
Fifteen years ago, a client and I were having a social meeting. We were cycling around Vancouver, and he introduced me to one of his friends. He said, “Hi, this is Al Quennec.” The friend said, “Who is Al to you?” He said, “Oh, he’s my money guy.” My heart fell right away because this client of mine didn’t have or wasn’t expressing appreciation for all the breadth of the work that we had done for him in the previous five or 10 years. And this fellow was in a mature marriage; that means he got married when he was in his 50s. His wife had an adult daughter, so he had a stepdaughter, and he was part owner of a private company. He was worried about how to get the sale of his shares through with minimizing taxes and making sure that he would have enough money to last them the rest of his life, and that he would have enough money to pass along to his stepdaughter, whom he loved.
So, we had all these issues that we discussed, and he boiled it down to “He’s my money guy.” I thought to myself, How do I rectify that? How do I show him all the work that we’ve been doing for him across all these different areas of financial planning? My mentor, MDRT Past President Jim Rogers, once said to me, “It’s not enough to do a good job. You have to show them you’re doing a good job.” I thought, How am I going to show them? I ended up talking with a coach for financial advisors, and together we came up with this idea of a personal financial organizer, a way of documenting everything we’ve done and everything we’re going to do for our clients.
Jim always said to me, “Before you get the client, you have to let them smell the leather.” Building on that advice, we made sure that all the binders were made of leather. That’s just one way that a client can have a tactile hold on it, and they can open it up and see everything that we had been discussing. It houses all this information, and we do it in physical form not in computer form. We could, but we don’t. It’s a visual experience, and it’s a tactile experience, and it doesn’t get lost so easily as a computer file would. This binder is not just for our use; it’s for the client’s use.
When I’m faced with someone who is thinking of becoming a client, I say, “Have you ever been on a trip?” Of course, everybody’s traveled somewhere. I say, “You’re storing your flight information, your hotel information, the car rental, the prices you’ve paid, where you might go to eat. You’re doing all of that for a two- or three-week vacation, but you’re doing nothing to plan or document the next 30 years of your life and where your resources are and where they’re going to be?” That’s the whole point of the personal financial organizer.
We begin by asking prospective clients what’s important to them. It’s a good icebreaker. We have them complete this before the first meeting, just a variety of questions that we’ve come up with to figure out if they are concerned about their children, retirement, their business or whatever it might be. [visual] We’ve looked over what they’ve checked off, and then we begin the conversation, and we begin discovering more and more things that are important to them. And there is another category where they can write whatever they like. Then we create a financial plan, which appears in the binder.
The first page in the binder is the welcome letter. “Welcome to your PFO: Personal Financial Organizer.” It’s a resource for your ongoing management as well as for those who may be acting as your power of attorney in case you are disabled or unable to communicate with your executors in the event that you die. We’re all going to die; not knowing when, it’s very important to have this done in advance. And we include a quote from Leonard Cohen, the famous musician, my fellow Montrealer, who said, “It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.”
What we get when we complete this PFO with clients is sort of a sigh of relief. They know that everything’s been done; it’s been documented. We tell them now that it’s done; it’s complete. “Go home, put it on a high shelf above the waterline so that it won’t get damaged, and let it collect dust. You don’t have to open it; you don’t have to do anything with it. We’re going to call you. We’re going to see you throughout the year.” As a matter of fact, our process with new clients is we see them every three months, no matter what, for the first year, just to make sure they understand all the changes that are going on. But at the one-year mark, and on every anniversary of the creation of the PFO, we call them and say, “It’s time to renew and refresh this binder. Bring it in, dust it off, and we’re going to refresh all the information that’s inside. We’re going to give you fresh paper hole punched in advance, and we’re going to send it to you in a package and tell you how to file all of this.”
