What You'll Learn In Today's Episode:

  • How to deliver the information people need in a tactful and helpful way.
  • The issue with unqualified advisors and the damage it is doing to businesses.
  • How Matthew and Micah would have advised a specific client who has been done a disservice.
  • The importance of charging enough in order to be there for people.
  • How to put government assistance to use and not have to pay it back.
  • What advisors can do right now to prospect.

There’s a lot of misinformation and confusion circulating right now, and Matthew and Micah are here to set the record straight. They are pretty fired up about this thing called fee compression and how giving valuable advice seems to have gone out the window, so today they’re talking about why many people are focusing on the wrong issues and what to focus on instead.

With businesses that were seemingly “bankruptcy-proof” now looking at millions in losses and potentially needing to shut their doors permanently, the issue with bad advice and so-called advisors who are unprepared to properly assist these businesses has gotten out of hand. Listen in as the guys break down what you need to know about who is eligible for what, where you should be focusing in order to help your clients make it through this crisis relatively unscathed, and more.

Resources In Today's Episode:

EP. 75 TRANSCRIPT

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…

Matthew Jarvis:   Hello everyone and welcome to a special mayday edition of The Perfect RIA Podcast. I’m your cohost, Matthew Jarvis, and with me as always, Micah Shilanski. Micah, how are you today, buddy?

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, it’s another day in paradise, right? Or should I be screaming mayday, mayday, mayday?

Matthew Jarvis:   Mayday, mayday.

Micah Shilanski:  I don’t know.

Matthew Jarvis:   Mayday, well, I got to confess Micah for this episode, I’m pretty fired up. You and I get fired up about a lot of things, but I’m fired up today specifically about this crap around fee compression. Let me tell you why, I was talking to a good friend of mine. She owns a private medical practice that was deemed non-essential. Now I will save my soapbox speech on why this is not essential or not, but she is out about a million five this month, 1.5 million dollars covering expenses because her practice has been forced to shut down. I’m texting with her. Of course, after they announced the PPP, I texted all my friends and I said, “You better be looking into this PPP loan.” She replies to me, says, “Well, you know, my advisor didn’t really tell me about this and because of how this is set up or that is set up, I think I don’t qualify.” She clearly does qualify. She’s just getting bad advice. It was such, and this is why I’m on the warpath, it was such a glaring reminder to me that while people in our industry are so hung up on fees and fiduciary and compression and all these things, that the point of giving incredibly valuable advice has gone completely out the window.

Micah Shilanski:  You know, and I don’t know what frustrates me more about that scenario, Jarvis, is that number one, you didn’t text me about this so clearly we’re not friends. That hurts. I’m not going to lie.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s right. Micah, are you sure you’re taking advantage of this?

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right. Or the second thing out there, which is just really aggravating is people that call themselves advisors, right? That suck and they’re not advisors, they’re brokers at best. They don’t give comprehensive advice, and it leaves clients in a lurch because, and I’m not ragging on CPAs there, they have their box. They have their thing. Attorneys have their box, they have their thing. We are the only thing that crosses those boundaries, right? We go over and we overlap between the CPA world, the attorney world, the insurance world, and there’s so much value to be had for clients that’s there, it drives me absolutely nuts. I want to make sure. You said she was a chiropractor, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah.

Micah Shilanski:  For her 1.5 million dollars a month in expenses. This isn’t lost revenue. This is expenses that she has to cover, that’s just a huge, huge burden right there. I want to make sure though, her advisor was a fee-only advisor though, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   In fact, she has a fee-only advisor who has proudly proclaimed himself as a fiduciary and yet had not advised her on the PPP loan, had not advised her on bankruptcy protection. Because this is a whole another thing and to the nation, we’re going to see this with a lot of professional services. People that thought they were immune to bankruptcy, right? Chiropractors, dentists, doctors, all this kind of things that are now seeing half million, a million, two million, five million dollars of expenses out the door. Now they’re seriously looking at bankruptcy, and if somebody hadn’t advised them saying, hey, you should be proactively positioning your assets to be safe, they’re going to be screwed. I mean, there’s just no way to paint around this.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s just proper planning to begin with, right? Because most of the time that when big businesses or even medium size businesses go into bankruptcy, this isn’t, we’d lost everything, right? Our well-structured bankruptcy sets things up for the Phoenix, right? To come out of the ashes into something else. But if you weren’t in advance in this planning, if you didn’t have these conversations, you did such a huge disservice to your clients. This is the aspect that Jarvis and I are fired up on is how are you adding value? We hear all this crap that you can’t charge this and you got to charge this and it has to be under this. Well, why? People who are concern about fee compression, and Jarvis, call me out on this, this is too much, but the people who are concerned about fee compression are the people that can add value to their clients.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, I’ve got to say, and I know we’re painting a broad brush here and we’re clearly on our soapbox, but I’ve got to say this is the case, right? The time and resources that are going over battling this are time that could be spent on delivering massive value to clients. Let’s pivot this a little bit so that we’re not guilty of that same thing. Let’s say, how would we have advised this client, and I know we’re going to have to use some real generalities here because we don’t have time to go into every nuance details. Let’s talk a little bit about that and then let’s really talk about how we can be prospecting like a maniac based on… This is like manna from heaven for prospecting for advisors who deliver massive value, right? Advisors that are part of the TPR nation.

