This is The Perfect RIA, in case you didn’t know. Bringing you all the strategies to help your business grow. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Sit back and listen in while you feel the beat. Another myth bites the dust…

Micah Shilanski: Welcome back to another amazing episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I am your cohost Micah Shilanski, and with me, as usual, is the legendary Matthew Jarvis. How’s it going, Matthew?

Matthew Jarvis: Micah, I’m doing good. And, in fact, out here in Seattle, we have sunshine and there in Alaska, you don’t have sunshine. So…

Micah Shilanski: Well, you know what? I have heard that in the next three to four months, the sunshine will return though. So, there’s something to look forward to.

Matthew Jarvis: Though, in fairness to Micah, I think you’re very quickly leaving for your annual pilgrimage to Hawaii because Alaska and Hawaii on every map are next to each other. And so…

Micah Shilanski: That’s right. It’s a quick trip. I don’t know why it takes the plane six hours on a jet, it should be just a puddle-jumper in my 180 but apparently, it’s not. But yes, we’re going to take a quick little pilgrimage to the land of sun.

Micah Shilanski: It’s actually really funny because all of our clients bring it up to us in a really good way. Everybody knows we go to Maui in January, and so, our clients will ask us about that. Say, “Oh Micah, when are you leaving? When are you going to come back? What are you going to do over there?” So, it’s a fun conversational piece.

Micah Shilanski: And the reason I bring this up, clients don’t care that you go out for vacation. Clients don’t care that you spend a month in Maui that’s there, as long as they know they’re taken care of, which is kind of the focus of what we wanted to talk about today, right, Jarvis? About how to beat the markets. Because if you’re not beating in the markets, you have a problem.

Matthew Jarvis: Clients will care. If you’re out of the office and you’re not beating the market … No, we do want to talk about investments, which is oddly a topic we haven’t covered much in The Perfect RIA podcast, and that’s intentional. But coming off of 2019, when the market’s had another phenomenal year, we want to talk about that. Specifically, we’ll use the scenario of a client comes in and says, “Micah, Matthew, I see that my investments are up,” let’s call it 16%, just to pick a number out of the air. For disclaimer purposes, these are purely hypothetical numbers, do not reflect the performance of actual investments, blah, blah, blah. So the client says, “I’m up 16%. I see that the market was up 20%. Why am I paying you a fee? And Joe at the water cooler tells me he was up 47% this year. So, Micah, what the heck’s going on here? You’re going to Hawaii and meanwhile, I’m underperforming the market.”

Micah Shilanski: Well, this only happens to Jarvis’ clients, number one, right? We never have these conversations. No, but this is a great thing to bring up, and it’s setting expectations all through the client process. And Jarvis, I want to go back to something you said as you were first starting to talk, was we haven’t talked about investments that much on our podcast. And I would argue and say we have talked about them in the appropriate amount of quantity that they should be talked about in relationship to your client meetings. That means not very much.

Micah Shilanski: So, live by the sword, die by the sword from that concept, but we can’t control markets. We can’t control when things go up and down. Those are things that are completely outside of our control. Or, if you have figured out how to control them, please contact me. I’d be delighted to hire you to figure that out.

Micah Shilanski: Since in our mere mortal ways, we can’t control that, we have to set our expectations with our clients so when they’re talking to Joe at the water cooler, who’s always bragging that the market, that he’s making tons of money … Doesn’t tell you about any of his losses, only tells you about the things that went up in value that he owns. And the client, all they do is hear that. “Here’s Joe, he’s the same age as I, he’s getting ready to retire, he’s getting 47%. Why are we only doing 16?” You should be ahead of that question and not behind it. And when you’re behind that question with one client, you need to step back and say, “Am I behind this with all of my clients?” and reset expectations, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Matthew Jarvis: It’s important to remember that it’s not just Joe at the water cooler. Unless your clients are literally living under a rock, they are being bombarded on a daily, possibly hourly, basis about outperforming the market, and this sort of notion that the markets can be predicted in some kind of way. And every time a magazine comes out with, “Here’s the 10 funds,” or, “Here’s the astrology rating,” or, “Here’s what our manager thinks about why the market’s going to do what,” … And by the way, I tell this to clients, I say, “Hey, anybody who’s doing that is claiming the ability to predict the future. Do you know anyone who can predict the future? The weatherman can’t even get the future right within the week.” But clients are being bombarded by this constantly and we’ve got to appreciate that, and one of our jobs is to reset that expectation of reality, if you will.

