Participants:

Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Michael Futterman

Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable. The podcast helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show Steve and I are speaking with Michael Futterman. Michael is the head of the Knowledge Lab’s Professional Development at Janus Henderson Investors, where he works with the Professional Development Team both on research and curriculum development for their professional development programs.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Michael and his team on some research projects and I really wanted to have him on the show because he brings such a unique set of experiences to the work that he does with advisors. We talk all about a few key concepts and tactics that I think are critical for any successful financial advisor. We start with the idea that you really need to have a compelling catalyst, a meaningful why that helps clients and prospects understand who you are, what you do, and why you do it. But we also go much deeper on how to communicate that compelling catalyst, and Michael shares some of the work that they’ve done with the great storytellers in Hollywood to help you tell your story.

He gives some great examples of what a powerful story sounds like and the impact that will have on those who hear it. We get into a lively conversation on what it means to wow a client in a hyper-competitive industry. With that, let’s turn to the conversation with Michael.

Michael, welcome to Becoming Referable. So glad to have you here.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. Thank you.

Julie Littlechild:
I was excited to talk to you, Michael, because you and I have had the opportunity to be on a couple of panels together. I just loved what you had to say, so just jumped at the chance to see if you would join us and give us a little more detail because it’s really interesting work that you do. But before we even jump into the specifics of any of that, can you just start by sharing a little bit of information on your background and the role that you play at Janus Henderson?

Michael Futterman:
Yeah, absolutely. I come from a weird little background.

Julie Littlechild:
I seem to recall that.

Steve Wershing:
We specialize in that, exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
You’ll fit right in. Thank you.

Michael Futterman:
I got involved in this business because I wanted to help change people. My background, I went to school. My undergraduate degree is actually in recreation. My diploma from Ithaca College says that right on it, which is always a-

Julie Littlechild:
So that’s a thing?

Michael Futterman:
It’s a thing. It’s a great conversation starter. And then recreation was really all about, it was about experiential education. That’s really what I focused on. After college, I went and I became an Outward Bound instructor. So I was running field trips for them out in New York City. Then I got involved in a consulting company running their phone system. I knew nothing about phone systems and I learned it on the job. It was a way for me to put a couple extra dollars in my pocket. After doing that for a number of years, I realized that really my passion was working with people and helping them to change and helping organizations to be as effective as possible.

So I went back to school and I got my master’s degree in organizational psychology. I started at my first job after graduate school was working as a learning and development professional for one of the big wire houses in New York City. And then followed that pathway and ended up here at Janus Henderson where I am the head of the Knowledge Lab’s Professional Development Team. It’s a mouthful. But really what we do is we seek to build relationships with our clients that extend well beyond product. What we know is that product is fungible. It can be replicated and duplicated. Performance, while we have great products and they do well, there’s always things that happen in the market that you can’t predict and things that cause performance to go up and down.

It’s this third piece that is around developing deeper, more meaningful relationships. We do that by creating cutting-edge content and then also support that content through coaching and training that is advisor-focused. My team, the group that I work with, brings a really diverse background that spans sales, training, and consulting. That’s really what I do on a day-to-day basis.

Julie Littlechild:
So there’s quite a broad range of topics that you and the team have expertise in delivering. What I thought might be interesting if we could focus in on a few of the things that you talk about to get a little more specific. One of the things that I know you talk about is the need for advisors to have what you call a compelling catalyst, which I thought was a really interesting concept. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is, but why it’s so important?

Michael Futterman:
Absolutely. The bottom line on compelling catalyst is there are 500,000 financial advisors in the United States and why should I work with you versus any of the 499,999 that are out there? A lot of advisors understand what they do and there are plenty that have a way that they do it or how they do it. But the compelling catalyst is really focusing in on what Simon Sinek calls their why. You have a unique why. You have a unique reason why you do what you do and it should be a personal story. And then the other part of compelling catalyst, after you really come to understand what that is, what your why is, is being able to articulate it to your clients in a compelling way.

