Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Stacy Francis
Steve:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing.
On this episode we talk with Stacy Francis, an Investment News Woman to Watch. Stacy was on a career track in college that was about as far from financial services as you can imagine. But personal tragedy intervened and gave her a mission that’s made her a successful professional, the creator of the charitable organization, Savvy Ladies, and the leader of a healthy and growing financial advisory firm.
Some of what was interesting about our conversation is the different approach she takes to things that Julie and I usually recommend to advisors. From not stressing her target market on her homepage, which by the way is one of the most beautiful websites we’ve seen for a financial advisor, to how much work she’s willing to do for prospective clients before asking them for the commitment to become a client. One other particularly valuable topic is when we talk about her referral tracking system. In the study that Julie and I did we found that this kind of system correlated strongly with getting a higher level of referrals, and Stacy clearly has it mastered.
Here now is our conversation with Stacy Francis.
So, Stacy Francis, welcome to Becoming Referable, thanks for joining us.
Stacy:
Thank you, I’m happy to be here. I’m very honored.
Steve:
Stacy, you and I have spoken a couple times and I’ve seen you speak before and I understand that when you were younger and going to college, financial advice was long way from your original idea for your career, except that this major life event sort of jumped in the way and set you on a new course. Can you tell us a little about that story?
Stacy:
Yes, I never, ever pictured myself becoming a financial planner. In fact, wanted to do everything as far from money and numbers as possible. I ended up going to a wonderful liberal arts school, Middlebury College, and I became a French major, Spanish minor, and not a whole lot of numbers in there. But I had a life changing experience, my dear grandmother, one of the most special people to me in my life, we had a heart-to-heart and I finally asked her why she stayed in her marriage. That sounds little bit like a prying question, and maybe even inappropriate, but I had seen her be verbally abused and unfortunately physically abused, and she never left.
I couldn’t understand why, and I was a sophomore and that point and finally got the courage to ask her why she stayed. The reason why she decided to stay was because of money. My whole world changed on that moment. My life became something very different and at that point I committed myself to learning about money. I realized it was not an option anymore, because if this could happen to one of the smartest, brilliant, most wonderful women on the face of this planet, that could happen to me.
Steve:
Yeah, and that launched you into an area now, did your charitable work start around the same time as your career? I wanted to ask you about getting into this career, but also starting Savvy Ladies. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of those?
Stacy:
Yeah, thank you for asking about that. Savvy Ladies is really my love letter to my grandmother. She ended up passing away unfortunately because of the abuse and I was devastated obviously. She and my mother were two of the most important people of my life and I lost one of them. Savvy Ladies was my way of honoring her memory and most importantly she was a person who lived her life trying to help others. So, it was my way of giving back.
So about 16 years ago I started Savvy Ladies and it started very small. It was women coming to my home, I would make snacks and dinner, and we would talk about all different topics. In fact, I remember the first one was the 25 Most Overlooked Tax Savings Opportunities. My kitties ended up sitting on I think, each one of the people’s laps there. Thank goodness no one was allergic.
It started out very, very small and my heart was so warmed by the women getting excited about this information, wanting to learn more, telling their sisters, their friends, their mothers, and ultimately grew. Some of our seminars have as many as 250 women coming and we have now weekly webinars that literally dozens, and dozens, and dozens of women attend. It’s become a huge part of my life and part of my mission to help women. We’ve now helped about 20,000 women.
Julie:
Wow.
Steve:
Wow.
Julie:
Wow.
Stacy:
Yeah. Yeah.
Julie:
The crossover between that and your financial planning work must be significant. Do you plan differently now as a result of all of that?
Stacy:
The crossover, it is significant in the sense that I have such a deep understanding of how women feel about money and the crossover is very similar between Savvy Ladies where most of the women are what we would say middle class to below. These are a lot of women who are essentially not going to able to work necessarily with an advisor that has a million-dollar minimum. These are women who might be business owners, teachers, working in the area of marketing and they really come to this many times very intimidated, feeling embarrassed that they don’t understand all of this information. That definitely does cross over to the work we do through Francis Financial, because the women who come to us who tend to be higher net worth, they have at least a million-dollar portfolio or more that we’re helping them manage, those same motions of fear, anxiety, embarrassment, lack of confidence, we see that as well.