Micah Shilanski: So, one of the things, and let’s talk a little bit about how we, maybe we should talk a little bit how we wrapped up our 2019 meetings. How do we phrase, how did we put in perspective the phenomenal client performance that most clients received in their accounts because the markets were up so well. Apparently, not the client that got 16% because that was horrible. But the clients that got a good rate of return, how do you put that in perspective for this year? And then how do you put it in perspective kind of going forward with clients, Jarvis? How would you have those conversations?

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, there’s a lot to tackle on that. I guess I would mention first … And actually, quick teaser, we’re going to do a webinar on Thursday, January 30th, specific about doing your client review meetings for the first quarter. I just mention that because I probably only spend 10% of my client meeting times … So, if I have an hour meeting, we’re spending 6 to 10 minutes looking at the accounts themselves because that’s proportionate to the focus. The rest of the time is spent on the planning process, on their cashflow, all of those things.

Matthew Jarvis: But for clients, I’m always talking about our war chest, right? Micah, you talk about the income buckets. Same idea. I say, “Hey, boy, this chunk of money is not designed to perform with the market. It’s designed for safety.” So, I’m not rubbing that in, I’m putting that up again and again because with that bucket, we’re never going to beat the market. Other than maybe in down years, I suppose that’ll happen. But I have to keep everything in perspective for the client and remind them again and again why everything is the way that it is.

Micah Shilanski: We do the same thing. I bring everything back to cash flow. Cash flow is the heartbeat of retirement, I say that very frequently. If you have good cashflow to do the things you want to do, life is great. The job with retirement is making sure you have that cash flow. Whether we’re building towards it or whether you’re living in retirement, we really got to focus on that cash flow.

Micah Shilanski: And what I like about focusing on it is two-fold. Number one, it’s something that clients can actually control, and if they have bad cashflow, this can be detrimental to their retirement planning. I really like that’s going to be there. Not only can they control it, but they can now have a sense of confidence and assurity that says, “All right, now that I got this war chest, I got this income bucket, as long as I stick within this cash flow, I’m going to be good. Now, I can ignore the noise. Now, I can ignore all the solicitation out there.”

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, I completely agree. Micah, and I’d be curious to your thoughts on this, it’s really important as an advisor that you’re ready for these kinds of conversations and that you don’t become defensive. I see a lot of advisors get defensive. The client says, “Hey, why didn’t we beat the S&P 500?” “Whoa! The S&P 500, that’s an arbitrary index. And that wasn’t your goal.” As soon as you get defensive about it, the client is going to naturally get suspicious. And so, if a client says… and Micah, go ahead, in a second you can share what you say when that one comes up. When a client asks me, “Hey Matthew, how did we do relative to the S&P 500?” I say, “Great news. The portion of your account that’s invested like the S&P 500 did exactly what the S&P 500 did. Because we indexed, it’s perfect like that. The portion that wasn’t, whose goal wasn’t to follow the S&P 500, did something totally different, and we can look at that.”

Micah Shilanski: I like to ask a leading question before that. If someone asked me that, “How did we do compared to the markets?” I like to ask them why that matters or, “Tell me more about that.” I kind of steal that one from you and I go back and forth between those. Depending on my client relationship, it’s either, “Tell me more about that.” I want to hear what are they looking for? Because when the client says, “How did we do compared to the markets? How did we do compare to the S&P 500?”, do they really know what that means? Or are they just saying, “Oh, well, Bob got XYZ, how did we do? I see the markets are up. How are we taken care of?”