Micah Shilanski:  Well, take an easy one, right? Which is just asking for referrals. Who are your clients and you already by the time this is aired, right, and this is a couple of weeks out in production where we’re at. By the time this is aired, you should have really been way ahead of this that’s there. In our office, we had reached out to all of our self-employed clients, whether that’s a Schedule C, a business, it doesn’t matter. Any type of self-employed individual we reach out to as soon as the CARES Act was going through, saying, “Hey, this is coming out, this is the general outline. This is what you need to think about. The money is going to go fast. Make sure you share this with your friends, right?”

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Now, Micah, you were doing that the moment it was announced, right? You weren’t waiting weeks or months for Kitces to do an article on it. No disrespect to Kitces but you were right away telling because I know I was. I was telling all my clients and all my small business friends that were applicable, “Hey, start getting your information ready for this. Pretend like it’s an SBA7 loan. Get all that together, data together and be ready for this. The moment that your banker will do, in fact, go ahead and email your banker right now and tell them to put you on the list.” They responded, they say, “My banker says we’re not ready.” I say, “That’s fine.” Just put me at the top of the list because in fact, as of this recording, the program is out of money. Maybe they’ll put more in it, but it’s out of money.

Micah Shilanski:  No, that’s exactly what we’re doing. I like to do a little humble brag inside that says, “Hey, I spent this weekend, I read the CARES Act that’s there, the 900 pages. Here’s how it affects you. This is what you need to do. Here’s the link to the SBA.” The first week we were dancing around this thing, right? Because the SBA, if you were following this, kept changing their links. They kept changing where the forms were all the fricking time and so we kept dancing around this resending out links to clients saying, “Grab these forms.” The same thing, Jarvis, we’re saying, “Print this form off, send it to your banker as the application,” because why not? Right? You’re going to have to have that form anyways. At least prove that you’ve submitted that information and that was there. “Oh by the way, send this to your friends because they’re going to run out of money.”

Micah Shilanski:  We’ve had several people contact us that says, “Hey, I heard about this from Bob that you were helping him with this. I called my CPA, my CPA doesn’t know anything about this. How does this affect me?” Now we have some new relationships that are coming on because they had no idea about how these PPP loans were there. All we did was say, “Hey, share this with your friends because it’s going to run out of money.” That’s it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Totally. Totally. Now, again, when this episode is coming live here on May 1st, the application might be close. That window might be open. I would still reach out to every small business owner I knew, everyone in the community and say, great, hopefully you’ve gotten PPP money. If not, maybe there’s money available or maybe here’s how to get it. What are you doing to make sure you don’t have to pay it back? Right? I would really throw that out, hey, are you sure you’re not going to have to pay that money back? We’re seeing a lot of people make mistakes on this. A lot of people are going to be potentially bankrupted when they have to pay this money back. Are you going to be one of them? When people say, “Oh, I didn’t even know about that.”

