Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Stephanie Bogan
Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephen Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing: Stephanie Bogan: Julie Littlechild: Stephen Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, a podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild. And on this week’s show, Steve and I are joined by the wonderful Stephanie Bogan. So buckle up, it’s time to get inspired. Now, Stephanie is the founder of Limitless, a company that helps advisors grow and achieve great success but on their own terms. She has consulted with and coached top firms and executive leaders and is a true thought leader in our industry.
Stephanie takes on the challenge in this episode of defining your value. She breaks things down into three distinct types of value and looks at how to communicate each. We also talk about the importance of mastering your own mindset and the impact all of this can have on your referral strategy. And finally, we explore the mistakes that advisors make when it comes to referrals and the actionable ways to create a culture to become more referable. And with that, let’s get straight to our conversation with Stephanie. Well, Stephanie, welcome to the podcast. So good to have you here.
Welcome Stephanie.
Thank you. It is always a pleasure to hang with the two of you and have really fun conversations.
You’re one of these people where I can’t believe we’ve not really had you on yet.
I know. How did we-
How did we-
How did we get this far without having her on.
I know, I know.
I did hide in Costa Rica for 7 years.
That is true. Steph’s strategy of just hiding in other countries apparently is not working any longer.
But it only worked so long we tracked you down.
We tracked you down. So we have so many questions for you, but could you maybe just start with an update on the work that you’re doing just to bring everybody up to speed?
Yeah. Well I think most people are marginally familiar with the idea that I unretired, at least part-time, I work about 25 hours a week now, I unretired. So I joked for a long time that right working with purpose on my terms was 25 hours a week from the beach in Costa Rica. We’re now post COVID splitting our time between Park City. We just bought a house here in Costa Rica. But the work has really been focused on for the last few years, one what we call the Limitless Advisor Coaching Program, which is really just my way of taking all the best of what I’ve learned and working with some of the top firms in this space for the last what, 25, 27 years, and really wanting to make that same kind of knowledge available with the twist of, to me, what I learned in retirement was that true success comes with the freedom to enjoy it.
And I had been really successful. I had been on the cover of the magazines and sold my business and I had done all these great things. But I was like the princess and the pea, I just couldn’t quite enjoy it. And so I really learned that for me success was a form of striving and significance. And so when I retired, it was just me on the beach with… I always joke that success is a very convincing disguise especially to the people wearing it. So it was just me and I was just a nobody on the beach in Costa Rica living my life and being happy.
And when I unretired, Bob Barris had called up and basically blame Bob in all cases just blame Bob Harris. For a very short version of that story because I know we have time limits. But I unretired because I wanted to take the best of what I knew from a business perspective, but I unequivocally wanted to deliver it in the wrapper of success that comes on your terms, right? The time and the freedom to enjoy it and live what I call to build a wildly successful business and a life that you love.
And so Limitless Coaching was really formed out of that. So the general premise is how do solo and smaller firms build that million dollar practice? We call it take a hundred days off, it could be 30 hour work weeks. We’ve got clients that would literally work half the year with a very small select client base. And then we literally have firms that I think a third of the population is over a million in revenue but they want to simplify and they want a more satisfying kind of success. So it’s all those best practices of practice management, operations and marketing but a lot of it is focused on…
I basically distill what I do now into four basic swim lanes, which is mindset strategy like where am I going, why am I going there? So I work with leaders, CEOs, and founders of finserv and fintech firms. We worked with Carson, some other big firms around strategy, particularly advisor initiatives, client experience, right? Very similar to the advice stuff that I’ve done and platforms that I’ve built out in the past. And I just love that work in terms of what I call scaling special and driving real efficacy and adoption, which larger firms tend to have a hard time with.
But I also wanted to have an offering for just the average advisor in the space who wasn’t building a mega firm who wanted to build a, right, a solo practice or a solo plus service advisor even what Michael Kitces calls that small giant, right? A small ensemble, a couple of million dollars. But how do you do that in a way that gives you time and freedom to enjoy it? So we have the group coaching program, we have what we call a leaders’ program, which is for, right, a million plus firms where I say more and better calls, right?
You want to do something with scale and impact. You don’t want to give up your life to do it and you’re really looking for how do you take it up a notch to the next level? So those are the ways that I’m working with advisors. But honestly, it’s really just about those swim lanes of mindset, strategy, performance. I call it high performance happiness. How do I be the best leader, driver and person and how do I be a happy human in the process? Because we think that’s the trade off for success if we’re being really honest, that’s the trade off we tend to make.
And I just learned you don’t actually have to do it. And we’re getting radical results with people and businesses. Michael Kitces and I are going to do a webinar later this summer, he sent me, I have permission to share this, he’s a coaching client. He sent me his growth chart for the last three years that we’ve been… and it’s like a hockey stick. And it was like, “Hey, look what’s happened.” And I was like, “I’m not taking credit for this.” Truly because of COVID obviously created some opportunities, but he will wholeheartedly tell you he was in a completely different mindset around his role, the strategy for the business, the value that he could add as a leader. And we’ll talk about, it’s a major shift.
