Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Cheryl Holland
Steve:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we have a conversation with Cheryl Holland, Founder of the Abacus Planning Group in Columbia, South Carolina. I’ve had the good fortune of talking to a lot of successful advisors and leaders in our profession, and Cheryl stands out among them for her thoughtfulness in leading her company and how many different things she gets right.
Abacus has carefully designed and continues to improve the experience they deliver to clients. They have invested time and treasure in developing and utilizing their technology to enhance the human experience rather than becoming tech-centric. She’s an experienced mentor known for her skills in developing talent. She shares authority with team members in a way so many founders struggle with. And she’s built a very successful firm that consistently gets a stream of referrals, including many from centers of influence.
Cheryl shares with us many insights and innovations that will benefit the leader of any financial advisory firm. I hope you enjoy our conversation with Cheryl Holland.
Speaker 2:
Learn everything you need to know to form and benefit from a successful client advisory board. From the man who has led more client advisory board meetings than anyone in the financial services industry. Stephen Wershing, CFP, has been helping financial advisory firms create and utilize client advisory boards as a business-building strategy for over seven years. And now you can get his best advice for a small fraction of the cost by attending this one-day program held just before the NAPFA 2018 Conference on October 15th in Philadelphia. By the end of this one-day program, you will have a complete and thoughtful plan to make your client advisory board a reality. Or make a bigger success of the one you already have.
What you’ll learn includes how to choose the right participants for your board, creating an effective board meeting agenda, choosing a venue, what restaurants won’t tell you, choosing the right person to run your meetings, and upgrading the client experience with your board’s guidance. The program also includes guest speaker Marie Swift, President and CEO of Impact Communications, a thought leader for thought leaders. She is known for bringing some of the industry’s best and brightest voices together for dialogue and debate. She’ll teach you how to leverage your advisory board and your marketing.
You’ll walk out with a complete action plan for getting your advisory board together or to make your current board a bigger success. Go to NAPFA.advisoryboard.solutions. One day, October 15th, in Philadelphia can show you how to deepen your client relationships and engage them like never before. Having a conversation with some of your best clients may be the fastest way to referrals and more clients. Don’t miss this opportunity. Go to NAPFA.advisoryboard.solutions to sign up for this event today. That’s NAPFA.advisoryboard.solutions.
Now, Becoming Referable.
Steve:
Cheryl Holland, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Cheryl:
Steve, thank you for inviting me.
Julie:
Yeah, pleasure to have you here.
Steve:
And so let’s just start with your client experience. You describe what you do at Abacus as having a team approach to servicing clients, and a lot of advisors say that, and in my observation a lot of the time it actually translates into different actual experiences and different ways of doing it. So could you describe for us what a team approach means to you?
Cheryl:
Yes. Language is so important, and I know we’ve hired some individuals who would say to us, “Yes I love working on a team.” And what they meant was they love doing individual work and then having friends around.
Steve:
Right.
Cheryl:
That’s a great way to be. What we really mean is, we’re highly interdependent, both in how we support each other’s workload and each other’s learning curve, and mentoring up and down both ways, but also how we serve the client. And so, if you were to come in for a meeting this afternoon at the firm, you would walk in and your team leader, which is the individual with the most experience, typically on the financial planning side, your portfolio manager, a support advisor, and your operational support team member would all be ready to greet you.
We would typically walk in as a group, shake hands, even if everyone is not going to be in the meeting, so you always have the faces to go with the names that you’re working with, sometimes, routinely, throughout the year. Clients pretty quickly orient to a favorite person on the team, so even if you’re the portfolio manager, you might field calls that have to do with a tax issue, and you have to quickly learn how to toss the ball appropriately and respectfully to that other team member who can really answer the question.
That allows the client – sometimes if we have a couple, they individually may relate better to one or another person on the team, not necessarily to the same person. So, it gives a lot of depth to the team. When you’re on vacation you’re not worried about what’s going to happen while you’re gone. As you all may know, we have a month-long sabbatical every five years. Again, you go with freedom and enjoyment knowing you’re coming back to a clean desk, or as clean as you may have left it.