Matthew Jarvis:   “Perfect. Well, we’ve got three weeks left for you to get this straightened out. I’m $1,000 an hour. We get done with the hour and I haven’t shown you how to save 10 times that amount, I’ll waive my fee.” It’s really that straightforward. Will most people respond to that? Nope. Most people won’t but a couple will and it could be the couple that transform your practice that make you reach the 100K challenge for the year.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right. I mean, getting in front of this thing and there’s always an opportunity regardless of the dates closed. Even if we are past the June date, that’s going to be there, right? You’re past all of this, I would still be talking to clients about it because our prospects about it, because it shows how you were proactive in this time, right? “Hey, when the CARES Act passed, we were proactive when we did A, B and C. Talking to CPAs about this as well, because a lot of the CPAs aren’t familiar with it. We’ve helped several CPA firms draft letters. Our name is not on there. We’ve helped them draft letters to send out to their clients on how this is going to affect them. Now, do you think we’ve improved our relationship with that CPA firm by helping them in that manner?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. Now with your centers of influence, your CPAs, I would do your attorneys, your bankers, I would preface all of that stuff with, “I’m sure you’re aware of this, but several of our clients have had confusion wanting to just pass that onto.” Now, please, please, please, don’t send them some generic PPP commentary crap that you found on the internet. It’s got to be actionable advice. Micah, like you said, here’s the actual letter. Here’s our checklist, here’s something that you can implement. By the way, my logo is at the corner of it so people remember that it’s me. If you’re not allowed to, under compliance, my logo is not on it and I’m going to say I found it from somebody else and I’m passing it along. But yeah, you’ve got to provide value, right? Deliver massive value every step of the way.

Micah Shilanski:  This is absolutely key. Just one of these ideas by the way, Jarvis and I were joking about this in our pregame, just one of these ideas for a self-employed person pays for your fees for years, some longer than others, but at least years. Right?

Matthew Jarvis:   This is a good thing to keep in mind when you’re talking to clients and when you’re talking to prospects in the future, whether it be weeks, months, years, even decades from now, you’d be able to say, when someone says, “Well, I’m just not sure why I would pay you $20,000 a year.” I say, “You know what? I just want to remind you. Just to tell you a quick story.” Now, again, I haven’t rehearsed this so it’s going to be a little rough. “I remember back during the COVID crisis that turned out to be a giant panic, we were able to advise clients, save them tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, paid our fee. In fact, to this day, a decade later, it’s still paying off our fee. That’s why people keep us as their advisors. At the same time, I run into lots of prospects, had lousy advisors, and they lost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they were do-it-yourselfer so they didn’t pay that fee.” Again, that’s a rough script, but I’m going to take that angle all day long.

Micah Shilanski:  I took that on a call earlier today that I had, Jarvis, I was talking with a prospect and it was initial consultation. Right now they booked this months ago before this PPP stuff all came out, and sure enough I find out that he is self-employed. We start going down that he had a job change last year. He’s self-employed, has his own contracting firm, so we go through and outline this. He thought again, he didn’t qualify. Now he’s going to get several thousand dollars. I think it was like 25, $38,000, something like that, just being a Schedule C person that he is going to get that’s going to be coming in. A revenue that he didn’t have before our phone call. Fairly it is easy discussion to pivot from, “Oh by the way, you just found out about $28,000 that you’re going to get that you don’t have to give. It’s pretty much a tax free grant from the government, and oh by the way, our fee is X.” It’s a no brainer moving off of that. That’s just one value add out of the many that we’re going to do on our relationship. These are great arrows in your quiver to have and stories to have going forward.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, it really is. Again, this is a super big, a super glaring example, but Micah, you and I could go back all day long and look at examples. I’ve talked often about, we had a client, I’ll be real brief on this one. Passes away. Adult son comes out with a state document saying that he gets all the money and the other kids are disinherited. We say, boy, that sounds really strange. We pull out the estate documents we have on file. Turns out he had pulled a page out of the trust, retyped it and put it back in and forged his mom’s initials on that. We were able to notify the other siblings saying, “Hey, you might check the copy that we or the attorney have, not the copy that he has.” It was a very large estate, ended up hundreds of thousands of dollars all over the place, jail sentences, things like that.

Matthew Jarvis:   When clients now say, “Hey Matthew, why do you need your estate documents?” I say, “Well, I know this wouldn’t happen in your family, but let me tell you a quick story.” All of those great things, and that could be a healthcare directive, right? A client can be in the hospital with a healthcare directive out of state. They don’t have a copy of it. They call your office and you provided. This could be a copy of taxes because they need to do a refinance or a mortgage on the house and I don’t have all this documents. Who has it? Jarvis has it. Great. I’m going to call him. All of these things are little value adds that you can be and all of those value adds add up to you being in business to help your clients. You being there for them when the times are tough. What does that mean? You have to charge enough to be there.

Micah Shilanski:  Yes. I was just going to say that. Yeah.