Micah Shilanski: I don’t really feel, with my clients, their concern is, “What was my direct correlation to the S&P 500, my investment return?” Their concern is, “Am I on track for retirement?” And, maybe, they’re articulating this in a different way. So, before I jump on answering that question, I want to stop and find out what’s the real question that’s going to be there. And if a client’s only concern is how are they doing compared to the S&P 500, and that is their sole concern, that is it, that is the only thing they want to talk about, not all the other stuff in financial planning, they are not an ideal fit for our firm. We can’t really help them.

Micah Shilanski: So, these are ways that we can articulate that, “Tell me what that means to you, tell me more about that,” whatever question sequence you’d like to get to the root of what the real question is.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, yeah. A favorite quote of mine that I use with great caution, reserve. It’s sort of like one of my last resorts. Nick Murray has a great one of “Mr. and Mrs. Client, if we beat the market by 2% every year, or whenever you feel like is a good number there, and you still run out of money, would that be a victory?” “Well, no, of course that wouldn’t be a victory.” “Okay, so let’s focus,” Micah, to your point, “Let’s focus on not running out of money. Let’s focus on not over-paying the government.”

Matthew Jarvis: But we want to be ready for those, and Micah, I think your point is really valid. If somebody, if their true, heart of heart goals is, “I want to beat the market,” unless that’s your value proposition, they’re not a good fit and you need to be the first one to escort them off of the ark, if you will.

Micah Shilanski: I am convinced. I believe. I am committed. I do this personally. The same thing I recommend to my client is the same thing I do to myself. Whether it’s a cash flow strategy, whether it’s a risk management, estate planning, retirement income, taxes, investment planning. Exactly. Everything I recommend to my client, that’s the first thing I ask myself, “What would I recommend to a client?” and I go do the same thing.

Micah Shilanski: So, when it comes to the investments of a client being concerned with how they’re invested or what should they invest in, I can say with confidence because I’m putting my own money behind it. My client strategies, all of them are based on this. These models work over time. We’ve got a good track record of being in business since the ’80s, of making these things happen. “This is why we’re recommending this strategy to you. It’s not the most sexiest thing in the world, but it’s going to work,” and I’m so convinced in that, that conviction comes through in my client relationships and meetings and they want to do the same thing.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah. A couple of thoughts came up as you were explaining that. One is something that I always mention with clients in relation to investment. I say, “Hey Mr. and Mrs. Client, there are two groups of investments, if you will. There is a group of investments that are very sexy, and there are a group of investments that work. And we like the group of investments that work. Now, they will, by the way, never make the cover of the magazines or the centerfold or anything else they do because they work.

Micah Shilanski: If they do, we sure don’t. We’re going to sell them.

Matthew Jarvis: We’re going to sell. But something I wanted to highlight about what you said Micah, about your strategies working, this doesn’t mean that Micah has this ability to predict the future or that I do or anything else. I mean, when we’re talking about financial planning, essentially everything we’re doing is unknown. Every variable about the future is unknowable and unknown. We can look back and say, “This strategy has worked really well for decades or centuries or whatever the case may be,” but part of what makes our job difficult and so important to clients is really we can say with zero certainty that one strategy will perform better than another going forward. That just can’t be known.

Matthew Jarvis: That’s why your conviction is so important. We have no evidence about what strategies are going to work. We have some historical basis to say, “Hey, this has worked. It should continue working.” But part of our job is to find sort of the least bad cash flow options, the least bad investment option, and, like Micah said, you’ve got to have conviction behind that and say, “This isn’t perfect. We can’t guarantee you this, but it’s going to give us our best, our highest probability of success.”