It brings a rich set of information to the client in terms of technical expertise, where we’re all generalists at some level at what we do in financial advising. You will have someone who has a lot of tax experience, perhaps, on a team, if that client needs that, someone who has more experience in fixed income if that portfolio needs that, so we tailor that group.
And recently, as I’ve gotten older and the gray hairs are starting to show, and clients begin to say to me, “What are your plans?” I can say, “Hey, we purposely populated your team with these different age demographics.” And they go, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got someone in their 50s, someone in their 40s, someone in their 20s. I feel good about that.”
So, it has multiple purposes when you say there’s a team serving a client. There’s the technical experiences. There’s the personality connection. There’s the depth of bench, when someone’s not in the office, the client doesn’t worry about that. There’s the long-term plan they can see. In this organization, they can be there for their life and not have to worry about their own future, and a new advisor at 85.
Steve:
You’ve said that–hang on, Julie, before we move on–the whole team walks in to greet the client and the client will often gravitate toward one person. As you have review meetings with that client and you address different aspects of their relationship to you, the planning and the investment management and the other services that you provide, is the same person going in to talk to that client each time, or do they meet with different people for different purposes?
Cheryl:
We absolutely meet with different people for different purposes. Abacus, we’re big into process, so we have our template agendas. Many advisors do. It typically has a big, “How are you? How’s the family? How’s the business? How’s health?” Typically the whole team will be in there, not always for that. Then there will be a section on financial advice issues, tax planning, estate issues, insurance updates. Whatever needs to be addressed. Then an investment section.
The whole team doesn’t always stay in for all of it. We do for some clients, but not for most. There’s an administrative section, which interestingly we’ve always done at the end, but we’re experimenting now with peak experience, learning that your final experience is what you really remember. So, should we be doing the grunt work at the beginning with the operational person, rather than at the end?
We’re not all in there at the same time, and we’re not always all in a meeting. We think about that ahead of time. If a client is not happy with how someone didn’t come to that meeting they tell us. “Where was John?” or “Where was Cheryl?” or “Where was Charles? Why wasn’t he in this meeting?” Sometimes we morph a little bit, what ideally from our perspective works, to what ideally from the client’s perspective works.
Steve:
Do those teams get mixed up differently for different clients, or is there a team that has its own client base?
Cheryl:
Yes. Steve, that’s such a brilliant question and one we are always navel-gazing over. Early on we always intertwined teams, so that we don’t have silos, so to speak. There’s several benefits of that. It would be very difficult for any one team member to leave and take a bunch of clients with them. That was probably early on a defensive posture. A logical reason to do that.
The second reason that we do it is people get mentored by different team members, and therefore you’re never having to work with X or Y. That person might be particularly irritates you over these issues. You never get drugged down by a relationship.
The negative is, there’s a little bit of drag in the system from that. We periodically review, is that optimal for us? Bottom up, right now, people like this sort of spider web approach that we have for our client service model, but I couldn’t say that we would never change to more strict team only based success.
The struggle is, let me just add one more thing, clients are so diverse at Abacus. You might have a very religiously conservative young couple who own a specific kind of business, and therefore really to serve them properly they have to have this set of team members, for them to be the most successful and feel the most comfortable.
The next client might be a client in their 70s, who owns a lot of real estate, who lives a certain place in the country, and is extraordinarily politically on the other spectrum, and might make some of my team members uncomfortable. Even though we’re trying to be always value free, it’s always about the client, there are just certain people that you work with more effectively, and your skill set is needed in a different combination for that client. There’s some real positives, but there are some challenges.
Julie:
You’ve talked about the development opportunities, which is often the argument I’ve heard in favor of the structure that you have today. You mentioned mentoring. Is that a formal mentoring arrangement that you have within teams, or how does that work at your firm?
Cheryl:
In real estate, it’s location, location, location. I think within advisory firms, it’s mentoring, mentoring, mentoring. There’s never enough mentoring, we’ve found. You have to do it all the time, every time.