Matthew Jarvis:   I’m sorry, Micah. I didn’t mean to steal your thunder. That was like so fired up. I’m like, yeah, because if you’re like, well, hey, I’ll just charge $100 an hour when they need it. You don’t have the bandwidth to read the CARES Act over the weekends. You don’t have the bandwidth to track this stuff down. You don’t have the bandwidth to be proactive. You almost create this thing where people are worried to take your call because like, “Oh great, I’m going to get a bill from Micah. Maybe he’s got a good idea. Maybe he doesn’t.” Our clients, they’re saying, “Well, I’m paying Matthew and Micah a premium fee. When they call, I listen because I’m paying them a lot of money. I know that when they call, they’ve got massive value for me.”

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right. It’s always going to be something that’s going to help improve their position. Also, let’s just say, I don’t know, I’m going to create a random scenario so just go with me on a second, Jarvis. About running a profitable business is so important. Charging enough to be there because let’s say randomly that a worldwide pandemic ensues, the stock market falls thousands of points on a daily basis and your revenue got cut by 30% in a quarter. I mean, what are the odds of that happening?

Matthew Jarvis:   Purely hypothetical.

Micah Shilanski:  Purely hypothetical. Right? But if that happens, how are you going to be in business? You shouldn’t rely on these government loans that are there. Yes, we still applied for the PPP loans because I think we were affected by this, but we have money set aside that we can weather the storm that we’re not laying off employees. How were you? Because I talked to a lot of advisors that are having a hard time that are going through this, that are having a challenging time. If that’s one of you, man, I understand that, right? Because we started at a certain place as well, but what decisions are you going to make now so when this happens the next time you are in a better position? How are you adding value? How are you charging enough that you can weather this storm?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. Hey, a couple of logistical things. Really, Micah, you and I should do 100K challenge episode for the backstage pass members specifically on the CARES Act. One of the big things that’s going to come up with these PPP loans is how to spend the money in eight weeks. That’s a big thing. If the money is not spent appropriately in eight weeks, they’re going to have to pay it back. Right?

Micah Shilanski:  Can we just write a check to The Perfect RIA? What I mean with that, just cover it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Make it a hundred amazing employees, I guess. Huge payroll expense. Actually, now that I think of that. All right, well, I’m going to sidebar that one. I got to think about that, but for example, in my own office, right? We’re giving our PPP money. We’re looking at can we accelerate retirement plan contributions? Can we accelerate healthcare contributions? Can we accelerate bonuses that we were going to pay? Because the forgiveness of the loan depends on how the money is spent. Yes, you can spend it on utilities and mortgage and lease payments, but only up to a certain percentage. These are things that as Micah and I looked through the CARES Act and as you all as our nation, as you’re looking at things in the CARE Act, your most valuable proposition is to look and say, all right, how does this apply section blah, blah, blah?

Matthew Jarvis:   The tax code, that’s useless. How that applies? When I can advise a client and say, “Hey, maybe you should play next quarter’s bonuses now so that you don’t end up having to forgive or pay back that money,” that is massive value. Let’s pivot it now for our backstage pass members or even Excel sheet that we got from one of our bankers to help figure this stuff out. We are going to throw in a backstage pass.

Micah Shilanski:  We got that I think Monday, right? Just a couple of days ago. Yesterday. We got that yesterday from them and it’s neat and it shows you the banking logic behind this. Also, think about that from accelerating bonuses, accelerating money to your team members. What did that just do to team loyalty that’s there? “Hey, I know this is a difficult financial time. I know these things are going on. Your job is very important. It’s not going away. In fact, we’re going to accelerate your bonus right now just to help with all of these things.” Because maybe their lives are unaffected. What about their spouses? What about your team member’s spouses? Did they lose their job? Did they get furloughed? Did they get a pay cut? Are they having those issues? Man, this is a huge loyalty builder with your team right here.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Another thing I’m doing, any of my clients that own commercial real estate, right, they’re worried about their tenant’s pain. I’m telling them, “Hey, listen. Call all your tenants. Not email them, not fax them. Call them, fax who faxes.” All right. Call them and say, “Hey, listen, I know cashflow is tough for everybody. I want to make sure that we both come out of this ahead. I want to make sure that you’re successful through here. Let’s look at your lease.” I’m advising real estate owners to do two approaches. One approach is to let them know about the PPP. If they’ve got that money, let’s go ahead and prepay a couple months of lease. The other approach, if they didn’t get the PPP money or they’re not eligible is to say, “Listen, I can defer some of your lease payment for this month and next month.”

