lunches and breakfasts and all these things.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: And I just wanted to take that feeling because of an advisor kind of brought this up to me.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: She's like I just I can't do it all and I'm barely, you know, able to get dinner on the table for my family.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: It just, you know, was kind of going through it and I thought, you know, if she's going through it and I went through it, there's probably a ton of you, especially parents of small children, that are going through it too and, comparing yourself to people who are in other seasons of life, have different priorities potentially than you have, um, maybe have a different type of marriage or relationship with their kids or relationship with work.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: You know it might be an unhealthy relationship you never know, um but just not comparing yourself to those other people and really just focusing on the things that you are doing for your clients within business hours and making sure that you're doing them very, very well so that they're high impact activities.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: And if you feel like you're stretched for time or that, you know, gosh, you're just living in a state of overwhelm, playing catch up on nights and weekends, going back and really looking at everything through that difficulty impact lens that I talk about in the longer episode and really looking at areas to redeploy your time or your team's time.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Get rid of things that have low impact, even if they's time.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Get rid of things that have low impact, even if they're nice.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Get rid of things that have low impact and try to redeploy those hours towards something significantly more impactful.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: So, again, like the dentist, as long as they're doing what they said they were going to do, they're reminding you, they're engaging with you.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Their team is nice, they're delivering an exceptional experience.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: They're reminding you they're engaging with you.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Their team is nice, they're delivering an exceptional experience.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: They're not selling you on a bunch of crap that you don't need.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: You feel really good referring them to somebody else.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: So go back, take a listen to the longer episode.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: But my kind of marching orders for you this week would be looking, doing those two exercises right, looking at everything through that difficulty impact lens.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: And what are you actually doing on a client experience and how do you, year over year, as a KPI, how a key performance indicator for those of you who I know will say what's a KPI how do we actually measure the impact that we're delivering for our clients and how do we improve that year over year?
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: And then, looking at it through that meh, smiley face, sad face lens, and how do we just improve every interaction that we currently have with our clients, whether that's them calling in and how our team is answering and responding it's what happens when they email us, it's the templates that we're emailing out, the contact that we're having while they're, you know, process, while their business is pending, you know, or their applications are in process, all of that kind of stuff, every interaction that you're having with your client and just focus on moving that from a sad or meh to a happy face and you will see a positive impact and you will see the results of that and you don't have to kill yourself outside of normal business hours doing all of those wonderful extras If it's just not the season of life for you.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: And I'll be honest, I didn't do it for a really long period of time.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: We did do some, uh, what I called white glove referral client events super amazing.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: I'll probably talk about this sometime here on the podcast at some point, cause they were super impactful, really, really high ROI.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: You know that was the number one way that we got referrals.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: But I didn't do all of that other stuff and, frankly, when my kids were school age and as they got older, I still didn't do it because it wasn't necessary.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: We were getting the right referrals from the right clients because what they engaged us to do was be an exceptional financial planner and we were focused on that and nothing else.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, I hope that's helpful for you guys.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: I'd love to engage with you more out in the efficient advisor community over on Facebook or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Thank you guys so much.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Go back and listen to episode number 146 about the family tree and grab your copy for a donation to St Jude.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much and have a great rest of your week.