Read the Transcript Below:

Matt  

Today’s podcast is brought to you by TPR live. That’s right, The Perfect Ria. Micah and myself will be joining you live and in person in Phoenix, Arizona on September 25, where we will be helping you with all things related to fees, how much to charge your clients how to adjust your fees, how to explain fees to your prospects, and of course the extreme accountability around how to make that actually happen. So go to the perfectria.com/live to get signed up and get all those important details. All righty. Back to the show.

Micah  

Welcome to another amazing episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I’m your co host Micah Shilanski and with me as usual, the legendary Matthew Jarvis. What’s going on, bud?

Matt  

Micah I’m living the dream! I just recorded a podcast episode before we got to go dirt bike for the day, so always excited to get fired up doing practice management, right? And you and I are constantly talking. Well, we’re constantly talking to each other. By the way if y’all ever saw that, the endless text thread between Micah and I, you’d thought we were like 14 year old girls texting each other constantly. But we talk to each other a lot about our practices. We’re constantly talking to advisors about practices. In fact, like I was having lunch yesterday with an advisor and we were specifically talking about his investment models and luckily this advisor very good practice very mature practice. He was looking for the angles, saying like, how do I spend less time on invest but we see the opposite from newer advisors. They’re like hey, what software should I get in which model should I use in which which tab should I be using? And so we see this this dichotomy emerge in the industry. 

Micah  

You know, it’s such a such a good thing to bring up right and to talk about because I see so many times this is an excuse for playing office service, Jarvis. That’s 100% of what there’s ‘No Micah, the investments matter so much and blah’, right? We’ll talk about that in just a little bit. Right? But the reality is the vast majority of the time that you spend on this, you are playing office and we can go through a whole lot of scenarios as to why and where that’s going to creep up. And that’s one of the things that I really pick on anytime we have to look at a trading company or you know, investment platform or like Orion or BlackDiamond software, etc. I’m not picking on them directly, just more in general by these comments. Yeah, but they spend way too much time looking at stupid features that don’t actually matter at the end of the day to the client. Now I get from their perspective, the advisors are asking for these things. So they want them but they don’t mean a damn thing. They’re not going to increase alpha, they’re not going to deliver more value. Right? So what should you really be looking at? I know we had a great question from one of our members kind of come up. We’re gonna kind of weave into this a little bit that talks about, you know, how do we explain investment how do we do investments and then, you know, are all clients profitable? That’s a great question. These are things we need to talk about, Jarvis. I know got my list of things that I do when I’m talking about investments. But what do you do when you’re talking about investments to clients?

Matt  

Well, there’s a lot of things that go into this and I know your very similar approach in that investments are the last things we talk about. When we’re talking with a client or we’re talking about a prospective client, right, we’re going reverse or right, we’re talking about cash flow. We’re talking about risk management. We’re talking about taxes, we’re talking about income which is a part of cashflow, and only then, just for a minute, we are talking about investments. In fact, if you took our One Page Financial Plan Masterclass, you’ll see that the investment line is basically like build a portfolio that will support your income in retirement, and that’s kind of the end of it, the end of the discussion. 

Micah  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s really where it kind of needs to be because you got to think why are these clients coming in and hiring you and this is the part that we forget so often, is clients are not coming in. If you’re listening to podcasts as a financial advisor, you’re not an institutional money manager. If you are I’m sorry for you I hope you’re doing very well. It’s a great career right? It’s just a different path, but clients are coming to you,  they wish to delegate these things. And they want to know if they’re on track for retirement. So Jarvis, your 100% right on we always have to start at the top right, the tippy tippy top financial plannings. One thing I was talking about our advisors on our team is whenever there’s a question, make sure you’re going up to the 30,000 view first, before we get into details. Guess what, a 30,000 foot if we’re going two different directions, the details are gonna confuse the hell out of every single person and we gotta get on the same page at 30,000 feet first, before we start coming down. So what does that mean? You kind of hit it a little bit before, Jarvis. For me, that’s the five areas of financial planning, right? We got estate planning, risk management, retirement income investments and taxes. You’ve got to be able to go through those five areas at high levels and into details. And investments is a tool of achieving your goals. That’s all that is, right. So first kind of really know where the client wants to be in all these other areas first, then I can pull investments in as the tool is the accelerant is the way to achieve these other goals. Investments is not the goal in the end.