We begin with our financial planning process, and then we tell our clients that we are helping them to grow their wealth, then enjoy it, and then share it with the people they leave behind. We’re listing all of the different areas, products, planning avenues that we perform for them. These are all the things that we think of. Again, trying to illustrate, showing them — they can hold it in their hands. Now we begin with the content, the advisory team. We position ourselves as sort of the head coach, marshaling the resources of all the other people on their team.
So we say, “Here we are. There’s our contact information. There’s the accountant you’re using.” Maybe there are two accountants or two lawyers, their mortgage broker, their notary, whoever else that they want to list. And then we get a copy of that, and we know come tax time we might want to talk to the accountant. We want to perform some changes, or we want to help them file their income tax returns, and we need to provide specific information to the accountant. So, again, that binds us to the client when they see that we’re acting in coordination with their team and we are directing all the information.
It puts us in the lead and in a position of prominence, a position of authority, and a place they can come to with no question too small, no question too large. We like to tell people, “If you’re feeling awkward about asking a question, that’s a sign that you should ask that question.”
Next, we have the financial plan, and we have the original financial plan that we created at the inception of the relationship. It addresses every area of financial planning, regardless of whether we’re implementing something or not. So we might be dealing with a 70-year-old, and we’re including a section on disability insurance just to let them know we’ve thought about it, and “No, you don’t need any.”
But if we’re dealing with a 40-year-old, we might be saying, “Yes, and yours is sufficient” or “You need more” or “You need less.” But on the one-year anniversary we start talking about the financial plan update report. For my team this is where it makes our lives so much easier, because at the 12-month mark, we produce this after the meeting. We bring out the original financial plan and say, “These were your goals and objectives when we started working together. Has anything changed? Do you want to strike some off? Add some? Let’s put a check mark next to everything we’ve completed together. And I’ll tell you when we do the financial plan update next year, that item, though completed, will remain on the financial plan update report because it’s a mark.”
It’s a sign of the work that we’ve accomplished together with the client. And there are some items that are still an empty box. They’re ongoing. “I want to help my children” or a long-term goal that they are thinking of. So every time we meet with the client in preparation for the meeting, we pull out the last financial plan update report, and in advance we know what our client’s concerns are. We’re refreshing our memory. I also like to think of this as a tool that makes me expendable, which is what I want. I want the client to want to work with me, not to need to work with me (because that makes them tied to us), because it’s what they want, not out of necessity.
We do a lot of work for the client, but we want to be like the duck. We want to be the duck feet. We want to be paddling furiously, but all they see is this. [visual] That’s why what we really focus on in the conversations are the few graphs and the financial plan update materials. We tell them, “If this is what you wanted, do this.” We can have the long conversation about the analysis, but they can just go to the recommendation page and say, “Change these investments, buy this kind of policy, cancel that one, do this.” There’s an old saying I learned at MDRT: “If the client doesn’t trust you, it doesn’t matter what you say. And if they do trust you, it doesn’t matter what you say.” So what we try to do is to say, “We’ve done all this work in the background.”
They trust us and they simply say, “Just tell me what you want to do, what you want me to do.” And we say, “Great. Then just do that. Just go to page whatever, page 6, usually page 7 of the financial plan. Here are the things we want you to do.” “I don’t know how to tell my lawyer that I want to make these changes to my will.” “Don’t worry. We’re going to send you an email with the actual wording, and then you just cut and paste that and send it to your lawyer. Done. We’re going to make it easy on you. You’re not going to have to figure anything out. We’re going to tell you exactly what to do. And if you do have questions, the trust is already built through the process.”
That’s it. It’s very simple. Some clients will say, “I know, I haven’t called my lawyer.” I say, “Well, you’re in the office now. Who’s your lawyer again?” Actually, I know who it is because it’s on the team page. “Let’s call your lawyer right now. Are you free next Wednesday? Let’s call. I’ll make the appointment.” It’s a call to action. As soon as I make the appointment, they know they have six days to figure out what it is they want to tell the lawyer, and it’s going to happen.