Let’s just use that client meeting as an example of a type of mentoring. After every meeting the whole team comes back together for a 10- or 15-minute debrief. We have a checklist of things. We can use a checklist or not to go over. It’s to go around the room, get the impression of every team member of how that client’s doing, did we meet expectations that we set for that meeting that the client had? Did we use too much jargon? Did we use the right tools when a situation came up? Did we listen enough?
We give each other feedback. Here’s what you did really well. Here’s what you could do a little bit better. Not only are we mentoring on the technical advice when working with clients, we’re mentoring on you’ve got to give feedback to people. Everybody in the room gets a piece of positive and critical feedback. There’s a 15-minute, 10-minute huddle. It’s meant to be great for better service of the client, but it’s also meant to be a mentoring opportunity for everyone in the room.
Julie:
That’s great. You mentioned earlier just that you have a wide diversity of clients, but you have a niche experience, is that right, for closely-held businesses. Is that your primary focus at the business?
Cheryl:
Julie, you’re exactly right, and I would say, probably 60-65% of our clients are families with shared assets, so not every client has a closely-held business anymore, or still has one. The vast majority of them have extensive real estate holdings that they own together, a business that they’ve owned together, a trust that holds oil and gas that they manage together. We are out looking for clients who have complexity on the planning side and complexity on the family systems side. We think that’s a blue ocean for us, because not many people are training on the technical and soft skills side to meet those needs.
Julie:
How did you come to that focus? You describe it as a blue ocean, so what was the thinking prior to that that lead you to that point?
Cheryl:
Well, for one thing, I was resistant to the notion of an ideal client, so Tracy Becks and I worked together a long time, and I like to say that Tracy recommends something to me, and it takes me five to seven years. I think that adoption is getting shorter and shorter, and then when I do it, I’m like, “What in the world was I resisting?”
This idea of an ideal client, which I like that approach better than niche, perhaps, in terms of people adopting more rapidly. We were slow to come to, but I think when we finally embraced it and we realized a good 40-45% of our clients, they may be a physician, but our really successful ones were ones that had their own surgery center that they had created.
There was this common thread of entrepreneurship. There was a common thread of family systems owning assets. We said let’s just embrace that. It means certain ways, certifications we need. We need to hire at a certain pattern. We need to develop different modules, such as family meetings, which we were not doing before.
It turned out to be something that gave me a lot of energy, because it was complicated, and required me to keep learning. I think for other members of the firm, they looked around and said, “Oh, these are my clients already. I can do this.” I really love advising people in philanthropy, and this so gives me the opportunity to do more and more and more of that if we can attract the right clients.
But it took us, I would say, a good two years to go through that process organizationally. We’re still in the process of developing our branding, our storytelling, our skill sets to really meet that ideal client where they are.
Steve:
I’d like to look into that a little further, because it’s so important. One of the things Julie and I found when we’ve studied this versus referrals is customizing that service offering to that target market. You mentioned family meetings as one special thing that you do. What are some of the other aspects, again, of the experience that you provide those – and could you explain what families with shared assets means?
Cheryl:
A family with shared asset would be, let’s just give a couple of examples. We have two sisters whose father was a real estate developer and when he passed away, and their mother owned the assets, but they became the de facto managers of this rich set of assets. Some of which was raw land. Some of which was strip malls for retail. That’s a very particular skill set to go in and work together and as the decider, and the entrepreneur and the visionary, two daughters as stewards for their mother, themselves, and their children, for whom this is the key asset.
Imagine all the different ways you have to think about what that client needs, in terms of other advisors, the kind of CPA they need, the kind of conversations they need to have. They’re both married to men that they respect and love and want to have input too. When you have five people at the table, mom and two couples, and then as the adult children become adult, they’re maybe in high school and they come on. Now they’re 28. They want to be at the table. Just being able to facilitate a conversation and a different kind of decision making for how to develop and liquidate properties is very different than what your typical advisor would be talking to you about in a meeting, perhaps.