And so there’s a segment of the population that lists right, their larger firms and their leaders. And so I really want to work with those firms that want to do high value, high impact work. And I really want what I call a community, which we’ve talked to you guys about being a part of, because I love the work that you do, of advisors that are smaller that really want access to all the best of and coaching and community and that’s what Limitless is really about.
I mean, besides being the person with the best quotes in the industry, which I feel you should get some credit for.
Sidebar, this is going to be the longest short interview ever.
Yeah. We’re not going to talk about any of what we planned on.
Or marketing and it’s literally we have now come up with Stephie Shots. There’s a little logo for them and it’s very funny.
That sounds about right.
That makes me… Look, I’m all blushing right now. I like it.
It’s so funny.
You can’t see that on the podcast screen.
I mean, I will say that having heard your story there and some of the highlights of it, that the fact that you represent what you’re talking about. I mean, I think and I know that’s not by accident so it’s… And I think just that is a message that’s really important for people, right? That you’ve got a set of beliefs that you’ve leaned into them that you’ve said, “If you’re not for me, I’m not for you and that’s okay.”
It’s funny because if you’re listening, we had a pre-call. I always feel like we should work towards the pre-calls.
I know.
Because it’s when all the amazing leaders have these really cool conversations about what’s really going on so we’re going to start having those. But we were really talking about that, which is how are we showing up in the space and what are we going to choose to do about it? And I realized I tried so hard for so long to be perfect at everything because I thought that would give me the success and the satisfaction that I was seeking. And what I learned is that there is so much beauty and joy and growth in taking imperfect action. You have to do work to get there, there’s no question.
But when you do, you do so much more, so much more boldly and more bravely and more expansively because failure isn’t a negative in a column, right? It’s an experience and an opportunity to win or learn or grow or move in that direction. And so when we think about just the impact we want to have, I really had to learn that I have a way and I have a voice and it really works for me and I don’t need to apologize for that anymore. And it also means that you’re going to actually be more polarizing, not less. There are people that don’t dig my style, I’m certain of it. I just don’t know who they are because they don’t call me. Like we were talking about this, right?
And that’s okay.
Well, and this really goes into just advisors and clients. I was having this conversation with a client earlier today, which is your job is to have the confidence to be polarizing. That is the goal. It’s just very counter to our human nature.
Right.
Because at the end of the day, I made a very specific decision that I knew the value that I could add to someone’s business and life. I know the value of that economically and personally, and I’m willing to draw a line and say that I do my best work with people who agree with me about that value proposition who like my role, approach and way. And if you don’t, that’s okay, there’s no judgment coming. That’s your of the street. My job is my side of the street. My job is not to drag you to my side of the street.
My job is to be clear on who I am, the value I can add, the fees I charge and to share that unapologetically without hesitation or reservation. That is exactly what I teach advisors to do. To be successful, by definition, you are drawing lines and being polarizing because you have to build a business around it. And half of the inefficiency, the ineffectiveness, the efforting, as I like to call it, that advisors go through is because they’re not building a sound business model around their behavioral practices, right?
A sound business has clients that are motivated, able to see the value and happy to pay at a level of profitability. But that’s not many clients and many practices. There’re still too many advisors doing too much for too many, for too little, for too long and they don’t know how to unwind that, and it’s not a practice management issue. We talk to those issues. It’s a belief issue. If you don’t believe inherently in your value and your worth, you’re going to make all kinds of compromises around it without ever recognizing that those compromises have a cost, a real economic experience for you and the clients. It’s very serious from a value percentage perspective.
And Stephanie, one of the things that I perceive about you is that when you let that loose, when you’re not hiding it anymore, when you’re not trying to buffer it at all and you can work with your people, you can take them so much farther because you’re all in the thing together. And to the extent that you want to try to make everybody happy, you just water that down so much that you restrain yourself or constrain yourself. And you can’t run with that bigger pack as much as you can if you find all the people who are of similar mind and you can all charge forward together.
We were having one of our coaching calls yesterday to your point around, right, these little quotes that I just somehow come up with. And we were having this conversation and it really… everyone stopped because it stuck, which is in especially in this very world that we’re all living in, authenticity is your new office. People really want to… right? Especially when you think about being a trusted advisor, people aren’t coming to you for products and projections, they’re coming to you for guidance, right?
And I know we want to have a deeper conversation around that, but that’s the framing of first and foremost, what is my role as an advisor? What do I believe it to be? Because we have a tendency to believe like you ready to go back 30 or 40 years, right? It was… right? We were selling products. And then we got very evolved and we started selling plans. But if we’re being really honest, this is where I get polarizing and I’m totally okay with it, those plans have become products. They are outputs and deliverables.
And you do not get paid for pushing buttons on a keyboard and spitting out a plan, you get paid for knowing which buttons to push, knowing how to engage the client, know how… All of the things that you do as an advisor is the value. That value is advice, it’s not information plans or projections. It’s also the ability, and I don’t want to take away from this, to construct a reliable delivery system that will help a client, right, go through a process and get where they want to go.
