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Jamie Shilanski  

Yourself doubt kills off more dreams than failure could ever imagine possible. Welcome back to TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, in an episode of Worlds to Conquer, and today we are going to dive into the professional head trash that is holding you back from being able to market yourself a financial advisor. And also, let’s really be honest with one another, justify the fees that we are about to charge when you get started in financial advisors. And we think there’s about three different tracks, if you will, that you will be on when you first get out, you get your license, and you’re so excited, if you are making less than sort of $300,000 a year, then you’re in your growth stage. That is the only thing that you should be focused on, is marketing and growth. Now, when I say marketing, people oftentimes think that that just means promotional that means branding, that means advertising, that means doing seminars, that means doing all these different things. And I get asked this a lot, Jamie, what should I do for marketing? Whatever you’re most comfortable with, whatever gets you in front of people, where you’re on a platform in order to deliver your expertise, go do that. Everything in marketing works. You hate social media. Don’t do social media. You Love Public Speaking. Go do public speaking. Everything works. You just have to work it. But marketing doesn’t stop on just the promotional about casting that net and getting in front of as many people as possible, because marketing also means to me, delivering exceptional client experiences. Now why do I tie that into marketing. Well, when I ask a financial advisor, tell me about how you’re getting your clients, what are they going to tell me? What are they going to tell me is their number one source for getting new clients gone? Yep, referrals, client referrals. Most of my clients come from client referrals. Well, then that means that you should be dedicating time and energy and effort to doing nothing but perfecting your client meetings and your communication skills. I tie that right into it, because if you’re getting if you are genuinely getting all of your clients from referrals, then every single time that you sit down in front of a client, you’re not only having an opportunity to deliver massive value, but you’re doing a little bit of marketing inside of there too. You’re knocking their socks off so much that they leave that office and they are just bustling with energy to talk to people about all the things that you outlined for them to go and do, and that means perfecting your client experience with them. So when you’re in that growth stage, that’s really what we want to see you focused on, how do you deliver a one page plan? How do you build a one page plan? How do we start delivering massive value? How do we incorporate value add? Ashley keen associates, our RIA up in Anchorage, Alaska, we do four value adds, minimally a year. However, if you are just starting out, we strongly recommend not going from zero to four. Why? Because you’ve never executed a value add. You might not have all of the information. And we just, actually, we worked with a company that was just trying to execute their first value add, but they won. They didn’t really understand the process of the value they didn’t really get the buy in of delivering it to people, and they didn’t have any of the systems set up in order to make it happen. Now, unfortunately, they gave themselves 17 days to execute this. That’s a terrible idea. In fact, Micah and I, my baby brother, we were just talking about our next value add, and I’d really said, you know, I kind of want to get this outlined. It’s on the property casualty stuff and side tip in curation. We haven’t run this through our office yet, but I’ll give you a sneak peek. In 2019 home values were dramatically different than what they are in 2020, through 2024, and so if you have clients that have escalated home values, how many of them reach back out to their property casualty insurers and made sure that their insurance was also increasing with the own value. So that’s a preview of what we’re going to do. Now, I think I could get this jammed up and I could get the execution of it done in the next 30 days, but like I said, You know what? We got a lot of information. We got to go enter in there, and we can’t derail our fall value add. Why don’t we either give this up for spring? So when we are thinking of our value adds, it’s not just something that we’re giving ourselves 17 days, we also have to think about the end result for our team. Do we have a lot of this information already in our infinity CRM? Infinity. CRM is a custom software that Micah and I built so that we can generate all these value adds for clients. It is our brain trust. So if you’re using gorilla or red tail, or Salesforce, or whatever big of CRM is out there, garbage in, garbage out, as much information as you’re capturing, that’s what you have to put inside of your CRM to generate these value adds. And so as we started looking at this, said, Okay, if we want to do this, we need to know, one, did they move houses? Two, are they in their current home? Still? How long have they been in that home? And then in Alaska, we publish our municipality records, their public information, but not every county or state does that. And so we said, Okay, we have to kind of divide this out. Do we have that information, or do we not have that information? And so it ended up being a much bigger project and live that we can’t just push on our team and give them 17 days to complete. Now this other advisor’s office are doing something a little bit different, but they still have that 17 day timeline, but they had never done that, and