In this module, we really study the work of Simon Sinek and then we also worked with another gentleman named Robin Cowie, who was a producer of the Blair Witch Project. Why we worked with that individual is because we wanted to understand what are some of the dynamics and the features of creating a compelling story. That’s really the components of compelling catalyst. It’s understanding why you do what you do and being able to communicate it in a meaningful, resonant way with your clients.

Steve Wershing:
Michael, Simon has some great stuff about that. His process is fairly deep. It involves some really probing questions and some work with a partner to help reflect back things. So a lot of advisors, of course, haven’t gone through a process that significant. What do you see advisors doing in the absence of having that kind of compelling catalyst? What are some of the consequences of that being the case?

Michael Futterman:
A lot of advisors if you ask them, “Tell me why I should work with you?” They’ll begin with pretty standard messaging. “Well, I have deep history. I have deep knowledge about markets. I really care about my clients. I’m always available.” Those are features, but really what a lot of advisors fail to realize is that everybody else out there is saying the same thing. I don’t think you’re going to find an advisor out there that’s saying, “Well, I became an advisor because I wanted to make a ton of money.”

Julie Littlechild:
The hours are good.

Michael Futterman:
“I have to tolerate my clients.”

Steve Wershing:
I have very little expertise and don’t call anybody back.

Michael Futterman:
Right. Of course you have expertise. I expect you to have expertise.

Steve Wershing:
Exactly.

Michael Futterman:
That is the basic premise behind what you are doing. I don’t know how to do this. I am coming to you because you do that. But we connect with advisors. We connect with service providers on all levels because they get us. There is something about their story that is meaningful. So the consequences of advisors not necessarily stepping back and thinking about how do they communicate this attribute of who they are is that they end up getting clients accidentally. They end up getting clients that may not believe in the same things that they do. Not that we have to be homogenous in our client base, but it’s much more fun to work with people that you want to work with.

It’s much more fun to work with people that buy into what you’re trying to do rather than fighting you every step of the way. So this compelling catalyst idea is really around connecting with an audience and a client base and prospects that allows you to have more fun. It allows you greater satisfaction because these are people that want to be with you for the right reasons.

Julie Littlechild:
You’re touching on something that is more of an emotional connection. Is that right?

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. There’s a big emotional connection. We make decisions with our gut. Behavioral economics is all about this. We can believe that what we do is based in logic and fact and figures. Certainly for some people, that does play a role. But most of the time we’re making these decisions because it just feels right. Simon Sinek talks about this pretty frequently in his work. But it’s this emotional connection with people. We like to see ourselves in our service providers. We want to know that our service providers are part of our tribe, whether it’s a hotel chain. That’s why all of these … Marriott has how many different brands?

One of the reasons why they have all these brands, aside from collecting them through acquisition, is because they recognize that not everybody wants to stay in a Conrad … Well, Conrad is Hilton. But not everybody wants to stay in a JW Marriott. I prefer to stay in a W. It’s the same category of hotel, but the W speaks to more of my generation and my design ethic and all of those things. They’ve gone to continue to differentiate that design. It’s the same thing with any kind of provider is that you want to connect with them on not just a logical level, but an emotional level.

Steve Wershing:
Well, and can you also address going a little bit more … Some advisor’s response to that would be, “I have a passion for helping clients achieve their goals,” and those kinds of things, which is pleasant to say. But it’s not the kind of thing you’re talking about, I don’t think. How would you encourage advisors to go beyond that and find that deeper why that would really grab people’s emotions?