Matthew Jarvis:   Maybe that’s half, maybe it’s all and we’ll just amortize it across the next 12 months. Ideally, by the way you amortize it over the top of their lease renewal so they have a real incentive to renew, but these are things that my real estate owner clients haven’t thought of. They’re just worried saying, “Oh, are these businesses going to go out? Am I going to get my rent payment? If I don’t get my rent payment, can I pay the mortgage on the property?” When I call and give them this, they’re like, “Matthew, you’re the smartest guy I’ve ever met,” because they haven’t met Micah. I’m now the lifesaver. When they’re thinking about the go-to smartest financial guy, they’re not looking for a fee-only fiduciary. They’re looking for the guy that called them and gave them actionable advice.

Micah Shilanski:  Let’s extend this too. It’s not just commercial real estate, it’s residential. I have clients that have four plexes, six plexes, and those other things. We are reaching out to their tenants as well saying that exact same thing. We don’t want to surprise, let’s work with you. We know this is a difficult time. Let’s figure out a win-win solution that’s going to be there so you’re not hitting them against each other. Flip side of that, that’s really going to be there as well is our lease and we haven’t renewed it at our building comes up in a couple of months. This is going to be a wonderful opportunity to renegotiate our lease considering about half the tenants left, right? It’s brutal. They’re not paying. We’re still paying. Right? If you’re still paying your rent, your lease, what can you do to renegotiate on your end? This goes both ways. You as the advisor. How you’re advising client? What role are you taking? Use this to your advantage to help add massive value to your practice and your clients.

Matthew Jarvis:   Okay. We just talked about a lot of different people. Who all are we contacting? Maybe this is one of our first action items. I’m contacting every small business owner, every real estate owner, commercial or residential. Anybody whose pain, who’s leasing commercial or residential, I’m contacting them. Really, I’m contacting any of my clients that are going to get a CARES Act check potentially. Any of my clients that have an RMD. Who else do we have on the list, Micah? This is a lot of people. When we talked to advisor to say, I want a prospect. That’s a lot of people to prospect. Now, focus on your niche inside of that.

Micah Shilanski:  Well, what about the kids, right? Maybe your clients are not affected by this unemployment thing, but what about your client’s kids or grandkids? You want to help a client out, help their grandkid out? No, you don’t need to take them on and do all this stuff, but say, “Hey, do you know the unemployment rules changed? Do you know these other things?” I’ve talked to several people, my clients that their kids or grandkids got laid off and didn’t think they qualified for unemployment. Don’t know why that was, right? But it came up during surge when we were meeting with our clients where I would explain the new rules that are going to be there. This extends to them as well. This not only helps your client, right? If you help them with that peace of mind aspect that their kids don’t have to come to them for money or their grandkids are in a better place because they understand this CARES Act or just how that $1,200 stimulus check works, that it’s really a 2020 tax credit. Right? How do these things work? Those are important things to figure out.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. I was talking to one of my biggest clients this morning. Their adult daughter is having some financial hardships somewhat related to this, not directly, but somewhat related. We were talking through how the CARES Act rule applies to IRA accounts and that ability to pull out $100,000. Micah, to your point like, hey, listen, have your daughter call me. I’m thinking, no, I don’t want her as a client, but I want to keep you as a client. Not only do I want to keep you as a client, I want to be the most referable person you’ve ever met. Right? Wow. My financial advisor took care of my daughter. He knew the CARES Act inside and out. This guy is a genius. Clients for life. Are they ever going to complain about paying my fee? Maybe a hundred years from now when they forgotten about this.

Micah Shilanski:  It’s not the aspect that we’re just doing this from this. Jarvis, you care about your clients. Right? Let’s not short that out. We care about the people we work with. We want them in a better situation. Us understanding and knowing this and how it applies to them helps them.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, and frankly, I even told this client this email, I said, “Hey, obviously, this is my job, but I got to be honest, I actually really enjoy this. This is a time where I can demonstrate massive value. Micah and I, you and I were talking about this before the call. There are certainly times, days, weeks, months, maybe even quarters where we can’t necessarily dollars and cents show value that we’ve delivered to a client, right? A beneficiary review. Is that valuable to a client? Yes, but it could be decades before it pays off. This is one where I can say, wow, I showed a client how to get $150,000 from the government, not have to pay it back. That’s going to pay Micah’s fee for at least a few months.

