Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 146: How to Use a Family Tree Template to Stay Organized and Deepen the Client Relationship

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146: How to Use a Family Tree Template to Stay Organized and Deepen the Client Relationship · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: In the ever evolving world of all of your clients, trying to keep everything organized, all the details about every family.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: It's a lot, and maintaining and organizing client data is really, really important.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: And if you listen to the show regularly, if you know me, you know I am always on the hunt for what is the simplest way to do something, and today I'm gonna share with you a super simple template that we used in my practice.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: A family tree and I know what you're thinking like family tree genealogy, all of the things yeah, that's pretty much it.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: But what a family tree can do in this super simple template is it can really help you better understand your clients, spot more opportunities and really strengthen the client relationship.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: So in this episode I'm gonna share with you whether you are a established financial advisor or you are just getting started out.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna help you understand how to implement this super easy, super simple tool and leverage it to the fullest.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about how I used it in the practice, mistakes that I made, how to create this template, how to update it, where to keep it, all the things.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: So financial advisors stay tuned.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: We are going to give you a clear roadmap of how to use a simple family tree template to keep your clients information updated, organized and optimized for success.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: And look, I know you're here listening to this episode because you care a lot about growing your financial advisory practice in a way that allows you to have energy left over for your family, for your friends.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: And, oh my gosh, if you'd imagine having left over energy for yourself and still having that dream business.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: And you know the business.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about, the one that you are running, instead of it running you.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: And if you're new to the Efficient Advisor, I'm Libby Graywee.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: I started from scratch, built and sold by age 37, a 100% referral-only planning practice that I grow 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 who wasn't tethered to her phone during soccer games all weekend and on her computer at night.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: I'm really being able to be present for the people in my life that mattered most.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So I'm here just to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to give you tools and strategies to take immediate action on the most important things that you need to do to scale, organize and create less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So we are about to transform your practice, one super simple tool at a time, and it's time to take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: So let's dive into the Family Tree Template.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, so one of the things that I get asked about the most when I'm out at a conference or doing work for a company and doing a keynote or speaking to a roomful of advisors, one of the questions that gets asked the most after hearing my intro is okay, tell us about how you became a 100% referral-only planning practice.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: This referral-only thing is a big deal to most people, as it should be right.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: We all want.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: That holy grail of a prospect is a referral, an ideal client referral that's coming to us, and one of the ways that we can get more referrals.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Well, really, I say the basis to getting good referrals is being a really, really good financial planner, so doing a really good job, delivering a ton of value to your clients, doing things that are very, very impactful with your time for your best clients, and a big piece of processes, and we talk about systems and processes and it's not really that sexy of a topic, but part of every single process needs to be an opportunity to create more human-to-human connection.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: So everything that we're doing inside of our business whether it's the nuts and bolts paperwork of getting money rolled over from Fidelity to Schwab, or whether it's taking the application for a life insurance policy, or whatever it is that you're doing there's always a layer of opportunity that exists in that process.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: So if we're thinking about processes, just as taking really good notes or filling out forms or taking applications, we're totally missing the boat.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: There is an opportunity in every process that exists inside of your business to build a human-to-human connection and to use that process as a way to connect deeper with your clients.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And so one of the things that we found in our office and we've done this through a couple of different tools is making our clients feel like they are the only client that we have and that we remember every single detail about them.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: And what's so funny to me is, when you have a really good process in place, it feels like this to your clients.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: We want our clients to think.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: When they came in the door, they would always comment to me about what an amazing memory that I have, and it makes me laugh because if you know me, I actually have a terrible memory and you know when you first start off in your business and you're maybe you know six months in, a year in, maybe even two, three years in, and you have, you know, a handful of really good clients.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: You can remember every detail about everybody.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Yet as you start to accumulate more clients and get more involved and have a bigger book and you're going deeper, those little details at least for me and a lot of advisors that I work with started to get a little muddied.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: And every time I built a process or built a template, most of the time it came from one of two things.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: It was either I was spending too long on something I knew I needed to make it faster, or I looked like an idiot and the family tree template came out of the ladder right.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: I can distinctly remember sitting across from a client and her coming in and me kind of like scrambling in my head to think about like who was still alive in her family, who she, you know how many kids did she have, grandkids, like all the things.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: And I remember saying, hey, how is your mom doing?
