Good morning. How amazing would it be if you could do holistic planning and never run out of appointments? A lot of companies have rules and processes in place. In our company, we have lists. So today I would like to share with you something that has helped me build a holistic planning process that’s very easy.

The process has allowed us to deliver to our clients a more diversified platform of products and services. It’s helped us build a paper trail that makes our files speak for themselves. And probably most importantly, it’s helped us with a balanced and a more stable environment for our clients. We’ve been able to achieve a 97 percent retention rate with this model. So, I’m very excited to share a little bit of it with you in the time I have this morning.

In our office, I put together what we call the List Book. And some of these are ideas from the TOT and MDRT and some of them I’ve expanded quite a bit. And there are many that I put in place myself.

Naturally, I don’t have enough time to go through all of them with you, but the first thing I did was I put together a master list. And the master list for me was nothing more than putting together the clients’ names, addresses and birthdates. And the birthdates were really key because a lot of the lists that I’m going to go over at least to illustrate to you on the screen today were lists that we were able to generate from birthdates.

Everybody does their A, B, C clients and that’s what we did. And following the A, B, C clients we were able to put together a list of all the services and products that we offer to our clients. Most importantly, the ones that they didn’t have that allowed us to continue to do that. This permitted us to have many touches with our clients throughout the year, which I know is something we all want. The following lists are ones that you can do on a weekly basis or a monthly basis. It’ll be up to you. But has worked well for us.

These are some of the lists that we have and I’m just going to pick out one of the ones here that I thought you might be interested in hearing a little bit more about. Our annual payment list. Our annual payment list contains the names of people who come into our office and bring their annual payments. They may be payments for 401(k)s that we rolled over from doing an inservice withdrawal and maybe they have some additional funds every year when we meet with them to roll over so we can give them the downside protection and better services that they may have not gotten with their 401(k)s.

We also have people who come in and make their SEP IRAs and IRA contributions alike. That was a list that really helped us a lot.

The 40- to 65-year-old list was really important too. That’s a broad range, but it also opened up the door for a lot of conversations about people who needed to chronic care, long term care, and other products they may not have gotten along the way with us.

The next slide, I really like a lot of the ones on here and I just wish I had more time to talk on these. But the will and trust list was really, really a big thing in our office. Over the years, I’ve tried to network with attorneys and I’ve never been successful, I’m sorry to tell you. But, I will tell you what I did to fix that problem. I went out and interviewed and hired my own attorney. We now have our own attorney in-house, on staff, who represents our clients. And one thing that’s nice about that is I’m able to walk down the hall and say, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith, this is our attorney. He can help you either update or revise your trust.”

Most of the trusts and wills that are out there, 85 percent of them fail because people don’t know what’s in them. People are not sure of the funding, if at all. And they never update them. So that was one of the things that we were able to do.

I had a similar situation with the tax process. When we started to do referrals to CPAs and other tax professionals, we found that we weren’t getting anything back. And that didn’t sit with me very well. So again, we quit doing business with CPAs and we started our own tax practice. Now I wasn’t very interested in building a tax practice, but what I was interested in doing was to be able to sit and talk with our clients and offer an additional service that we didn’t have with them before. And it helped us verify assets that they had and some things like annuities were coming up for maturity, possibly life insurance policies were up for conversion. So, it helped identify a lot of different things that we wanted to do.

Multigenerational planning list was one of my favorites. I spend a lot of time on this one because I always ask my clients, “Do you like what we’ve done for you?”

They say, “Sure, Rick. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

I say, “OK. Fine. Let’s take a look at your children. Most of your children are married. Why don’t we invite them to have dinner at a private restaurant in a private room?” And what that looked like for them was that we were able to talk about what we did for mom and dad, without sharing the details unless they wanted that opened up. It allowed us to pick up additional business and retain the assets in the office that we might have lost when those people would have passed away. So that was an important one.

Our annual review list, I know a lot of people like doing the annual reviews and we do too. But I find a lot of money when I do the annual reviews. This is just another list that we have but my time is up. I’m getting close here. I just want to wrap up telling you that Jim Pittman from this very stage said something that resonated with me six months ago. Jim said to me and to all of you, “This business you have to do yourself, but you don’t have to do it alone.” Jim, thank you for that.

That has resonated in my office environment now for quite some time. And I have one of the people in my office that has increased his production 100 percent by using the list book. It’s a great training tool for us. It allows us to have more touches with our clients. Nobody can complain about not having enough opportunities to meet if they work the list book.

So I wanted to say to all of you, thank you for sharing and allowing me to learn from you and hopefully today I was able to pay back something to you.