Read the Transcript Below

Amber  

Hi TPR Nation Amber here from your Follow up Fridays. Today we’re excited to share another encore episode of Worlds to Conquer as Jamie goes in depth into the information that prospects provide with the personal financial factfinder. And if you’re looking for more training on the prospect process, be sure to email us at lifestyle@theperfectria.com to learn how you can sign up for our newest masterclass.

Jamie  

Welcome back to TPR Nation this is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer and in this four part series, we are going to be talking about how we onboard new clients. So the transition from when you are a prospect to when you are a client, and last week we really dove in and talked about setting expectations with prospects. We talked a lot about how our relationship managers handle speaking with prospects about our schedule, how they can get in when they can get in to see a financial advisor. And of course at our RIA Shilanski and Associates we charge for our initial prospect meeting. So how does the relationship manager collect that fee? What are those fees? And what do we deliver to those prospects for that feed during that initial consultation, and this week, what we’re going to unpack on this episode is what we expect prospects to give us prior to that initial conversation with them. What we go through in preparation for that initial consultation meeting with a prospect who we hope is going to become a new client, and then we will wrap it up with what our deliverables are because if we’re charging 500 to $1,500, for a consultation, what does the prospect anticipate to get out of that meeting? And do we apply it to the regular ongoing financial planning fees? Do not forget that during the month of October we’re talking all about onboarding brand new clients. As always, we’re going to start with basics and basics is wrapped around our terminology. And this is really important to understand you as a financial advisor might pick up on this very quickly, but you’d be very surprised if your team does not understand the definitions of these words. So prospect and client, a prospect is somebody that we want to do business with potentially or they think that they want to do business with us and a client is somebody that has hired you for a service. So in order for somebody to become a client, they have to first have some type of agreement. They have to agree to engage with us, because we charge for our initial consultation, they sign a one page contract that says hey, we’re gonna have this hour long conversation. Here’s what it entails, here’s what you’re entitled to. Here’s our guarantee of providing value during that consultation. And here’s the cost of what it takes to in order to meet with one of us. So, first, we start with an engagement agreement of some sort. Ours is a one page contract. If you become a full fledged financial planning client, we’re going to have much longer extensive contract defining the scope of our relationship. The second element to become a client is that there has to be an exchange of money. So there are two elements that define a client relationship for our firm. And that is one an agreement that something is going to be done. That’s our one page contract or our larger financial advisor agreement. For people that want full fledged financial planning throughout the remainder of the year. And then second of all, an exchange of money has to happen. And so that is somebody either paying for a consultation, they’re paying for financial planning fees, or they’re transferring assets and now we’re going to be charged an asset under management fee. And this is really important to understand, because a lot of financial advisors, we kind of have these weird hybrid practices, not everything is identical, especially if you’ve been in business for a really long time. So in our RIA we are fee and AUM and that means that we charge a financial planning fee for developing the financial plan, our retainer for maintaining it and having more extensive conversations outside of just talking about investments. Now we also charge an asset under management fee for investment management of a portfolio. We do not do insurance only clients. So if you only have annuities or there’s only some IUL UL VUL product out there, and that you want us to manage it for you. We don’t do that in our RIA. Maybe you do that as a successful financial advisor. What we have found is that we work best when we are 100% involved and not 10% involved. Anytime that we’ve done any type of one off where we said okay, sure. You only want me to manage X I’ll do that. It just doesn’t work for us. We’re all or nothing. Same thing when we meet with a couple that maybe he manages our finances separately, and they say hey, you know, I’m the husband in this relationship I’d really like to hire you, my wife is really not involved in the finances I make all the decisions, can we go ahead and move forward? And then my cheeky responses to that is that I’m not the other woman and in any situation and I won’t be that person that’s involved in your finances without your wife participating also, and same thing goes for the women that just want to meet with me and they make all the decisions in their household. I tell them the same thing. I’m not the other woman in a situation your husband has to come to this table. And one of you can be the decision maker but both of you have to be