Micah Shilanski: And one of the ways that I think, Jarvis, and you do the same thing behind this, is this is all from a goals-based perspective. What is the client’s goals? What do they want to do? Investments are just a tool to make a piece of that, to make that reality happen. Our job as advisors, and it’s easy to do when the markets are going up, it’s hard to do when the markets are going down, is to keep clients committed to the long-term.

Micah Shilanski: The reason I’m bringing this up now is this is what your conversation should be with your clients. And we’ll talk more about this on our January 30th webinar that we’re going to put on. But you need to be focused to the clients of, “Yes, let’s absorb the gains. We love it. We like it when the markets go up. These make us feel really good. However, what happens when the markets go down?” We got to have those conversations. This isn’t an hour conversation, this is a two-minute conversation that you have with your clients, always focusing on what happens when the market goes down. “What’s your war chest? What’s your plan?”. So, when bad things happen, your clients will stay committed to their long-term approach.

Matthew Jarvis: And that focus back on the plan and goals helps with that water-cooler discussion of Joe who allegedly got 47%. Sometimes, I like to drop in there things about, “It’s kind of like Vegas. Everybody talks about their winnings and not their losses.” But more important, I go back, I go, “I really don’t know if what Joe’s financial goals are, right? I don’t know if Joe is planning to retire next year or not, and he can risk the market’s going down 50%.” Sometimes, I mention about … This is, by the way, this is a true story of a doctor that I knew that my kids went to. He, like 2006, 2007, he was always trying to get me to invest in this strategy they were using. They were trading options and whatnot.

Matthew Jarvis: My first question with any investment strategy is, how do I lose money? That’s just my first one and he says, “Matthew, that we just, we can’t lose money in the strategy.” “All right, well I’m done. I don’t, I don’t want to have any further discussion on this.” Well, about a year later in the middle of financial crisis, I meet him, I say, “Dr. D, how did your strategy fare during the financial crisis?” And he gets really, really serious, very depressed actually, and he says, ‘Well, it turns out our options strategy wasn’t fully covered and it broke through the bottom of all their options and their accounts went to zero.” So, whereas before he had been dogging on me, saying, “Boy, I’m up 50% this year, 60% this year. Zero risk strategy,” at age 57 his account went to zero. By the way, how much does the market have to grow to come back from zero? There is no number.

Micah Shilanski: Right, it can’t, right.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, you have to be able to share those stories like, like a sage, right? Like you’re sharing a piece of wisdom, not to throw it in their face, not a, “Hey, this proves that I’m right,” because they might have a hundred stories to counter that. But just like, “Hey, let me, let me tell you about an experience I had. Is this something that you want to risk?” “No, I don’t want to risk that.” “Okay, perfect.” Or if they say, “I’m willing to take that risk,” all right, well we’re kind of in the wrong place.

Matthew Jarvis: Now, Micah, how about … And I’d be curious to how often you have this or if you’ve ever had it. If a client comes and says, “Hey Micah, I’m paying you an AUM fee to beat the market, how come you’re not beating the market?” And I’ll just start by saying, I don’t think I’ve ever had that come in directly because we’re very careful from day one saying, “Hey, we would charge an AUM fee. Our fee is,” however we’re going to articulate it for that client, right? “It’s one quarter of a percent each quarter, dah, dah, dah, dah, and that’s pays for everything that we provide for you, which includes managing your investments, goals, et cetera.” But I’m curious, Micah, have you ever had someone to ask you that directly or is that a straw man concern?

Micah Shilanski: Well, I think it’s a bit of a straw man concern that’s there. You know, I think probably back, and I’m sure I’ll get this a little bit wrong, probably back when I was first starting in the business, I’m sure I had those conversations that was going to be there, because I didn’t really know how to articulate it and how to build it. That was inside. But I can’t remember any recent conversation, whatsoever, that comes up that a client was complaining about what the market did versus what they did in their accounts that are going to be there.