Michael Futterman:
Well, you’re talking about, I think what you’re talking about is two different things. Number one is it’s really understanding why you got into the business and being able to use that as a motivator for having people work with you, articulating that story. So if you say, “I became an advisor because I want to help people retire with dignity,” I think that’s not a bad tagline. But if you tell people, “I became an advisor because I watched my parents make bad decisions about money and even though they were really educated people they had the opportunity to work with an advisor and they felt, ‘Well, we’re very educated. We should be able to make these decisions on our own.’ They were, in some ways, embarrassed that they didn’t know the answer to the puzzles that are economics and investing. As a result of that, they are not in a place where they’d like to be in their retirement years. I become an advisor-”

Steve Wershing:
I’m sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

Michael Futterman:
Well, this story of being able to tell something that speaks to everybody as parents, my story that I just shared with you, everybody that I’ve met has parents on some level. We had to come from somewhere. Or they had people that guided them and at some point in their lives they saw those people as godlike or deities. They said, “These people are infallible. They can’t make mistakes. They know everything.” And then as you get older you start to realize, no, we’re all human. We all make mistakes and we all have insecurities. We all have those things. Those elements of your story are really important in connecting with your clients because your clients are coming to you because they need help.

If they’re doctors or lawyers or accountants or people that are educated, and not that those are the only ways to be educated. There are people that work with their hands and run businesses, that are extremely educated. But the point being is that people are coming to you because they want help. They want help and some people are going to feel embarrassed by that. Everybody knows what it’s like to be embarrassed. Everybody knows what it’s like to feel like they should know the answer but they don’t. That’s really what I’m talking about there is turning on your understanding of what your clients are coming to you for. Now, that’s one part of the puzzle.

The other part of the puzzle is really getting to know your clients on an intimate level. This is really stretching into our client retention program, which we call the Art of Wow. But it’s about understanding what is important to your client and that may be very different than what’s important to you. But I think it’s answering the other part of your question. When people feel that emotional connection, it’s because you have distributed or displayed to them that you get them. That is well beyond sending them a gift basket at the end of the year. Let me stop there. There’s a lot that we could go into here.

Steve Wershing:
One of the things that you’re saying here that I think is worth distilling out is it sounds like you’re talking not so much about principles. “I want to help people retire with dignity or retire comfortably,” but pulling up the story that’s behind that principle because people will connect with the story better than they’ll connect with the principle. Is that right?

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. I think that that’s well-said, certainly a lot less words than I used.

Julie Littlechild:
Do you find that advisors if … Well, I won’t say advisors, any of us. If you said, “Why do you do this work,” do you find it takes some probing to really peel back the onion and get to the core of that answer?

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. Absolutely. This in particular is a business where we are focused on, “Did we ring the register today? Did I make a sale? Did I do something that moved the needle?” We’re very focused on daily, quarterly, weekly, yearly results. It’s very quantifiable. What we’re asking people to do is step back and really have more of that existential chat with themselves about, “Why am I here? What is my purpose? What do I want to bring? How do I bring the best of myself to what I’m doing rather than just a job?” It’s fine. I don’t suggest that this is for everybody. I’m willing to work with anybody, but certainly the work that I’m talking about doing is not for everybody.

There are plenty of advisors out there that say that, “You’re full of hooey.” I mean they use more colorful language than that, but it’s fine. The point is, is that it takes some real introspection and that can be challenging for people.

Julie Littlechild:
It can be. I’ve witnessed situations where advisors try to sit down with a piece of paper and answer these questions. It ends up coming out quite formulaic. And yet, when you get them in a quiet moment and just say, “Hey, tell me about your experience or how you get it,” then it just flows. I’ve often found that just finding … even having somebody else ask some of those questions which is, I imagine, some of the work that you guys do, really can bring that out.

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. A lot of the coaching work that I do is sitting down with the clients one-on-one, giving them activities to do. Some are more willing to this than others. But having a worksheet is nice and doing it in a workshop is a good place to start. But like I said, this work isn’t for everybody. There are some people that are much more inclined to step back and say, “How can I focus on this in a different way and take the time? Where am I going to see the benefit?” I use this joke a lot in my presentations. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is it only takes one, but it takes a very long time and the light bulb has to want to change.