committed to this you both have to buy into the financial planning. Otherwise, it’s just not gonna work for me. Now that we’ve defined what a client is versus a prospect. And a prospect is somebody that wants to meet with us. They just want one time advice. They want to see if we’re a good fit and we want to see if they’re a good fit for us in return, right? Just because somebody is willing to hire you doesn’t mean you should take them on as a client. Listen to your gut instincts. Listen to those red flags when they come up in a meeting. Generally, my red flag is when somebody starts hitting me up on returns and asking me what I guarantee was my average portfolio run all of those like red flag questions because I believe that if you live by the markets, you will die by the markets. And if somebody is only interested in who’s going to give them the greatest rate of return possible, then they’re missing the larger concept for me, which is the comprehensive financial planning. So just because somebody wants to hire you doesn’t mean that you should take them on as a client. So when a prospect calls our firm or emails or text us online and asks for an appointment, our relationship managers are going to hyper gear and they’re going to start tracking every interaction that they possibly have with that prospect. I want to know where did they come from? How many times have they contact our office to get an appointment? Did they contact us through a webform? Did they email us? Did they go through a referral option? How what is that source that they came from? And we tracked that top of the funnel because I want to know what’s working in our marketing. Where should we put the most amount of energy and dollars? And then also Where’s where are we neglecting? Last year in 2021 and 20, the beginning of 2022 we had a flood of prospects to Shilanski and Associates, tons of requests, unrealistic numbers. Which is fabulous, what a great problem to have. But just recently at our summer leadership meeting with our lead relationship manager, we sat down and we started talking about where they’re all coming from. And then our operations team pulled the new client log, and we discovered that we had only had two referrals in the last year onboard new clients. Now as a financial advisory firm, we normally get probably 12 to 15 solid client referrals every single year. But all of a sudden, we have stopped getting client referrals because we stopped asking, we’d have this other valve of marketing turned on. And it was providing such a wealth of opportunity for us that we completely neglected to be cultivating those referral relationships and oftentimes your centers of influence your clients won’t exactly know how to refer other people to you. And that’s something we have a lot of coaching with our centers of influence and our clients around. But when we took our foot off of that gas pedal, we completely neglected our source of referrals, and it showed statistically on a report. So it’s one thing that we want to make sure that we’re keeping our eye on the ball but also what else is happening on the core. What areas are we neglecting that maybe we need to put a little bit more energy or at least a balanced amount of energy towards so they’ll hit that top of the funnel? And then I want to know how long does it take before they do one of two things in order to get on our calendar. They have to sign a prospect has to sign our one page agreement for the consultation. And then second of all, they have to pay up front. Now we have 100% value guaranteed promise that we make to prospect so if you pay for your appointment and you feel at the end of the conversation talking to one of our financial advisors that you did not get value out of that meeting. Then we will 100% refund, period. No problem. Do we sometimes have to refund people? Yeah, absolutely. It’s an ambiguous question. Do we provide you with value that’s completely subjective? It’s a yes or no and it’s in your personal opinion. Since I’ve been doing this I’ve only ever had to refund two people. One of them was my choice. We asked for a lot of information, which we’re going to dive into here in just a moment from a prospect. And when we called, but it was a telephone appointment. They live in a remote village and we said great, how can we be of help to you? And she said, I don’t know. I gave you all my information how can you help me. And as we began to ask question, she gave us monosyllabic answers, it was yes or no. We really couldn’t get a lot out of her in this conversation. So when we wrapped it up, we went through our best you know, sort of blind financial planning since she wasn’t giving us anything and we said based on everything that you delivered on our prospect appointment, here’s what we see here is areas that you need to work on. And then we asked if this was of any value she said yes, I didn’t feel like it was we refunded the fee because I want to sleep at night and I and I knew that appointment was off, we just weren’t connecting. So it can happen it can happen to the best of us and that’s okay. We want to make sure that we’re delivering high quality consultations, high quality meetings or answering questions we’re delivering massive value. And if we fall short of that, we have a choice. We can either 100% refund the fee, they can switch for our financial advisor or we can just say you know what this meeting we didn’t really get accomplished everything I wanted