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: And, gosh, this is so embarrassing to admit this to you guys, but she looked at me and she was like, oh, remember, my mom passed away a year and a half ago and you did that death claim for me.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: And it was like, oh, gut punch.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: I felt like such an idiot Cause, yes, her mom had died and I had actually processed all of the paperwork.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: Her mom had been a client of my broker dealer and I had to pass.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: I did all the paperwork and I knew that.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: And it was just one of those things that I felt so bad, not only because I missed that and then it looked like I didn't remember even doing the work for her, but also like way, way to go, libby, way to bring up something really, really emotional for that client in the beginning of that meeting in such an abrupt, kind of terrible way, like I remember that her mom was sick, but I had forgotten the detail, you know, minor detail that she had passed away and thus was born the family tree, right.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: So I immediately went to work saying how can I make sure that I don't make that level of a bonehead mistake again?
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: And effective data management is so crucial for financial advisors.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Unorganized data can lead to missed opportunities.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: It can lead to mistakes and in my case, right, it actually led to impacting the client relationship in a negative way, in the opposite way of what we work so, so hard to do in my business.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: So, like I said, thus was created the family tree.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: So, in the context of a financial advisory practice, what we used the family tree for was a couple of things.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: We used it for visualizing client relationships and better data organization.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: So, for me, if it's hard, if it's complicated, if it takes too long, I know myself well enough that I'm just not going to do it, or if I do it, it's certainly not going to be consistently done if there's a lot of complexity.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: So we created a very, very simple family tree to help me solve some of these issues.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: So, if you can kind of picture this with me right, I know this is the hard part about a podcast and always talking about templates, but picture like a little flow chart, like what you would picture for a family tree, right?
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: So we had our clients in the center.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: So if they were single, if they were married, if they were just in a partnership, we had them kind of in the center with lines going up from each of them for their parents, and Then we had lines coming out the sides of them for their siblings, and then we had lines coming out the bottom of them for their children and then, underneath their children, their grandchildren.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: And when I first started off with this template, it was where I would sketch it out with the client.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: And this is so easy to do.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: You guys, we could do this as part of our re-onboarding process.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: One year it was just part of our agenda item is hey.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: After I made this mistake, it was hey, let's just get.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: We just want to capture a family tree.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: We want to make sure we know who's who and keep it all organized in our heads and make sure we understand who your VIPs are, right, who are the very important people in your life client.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: So we would sit down with the clients and I'd sketch it out on a piece of paper and then the next step was to take it and put it into.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: We had at the time a PowerPoint or a Canva where my team would go in and then actually type in the name and information, and we had lots of ancillary information.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: I'll get to that in just a second.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: And then we realized that just took too much time.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: It was too complicated, it was too hard.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: There had to be a simpler way.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: So we just created a basic template that had all of those boxes and lines I was just sharing with you, and whether or not they had one kid or they had four kids or they had three kids or they have 12 grandkids, it didn't matter.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: We had one template that we used and we would just print it off and handwrite all of the names on there during the meeting.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: So I would have it literally sitting in front of me and I'd be like let's fill this in together.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: I'm going to make sure I've got all your VIPs and we would sit there and fill it in, and so previously then I would hand it off, my team would go, type it into the thing and then save it in the client file and print it off and put it in our paper file, because it was one of those things for me that I wanted to be able to peek at very easily before a client walked in the door.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: So even though we did digital files for our clients, I still had a paper file for everybody that I could open up and very quickly glance at a couple of key pieces of information.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: So we had what we called our client overview sheet, and if you're in our group coaching program you're going to get all these templates that I'm talking about.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: But we had a client overview sheet that had all of our key data that we wanted to be able to really quickly look at for our clients, like marginal bracket, agi, income, age they told us they wanted to retire.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: We had a bunch of very specific things to me that I wanted to be able to access very, very quickly.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: So a client said anything, I could very quickly look at their marginal bracket and what we're currently withholding on their distributions or whatever.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: So stuff like that.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: And then we also had another family tree.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: So before the client walked in the door or before I walked into the conference room where they were seated, I could just quickly glance at it and pull a name or two, make sure before I said anything I could sit there and kind of look through it Like if I'm sitting across the desk from a client before I say anything about their parents, I'm just going to kind of open my file and peek really quickly, because most of our stuff we did digitally and we had my computer up on a screen in the conference room.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: So I didn't want to be like pulling up their family tree in front of them before I asked a question about their mom or dad.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: So I wanted to be able to peek at it.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: So I wanted a paper copy, but then I also wanted a digital copy inside of their digital folder for myself and for their team, just from a client management perspective.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: So I don't want you to overthink this.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be this fancy canva template that you update and type into every time.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: But what we were looking for was basic information on who, what and where.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: So for everybody in the family I wanted to capture who were they, how were they related?
