Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Chip Munn
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Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we speak with Chip Munn, who’s CEO of Signature Wealth Group. After leaving teaching, Chip joined the financial services profession at age 22, and since then, has gone on to build a wealth management enterprise, with 10 advisors and over $1.3 billion under management. In addition to running Signature Wealth Strategies, he’s also the host of the new podcast, Maximum Advisor.
Now, we recorded this episode just a couple of weeks after the beginning of the coronavirus crisis and the associated market decline and volatility, so we start our conversation talking with Chip about what he’s finding successful in helping coach clients through this difficult time. We talk about how he’s keeping a pulse on client feelings by, among other things, convening an unscheduled and virtual version of his client advisory board that he’s run for some time. We discuss how he believes we will all be about 20% different in how we approach our professions after this crisis is over. Chip reviews with us his eight principles for making a successful advisory business. And stay through to the end, where Chip talks about how he believes this market can be a huge opportunity for building business and attracting referrals. There are lots of great tips on how to become a thriving advisory firm, even in this difficult market. And so, here now is our conversation with Chip Munn.
Chip Munn, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
So, Julie and I want to ask you a whole bunch about Maximum Advisor, and about Signature, and about all of your stuff, but we’re recording this after the first week of the big market correction, and we’re all quarantined at home. So we’d like to start out, actually, by talking a little bit about how you are adapting to this, because I think sharing that experience would be valuable… and if you want to tell us a little bit about your network, I know you have about 10 or so offices, if that’s right? And so, how are you adapting to this new environment, and what kinds of interesting things are you finding that are working for you and for clients?
Well, for all of us, it’s been a time of transition, right? Not only for us in learning how to do business, but also… or how to do business in this environment, but also for our clients. And so, one of the toughest things I’ve found for our advisors… so we have, as you mentioned, we have 10 offices throughout North and South Carolina, and Kentucky. And, yeah, as I talk to advisors, really, the toughest thing in this first week has been balancing the things that you need to know, or skills that you need to run in this environment, while also being there for clients in a more enhanced way.
One of the things that we’ve had a good experience with this week in taking our operation completely virtual is that, yeah, having multiple offices, we’ve had to experiment and figure out things like the technology component, how to develop a virtual culture, and to work with… I’m a big believer in Dan Sullivan and Strategic Coach’s concept of unique ability. And so, one of the things that we decided early on was we wanted to be able to have virtual folks who were incredibly good at what they do, and we’re based in Florence, South Carolina, and there aren’t a lot of people… I joke that Florence is a good place to be from. There aren’t a lot of people who are the best in their field, with the exception of probably in our case, of medicine, which is good right now, who are actively looking to move. Folks want to be in a bigger place, and we want to be able to work with the best.
And so, we have really made a commitment that over the last couple of years, and it’s been to our benefit in the last week, in that we’re really comfortable with tools like Zoom. We moved about eight months ago to a VoIP phone system. So right now, our folks have their office phones at their desk. If a client were to call our office, I mean, it literally is… while we are kind of dislocated and dispersed operationally, we’ve been able to operate pretty well.
Yeah, it’s been a fairly seamless transition, but it’s because we already had to figure a lot of it out. And so, that’s been the biggest thing, but managing that, plus also, again, keeping up with… not only do I do what I do with our advisors and Signature, but yeah, I still have clients. And so, communicating to them, and managing their emotions and expectations has been… I think that’s the tough balance for a lot of us.
I’m interested in your perspective on what you will carry forward from this. I was playing around with some things, just wording the other day for a post, and I had sort of come up with this idea that working from home isn’t just about doing the same things from a different location; it’s actually causing us to work a little differently and to think a little differently. So do you see some fundamental changes that you might carry forward?
Yeah, I think that I’ve developed recently, kind of the theory that coming out of this time, we’re going to be what I call 20 percent different. I think that we’re going to see a lot of people who have experienced virtual work, that they want to… I don’t think that they’re going to all of a sudden quit wanting to come into the office, necessarily; they may want to come in 20 percent less. I think that there may be folks who right now are really amping up their content creation by 100 percent, and I think it’s human nature for people to regress back to what they’re comfortable with, but I don’t think that we’re going to go all the way back. I think that most people are going to be, again, in my way of thinking, 20 percent different when we come out. I think that if people have doubled their content creation-
Mm-hmm (affirmative) And figured out how to do that at a busy time, right?
