Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Lisa Kirchenbauer
Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild. On this week’s show, Steve and I are speaking with Lisa Kirchenbauer. Lisa is the president of Omega Wealth Management, and if you’ve attended any industry conferences in the last few years, you’ve probably heard her speak. She’s very much in demand.
There are so many things that we could have talked to Lisa about. We wanted to focus on the things that set Omega apart. We’re excited to talk to her about some of the very specific decisions that she made about her business. We dig in on a few key areas starting with their focus on life planning and transition support, how that works, how it influences who’s right for their business, and the impact that that approach has had on their level of engagement and growth.
We get very specific on how Omega charges on the three ways that they package their offer to make it relevant for clients with different needs and on the processes they’ve put in place to make all of that work. We also talk to Lisa of the five essential skills exceptional advisor. She’s written and spoken on this topic extensively and it provides something, a roadmap to assess where you are today and if or what you might need to improve. Because let’s face it, we all need to improve on something.
With that, let’s turn to the conversation with Lisa. Lisa, welcome to Becoming Referable. So happy to have you here today.
Steve Wershing:
Welcome Lisa.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Oh, hi you guys. I’m so happy to spend some time with both of you. Looking forward to our dialogue today.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have certainly followed a lot of what you’ve done. Ran into you at a conference recently, and we were catching up and thought, “We’ve got to get you on the podcast.” It’s like, “Stop talking to me. I want you to talk to everybody else.” But hey look, before we dive in, there’s a bunch of things that I know I’d love to cover today. Can you just give us a little introduction to Omega Wealth Management and the work that you do?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve actually been in the financial services industry and I’m clear about industry since 1985, had my own firm since 1999, so we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary this year.
Julie Littlechild:
Congratulations.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
I’ve been fully independent fee only since 2004. That’s normally important, and that’ll be important in some of our conversation about life planning and how that came in. I have 16 members and a summer intern right now. Three of us are advisors working directly with clients. We have about 100 clients. We just did a small acquisition of a group in New York. The work we do, I think, focuses on two areas, which is financial life planning and financial transition management. I know we’re going to talk more about that. We work with a lot of entrepreneurs and people in significant transition like inheritance, stock options, retirement, divorce on the back end, and the sale of a business. So that’s really where our focus is.
Julie Littlechild:
Well, let’s talk a bit about that. So life planning and transition, you mentioned clearly two big themes in your business, and they’re big concepts. I often wonder if we hear about these things a lot, but I don’t know if we always dig into them enough. I think it would be really interesting. Can you maybe talk to us first about maybe what life planning is by your definition, why you focus there, and maybe even just how that compares to financial planning.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Yeah, I’d love to. I think this comes up as a question both for advisors and planners and for clients. In fact, I’ve been in a dialogue with a prospective client over the last couple of weeks about this exact issue. Let me just say that many of us out there who’ve been trained as CFPs do what I would call comprehensive financial planning. That’s cashflow planning, tax planning, investments, insurance, retirement planning, education funding, estate insurance, that whole thing, that’s comprehensive. Now I can tell you some people call that holistic planning because to them it’s more than investment management, looking at your whole picture. But to us, that’s just comprehensive planning. That’s what I was trained to do as a CFP many moons ago. I think there’s a growing body of advisors and planners who are doing that work.
Now you see lots of commercials on TV and they talk about a holistic approach. To me, that’s where we get into really life planning. That’s the work I’ve been trained to do since about 2004. We can talk more about that training in a minute. But to me, we utilize a lot of both the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, George Kinder tools and questions, as well as Susan Bradley’s Sudden Money Institute, Financial Transitions Institute tools and process.
All of that work dives a lot deeper in dialogue and exercises and conversation with clients about what are their deepest values, what is truly most important to them? If they could live the life they really want to live, what would that look like? Often that when a client gets into that discussion with us, it’s much different than what they walked in thinking they were supposed to do, should do, should be planning for.
Often it’s emotional. Often if they’re sharing things that they’ve been carrying around for many, many years, but haven’t been able to achieve. Maybe it’s a complete career change into a very different direction. Or maybe it’s living very differently in their lives, really integrated with their values. Then the ideas, financial life planning is where we integrate two things. So I always like to say what we do is financial life planning.
