An often underappreciated aspect of the financial planning process (and the resulting Plan that financial planning software packages produce) is that it wasn’t originally developed as part of fostering an ongoing client/advisor relationship. Rather, it was a tool that advisors would use to identify “gaps” or “needs” in someone’s overall financial picture… in order to then sell them something to fill that gap! Which, in turn, is why many financial planning software packages are still structured in such a way as to produce moment-in-time snapshots... and why some advisors have turned to other types of client deliverables, such as one-page financial plans and action checklists, as a means to engage clients in an ongoing planning process.

Yet, while there’s a broader recognition that planning isn’t a one-and-done event, the issue remains that clients can often see tremendous progress in the initial stages of working with an advisor, but may end out wondering what value they’re getting on an ongoing basis. Which raises the question: how can advisors create (and more importantly demonstrate) value for their clients... if they aren’t producing a new Financial Plan every year or few?

In our 54th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards discuss the most important factor to consider when thinking about creating ongoing value for clients, strategies advisors can use to actually demonstrate that ongoing value, and how to avoid a common challenge when creating a “value structure”.

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that the most important aspect of demonstrating ongoing value to clients is consistency. For instance, some advisors adhere to an outreach and meeting cadence throughout the year to make sure that there are (depending on the nature and complexity of the relationship) a certain number of in-depth meetings and touch-points. Others even systematize the process even further by creating (and sharing) checklists of regularly performed tasks and client service calendars in order to actively communicate to clients that their advisor is routinely paying attention to all the big picture (as well as mundane) things on their financial plates (so they don’t have to!)

Meanwhile, some advisors have implemented more “homegrown” solutions to actually track the value that they create for their clients. Some examples include “keeping score”, whereby advisors assign point values to all the various pieces of the financial planning process and tally a score to show clients the progress that they’ve made. Because while advisors do a lot of behind-the-scenes things for their clients, they often underestimate how important it is to actually communicate to clients all those things that they actually do already! Other advisors prefer to track a client’s net worth over time (even having the client themselves enter the number themselves into a spreadsheet to further emphasize progress and ownership), or even keep a running tally of the real dollar value of the money that clients have saved as a result of the advice they’ve received, either of which shows the client the actual progress they’re making on an ongoing basis in real (but non-portfolio) dollar terms.

Ultimately, there are a lot of things that advisors do for their clients to create value beyond ‘just’ producing a five-inch three-ring binder called The Plan once every few years. The key, however, is in being consistent, not only about the doing part, but systematically showing to clients that all the different pieces of their financial puzzle are regularly taken care of. Yet at the same time, it’s important not to get so focused on their systematic process that the advisor may miss uncovering a new issue or pain point. Which can be avoided by asking their clients ahead of meetings if there’s anything that they would like to cover in the upcoming meeting that isn’t already on the agenda... and then making that the very first thing they talk about. Because at the end of the day, the most effective way to demonstrate ongoing value to clients is simply to be ready and prepared to address their ongoing financial planning needs and concerns, whatever may arise!

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The evolution of advisor technology in recent decades has made it easier and easier for financial advisors to build (and manage) systematized model portfolios for a large number of clients. The good news of this shift is that it has greatly facilitated the scalability of advisory firms. The bad news, though, is that it centered the advisory firm’s value proposition around the portfolio, as the firm’s resources were literally focused on “investment management”. And in turn, to help convert the prospects to clients, advisors learned to create beautifully designed marketing brochures, “investment decks”, and engaged proposal generation tools to show why their bespoke portfolios were better than all the other bespoke portfolios out there.

However, as the industry has continued to evolve towards a more holistic and service-based (i.e., intangible) approach to the financial planning process (and away from such a focus on investment management and the attendant performance expectations), advisors often struggle with illustrating the increasingly financial-planning-centric value that they offer (often over the course of decades) to their clients. Which, in turn, raises the question: Is there such a thing as a “financial planning proposal”, or something similar that financial advisors can give to prospective clients in an initial meeting to illustrate how great all this ‘financial planning stuff’ really is?

In our 43rd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards talk about the importance of meeting prospective clients where they are and asking good initial questions, creating a preliminary financial planning proposal and deliverable (and what that might include), and how to provide an even more substantial piece of supporting material that can help advisors show prospects what value they can expect to receive from the financial planning process.