Matt  

Now again, for our listeners, and thanks for being part of the TPR nation, you might be thinking I get that I get comprehensive plan and I’m really fond of that, but my clients are coming to my prospects are coming in. And even just myself like I’m drawn to the investment like a moth is drawn. And we have to remember that we’re constantly being bombarded by the messaging. It’s like conspiracy of a costume party, but the messaging that it’s your investments are all that matters. That’s all that matters. Why we’ve been worried about the messaging, right? Why is the cover of CNN or the CNN news feed or the cover of Money Magazine, whatever, it’s always saying 10 new funds to buy by the way, this is the same language I use for clients, right? I say Mr. Mrs. Client, have you ever seen a news publication that says just on the same investments we recommended last year? Have you ever seen that? No. You’ve never seen that every headline is this headline: Buy this horse. That’s why Mr. Mrs. Why? I pause I reflect back and say why why do you think that is? I don’t know. It could never be the case of the same investments make sense for more than a day. That yeah, that’s really good point. Why is that? So? Let me tell you why Mr. Mrs. At the end of each market day when the stock market closes, there’s still people on the stock market for mostly symbolic they cheer everyday that the market closes, it doesn’t matter if it went up or went down why why did they cheer every single day? I don’t know what… Because Wall Street makes money regardless of which direction the markets go. Now clients never thought of this by the way they think Wall Street makes money as we make money. That’s not the case. Wall Street makes money on trading Fidelity Schwab LPL they all make money on the trades and that’s who’s paying these and these media outlets right when you see the commercials the commercial isn’t for long term investing. The commercial is for XYZ fund. That’s who’s paying for this. So they want you to trade Wall Street wants you to trade Fidelity wants you to trade everyone wants you to trade. We don’t want you to trade. We want you to achieve your financial goals but we have to remember that you’re constantly being bombarded with the message of trade trade trade, which is really the message of ‘Pay us. Pay us. Pay us.’

Micah  

Jarvis that is such a fantastic language, right? Because it’s really putting the things in perspective. First of all, what are we solving? Well, we’re not solving for increasing Wall Streets’ revenue, right? We’re solving for achieving our clients goals and that ties nicely to the next piece. And this is one of the things that I like to add to clients is: Look we’ll hold an investment as long as it makes sense to hold that investment. And if there becomes a time it does not make sense to hold that investment and kind of a good way to think about this. Would I this again today, and if the answer is no – then I probably need to transition out of that and we need to move somewhere else. So sitting in and holding your investments for the next 60 years and ever looking at him, not the camp that I meant. This is something that should be reviewed, but not actively traded on all of the time. Right. And I think sometimes clients get that a little bit confused, but saying well, passive investments means you shouldn’t be doing anything with them. And active investments means you’re trading every single day. Signal – there’s a lot of middle ground that’s going to be there in order to make sure that you are viewing things. And Jarvis, I like that language a little bit too because it also gives me a little bit of permission with clients about we’ll say we do a little bit of a model change or let’s say we do a rebalance and it just happens the client came in on Thursday, and then we change up our models next week for some reason. And now it looks like we’re actively trading in a client’s account and say it’s great news Mr. Mrs. Client, we’ve owned this other investment. I know you only owned it for a week, we actually owned it and all of our accounts for years and it came time that we moved out of it. And we weren’t gonna keep doing something just because we just put you in it. We want to make sure that it’s the right thing for the long term.