So the crossover is definitely that it really doesn’t matter how much money you have or don’t have, this information is paramount for you to understand, number one. And number two, a lot of us feel intimidated, but it really comes down to the fact that we just haven’t had a formal education. That’s really where Savvy Ladies is rooted in, of “Let’s start talking about money, let’s learn about money.” Because something that might be very intimidating, once you get more information, it’s not nearly as intimidating. If you think about maybe the first time you went driving, your first driving lesson, and how, at least for me, was very scary. Now I get behind the wheel and it’s automatic, you don’t have to think about it in the same way. It’s the same thing with money, same exact thing.
Julie:
Do you- sorry.
Steve:
I’m sorry, go ahead, Julie.
Julie:
I was just going to ask if you see this distinction within couples as well. Clearly this is something we talk about as being gender-related, although it’s not specific to women. If you looked at my household, my husband hates to talk about money, felt ill-equipped early on to do that because he didn’t get that right education. But more often it’s going to be the woman, I think traditionally. Is the work that you do sort of to help… Are there skills that advisors you think need to learn in order to engage couples as well coming out of this?
Stacy:
I do. I’m using really broad generalizations about women feeling this way or that way. That’s, of course, right for a certain subset, but there are a lot of people that don’t feel that way and I see a lot of gentlemen feeling the same way.
Julie:
Yeah.
Stacy:
There are definitely skills that us, as advisors, and myself included, continuing to get smart about and continuing to learn. The biggest piece is empathy, not having judgment, and patience. Those sound like different skills that any advisor should have, but when you’re working with someone who really would much rather go and get a root canal at their dentist’s office than be sitting in that chair at your conference room.
You really need to dip into those, so we do a lot of things that doesn’t seem like it makes a big difference, but it does. We have a dog, little Shadow, we called her our security dog even though she’s about eight pounds. She’s actually a trained therapy dog, and she’s here, and our clients love seeing her. We have candles, we have beautiful colors, it’s very warm and inviting, there’s a couch to sit at or a conference room table. When you come in it’s not just coffee, but macchiatos, and cappuccinos, and lattes.
And sometimes clients may not even want to come to the office, even as much as we do to try and make this a warm, wonderful place, sometimes they prefer for us to go to their house or meet them for dinner. A couple clients will come over and bring their kids and we’ll have play dates. So, it’s meeting the client where they’re at, in the place that they feel most comfortable to talk about money. It takes a little bit more effort, but I think that it really does deepen that relationship that you have with the client and truly, they’ll be a client for life.
Steve:
You’ve talked about how you customize the environment and the different ways that you make people comfortable, have you customized your process as well to tailor it to the group that you want to serve?
Stacy:
Yes, and that’s a good question. We worked really hard on this for the last three years because before it was a little bit more willy-nilly and we would have a conversation and it might go over to here and back over to there. Sometimes we didn’t get to cover some of the pieces that were very important. Over the last three years we have put together a process. It’s a three-step process, the first meeting is our discovery meeting, we have specific questions that we ask, and we ask them to all of the potential clients that come in. It’s really powerful because there are pieces of their life that we learn about that may not have come up in just normal conversation. Pieces that actually really impact the best way that we can work with them, and also really impact their planning.
So yes, we definitely have changed the process and the system we use to make sure that we’re there for them. The questions we ask are very soft questions, and those soft questions then after we’ve created a rapport, after there’s comfort, and there’s more trust built, then finally, at the end, we’re talking about what’s in your 401K, what might be in your Roth IRA.
Steve:
I’d like to dig into that just a little bit, just because I believe that the way that you approach your clients is different and tailored to the people that you want to serve, but the way that you describe it, having a three-step process that starts with a discovery meeting sounds almost identical to lots and lots of advisors out there. When you’re communicating about this process, or when you’re putting things on your website, how do you help women understand that this is different from the three-step process that all the other advisors have?