Micah Shilanski: Now, I will have clients come and ask, because we use the bucket strategy, about why an account did more or less or why their IRA or Roth or like these other things. I do have those conversations that come up with clients. And a conversation that I sometimes have with clients when I’m first getting them to start in Roth IRAs, is why their Roth IRAs are always underperforming. And they never are, but it’s the dollar amount, right? And so this is a failure on my end, I didn’t best articulate this to clients.

Micah Shilanski: But they got a huge percentage rate of return in their Roth IRA, but they just started funding them. It’s 11 grand is in there, not that much compared to their 700,000 TSP. “Well, my TSP made all this money and the Roth didn’t.” Because again, clients don’t understand percentages. Marshmallows, right? So I will get those comments from time to time and it’s an opportunity for me to look back and say, “I did not articulate this very well when we were doing Roth conversions or Roth funding, et cetera, on how this would be.” So, those would be the only ones that I’ve really seen, but never the, “How come you didn’t outperform the S&P?

Matthew Jarvis: I really loved that example that you gave and the extreme ownership there, about asking the client again, “Well, tell me what you mean by underperformed.” “My Roth underperformed.” “Well, tell me what you mean by that.” “Well, it’s only up $400.” “Oh, well, because there’s only a thousand in it.” I’ve had that happen.

Micah Shilanski: It’s up 27% yeah. Right.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, and that’s again why we need to help clients focus on the most important thing. When we’re looking at investments and performance, it needs to be at the highest level since inception. Right? Your overall nest egg since inception is up $200,000 or $400,000 or whatever the case may be, and the different pieces are going to move differently inside there and that’s how we intend them.

Micah Shilanski: Now when you’re doing that overall inception, we’ll probably talk about this on the webinar as well, but you’re also articulating their contributions or distributions, more importantly, when you’re talking about the overall performance, right?

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, I’ll have a copy actually in that webinar of the the investment statement, if you will, that we look at, right? “Here’s where you started, here’s how much you added or subtracted, here’s how much your growth is,” all in dollar amounts and so we can just really look at that, and again, it’s since inception basis. And something that that places are getting bombarded as well for wrong focus is just from the investment custodians themselves. Every custodian I’ve seen sends out a monthly statement that says, here’s your performance month to date. What a useless number.

Micah Shilanski: Oh, what about the fricking log online? It tells you the last 10 seconds, right? One second ago, your account is down. Now it’s green, now it’s red, now it’s green, now it’s red. Oh, it’s fricking ridiculous. I wish they would change it. What a way to train investors on how to lose money, how to be irrational about the markets.

Micah Shilanski: Oh, I’ll get up off my soapbox. I’m sorry, I’ve got to calm down. So, it is absolutely ridiculous that they do this and you’re right at the inception to date, the longterm focus is what you have to drive home to clients.

Matthew Jarvis: Another tool I use on this, and we just keep dropping these in here because I think they’re really valuable, I like to remind clients, I say, “Mr. And Mrs. Client, you may not know this, but Wall Street makes most of their money on transaction, so every time you buy or sell, Wall Street makes money.” They’ll say, “Well Matthew, we don’t pay trade fees.” I say, “That’s correct, they do not charge transparent trade fees, but every time you buy or sell, Wall Street makes money, so their incentive is for you to trade as much as you can. Now, keep in mind, Mr. And Mrs. Client, who pays for the financial media?” “Well, I don’t know.”

Matthew Jarvis: “Well, let’s look at the advertisements. Okay, so Wall Street pays for the financial media and Wall Street has an incentive for you to take as much action as possible. Do you think that could be why every article seems to say buy these funds and sell these funds, right? Wall street wants you to take action so that they make money. We are trying to do the opposite of that. We are taking as little action as we need, so we pay Wall Street as little as possible.” And so, antidotes like that really help clients kind of see the bigger picture.

Matthew Jarvis: Now, when they see a, “Buy these 10 funds,” they think, “Oh, Matthew told me that I was going to see that kind of stuff because they want me to do activity in my account.” And same goes, I think Micah, for those custodian statements. Right? The custodians make money every time the client trades, and so they want the clients to trade. That’s their incentive.