Matt  

Do I get another great quote and I think early analysts we’ve talked about all that episodes. Early in my career, I didn’t think it mattered how you communicate. And I thought that the technical knowledge was everything right? That the investment Alpha was everything that this was really the thing. And then the longer I’ve practiced and the more advisors we’ve coached, the more I realized that how you communicate is everything, a phrase that I use constantly, especially when performance comes up and I got this one from Nick Murray, which is Mr. Mrs. Client, if we’re able to beat the market by 2%, let’s say we can beat it by 2% every year and you run out of money at age 83. Did we win? Did we win? And the question blows client’s minds because we have somehow in our mind that if we beat the market that solves all problems, but that is the only thing we need to do. That kind of clicks well wait a second, we could beat the market and still run out of money. Oh my goodness or Mr. Mrs. Client if we beat the market by 2% every year but you pay 10% a year to the IRS and taxes. Did we win? Right, so my job one of my jobs as a financial advisor, especially with investments, Micah this goes to your point, step back to a 30,000 foot level because again, everything that we’re getting to hearing from messaging this is let’s get down to the absolute […]. People don’t really talk about the Morningstar rating much anymore. But that was the big thing for a long time. How many stars does it have, or whatever the case may be? We need to get them to step back and we need to step back as well.

Micah  

Ok, Jarvis, so just one of the ways I like to get clients to step back and focus off of the stock market and more on themselves, is I use a lot of that same language. We start walking through it and says okay, Mr. Mrs. Client, what’s going to be really important, is it we’re tracking the index, right? Is it that we’re tracking the stock market and I’ll use air quotes because that same thing right with that Nick Murray quote comes in there. It says the more important thing is that we’re beating your retirement benchmark. So, one of the first things we need to do is we need to create the Bob and Sue retirement benchmark. And that’s going to be directly aligned to your goals and the things that you want to achieve. And then we’re going to map that out for the next 15-20 years. And as long as we’re on track for the Bob and Sue retirement benchmark, then we’re set right so it’s my job to look at it and say how do we keep on track and it’s also my job to raise the hand if I think we’re getting off track from the benchmark. And when you say, hey, we need to make some decisions to make sure we don’t affect your retirement. So I don’t care about Wall Street making money. I care about Bob and Sue the two of you being on track for retirement. Is that going to be okay with you?

Matt  

I love it. And we could spend what we’ve spent entire masterclasses on this. I wanna shift on how to detect as an advisor if your’re playing office in this story I have to tell this is gonna make sense you and I are similar age or older, though you’re much younger than I am. Your way like is much younger. Someday you will catch up to me, son. But you did start in the industry two years before me so that’s why this battle will go until the end of time.

Micah  

Very much. 

Matt  

Early in my career we had I can still picture my mind with a lateral filing cabinet. And in it we kept the fax sheets for each of the American funds mutual funds. Now again for those younger advisors. They don’t know what fax sheet is because the internet was not reliable back then. Or a filing cabinet is it’s okay, filing cabinets. So we would order from American and there was a count on each file. There was a count of how many Growth Fund of America fax sheets and it was somebody’s job every week to go through there and to see how many were an order however many we needed, so it was full. And for those of you who can’t see us Micah is laughing because he knows this stuff. I think at least half our listeners are like I’ve no idea what these guys are talking about. But that was this insane example of playing office. And it’s the same if you’re spending a bunch of time on Morningstar or Bloomberg terminal or whatever you’re doing and something that helps me steal those weeds Micah is to think about how insane it is to assume that me sitting in my office somehow has an edge over Goldman Sachs. Like somehow I’m going to derive some piece of information that Goldman hasn’t already priced into the models, right. There’s just I’m bringing no value to the table. 