I mean the process of doing this is iterative. There’s no right answer. That’s the other thing is that this is not like, “I have found the answer.” You find the answer that’s right for you at that moment. I think it’s important to have a moral core, but the way in which you articulate things may change over time. But knowing it is valuable.

Steve Wershing:
Is it fair to say, Michael, that you probably don’t have the right engaging story until it’s really uncomfortable or at least uncomfortable to a certain level? Because as I’m listening to you talk, it occurs to me that one of the reasons that some folks may not want to pursue this is because if it’s going to work it’s going to be uncomfortable and some people aren’t really seeking that. Am I off base there or is there something to it?

Michael Futterman:
That’s an interesting line of thinking here. I’ve never thought about it that way. I do believe that discomfort is powerful motivator. Understanding where your discomfort is coming from can be really, really revealing. So if you ask yourself, “Why did I get involved in this business?” and you start to back out into some of the line of thinking and the line of decision making that led you there, for some people, “Wow, I got into this business because my parents really pressured me. I don’t really like it.” That’s a hard thing to realize. How do you then use that story to articulate that to your clients? You may not want to use that story. You may have to find the silver lining in there.

But knowing it is valuable. I think there is a value in exploring the areas, the darker corners of how we think and what we believe to be true in helping us to develop these stories. I think that people, if you go back to the storytelling that we learned from Robin Cowie, movies work and novels work and stories work because of things like the hero’s journey. They work because it’s not all easy. There’s a struggle involved. We all relate to the struggle. So there’s something here that resonates for me about what do we have to overcome, because people relate to that. I think that that may be what you’re getting at. But again, I hadn’t taken time to think about it this way.

Steve Wershing:
I’m going back to an old girlfriend’s advice that-

… “Steve, you haven’t really gotten anywhere in therapy until you’ve cried,” which I poo-pooed at the time. And of course, she was correct. But going back to the storytelling, I think it’s people want to prevail. People want to follow the journey along with the hero because they … If you’ve set aside a little bit of your income for a long period of time and it doesn’t really cause any pain and you have a nice comfortable retirement, that’s not necessarily an accomplishment. But if you make trade-offs and there’s something that you have to either … If you have to make a compromise or if you have to do something that’s not the easiest thing to do, then it makes getting where you’re trying to get that much more rewarding. I think that’s one of the things that people relate to in heroes.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, I’d love to-

Michael Futterman:
Well, you’re-

Julie Littlechild:
Go ahead.

Michael Futterman:
Well, I think what you’re saying there, and I really emphasize this to everybody listening, remember that money is not an end in and of itself. Money is a means to an end. So as an advisor, if we don’t understand … Money allows you choices. I mean that’s essentially what it is. It’s a tool that allows you choices. If I’m an advisor and I don’t understand what choices are important to you, if I don’t understand what is important to your family, then the money somehow becomes … There’s a disconnect there. That’s what we talk about in the advisors creating these long-lasting, meaningful relationships. If I can’t understand that education is really, really important to you and your family or philanthropy or keeping the family business alive or whatever it is, then how do I help you achieve your goals?

That, I think, is what you’re talking about there. If it’s only about, “Well, we invested the money. You got a 13% return or whatever it is, and you’re where you wanted to be. You wanted this number and here you are.” That’s a very transactional thing. But if I understand you on an emotional, visceral level, it’s about why that number’s important. Well, now I can really be different in the relationship that I have with you.

Julie Littlechild:
Because we talked about storytelling, which and all of this I think relates but I want to make sure that we go back and unpack that a little from a tactical perspective, particularly … and it’s a good way to … You did bring up the Blair Witch Project at the outset. It’s an unusual reference. The work that you did, it was Cowie, right?

Michael Futterman:
It was Cowie, yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
Can you tell us about what that work can mean for advisors, how they can think about that work in relation to their own storytelling?