And so you can be a wonderful, trusted advisor and add a lot of value and have a really broken delivery system. And you can have a really great delivery system and just be, right, putting a lot of products in that delivery system. And I think the advisor of the future in terms of high performance happiness, high margin, so I talk about building a practice or any business really on five basic freedoms. Is that unequivocally, I’m not going to compromise. If you don’t agree with me, please don’t ever call me and ask me to work with you.
If you do agree with me, I’m a great person to call because I’m all about this stuff. One, freedom number one, work with purpose on your terms, right? Mine at one point became 25 hours a week from a beach in Costa Rica. Now I’m splitting my time between Park City and Costa Rica. If you tell me that I have to sit in a building every day, it’s just not going to work, zero chance not going to have the conversation, non-starter. And I have people call me on a regular basis and make really attractive offers for me to run a division or a business or something. And as of yet, it has not met my terms, therefore, not interested, right?
Freedom number two, do work that you love, really life is very short, right? And that doesn’t just mean in general planning or advice or investment, it means on a daily basis you should not be grinding out $25 admin work because you haven’t figured out how to create leverage for yourself via people, process and platform because you can so do it. Three, with people that you enjoy, clients and your staff, I think that’s fairly self-explanatory. We do way too much compromising around this. Four, enjoying all the financial success you desire because let’s be honest, people have done it. It has been done before, it can be done again.
And freedom number five, this is the one I had to go to Costa Rica and retire to learn how to do all of that while living a life of happiness, fulfillment and contribution. Because if you run a business or a division or you are a leader, I know what you want. At the end of the day, you want to be, let’s be honest, you want to be kind of a badass at what you do. You want to keep your edge and you want to have this really peaceful, relaxing, fun, amazing life experience, and the two of them seem to knock heads all the time.
And the secret is truly mindset and methods, right? And the value in the advice conversation is such… it’s a prime place. That’s why I unretired. I literally was like, “They’re going to think I’ve lost my business edge. Like I went to Costa Rica and I got soft.” And the truth is I went to Costa Rica and I got strong because I realized that a lot of what we do are just strategies and those strategies don’t always serve us. And we do so many of them in a disguised attempt to serve clients. If you have clients that are not profitable, that you don’t get excited when the phone rings or that you can’t even articulate to me in a definable way how you deliver value and what you do for it, then something is broken. And if you’re being really honest with yourself, it’s time to fix it.
Can I ask you about that Steph though? So I mean you’re right. I mean, these are the challenges we see. So why do you think it’s so hard for advisors to articulate that value? And I mean, is there… I know there’s a big methodology that you would walk them through, but how do they walk down the path that really you’ve walked down for yourself and your business?
Well, you have to understand two things, one is you’re dealing in the invisible and in the commodity. There’s a lot of debate about whether planning is a commodity or not. I will say for sure plans are a commodity, advice, I don’t think you can commoditize. But the problem is advisors in typical, as they define and articulate their value proposition, they don’t draw any distinctions. They focus on products, they focus on plans, we’ll build a financial plan. That’s great, but what does a financial plan mean to somebody?
If you ask the average person what’s the financial plan and what does it mean to you? They’re just going to say, “I want someone to help me achieve my goals.” That’s what all the research says. And so it’s really about how do we shift the conversation to do two things. One put ourselves squarely in the role of trusted advisor. That’s what the research says clients want when I was at United Capital and we built out like the whole advice model, right? That is now Goldman Sachs. There was a lot of work.
I still love that process to this day because it was built on the advisor being a collaborator, on being a guide, not guaranteeing a plan or an outcome. It is about helping people solve problems and capture their possibilities. And so the idea of being a trusted guide is about how you engage with clients. How do you create what I call trust equity? Which is how do they know that you are sitting on their side of the table? Not even as an advisor, I think Dennis Moseley-Williams, we were Twittering and he used the phrase advocate over advisor. And I really like that. That’s what I call being a trusted advisor.
When your client knows that you’re using your experience, your knowledge, your education in advocacy of their goals, always, and that you have people and process and a platform and that delivery system that they can come to rely on, and when you do those two things together, you will have a high happiness, high performance, high margin practice because you’re adding deep, what I call, deliver massive value to clients while running an excellent business. So one, understanding that you’re managing the invisible.
You have to define the value for people. All they know that they want is one, I want to solve my problem. They come to you at a moment in time, they have been thinking about this, there’s some reason that they’re calling. Your job is to understand that reason. That’s it, it’s their agenda. So when you’re having those prospect conversations, which I know people like to focus on, your job is to define your value, you have to create a shared story. Our brains create stories. They create expectation models. If you don’t define it, the prospect will.