Julie:
I can imagine-
Cheryl:
Another example. I’m sorry Julie.
Julie:
I was just going to say, I imagine the technical complexity is very different, but I would also imagine that the soft skills around facilitation are very different as well.
Cheryl:
Absolutely, and for that reason, two of us have gone to the Family Firm Institute, and we’ve gotten accreditation in that area, specifically, to get better at those skills. We had a wealth psychologist work with us for many years, firm wide.
Those skills trickle across all clients, but if you have a focus on why you’re doing it, it really hones your willingness to do it.
Another example would be a family that owns a manufacturing plant and the father is transitioning. They co-founded it, father and son, but the father is older now. He’s transitioning out of CEO President, the son’s transitioning in. The daughter is outside the business. What does this mean for legacy estate planning, governance, decision making? Who has a voice? Who has a role?
Succession planning for that son. Is that going to be a grandchild? You have all the normal, “How do I invest my portfolio? My rollover IRA? How do I think about debt for the company versus me?” But you have this extra layer that’s critical to the wealth creation and wealth preservation that you would not have if the client were an attorney, an engineer, another type of profession. Working for a public company, for example.
Steve:
There are so many really interesting elements of this that I think you’ve consciously addressed that’s really interesting. You’ve looked at the unique needs of that market and the things that they need. Then you’ve talked about the skills and things that you’ve developed to provide services to customize the client experience to the needs of that client. You’ve also done a lot of work in your back office, customizing your technology and your support systems. You’ve already talked about having processes for everything, and having template agendas and all kinds of things to make things go more smoothly.
I’d like to talk a little bit about your CRM system, specifically, because you’ve done a lot of work in customizing that to facilitate providing this kind of client experience. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of work you’ve done on your CRM system and how you utilize it specifically to enhance that client experience?
Cheryl:
I say that a long time ago, I may have had the vision, then did framing of a red barn. The next generation in the office who’s really the ones that have turned it into this beautiful work of art that can do all the things I’m going to talk about. I can take about one percent of the credit.
What’s exciting, on the client experience side, and we’re really just getting into more and more of this is, I’ll give you a small example. We have these age-triggering checklists. When someone turns 18 or 35 or 60 or 81, right, these things should be thought about. Now all that is automated, so when your child turns 18, the advisor automatically gets a to-do with a template email saying, “Hey, your child is 18.” It’s more elegant than this. They need to have a healthcare power of attorney, because they’re age of majority in South Carolina or wherever. Here’s the statutory form. We would love for you to go meet with your attorney, X, Y, Z, to fill it out. In the absence of doing that, sit down with him and go over this, or her, and have her complete her healthcare, because without it the doctors are not going to talk to you anymore. They’re not a child anymore.
We’ve always had that rule of doing it, but it was sometimes hit or miss. This way having automated, every client gets this experience. I’ll tell you all, that’s the kind of thing clients value. After they’ve been here for a time, they trust you on the portfolio. If they’re getting that, or you turn whatever age it is where there’s a touchpoint that you and I all know, it’s common. Child turns 15 in South Carolina, believe it or not, you can get your permit to drive a car. We send out this document called I Promise. You can sit down with your child and go over the rules of driving a car.
You turn 50, you get from us the Forever Letter. Sit down and think and think about writing your family the Forever Letter. There’s this way now that we can automate that that takes all the minutiae off the advisor, the relationship manager some people may call them, and makes it automatic, so they just really have to get in, go through their activities for the day, customize the email template, and hit send. It all goes out automatically. That’s just a small example of what all it can do, but it’s one that brings me great joy.
Steve:
There are two things I really love about that. One is that, like you said, you have automated it, so it’s not left to the advisor to try to remember. I’m still amazed, when I talk with advisors, they know a lot of really good things to do for clients, but still on some level they’re kind of recreating it every time a client hits one of those benchmarks, because there isn’t a process around it. It’s not automatically presented to them, and I love that part of it.