to, let’s go have that second consultation. It rarely happens, but when it does, I want to know how I’m pivoting where I’m moving to. So now let’s dive into everything I’ve asked a prospect to bring us and this could really go to almost the first two meetings that we have with someone so we have that prospect meeting and that prospect as Micah Shilanski probably shared with you for our RIA Shilanski and Associates, it is a no sell sell. And this is really really difficult for a lot of our old timers out there that are currently in that aggressive sale mode. We have to flip it it’s the no sell sell is that by delivering so much value during that 60 minutes that we’re going to spend together and answering all of the client questions. I’m not going to pitch the prospect. In fact, if I do my job, right, and I have absolutely inundated them with value, then they’re going to ask me, How do I continue to work with you? So in our office, we call that that a no sell sell is that you’re going to deliver so much value that at the end they are going to as you how they can give you money to continue to work with you because they’ve just been so overwhelmed by value. We ask for a ton of information during our initial consultation with a prospect. We almost always get the information. Sometimes we’ll get a prospect calling in a panic and saying wow, I really underestimated how much information you guys needed before my appointment. Do you think I should reschedule? Our relationship managers have a really great script for dealing with that. If a prospect does not give us all of the information that we request, we will absolutely still have that appointment. But we also have the opportunity to put a little bit more responsibility on that prospect that we did ask them for a lot of things that they didn’t deliver to us. So our relationship managers won’t verbally go through the list and then we will also send them a written list of everything that we’re looking for. And we’ll do a one page summary that says hey, we know we want your lien on earning statements. We want the last three years taxes. We want statements from investment accounts that you have. We want copies your estate planning so that could be your for estate planning documents, which is your advanced medical health care directive, your durable power of attorney your last will and testament and potentially trust if you have one in place. I also want all your employment documents. So if you’re working for a corporation and you have a benefits package, I want all of that too, as you can see, this is a tremendous amount of information that we are putting an onerous on the prospect to deliver us ahead of time and then also we’re going to give them what’s referred to as our personal financial factfinder. And that personal financial factfinder I absolutely love because we were dealing with a business coach one time and he said okay, give us everything that you asked the prospect for. So we gave them everything we asked the prospect for and I think it was the first time he ever had a list this extensive because he ended up coming back to us and said, Are you kidding me? Who really gives you this information? And we said, you know, probably the high 90 percentile of people that that request a meeting with us are going to give us almost all of this information. And he scoffed and he said I would never fill all this information out. I would never give it to you. And we were like, well great

Jamie  

because you are not the ideal client we would never hire you

Jamie  

we would not work with you anyway in that capacity. You’re a great business coach, you would not be our ideal client. It’s 100% acceptable that you wouldn’t fill out this information we wouldn’t ask you to in the first place. Alright, so now here’s what we’re gonna go through on the personal financial factfinder. I’m going to walk you through all the different sections of information, and you can take notes on the information that we’re asking for. And remember, when we’re going through this personal financial factfinder a couple of the things that we’re setting the tone for with our prospects that we hope to become clients is what we’re going to do during this analysis. And during this analysis, we’re gonna see are your assets properly positioned? Right? What is your present method of savings? And what is it going to take to maximize it to hit your long term retirement income goals? What’s your pre tax and after tax strategy, right, because we were really big on having a five to 10 year tax plan. Okay. How much capital are you need in order to feel comfortable for retirement? What kind of savings and investments are you going to need to hit your goals before retirement? Right? We are comprehensive financial planners. We want people spending money today, but not intending them from their goals tomorrow. How would you set aside each month from savings and investments? What’s the impact on inflation going to be over the long term for your savings and investments? What kind of tax advantaged investments are best suited for your particular needs? What type of monthly income are you and your family going to need? In the event of you or your spouse preseason the other or both of you doing that? And then of course, we’ll look at loan Long Term Life and disability insurance and make sure everything’s properly positioned. So we’ll give them this personal financial factfinder and it is I believe, about 11 pages long. And it goes through different sections. So in section