So just to your point around like you want to be authentically you and show them that you have a delivery system to deliver on the brand promise the outcome, that you’re going to help them create. Yes, there are features and benefits and commodities in that process, but we want to change the way we talk about them. So I think one of the questions you had asked me in advance, and I wrote an article about it is like, how do you actually do that? Right? So there’s a hundred thousand different ways truly. And I could come up with 17, but this is one that people seem to like, and it works really well because I like to create success models that people can follow.
And you’re going to talk about planning value, portfolio value and personal value, right? Because those are the real things that you do. You manage the assets and the investments. You’re optimizing the portfolio, you’re managing the plan, a roadmap for change. You’re making choices to get to an outcome and personal value. I am the person that you call when you’re stressed or you’re worried or you’re this or you’re that you got to figure stuff out and you need that person to call, right? I’m going to save you from yourself and the big mistakes, right? So those are really the three swim lanes of value that we deliver.
The same way because I realized those swim lanes for the business are mindset strategy, value productivity and growth, right? So we’re talking squarely in the value lane, but that mindset lane touches them all, the strategy lane touches them all. So if you can say to a prospect, I’m really glad that we got the opportunity to sit down today, we’ve talked about your goals. You’ve shared with me that you want to retire at 55, have $10,000 in retirement income and make sure that you have time to spend with the kids and the grandkids. So let’s talk about the process and the plan that… let’s talk about the way that we can work together to help give you the confidence, that’s the outcome that we can create together.
There are three ways that we can really add value as we work as your trusted advisor, one, portfolio, right? Our job is to design and manage the investment portfolio, optimize portfolio construction, create tax efficiency, withdrawal sequencing, tax… these are all things that… right? This is industry jargon. My job is to help you make the most of the assets that you have. You’re going to insert your philosophy here. Our investment philosophy is we believe in taking a conservative approach. Our fundamental philosophy is the best way to make money is to not lose big chunks of it. Hey, we believe that you can double your money into… Whatever your philosophy is, I would encourage you not to go with the latter.
Not that one.
Basically saying I’m putting a story about my role and our approach on the table, are you in agreement? And when you say we’re going to add value with the portfolio, we’re also going to add value through the planning process. It’s really the process of our working together as your trusted advisor and being a guide that helps you get improved financial outcomes. Through the financial planning process, we’re going to do consistent saving and investing, we’re going to manage debt. We’re going to look at tax savings, we’re going to look at college planning, business exit planning, estate planning, insurance, right?
But our job is to make sure that we’re pulling all the levers that we can pull through planning to create the best possible outcomes. And the thing that I know matters most in those first two is the third way that we’re going to work together, which is my job is to be your personal and… right? Your personal guide and trusted advisor in that process. It means I’m going to help you get clarity about what matters to you, how to align your capital with the outcomes that you want to create.
Make those choices sometimes, avoid the big mistakes that tend to hurt the most, manage those scary markets and really be the person that you can turn to every step of the way that knows what’s important to you about life and money and that can you call at any time to be here to help you make choices that give you the clarity and confidence you need to… right? You’re going to be a little bit more succinct, but you can see all that I’m wrapping, which is so different than, “Hey, we’re going to do a plan. We’re going to meet once a year. We’re going to…” No one cares about that stuff.
And I’m not saying there aren’t clients that fit in that genre, but that’s a really easy business model, right? You meet with them once a year, this is what we do, we charge you X. And that’s not a hard business model. I tend to really be working in the space of like, “How do you create that firm that’s delivering high impact, trusted advice?” Right? That’s the… So I think that model requires that we understand that we have to create a container for the invisible, right?
You know those lasers in the spy movies and they put smoke on it? The conversation, those stories that I wrapped up, I defined my role. I said three different times my role is to serve as a trusted advisor. If they don’t walk out, their brain goes, “Okay, you are a trusted advisor.” I like that same side of the table stuff. Two, I’ve explained to them the ways, practical, tangible ways their brain can latch onto and go, “Yes, I want to optimize, I don’t understand anything he’s saying, but…” Right?
And then your job is then to always put it in plain English. What that really means is I’m going to help you make sure that we manage the markets, we’re going to meet once a year, right? And you define the process that you’re going to follow. If you do that and you have a prospect meeting and they say no after you’ve quoted the fee, then they’re not a good fit. If that’s your approach, if that’s not your approach, obviously you have a different story.
Hi, it’s Julie here, I hope you’re enjoying the episode. And just wanted to pause to share some news. The team at Absolute Engagement recently launched Engagement By Design, our weekly newsletter. Our focus is to bring you valuable ideas, not only from our team, but from experts across the industry. Each week, we’ll share articles to help you engage with your clients, your prospects and engage your mind. And we always include something a little different that we hope will make you see the world in a new way. To sign up, go to www.absoluteengagement.com/newsletter. That’s absoluteengagement.com/newsletter.
You’ve spoken before about the difference between building a business case and a belief case, and it sounds like that’s what you’re referring to here. So talk a little bit more about that, how belief case is different than what we’re used to doing.