The other thing that I really like about it is the consistency of the client experience that that provides, and that the client experience is about more than financial planning. There are only so many ways that you can differentiate yourself based on financial planning and investment management. The more you can go beyond that, the more meaningfully you can differentiate yourself from other firms. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of that kind of thinking for clients.
Cheryl:
Well, I hope so. We’re not perfect everyday by a long shot. I’ll say a couple things. One, you’re right. Other advisors have these wonderful ideas. Everything I just told you, I probably stole from somebody else, so you don’t have to be creative to be good at this. You just have to go out and do it.
The other thing is that most of us who got into this profession got into what we believe is a helping profession. We want to help other people. We’re really good at portfolio management, or we’re really good at long-term cash flow projections, whatever our gift is. In our heart of hearts, we also like helping people. The CRM at Abacus really allows us to help more people consistently.
It does all kinds of other smart things, but in terms of the client experience, I think we’re really beginning to just touch the surface of what it can do. I think that’s why you get a CRM. You get a CRM for two reasons: A repository for all your data, but a way to mass produce a customized experience. That was always our vision.
Steve:
Let’s get a little technical about that for just a minute, so that people can understand. You use Salesforce, is that correct, for your CRM?
Cheryl:
That’s correct.
Steve:
My understanding, I haven’t seen the system, but my understanding is that with Salesforce, even more so than most other CRMs, you have the basic system, but then you have to do a lot of customizing and tailoring and engineering before you can actually put it into use. Is that right?
Cheryl:
That is correct. We were fortunate to have used an older Saleslogix that we had a lot of things. We knew what we wanted, and that was very helpful. We work with Agili, Michael Joyce’s firm, as copartners in all of this development. But for many years we probably spent $50,000 a year on programming. We have a very gifted person in house who does some of that work himself.
It’s no small undertaking, but if our return on investment that we calculate pretty routinely, it’s extraordinarily high, because of the work we don’t have to hire someone to do.
Steve:
Yeah, and I really think that’s an important message for our listeners, because I fear that for a lot of advisors who’ve not gone that far, there may be the mistaken impression that you can, “Okay, well I bought a package and I put it on the computer, and so now I’m done. I’m ready to go.” That’s really not. If you were to look at the total cost, the total commitment of resources from Abacus to how you can use your CRM system now, how do you think roughly you would break that down between the cost of the software, the cost of customization, and then the training and compliance that you have to do in the office to pull all that into action?
Cheryl:
That’s a great question, and I should have a better answer, but nowadays you’re adding all these little add-ons. I would put it confidently that it’s in the two to three percent of our total budget range. Once you look at opportunity cost of people actually mapping process is evolving, business impact. Training actually is pretty straightforward these days, because there’s high adoption, and it’s an easy to navigate system. You never get away from that.
It’s definitely in the two to three, and maybe even higher than that percentage of the budget. This is for a large firm for whom revenue’= has become a significant number. I think what I would say to people is this: Just start somewhere.
Data – it makes your organization more valuable. If you have a CRM and all you’re doing is getting the data input, and you think of that as a cost, which it is, your firm is more valuable. Whatever happens, you die, you sell it, you train someone else to take over, having easily accessible, understandable data is so valuable. Then you begin to program slowly over time. Just pick your biggest pain point, everybody has one.
Is it increased calling when you drop the ball? Is it getting out your portfolio reports on a regular basis? Whatever it is, there is a pain point. Just start there and you’ll be surprised how rewarded and validated you feel, and then you’ll just start building over time. But it is a time and money commitment, and patience.
Steve:
What do you do to make sure that people follow through on the processes and things that you set up, to make sure that they’re putting the notes into Salesforce and that they’re scheduling the tasks and all that?
Cheryl:
That’s a whole different discussion, because some people love that and some people don’t. You have to have a broad expectation. I think what happens there is, once something goes successful for you as an advisor, because you have done the proper things, you don’t need much more encouragement than that.
Is everything boxed perfect across every advisor? No, because each advisor has their own different joyful gifts that we take full advantage of. So if they’re not the one to fill in the X box every time, but they do these other things, no one gets super worried about that.