Jamie  

one I’m going to ask for their family data. And this is all of their pertinent for one – one information on them. Assuming we have a married couple, and then also their children. A couple of things we do a little bit differently than a lot of other practices, and this is where you don’t ask First Name, we ask first legal names, we’re really big on making sure we are complying to the Know Your client roles. So we always ask for driver’s license or proof of government ID and then we make sure that we have the legal name of the person that matches up and here we’re going to ask just their overall information right? Their age, their sex their you know, education levels, all of that sort of know your client. And now we’re going to ask about the children and we’re gonna say are the adults are they dependent where we add or receiving for college and then section two, we’re gonna dive into their personal information. And this is occupations, who was working where and how long have they worked at those different places, or are they already retired? And then we’re gonna also talk about their current centers of influence. Are they working with accountants, attorneys, other financial advisors? Are there other people on their team that we maybe need to position ourselves to bring in and then we’ll dive down into section three. Section three is going to be their employer benefits. So what type of benefits do they have? And this is all a questionnaire right? So this is twofold. Everything on this questionnaire. I’m asking them to review their information and make selections. What do you have, you know, for client A and client B. Now also, I’m going to ask them for copies of the documents too, right. And it’s redundant, but we’ll go a little bit into why in just a moment, and section four I want to know their retirement objectives. Right. When are we anticipating retirement? Do you plan on working part time in retirement? Talk to me a little bit about those goals. Alright, and then, sometimes for my younger clients, especially my millennials, that they might scratch out on personal financial Biplanar and instead of saying retirement, they say financial freedom, and they’re giving me those target dates, most of them are choosing age 55 And that’s because they’ve had it most of the time when I have a prospect or a new client choose to be financially free by 55. They’ve lost a parent before that parent was able to retire so we get a lot of value around money and why that matters so much them section five, we’re gonna go into the cash reserve details, where is your money? And I want to know how many savings accounts they have if their mattress stuffing if we’ve gone to you know, silver coin in the gun safe at home, or all those bank accounts. As you know, we take all of this information and we dump it into our custom CRM called Infinity. And we track every single one of these fields inside of infinity for our value add reports that we run regularly for clients, and we do track bank information. Right now it’s static fields. So we’re just relying on the client to give us a statement and their input of what these different account values are. We don’t use any account aggregation software at this time. We used to use cash edge and a few other products, but we ran into a lot of dual factor authentication issues that just made this more cumbersome for clients to keep up on that it did deliver value to them. So if you’re using something hit me up at lifestyle@theperfectria.com. I would love to know what that is. I’m always looking for strategies about how we can enhance the level of value that we’re providing our clients Section six, we dive into different investments. Now here’s where it’s key. Here. I asked you to fill out all the types of investments you have either set. Do you have a TSA, a 403B, a 401K, a mutual fund or money market? You know, give me everything and land write them out and tell me whether or not you have a statement and what type of account it is. And this is imperative to me because I’m not relying on the client to have an accurate account value account name account description on the personal financial factfinder instead, I’m doing something different. I’m seeing the client thinks that they have and then I’m going to compare it to the statement that they actually have. If you have been in business for a few years as a financial advisor, you know, that a lot of times it’s not what clients know, it’s what they think they know that isn’t so right. And a lot of times clients will tell me Oh, yeah, I have a Roth account. No problem with that, funding that for a really long time, and I’ll pull it out and it’s not a Roth, it’s an IRA. Right. They might think that they have a 401k but maybe they’ve been investing in a deferred comp plan. And it’s a 401A and they get confused. You know, so there are all different things that that they have that may not be so and I see this most in our next section. And section seven is going to talk about present life insurance. And here’s where I see one of the most egregious mistakes that a lot of prospects will think that they have adequate life insurance, which of course all of us out there. You know how much is enough? It’s almost never enough, right? If you’re dealing with a widow or widower but a lot of times especially those millennial clients will enroll in employer sponsored life insurance, and