Well, business case is the first part of the conversation, right? You have to be really clear at a business level that you have value to add. What are you doing? Have you segmented your clients? Do you know what specialties exist within your practice? If you don’t have a full niche practice, have you segmented those specialties or niches? Right? Entrepreneurs versus owners. I’m huge on life cycles.
This is my new thing with large firms and specialization, is the young career versus the mid-career versus about to retire versus the retiree. Whether it’s cops or doctors or dentists, you’re having different conversations in those life cycles. So just the business case of getting clear on what’s, we call it my model practice, what is the practice that I want to build? And there’s four basic questions that you ask, right? What kind of lifestyle do I want to have? How many hours do I want to work? How many days a week do I want to work? How much money do I want to make reasonably?
What clients do I want to serve? What experience do I want them to have and what kind of business do I want to run essentially? And then we go through a series of questions. And literally like the back of a cocktail napkin, you get clear on the practice that you want to build. And then it’s who are the clients that I’m going to serve so that I can define my value to them? It’s hard to define your value for everyone. It’s hard to put a container on everyone, everything because I…
And this is the underlying issue for all of the questions that we are talking about, is that advisors, if you fundamentally serve from a crisis of confidence, you will shrink yourself. There will be a compromise cost. It will be when a prospect says to you, I really like what you’re talking about here, but could we talk about a slightly lower fee? No, we can’t. Here’s why. Because coach Stephanie’s going to reframe that for you. And what she’s going to say to you is that’s not really the question.
What they’re really saying to you is, I really love what you’re talking about, all that stuff sounded amazing. I’d really like some of it. I think there’s a lot of value. I just don’t think there’s as much value as you do. So what do you say I get all that good stuff, all the good stuff your other clients are paying full pop for and how about you give it to me for 25% less while still feeling wildly excited and giving me your very best when I call? Would you say yes to that? No. Everyone goes, “No, I would say no to that.” Yes, but you say yes to it all the time.
They’re just not being that blunt in how they ask. That’s not owning your value, that’s crisis of confidence. You should, as an advisor, sit down, get clear on the value add. Who are the clients they serve? What segments do they fall into? What services do they get? Beyond that, what is my real value? Right? It is about being a trusted guide. I am here to guide you, not guarantee the outcome. It’s about advice, not information. It’s about sitting on the same… so if you can learn how to articulate that story to a client, it becomes what I call a shared story.
So the business case is you’ve got to know that you’re delivering value. I teach people to do amazing things, but rule number one, every single time is deliver massive value to the client. It is not compromisable. Rule number two is run an excellent business. If you do those two things, you will enjoy the ride and the rewards. The business case gets compromised because we’re not necessarily great at the business piece and segmenting and listing and writing stories, we just want to show up and do great work for people.
And the belief case is even without all of that, you should be able to sit across from someone, explain who you are, the real value that you can add and the fees that you charge for it without apology or hesitation. And if they walk out the door saying no, you should feel happy that they are not a client because they are not a fit. And if they can sleep at night without having you as an advisor, I promise you, you can sleep at night without being their advisor because the cost to you is far smaller than the cost to them.
But we get stuck in the I have to, I should, the comparison. Someone’s bigger, I need the money. And those stories shrink us because they compromise the quality of our decisions. When the voices in our head shrink us down, immediately, the quality of our decisions and our capacity become compromised. And we make compromises that when I show up and say, “Well, Steve, why would you do that?” And people say to me all the time, “Oh my God, Stephanie, when you put it that way.” I’m like, “Well, it’s that way every day, I’m just giving you a different lens to see it through.”
And to what extent do you think that comes from advisors perceiving that the client is responding to them as a person as opposed to their proposition or their business?
I think when you’re insecure and uncertain, you latch onto what seems tangible and obvious, right? Truly. And what’s tangible and obvious is here’s the paper and the projections that prove to you how smart and hireable I am. Or we’ve talked a lot about prospects, but let’s talk about like as most of the people listening have clients and those clients have to be managed, right? Scary markets. I want to put everything in the mattress, right? I have these coaching calls all the time. Just read my articles, right? They’re all in there. And it’s the same thing. It’s a crisis of confidence.
Last year when the market was down, one of our coaching clients called me and he said, “My client with $80 million wants to pull his money out of the market. Can you help me frame the conversation?” I was like… And you can reiterate, I wrote an article about it. And that conversation is I cannot guarantee the outcome. I am not here to predict the markets for you, I am here to serve as a trusted partner, right? To help you make big mistakes. Can we go back to the goals? Right? Have your goals changed? No. Okay.
Well we knew these moments were going to happen. We knew they were going to be scary and we agreed that when they happened the job that I was most valuable… the way I’m able to add the most value is to help you through this in a way that still aligns the capital with goals in spite of the scary market work. There’s a hundred ways to frame that conversation, but what you’re essentially saying is, “I’m going to do the hard work of being a trusted advisor right now and I’m not going to shrink back from this conversation. And if it means that you fire me, then it means that you fire me.”