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that, in order for a prospect to decide to hire an advisor, the advisor needs to have asked the right questions to uncover and understand the specific pain point that prompted the prospect to book a first meeting. As it’s the clear understanding of this pain point as a motivator that led the client to take action that the advisor must address in a financial planning proposal (and communicate back to the prospect to make them feel they’ve been heard!).

From there, the advisor can create a one-page plan that lays out what the key issues are, which might include a preliminary statement of purpose, a list of initial goals that have been identified, and a 90-day action plan to start down the proverbial financial planning road. The key is to understand that prospective clients care far less about specific solutions than knowing that someone understands their problems (and can help them work towards a solution). Additionally, advisors can supplement that one-page plan with a full sample financial plan, which can really help prospects understand what exactly they will be getting, why the fees are what they are, and what the financial planning process really means (beyond what they may have encountered in prior experiences).

Ultimately, the key point is that the days of glossy brochures full of Morningstar reports and stock photos of compasses and lighthouses may not be as relevant as they were when an advisor’s main value proposition was investment management. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t valuable deliverables that advisors can use to help demonstrate the sort of value that prospective clients can expect. And at the end of the day, tools that help clients decide to move forward and engage a financial planner not only help them solve the problem that they came in to get solved in the first place but can expand further into a holistic financial planning engagement… and also help advisors grow their businesses in the process, too!

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Over the past several years, the technological capability for financial advisors to implement dynamic, interactive websites has evolved dramatically. Gone are the days of needing to publish static brochure-style webpages with images of lighthouses, compasses, and winding roads, and instead, advisors are able to publish robust portals that allow them to share content that demonstrates their expertise, provide information about the advisor(s) and their team, communicate directly with those they hope to serve, share the details of their pricing and the value they provide, and (if everything goes to plan) have visitors become a lead or even outright book an appointment. Yet the end result is that the advisor’s website becomes a sort of Swiss Army knife… chock full of little tools that can do a lot but don’t necessarily work nearly as well as a tool with a singular purpose. Which, in turn, raises the question: Are advisors asking their websites to do too much?

In this our 52^nd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss the one important thing that all advisor websites should do, ways to create awareness and become relevant to a specific audience over time, and why some advisors have unrealistic expectations from their website.

At its core, the key to marketing success as a financial advisor is learning how to solve the specific problems of a specific group of people better than anyone else (rather than trying to be ‘everything to everyone’, and in the process, not actually being especially relevant to anyone). Because having a clear focus on a clear target market niche clientele allows the advisor to differentiate themselves in a crowded and competitive marketplace, by being able to clearly stand out to the clients they are best able to serve. Which also means moving away from having a website that tries to be everything to every visitor, and instead simply gives a clear statement about who they serve… and an obvious next step for those prospects to actually move forward with the advisor.

Which, in almost every instance, isn’t going to be a newly minted client deciding to hand over their life savings. Because, outside of referrals who are doing their last bit of due diligence before reaching out, most visitors to a website simply aren’t ready to do business with an advisor upon their first visit.

Instead, by simplifying a website’s design and ‘just’ having a well-defined audience and clear next step, advisors can build a targeted mailing list that they can use to share out relevant and actionable content, so that when someone who’s been on that list realizes they have a problem that needs solving, they will remember that the advisor who serves ‘people just like them’. In other words, an advisor's website should have one purpose, and that’s to gain permission to communicate with a visitor again. And use those subsequent communications to build the trust relationship necessary to actually do business with them whenever they are ready.

Ultimately, the key takeaway is that advisors should shift their mindset around what their websites are meant to do, and recognize that it’s extremely rare that a first-time visitor has arrived ready to do business. And that, unless it’s clear who the advisor serves and what the next step is, the odds are that all those first-time visitors will also be last-time visitors as well (even if they are exactly who the advisor serves in the first place) unless there’s a simple way (and a reason) for them to give their permission (by sharing their email address) to hear from the advisor again. While advisors who can find a way to stay in front of people in the future after they come across the advisor’s website once have at least a fighting chance of being top of mind when that one-time visitor eventually needs to actually hire a financial advisor!

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For most of its history, the financial advice industry has been predominantly transaction-based, with advisors earning a living solely from the commissions they earned on whatever product they sold to help their clients meet their needs. And since there wasn’t any reason to meet with those clients again until there was another opportunity to implement a product, advisors needed to attract as many potential clients as they could in order to be successful. As a result, it was essential for advisors to be as broad in their messaging and marketing as they possibly could, to be certain they reached anyone who might potentially be able to buy their company’s products.