think that they have adequate insurance in place. I see this a lot with my union workers particularly IVW, I see in some health care also. The life insurance will be Accidental Death and Disability, which is so ambiguous. I get the logistics of the policy, but I have sat there with medical foreigners and told me that in order for them to determine whether or not something’s an accident, is subjective to the person that the physician that is making the decision on the death certificate. I have two examples here. Lost my grandpa after surgery. In recovery. He had a heart attack, and they marked it on his among on his death certificate that it was an accidental death because he accidentally died as post surgical. Then I had a cousin who was married to a man who was on a lineman and working on the electricity pole, ended up touching something a little hot, had a heart attack fell off the pole and die and it was not ruled an accident. It was a death of the heart attack for natural causes. So I’m a big fan of supplemental insurance being accidental death and disability, but not being your primary case for insurance. So I know a lot of you out there probably have tons of insurance experience. You’ve seen the game  of different things that can happen here is one area that you know financial advisors we know a lot about, but we get a little shy because the public expects us to be insurance salesmen. And that’s not really the value that we’re trying to deliver. But we want to make sure that this is an area that is taken care of for people. I also see a lot long term health care, particularly people that are involved in big church programs that they’ll get a long term health care plan in place that they think is going to adequately provide for them for the rest of our life and may provide around $40 of value when Long Term Care averages two to $300 a day in value. So want to make sure we really watch that. Section eight we’re gonna talk about variable annuities and variable life insurance details. We’re going to be a little more information there. Section nine we’re going to drop down to employer monthly benefit for pension details. And this is for any individuals that have some type of defined benefit plan with their employer and we want to know when they’re eligible, and we also want a good working history because sometimes people have breaks in service or they leave service or they might later in life go back and return to and we see this a lot with school teachers that just get burnout and they go do a different career. And they’re just shy of how invested in sight of some type of pension plan. And we’ve had an opportunity to do a lot of planning between government employees, teachers, and even military people that get out at 17 or 18 years and didn’t get the full career benefit in order to get them to get retirement benefits. We’ve had success in having them go back and take a government job for two years pounding those out buyback their military time, which counts towards a pension for them. So we like to see those working history to make sure we’re optimizing any benefits possible. All right, and then we go to section 10. And this is money owed you. So any type of loans that you have, and this is normally where we see some adult children that maybe have borrowed money put inside of here, section 11 We go down into your real estate portfolio. And I want everything everything that you own. I want to know about vacation homes, investment properties, cabins, all of that kind of information. I cannot tell you how critical this real estate portfolio is. Not because it adds to your net worth but instead because it’s so imperative when we talk about estate planning a lot of times people will have a primary residence and then they’ll have investment property. And those types of properties are pretty easy for adult children to know who is going to get what to write. So and so it’s going to get the primary residence we’re going to sell the investment property we’re going to sell both the primary and investment when mom and dad pass but is that cabin is that lake house is that smaller valued asset that causes the most amount of familiar grief. So I like to know about all of those properties, especially so we can get estate planning in place and make sure that we’re not causing any family drama after mom and dad pass away. And then we dive into liabilities, what do they owe and who do they owe it to? When we do a comprehensive financial plan, I wanna know who are you borrowing money from and I want to know what interest rates and you know, we like to have really strong relationships with bankers and credit unions and if other opportunities present themselves or they can maybe refinance or do something differently, we’re going to recommend that they do so. I’m also really good into cash flow spending plans. I don’t call it a budget because budgets like a diet and we’re all going to break it it’s cash flow spending plan is the language that I use. So a lot of times when I ask for those auto loans will have that payoff date and some type of explanation written on the forum. Because somebody’s really, really excited about that. And then I’ll come in and burst their bubble and tell him that even when the car is paid off, we’re gonna keep making fake car payments to a car account, because the second you pay off your car, equitably. Something goes wrong with it, you have to repair it, and then you’re like, Wow, do I