Stacy:
You know, it’s the biggest challenge, I think for any advisor in this field, is how to differentiate themselves. Saying, “We’re different, we do this different.” What we have decided and what I truly see as the most effective is, we can tell you anything, but you will see once you experience working with us and our product that we are different. That client will come in that first meeting and then the second meeting they are sitting down and they see their entire life, both the wonderful people that are important to them, their goals, their values, what’s important to money about them. Also, all of the hard points of their investment portfolio, we do a full analysis of that portfolio so that they understand exactly where their money is and what tweaks and recommendations.
That amount of work for us is about 20 hours, but we have decided that that is part of the investment in a potential client, because they then, instead of us telling them how it is to work with us, they actually get to experience it and feel it. That is key for the to decide are we the right fit for them long term. And it’s also key for us, because we get to know them and see are they a good fit for us long term? There definitely are clients, potential clients, that we say no to.
Steve:
Where in that process do you ask for a commitment from the client? How much of that work do you do before you, for lack of a better way of putting it, get paid for doing all that work?
Stacy:
We don’t ask for commitment until then our third meeting. So, it’s after all of that work is done. What we have found is that those individuals that don’t move forward with us, typically they’re not going to be a good fit for us long term or, it could be that there’s something else. We’ve had, for example, one woman deciding not to work with us because her father offered to manage her money. Now, granted there are a lot of negatives with that, but for her that was the right thing. However, she sent us a referral two weeks later.
While this is a good amount of time, and I will tell you, I’ve had to add staff to our team to be able to handle this volume because of the amount of work, it’s been well worth it. Well worth it in the pace that we are growing, we’ve never grown at this pace. And also, our close ratio has never been better. Both because they know exactly who we are, what we’re going to do, but also because we’ve gotten better at screening out in the beginning too.
Julie:
I want to make sure we come back and finished the three steps, but if you don’t mind, just because you talked a bit about differentiation, to pick up on that. A couple of things, when you explain what you do, Stacy, to people, is it geared toward women or is it more general than that and you just attract women based on the way that you operate, and your website, and the things that you talk about?
Stacy:
Yeah. That’s a good question, Julie. We talk about how we work with women. And I’ve received many tips and suggestions from other financial advisors and marketing people telling us that we’re saying no to a very big group of other people who happen to not be women. But we don’t listen to them-
Julie:
Good for you.
Stacy:
We believe that if we talk about who we give the most value to, who we were essentially made for, and who we’re made for is somewhat narrow. It’s women going through, or have been divorced, and women whose husbands have passed away. So that’s saying no to a huge number of potential clients. However, what’s really, phenomenally interesting and also just a wonderful blessing is that we also have about 30% of our clients being happily married couples. They come to us typically because the wife is doing research and she is really attracted to us because she wants to be involved with the finances, and maybe hasn’t been involved with the finances as much as she would like to in the past. So about 30% of our clients are happily married and that is really nice too. It’s really nice to have that balance.
Julie:
I noticed there’s some subtlety that I’ve noticed with a lot of websites around visuals. For example, if we go to yours, I don’t know that on the homepage it says, “We work with women,” but the visuals … it does once you dig into it. It’s interesting how the impact that the visuals have with young families and women, the imagery’s quite clear, it seems to me.
Stacy:
There was so much thought that went into that imagery. Those are our actual clients and we really wanted to show that we work with real people. Real people that are just like you and have the same worries, the same difficulty balancing. Essentially, people that you can relate to. We put a lot of thought and effort into that because it’s intimidating enough to go to a financial advisor, if you go to their website and there are canned pictures of people you know really that they’re not working with, I think it makes it even that much more difficult.
Julie:
Yep.
Steve:
It is interesting, because I’m a words guy, so it’s interesting to hear you talk about the imagery and it’s also interesting that you really don’t talk about that sort of mission of making sure that women are comfortable with and understand money as that target market. How else do you communicate that message? Because I understand that your business is doing great, and you’re not at a loss for new clients or referrals, so how else do you get that message out, or to what extent do you feature that mission when you talk about the business?
Stacy:
The way that we get that message out has many different prongs. Many of those prongs might be social media, a lot of speaking, a lot of TV, writing articles, specifically about women’s issues, money. It’s also having special events, so we’ll have money circles where we are journaling about money and we are talking about money and what money means to us in very small groups of 10 to 15 people. We’ll go on beautiful sails around New York’s Statue of Liberty, over the sunset, sipping rosé. In the next month we’ll be doing 15 different sails on my sailboat. So, we do that as well.
