BachrachBlog

Larry is early in his Values-Based Financial Planning™ Journey building his Ideal Client Community and he wanted my point of view about the benefits for clients or potential clients in creating their Financial Road Map®. Whether you are new to the Values-Based Financial Planning™ journey or a veteran you will appreciate my response to Larry.

First, for the clients, they LOVE the Financial Road Map®! It’s big, colorful, and visual. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words… maybe more. The Financial Road Map® takes what’s most important to them and puts it on one single piece of paper in a way that is aligned with the flow of time. Husbands and wives see their values side-by-side on the values staircases, their goals are clearly defined with target dates, specific amounts of money, and the positive reasons these goals are a priority have been expressed. Also, there is simple summary of their current financial reality.

Once equipped with a Financial Road Map®, most people feel as though they have never been better equipped to make smart choices about their money so they can achieve their goals and fulfill their values.

A visual tool, like the Financial Road Map®, is very important because most Financial Advisors are much too linear and tend to way, way… WAY over-explain financial concepts, financial products, and financial services. The Financial Road Map® makes the whole idea of having a financial plan and a relationship with a Trusted Advisor, to create and implement that plan, much easier to understand —- for the client.

When I wrote the Values-Based Financial Planning™ book I asked the practitioners of Values-Based Financial Planning™ to ask their clients to describe their experience with the Financial Road Map®, some of which were published in the book. Comments like this one from Jerry Mercer were common, “The Financial Road Map® concept is ideal for the serious investor. Being able to compare our holdings with our needs has led my wife, Ruth, and I to a financial plan that gives us peace of mind and maximum control of our funds. Our Financial Road Map® is a terrific tool for managing our future.”

The clients love the Financial Road Map® and so do Advisors who learn to facilitate the quality experience described above. What’s in it for you?

Delivering the Financial Road Map® experience gives you a process to make a strong human connection in less than an hour. During the Financial Road Map® interview your prospective clients talk for most of that hour giving you the opportunity to make an intelligent choice about whether or not you want to invite them to join your Ideal Client Community. Done properly, they learn that you really care about them as humans and that you are trustworthy.

This is very important because a huge career mistake made by most Financial Advisors is not being more discriminating about who they accept as clients in the first place. Most Financial Advisors end up, after years of working hard to build a business, with only a handful of truly Ideal Clients. We call this a dumb business. Look at the cold hard facts of life for most Financial Advisors, even before the recent economic problems: they work too many hours, for not enough money, with too much liability for the reward. This is at the root of why so many who enter the financial services business fail and most who “make it” past the first several years look a lot more like mediocrity than success.

How much more successful would you be if you were skilled at conducting an interview where, in less than an hour, people hire you to write a plan, want you to be their Advisor for all of their financial affairs, entrust you with all of their money, act on your advice, and refer you to others for the same service?

That’s the impact the Financial Road Map® is having for other Financial Advisors and it can do the same for you.

Using the Financial Road Map® and building an Ideal Client Community by referral only on the Values-Based Financial Planning™ platform will enable you to have your Ideal Life in 4 years or less. It’s the ultimate client-centered win / win and it’s how we train Financial Advisors to build an Ideal Client Community by referral only in 4 years or less.

If you have not done so already, contact us to schedule your complimentary Success Road Map interview with one of our Accountability Coaches today.

Remember, it’s a great time to be a Financial Advisor!

In 2001, CEG Worldwide founder John Bowen conducted a survey of financial professionals. His question: “Do you think you’re client-centered?” Every one of them answered yes.

No surprise there. Most advisors care about their clients and, I suspect, that’s what these advisors thought John was asking them about. But when asked to apply twelve (12) objective criteria, only 14% of the advisors’ businesses were actually all about the clients. The majority of these businesses were set up to cater to the advisor’s preferences. (FYI, the 14% who were truly focused on clients were also attracting as much as 30 times as many assets under management as investment-centered advisors and doing especially well in the downturn that began the year the survey was taken.)

The truth is there are a lot of people who think they are client-centered, and who don’t behave that way. What’s more, most advisors agree that their businesses should be all about their clients, but they’ve never formulated or implemented a plan for actualizing this ideal. It’s the same as folks who say, “I have a healthy lifestyle,” but then smoke cigarettes and eat poorly. Maybe they go to a tanning salon and the gym so they can look good, but they really aren’t creating a health-centered life.

You can probably come up with dozens of new ideas for making your business all about them. Then again, maybe you’re stymied. Perhaps you’re thinking, I’d really like to do a lot more than I do for my clients, but another thought also crosses your mind: I don’t have the time, the energy, the staff, the knowledge, or the resources.