I think Mitch Anthony talks about that. Because it is about money too. We’re not just life coaches. We really are integrating the personal and the financial sides of our client’s lives. For our business owners, we’re integrating the personal and the business sides of their lives together. So it’s comprehensive. It’s all the things you know about as far as traditional financial planning, but it adds this depth and intimacy to the work that we do.
Julie Littlechild:
It’s interesting. You mentioned that it goes deeper, and I think it clearly would. If I come and meet with you, do I sit down thinking, “Okay, we’re going to, I’ve got my statements here, and I’m ready to talk about my money.” Then find myself going down a different path, a different way of questioning that’s deeper. How do you do that? How do you make that transition to the deeper conversation? What’s the reaction and impact for the prospective clients in particular that you’re talking to?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
That’s a great question. We really try to be careful that we’re not blindsiding people. Honestly only the perspective clients who have been really clued out, not listening, not reading anything we send them, didn’t go to the website.
Julie Littlechild:
That never happens.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Never happens. They get a little blindsided. But everybody else, we actually take a lot of care to prepare them for what they’re walking into. It starts when we get a lead. Actually this is something we’ll want to talk about. Most of our new clients come completely blind off the Internet so we need to talk about that a little bit. Why is that happening? They come, like we get an email, we get a phone call, they want to talk to a planner. First thing we ask them is, “Have you been on our website?”
If you go to our website, I think for anybody who goes there, it’s going to be pretty obvious what we’re doing is different. We look a little different. Our whole website has a different look and feel. It just feels a little more touchy feely. It clearly lays out what our two different niches are. That’s the first place.
Then we talk with them on the phone to screen to see if, “Hey is this really going to be a good fit? Do they understand the work we do? Our business model’s different. Are they willing to engage?” Even then they may still not get it. So we send a package of information if they’re going to come in and meet with us that talks a little more about our process, actually has the George Kinder three questions in the back.
Most of the prospective clients actually do at least take a peek. Some actually go ahead and fill it out, which is awesome. But many of them just look at it. We know that if they keep the appointment, they have a sense of what they’re walking into. They really don’t know where this is going to go and that they’re going to end up with a vision statement and what direction they’re going to be. But they at least know that we’re not just going to be talking about the money.
In fact, we ask for feedback every year from our clients. One of the things they all say is we really appreciate that it’s not just about the money. It’s about us as people personally, what’s important to us. If they get that far, we know that they like that and it’s successful. The key is that we prepare them before they come to us so that really they aren’t blindsided.
Steve Wershing:
Lisa, you were just saying that you send them information about the two sides of your business. Just clarify for me what those two sides are.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
I actually on our website, Steve, if you go to our website, OmegaWealthManagement.Com, what you’re going to see is that we have, “Are you an entrepreneur, or are you someone in transition?”
Steve Wershing:
Oh, I see.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Yeah. It’s pretty obvious these are our specialties. Now do we end up with people who B are contemplating a future transition like retirement but still want to work with a more holistic comprehensive planner like us and want to come on board now? Yeah, sure. We tend to draw specifically people in significant transition.
Steve Wershing:
You’ve been in the business for a long time. Then in 2004 you started working on the life planning training. Making that move from the traditional kind of planning over into the life planning, what has been the impact on your business after making that transition yourself?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Well, I think it’s a couple of things, Steve, both practical and then I’ll say the profound side. On the practical side that because we develop this quite intimate relationship with our clients, and it’s not like we’re friends with our clients. That’s really important. I know there’s a lot of advisors who, “I play golf with and I go out to dinner with my clients.” It’s so intimate that honestly we don’t necessarily have the same sort of social interaction with our clients. But they’re very sticky because they know… I mean add we’re really living into that fiduciary standard that we’re putting their interests first, that we are co-creating the life they want to have. There’s so they stay. They come to the conclusion that nobody else is going to understand them as as well as us even if they’ve got assets held elsewhere.
Often the decision is, “Hey, we need to move the rest of our assets to Omega because they really get the whole picture, whereas our other advisor doesn’t.” That’s the practical piece. The profound piece is being able to see people totally really live into their fullest lives. It’s just more interesting work.
Truth be told, as you guys probably know, in the Kolbe world of assessments, I’m what’s called a quick start. I get bored when everything’s the same all the time. What’s fun about this work is that when you get to the personal part of people, and pivoting with changes and evolutions that are happening in their lives. Then figuring out how do we make the money work. It’s much more interesting work as a result than it would be if all we did was review the portfolio, and do our annual review, and everything looks fine, and good we’ll see you in a year. It’s rewarding work. We’re really making a difference.