If you’re not someone who loves living in a system, and this is another good thing about an organization, Abacus has a very unique culture. You either love it or you do not like it at all. Part of that is living in a CRM and being very task driven for part of your day. That is not for everybody’s experience as an employee or as a team member or for their life. Their not going to last here very long, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I’m glad we’re at the point where it’s robust enough. People figured that out really early.
Julie:
When you think-
Cheryl:
Everyone here right now says, “This system is my friend, but I want it to be better tomorrow than it is today.”
Julie:
If you think about an advisor who, so we just touched on this, is not investing at that level, and probably won’t for some time, would you say there are particular processes or workflows that have had the most significant impact overall on your client experience?
Cheryl:
I would put that in three areas. One, I would say the process around inquiries. Right at the moment someone calls, and that entire process until they become a client. You want to be closing at 75 or 80 percent, I believe. When we slip below that, we start looking at what are we doing wrong? Are we taking the wrong people in the door to talk to? Did we do something wrong in the process? I think mapping out that process and making sure that goes flawlessly.
Then, I think the second thing you tackle is your onboarding process. Then you get a lot of feedback. We do an assessment at the end of the client’s first year. We do a 30-minute interview by our Chief Operating Officer, who has never met that client, typically. What was your experience like? Where would you give us feedback? Can we improve the process?
Those are the two pain points, because as Mark Curley wrote in a report, your most expensive part of acquiring a client is that first year. After that they become a much more profitable venture. Getting that right and making that profitable as you can is only possible through process.
The other is the inquiry all the way to signing the client advisory agreement and becoming a client. Those two seem to me the most important pieces of what we do.
Julie:
You talked about culture. We started off looking at your team approach. Could you first of all, describe your culture. You said it’s very unique, and it’s probably not all CRM. I’m going to guess there’s more to it than that.
Cheryl:
I hope that’s- When I die I hope that does not go anywhere on my obituary.
Julie:
Yeah, yeah.
Steve:
That’ll be on your grave stone.
Cheryl:
It’s not going in my Forever Letter.
Julie:
It’s really not. It’s really not. I’d also love to know a bit about how you develop talent at the firm.
Cheryl:
I do think one of the biggest challenges facing our profession is talent recruiting, growing, retaining talent. That’s not ever going to go away as a challenge, so we put a lot of energy and thought into that. Any firm that wants to grow, for us, we decided to grow, because we were attracting great young minds and people that we enjoyed spending time in the day with. Therefore, how do we retain them? Only if we’re growing will they stay.
Once you start to grow quickly, or grow at any rate, that puts stresses on the system, because they’re not the right skill level. They’re not prepared in any way, shape, or form for certain kinds of situations. Mentoring, development, putting resources in place becomes imperative. We think about that. We work on that all the time.
The newer trend, certainly for us, is we put just as much energy into developing our operational team as we do our more traditional professional team. They’re both professionals. We just have acquired different types of mentoring. We’ve been rewarded for that. I’m just blown away, what that team has accomplished.
It was them saying, “I don’t see myself on your leadership pipeline. Where’s our path? What are our resources?” They were there. We just had to think about it differently and more carefully, and coalesce that around a plan for them.
Steve:
You mentioned the leadership pipeline. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Also, can you tell us a little bit about what the path looks like for somebody to become- do you have multiple owners at Abacus?
Cheryl:
We do. There are four of us that are shareholders now, and we’ve invited three new will be joining us in December. That’ll be interesting. The firm run by a decider to a firm that’s truly group governance. It’s a very different approach. Many organizations succeed with that and we’re transitioning to that.
The way we think about it is, historically we thought of three stages of development. We’ve added a fourth, which I am excited about. The first stage is just coming onboard and doing basic work habits. My daughter just started working for a firm in San Francisco, and I said to her, “Just be on time every day. Don’t leave at two minutes till. Learn to say thank you. Learn to ask questions.” Just the basics of learning how to work.
