About 13 years ago, I realized that I needed to start advertising. I needed to spend money to make money. A friend of mine had just started selling advertisements in the Yellow Pages. I thought, OK, I’m going to go ahead and invest some money. I decided I was going to invest $10,000 into a Yellow Pages advertisement, and I was going to hopefully get some good ROI on this thing.

I took a leap of faith. Sadly, as you might imagine, that advertisement did not bear any fruit. A few months after the ad had been placed, when my phone was not ringing off the hook, I looked hard at my business for that year. I asked myself, Where did all my new business actually come from? As I looked at the numbers, it quickly became clear to me that my new clients had all been coming from one source—referrals.

What was more, they were coming as referrals from my existing, happy clients. As I thought back on that $10,000 that I had just spent on something, I felt sick. I did not feel sick because I had spent $10,000 and not gotten any value out of it. What I felt sick about was the fact that all of my clients did not get a benefit from that. That $10,000 that I spent was not doing anything for them. I thought, You know what? Instead of spending this money on something that nobody benefited from, what if I spend that money on my clients just to say thank you?

That’s when I thought a little bit harder: How can I take this money next year, instead of wasting it on the Yellow Pages ad, and spend it on my clients? I decided that I was going to go ahead and say thank you to my clients.

That year I had just experienced my first prix fixe dinner. Anybody here have one of those dinners with wine pairings? It’s phenomenal. I grew up in the restaurant business and absolutely loved the experience of that. But I realized that a lot of my clients had never had such an experience. They had never had a prix fixe dinner. I thought, I’m going to throw a dinner like this, because I was extremely grateful for these clients. I said, “You know what? I’m going to go ahead and hire a chef to talk about the food. I’m going to hire a sommelier to talk about the wine. Then, we are going to have a wonderful dinner together.” I decided I was going to give them all this amazing dinner because they are too frugal to buy one for themselves.

But then I looked at the budget. I couldn’t bring in every single client and pay for this dinner for everybody, so I needed to draw some lines in the sand. Fortunately, I had just segmented my clients based on their profitability. At my firm, we classify our clients openly. Our clients know where they stand. They are in four different categories: Pearls, Opals, Rubies and Diamonds. Pearls have less than $250,000 with us. Opals have $250,000 to $500,000. Rubies have $500,000 to $1 million. And Diamonds have over $1 million with us.

Based on the Pareto Principle, we proved that we did in fact earn 80 percent of our revenue from 20 percent of our clients. I wanted to make sure that I thanked the top 20 percent of the clients who were paying the bills, those who had more than $500,000 with our firm, so I said, “Let’s create this event.” Rubies and Diamonds were allowed to go and have this amazing experience. I did not sell any products. I just said thank you. Nobody could attend unless they were an existing client.

The event was a total hit. Most of my clients got to have their first prix fixe dinner. They got to listen to this amazing chef talk. They got to learn about all this amazing wine, and I truly believe that they will never forget the experience they had. But what happened next was even better. They went home and talked to their family and their friends about the event, and their family and their friends had this major experience of FOMO, fear of missing out. I got referred to all these family and friends.

I decided I was going to host another event the next year. And so we did this: Our Ruby event was our dinner with wine pairings. That was such a huge hit. We would do an Opal event for our clients at $250,000 and above and pay attention to the per head cost. We would then do a Diamond event and try to make it unique and memorable every single year. We would still have our holiday event each year, and over the past decade, our events grew.

When I started we had about 25 clients at our first event. In 2019 we hosted over 80 people—all those FOMO people who had come over and wanted to invest with us because they wanted to go to a dinner with wine pairings.

With COVID-19 we did have to put these on pause, but I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to resume these events, and we believe we are going to start again this next year. We just want to show our love for our clients. In general, we found that robo-advisors are not a threat to our practice because we show our clients the love. We show them appreciation. And what we have found over the years — even with COVID-19 and the lack of these recent events — is that we have become emotionally irreplaceable.

Timothy D. Clairmont, CFP, MSFS, an 11-year MDRT member with one Court of the Table and 10 Top of the Table honors, is founder of the ClearFP companies, a bestselling author, public speaker and a Platinum Knight of the MDRT Foundation.