Michael Futterman:
Well, it’s about understanding what is the journey that you’ve been on. What is the journey that you’re taking your clients on? Who’s the hero of your story? The Blair Witch Project worked. It was a very simple premise, right? We had these people that found this footage and went into the woods to try and figure it out. They go on this terrifying, harrowing journey. That’s the essence of storytelling. Blair Witch is a very specific example in that it’s a horror story and it was really brilliant though at its time for being viral in the way that it marketed itself.

You got to get people interested. I think that that’s one of the pieces of the puzzle here that we’re trying to help advisors instill in their story is how do you create drama and emotion in your story. There’s got to be a situation. there’s got to be an obstacle that needs to be overcome. There’s a hero of the story. Ideally, if the advisor can tell the story where there is somebody other than themselves that’s the hero, then that’s great. So telling a story about, “Well, I became an advisor and why I’m an advisor is because I help people like the Futtermans who struggled and saved for their kids to go to college. Because of the investments that we made, their children were able to get scholarships and then they were able to do these things that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

Whatever that struggle is, I think that’s the takeaway here with the work that we did around screenwriting is understanding the arc of your characters in the story and identifying with the hero through common elements. I told about having parents and feeling embarrassed. Those are things that everybody can relate to. That’s really what we want tactically, advisors to start thinking about is create emotion and drama in your stories that resonates with your clients.

Steve Wershing:
But I also want to just highlight something in there because a lot of advisors when we talk about storytelling and creating that journey, some of them tend to put themselves in the role as hero. That doesn’t work because if it’s going to work then you want your listener to put themselves in the role of the hero. Whoever you’re telling the story about, it can’t be about you because you don’t want them to be you. You want them to be the client.

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So telling stories about how your clients were able to achieve their goals by the things that clients did, not what you did, I mean you can be part of the story but really it’s about choices that their clients made, sacrifices, achievements, whatever. That’s what’s going to resonate with other people because then they will place themselves in the client’s shoes.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Even the example that you use about, “My parents made bad decisions and they were really embarrassed about the mistakes they made,” and those kinds of things. You want to craft that so it’s my passion. It’s my overwhelming mission to make sure that other people don’t do the wrong things because they’re embarrassed. So you’re making the client the hero who’s overcoming the embarrassment with the help of the person who’s motivated that way.

Michael Futterman:
Exactly. Exactly. I became an advisor because I never want my clients to feel embarrassed about asking a question they think they should know the answer to.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
Can you talk about when to share stories as well? Because I think there’s a real art to crafting them and I think we could go on much longer about that. But then there’s just this idea of, okay, so, “Hey, Michael, what do you do?” And you say, “Well, let me tell you a story.” How do you do it comfortably?

Michael Futterman:
I think that’s going to be unique to every advisor. That sounds like a cop-out. But the reality is, is that everybody has their own sales process and sales cycle and prospecting cycle. But if people ask, one of the best answers I ever heard from an advisor was when somebody asked them, “What do you do?” Their answer was, “I make money boring.” It’s like, “Huh?”

Julie Littlechild:
That’ll clear the room.

Michael Futterman:
And then it provokes more questions. So I think that if you can create a story or people talk about their elevator pitch and their 30-second thing. I think that those things are valuable. You should be able to have a story there and have a hook. They talk about music having hooks or advertising having the line like Alka-Seltzer, “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.” There’s something to that, encapsulating the whole message. “I make money boring.” “What do you mean, you make money boring?” It provokes another question. “I make money boring. My clients don’t ever have to think about the money part of what we do. What we talk about is what they’re going to do with the money.”

Julie Littlechild:
Right. Okay. That might lead into stories that you share with prospects or with clients at the right moment, at whatever moment feels right for you.