However, as the industry has moved towards recurring-revenue model, where advisors are paid for ongoing financial advice, not only has it become increasingly difficult for advisors to stand out in a crowded and competitive marketplace, but as recent Kitces Research shows, advisors who serve a niche enjoy clear operational benefits as well, including the ability to spend more time on high-value, client-facing activities, charge more for the advice they give, scale their practices more efficiently, and earn (on average) more than 50% more than their non-niche counterparts. Yet, the reality is that many advisors still balk at the notion of focusing in on a specific niche, which raises the question: why is it so challenging to choose an area of focus, and how does one get comfortable choosing a particular niche to focus on?

In our 51st episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss some of the reasons advisors have a hard time committing to a niche, the mindset shift that advisors can make when thinking about the choice to serve a niche, and why relevance (through serving a focused clientele) is a key element to building a successful advisory business in the future.

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that the most common reason that advisors avoid ‘just one’ specific client-type is that they worry that they will have to say ‘no’ to prospective clients who don’t fit that focus… and actively turn down revenue in the process, which a particularly daunting prospect for advisors who are in the early stages of their career. Yet, the likelihood is that very few people (if any) end out saying ‘yes’ to advisors who try to be everything to everybody in the first place. Which is often readily apparent when looking at advisor websites, that (for generalists, at least) rarely generate leads, despite seeing (usually) a few hundred visitors each month… who might arrive at the advisor’s website, take a (virtual) look around, but leave without taking any action. Put another way, advisors who don’t develop the expertise to solve specific problems for a specific group of people better than anyone else may be able to work with anyone, but don’t end out being relevant to anyone.

Ultimately, the key point is that deciding to serve a niche isn’t about saying ‘no’ to a bunch of prospective clients, it’s about getting at least a few more potential clients to say ‘yes’ in the first place. Getting started as a financial advisor (regardless of the business model) is by far the most difficult stage in every advisor’s career. But the good news is that there is nothing to lose by not trying to be everything to everyone, and a whole lot to gain from getting really good at serving a specific clientele with issues that are unique to them for which the advisor can offer differentiated value. In the process, advisors can move from not being relevant to each and every person with whom they interact, to being in a position to serve the exact needs of at least a few of them… which, at the end of the day, is a big step forward, both for advisors just getting going, and for advisors who want to take their businesses to the next level!

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Over the past several years, there’s been an explosion in the number of marketing channels that advisory firms can use to attract new leads, turn them into prospects, and finally convert them into clients or customers. Yet, despite the ongoing evolution in marketing, our Kitces Research studies have shown that the most common way that financial advisors gain clients is the same way they’ve been doing it for decades… through referrals. As the profession has evolved, however, so too has the approach to actually generating those referrals, as the invasive “I get paid two ways” tactic has been replaced by having far more effective (and far less uncomfortable!) conversations with existing clients about ways in which they would prefer to connect with new people.

Unfortunately, though, many advisors still have a difficult time actually starting up those referral-asking conversations in the first place, which, in turn, raises the questions: What are the blocking points keeping advisors from having conversations with their existing clients about finding more clients like them, and how can we as advisors overcome those blocking points?

In our 50th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss the underlying reason why advisors have such a hard time asking their clients for referrals, how to push forward by instead asking advice on how to grow their practices, and ways to gain the sort of confidence that ultimately eliminate those blocking points altogether.

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that anything having to do with marketing and business development requires an advisor to put themselves “out there”, which means that there’s a risk of rejection. And since human beings don’t like rejection, it’s that fear of rejection that causes us to find all sorts of reasons to not do what it is that we’re supposed to do. Overcoming that fear initially often requires a burst of courage to take a leap and take action, but the good news is that those leaps not only get easier with repetition, they eventually become something to look forward to as the advisor starts to see tangible results from their efforts and feels “rewarded” for taking the leap.

From there, the next important step is for advisors to gain the confidence that the services they offer really do bring value – so much value to their clients, that they should want to be passionately telling (nearly) everyone they meet about the great work they do! There’s a plethora of pathways towards gaining that passion and confidence, but two of the most important for advisors are by making sure they are in a situation where they are proud of what they do and the services they can offer, and by obtaining the education necessary to have the self-confidence of knowing that they are good at what they do and that they help people.

The key point is that the challenge around generating referrals from existing clients is less about the method itself, and more about overcoming the fear of rejection, and addressing our own self-confidence gaps that may exist. Because at the end of the day, it can be helpful to reflect on the fact that most of the good things that happen in life involve some initial element of risk. Ultimately, soliciting a client’s help in meeting more prospective clients that are like them isn’t about generating referrals or having conversations about referrals, but is simply a way for advisors to try get more people great financial advice that they’re confident they can provide!