they didn’t have all of the information in order to pull this off. And so you also have to think about that. You have to, in my mind, start with when you’re coming into the value add, start with the end result, and then back in, okay, if I want to deliver this, then I need to know that. So if I’m delivering something on property casualty, guess what? I need to know what their values are. I need to know what those they start backing into it. Did they move? Do we have current loan information? Do we have this, etc, and once we have all that compiled, now we can execute on that value add. So when you’re in that growth state, those are the things that you should really be focused on. And if you’re in those early stages of growth, I would say, don’t worry. Start perfecting marketing. Start perfecting the client meeting experience and setting client expectations. And then as you tiptoe towards the latter part of growth and or into freedom, now we can talk about delivering those value adds consistently, the freedom is when you are sort of pop at that 250 $300,000 range, you’ve got a lot of money to do the things that you want to do, but not so much money that you could do nothing. Because with escalating income tax brackets also means a lot more responsibility, and a lot more is getting outsourced, and you have a bigger burden. Things start costing more suddenly. You’re not buying ground beef. You’re buying steak three nights a week. Those things have a price tag that come along with them. And so when you’re in this freedom stage, you’re really saying, all right, I’m making good money, good money, good honest money. And most financial advisors, I know, they’re not silver spoon people. These are people that bootstrapped themselves up. They didn’t come from people that made tons and tons of money, millions and millions of dollars. These are people that, you know what, got into this business to help people, and the money’s really good, and I really get a satisfaction of solving people’s problems. And once they hit that freedom stage, now what they want to do is they want to take a little bit more time out of the office. They want to delegate a little bit more things to different people, and they need to be able to also increase their revenue while doing so. Because as financial advisors, we think that the second we stop coming into the office, the revenue stop. It comes to a grinding halt. That’s one thing. You know. My father, Floyd Shilanski started Shilanski and Associates back in 1981 with my mom, Rosa. And he had a really hard time with that for several years, and I would say only the last six years, he’s come around to the fact that he doesn’t have to physically be in front of clients to be earning and generating money. And that was really hard, because that’s how he he built the practice was, get him in front of clients, he’s going to earn money. There was a direct correlation to that. So we packed his calendar full products. We packed him full clients. And it is true, when you sit him across from somebody, find a deal, he is going to make money. In that experience, he’s just good. I mean, he’s a master of his craft. And then you get to this enterprise stage, and this empire, if you will, that you’re building now it’s now. It’s not just delegation. Now you’re growing your practice, and you’re training financial advisors. So this is when you’re bringing in proteges and leads and senior advisors, and they’re all under your umbrella, and that you should all be drinking the same Kool Aid, doing things the same way. How do you scale that without feeling like go back those beginning days and be in the office 24/7, and that’s really what Empire is about. We’ve built it’s weird Empire for us, but this which is the language I think I more default to. And we have five different financial advisors. We work with clients all across the United States. We will do things the same way. Our delivery inside the client office, in the meeting room might be a little bit different, so I’m jocular. If you are not a person who other people have told you that you’re funny, you are not funny. Don’t try to tell a joke. We and Pat Barbas, he was on our advisor training one day, and he was talking advisors that too. He said, Listen, you’re going to hear, you know, Micah myself and way, but if you hear them, if you hear a nuance that you don’t think, that you don’t do it. And so Matt was saying, for instance, he said, listen, James, come in and she’s got to make kind of a comment. She got to make kind of a joke lands, and it’s funny. If you don’t have that, do not tell the joke. Do not do it. Do not those type of things. You have to have that same ability to deliver in those client meetings. And it’s really important to understand that, because a lot of times when we get to this empire stage, we think everyone verbatim has to say the same things. You don’t have to say the same things exactly, but you have to use a common vocabulary, and you also have to have the same point. We got to come to the same conclusion. And so when we build out financial plans in our empire office. You know, we can kid ourselves all day long that every financial plan is custom, but really, we’re doing very similar tasks with different people. There are different nuances, because they’re the idiosyncrasies that come with families. But for the most part, we’re following a same strategic plan. What are the five areas of financial planning. How do we cash flow management? How much insurance do we always recommend? What are we doing on the estate planning side? When do we start the investments and conversions? When do we transfer funds? We have the same strategy in place, and when you’re building an empire, that is the most important quality, because what you don’t want is dissension and separation, and