Micah  

Well, you know, just another way that I like to look at like today like how do advisors today kind of play office with it? A couple of things. One, it was like my client communication just a second. But one, how are you preparing for your meetings? How much time are you spending reviewing investment performance in detail now this should be streamlined. It should be minutes and that’s about it. On preparing for client reviw. I know this isn’t doing a horrible job for a client by the way, but are still doing everything they’re supposed to do. We streamline our process down on it only look at the things that I need to look at when I’m preparing for a client. So where something that goes wrong will have an advisor comes up says: Micah, how do I calculate the month by month net performance of… You never get this question from  any advisors? No?

Matt  

I was tuned out I was like, grab a pencil and slam it in my eye if I have this question come up.

Micah  

So I’ve still got it from members. How do you count your month by month performance blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like not only do I not calculate and I don’t even look at it. That’s not my job. I also don’t calculate day by day. I also don’t calculate second by second, right that’s not what I’m focused on. So if you do have the buckets report, right, I get a bigger picture. Are they on track with keeping up the distributions? That’s the bigger thing I’m looking at. I will also look at five year trends with clients to kind of show them a little bit more, especially if clients are you know, big on the distributions, right? They’re taking out kind of the max distributions. Sometimes it’ll happen and be like Micah, you know, I gave you a million bucks. And you know, five years later, it’s only about 1.3 million. You know, I really expected more growth in that period of time. And I could say, Well, that’s true, Mr. Mrs. Client, but she also took out $600,000 in the same period of time. So, if you wouldn’t have taken that out, we’d be over 2 billion, right. So so I do like to know net flows over a period in time. Now please, note, nowhere in that comment I made I gave a percentage I talk in dollars over this right I’ll talk about maybe a 5% distribution is the max, but I’m not talking percentage growth over time. Because you can’t go to store and spend percentages right we go to the store and spend dollars is the client on track dollar wise and where are they? 

Matt  

Yeah, every time you say percentage, I’ve always… My mantras is if you’re gonna say percentage, just say marshmallow because it will make about as much sense and that’s not to be disrespectful to clients. It’s just not how their minds work, guys, financial advisors, you know, we can take a 37% of any number, right clients don’t think that way. Micah, let’s pivot just a little bit on this. This is something that you and I have I don’t know if we’ve ranted about on the podcast, but we run into advisors that have outsourced their investment management which there’s no harm in that. In fact, for most advisors that’s a good rule but they don’t understand how much the client is paying. You and I talked to an advisor once who wanted to join our coaching program. And he’s part of a very large RIA organization very, very large. You would definitely recognize him as we said we’ll call him Dave. Dave, how much are you paying to be on this platform? He says guys, I don’t pay anything to be honest platform.

Micah  

I sweet talk these guys. I got such a deal. I have such a great negotiator. They almost pay me to be on here.

Matt  

Yeah, this is a true story. The guy had I think he had $100 million in assets or so this is not like his day one. And we said: Dude come on what do you pay? What are you paying? I don’t know about pay anything. How are they running the shop? Well you know well so there’s a clients are paying 50 pips. Okay, okay. Okay, so you’re charging one we’re using that and they’re charging 50 pips, so they’re getting 1/3 of your revenue. So when you said you weren’t paying them anything, you’re paying them 1/3. Well, the clients paying that now this is where we get hung up. That’s why we always talk about when we talk about red profitability referral, we’re saying what is every dollar of fees is coming out of client account and then how many of those dollars end up on your tax return? Because in this case, the client is willing to pay a buck 50 and you’re giving a third of that to this conglomerate who’s not really doing anything for you. 

Micah  

Jarvis, just nailed it. Right. This is kind of the big thing. Now sometimes it’s worth paying for other people to be part of this. For sure. But what we want is knowledge of this right the ignorance of it or the glossing over it and saying, well, it’s free, I don’t pay anything. You’re just lying to yourself, knock it off. That’s not how you run a business. It’s not how you do successful financial planning. And where does that end? Right you just start lying to clients when their distributions now you’re taking out 12% a year you’re fine. You’ll make it to 85. We wouldn’t do that. Why would we do it about our practice? We have to be looking at these things with open eyes on what they really cost. 