Because if I don’t have this conversation with you, this is what I tell my clients to say, say, “This is not going to be an easy conversation. Things are really scary right now. We’re talking about your life savings. We’re talking about the 200 clinics that you’ve…” Literally a client last year, $200 million client. He’s built up a series of dental clinics that he wants to leave to his son, it’s his legacy.
And he wants to pull all his money out of the market. Is that a good financial decision? But the conversation was, “I know that this is scary. And we talked about sometimes money is scary. And when that happens, this is a hard conversation for me to have as your advisor but if I’m not willing to have this conversation with you, then I shouldn’t be your advisor.”
And I mean, you’re talking about the way in which a lack of confidence ultimately gets in the way of us doing these things. Is that the same issue you see with advisors who are hesitant around referrals? Does it kind of come from the same place?
That crisis of confidence is the symptom, the underlying… this is the belief case that Steven was asking about, is the belief case is if we don’t believe it, we’re not going to convince anyone else. We’re also not going to build the website which is why you’re stuck. We’re not going to build the service model which is why someone calls me and they’re like, “I just can’t…” Like I was on the phone with someone this morning, he’s like, “I’m so stuck.” I was on the phone with him for 15 minutes, he is not stuck. It had nothing to do with the issue, it had to do with the story in his head around the issue.
And I love the business stuff. People think I stop talking about it, I talk about it 70% of the time. But if you’re stuck on anything, if you’re stalled, struggling, it is a practice issue, it’s why haven’t you solved the practice issue? Because the answers are all on Google. Literally you can Google how to segment my clients, how to change my mindset. I mean, you don’t need me for any of that. You need me to take you through the process of getting clear, getting focused and getting to work. That’s what advisors and coaches do, period, end of story.
So do you think that when advisors achieve that level of clarity, not easy, but let’s jump to that point, that then how they position for referrals and the growth just comes naturally at that point?
Well, all of it’s a fear story, right? When you were clear and… I call it being in a success state, you were always in one of two states. Take out a piece of paper, you all can’t see me, but take out a piece of paper, draw a line left to right across that piece of paper. Draw a plus above the line and a minus below it. Above the line, you are in a positive, empowered can do, everything is figureoutable success state. I am awesome, I’m here to serve, I’ve got value. I have confidence. I have creativity. I am unstoppable. And we all have lived in that zone and we love it. The problem is we don’t live there most of the time.
I’ve learned that you can live there a lot more of the time. I’m not there a hundred percent, but strikingly more. Below the line, negative, disempowered, frustrated, overwhelmed, fear, uncertain, don’t want to make the phone call, don’t like it when the prospect asks me about the fee, I shiver in my boots and fake it till it’s true, don’t like any of that stuff don’t want to ask for referrals because it’s scary as hell, right? And the reason it’s scary is because two things.
One, there’s a story about the event. If I ask, I will look like a schmucky salesperson, I might get rejected, that will feel bad. That’s what crisis of confidence is all about, it’s about the fear we have behind it. And I’m just here to say stop being selfish people. I mean this with all love and respect, it’s not about you, it is about them. If you believe in the cause and calling of financial planning, you should not be shrinking yourself. You should be standing on the rooftop telling the story of what you do.
You should be sitting down with your clients and having those conversations. Bob and Mary, thanks for sharing that with me. As you right go out into the world and in your daily lives, if you have friends or family that need the same kind of trusted financial guidance, I know that you’ll think of us. And I want you to know that we’re always here to talk to your friends and family, whether we’re the right fit for them or not. We want to be the first phone call for you and the people that you care about.
If we can help them in a 15 minute phone call, or if you do hourly work, I have clients who do literally hourly work one Friday a month so they just have a place for those people. And if they want to wait nine months, they can wait nine months. There’s an answer for everything. I’ve been doing this for 27 years. There’s a business answer for everything, Stephen. If you don’t have the belief case, you won’t build the business case. So around referrals, let’s talk about that, but I’ll take a breath first. Excited about this stuff.
For those of you who are watching, first breath in 34 minutes. You must be an awesome swimmer.
I don’t get excited about this stuff.
No, no. It’s the passion, it’s clearly where you’re lacking.
Yeah, I know. So hodgepodge and blob out it all.
Look, I think you’re… I mean, you were hitting at the core of something that is so critical for people, right? And you’re talking about fear, you’re talking about self confidence and I think you’re holding a mirror up to people in a way. And frankly, I’ve jotted a few things down about myself as you’re talking, which is always scary and biased say, what’s really getting in the way, really getting in the way? And that’s a powerful place to be. I mean, when we’re talking about growth and we’re talking about referrals, when their advisors are at that point where they feel a sense of confidence, is there other process and whatnot that you recommend they have in place to support that?
Yeah. And that’s the thing that I most… you don’t get to share this stuff on social media. But there’s a system and a model and a business for everything that I do. We’re not just talking theory over here. It’s you have to understand the principles in order to understand how best practices are formed and really it’s all about turning those into proven practices. And so when you think about it, what I always say is everything starts with when your vision is clear, your decisions are easy. And people are like, “Whoa, no.” And I’m like, “I didn’t say they were comfortable. I didn’t say that they weren’t capital intensive. I just said that when your vision is clear, the decision is easy.”