 

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Achieving success as a financial advisor is difficult. Not just because of the challenge of learning the necessary information (and how to deliver that information), but also because of the perennial challenge for advisors in getting people to (in marketing parlance) “know them, like them, and trust them” enough to become clients and pay the advisor for their expertise. Which is why, despite the tremendous growth in recent years of available channels to connect with prospective clients, by far the most common (and reliable) means of growth for advisors is when existing clients (who already know, like, and trust their advisor) refer their friends and family to the advisor. Still, though, while “referrals” remains the most common channel by which advisors get new clients, most are not getting as many referrals as they would like, and struggle with figuring out how to actively get more referrals in a way that is both genuine and scalable, in a world where just trying to be “remarkable” may no longer be enough.

In our 49th of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss why asking clients to refer their family and friends has become increasingly difficult for advisors in recent years, the key mindset shift that advisor should make when thinking about growing their business through referrals, and a systematic strategy to actively go about making that happen (beyond just trying to do more and give more away to clients in the hopes that they will tell their friends and family about it)!

As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that, as the industry has shifted towards a more fee-based model (where clients see the fees that they pay as a line item in their statements), the old “I get paid two ways” conversation (by the work you do with me as an advisor, and giving me a referral to your friends and family) is no longer a comfortable one to have. Yet, when asked how they go about generating referrals in a post-commission world, most advisors still don’t really have a good answer other than they try to give remarkable service and then hope that their clients will, in turn, remark to their friends and family about what a great advisor they have.

Unfortunately, that process is neither reliable nor repeatable for most, which is why advisors should instead adopt an approach that is. A more targeted strategy is for the advisor to instead make a shortlist of the clients that they would most like to replicate, scheduling a short call with those clients, and asking them, if they were in the advisor’s shoes, how they would go about finding more clients like them. Some conversations may not go anywhere, but a few may result in the actual name of a new referral on the spot! But by far the most valuable outcome is an idea, that comes from the client, about a good way to meet more people just like them. And because those ideas are coming from the client, chances are pretty good that they’ll be the first in line to show up with their friends or family to an outing or event that they thought of in the first place!

Ultimately, the key point is that getting clients to refer their friends and family to their advisor is about creating room for clients to become invested in the success of the ideas that will help their advisor build relationships rather than just trying to provide remarkable service (which is still important) and then hoping for the best. Because if advisors can show that they are genuinely interested in their clients’ interests, ideas, and opinions, then those clients will become actively engaged in activities that will give prospective clients the opportunity, in turn, to get to “know, like, and trust” the advisor as well.

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Decades ago, when the financial advice industry was focused primarily on the sale of investment products and insurance, the standard planning approach was to conduct a gap analysis to highlight the client’s needs… so that the advisor could implement whatever available products they had to address those needs (and earn a commission in the process). More recently, financial planning has shifted away from a needs-based approach, and towards a more aspirational “goals-based” approach where clients commit to pursuing advisor-recommended strategies to achieve those goals. Yet the challenge of goals-based investing is that it presumes clients know what their goals are, and can effectively articulate them… which in practice isn’t always the case. In part because the compounding math of wealth accumulation itself isn’t natural for most, and it’s difficult to set goals if you don’t even know what the compounding of saving and investing might make possible in the first place!

In our 48th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss why goals-based financial planning puts the proverbial cart before the horse, the importance of exploring the possibilities first, strategies to dig deeper with clients to create frameworks from which realistic and meaningful goals can be developed, and why iterative planning allows advisors to develop long-term relationships with clients, where the focus isn’t on The Plan, per se, but rather on the process of planning and adapting to what else may become possible over time.

As a starting point, it’s important to understand that humans in general aren’t really wired to envision a future that is substantially different from what we experience today. It’s little wonder, then, that clients, when asked about their “goals”, often don’t have very good answers... and may even sometimes wildly unrealistic expectations (which, in turn, forces the advisor to become the “bearer of bad news”). Which means that the first (and perhaps most underrated) thing that an advisor should do is to help clients understand the myriad of possibilities ahead of them, explore a range of scenarios, and understand the inevitable trade-offs and choices that they will have to make along the way.