Matt  

There’s a place to work on your business and there’s a place that you’re playing office. So let’s say you outsource your investment management, which isn’t again, a great plan for most advisors. That’s probably what they should look to do. Playing office is reviewing the trades made by the trade manager. That’s playing office. Understanding how much the fee is and what they’re getting the client and you are getting returned that’s working on your business right? So there are times to really dive deep , Micah I’ve heared you have talked about that too. Hey, go through your entire P&L start canceling everything that’s all there and see what happens right there’s that’s a place to spend time. Reviewing cash flow.

Micah  

As long as the credit card charge doesn’t say The Perfect RIA – cancel it. Sorry.

Matt  

That’s right. Reviewing the client’s cash flow where the money is coming up that’s worth reviewing where the dividends went on the last special distribution now, no stop that.

Micah  

Another good thing that could be done from time to time depending on your skill set is if you’re really good at processes and flows and whatnot. From time to time I like to look in and see great from our office perspective, how are the trades being communicated to the investment management team? How will we free up cash flow on a monthly basis for clients? What’s the turnaround time when a client needs money that it sends in right? These are things you should know these are things you should not micromanage. So if you don’t know those things, you should figure out what they are and then we can kind of look at them and say okay, you know, or is it serving the client best? Okay, I can argue that it’s working on my business. I’m making sure things are taken care of. I’m not getting caught up in the detail which is executing those individual things. I’m also not arguing it takes t plus two or t plus three or how long it should be. I said tell clients great news by Wednesday of next week we should have this money in your bank account. Right? That’s generally my standard line across the board also when task are due etc. It’s Wednesday of next week. It’s more than enough time for our team to get it done. Most of time it happens a lot sooner than that. But again, that’s just really good communication with clients. 

Matt  

Micah! Ryan, who’s one of our longtime Invictus members, he asked that we speak about what about clients or prospective clients that have preferences and he didn’t really specify what preferences other than outside of the models? So I would imagine this is probably things like ESG or maybe it’s at least because I run into like, can we buy Facebook or can we not own real estate? You know, those kinds of things. How are you handling that when it comes up? What happens?

Micah  

We don’t buy racism funds, so we don’t buy ESG investments. So those are just out. So it depends on what it is right? So I have some clients that like to do their own trading. And we have play accounts. 

Matt  

Micah, real quick. You were sort of making a joke about it, but sort of not.  Like, as an advisor if there’s things that you are morally opposed to – do not do those in your practice, don’t do ’em and so, you know, Micah and I have we have our things that we’re morally opposed to and if a client comes in and the day trading could be an example of that buying cryptocurrencies, there’s different examples of that. I will not do things that I find morally wrong. I will not use it. Using your morals that are totally blind or you need to work on your morals if they’re different than mine. Right but don’t do those things in your practice non negotiable. Once you say like, Hey, listen, I don’t want to own tobacco companies and we can have that discussion. I do not do that. Now someone comes into you and their morals are different than yours. And it’s a non negotiable that is not someone to work with. 