Micah Shilanski:  You know what? They were able to maintain their commercial property. We’re able to renegotiate with the debt obligators that are there. We have one business that’s really going to have a hard time. It’s probably going to be BK out of this. We’re really working with them in restructuring things that are going to be there, but we have several others that we’re able to renegotiate a lot of their debts that they have right now without a BK. What are the different things that are out there? How are these different tools applied? This is a time where you should be proactive.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. I love it. Well, should we jump into some action items? I know that was our first one, contact. Just really anyone and everyone with inside of your niche, but again, find an angle that makes sense to them, right? If your niche is small business owners, well boy, you have all sorts of angles there. If your niche is people that own real estate, perfect. If your niche is young people, perfect. Whatever your niche is, talk to them. Don’t talk to young people about required distributions and don’t talk to old people about unemployment, right? Find your niche. Contact everyone there. A quick message, “Hey, I thought of you. I hope you’re doing fine. Notice a lot of people aren’t aware of X, Y, or Z. Feel free to give me a call or send me an email if you have questions.” No one’s going to complain about that. Even if you have the highest fear of rejection in the world, no one’s going to say, “Matt, you’re a real piece of trash for trying to make me aware of that.” Not going to happen.

Micah Shilanski:  It’s not, and don’t think that they’re already getting this information elsewhere. Yes, it’s been talked about a lot. People are aware that there’s something there. They do not understand it. They don’t understand how it applies to them. They don’t understand these rules. This eight week requirement. I think that’s going to be round two after we’re done. I mean quite frankly in our plan, that’s round two of marketing. Round one is letting people know about it, et cetera. Round two is going to be that eight week wrap up of saying, “Hey, make sure you don’t screw it up if you got this money.” I like that. We talked about this applies to everyone, right, which I almost hate, so niche this thing out. What is the one area that you can add value and that affects your clients? Right. Just pick one. That’s it. We talked about a lot of different ones. Pick one and start going for that.

Matthew Jarvis:   Action item number two, we usually slip this in at the end. We’re going to put it in the middle. Be sure to go on iTunes and give us five stars for the podcast. I think we’re like 275 star reviews. We’re trying to break that over 300. If you’ll go on there and drop a few more on, we’d appreciate that. Vote early. Vote often.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right. Make sure you take a screenshot of it. Hit us in social. We’ll send you some swag. If you have swag ideas, by the way, hit us up on social with that. We’d love some creative thinking on what could TPR swag of the nation would like and we’re happy to produce it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. Action item number three, never spend another ounce of your energy talking about fee compression or any of that kind of stuff. Unless you’re mocking it, then it’s fine. Spend all of your efforts saying, I’m charging a premium fee. I’m focusing on delivering a premium value, right? I am going to be the Ritz-Carlton of financial planners. I’m not trying to compete with Motel 6.

Micah Shilanski:  Action item number four. We’ve got a bunch on this one, but so much to think about. Even if you were mad as hell about what’s going on, even if you think this is pure stupidity and a hoax, I don’t care if you’re mad at the government officials on local things that are going on. The atmosphere in which you talk to clients is positive and optimistic, period, end of sentence. You do not want, even if you’re on the same page as the other person politically or rant-wise or whatever. You never want to have your office, your voice, your number associated with negativity. You are a source. You are a fountain of optimism. You are fountain of great ideas. You are fountain of objectivity and being able to take this opportunities that we have in front of us and take action on them. Always be positive.

Matthew Jarvis:   Totally. You know, a pivot I’ve been using a lot on that, Micah, even like you said, if I’m 100% agreeance, I say yeah, that is really frustrating. Really makes me grateful that we had the war chest fully funded. Really makes me grateful that our income bucket is topped off. I’m just going to acknowledge, pivot, acknowledge, pivot. I’m going to do that all day long.

Micah Shilanski:  Yep. Same thing.

Matthew Jarvis:   Last one on the list. The one page financial plan webinars series is going live and well. If you’re a backstage pass member, make sure that you’re tuning into those live is always more fun. If you’re not a backstage pass member, there is a recording of the first episode on the TPR website. You can go ahead and watch that. It’s all about how the one page financial plan, it was one of the three critical tools that let me 5X my firm revenue and 10X my personal revenue, which means I’m almost halfway to Micah.

Micah Shilanski:  One step at a time. I wish I could say I’m getting closer every day, but every time I get closer, you go one step further ahead.

Matthew Jarvis:   You push me. I appreciate this. That’s the reason we’re doing this whole thing, right? Just so you can encourage me. You don’t text me when you have good ideas, but whatever. We’ll get to that off air. Hey, this is all about action items, right? It’s about you making a better practice for you, for your life and for your clients and that’s taking action. Take this time, be proactive, and go out and do these things. Until next time, happy planning.

Micah Shilanski:  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.

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