that happens when not everyone is getting the same training, when not everyone is on the same page. And now you have five different advisors, and all of them have different assistants, doing different things in their own way. That does not work. We have done that before. It does not scale. It becomes incredibly it’s like being in a chicken frickin coop, because then it becomes this hierarchy and this pecking order, and it’s just, it’s a toxic environment, and it doesn’t lead for good stability in the organization. Now I don’t like it for those internal reasons, but here’s the driving reason. I don’t like different advisors doing different things. Clients talk, clients talk, and you just told me that most of your clients come from referrals, if your clients are out doing a social event together. In fact, I didn’t even know three clients knew each other. I knew two of them knew each other. I didn’t know the third they were all on a trip in Ireland together talking about the Roth conversion strategy that we had in place for two of the clients, but not the third one. Now the third one, that’s because the employment was a little bit different in that situation. But guess what? The next meeting, they said, Hey, by the way, I was out with Bob and Sue. And they said, for them, you’re doing X, Y and Z. Now, why would they ask that? Does everyone know everyone’s situation is different kind of but we all think we have more similarities than we do differences, and birds of a feather flock together. So they figured, if it was good for the two of them, why wasn’t it good for them? Why were we doing something a little bit different? And so I want to make sure that we’re planting seeds and we’re talking about the same strategies with clients, because they’re going to talk. So even though that we have an enterprise office, here’s our format. This is what we do, and this is the common vocabulary that we use all of the time. Our delivery might be different. Our point is the same. We follow the same process. And you know, we got a little flack from a coach that we’re no longer affiliated with, because he said it was paid by numbers that you could just come in here and just be like, Oh, you fit in this box. Slide. Here you go, here you go, here you go, and you totally miss the value that is delivered in being consistent. I mean, why do you think Starbucks sells so much gosh darn coffee. The coffee’s not good, people, the coffee is not good at Starbucks. It is bitter and acidic. But we all go in there because we know what we know what to order. We know that we’re going to get consistent cup of coffee. The paper is going to feel the same on the cup. We know what we want. They might have all the variations in the world, but for the most part, we are all sticking with our normal coffee order all of the time. No matter where we are at, there’s value in being consistent and also value in understanding when the nuances are different, why we’re doing things differently. All right, so now let’s dive into that. We have those three stages of your career where you’re at and here’s where I see, most people get stuck. Most people get stuck between growth and freedom, and they get stuck between growth and freedom because they don’t believe that they are delivering any value as a financial advisor to justify asking somebody to pay a fee. Now, TPR nation, you know, I don’t give a how you’re paid. I do not care if you’re fee only, if you’re AUM only, I don’t care. I do not care how money comes to you. I care whether or not you’re leading the conversation with that. The thing that drives me nuts about fee only advisors is they blast that everywhere. Instead of saying, Hey, how can I help you? Everyone expects you’re going to charge a price. Everyone expects you’re going to charge a price. And when you’re saying fee only, that’s the very first thing that they’re bringing up to their consumer. Hey, this is about money. This is about an exchange of money between the two of us. And don’t kid yourself about all the transparent conversations. We’re transparent as a day, as long I am blatantly honest about our fees that we charge with clients. I make sure I have that conversation so we’re both comfortable with what’s being charged and assessed, and when I think that I am no longer providing value for the effort that we’re doing, I let the client go. We graduate clients and we fire clients, but we call it graduation in our office, and the reason we call it graduation is we need to move them on to somebody else that’s going to be able to provide more value. I had this killer relationship with a client that I did a bit of fractional CFO work for, and I really liked them, and we set up multiple offices. We did great things. We turned their less than a million revenue into multi million dollar company. It was fantastic. Up until 2020 when covid hit and when everything got shut down, in this particular instance, they did a bunch of PCA, CNA work, so, you know, hands on with handicapped individuals and communities and senior citizens. But the problem was, is that when that happened, you had highly susceptible people, and when covid struck, they had to shut down everything and their operations, and all sudden, people weren’t getting these types of services, because you couldn’t have any type of exposure. It decimated the business plan. Now we were able to recover from that thanks to federal programs as well as the cash reserves that we had, but man, it has been a claw back up to the top to get those systems better operational, because what most people don’t realize in that particular industry is that when it happened and you could not get help for a year and a half with your handicap individual, the two people working in the household, how to make a decision, do we continue to, you