Michael Futterman:
The client may ask, “Well, how do you do that?” That’s a trap in some ways. “How do you do that?” An advisor may then say, “Well, I have a comprehensive investment process that blah blah blah blah blah blah.” It’s like, great, so does everybody. But how do I do that? Well, I start by really understanding my clients, “Tell me what’s important to you. What are three things that you’re excited about this year? What are three things you’re concerned about this year? What is your relationship to money? Did you come from it? Did you have to scrimp and save it? Do you spend it the minute you get it?” I want to understand who you are and what your relationship is to money. That informs how we’re going to work together.

What I do? I invest money on behalf of my clients. That’s the nuts and bolts of what I do. But why I do it and how I do it? That’s a whole other thing.

Steve Wershing:
We’ve been talking a lot about how to explain things to clients about the story, or how to explain things through story and how to start developing your own story. So I can see how stories would help with persuasion when you’re in front of somebody. But is there a way that stories can help stimulate referrals?

Michael Futterman:
Absolutely. When you get your clients to articulate your story without you asking them to … If a client is asked without you in the room as the advisor, “Why do you work with your advisor?” You want them telling your story. You don’t want them telling … You want them articulating the story that you’ve crafted because that’s going to draw the right type of client to you. The beauty of this business is that you get to choose who you work with. People don’t often approach it that way. They swim around like a big whale and they take in all the plastic and all the garbage that’s in the ocean. They’re not selective about eating the right nutrients.

But you really do have that choice and a lot of advisors have built their business by just taking all comers, a pulse and money. But I think that’s probably not the right way to go about it. This is a business that requires a lot. It’s a business that is a 24-hour a day business in many cases. People expect you to be there. It’s a very intimate business. All of those factors, why would you want to work with people that are hard to work with? Why would you choose that? Your story helps you to define the type of client segment that you want to work with. We call it a unique business traunch.

We want you to be focused on developing a tribe. We want you to have this story that your clients articulate to other people. Part of the way that you do that is by creating these memorable moments that we call wow moments. A quick story about this is we were advising an advisor on how to wow one of their clients that was going to play a golf course. The client was going to play at this very exclusive, exciting golf course. What we had the advisor do is send along a sleeve of golf balls to the clubhouse. It was in a just brown paper wrapper, plain wrapper, not really revealing what’s inside. It said, “Do not open till 17,” where there was a very challenging hole on 17. So the client shows up at the clubhouse, gets this package says, “Do not open until 17,” and obviously with the foursome that they were playing with.

They were all excited to learn what’s inside this. They finally get to 17 and they tear open the wrapper excitedly. Inside are this sleeve of golf balls, the kind of balls that the clients uses obviously and a note. The note says, “I know you’re a great golfer. This is a tough hole. You might need some extra help. Enjoy your trip.” Now, it’s not just the client that’s being wowed there, but the other people that this client is playing with are now seeing the relationship that the advisor has created with that client and they’re going to ask, “Who sent this to you?” “Well, that was my advisor.” Those little things add up to a greater bank account of goodwill.

When you go out of your way to wow people, when you go out of your way to create these moments that are memorable and resonant and of the moment, and it doesn’t always have to be gifts. It can be simple things like writing handwritten notes. They could be simple things like phone calls. It can be donating time or energy to things that are important to the client. I mean building that wow practice, when you build up that bank of goodwill you’re in a far better position to then have your clients be talking about you in a way that you want them to talk about you. rather than a way that they figure out how to talk about you, if you can catch my drift.

Julie Littlechild:
It sounds like, I mean if you tie it back to the whole storytelling, you get clients to tell stories that you’ve crafted that are about challenge and are about experience.

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. Deliberate.

Julie Littlechild:
But you also tell stories about these moments that get shared as well. I imagine both of those things drive referrals.

Michael Futterman:
Absolutely. There’s a company out there called Lovepop Cards. There are plenty of other companies that do this. I just happen to know this one company. They make popup cards. You open them up-

Julie Littlechild:
Shark Tank. They were on Shark Tank.