Practically, I think the client relationships are really strong. We’re actually having a 20th anniversary client celebration this weekend. We’re going to have I think about 77 folks there, and they’re so excited. One of our clients actually volunteered, a long-time client, she wants to speak at… Just completely volunteered that she wanted to speak at the event. So that says a lot. Isn’t that sweet? We were just really touched by that.
Steve Wershing:
Oh, that’s cool. That’s very cool. Yeah, that’s neat. Not that everybody is a Kolbe quick start, but you’ve talked about like what Julie talks about, about you getting more engaged in it because it’s more interesting work. You’ve talked also about because people understand that you get them so well that it helps you attract assets. Has it also made it different in terms of how you attract clients?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Yeah, I mean because we live with, and I didn’t say this in the introduction, I’m in the Washington, D.C. area, Steve. There are, as many people may know, there are a lot of financial advisors, financial planners, investment advisors, financial advisors. There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of noise. It’s hard to distinguish yourself.
One of the things that we did pretty early on is that we were looking for how could we have a bit of a niche so that we could stand out? I think it has helped us. Now that means that there’s going to be a whole group of clients who just want their portfolio managed, or they just want to plan one and done and they’re out of here. That’s fine. They’re not our best client. We’re fine with that and that’s not our best work.
So yes, I do think it helps us reach some unique clients. I’ll give you a couple of examples. We’ve certainly over the years attracted a number of business owners where the vast majority of their assets is tied up in the business. Maybe they’ve got a $300,000 or $200,000 401K. To most advisors, they don’t look like a very attractive client. But maybe they have a $10 million business. That’s a great client for us. We can talk a little bit about the business model that supports that. But it has helped us attract a group of clients that really could use help, complicated situation, integrating the personal and the business. They don’t really have anywhere else to go.
Another example would be we’ve recently had two young inheritors come to us, both in their 20s, women, young women, totally blind off the Internet. They did searches like Sudden Money and got to us or Sudden Wealth. One of them’s going to inherit before taxes about three million. The other one’s already inherited, maybe got 1.2. The work we can do with them as amazing. Yes they have assets that would be attractive to most advisors, but there’s some really unique issues around inheritance and transition given how they received the money’s.
Julie Littlechild:
Well, let me ask you about that, because you mentioned this earlier about people finding you blind on the Internet was just a such a different way. Can you talk to us about why that’s happening?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
I think there’s a couple of reasons that it’s happened. One is, like a lot of people, if you’re in a big urban area, we have a couple of magazines that do top financial advisor lists where they’re either peer voted on. Most of them are peer peer voted on. About five years ago, we started to make those lists along with some of the people that we really respect. Then what I learned from one of my colleagues, a very smart man. He said, “What you need to do is like one of the magazines, you can go online like after the magazine has published, you can go online and search for an advisor if you’re somebody out in the public. If you pay $250 a month, your profile, the advisor’s profile actually goes to the top of the list.” As a K, because it’s actually done by individual advisors, I’d never be found unless they were looking for somebody in my city or whatever.
That single thing that we did, we ask every person who comes to us, how they found us. Almost always that’s the starting point. Then what they do is, and this is important for all of your listeners to hear if they go to my website. You need to know they’re going to your website before they ever call or email you. Then they go there, and either like the ones that we hear from, of course, they resonated with what they saw for whatever reason. I’m a woman, they saw that we deal with people with sudden wealth. They are in transition, they’re a business owner, they’re whatever, and then they contact us at the info at Omega Wealth Management. I mean it’s crazy.
Then we screen them. To be clear, we have ended up with a few what we would call validators. That’s not our best client. Validators are folks who their spouse has said, “Hey, if you’re going to retire, you got to talk to a planner because I’m not sure about this.” But they’re a one and done kind of client. That’s not a great fit. We have to screen a little harder because not everybody is coming. We do get referrals and we’re getting more, and we’ve been working proactively on that. But we’ve got to screen a little bit harder maybe than with a referral because they may just be a validator.
