What I am going to share with you is what has happened to me over the last five years: how I’ve developed things even further and how it has created a business that gets more referrals, is more profitable, and where clients are happier — we have a community, and we have a sense of connection.

There are certain things that are really important. One of the things is clarity of message. We all know that clarity is important; the brain is drawn to clarity. I love, I crave, simplicity. I crave centralism, and it has certainly helped me throughout my life. But how do we get that message out to people? Because I think that, in financial services, we are all preconditioned to look at these things we do, and we try to explain them in words that everybody else uses.

So, I’ve always tried to use slightly different words. I read a book a couple of years ago, and it really transformed the way I think. There was a task in it that I’m going to share with you, and the task is, at the end of each client meeting, to ask the clients why they deal with you.

A couple of years ago, as I was going through this rediscovery process, I started saying to the team, “What we’re going to do after every meeting is to ask a crazy question and say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Client, why do you deal with this? Is there anything that makes us a little bit different or a little bit special?’ Just be quiet and let them answer the question, then say goodbye, go into the next room, get one of those big, sticky A3 charts, and write out what they just said, in their own words, which is really, really important.”

Then I’d take it back to the back-office team. I’d say, “This is what so-and-so just said about us. Isn’t that great?” We’d all look at it. Then the next meeting would happen and the next meeting, and before long, the whole back office was covered in 20 sheets of paper stuck to the wall.

One day the penny dropped, and we were looking at this wall with all these things that people have said, and there were themes that went across. Why would we pay thousands of pounds to a marketing department to tell us what we should be saying to clients when the people who are paying the checks are actually telling us what they value? So, we completely reformed what we were doing.

If you follow that exercise, it will help you have the words for your website or your material that really resonate with your target market. It helped us clarify and bring simplicity. Why say in a sentence what you can say in two or three words? It radically changed what we do, just by going through that exercise.

We went through a process of what we offered and asked how it would make a client’s life better and how we could make it easier for them to buy it. We really took it back to the basics. You have probably gone through these things before. What does the client want? What is the problem that we solve? We got all these client feedback sheets, but we didn’t realize that we weren’t showing the journey. We were talking about the stuff that we did while the clients were here, but we weren’t showing what it looked like after they had purchased the product or they’d gone through our process or whatever it was.

So, the key thing about this was that we had to start showing what life looked like after. By doing that, we could bring in the journey. So, to use Bono’s words of U2 fame, we had to get out of our own way. We started to say to clients, “We’re on a journey, and we want you to come on that journey with us. Isn’t that exciting? We’re going to be on this journey of discovery.”

How much of your journey and your story have you shared with clients? I backed away from doing this for years and years and years until it got to such a point where if they were going through something, they would have to share a little bit. And then I suddenly realized that the more I shared, the more a client shared, and then the deeper the conversation would get.

Some of the things that I’ve learned, especially over the last 12 months during COVID-19, is to be more inquisitive, to be more curious. I realized there were things I was saying or asking a lot. My first priority was to look after my wife and family. I’ve got two teenaged boys going through COVID-19, going through lockdown. Then my team, then my clients. And I found that I was then checking in with them and asking the same question constantly: “How are you feeling?” This is an interesting one. It’s such a simple differentiation. In our culture, most people say, “How are you doing?” Then the other person says, “Good,” and then you move on.

I’d like to issue a little bit of a challenge, that you, instead of saying, “How are you doing,” swap it for “How are you feeling?” Because if you said that to me, I couldn’t just blank it out. I’d have to go back inside my head and think, Oh, how am I feeling? And it brings out more emotion. It brings out more connection. It brings out more stuff for conversation.

Checking in with clients has been incredibly important over the last 12 months. When we got into this situation last March, and we were all in lockdown, I got together with the team, and I thought, How on earth are we going to deal with this? Because we could have hundreds of people phoning us up every hour of the day wanting to know what’s going on. And I thought, Well, no, let’s try to head this off at the pass.

During adversity, the solutions do not have to be perfect. In fact, sometimes the rougher and the readier, the better. So, we got together with a colleague in the office named Nick, and I said, “Oh look, what I want to do is have a little 10-minute interview each week, which we’ll record, and then we’ll send it out to clients every Thursday night just to tell them what I’m thinking, what my current thinking is, what my freshest thinking is.” These were little snippets of reassurance, and, yes, like everyone else, I haven’t really got a clue what’s going on with the pandemic and the path of it. But it was just little words of reassurance and confidence and comfort.

We did it for a few weeks, thinking that would be it. The feedback from clients was absolutely amazing in that even today, a year on, they won’t let us stop doing it. We still get feedback, and back then we were getting weekly feedback from clients. We did it on Zoom. It wasn’t video; we just recorded it on the phone. I got together with Nick, my colleague, for about a half-hour beforehand, thinking, Well, these are the headlines in the news. The feedback does not give any advice. It is simply that little 10- to 15-minute segue that you have when you meet clients face-to-face, and you talk about family, friends and what’s in the headlines. That’s what it was. It was that connection, giving that community back to clients.

This is what I mean about being curious: thinking about doing things slightly different, and being able to move the conversation on, even in these difficult times.

Austyn A. Smith, Dip PFS, has spent 25 years helping retirees clarify their retirement journey, reducing uncertainty, freeing up their time and enabling growth. He's the CEO of Austyn Smith Associates, an award-winning U.K. financial planning firm, the co-host of Austyn's Insights weekly audio call and the author of “Money Mapping: Creating a Relationship Centered Business.”