spend $2,000 repairing my vehicle or do I just trade it in and spend 50,000 upgrading the model. So if we have that car account, then we’ve got a little flexibility that you can make a decision that you can continue to repair a vehicle or you can use it as a down payment. So we have a lot of cash flow spending ideas that come out of this and we want to be able to make sure we’re capturing all of those liabilities. Okay, as we near the bottom of our financial factfinder we’re gonna go through the income data. So this is salary and wages and bonus compensation and deferred compensation plans. We wanna know all the ways in which you and your spouse get money. Section 14 we dropped down to income taxes, and I want to know what they have filled out on their tax return. Now, I’m also going to ask them for three years worth of tax returns, right? But I want them to go through that tax return and sort of mark these different areas that may apply to them so that they can have that reinforced value a lot of what we do in financial planning is around developing that five to 10 year tax plan. And the more that clients become aware of what they either know that isn’t so or what they don’t know. So we can we can educate them, the more value we’re able to deliver in a relationship and then section 15 we anticipated future income. This is the area that cracks me up the most because this is where somebody always puts you got it anticipated inheritance. So I see a lot of anticipated inheritance here. But unless I’m working with mom and dad and I know their estate planning, I really didn’t the children from recognizing anticipated future income as an inheritance because I have seen a lot of estate planning documents that exclude the children from getting as much as the children think that they’re going to get so unless I know that for a fact we exclude it as part of our financial plan, but we just put it on our horizon and something to know about. One of the good things on the anticipated future income side of things too is if you have a farm family, you work with a lot of people that have farmlands that stay in the family. They’ll kick out K1s and normally you’ll be able to see those here as well. They’ll report that farm income coming in Section 16. We talk about the survivor needs. So what are we most concerned about? If our spouse had a financial hardship, and this is where you’re going to divulge all of those fears? Right? My spouse is a spendthrift. My spouse is handicapped and isn’t able to get around if I’m not here to take care of them. So all of those different survivor needs that you want to make sure your financial advisor is aware of, I want them inside of here so that we can make sure that we’re developing a financial plan that incorparates and addreses those fears. Section 17 we are gonna jump down and move the cash flow

Jamie  

and this is where you can use that word budget. For those of you that meet Matthew Jarvis in person at a conference. He is allergic to the word budget. He says it Boo-che so you’ll have to ask him about his thoughts on Boo-che’s if you see him in person, so in that monthly cash flow again, I don’t call it a budget. I call it a spending plan for people and I want to know what their income is, how much are they bringing in on a net basis? And where’s the money going? I can also discern pretty quickly that if a client totals up the monthly spending plan for themselves, that they’re pretty good at tracking where their savings and where their money goes. If they leave that total blank then I know that we have some self awareness about spending habits that we don’t want to address. So if they don’t have a total down at the bottom of that form, then I know that we’re gonna have a conversation about making sure we have disciplines and habits in place. If they do total it up. I know we’re gonna have a really easy segue into talking about savings. Section 18. We talked about other insurance. This is where we’re going to capture the disability, long term care insurance, auto insurance, all of those details, renter’s insurance, everything inside and in Section 19. We’re going to come to almost the conclusion. Talking about the estate planning what do you already have in place, if anything, and so we’ll ask you about those four documents. And we’ll also ask you about do you have q tip trusts, annual giving trust, charitable trusts all of those more intricate levels of trust as well. Then we’ll ask the date that it was last done. If you have any questions regarding it. Next we’ll segue into investment attitudes and risk tolerance. And so here I’ll do my due diligence and making sure that I check market those risk tolerance for clients, which is a giant industry joke in my opinion, because when markets are high clients are risky and when markets are low, clients are conservative, but sure we’ll ask them to rate this because we don’t have a better solution for helping to identify risk. All right, then section 21 will go down to retirement goals. And this is telling me all right, how much do you want? What do you what are you going to bring in? What do you really want to spend? What do you want to do when you’re in retirement? And then we’ll ask them to finish out the financial factfinder by giving us a retirement priorities and other goals and say alright, what are you? What’s important to you? Is it gardening? Is it advanced education is it traveling? Is it purchasing boats or airplanes? Where