From that “possibilities-based planning” foundation, advisors can focus on asking good questions that lead to meaningful conversations around helping clients discover those things that are most important to them, identify their desired future state, and then build a framework upon which they can define (and start moving towards) their goals. In turn, defining those goals with a possibilities-based discovery approach creates room to reassess those goals and to shift over time… while allowing the underlying framework to remain in place.

Ultimately, while it’s not necessary to completely discard the notion of goals-based planning, the key is to examine what the various possibilities are to begin with, before even thinking about asking clients what their goals might be. By thinking more along the lines of possibilities­-based planning, advisors can help clients determine what are realistic goals to set in the first place and determine the most efficient recommendations that will allow clients to focus on what’s most important to them and get them to their desired future state.

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When it comes to financial planning, it’s impossible to create (and then implement) a plan that will improve a client’s life and help them reach their goals if the advisor doesn’t have the data to analyze the situation and formulate recommendations in the first place. Yet even though having the requisite data is the most important piece of a client’s financial puzzle... every advisor at some point experiences the challenge that it’s not always the easiest task to gather a client’s pertinent financial data in the first place. From a client’s perspective, the process of collecting all the necessary facts and figures and then entering it all into a multi-page intake form isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time… and the irony is that the clients most in need of help may not be organized enough to gather their information to give it to the advisor, to begin with. Which in turn raises the question: are there any better ways that advisors can get the data they need to do the planning work they’ve been hired to do?

In our 47th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss a few of the reasons why getting data from new clients may sometimes prove to be such a challenge, how advisors might shift their thinking around data-gathering to overcome the challenge, and some simple strategies to help clients get more comfortable with the data-gathering process itself.

As a starting point, it’s important for financial advisors to take a step back and consider why they’re gathering a client’s financial data in the first place. As while data is a wholly necessary ingredient in every comprehensive financial plan, it’s also important to recognize that financial planning isn’t an event that happens once and is set in stone forever; instead, it’s a process, and initial meetings with new (or prospective clients) are more about building connections and helping them be more comfortable, than they are about getting (potentially too) bogged down in the minutia of account balances and interest rate assumptions. That’s not to say, though, that advisors shouldn’t be asking great questions to learn about a client’s current situation and what’s most important to them. In fact, those are the key ideas and details that can then be used to identify what blanks need to be filled in first!

Meanwhile, advisors can also find themselves in situations where new clients simply aren’t organized enough to collect the necessary statements and get stuck in a downward spiral of guilty feelings over not being able to give the advisor the data that’s being requested. But it’s those clients who most need the help of a financial advisor who can live up to the profession’s promise of “helping people get their financial house in order and focus on a plan for their future”. Which means in such instances, instead of having clients gather, organize, and deliver their own data, advisors may simply wish to have the client bring in their piles of unopened statements… and help them through the process of sorting it all out (with the bonus of helping them finally truly get organized!).

Finally, advisors can also leverage the latest iterations of financial planning software packages to make data gathering more interactive and engaging for the client to want to get through the process. By building out the initial iterations of a plan with clients, not only will the advisor give them a more genuine and tangible financial planning experience, but clients can often get excited about the process itself and begin to feel the motivation to make sure it’s as accurate as possible when they literally see their financial plan taking shape before their eyes… and in the process, end out wanting to actively pursue any missing information that was needed in the first place.

Ultimately, the key point is to recognize that financial planning is a process rather than an event, building long-term relationships is more about making connections than collecting as much data as possible at the early planning stages, and often clients don’t have or know where all of their data is. And by making it easier to get started by meeting clients where they are with the data they have, and focusing on just the most important data points (which will vary on a case-by-case basis) in an interactive setting, financial advisors can demonstrate, in real-time, the connection between the data and the benefit that financial planning will bring to a client’s life.

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Over the past decade or so, the financial planning profession has continued to shift away from its transactional business model roots – where a client is a “client” simply because you’ve done business with them at some point in the past – to a model driven by long-term planning relationships (where a client is a client because they’re actually in an ongoing client relationship). As such, many advisors are making that same transition themselves, as they expand their expertise and introduce additional services for their long-standing clients to round out an ongoing service model. Along the way, though (and often due to the performance-centric nature of the transactional relationship), advisors may not have formed a full and complete understanding of all of their clients’ circumstances (beyond what was necessary to know to implement the original product recommendation). In turn, those same clients may themselves be accustomed to a certain cadence and routine of annual meetings. The net result is that advisors may sometimes struggle when trying to figure out the best way to introduce those clients to a more holistic planning-centric relationship, and gain a clearer picture of what’s most important to them beyond the original product need (that the advisor may not have really delved deeply into in the past).