Then when we’re talking to referral partners and we’re talking to potential clients we talk about how we work with women. I think really the most important thing is that we share our personal stories. Every person in this firm, we’ve done a huge amount of work of tapping into their personal story or why they do this very important work. They could work for many different firms, but they chose a firm that really focuses on supporting women and sharing those personal stories, which we do at any, given any opportunity we try to do that because it shows how dedicated we are, and it shows that we’re really doing this from a place of love and support. It helps women realize that guess what? They’re not going to be judged and this is a group of people they really can trust.
Julie:
Is that part of the skills, I guess, that you have developed and you and your team have developed to ensure that people don’t feel embarrassed by not having the knowledge, but feel more empowered?
Stacy:
Exactly. We have formal education and training here in the office, so we’ll have a soft skills once a month and we’ll then have, obviously, a hard skills the other time. We also have a book club here where every month we’re meeting, talking about the book that we’re reading. Right now we’re reading essentially “Option B” by Sheryl Sandberg and that is to talk and again, put ourselves in the shoes of a woman who has suddenly lost her husband, because so many of our clients are in that boat. We’ve talked about other different books, “The Power of Presence,” we’ve worked on books of dealing with change because so many of our clients are dealing with change whether they wanted the change and have asked for the divorce, or if it was even something they didn’t ask for and are having to deal with.
We do a lot of work here to help our clients and then we also get additional certifications. Several of us are grief recovery coaches, doesn’t mean that we actually have a separate business coaching grieving clients, but that work, that skill, that certification is significant in helping us make sure that we know how to deal with our clients who are dealing with the different stages of grief. We see that grief, of course if someone has lost their husband, but we also again, we see that grief with many different pieces. With divorce, with children empty-nesting and going to college, there are a lot of pieces of grief that sometimes we don’t think about.
Julie:
I feel the need to sort of put a line under a few things that you’ve been talking about because we talked about differentiation and how difficult that is, and yet what you’re describing is what differentiation is. At least in my view, because what you’ve said is, “We have a clear niche market and it’s not just that we said we did, we’ve built our entire business around those individuals.” Whether it’s how your office looks, and the candles, and the colors, to the events that you run, to wine that you drink at those events, to the actual skills that you’ve got. So, it strikes me that we can see that target market reflected in every part of your business. That is different, right? At the end of the day that’s what’s differentiation.
Stacy:
It is, and I just really want to tell anyone that’s listening to this podcast that one of the most frightening things you can do is to put your stake in the sand and make that decision that you’re going to serve a certain market, and you’re going to tailor everything around it. But that decision, as scary as it might be, is the decision that will set you free, that will give you such rewards. Obviously personally and professionally, but also monetarily, because the world that we live in, our industry is only going to become more and more competitive, we know that. So, what is going to make you different? If you’re trying to serve everyone, and you’re trying to say yes to everyone, you’re going to be finding yourself unfortunately working a lot harder and not getting the financial rewards that you hope for.
Steve:
Let me just sort of add to that, let me reiterate and put a focus on it like Julie did. I think what you’re doing is the basis of real differentiation where, like Julie said, you’re not just saying it. One of the things that impressed me is talking about getting the grief counseling certification because you recognize specifically non-financial things that your clients are going through and have developed additional skills and additional knowledge around those things. It doesn’t just have to be products, and services, and financial things that will differentiate you, it’s also understanding the client on a different kind of level and being able to engage with them on entirely different things.
Stacy:
You’re right, you’re right. It does make a big difference and it’s again, not that we’re therapists, and one of our biggest referrals out to outside individuals are therapists, MSWs, psychologists, psychiatrists, depending on the need of the individual. But having that skill set helps us see and understand when a client is struggling so much so that they really need that outside support as well. Interestingly enough, one of our biggest referral sources is actually from the mental health field. We get our second largest referral source, other than matrimonial attorneys is in the area of MSWs, psychiatrists, psychologists, couples’ therapists, a lot of individuals that are working with people who are really struggling and that part of that struggle is not feeling financially secure.
Julie:
I was just wondering, that’s such an interesting comment and I’m interested to know if and how you reach out to that community.