do we want to spend the most amount of money when we go to retire? And then of course, we’ll ask them we’ll finish the document, asking them for any questions that they have. And we’ll give them the checklist of attached documents that they need to make sure that they include inside of their prospect folder. We use an online system called box.com for the transfer and share of information Box allows you to encrypt information and share it back and forth. So it’s a really secure place that we have found that we push all clients. We also deliver client information through box.com. Because the way that you deliver information to a client is the way that they will return that information for you. For example, if I had my operations team send a blank account form for a client to complete the email. That client will fill out that account form and guess how they’re going to send it back to me. They’re going to send it back unsecured via mail, because the way that I sent the client information is the way they’re going to return that information to me. So we push all individuals to use box.com in order to share securely information, and now we’re going to ask them to attach statements. I want their incomes or the pay and leave statements I want their taxes, minimally last two years ideally last three so I can see ebb and flow of income I want any retirement account statements. I want all insurance declaration policy pages, and then additional items that they want to make sure that we have purview to as well as estate planning documents. Do your prospects give us all of this information? Yes, yes they do. They have paid for a meeting. They really want help and talking about their finances. They’re going to give us all of the information possible to give them educated opinions. And most of the time, we have prospects tell us thank you so much. I’ve been meaning to get all of this together for a really long time. Nobody’s asked me to go through this exercise. This was really helpful. So prospects definitely give us all of this information, anything if they were unable to get a statement or they didn’t have a leave in earnings statement. Generally, it’s the pay stub that comes in a little bit later. If we hit them right between pay periods. They may give us their last but a lot of times people say hey I get paid in 3 days. I was going to wait and give you my most current one. If a prospect does not give us all this information, will we still have the appointment? Yes, of course we will. But our relationship managers will sculpt that conversation saying hey, listen, you know we asked for all the supporting information. You are not able to get into it for whatever reason, but we’re happy to answer your questions during that meeting. And normally when we set that tone, you’ll find that prospects are a lot more compassionate to you not being able to answer something because they didn’t provide something. They understand the rules of engagement for having that meeting. And part of that was getting all this information and delivering it to us. We can also discern a lot about a prospect by how much information that they’re able to give us prior to that meeting. And then we can do some questions. So one of the things in order for prospects to meet with us is that our relationship managers are going to ask them great, what kind of questions can we answer for you during that meeting? How do we deliver the most value? What are you hoping to get answers to during your consultation? And we’ll get a list of questions. Normally, no more than five. I mean, sometimes we’ll have a lot more. But normally it’s about five questions. And those five questions they have just armed us with the ability to answer during that consultation. So instead of us as financial advisors saying, I don’t know it depends, well, maybe it’s this maybe it’s that now we have the information. Now we could pull up the statement, we can look at their pace that we’d say hey, listen, I know you thought you’re maxing out 401k But actually you’re only maxing the employer contribution percentage of 4%. The actual value that you can put inside this account is x. What do you think about why? Now asking for all of this information also does a few other things. One, it gives our team an entire leg up on getting all the information and put it into our system after they’ve become a client. It helps with the onboarding process. And then if that person chooses to hire us there are no cell so that we can begin building that financial plan because they’ve given us all of this data to get started. Now if they’re missing information, which oftentimes happens, they’ll get us most of it that box.com file, but if they have neglected giving us information in some area once they’ve decided to hire us and move forward, they will say oh, by the way, I will go ahead and go get X, Y and Z or maybe our relationship managers will say well, you give us everything but your last three years taxes How can we facilitate making that happen? And prospects are expecting it to take a lot of time for you to go through their information and build a financial plan. Because they just went through this exercise of gathering all of that information. So they already know how laborious it is to gather all of those documents and give them over to someone and they want you to take your time going through and giving them an educated opinion or advice on the information that they’ve provided. When the