Getting off the Treadmill
Most financial advisors I know are looking for ways to keep their calendars full with new prospects. They exhaust themselves on endless marketing treadmills adding as many new clients each year as possible. And, every time they add a new client, it gets harder and harder to do a great job for the ones they already have. These advisors run seminars at expensive restaurants, they join the Rotary Club, they serve on school committees, they write blogs (ahem), they do anything and everything to find that next client. Certainly, at the beginning of a financial advisor’s career she has to do a lot of marketing, but it should not become a way of life. The goal of marketing is to eliminate its need.
Trouble is, most advisors already have too many clients. Let’s do a little math. If an advisor has say 300 client families and sees each one 4 times a year, that works out to 1,200 appointments annually. Assuming 4 weeks of vacation, illness, and business travel each year, this advisor must have 25 appointments a week just to keep up with her current book. Some of you may be thinking right now, “I can’t spend that much time seeing my existing clients or I’ll never have enough time to find any new ones.” Or, you might be thinking, “My clients don’t need that much of my time, besides, I already have all of their business.” Nonsense. You need to take a fresh look at your book.
The Book Produces
This is a mantra in our practice. In fact, it goes like this, “The book produces; love the book.” Advisors like to believe that they have all of their client’s money. But, study after study has shown that most clients, especially the more affluent ones, prefer to work with more than one advisor, and sometimes three or four. This means that there is opportunity for more business in most client relationships. Business is continually being generated from our existing book of clients. A spouse retires, an inheritance comes in, the other advisor leaves his firm, a CD matures, dividends pile up, profit is taken on an investment, a job change necessitates a 401k rollover, a business succession plan needs creation, a partner buyout occurs, and on, and on, and on it goes. There is no end to the possibilities in a book of business. If you aren’t paying attention and cultivating this business, another advisor is getting it.
Field of Dreams was the first movie that I ever owned. I watched that VHS until the ribbon snapped. For many of my childhood years, I would build lemonade stands and bake sales, truly believing that “if you build it, they will come.” It worked, to an extent. However, as I matured, I realized that the tag line was missing a key component: “If you build something of QUALITY, they will come.” The difference is loyalty and word of mouth, both nurtured through quality service and genuine relationship. It is a model that proves itself true across all sectors, sports to lemonade stands to financial planning.
Quality is better than quantity. If I were a client, and I soon will be, I would prefer being a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Essentially, if you take care of what you have, regardless of what the commodity is, with a surgical precision, the dividends will speak for themselves.