We think about the basics in five areas. Business acumen, which could be networking, using the processes, your technical skills. Your communication skills. That’s writing, listening, verbal communication, presentation skills. The fourth theory that we think about is things around working with your colleagues. That might be learning to be delegated to, as you move up the ladder, delegating to others. The fifth is really our culture. Those are the five areas that we think of in development.
Level one is just managing yourself. Level two, where we find the most difficulty, is the bend in the pipeline to managing. Getting work done through other people. So you’re a great solo worker. All of a sudden, you’ve got two or three people who are giving you work before you can do your work. You’re managing them, or you’re mentoring them, or you’re supervising them. It’s a completely different skill set, and we now throw more resources helping you take that bend in the pipeline.
The third is thinking not about getting work done through others, but getting work done through the organization. Strategic thinking. On the client side it might be working with C-Suite clients, CEOs, CFOs who tend to be a little tougher. Business development. You’re expected to not only develop relationships, but bring on clients.
We’ve added a fourth level I can’t tell you much about, because we haven’t mapped it out totally, but transforming the organization. Because the world is changing, we’re going to be a different place in 10 years. So how do you transform an organization, which is different than managing yourself, managing others, leading a firm. Transforming it is a whole different set of skillsets.
No one is ever good at everything. When we first developed the pipeline, I was like, I am really good at level one, basic work habits, and I’m pretty good at leadership, but I really suck at management. I had to go out and do a lot of resource building and skill building. I’d still give myself a solid B minus and sometimes a C minus, but I’m working on it.
Steve:
Go ahead, Julie.
Julie:
I was just going to say, because I know we’re pushing toward our time, but one of the things I wanted to make sure we asked you about is the referrals you get from centers of influence. You know we love to talk about referrals on this podcast. Could you tell me a little bit about how you go about that, and what you think has driven your success there?
Cheryl:
Centers of influence can mean all kinds of things. We traditionally think of attorneys, especially estate attorneys. We think of business transaction attorneys, CPAs. We’ve broadened that. We think of foresters and certain kinds of commercial real estate agents to also be our centers of influence. Broadening that definition is powerful. I think it’s just a matter of two things.
One, if you think about going into the grocery store, you want to be where the Raisin Bran is, not where the Grape Nuts are, in terms of people’s mindset. You always want to be dominant shelf space. How do you do that? We send out a newsletter that we can tell who opens it and we can tell what they read, and we customize to that. I’m not a big lunch person, but I will say, “Come have coffee with me. I’m going to go walk down the street.” Something simple, because I know they’re busy, so when I’m near them I’ll get on their calendar for a little bit of time.
I also think referring out to them has made a difference when we refer the perfect person. We’ll have them to a networking luncheon in the office to show off our interesting space, but also to find out what they love to do best. It’s not just about telling them what we do well, but learning what they do, and then trying to figure out a way to make that happen, where it’s appropriate for our clients. I think there’s a lot of nuances to this.
Steve:
Yeah, let’s get real nitty gritty about that. You call up an estate attorney and say, “Hey, let’s go have coffee.” You sit down in front of that attorney. What do you say in the conversation?
Cheryl:
I almost always bring something with me. I often times know them. I love giving weird gifts. It might be something as simple as the Vietnam DVDs, by Ken Burns, or The Little Book of Bunny Suicides, if I know they have a weird sense of humor. I’ve made peach pies the night before, and I’ll bring them a couple slices to take home to their family. I try to bring something that says to them, I know who you are. There’s a wonderful company in Charleston that makes these beautiful sun teas, where you just put the little tea in a plastic jug, put it out on your porch and you got tea in two hours. Something that says I thought about you.
Then, keep to your promises of 15 or 20 minutes. How are you doing? What’s going on in the business? I really want to hear what’s going on in the business, because that’s a data point for economic trends. Talk 80/20, 80 percent about them, 20 percent about you. That’s the power.