Micah Shilanski: It’s going back to what you said earlier, do you want a sexy portfolio or you want the one that works? Right? Now, Jarvis can say that because not only does he have conviction inside of there, but he owns the same things he’s recommending to his clients, and this is key, right? This is really important. That’s going to be inside of there, is your conviction. You have to put your money where your mouth is. You got to back up what you’re saying. So again, if you’re doing the exact same thing for your clients, for yourself, as you would recommend for your clients, that’s going to add your conviction that these strategies work and that it doesn’t make sense to make the changes.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, it has to be. I think it’s an integrity issue. We’ve talked about this, I think, before on the podcast. And even if your account, if you’re a new advisor on your account, has $5,000 in it, great. Divide it up the same way? Or if it has $10 million in it, whatever it is, it needs to be invested the exact same way other than … And Micah and I have talked about this. Your bond allocation may be different. Your cash flow buckets are going to be different, but the investments themselves, exact same ticker symbols, the whole thing.

Micah Shilanski: And actually, I have a client sign off on a disclosure when they onboard so we can see if we want, we’ll put that in the presentation as well, the webinar, which is, we invest in the exact same things you guys are invested in. It works for you and against you. The only difference that I have is I generally take more risks than my clients because I have a slightly different investment time horizon. That’s exactly what I say. They’re like, they feel so relieved to know that our money’s in the exact same place.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah. Yeah. We put that in there. It’s in our disclaimers too, because it has to be in our ADDs.

Micah Shilanski: Oh, let’s take that right. Just the dishwasher rule, right there. If it has to be in there and it’s a value add to the client and you’re not telling the client, and the EDV is not telling the client, right? I’m sorry, regulators, I’m sure some people read these and go through them. I don’t think clients fully understand them, but maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? Hopefully, I’m wrong about that one. But you have to articulate this to your client, and this is a great value add that A, you have to do. Why not demonstrate it to your client? Why not show them that you’re doing this and set yourself apart? Little things like that.

Matthew Jarvis: Yep, and they have to be reminded of that. Right? And in fact, we’ll transition to the action items in just a minute, but as I’m mapping out my communications calendar for the year with clients, I’m always looking at how am I going to remind clients about these critical things? What are their investments? Just because I told it to them five years ago, when they onboarded, does not mean they remember today that I’m invested in the same thing.

Micah Shilanski: No, not at all. So Matthew, as we know, this podcast is all about action items, right? So, of course, the action items are going to be a couple of things. Number one, we got that webinar that’s going to be coming out on January 30th, and so we’re going to be sending out.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, 9:00 AM Pacific time, so mark your calendar now. We’ll send some invites out for that. But yeah, January 30th, 9AM Pacific.

Micah Shilanski: Yeah, and this is only a live event. It is not going to be recorded, we’re not going to have it out there, so if you miss it, you miss it. It’s really important to get this on your calendar if you want to find new ways to add massive value to your clients.

Micah Shilanski: The other thing that we want to mention before we get into some action items is, as we mentioned in one of our previous podcasts, we’ve come out with the 100K challenge. And basically what this is, is we’re going to challenge advisors out there, can you deliver so much value to your clients, so much value to your market, that you will generate another $100,000 of new revenue this year? Can you deliver that much value?

Micah Shilanski: And we are so committed to this and thinking in this can be done, we’ve done the 100K challenge, and as we open up we going to call it our backstage pass. We’re going to give you a behind the scenes tour of exactly how Jarvis and I are going to do it. How are we going to deliver so much value to our clients? What is the program that you have to do that you could add another $100,000 in revenue this year by following these steps? That’s how committed we are to delivering massive value to our clients and again, what that benefits us in the end.