We certainly have.
Yeah.
But for a lot of folks, I think you may go from, to 200 percent, you may come back to 120. So I think there are going to be a lot of things… as we kind of come out of this time, we’ll have learned to work a lot more efficiently. I think that’s one of the things that we’ve learned so far in the last week, is that when you’re working in this environment, you can work 16 hours in an eight hour day, or you can work 24 hours in a 16 hour day. It seems and it feels like, for all of us, we’re working harder at home than we did going into the office, and-
Absolutely.
And I think some of the things that we’re learning from a capability standpoint are definitely going to be things that carry over.
What will be interesting is how it changes people’s level of comfort with things. So, I’m on the board of a school of music and dance, and I had tried to persuade the school to take a look into more virtual instruction a year or two ago, and all of the music teachers were like, “Nope, nope, nope. We have to be right there. We have to be able to physically correct our student, their positioning and their setup.” And of course, now 78 percent of those teachers are teaching virtually.
Now you look brilliant.
Now, yeah. It doesn’t sound so crazy now, does it? But when we… on the retail side, when working with our clients, we had constructed… we’re working on a new model, and from the get-go we had put virtual meetings in as part of that, because we want to do a larger number of shorter meetings so that we don’t overwhelm clients. And so, we planned on doing it on Zoom right from the get-go, but I know a lot of advisors and a lot of even clients are resistant to that. It will be interesting to see once they get familiar with that out of necessity, how many clients would be a lot more interested in meeting face-to-face over the internet as opposed to in person, especially in high traffic areas, to areas that are difficult to get around, or if they’re at a distance from their advisor, like they have an advisor in New York, but they’re wintering in Florida or something.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. I think there’ll be a lot of people who… they wouldn’t have made this change. They didn’t want to, and the hardest thing for most people, in any kind of behavior management, the journey of a thousand miles is the first step, and a lot of people are being forced to take that first step now, whether it’s Zoom, or FaceTime, or they’re having to get comfortable. And I think that what I believe… about 40 percent of my clients don’t live in my town as it is, so we’ve done a fair amount of this kind of thing before, but we have plenty of clients who didn’t want to take advantage of it, who weren’t comfortable with it.
And yeah, you’re in a situation now, whether it’s via FaceTime, or Zoom, or any of these technologies, if you want to see your family, you’ve got to get on a screen. It’s just an unprecedented kind of interesting time, and I think that… once again, I think you’ll be 20 percent different. You’ll have a chunk of people who, all of a sudden, they’ve tried it, it wasn’t as bad as they thought it was going to be, or they learned, depending on how long things last, the more comfortable people will get with it, and I think that we’ll see a lot more of this kind of thing, whether it’s one-on-one meetings… or one of the things that we’re going to be doing is, we have a client advisory board.
I was just going to ask you about that. Yeah, tell us about that.
That’s interesting.
Something that you’re an expert in, and we’re going to be taking our client advisory board and using Zoom now to hold our client advisory board meeting, kind of one that’s almost… emergency really isn’t the right term, but an unscheduled advisory board meeting to talk to them about how we can best support our clients, in our communities even, in this time.
And so, I think that… again, not something we would have done, but I think a lot of folks are more comfortable with it, and frankly, right now it’s all we’ve got, and there is a comfort to seeing people.
Well, and there’s also, like you said, it’s an unscheduled meeting, so we’re contacting all of our clients to suggest to them that they do. If some of them had advisory board meetings that were coming up in the next month, but we’re calling all of them saying, “Look, even if you hadn’t scheduled it, you should give it some thought,” because getting their feedback on how you’re doing, what’s most on their mind so you can respond to it… I think it’s a great thing. I’m glad to hear you’re pursuing it. I think that’s going to be really important.
Chip-
I’m sorry, Julie, go ahead.
No, no, I want you to finish your thought, because I was actually going to pivot just into a different topic.
No, go ahead, I’m all done.
Well, I wanted, Chip, to ask you about your podcast and the work that you’re doing. You’ve got the Maximum Advisor. So first of all, I mean, it’s interesting that you are an industry participant doing a podcast for the industry, right, as an advisor. I’d love to hear a bit about your path there and your decision, and what it means in your mind to be a maximum advisor?