Your rationale may even include the idea that your clients won’t let you do more for them. I recently heard this at a meeting with the CEO of a major insurance company in California. He made an offhand remark about the wonderful things the agents do for “the clients who will let us.” I couldn’t just let that pass without comment, so I told him it shouldn’t be up to his clients. Of course, a client can choose whether or not they work with one of his agents at all, but the CEO needed to decide what level of service they were going to provide to everyone who works with them. When you get on an airplane and the flight attendant closes the door, does the pilot ask, “Does everyone want me to fly the plane today?” or “Does everyone agree with my flight plan?” An airline doesn’t give its passengers discretion about whether to board the plane on time or not, whether to take off as scheduled, whether to divert to another airport at their whim. And why not? Because the other passengers suffer when the pilot abdicates his responsibility to serving all of them equally.

How does this translate to your profession? When you commit to having an all-about-them business, you do what’s right for the clients. Period. No hemming or hawing, no allowing them to dictate how you run your business. You figure out what is in their best interests, and then you do it. You don’t simply revere the idea of doing what’s right for them; you actually implement every time. As Guy Kawasaki wrote in The Macintosh Way, you don’t compete on strategy; you compete on execution.

I know you really care about your clients and would really love to run an all-about-them business, but the question is how? How do you go from running your practice as it is now to operating the kind of business that puts the clients first? And if you think you already run a business that’s all about them, then how do you take it to the next level?

1. If my business were really all about them, how often would each client see me each year, and how much time would they get?
2. If my business were really all about them, exactly what would I do for each person?
3. If my business were really all about them, how would I make my clients’ lives simpler?
4. If my business were really all about them, how would they pay me for this value?
5. If my business were really all about them, how many clients could I do all this for?
6. If my business were really all about them, how many people would staff my office?
7. If my business were really all about them, would I have strategic alliances and partners?
8. If my business were really all about them, how would I take care of myself physically and emotionally?

This should be your objective: Once you’ve brainstormed answers to the eight questions above, make a list of everything you will be delivering to your clients and how it benefits them. (If you’d like to see what one highly successful advisor calls his “10 Client Deliverables,” go to www.TrustedAdvisorToolkit.com. You will be surprised, I imagine, to find that many of these benefits create a better, more manageable business for you, too.

For example, if you were to spend the kind of time with your clients they deserve, that would probably mean less clients, which would mean you’d need to work with clients who yield you more income per capita. You’d need to be extremely competent to work with these folks, and they’d expect you to be focused on your professional growth. Ultimately, you’d need to figure out a way to run a business that allowed you to become very good at what you do, to limit the number of clients, and to serve all of them very well.

So no doubt there’s a learning curve to contend with, new management practices to adopt, staffing issues to resolve, and client contact to be made. And that’s probably not all. It’s not an easy thing, being client-centered. But if you’re going to make it all about them, it’s what you have to do.

Near the end of one year, I called someone who had invested in a year-long program but had bailed out at about the halfway mark. As we talked, I reminded him that he had paid for a full year of training and coaching and offered to help him get more of his money’s worth before time ran out.

He declined and gave me a variety of excuses. But underneath the “Things are crazy right now,” “This was a bad year,” and “I have a bunch of legislative and administrative concerns,” the truth was blaring much louder than his words. He actually said, “I don’t really need to change,” “I’m a talker,” and “I’m good at winging it.”

Tucked in between his rap about how busy he had gotten, he mentioned that he had begun another program concurrent with the one he’d paid me for, and this other program taught presenting, convincing, and persuading skills—a.k.a. the advisor does most of the talking (traditional transaction –oriented sales). He obviously felt more comfortable with this approach.

The training we deliver and advocate at Bachrach & Associates makes it all about them, not you. It’s about asking questions then listening rather than talking. It’s about creating a profound experience for the prospective client rather than persuading and convincing everyone you meet to pay for your services. It’s about leading clients to draw their own conclusions on whether to hire you or not rather than persisting (or even stalking them) until they say yes.

But this fellow had decided he was more suited to the old-school sales model: He was simply more comfortable talking instead of listening. This wasn’t the first time I had heard someone prefer to present rather than ask questions, but thank goodness it doesn’t happen frequently, and the financial services industry is going away from this mentality. Most of the advisors in my programs had the sense to ask themselves, If I were considering hiring a financial services professional, what would appeal to me more: someone who extolled their own virtues and tried to talk me into hiring him or her because they scared the snot out of me or made me feel guilty (negative emotions), or someone who asked a lot of really good questions that helped me think, explore, and discover, then come to a reasonable conclusion about whether working together was a good idea or not (positively inspired me to take action)? Not How do I prefer to deal with clients? but instead How would clients prefer to deal with me?