Julie Littlechild:
Right. So there’s a couple of things you mentioned. First of all, you’ve clearly got this process, a very in depth process. Not everybody’s a good fit. Does that mean that you say, “Sorry, we’re not right for you,” if someone doesn’t want to go through this deeper process?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Oh, absolutely. If they’re not willing to engage and at least go along for the ride. Sometimes one spouse is more engaged than the other. But if they’re not willing to go through our standard process, which we certainly adapt as circumstances arise, then yeah, they’re not going to be a good fit. Because what’s going to happen, Julie, on the back end is they’re not going to see the value. We do charge a retainer fee with a lower assets under management fee, and so it’s really transparent. It’s not hidden. They’ve got to see the value or we’re going to be hearing from them saying, “I’m not sure I want to keep spending the money.”
Steve Wershing:
I was just going to say, Julie, I’m sure you’re going the same place. Can we talk a little bit about that, Lisa? Because I know on your site there are a few different kinds of services, a few different levels. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you charge, what the combination of things is?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Yeah. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. So generally, we charge an annual, that’s not the right word, but annual retainer fee, annual planning fee that is paid in quarterly payments. Then if the client is bringing assets to us… They are not obligated to. By the way, that fee is based on investible net worth, so not overall net worth, investible net worth with a little bit of complexity addition as needed. Then a smaller assets under management fee, 35 basis points for most clients unless they’re really super ultra high net worth and then we’re going to negotiate that down. And on purpose, we want to compete against the Fidelitys and the Schwabs on the investment management piece but bring a lot more to the value there.
Whether they’re a transition client or whether they are a just a traditional financial life planning client, we often have the same fee model. But I will say that we’ve had a couple situations like where we just got a new prospective client. Business owner, going to be selling her business next year for 70 to 120 million. Not even sure how do we put a fee on this. We ended up saying we’re going to start at 25,000 but I reserve the right to come back if it’s a lot more complex than I think, and we will raise the fee. Then we will renegotiate it on the backside. We’ve got some flexibility there. What’s the difference really is not so much the fee, Steve, it’s the process behind what they’re going to get. A transition client follows a different process than one of our what we would call life wealth integrator, our traditional financial life planning approach clients would get.
Steve Wershing:
I’d just like to drill down into this a little bit and get a little more specific. You were talking about investible net worth and how do you define investible net worth?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
That’s where it gets tricky with business owners. Easier with stock options because when we’ve got corporate stock, we’re going to count that into the info. I mean basically anything that is an investment or cash, whereas we’re not including the house or other real estate. We’re generally not including the value of the business. But like with this new business owner who’s coming on board, I had to put some sort of premium because her investment assets are under $1 million. So that would have been a $7,500 fee. And that’s just not, I mean I already can see the complexity and the demands that are going to be required. So we quoted a completely different fee for her because we know that there’s going to be a lot more work.
Steve Wershing:
Then is that common for your entrepreneurial edge offering or is that calculated a different way?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Well that is calculated a little differently because what’s in entrepreneurial edge for a business owners is that we’re going to take them through the traditional financial life planning process for them personally and their spouse or whatever. Then we’re also going to come in and we’re going to do some high level work around what kind of business do they have, is it a lifestyle business, is it an asset business that they want to sell? We have some different sort of almost life planning questions we do for business owners about their business. We would do a Kolbe consult with their management team. Then we offer one hour of coaching each month to the entrepreneur to help reinforce and support the integration. That is really a different offering and it’s a higher fee level.
Julie Littlechild:
Really valuable. Wow, that’s something. Say hey, let’s talk a bit more about the transition. We’ve had Susan on the podcast, but you are a Certified Financial Transitionist. Maybe just a brief intro to what that means. Because I think one of the really powerful things is so many advisors talk about transition, use that word, but you have the certification behind it. What prompted you to get that and what does that mean for you and your clients?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
I actually have been affiliated and part of the Sudden Money Institute community, Susan’s community, since 2004. That was actually the first life planning training I did. Then I did George Kinder’s training the next year and became a Registered Life Planner. Then now as Susan’s work has evolved and she’s created this designation and a whole lot of process and tools and certified training, I’ve participated in that and got that designation.
I think that yes, there’s lots of people who work with clients in transition money in motion. What you have to understand, and again this may be a little repetitive, is that in any transition there is the personal and the technical side of the transition. There’s many advisors out there who are prepared to deal with the technical side but have no clue how to deal with, let’s call it the emotional side, the personal side of transition. Understanding the stages of transition is really important. Understanding what happens in those stages, the emotional sort of things that bubble up for people both positive and negative. Then understanding that you have your process has to be completely different working with somebody who is in a major life transition.