For example, if you as an advisor, ask yourself, I’m going to start a practice where I do too much for too many for too little for too long and I’m never going to feel comfortable raising my fees or saying no to anyone. And I’m going to have the practice that I get when I’m going to be pretty miserable half the time because I’m going to see other people doing better and I’m going to wonder why, would you sign up for that? No.
If I said to you you’re going to build a practice where people can sit across from you and they can say to you, “Here’s my million dollars. It represents my life savings and I trust you with it.” And you can say, “Thank you. Give that to me. I will take it in good hands and be a good steward of it.” How is it that you cannot sit across from that same person three years later when you have demonstrated the value, when you have delivered on it and not simply say, “If I could do that for anyone else you know, please think of me.”
It makes no logical sense whatsoever that you can do the first without evidence and then shudder and you’re quaking your boots three years later when you have evidence. It makes no sense. And that’s the story. So the system, first of all, you have to build strategies and then you have stories. So a strategy around referrals is, right, have a system for asking for them, which is not, ladies and gentlemen, the cheeky five lines on a piece of paper. Could you give me the names of five people you know? Who?
Oh my gosh, that’s why we don’t ask for referrals because no matter… our brains instantly go to I’m that guy or I’m that gal and we just shut down. As you guys know, there’s so much room between cheeky salesperson and trusted advisors saying, “I’m proud of what I do and if you know anyone else that I can add value to, I’m a good spot to send them.” There’s a lot of room in there and we just skip straight over it. So one, you can have those systems. One of my favorites actually happens on the other side of referrals, people mess this up so often.
How many of you have a referral list? Go back to your referral list, it’ll surprise you. As far as you can go 1, 2, 3 years. And I want you to list who’s made a referral one time and who’s made referrals more than once and greater than 80% of the people will have referred to you one time, which means that you are mucking up the process. Because it either means you’re mucking up the process, you have not made it in a memorable pleasurable enough like how the brain works positive enough event that their brain can be bothered to do it again or it means statistically they know nobody else on the planet that they could possibly refer you to. And I’m going to go with probably not true, which means that something in that first event didn’t pop for them in a way that they’re looking for a new… When you find a great restaurant, what do you do? When you see an amazing movie, what do you do?
Tell others.
You tell people, that’s right. And not like 17th degree stranger, but your friends, your family, the people in your circle, you have those conversations. So we have what we call this five step referral process and it’s basically five steps. And if you guys, I have to figure out how to get it to any… there’s a whole little white paper around it. I’ll have to think about how to do that. But those five basic steps talk about like step one is you involve the referral.
You have to involve them, you have to educate them. So these five basic steps take you through getting the COI or the client on the same side of the table as you, right? So for example, this is the way that it shows up. If COI has made a referral to someone and you feel like it’s a good meeting and then you quote the fee and it stalls out, right? They’re like, “We’re going to think about it.” This is so important how you handle this. Most people just let them make their decision. So step three of the five step process is he who tells this well and he who doesn’t is to blame. It’s the update.
And the update is the AM-PM rule. And the AM-PM rule is if you have the meeting in the morning, you must update the COI by that afternoon with the client. And if you have the meeting in the afternoon, you must update them by the next AM or morning because he who tells this well and he who doesn’t is to blame. That was 20 years old. I’m not saying to quote me on that, but at 20 where that sounded really good.
I want to hear swell a lot, which is good.
I know, I know, right?
It’s a good-
Everyone knows I love alliteration so there you go. If you call that center of influence, let’s say it’s a CPA because that happens a lot and you’re like, “Hey, I met with Bob and Jane. You were absolutely right to send them over. They had some issues, right? Highlight. We’ve looked at this, we looked at this, we looked at that. We talked about the ways that we could help them. We’re going to look at X, Y, or Z. They seemed really on board. We quoted the fee. It was $6,500. I definitely noticed a pause at that moment. They wanted to take some time and think about it. I don’t know if they’re just thinking about it or if the fee…”
Notice I’m not apologizing, I’m not hesitant. I’m just stating the facts, ma’am, right? So presumably they’ll follow up with you. If not, it might be good for you to follow up. If you have an opportunity to talk with them, I hope that you’ll let them know our fees aren’t the least expensive, they’re not the most expensive, right? Our clients continue to tell us they’re fair for the value that we deliver and I think that we can add a lot of value to their financial life.
If I say that to you in some form or fashion, the implied story is the client doesn’t get the value, they’re being cheap, which is very different than if you don’t make the phone call. Because now remember you’re involved in step one and two, you’ve talked to them, you’ve engaged them, you sent them some thank yous, there’s a process there. But now I’m showing up and proving that they’re part of the team because I’m calling them back right away and I’m telling them what happened. Now they’re on the team with me. Do you want your team to lose? Nobody wants their team to lose. Now they’re engaged in the same outcome, shared story.
Right.