In our 46^th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards explore best practices for transitioning longer-term transactional clients to a more planning-centric relationship, how to introduce the concept during regular meetings (particularly when the advisor may need to gather additional information that they hadn’t asked for along the way), and why a gradual (and possibly interactive) transition may be better than making any big “now we’re doing financial planning!” announcements.

As a starting point, it’s important to understand that there’s no shame in needing to learn more about long-term clients. One approach to introducing the conversation is simply to include some initial discovery questions as part of a ‘normal’ agenda, which in turn would provide the advisor a reason to start spending more time on deeper questions in subsequent meetings, as a means of going beyond the ‘traditional’ client review meeting that’s so often just focused on portfolio performance reviews.

From there, advisors can start filling in information gaps that may have opened up over the year, not by shoving a thick intake questionnaire in front of the client (which could prompt clients to wonder if their advisor shouldn’t already have asked for that information years ago), but by using modern interactive planning software where the pertinent information can be populated live (and collaboratively) in the meetings themselves. The important thing again, though, is that these things don’t have to happen all at once, and instead can happen iteratively over time.

Ultimately, the key takeaway is that advisors don’t need to make any drastic changes in the way they interact with their clients to introduce a more planning-based approach. Rather, by making the process more conversational, interactive, and gradual, advisors can start by asking deeper questions to find out more about their clients’ long-term goals, gather any missing data by using interactive planning tools available in various planning software applications, build more financial planning depth from there in subsequent meetings, and foster a deeper relationship with a more engaging process of real financial planning.

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In the early days of financial advice, an advisor’s primary (and key) value proposition was giving clients access to capital markets via various investment products and vehicles that consumers simply couldn’t buy on their own. And as a result, the nature of the advisor/client relationship was such that they would ever only really need to interact when some sort of transaction needed to occur. However, as the internet made various investment products increasingly accessible to consumers directly – through online brokerage accounts – many advisors’ primary value-proposition became managing a more holistic diversified portfolio… necessitating regular (often quarterly) meetings to discuss the performance results of that portfolio. Yet as the financial advisor value proposition begins to shift once again, and the profession further broadens its scope to include all the other facets of a person’s whole financial picture, many advisor/client review meetings still revolve largely or entirely around investment performance reviews. Which (especially for advisors who are transitioning clients into ongoing planning relationships) raises the question: how exactly does the advisor change the conversation in review meetings with their clients to be less investment-centric (when it may be all their clients have ever known!)?

In our 45^th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards explore what it takes to restructure the client review meeting, and discuss what advisors might talk about on a high level with their clients, how action items (which stem from their Goals) help them make progress towards their “desired future state”, and a way to systematically structure those meetings in such a way that allows the advisor to demonstrate exactly how they’re bringing more than just investment value to the relationship.

As a starting point, advisors can think of the periodic review as a sort of “State Of The Plan” meeting, which (barring any unforeseen events in their lives) typically is to know that they’re making progress towards their goals. Accordingly, on a broad level, talking points can include a review of the client’s Statement Of Financial Purpose (which could include things spending time with family, serving in their community, or traveling, to name just a few), Goals (which flow out of the Statement Of Financial Purpose), and then their progress towards those goals and if the use of their capital still aligns with where they are headed (which is where the real meat of the conversation resides).

Meanwhile, a strategy for structuring these meetings might include actually crafting a physical agenda, which should cover a basic check-in to make sure the proverbial plane is still flying in the right direction, any news and updates (either within the advisors firm or out in the world that might have a bearing on the discussion), some sort of planning item (which, depending on the time of year, might revolve around taxes or estate planning), and then (and only then) a portfolio review. Ideally, the agenda should be delivered a few days before the meeting itself, which will not only help build trust (first by telling the clients what will be discussed and setting expectations, and then by adhering to that agenda), but also gives them an opportunity to add anything that may have come up that the advisors isn’t aware of yet (further facilitating more non-investment-centric client conversations). .

Ultimately, clients really just want to learn three things when they meet with their advisor: are they okay, are they making progress, and are getting their money’s worth from the advisor relationship? And by using a consistent structure and cadence, with a standardized meeting agenda, not only can an advisor make those periodic review meetings more valuable to their clients beyond a discussion around portfolio performance (which can be sent separately anyway), but it also provides a framework that they advisor can use to mention all the great things they’re doing behind the scenes to continue to earn their clients’ business as well!

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