Micah  

Yeah and this came up relatively recently. Well, in the last year or so is client want to do this. And you know, it was like nope, that’s just not something we do. And here’s the pros. Here’s the cons. Here’s where we stand on it. I can understand that if you have a different perspective that ok but this just isn’t what we really do and end of conversation, right? You know, it was around. Anyways, so I have clients that like to trade their own accounts. Well this is a play money, right, we set up a new account at Schwab right. So it’s self directed it’s not inside of our accounts – we’ll set up a new account for them. They can have online trading access, where we can get that thing set up. My requirement is this has to be play money, my definition of play money, it can go to zero and has no effect on their financial plan. That’s play money. So if a client has a million bucks and let’s say we need to cut out, you know, a pretty says, hey, I want to pull 100 grand out for play money  – the answer’s no. Right, that blows up my financial plan. I got a client with a couple of million bucks and they’d like to have $50,000 of play money and they take out a whopping 20 grand a year. They don’t need it right. Go for it. Yeah, they’re welcome to do the play money and to hold them. Again, the question is, is it their preferences, of course, against our values, and then it’s going to be out or is it does it devastate their financial plan there’s going to out. If preferences violate our models, they’re also out. So we do have tobacco filters. And alcohol filters, right good Catholic, I like alcohol. Some clients that don’t like the filter, filter the filter as bad as the wine Come on. Now. No Marriott stock like these guys are drinking enough, get ’em out. Yeah. So we look at those things. So we have tobacco and alcohol filters, which we can easily put on clients accounts if they want it. It doesn’t work on ETFs by the way, so if you’re doing broad markets, so it’s something fun to look at. So those type of preferences would be fine. My preference I wouldn’t take is saying Hey, Micah, I want to review every single holding and I want to review every single trade before it’s made, etc. No, that’s just that doesn’t fit into our discretionary models. 

Matt  

Or if they said hey, I think small cap should be underweighted or those cashiers those are just not. One other thing on play money account, please correct me if you do it differently, we will not inclide that money in buckets, guardrails, right just crossing with a super concentrated that we’re winding down over several years. We will not, I will not inlude that money there. Because I mentioned I say listen, this is not predictable enough there’s too much volatility too much risk. In this position. We can’t once it liquidates will add it back it will keep in mind that we will not count it for distribution sale.

Micah  

That’s a good way to also is one of the things we generally have a net worth statement when we’re meeting with clients or clients that had those concentrated pitches. Like Jarvis go pull up my buckets and net worth at the same time. Think about how we should probably start with the net worth and walk in a bucket versus the other way around. Because right now I walk into buckets. Right? And they’re like their 3 million bucks, like 1.2. They’re like what the hell happend and drag them into assets. I love to have that net worth statement. It’s as you’ll remember we used to got this 3 million dollars, yep, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s the reason we set it up this way. Right? So I show it to them in some way. So they don’t think the money is gone. But again, it’s not in that distribution bunny.

Matt  

Something else when these preferences come up, and like this technique I learned from you, which is just to ask a little bit more about why the preference. Nine times a out of ten the client against me is – no disrespect – but the client is kind of repeating a buzzword that they’ve heard. Right and so we need to I think we need to be heavier on small cap stocks and we’ll talk about that. I had a client actually, Micah, a couple weeks ago for a review meeting. She says hey, I heard that Fidelity came out with a crypto ETF, I think we should buy it. My initial in my mind was like, Oh, give me a break, I’m gonna fire this client right now. Well it’s really interesting that that happened, but tell me a little bit more about that. Long story short, she wanted to put $1,000 over 3 million I said great news, no worries. But I did also set the stage. There’s a line between fun money and if you want to be more of this we’ll open a fun money account, but this is certainly better going to the casino. We have to assume that this could go to zero. That’s not going to cause a problem. Okay, that’s fine. I just want to put $1,000 in or whatever. Okay, cool. But to ask them ‘tell me a little bit more about this’.

Micah  

This is don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater type of thing. Right? Now, with the next point of this question that’s gonna be is where do you separate the baby with the bathwater, right. So you know, we’re taking a client that’s meeting or three Ps – personal production profitable, right? They’re a good client. They want a little exposure and something else it doesn’t blow anything up. Okay, fantastic. Let’s go ahead and we accommodate them. Now this is different than saying okay, well, what if you have smaller clients that are non profitable, but you’re like it really doesn’t cost me anything to have these clients? Should I just bring in somebody in house to run them because just kind of pure profit first, what are your thoughts on that?