When you put other people first, you get all the business you’d ever want to get, because that’s what they want. Yet there’s the paradox: You can’t be thinking I’m putting clients first so I can get what I want, because the dominant thought is get what I want. Although you accept this as a fundamental truth of your business—that putting clients first gets you what you want—you have to put that principle out of your mind when you are with clients. Focus only on putting them first and forget the rest. Trust the process, which means letting go of certain old habits that could be holding you back from realizing your true potential and developing new ways of being with people—ways that may feel more comfortable to you.

Yet there can be pitfalls. In my experience, advisors make three common mistakes, which can be avoided easily with a shift in skills and mindset. These mistakes are 1) most advisors talk too much, 2) many don’t bother to listen, and 3) even when they do manage to be quiet and hear what clients have to say, they don’t clearly communicate to the client the connection between their recommendations and what’s in it for the client. How can you remedy these mistakes? Simple.

1. Stop talking so much.

Stop rattling off your credentials, employing manipulation tactics, and jabbering on in the hopes that if you just say the right thing, they’ll buy. It’s simply not true that a sales-chatter method leads to a greater number of clients than a client-centered approach, so let go of the illusion that you can control the outcome of the conversation by doing all the talking. Learn to let the outcome just happen: If they decide to work with you, great. If they decide not to work with you, equally fine.

Instead, concentrate on learning about the person. The objective is not to win him or her over, but rather to determine whether there’s a fit with your business. You don’t take on all comers; you are selective and choose to work only with those people who will help you build a profitable, solid business so you can ultimately enjoy a great quality of life.

2. Listen.

How can you distinguish the best clients for your business? How can you communicate to people that they are important to you? How do you let people know “it’s all about them”? Simply ask questions and then listen to the answers.

This is different from asking manipulative questions to probe for pain and instill fear. The questions we teach advisors to ask in the initial client interview are designed to help the advisor and, more significant, the potential client make some discoveries about what’s most important to them: their core values. And as people respond, the advisor listens not only by hearing the words people speak, but also by being attentive to the experience they have while they talk. We use a tool called a Financial Road Map® to record people’s answers and demonstrate that they’ve been heard.

3. Make the connection between what you can do for your clients and what’s in it for them.

If, after this conversation, you feel there is a good possibility for a working relationship, then offering to work with someone needs to be phrased in such a way that people understand how you will benefit them, not the other way around.

The wrong way: “How would you like us to create a financial plan for you so you can make smart decisions about your money?” (Focuses on what you do and what you think is important to them.)

The right way: “Now that we’ve explored what’s important to you, we can see how I might be of service to you. Your financial plan will be designed to help you so you can spend more time with your family, build the retirement home of your dreams, help your grandchildren with their schooling, and lead a life filled with the happiness, freedom, spiritual development, and sense of balance that you identified are so important to you. Let’s say we create a financial strategy that has this kind of impact on your life, is that the kind of relationship you would like to have with a financial professional?” (Reiterates what they’ve said is important and connects your helping them make smart choices with their money to actualizing what’s really meaningful to them.)

Although all three of these actions clearly put the focus on clients, clearly this is not an altruistic business model. It’s simply that, because of your ambition to have a practice that yields the highest possible income, runs smoothly and efficiently, and serves clients who value your services enough to gladly make referrals to friends, family and peers, you are unwilling to put your desires (for momentary comfort or control) ahead of what’s in the best interest of somebody else and, therefore, the business. So you’re willing to walk away from people who won’t augment your business and welcome any opportunity to meet someone who might be just the client you want. But it’s always all about them.

And that some things that you don’t believe to be true actually are?

I’m not talking about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy. I’m talking about crucial beliefs about what is actually true that you believe is not true and what you believe to be true that is false. These are called limiting beliefs. Sometimes referred to as baggage. Some of them are harmless and others can have a devastating impact on your success and happiness in life.

For example, most advisors believe that it takes many, many years to build a clientele, any clientele. Or that prospecting is a lifetime activity. Many believe that having a community of ONLY Ideal Clients, people who you LOVE doing business with and LOVE doing business with you, who appreciate your service so much they will help you build your Ideal Client Community by referral only, and happily pay you exactly what you need to fund your present lifestyle and future goals is a pipe dream. Many advisors believe this kind of clientele is an impossible level of financial advisor Nirvana that is unattainable. Most advisors don’t even know where these limiting beliefs came from. These limiting beliefs just live in their head, directing their choices at an unconscious level, from many years of failing to achieve certain goals, listening to the endless blather and excuse-making of mediocre advisors, and ineffective managers who simply don’t have the vision or the skills to actually help advisors be successful.

We have a compelling vision for where your business can be in 3-5 years, or less, that you may find hard to believe. More importantly, we have the tools and experience to help you make it happen. Can you set aside your limiting beliefs long enough for an objective analysis? What if it’s true? What if we’re right? What if you really can have the business we describe?

Go to www.baivbfp.com and read my message on our home page, several times. And try not to let your limiting beliefs get in your way. It’s a great time to be a Financial Advisor!