So all I’m saying is if you get a chance to talk to them, I hope that you’ll remind them that, right, my job is… whatever messaging you want to impart. So when that client calls the CPA or the CPA calls the client, guess what tends to happen? What do you think? Oh, totally worth it. Yeah, right? If you don’t and you haven’t had that conversation with the CPA about your fees and about your value and the client calls them and the client says, “I talked with Stephen and he seemed like a good advisor, but at the end, the fee was 6,500 and holy heck I just was not prepared for that.”
No matter what, you’re on defense. You’re on defense, you have to defend the fee and the value. Again, if you’ve really educated the COI, that won’t be the case, but most people don’t. So just having that five step process of informing, right? Thank you very much. I’m touched by your confidence, I appreciate the referral. I’d love to schedule a call to talk through this and see why you think it’s important, right? Validate, validate, engage, engage. Have a quick call with the center of influence or even the client, “Oh, thanks so much,” right?
Clients, obviously a little bit different because of confidentiality. But when you call that center of influence, engage them, “Hey obviously you referred Bob and Mary for a reason. What has their attention right now that this came up? What issues do you see?” I’m asking for your professional input. I’m engaging you. I’m building trust equity. I’m not saying thank you for the referral, I’m going to close the curtain and you’re never going to hear again, right? Post call, I’m going to update you. I’m not just going to send you a cheeky thank you note.
If you think about it, when someone makes a referral, the most common thing to do is send a thank you note or email. And I think that’s common, that’s table stakes. But I want to share the story about when I… my son’s 14 now, he loves it when I share this story. But when I potty trained him, right? Really when we went to potty training and, right, he made it in the toilet for the first time, what did I do? What did I do?
I’m going to go with a dance, that’s what we did.
Oh, my God. I was like, “Oh my God, you’re such a good boy. Mommy loves you. Yay, yay, yay.” Why did I do that? Because I want his brain to hit on that dopamine, have that positive feeling and trigger into that. It’s a behavioral cue, I want him to do it again.
So you didn’t write him a thank you note that said thanks for doing that.
I did not write him a thank you note that said dear Parker.
That’s right.
Really appreciate your time today.
Right?
Write a note to his father, thank you for sending him to bathroom.
Exactly. What’s the experience that you’re creating? You’re saying I’ve checked the box on my thank you. That is so not going to cut it anymore, ladies and gentlemen. If you pick up the phone and say, “Hey.” And you’re going to get voicemail, it doesn’t matter. Hey, met with Bob and Sue, great couple. Then what happens is once you get to this process, you go through these five steps with the center of influence, when they make the referral at some point they’re like, “I know, let me just give you the download. It’s all good, have a good day.” They’re like, “Thank you so much. We’re on the same team. I don’t need the playbook anymore.” But we don’t stop, that’s the business case.
We don’t stop to get clear on what the real problem is, which is one. We’re shrinking from referrals because we don’t know how to ask for them with authenticity, integrity. So we just avoid them instead of looking at the belief case. And then when… This is people are like, “How do you get these hockey…” Like, “How are you doing this?” And I’m like when you solve for the bully leave case, you would be amazed how quickly the right actions get taken. I will no longer work with clients who are not profitable, I’m simply going to have to… That’s the vision that’s clear.
If your vision is those five freedoms, if your vision is a practice that’s profitable and doesn’t suck the soul out of your daily existence, then you need to get really clear about what value you’re delivering to clients and do a good job and then get really clear on how you’re delivering that value because that’s a lot of the loss and then figure out what changes you need to make in your engagement system, in your sales system, in your staffing systems, right? In your service system. We have a very specific process that we go through with these things but it starts with what is really holding you back. And what I’ve learned is the less that you hold on to, the higher you will go.
We could literally talk all day because it’s like we’re trying to extract things from your head which seems limitless, which isn’t a good name. I had the opportunity to a chat with some of the advisors that work with you recently and I was taken by how many of them were referring back to content that you’d deliver and going, “Oh my God, that just changed the way I saw it.” It was this lens issue that they kept going, “Oh no, that’s it. Now I get it.” And it was great to hear and I think you’ve done the same today.
Well, thank you.
So thank you so much for your time. We’ll make sure we put a link to, I guess it’s Limitless. Is that the best place to find you? I mean you’re everywhere, but if someone was looking.
Yes. You can find me on Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter a year so I’m actually trying to tell people that I’m on Twitter.
Go to Twitter.
Go to Twitter and LinkedIn. And obviously you can find our website where you can sign up for our Monday mojo kind of bloggy, stuff like this, tactical, practical, me really talking through both the principal and the practice. And you can get on that at limitlessfa.life.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time.
Thanks Stephanie.
Oh, you guys it’s been so much fun talking to you. You guys know that this is stuff that I just… when it comes to advisors and delivering greater value, I’m always, always happy to have that conversation. And thank you for creating such a fun and comfortable space to have a really great conversation, and that’s pretty cool.
Oh, thank you.
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really helps. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. So until next time, so long.