Sure. Well, my background’s in teaching, so… Maybe I was supposed to get into this a little bit earlier, but I was a sixth grade teacher. So I taught school for a year, so I usually joke that I was teacher for a year, which if you say it really fast, right… taught fifth grade… and part of the reason that I ended up in education was because my mom taught kindergarten for 30 years. And so, education has always been something that was really important to me and as, kind of over time… so I’ve been in financial services for 22 years, and so over time, one of the things that was important to me was teaching younger people. I got into the business, I was 22 and a half or so; young person, school teacher background, probably had no business…my manager at the time had no business probably hiring me.
And so, it’s been important for me to try to find ways to help grow younger advisors and to help them, and then as that has kind of taken shape over time… so we’ve had a handful of younger advisors over the years. We have in kind of our offices now seven, I think, who are under the age of… so we have as many advisors in our firm under the age of 40 as over, or pretty close. And so, it’s always been important to me to bring along folks, because somebody did it for me, and I think that our industry has had a problem, Julie, especially since ’08, and we may see it again, where training programs are down and folks just aren’t bringing along, and it enhances the already difficult potential succession problem that I think a lot of us feel like there’s going to be.
And so, our business model has been to bring in and train younger advisors. We bought several practices, and then have a kind of a process for bringing in younger advisors, integrating them into a practice that we’ve bought, so that then the older advisor can retire. Our theory five years ago probably was that an advisor in his 60s probably isn’t looking to sell their… they may want to retire, but they’re not looking… if they haven’t done the work to bring somebody along, they’re not looking to sell their practice to somebody in their 20s. But what they would do is sell it to a team of people in their 40s who would work with somebody in their 20s.
And so, that’s where Maximum Advisor came, just kind of as an outpouring of that. I want to be able to, again, with seven younger advisors of our own, wanted to be able to continue to teach them and use it for them, and then to be able to take anything that we do there and just share it out there in hopes that it would help other people. I wrote a really short 40 or 50 page book for advisors back a couple of years ago, and I’ve given it to the young advisors in my town that work for Edward Jones or Wells Fargo, because… I mean, there’s plenty of business out there for everybody. My kind of life philosophy is that we’re better together, and so, that’s a big thing for us, and so that’s how… yeah, I’m a student and being a student, having listened to virtually all of you all’s episodes and trying to process that, I believe that the surest way to make sure that you learn something well, or if you want to make sure that your kids are learning, is to have them teach it. And so, for me, to learn things and then to be able to talk about, consult, and teach those… yeah, it’s part of me sharpening my saw, Julie, too.
Yeah. So, Chip, you talk about helping advisors develop a thriving practice. What do you consider to be a thriving practice, and how’s that different from the way most advisors experience their businesses?
Well, my experience has been that, like me, a lot of advisors, I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I was a school teacher. I wasn’t meant to be, I wasn’t groomed to be in this business. And for a lot of us, what we did was we took a sales job. 20 years ago, it was a sales job; we still cold called people during dinner to see how many enemies in our town we could make. And over the years, the business has changed. The Maynor’s Money platforms came out, and over time, many advisors who want to grow have transitioned. This is not to say that you can’t grow at a wire house. There are a lot of us with an entrepreneurial spirit that want to be able to do things that we could not do in a true… we opened and started Signature four years ago from a regional broker dealer.
So, we went into the independent broker dealer space, and the reason for that was there were a lot of rules that weren’t laws; so, there were rules that the company wouldn’t let us do and we wanted to be able to grow. And so, I think that, for me, a maximum advisor is somebody who has a growth mindset, that they are looking to grow and they really, in a lot of cases, just want to be able to share ideas with other people. They believe that you’re better together, that there’s… it’s an abundance mindset where there’s plenty to go around. And there are kind of eight areas that I think kind of contribute to that; we developed kind of a scorecard to figure out… again, we developed it initially for our own offices to be able to do a gap analysis of where our folks felt like they were to help them.
But the eight air areas are, and I know that this will resonate with you all, is client experience. Where do you stand in terms of that? Is it creative? Is it repeatable? Is it engaging?
The second is practice finances. You got to know where your money goes, and for a lot of folks, as we transition to independence, finances is near… there’s a big difference between signing the front of a check and the back of a check. So, [crosstalk 00:20:04].