prospect appointment and we’re moving on to the onboarding for new clients. I will always ask them, if this was a value and what other questions they have. By the end of the meeting. They will normally tell you I think that’s it. I think you’ve answered everything. This has been very valuable. Nobody’s giving me this information before. Thank you so much. I will get some sort of segue. And then I say Mr. Mrs. Client, I don’t know if this has ever happened. But anytime I’m at the doctor’s office and the doctor says Do you have any more questions? I say no, they stand up they touch that doorknob and all sudden I’ve got 50 Other questions I forgot to ask. Mr. And Mrs. Client, I work with a lot of doctors as a financial advisor. And we call this the door knob role. So in our office, we call it the parking lot rule as we conclude our meeting you are free and we’re going to hit that pavement and we’re going to think of all of the questions that you did not ask at this consultation. And when those arrive I want you to email them to and then I give them the email address that’s not my email address but goes to our relationship manager inbox. And when you got those questions, I’m more than happy to follow up and give you that information. Now, if they are a prospect and we have concluded our appointment, and they have a lingering question, if it is a question about something that was discussed or said in the meeting, I will normally answer that. If it is a complicated question, and they need more financial planning advice, or they want a follow up of some sort then that’s a second consultation that either a fee or as an onboarding as a client. We don’t just sit here for alltime consultation fee and answer your questions and demands for the rest of time. And our relationship managers are empowered to know how, with prospects if it’s a quick question based on something that happened during that

Jamie  

meeting something they said they misswrote a note or forgot what they need to do. We’re gonna answer that really quick for them. But if they want continued financial planning advice than they need to become a financial planning client. Alright, this podcast is 100% about action items. It was super long because I wanted to walk you through everything that we go through when we talk to our prospects and we move them to the onboarding stage of becoming in new client. And again, a prospect is somebody that thinks they want to do business with you or you think you want to do business with them. But there has not been an exchange of money and there has not been an agreement set forth. Once we have exchange of money and an agreement that person become a client and our office we practice the no sell sell which means we deliver so much value in that financial planning meeting, that we have the prospect ask us they continue to work at our firm on a ongoing basis and we always listen to out gut instincts if we have a red flag if we don’t like how the conversation is going – You do not have to allow everyone who’s willing to hire you to hire you. Prior to ever meeting with that prospect. We ask them for a host of different information so that our financial advisors can be prepared during that consultation to review their questions and give answers. On average. It takes a financial adviser about 30 minutes to one hour of prep time prior to that meeting, to go through all of the client questions and make sure that they are prepared. But that really depends on the caliber of the financial advisor and how they process information and like to prepare for appointments. This can take 10 minutes of time. This can take an hour of time. If it takes more than an hour time you need to stop and because they have not fully hired you as a financial planning client and in that prospect relationship so making sure that you’re really intentional. You don’t play office, you don’t get the head trash about little Gushin on how to answer this, but you’re really going through the questions, looking at the they’ve provided and delivering value right off the get go. During that consultation. We want to make sure that we are answering their questions even if we are bursting at the seams with things that we want to tell them based on all the information that we just reviewed, and all the areas that they need to improve. We close our mouth we open our ears and we listen to their questions they have paid in our instance for our time and therefore we owe it to them to answer their questions. First, we will end that consultation with any additional advice or things that we wanted to be aware of that they didn’t ask questions about and then we will always ask that prospect Mr. or Mrs. Client have I provided you with value today and if you are asking for this information if you are listening to clients if you are practicing that no sell sell they will almost always say yes to that question. Because the information that you have is valuable. It is important and we’ve never ever, ever forget that money is an exchange of value. And they have entrusted you to help them in ways that they don’t understand the complexity of they’re scared to make a mistake or their family is so dependent on them getting it right. You have to provide that level of advice to every person that you meet with. And if you follow this formula that The Perfect RIA has laid out for you, then there’s no way you can’t deliver massive value on a routine basis and radically change lives.