Matt  

Don’t do it. Don’t do it. With every client is a bullet in the revolver of compliance. So it will not matter if it’s a $1 or $100 million client, they can all sink your firm so there’s a compliance issue. The other issue you’re not running a nonprofit. If you want to do for pro bono, and you should do that outside of your practice. You can call the local library or the community group and say, Hey, I’d love to one Thursday a month do pro bono financial planning, and bless your heart for that. That’s an incredible thing. Do not do it inside your practice. Practices have minimums. We talked about regular green. Everybody has to meet the bottom. There’s none of this like free money thing. That’s not a real thing.

Micah  

So I’m from the north, so forgive me, but my understanding of southern talk is that bless your heart means you’re an idiot.

Matt  

It could I’m from the West End, we don’t have any phrases. So we’re just really passive aggressive. We were just looking at you like okay. You should do that… 

Micah  

If you want to do it, I mean, I mean, again, knock yourself out in that aspect of it. But treat it for what it really is. Don’t lie to yourself about it. And that’s where I feel advisers come in. Alright, Jarvis. Speaking about not lying to yourself, this podcast is all about action items. So kick it off for us What action items our listeners can do this week?

Matt  

Interesting, making a joke about not lying to ourselves. How ofted do we lie about our professional and personal development, like oh, I’m reading this book I’m learning but I don’t like I’m listening to people like I listen to every single of your podcasts. I think you’ll be sure to give it five stars. How is Surge going on – I haven’t implemented Surge. Okay, so don’t lie to yourself when you’re doing personal development that you’re just entertaining like could’ve been avoidance behavior aswell.

Micah  

Yeah, it can be, right? It’s always good to kind of scratchy this for me to scratch that learning edge. But then I gotta come back down. What am I doing? And then also not putting so much on my plate – It’s not going to get done. And so that’s a fine balance from everyone depending on what you can execute on but I love that Jarvis you got to be taken action. Action item number two. I’m gonna throw in there, review your investment conversate your investment process and cut out half of it now. How do you know you’re talking about investments too much – the client is talking about investments too much. Jarvis in your client meetings, how often are clients bringing up and talking about investments or one hour meeting how many of those minutes are your clients or you talking about investments? 

Matt  

When maybe two or three sentences I guess is that a minute? Let’s call it 5 on the high side.

Micah  

 It’s about fair right five no more than 8 is kind of 10 would be like a new claim. We’re transferring things more time but on the ongoing basis –  it’s less than five reviewing buckets, talking about investments. And that by the way, that’s not doing a disservice that’s not hiding information. That’s giving all of the key information needed. The custodian bombards the crap out of the client with all the details, right? So it’s not like you’re hiding because they get all the details. Your job is to show them what they need to be doing. So if your investment conversation is more than five minutes, you need to figure out what you need to cut out of there to get it to five minutes or less.

Matt  

Action item number 3 you need to have and this goes to the core of The Perfect RIA Surge meetings and time blocking: you need to have time on your calendar monthly, maybe weekly, but really monthly when you’re going to review investments. This is not him bored on a Tuesday and I should be prospecting so let me review our investmet models. And this needs to be an allocated time and anything that comes up on investments, even a random thought needs to have a file we have a file for our investment policies file, drop things in there and the way that is when I look at it. It’s the only time I look at it. You can tell the easiest giveaway that you’re playing office is that this wasn’t on your schedule, whatever it is you’re doing, like I’m reviewing investments, that’s an important thing, but it wasn’t on my calendar for three more weeks. I’m playing office. 100% 

Micah  

I love files that I can drop ideas in. Right so that way I can get it out of my mind. I can drop it down and then address it later at the appropriate time. So again, you got to do something with those ideas. Jarvis that’s a fantastic one. Another fantastic idea that comes up all the time is give us five stars five stars right five stars share this podcast. We’re transforming the industry with your help. Jarvis, as always this is a blast. Thank you so much, my friend. 

Matt  

Hey, Micah. Thank you. Until next time, happy planning.

Micah  

Happy planning!