Just as an example, we just recently have lost a couple of clients and we’re dealing with their significant others. By the way, these are not like old, old clients. These are some interesting stories. The pace changes. How much they can take in, their cognitive capabilities may have temporarily changed, diminished a bit. You can’t tackle as many topics as you might’ve been able to tackle last year in the review with them. There’s a lot of skills and sensitivities and changes and process that you have to be able to integrate, which is challenging by the way. Clients and transition, it’s not a straight through process because sometimes they’re really stuck and you just have to hang out and wait for them to be unstuck before you can continue moving forward.
That’s what’s great about our model, our business model, is that we get paid while we wait for the clients. Sometimes depending on your business model, you can’t get paid until you get the client to take action. But when they’re in transition, they can be changing quite a bit. Not sure, not ready to take action. We’ve got the process, we’ve got the tools, we’ve got the sensibilities and the skills to meet clients where they are, in really significant kinds of transitions.
Steve Wershing:
Now Lisa, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that transition because Julia and I are all about the niche. You were talking about all the different kinds of transitions that you help people through. We talked about losing a spouse, getting an inheritance, going through a divorce, selling a business. Help me understand, to me they sound like radically different kinds of transitions. It would seem to suggest that they require sort of different kinds of processes. How do you reconcile all that and have a model around such different situations?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question, Steve. For some people, depending on the kind of transition, retirement or selling a business definitely has emotions with it. But can be a little bit more straight forward, which allows us to lean more on our traditional financial life planning process. Losing a spouse, going through divorce, a medical settlement, we’ve had a client who received a medical settlement. There’s some real emotional issues about that, a legal settlement because of a medical issue.
There are some differences, but the skills are quite similar, and we can lean on our two systems and processes. Part of what Susan Bradley would tell you is that you’ve got this quiver that you’re carrying around on your back and you’ve got all these different arrows that you could pull out depending on where the client is. The real skill in transition planning is knowing where is the client, what do they need now, and which is the right thing to do?
If you’ve got the baseline skills and a variety of tools, you can deal with each of these different groups because you understand at the deepest level what the impact of transition is. Then it’s just a matter of, okay, well this is business. So these are some of the things we need to bring in. Or, this is divorce. Again, not our favorite, we’d rather be on the back end of that one. It’s actually not as hard as it seems, but you have to have that baseline set of skills and tools and a couple of processes that you can lean on to navigate it.
Julie Littlechild:
It’s fascinating to me how the core skills that you need are so unique in these situations. I know that’s a lot of the training. It seems connected to what you’ve written about. You wrote the book on it and you call it the Five Essential Skills Of An Exceptional Financial Advisor, authenticity, deep listening, empathy, non-judgment, curiosity. Are those some of those skills that you’re talking about? Maybe you can take us through those essential skills and what they mean.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
In a client, I’m working with a transition client, the first thing obviously is that… Let me just say that these five skills are going to help you build deep trust. I think build a better connection, and are going to help ultimately with better implementation of whatever the plan. If you’re working with somebody in transition, they’re fragile, they need somebody they can trust. As human beings, we’re going to trust somebody more if we think they’re showing up authentically.
If they’re showing up and there seems to be an affect or an air about them, or there’s a disconnect that most of us as human beings can feel, maybe not identify what it is. That’s really the first step is that you need to show up authentically. With a client in transition, that might mean sometimes there’s a little bit of emotion there. There’s a lot of sensitivity that you’re meeting them where they are and you are authentically there as a person, a human being.
The deep listening is absolutely critical not only in the traditional financial life planning work we do, but certainly with anybody in transition. They need to be heard. Our widower client was just in last week and he needed to just talk to us, really walk us through what he was going through and how the process, the experience had been. Even if we hear him say things again, multiple times, they just need to talk. It all depends on the transition that they’re going through, how much of that, that deep listening they need from us. But everybody really needs that.
Then the empathy, just really trying to connect with what must it be like. The client that we just heard about this past weekend honestly committed suicide and I’m working with her ex. Yeah, it’s her estranged spouse at this point. There’s just a lot of emotion and just being able to sit and empathize with the complexity of the situation is absolutely critical and I know is really appreciated.
Then non-judgment and curiosity, I think are the hardest ones for most financial advisors because we are taught to be that we’re the experts. There’s a bit of a, we’re right and you’re wrong. You’re coming to us because we are going to tell you how it should be. Being able to let go of that, because most of us don’t want to be judged. If we’re feeling judged, we’re more likely to not share the information that really our advisor needs to hear.