Michael Futterman:
They were on Shark Tank. That’s absolutely right. When you send a handwritten note to somebody they generally keep it, especially if it’s in a card, like a Hallmark or recycled paper card. They will keep it. Or even just a plain note card with your stationery. They’ll hold on to that, maybe not an actual letter. But they might hold on to a greeting card. These greeting cards are meant to be displayed. So if you send your client a card, they’re going to display it and somebody’s going to say, “What is that thing?” And then they’re going to say, “Well, this is from my advisor.” “Wow, that’s kind of cool that your advisor sent you that. Who’s your advisor?”

That starts that conversation. So trying to figure out ways to create those moments where your clients are inclined to talk about you is a really valuable way to generate unsolicited referrals because people will be talking about you, and talking about you in a way that you want rather than in a way that they just happen to end up talking about you.

Steve Wershing:
I also think that, and forgive me, I just have this aversion to the whole idea of wow. So I’m going to think about it a little differently if that’s okay with you.

Michael Futterman:
Sure.

Steve Wershing:
To me, what that’s saying is not just the wow because there are a lot of ways of getting to wow, but what you’re talking about really is intimacy, is client intimacy. There are a lot of things, flashy things you could do that are wow, but really what matters here is that you have your why and you’re creating a story about your why. But you’re also in touch with what their why is. The more you can communicate on that level, that’s really … The intimacy is not you told me your Social Security Number and I know what all your assets are. The intimacy is I know what you love. I know what’s important to you and I’ll reflect that back to you to let you know that.

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. I want a snippet of you saying that because that’s exactly what-

Steve Wershing:
Well, I think it’ll be on a podcast sometime soon.

Michael Futterman:
Yeah. It’d be great if somebody was recording all that stuff. It is absolutely what we talk about in the Art of Wow is that it’s creating these meaningful, memorable, customized, and personalized experiences that go above and beyond expectations. The only way to do that, the only way to make it personalized and meaningful is to have information. The information that we’re looking for is not name, Social Security Number, and rank. It is where are you in the arc of your career? Do you like your job? What do you aspire to? I know that you take vacations. Where do you go? Who do you go with? I know you have dogs. Is this a series of dogs or have you just always gone and gotten dogs from the pound, and they’re all mutts and different? Or are you on your fifth standard poodle?

Understanding that level of detail allows you the opportunity to really connect with people on an emotional level. You all know people out there that give the perfect gift. They give that perfect gift and you’re like, “How did they know that this was the perfect gift?” It’s because they just pay attention. Some people are more inclined to do that, but it’s something that can be taught. What we teach is looking at a variety of information points, the basics, know your client, recreation, family, occupation, but then even beyond that. We talked about some people don’t respond to getting gifts. If I’m really wealthy, I can buy most of what I want. But if somebody gives me recognition or acknowledgment or somebody donates their time or their energy to something that’s important to me, that’s meaningful because you can’t buy that. You can only get it through affection and intimacy.

Very often the only relationship that’s more intimate than the one with a client and the advisor is the one with the primary medical caregiver, the family doctor.

Julie Littlechild:
Absolutely. Well, look. You’ve come a long way from recreation. Congratulations on that. We could go on, but I know we’re at time. Just let me ask you though, where can advisors learn more about the resources that Janus Henderson has to offer?

Michael Futterman:
Absolutely. They can go to janushenderson.com and there under the Advisor Resources there are a variety of links. We’ve got a blog that we publish pretty regularly. You can follow me on LinkedIn. Those are all different areas where you can hear more about what we’re talking about, what we’re doing. And then for those of you that are interested more in our Art of Wow program, we’ve got the Art of Wow website, which is wow.janushenderson.com. It’s just a consistently updated list of wow ideas sorted by occasion and interest in all of those different categories. But we’re out there. It’s not hard to find us. Just go to our website.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, appreciate your time. Thanks so much.

Michael Futterman:
Thank you.

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.