Stacy:
Reaching out to the mental health community is really, for us, it’s been a very conscious effort, particularly over the last two years. I have really been embraced with open arms in that community. Partially it’s because we really do walk the talk. We are continuing to bring in professionals from that field to help train us, help us understand difficult clients, sometimes even clients behave badly. I call it behaving badly because they are really going through such trauma that they tend to lash out, and they may not be behaving the nicest way to us. So how do you deal with a client that is not really being themselves?
There’s a joke in the legal field that criminal court you see many times not so great people at their best, people who are going through a divorce, you see often very good people who are definitely not at their best. So, how do you deal with that? How do you not take it personally? How are you able to broach that section, the area where you, “Who are you talking to about this? Where is your support network?”
We have actually written a beautiful book where we asked 150 women 100 different questions about their divorce before, during, and after. We asked them what areas where they didn’t get enough support how might they have benefited more from more mental health support, more legal, more financial support. We share that work with them. With that, they realize that this is not just your average Joe financial planning firm, this is a firm that truly is committed to this. Something that took us two years, a year worth of actual interviews and then a year of writing this. That helps them know that we’re not just here for their clients, we’re really here for helping and supporting.
Steve:
Stacy, there’s so much that I’d like to dig into, but I want to make sure we get at least one or two more things before we hit time. One of the things that impressed me about how thoughtfully you’ve built this business, when you and I have spoken before is how organized and how thorough your referral marketing system is. That when you do get a referral how carefully you track and monitor people through the process toward becoming a client. Can you tell us a little bit about that system that you’ve set up?
Stacy:
We have a fantastic system and we built it over time. We use our CRM, the CRM we use is Tamarac, but there are many CRMs that can do this for you. Every person that is referred to us, we tag them, so that we know where they are in the process: have they had a pre-discovery, have they had a discovery, what’s the next step. Who referred them to us, to make sure that we’re sending them a handwritten thank you note. And also, so that we’re able to let that referral partner know where they are in the process, and most importantly, if they do become a client, then we send them a gift. The gift that we send is actually a donation to their favorite charity.
This process is excellent because every Monday we then go through and we see where all of these individuals are in the pipeline. We are able to understand, is there something that we need to do to help move them forward, is there a deliverable, where are we at, so that no one falls through the cracks. Doesn’t matter how busy we get, no one falls through the cracks.
It also helps us monitor, how are we doing, what is our close ratio, close ratio with this person in the meeting versus that person in the meeting. Close ratio of people referring from Susie versus people that were referred from Sally. That helps us understand, what should we be doing differently, maybe we’re not communicating who our ideal client might be to that referral partner in the best way. If the close ratio is different from one financial advisor vs. another financial advisor here at the firm, does that financial advisor need to have additional training, what’s going on there.
These are all things that help us see how are we doing and how can we get better. Then every quarter we have our quarterly retreat, we go through our business goals, our personal goals for each one of us, and we have a big marketing conversation. We spend an hour going through each one of these numbers to get a better idea of, are we on track and what should we do. It’s the whole firm, it’s not just the marketing team, it’s not just me, it’s the whole firm brainstorming and tweaking what we’re doing. That’s how we’ve also, I have to say, I think created such a great process, because the whole team is giving us ideas.
We’ve made some significant changes from everything from our interns giving us advice to people who have been here the longest. Because everybody’s part of it there’s ownership and everybody takes such pride in our success. That’s really important, it’s a really exciting, thing for us to be able to do.
Steve:
Just for context, Stacy, can you tell us a little about the composition of your firm? How many are advisors, and how many are support staff, and how many are marketing?
Stacy:
Great. We have two in marketing, plus an intern. We always have an intern for the marketing team. Then for the financial team we have three teams, and two people are on those teams. So, there’ll be an associate and an analyst. There’s three of those and the 125 clients that we have is broken up among those three teams, so you can see it’s a very small client to personnel ratio. Then there are two senior people. Myself and Avani, we are essentially split among those 125 people, so we’re jumping in as the most senior person there. Then we have another admin person, and she is our rock star, we call her the mom to the office. She’s my executive assistant, but she’s also the person that’s making sure that we’re making smoothies, that a client comes in that she remembers their dog’s name. She really is the heat and soul. It’s a lean team in the sense that we do so much, but from the outside perspective, because we don’t have that many clients, a lot of people might think they’re sitting around twiddling their thumbs, but we definitely are working hard.