know, have to call out of work, or do one of us just take off and do this full time? A lot of people chose to take off and do it full time, and so then all sudden, you have this demand for services go down. So it’s not that it’s going to go down forever, it’s it’s just where we were at because of the acts of God, like stronger than necessary, things that impact our business. And so this last year, you know, we were talking about it. We were doing different things. We’re kind of get them on the track. And I said, Hey, listen, I just, I don’t feel comfortable charging you the fees I’m charging right now because we’re not able to do any of the things that we had talked about. I think you’re going to need a couple years of recovery, and, you know, I’m going to bow out right now and allow you guys to recover from that. And he was like, Jamie, I I cannot tell you how thankful I am. I don’t want to lose you, I believe every single month, but I know we can’t do any of the things that you’re wanting me to until we get out of this, and we left in a really good place with one another. And he was like, from the bottom of my heart, like my family, everyone, like, thank you so much for everything that you have done. You know you’ve been absolutely tremendous. And he’s like, I will be back. We’ve just got to recover. Great, fantastic, wonderful. See you later. Bye, and, and then that was good for me, because I didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel like I was charging them, you know, I was charging them X amount of dollars, because I don’t work for free. I don’t work for free. And, and I also know I’m comfortable with what I’m charging because I know I’m gonna knock your socks off. I know I’m gonna deliver value. I know I’m gonna show up and advocate and fight for you. And when I have that in place, it works a great in harmony. But the second I feel like, gosh, I don’t think I’m providing any value here. I have to do one of two things. In that particular instance, I needed to graduate the client because I knew we couldn’t implement any of the plan design for that particular business. And so that I was like, well, as good as this money is as much as they’re willing to continue to pay me. This isn’t right. I gotta be able to sleep at night with both eyes closed. This isn’t right. We need to have the card conversation and move on. Alright, the second thing I need to do when I’m like, Oh my gosh, this this top client, this big client that that only wants you to talk to me maybe one or two times a year, they talk to the staff a little bit more, they’re really not needy, because, let’s face it, are really affluent clients, you know, for the most part, like, if you, if you go into like, the super millionaires, they might be super needy because you are now becoming their concierge to fix everything in their lives for them. And that has less to do with financial advice and more with like, coordinating private jets and solving those problems, hiring people to do interventions for drug problems, for grandkids or nieces and nephews or sons or daughters, you know. So, so that’s a whole other level. But for the most part, for the most of you know, the clients that are of 2 million and up to 10 million, you know, they’re not super needy, like they got that money because they’ve been hustling and doing their own jobs and focused on their own career, and they understand that you’re a professional, and they want your advice, but they don’t. They’re not needy of your services, where, when people make a little bit less than that, they’re constantly needy of your services, because they don’t understand a lot of those complexities, and so they want to make sure that they’re reaching out and getting their money’s worth. So it’s this weird dynamic that you have to, like, gage where your clients are with that. So when I have clients and then I feel to myself, like, gosh, we really don’t like we’re making x amount of dollars. It’s really good money, but man, this client does not need a lot from me. Then we have to do it, sit down and do a self assessment. And that self assessment is super, super important. So whenever they talk about marketing, if you hire a marketing agency or whoever you work with, the very first thing they’re going to ask you for is your unique selling proposition. What makes you different than everybody else? When you have to sit down and put that on paper, it is really difficult to think of yourself unique to everyone else in this entire world. So instead of thinking about the unique selling proposition when you’re trying to compose that, here’s what I do. I take a sheet of paper, I fold it in half, long wise, I draw a column. On the left hand side, it’s one of a kind, and on the right hand side, it’s one of many. And what makes me one of a kind? What makes me one of many, and those one of many things aren’t bad things. I mean, guys, that’s that’s why we have there’s not just one person doing one job. There’s not just one doctor out there that we can go see. There’s not just one mechanic that everyone in the world brings their car to. So just because there are tons of people in this particular industry. That does not mean that somebody’s not looking for you. We get into our heads about that, we start thinking, oh my gosh, I have to be unique. I have to be different. I’m not doing anything that’s different than the Edward Jones guy down the street or the Ray J guy over here, or the Schwab girl over there, and I’m just one of many of them out there in the sea. But what you don’t understand is that not everyone wants to work with those people. There are people that are going to want to work with just you, and I see this no more true than in our own office with my baby brother, Micah Shilanski and myself. And so people that I like to work with