It’s so critical in that trust building that they feel they can say anything, we’re going to hear them, we’re not going to make a judgment about they should have done this or they should have done that. Because often when you’re in a big transition, especially you’ve lost a spouse or maybe divorce, you sometimes don’t make what would seemingly be the optimal decision that a financial planner would recommend you make. I’ll just say it like that. We are always saying, hey non-judgment, we’re not judging you here. We want to just figure out what’s going to work for you.
Then finally, curiosity. We’re all curious. Planners want to know lots of things. We like to… Steve, you’ll remember this from the old days of selling… probe, you need to probe your prospect. Well who wants to be probed? Nobody wants to be probed. I don’t want to be probed at the dentist.
Steve Wershing:
I don’t want to be a proctologist.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
Oh yeah, that’s even worse. How do we find out what we need to find out without setting up judgment? Part of the training I’ve done with other advisors and I do with my own team is how do we ask why without asking why? We use things like, tell me more about, I’m curious about, I’m wondering about it. We actually use it with each other. We use it with clients. Being able to be curious without judgment is critical.
I think when we’re working with people in transition where there is often a little bit more emotion, a little more sensitivity, all these skills are especially important. Likewise when we’re getting into these deep life planning questions, bringing all of these skills to bear is really the absolute most important thing. The questions don’t matter as much as the listening. The tools don’t matter as much as really being authentically there without judgment and really being able to open up the conversation.
Steve Wershing:
So Lisa, because this is a podcast about being referable, we wanted to ask you this, but also you had brought up before that you’re working on developing more referrals. Can you tell us a little bit about how these business models and how you do this affects the referrals that you get and what kinds of things you’re working on to get more?
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
I think one of the things that I’ve realized is we’ve been getting some referrals but not as many as we wanted from clients. As I think we all know, somebody who is coming as a warm lead or introduction is probably going to be more sticky, and it’s going to be a little easier to explain who we are, at least generally. Our clients sometimes struggle trying to explain what we do exactly but they’re at least passionate about it, so that helps.
What we’re trying to do is develop a little more structured process for checking in with clients to find out would be interested in referring. It’s opened up some beautiful conversations. We’ve already gotten several, one new client and another lead. We’ve got somebody, we’re working on a couple of people we’re working on bringing in in the next month or so just to talk with them.
So having a more structured process. It’s a little uncomfortable, but I’m getting with the program, and it’s beautiful, the clients. Here’s what we’re finding, Steve and Julie, is that in fact our clients are referring us to people, but the clients are not making it into us. We’re really trying to set up, “Hey, it would be better if you could make an email introduction because we know that they don’t know us as well as you. This is all different and new for them. So if you could help make an introduction, then we can go from there.” One of my clients beautifully did that a couple of days ago. Now I’m in dialogue to set up a call and a meeting.
We’re trying to retrain, first of all, open up the possibility, figure out which clients are the ones who are going to refer other people and which ones aren’t, so we won’t spend time asking them about referrals. Then helping to train them around how to do it more effectively so that we have a chance of seeing those perspective clients reach out to us.
Steve Wershing:
What you just mentioned, that’s something that Julie has found in her research. What is it, Julie, that something that the average advisor is being referred about seven times more than they think?
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, I would say so, yeah. About 36% of clients say they refer.
Steven Wershing:
Versus the 4% that advisors report getting, exactly.
Julie Littlechild:
So it’s not uncommon. But I think yeah, what you’re touching on is how to transition that to an introduction starts… Because once they’re with you, once presumably you’re talking to them, then there’s the likelihood of working together just increases so much. That’s terrific. Well, and look, I mean that’s probably a great place to wrap up since we’ve tied it back to referrals quite nicely there, I thought. Good on that.
Steve Wershing:
We’re getting good at this, Julie, aren’t we?
Julie Littlechild:
Lisa, thank you so much. The work you do is so impressive.
Steve Wershing:
Thank you. Lisa.
Julie Littlechild:
It was great to have you on today. Appreciate it.
Lisa Kirchenbauer:
I appreciate the opportunity to talk with the two of you and appreciate the work you’re doing for the whole profession.
Steve Wershing:
Hey folks, Steve, again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. So until next time, so long.