Then, I realized I always do this. I heard Susanne Peterson talk at the NAPFA conference. She’s a leadership development expert. She said, “Always make a pinky promise and follow up on it.” I’ll say, “I’ve got the best book I want you to read. I’m going to go home and send you the link from Amazon.” Or, “You know what, I just saw a white paper on that technical topic we’re both struggling on. Let me send you the link.” Always make a pinky promise, and then follow up and do it, because if people see you making a promise, and doing what you say you’re going to do, that makes all the different in the world. Then they know that you will follow through with someone they send to you. It’s a must-have to be referable.
What did Dan Sullivan say? Say please and thank you. Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. Show up on time. If you can do those three things, you’re referable.
Those opportunities, when you make a little tiny reservation with someone, is a way to show off those three skills.
Steve:
We’ve talked about focusing on a specific market. We’ve talked about processes and procedures, and organizing your technology around that. We’ve talked about developing the team and how you pursued that. When you put all of those together, what do you think has been the effect on your ability to attract clients and referrals?
Cheryl:
When we ask our clients, they would tell us something completely unrelated. They would say authenticity and listening skills. You’re always yourselves and we feel heard. All the rest of it is sort of necessity, but those are the two things that I think have allowed us to grow in a pretty small market, relatively speaking.
We’re not a large, wealthy community, but we’ve been able to be very successful. And I think it’s because we’re just ourselves at all times. We’re comfortable with that. Clients feel heard and listened to.
Steve:
Okay. That’s probably-
Cheryl:
Did I take too much of a left turn there?
Steve:
No. When we’re trying to help the listeners understand how they can apply it-
Cheryl:
We’re coaching.
Steve:
We can’t just say, “Okay, so here’s what you can take from Cheryl Holland. Go be more authentic.” I think what that authentic is and all the things that go into that authentic experience is really what’s got people talking.
Cheryl:
Maybe the better way to say it is- Do you want to ask me the question again?
Steve:
The impression that I get is all of this work that you’ve done about customizing your offer, and systematizing the experience, and having a team approach where you’ve developed all the people who are coming in contact. The operations team. That all of that has a significant influence on your ability to attract referrals. My question was how does that come out in the conversations that you have, or what do you hear back from clients? If what you hear is, “You guys are really authentic and we feel heard.” I’m just wondering about your thoughts about how all of this work that you’ve done in those different areas leads people to refer you differently, or refer you differently than the clients of other advisors.
Cheryl:
I think people are looking for a trusted advisor. Once they have a sample in our first year process, which covers, in six meetings, all the areas every financial planner touches on, they have deep confidence in our technical skills. That is unquestionable. They have deep confidence in our ability to manage an error, which we typically make in the first year. So they trust us, but what they say to their friends is, “I really want you to call my financial advisor. We really like Cheryl and Charles” or “We really like Susan and John. They’re the real deal. And you’re going to find out that they’re going to listen not just to you, but your wife.”
Cheryl:
A lot of men still come because they’re worried about if something happens to them, their wife is not as interested in the financial side. All those other things we do bring us trusted advisor status very quickly, so that our cycle of growth is higher because of that, but what they’re saying is these are the things that make them special. Because their expectations were high when they came in the door.
Steve:
Okay. Sure.
Cheryl:
We have to earn our reputation every day. The only way to earn our reputation every day is all these things we talked about. Process and training. Our reputation is what gets people in the door.
Steve:
Yeah. Interesting. There’s so much more that I’d love to ask you, but we have to wrap it up. Unfortunately we can’t go as long as we would like to sometimes. Maybe we can have you back some time.
Cheryl:
I went too long. I’m now looking. I’ve blathered on. Alright.
Steve:
No, it’s not you. It’s a lot to say.
Cheryl:
I even wrote little short answers to try to keep it short. I’m working on that, too.
Steve:
No, it was great. Cheryl, it was great to have you on today and thank you so much for joining us. There’s so much that advisors can learn from what you’ve done. Thank you so much for joining us on Becoming Referable.
Cheryl:
Thank you all, again. It’s delight to be with both of you and I look forward to starting to listen to the podcast. It’s now on my shortlist.
Steve:
Okay, thanks.
Cheryl:
Alright, bye y’all.
Julie:
Thanks, Cheryl.
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.