are good Salts of the Earth people. You know, I often call it my wine or beer test. Would I go get a glass of wine or beer with this person? And if the answer is yes, cool, then they pass my first test. Now, Micah, conversely, he does not want to get wine or beer with anyone. He is very technical. He’s very logical, and he works really well with a certain group of people, people that are very analytical, people that oftentimes gravitate towards the left wing. They work really well with Micah. They like how he talks, they like how he operates. They like how they can see the different processes, and they like his discipline. And if Micah was meeting with some of our clients, would they still like him? Of course, he’s my baby brother. What’s not to like? But they would not like the formality of that. They would need somebody that was a little bit more we broke it down a little more simply. We drew it on crayon, on the P on the piece of paper in the conference room, and we had real conversations. We were a little bit more familiar with each other, and so those are two unique styles. Now we’re still going to bring you to the same conclusion. We’re just going to take two different paths to get there, and that’s what you need to remember, is that because people out there are looking for similar services that you might offer next to anyone else, doesn’t mean they want them from somebody else. How many times do we not switch CPAs, doctors, mechanics, all of those different people, carpenters, contractors, because we have somebody that we like working with, and they’re all giving. They’re all, we’re all, they’re hustling the same product for the most part. We’re all trying to sell you our opinion, because that’s what this is. It’s our opinion on how you should manage the money that you’re earning and how you should do different things when it comes to financial planning, and that can be hard to put a price tag on. So when you’re doing that self assessment, and you’re looking at that unique selling proposition, one of a kind, one of many. Don’t get discouraged by what makes you one of many. So sit down there and say, okay, when a client hires me, here’s what I am going to deliver for them. This is what I said I’m going to do for these people. And if you ever feel guilty about the money that you’re charging. Just look at any realtor contract out there, and you will probably feel a lot better about yourself, because all there’s, I’m not even going to start. I will not start. But you know, they’re making 6% commission on leveraged money. And just be in the middle man, and you’re doing the grunt to the work. But guess what, most people sell their houses by using a realtor. Now I’m not saying that we should mirror that, but I’m saying let’s, anytime you feel like you’re a little bit less or charging a little bit too much money, just go compare yourself. Just go price shop next to some other people and be like, Oh my gosh, no, my fees are fine. So you sit down. You say, Okay, when a client hires me, what am I going to deliver? What am I saying that I’m going to do? I’m going to do? I’m going to meet with them four times a year. I’m going to meet with them three times a year. I’m going to meet with them two times a year, one time a year. It doesn’t matter what what is your practice? What are you going to do? Great when I meet with them. What are the areas of financial planning we’re going to cover? There are five. Sometimes they incorporate six, because I think they’re now segregating cash flow out. I’m not really hip on all the trendy ways they’re doing that. But you just take those five basic areas of financial planning and say, Okay, great. You know what? Every meeting, we’re going to talk about two of these, and we’re going to keep rotating, rotating, rotating through the list. And guess what, every year you have the same conversations about different topics in financial planning. Why? Because our income, our lives, our careers, nothing stays stagnant. And so even though you had already talked to the client about this, you need to bring it up again. That’s one of the reasons that we start every single client meeting with talk to me about your cash flow. Talk to me about your cash flow. It is after we make our salutations. How you doing? What you up to this summer? Do you guys get a moose this year. How sufficient, etc. Our next conversation, when we start the meeting off, when we’re getting out of salutations and into the meeting, we say, talk to me about your cash flow. And then what is the response? Well, it’s flowing. Great. You guys have any big expenses coming up, and all sudden you’re going to start seeing with your book of business. A lot of similarities. People looking for Windows to get replaced. People moving, people needing new roofs, new drives, all of these different similarities. And all sudden, when you get through client meetings, you’re going to start getting a Pulse Point like right now, I know how much Windows cost in rural and to urban places in Alaska. Why? Because we must have had 20 clients replace windows this year. And so all sudden, you get to know these different and say, okay, you know what, if you’re thinking about getting windows replaced, it’s probably going to be X amount of dollars. And now you start getting into them casual and clients love that. They love that sometimes, as financial advisors, we think that low hanging fruit isn’t fulfilling. But for clients, we are problem solvers. We have solutions to problems that they have that were weighing on their mind, and so think about that for a second, right? And I’m just going to use this window one as an example. And let’s say we have a client. You know, they got a 3000 square foot house. The windows are bad. The house is about 40 years old. They got to get something