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: What did they do professionally?
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: If they had a profession, if they worked outside the home or if they were stay-at-home parents or if they were retired or whatever.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: I wanted to know where they lived.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, if they were beneficiaries or they were involved in the estate plan of our clients.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: We wanted to have just their data births on there.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: So that was some of the basic information that we were looking for and, like I said before, I would walk into the conference room, I'd open the file and peek at it really quickly and look at the agenda that we had created for them.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: And usually, as I was creating agendas, I'd look at the Family Tree too and just make sure I would ask very specific questions.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: So imagine this when you're walking in and you look at the Family Tree and you're like, oh my gosh, that's right, their daughter just had a new baby.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: And instead of walking in and just saying, oh my gosh, how's that new grand baby, to be like, hey, do you have any pictures of little Jack?
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: We have been dying to see photos of him ever since you guys told us he was born.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: So there's two things happening here, right?
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: There's capturing this information.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Everybody on your team needs to be brought into the loop of what is the purpose of this Family Tree and how do we update it.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: And, as our clients tell us information, capturing that and then updating the Family Tree accordingly.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: So same thing we would put tasks and reminders into our tasks management system.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: If a client mentioned that they were gonna be having a grand baby soon, that we would put a task in there to check in and see if the grand baby has arrived, if they have any pictures.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: All those things go so far with your clients.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: That extra level of caring is the step that most advisors miss.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I firmly believe that it's really not hard.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Most advisors can do all the things right.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: We can show up and be good planners, we can be on time, we can be professional, we have access to pretty much the exact same investments, pretty much the same stock market, pretty much the same products and services that exist out there.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: So how do we really differentiate ourselves?
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: And the biggest differentiator to me, in my opinion, and the reason that I do think that is kind of the core backbone of how we became 100% referral only is client relationship and client experience literally being everything.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: So the idea of going that extra mile to capture that data, to have your team capturing that data, to keep that data updated and to do it in a way that's super simple and easy to execute was really really imperative and important to my practice and something I wanna make sure that I mentioned, as I kind of talked about.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, like here's what we were doing in the beginning we were writing it by hand, then my team would go in and type it and make it all fancy and then they'd print out a fancy copy and save a fancy copy and, like I said, it was just taking too long.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: We weren't being consistent with it, so we started just writing on it by hand.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: We created a standard template, we started writing on it by hand and then scanning it into our digital filing system.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: And so what would happen?