Steve:
You’ve talked about tracking people through the system if they get referred to you, what happens if a client, or if a psychologist refers somebody to you, what happens to that phone call when they first make contact with you?
Stacy:
The first thing they do is they talk to one of our two people in marketing for what we call a “pre-discovery.” It’s a really good meeting because we get to hear what they’re looking for, if they’re an ideal client from a net worth perspective, and also explain to them the process and setting expectations so that the first time they’re coming in, if they do make it through that pre-discovery and they are ideal in all those areas, that we’ve clicked the boxes, when they come in for that discovery meeting with myself and an analyst, or it might be Avani and an analyst, they know exactly what to bring. They feel prepared, they feel more confident, they feel less intimidated.
Once that discovery meeting happens, before they walk out the door we then schedule what we call their “investment plan meeting,” where it’s essentially that, looking at their entire life that I spoke about. It’s really key and I do want to emphasize that you have to make the meeting before they leave, because otherwise you could spend even an hour in admin time trying to get an appointment on the calendar.
Then once they do the investment plan meeting, then we schedule their mutual commitment and at that point, that’s when we are actually filling out forms, they sign the contact, and the rubber hits the road. Often we’ll do a lot of the blueprinting for writing their financial plan in that meeting too.
Steve:
Interesting.
Julie:
Awesome process.
Steve:
Yeah, no kidding.
Stacy:
It’s detailed too. We actually have it visually broken out for them so that they understand what they need to bring to each meeting and then what we’re doing to prepare for each meeting, so it’s very clear visually. I just think having that certainty and understanding that structure gives a lot of comfort. I even see this with my own kids that having structure and having life be organized, “By eight o’clock our breakfast needs to be done, because otherwise we’re not going to get to school on time.” They know that, and there’s kind of that comfort, that comfort of, “Guess what?” You know what to expect, it’s not a surprise for you. It’s the same thing with our clients. I think we all have so much change and so many things of our life that we can’t control, having a few things that we can count on gives, at least for me, a huge amount of peace of mind.
Steve:
Sure.
Julie:
I think it reinforces value too, right? I mean, your clients don’t have to wonder what you’re doing for them because you’ve laid it all out there.
Stacy:
Exactly, exactly. Also, part of that value is saying that we’re going to cover every part of your financial life, and if there’s something that we don’t quite know all the answers to, don’t worry. We’ve got a team of experts that we meet with quarterly that we can call at any time, that we can get your answer for you as well. We’re not pretending to know all the answers, and I think our clients appreciate that because who does know all the answers? And if they’re telling you that, you know that they’re lying. That’s really nice too, because they realize it’s not just us, but we’re actually bringing a team of experts that are there. Whether it’s estate planning, or insurance, or taxes, or college planning, we’ve got our team that we can reach out to, to help support them.
Steve:
Stacy, like I said, there’s so many things I’d love to keep talking with you about, but we are a little over our time.
Stacy:
I know, I know. Thank you.
Steve:
I don’t want to keep taking up so much of your day. But, before we close, is there anything else that you’d like to say to our audience before we close it up?
Stacy:
You know, I would just say the final piece, as scary as that step is, to make that mark in the sand, to really put your flag down for who you work with, and what you do, it is so worth it. It is so worth it and the more specific you are, the more profitable your firm will be, and also the better work life balance, you’ll have. Because, for me, knock on wood, since I’ve been able to do this, I now take half days on Mondays and Fridays to be with my kids. It’s phenomenal, and that’s better than any financial compensation, although I’m very happy with what I’m paid too. Think about this, if you love your family, if you love your staff and your team, this is something that you really do need to do.
Steve:
Well, I can’t think of a better way to wrap it up than that. Stacy, thank you so much for joining us on Becoming Referable, it’s been a great conversation and we really appreciate your sharing with us.
Stacy:
Thank you, it is such an honor to be on here. Thank you, thank you.
Julie:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really does help. 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. Thanks so much for joining us.