in. Okay, great. Now, now we know what the windows are going to cost. We’re going to know who the top people are, who’s had good experiences and bad we’re going to know that renewal by Anderson is going to cost them $100,000 so let’s go talk to anybody else besides them, no matter how beautiful their binder is, when they present you with all the different options, they’re the most costly in the state. Now we’ve given them a little bit of proof of like, Oh, tell me about other people’s experiences. So we’ve set the gage of what things might cost. We always set it on the high side. Always set on the high side. So that way, when they if I say your windows are going to be $100,000 and their window person comes in says it’s 85 they’re like, oh my gosh, I saved $15,000 they didn’t save any money. But those expectations high so that when they come in, they feel better about it. Great. You know what? We anticipated this. And here’s how we’re going to allocate money. Your RMDs are coming up for both your accounts. We’re just going to accelerate it, and we’re going to kick them out of here, here and here, and then we’re going to take the rest of the money out of the trust. Now, say we have a younger client, they can’t afford the 100,000 Great. Now we know how much banks are charging on those type of equity loans. Now we have conversations about going to get a HELOC. Now we have conversations about payment plans, different options. Can we do all the windows at once? We have all of those different things. And for the client, they’re sitting there stressed about the windows in their house and not sure how they’re going to afford getting it replaced. And you’re coming in as that problem solver. You’re saying, Hey, you’re going to have this experience. Most of my clients have had this situation happen. Here’s how they handled it. Here’s how we’re going to handle it for you. And that low hanging fruit takes so much burden off of the client, and we underestimate it all of the time, all of the time, because when they came in that office, that’s the number one thing that they were worried about. So we say, How is cash flow? And they talk to us about the cash flow the second question right out of their mouth. And we get, normally, we try to get this before the meeting starts. It says, hey, just so that your financial advisor is prepared. Are there any specific questions you would like them to address during your meeting? And we go out two weeks before the meeting happens, and we ask those questions. And guess what? Clients respond. If they have questions, they put them in here, and if they forget, and this is the this is a beautiful consequence. So we started asking these questions, getting them from the lines ahead of time the advisors for appointment preppy going through the list of questions, and now knows what their questions are and how to address it. This is so beautiful for our client experience, because if we were going to go in there and talk about, let’s just say their net worth report, let’s just say that they were coming in and that particular meeting, we were going over their net worth report, but in their client questions, they started asking about divorce counselors, and if we knew anyone that could have an amiable separation or all of these different things, guess what? Now our meeting is going to be tempo way different. We’re going to completely change that meeting. And so it’s a really great insight for what’s bugging your client, what’s on their mind. Now, the beautiful thing that we didn’t know was going to be a result of this is that when clients did not submit a question and we said, How’s your cash flow, then the next question that we ask is, hey, do you have any questions for me that I can address right now? Now we asked this right out of the gate in the meeting, right out of the gate. Why? Because if they have a question and you’re going through your spiel, they’re not listening to you. They don’t care. They are dying to ask you whatever burning question is in their mind. Address their question first. Problem. Solve for them first. Put your client first. So we ask them for those questions, and when they don’t have them, they say, Hey, listen, I wanted to ask you this, but I forgot to submit it ahead of time. So if you don’t know the answer, I totally understand if you need to get back to me. But and then that is beautiful, because they were never caught with our pants down. So if they asked us something that we don’t have an answer, I say, You know what? I needed a little bit read more research on that one. But let me get back to you. They say, Oh, absolutely, I knew I should ask ahead of time. And so it created this cadence of clients and understanding when to submit questions and how we were going to answer those questions, and if they still had questions that need to come up in the meeting. It also set the tone that we’ll get back to them, and that’s okay we get to get back to people. I’ve never once dealt with a professional who answered all of my questions and then I asked him some obscurity, and then say, well, you know what? Let me get back to you. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, what an idiot. I can’t believe you didn’t know this. I’m out of here. That just doesn’t happen. That doesn’t happen most of the time. People afford you the opportunity to respond to them later as needed. And so when we have this cadence, and we’re going through this and this expectations, now we’re delivering value to the client now. We’re addressing and identifying what they needed. And then we’re moving on to our spiel, whatever it might be for that time. So we might be going over buckets. We might be going over a cash flow distribution. So net worth report 1099, beneficiary reports. You know, we’re gonna do this property casualty in the spring. We might be doing all of those topics towards the latter part of the meeting, after we have addressed their most concerns. And so if I’m having head trash about what I’m providing to the client and the fees I’m charging, I go through that list and I say, okay, great. Did I meet with the client when I said I was going to meet with them? Yes, all right, when I had that meeting, Did I check in with them on their questions and address all of their questions. Yes, all right, did I also ask them questions in relation to one of the areas of the financial plan? So I’ll make my math really easy. We’ll round it up to this new, trendy six numbers of financial planning. And let’s say that you meet with a client four times a year. Well, the beginning of the year, you’re going to do two of those topics. I recommend taxes, just so you know, because everyone’s going to be thinking about be thinking about taxes all right? And then in the summer, it will say, the next quarter, you’re going to meet with them, and you’re going to go over to other of those topics. The next quarter, you’re going to go through the next two topics. Then the next year, you’re going to go through that again. You’re a star at the beginning of the list. You’re going to go and go and go and go and repeat that, right? So, 2222, and you’re going to continue that every single cycle to make sure that you are reviewing all areas of their financial plan like you said you’re going to do. And so if you do those things, if you talk to the client about their questions, answer their questions, if you meet with them, when you say you’re going to meet with them, if you’re going over different aspects. And I strongly, strongly recommend you do not do more than two areas of financial planning in one client meeting. I was talking to this awesome advisor, her and I were chit chatting one time, and we just got one of those long conversations at a conference and going through like client experiences. And I said, Well, how long is your appointments? So our appointments at Shilanski and Associates are one hour time blocked. But we came and said at 15 minutes for each conversation, because around 45 minutes your clients are gonna have glass guide. And she goes, Oh, I carve out two hours for every client meeting. And I was like, Oh, my God, two hours. What are you doing in those two hours? And there was a whole whiteboard, there was a presentation of a binder, and every single client meeting, they went over all areas of their financial planning. And I was like, how does that go with your clients? And she’s like, Oh, some clients find it really useful. They really like how thorough it is. I was like, okay, that’s some clients. What about most of your clients? And she goes, you know, if I’m being honest, I think I lose them about the first hour in. And I was like, Yeah, we don’t. We don’t have the bandwidth for that. And if somebody has hired a financial advisor, they also don’t have the joy for going through all of those things. And so I really recommend that you don’t take on any more than two areas of financial planning and go through those in the meeting and then move on to the others. Now, can clients spontaneously bring up other areas? Yes, of course. They can do whatever the heck they want. They’re the client. But that doesn’t mean that you are going, Oh, let me do all five areas. Let me do all of these, or six, whatever you subscribe to. So make sure you’re keeping that in mind. And if you’re doing those things, then you have to be comfortable knowing that there is going to be an exchange of value, and that exchange of value is that you’re taking care of things for them. And as my father always said, don’t get your checkbook. Don’t get in their checkbook. Don’t look at them and say you can or can’t afford. Me. Your price is what your price is. Set it out there. These are the services that you’re going to deliver. And then deliver those services. Nobody stands in line at the grocery store and says, Hey, that person looks poor. Let’s discount the meat. That just doesn’t happen. But with financial advisors, because we are selling our opinions, we discount it constantly, constantly. We discount it for people, and I don’t, I don’t ever see other professions do that. I don’t see lawyers do it, and they’re selling opinions. Sure, it’s about the law, but ours is about finance. There’s still rules and regulations with ours, but when you hire an attorney, it’s all for their opinion. And then, second of all, when you hire a therapist, I don’t see them discounting their rates because they just got a lot of head trash about charging you. They’re charging you to be their therapist, to listen and go through these things. So we need to go back. If you struggle with with really delivery value, if you struggle with the head trash that comes into knowing if you’re worth what you’re charging. Write it down. Write it down and make yourself a checklist and then say, You know what, Bob and Sue? Did I meet with them when I said I was going to Yes? Did I ask them if they had questions? Yes, did I review and then break it down five areas of those financial planning and say, Did I review this with them? Yes, this is the date. Did I review this with them? Yes, this is the date. And go through that and give yourself a checklist that you can look back on and say, Yes, I did what I said I was going to do for this client. And if you’re doing you said you’re going to do, then you should have no problem charging what you said you’re going to charge, because it was their choice to hire you. They understood what they were getting, and you are now delivering on what you said you are going to do. TPR Nation, this is Jamie Shilanski, in an episode of Worlds to Conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.