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Like, let's say, we got the email from a client saying oh you know so, and so my sister just had a whatever.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: Whatever, we had a place, we used Salesforce for our CRM.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: We would just plug in Salesforce into a certain box that we could then run a set before the next meeting.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: Any details like, oh you know so and so mentioned when she called in that her sister was just diagnosed with something, something that way we could make sure we captured that in our next meeting.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: So my team would take this Intel and we had, like I said, we had a little place in Salesforce that we would put all of our client Intel and then between meetings right, that's where all the information went.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: So before our next meeting, when I would sit down and be doing my agenda prep, I could look at all of the interactions that my team had with that client related to Intel between the last time I saw them and this time, and then I'd also look at the family tree, and my team was trained that, hey, if somebody mentioned something about someone passing away, about someone having a baby, about someone getting divorced, about somebody getting married, all those things, they knew that their job was to pull up that family tree and digitally type it on in.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Or someone changed jobs or whatever, they would digitally type it in or they could just open the paper file and hand write it on that page and then any updates would just get scanned in.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: And again, we weren't over the top about it.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: I didn't wanna spend a ton of time on it, but I did think it was a really helpful tool for keeping us all super duper organized.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: And so if you're like, look, hey, that's kind of a cool idea, I'd love to do a family tree, how do I implement that?
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: So it would be creating the simple template and then training and educating your team on what you're doing and then integrating that family tree into your existing client data management system.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: So if you want to find some sort of family tree software and make it all fancy, you do, you boo, boo, you do that.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: That's a wonderful and I think that's amazing.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Or you could do it something super simple, like I did, and just have it on a friggin' piece of white paper and I would suggest doing it in some sort of a re-onboarding setting or just making it part of your agenda for that season of your business.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Like, hey, we're just going through and updating everybody's family tree.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: We just wanna make sure we can keep it all organized as our financial world becomes more complex.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: We wanna just make sure we're keeping track of who all the very important people in your lives are.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: And our clients loved that language of like hey, we wanna know who are your VIPs and we wanna be able to kinda have a basic idea of who they are, where they are and what they're up to.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Right, because that matters to us, because you matter to us.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: So I don't want you to overthink like how you're gonna get this information.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: I don't want you to think you have to have someone on your team create like a quarterly project where they have to go into every client's file and look at their beneficiaries and try to figure all of this information out.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Now, it's not a bad idea, if you're going to be presenting the family tree, to have a rough idea of, like who's in their world, because you don't want to be staring at your best client going do you have children?
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: So maybe you're going to want to pull some of that data ahead of time, or you're going to have a rough idea in your head because, especially for your top clients, you could also send it to them and have them fill it out.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: There's a million different ways to do this, but don't overthink it.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: So the action steps for this episode would pretty much be as follows Create the template, figure out how you're going to get the information on it, figure out where you're going to store it, where you're going to keep it, how you're going to update it or keep it updated, and then how are you going to implement it and how are you going to use it.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: So for me, it was peaking at it right before I walked in the room and kind of refreshing myself.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: You might have a slightly different methodology that you're going to use when you're implementing your family tree, but that's really it.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's super, super simple and it's one of those things like I do.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: I get a little imposter syndrome sometimes when I talk about really simple templates that we use or really simple processes that we use, because sometimes it's like it just seems like that's too easy and it doesn't even make sense.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: But the advisors so when we used to host our live workshop and advisors from all over the country would come in and we train them on our tools and systems, it was so fascinating to me how family tree was one of the easiest things for advisors to one implement.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: But two, it was one of the things that advisors said they just felt so good once they implemented that, once they had that on track.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: And even if you have a family tree, it's not do.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: There is no shame in your game to bust that puppy out every couple of years with your clients and just say, hey, I just want to take a look at this.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Do I have it all right?
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: Is everything you know?
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Is Nick still in the Air Force in California?
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Is Jamie still you know?
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Blah, blah, blah.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And just getting that information from them, you don't look like an idiot.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: In fact, if anything, it helps enhance your client's perspective of you and this level of human to human caring that we talk about so much here at the Efficient Advisor.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Anyways, I hope you guys found this episode helpful.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: I will keep trying to bring you episodes here on very simple tools and simple solutions that you can literally implement in your business tomorrow if you wanted to.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: So I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: I'd love to chat with you more about family trees over in the Efficient Advisor community on Facebook.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: We have about 1800 advisors in there, and it has just become such a great place for people to ask questions, to gain insight, to share templates and resources.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: You guys are the best, and I also hang out over on LinkedIn, so if there is anything that I can do for you, please don't hesitate to ask and I will talk to you guys soon.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Have an amazing rest of your week.