“I thought it was impossible too, before I did it.”
LANCE ARMSTRONG
7x Tour de France champion

Have you noticed that some of the things that are good for you aren’t necessarily pleasant? Not everyone loves to exercise. Many people would prefer to not eat well. (It might surprise you to discover my 3 favorite food groups are In-N-Out burgers, pizza, and Taco Bell.) I don’t have personal experience raising children, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it would be easier to be your kids’ buddy than to be a good parent. Some of things you have to do in order to earn the living you want may not be pleasant either.

It might be one of the most challenging things for humans to deal with and, certainly, one of the comments that I hear on a regular basis from the advisors we train and coach. “I’m failing in ___________ area because it’s just not comfortable or not something I enjoy.”

What do you say to a client when something their goals require is unpleasant or uncomfortable? “I just don’t find writing those insurance premium checks much fun.” “Do we really have to save that much every month? It would be more fun to spend it all now.” Can you just skip these things and get the same results? What do you say to a child about eating their vegetables or doing their homework when they don’t feel like it? Can you just skip vegetables and homework and have your life turn out just fine? What do you say to a friend or family member about exercising, eating well, and generally taking good care of their health? What if it’s just not fun or comfortable or enjoyable or pleasant?

You’ve heard the saying you are only as strong as your weakest link. That’s definitely true for running a business. You are the CEO of your Financial Planning business and not everything that makes your business successful will be pleasant.

In Dr. Scott Peck’s landmark book, The Road Less Traveled, he begins the first chapter with this, “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

Read that paragraph as many times as you need to until you really get it.

Where do most businesses break down? That’s right, client acquisition. Why? Lack of a good system? Inconsistent execution? Weak people skills? All three?

What is the best method for acquiring new Ideal Clients? According to those people you would like to acquire, it’s by referral. Yet most advisors manage to get through their entire careers knowing this to be true, but never approaching mastery of this basic skill. Why? Back to square one: it’s not comfortable or enjoyable. Vegetables? Exercise? Homework? Insurance premiums? Saving? Bummer.

Life is difficult. And once you accept that…

Asking for referrals, making follow-up calls, conducting phone conversations, and scheduling appointments may be difficult for you. Once you accept this truth it no longer matters. It becomes something you just do. And if you’re not willing to do what is difficult in your life then how do you earn the right to advise others to do what’s difficult in their lives? Let your integrity be your inspiration for doing the things in your life that you find difficult so you earn the right to give advice to others to do the things they need to do that might be difficult for them. This is what it means to be a Trusted Advisor.

“Too many people see change as what other people need to do” – David Zach

“Daddy or Mommy, if you don’t ask for referrals and make your calls, do I have to eat my vegetables and do my homework?” Seems silly from this point of view, doesn’t it?

The bottom line is that you have to let go of the fantasy that every element of running your business is going to be enjoyable. If comfort is your goal then success in business is not in your future. There is no silver bullet. Some aspects of being a business owner just suck. Deal with it. Some things are just not fun and the time and effort spent worrying about is unproductive. Put on your big boy or big girl pants and get on with the work your goals require to achieve them. Getting results is fun.

It’s become a popular idea in recent years that you should focus on your strengths and delegate your weaknesses. And this is a great idea, where it’s possible. And what’s possible is defined by your goals, not by your likes and dislikes. When building your Ideal Client Community you simply can’t delegate the relationship-building and relationship-management part. Asking for referrals and following-up with the people to whom you are referred is your job.

If you were single and a friend referred you to someone for a date, you wouldn’t have your secretary call to make the date, would you? If you would, this could explain why you’re single. There are certain calls YOU have to make. Following up on referrals is one of them.

Over 21 years of coaching and training Financial Advisors, there is another interesting dynamic I witness. I call it the consensus-versus-wisdom phenomenon. This is well-illustrated by the group of fat people who get together and decide that exercise is bullshit and agree that a trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet is a better use of time. While they all may agree, creating consensus. Their choice clearly isn’t wise, presuming being healthy matters to them. Obviously silly when I put it that way, but what about when a group of financial advisors have a “meeting of the minds” and decide the method must be flawed because they aren’t doing the work required to be successful? Don’t blame the method for poor execution.

The bottom line is that the most client-centered, cost-effective, time-efficient, and results-producing way to build an Ideal Client Community is by referral. No matter how uncomfortable you find it to be or how many other advisors you can find who are equally inept at building their business by referral, the fact remains: the most client-centered, cost-effective, time-efficient, and results-producing way to build an Ideal Client Community is by referral.

My advice: suck it up, make a REAL commitment to build your Ideal Client Community by referral only, get good at it, and keep doing it until you’re done. The positive feelings from the results will far outweigh any unpleasantness along the path.

It’s a great time to be a Financial Advisor!