Matthew Jarvis: Yep, I love that. I love that. So, additional action items, I would say first and foremost on that action item is to go back and look at your own investments and make sure they perfectly mirror whatever you’re recommending to clients, and I mean ticker symbol for ticker symbol. Whatever you’re investing in clients is in your own account. Of course, you’re not front running and doing those kinds of shitty things. Your investments need to be exactly the same.

Micah Shilanski: You know, on that, what does your team do? Does your team members, your staff, do they own the same things that your clients do?

Matthew Jarvis: Oh no, isn’t that an interesting, we could have a whole webinar on that. My team does. They all have … And this is a little tricky when you’re hiring new people, do you mandate that they move their investments? I mean, you have to see their investments if they have access to information. Currently our entire team has all their investments through the office and they run the exact same models as our clients.

Micah Shilanski: All right. Well, I’m going to say the number two thing that you need to do is conviction, right? You have to believe what you’re saying to the clients. You have to know in your heart of hearts that this is the best option for them, that this is going to work and you got to communicate that with your clients. Really, really important.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah. Now, there is a real margin of diminishing returns on trying to find the perfect investment that you have perfect conviction behind, right? If you spend another a hundred hours researching investments, it will not make your investments that much better. I remember early in my career, I recommended a certain model because that’s what Nick Murray had recommended and I had conviction in Nick Murray. I’m like, “Well, if he believes it then I’m going to leave it and it’s as good or as bad as anything else.” I just want a little caveat there, because I’d find advisers get caught in this rat hole of, “I’m going to find the perfect investment,” and such a thing does not exist.

Micah Shilanski: Oh, thank you for that. I always meant model, right? What’s the model? What’s your conviction in your strategy? Conviction in your model? Do not spend, there’s no reason to spend all this time researching all these different investments. That’s what software’s for, right? I mean, there is a huge diminishing return. You have to have conviction in the model and in the process of how you invest your money and your client’s money to meet their goals.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah. I would say action item number three, and we’re going to have to do a whole episode on this, is you need to be darn ready for what happens when the markets go down dramatically. Again, I’m not predicting when that’s going to happen, if it’s going to be next week or five years from now, but that cannot catch you off guard. When the market goes down, your clients, they have to say, “Hey, that’s what Micah told me it was going to happen. Man, that Micah, he’s a sharp guy. He really knows what’s going on.” That’s what happens, so be ready. Almost have that in case of emergency break glass ready for how you’re going to communicate that. Don’t ever be afraid of a bear market. Be ready to celebrate it.

Micah Shilanski: Oh, it’s, it’s great. It’s a great way to show your value to all of your clients. And of course, and we’re going to talk about this when we talk about in our upcoming webinar, that’s there, about how to have these conversations with clients. But that bear market conversation has to happen now. The bear market conversation has to happen in a bull market, has to happen now with clients, not after the fact, right? If you’re, if you haven’t communicated this with clients and you’re breaking the glass, Oh crap, when the bear market go, happens in the markets go down, you’re in trouble. You’ve got to stay in front of these things.

Matthew Jarvis: Yeah, so perhaps that’s another action item. When you’re getting ready for your first quarter of surge, how are you going to talk about bear markets in that surge in your client newsletter, if you send one, how are you going to talk about bear markets? You need to be ready for that, all the time.

Micah Shilanski: I like it. So, as always, this podcast is about those action items. Make a commitment to yourself, grab one of those action items, and do it. Do it this next week. See how you can continue to help deliver massive value to your clients, massive value to your team, and you get massive value in your life and great returns that come from that.

Micah Shilanski: If you’ve got questions, of course, feel free to hit us up at lifestyle@theperfectria.com and until next time, happy planning.

Matthew Jarvis: Happy planning.

Hold on before we go. Something that you need to know. This isn’t tax, legal, or investment advice. That isn’t our intent. Information designed to change lives. Financial planning can make you thrive. Start today. Don’t think twice. Be a better husband, father, mother, and wife. The Perfect RIA. The Perfect RIA.