I love that.
Can we go back for just a second? You started out as one of those eight principles you were talking about was client experience, and of course, that’s something that’s near and dear to both Julia and my heart. How did you approach designing that experience? And one of the things that you talked about was also making it repeatable, which I think is really significant. So how did you design it, and how do you refine it, and then how do you make it repeatable?
So for us, it began… I don’t know, going on 20 years ago… with being students of what other people were doing. So I think back then, it started originally kind of with a group called Payne Sender Brand. They had a group called PSB Training years ago. And I think it was the beginning of what I attribute to Meryl as the Supernova Program, kind of the 12-four-one, is where we started… but it’s morphed over time based on… I mean, some of the influences, for example, would be Duncan MacPherson and some of the stuff from Pareto and Matt Oxley. We’ve tried to integrate what we feel like are the best parts of all of those things into something that you we can use, that we can teach… because I think that, really, from an engagement and from a client relationship standpoint, I think the most important thing is being proactive; is that if we are continually communicating in a proactive fashion, our clients aren’t wondering where they’re going to hear from us, they’re not surprised. And a big thing for us is layering in multiple team members. And so, when a new client comes on board, they get a new client welcome kit that includes a list of who their team is.
And so, I think that’s been the biggest thing is intentionally trying to always put ourselves in the client’s shoes, asking them… doing client advisory boards and making sure that we ask.
Let me come back to the repeatable idea. I speak with a lot of firms and we talk about the client experience. Often, when we’re talking about an advisory board and we’re talking about getting feedback, one of the comments that they make is, “Well, it really kind of depends on the advisor.” So you get the idea that the experience is somewhat different from advisor to advisor, that they’re organized under an umbrella, but what individual advisors are doing with their individual clients are different from advisor to advisor. So how do you develop that repeatability, and then how do you spread that across your 10 offices?
So under our umbrella, if you will, we have two different ways that people can work with Signature. One is by adopting kind of our brand, our standards. Some of the practices we own, a couple of them are affiliated, but they choose to kind of do business our way, and then we have some practices that just affiliate because they want to be able to utilize kind of what I’ll call middle office services, non-client-facing things. And so it’s a… what we do with our Signature offices is we have everything processed out. We have toolkits that really run the gambit of how folks can operate the practice, very detailed, and we teach those. So, a lot of our younger advisors are coming into the business… a lot of the younger advisors that we hire are coming into the business for the first time, so they only know our process.
And so, for all of the offices that we own, we run them exactly the same way. There is a set of model portfolios. There is a set client experience that we insist on and monitor to make sure, because that’s how you know that the clients are being taken care of, and then we provide those same things to our affiliate advisors.
And to your point, Steve, some folks kind of modify… either modify what they’re doing or adopt what we’re doing… and others are comfortable with… we advisors are a funny lot, and we can get territorial and particular about what we do, and a lot of times a lot of us feel like what we’re doing is the best thing. I mean, we’re doing the best we can, and so our thing is with advisors who affiliate with us, is not to force them… I’m a big believer in freedom. It’s the reason that I went independent versus staying in the regional space. But we also think that by continually meeting together… you mentioned, we were talking about virtual… we have an advisor call every month where senior advisors only can jump in and share ideas and talk with one another, and we try to integrate that into our service system. So, over time, it becomes a bit of the best of all worlds as best we can make it.
And I do want to make sure we get the other six areas, by the way, because I know Steve and I do this… we take people off in all these other directions. But what do you believe when you think about client experience actually sets you apart, or what can set an advisor apart or drive deeper engagement? Because I imagine there are elements of process and efficiency, and then things that clients actually see as differentiated.
So I think that for an advisor, that the most important thing is intention. I think that it starts with developing an experience that is kind of… you want to be efficient in the things that the client can’t see, and personalizing the things that they can, and through personalizing some of your market updates and things like that. Those kinds of communications aren’t necessarily going to be… I mean, that can be relatively streamlined and easy. The client contact needs to be personalized to them. So, I think the key is, again, really walking a mile in their shoes, experiencing, as I think you do, Julie… kind of coming in from the front door, and what are the touch points going to be and how would I receive any kind of information and what would I want the experience to be like? But more importantly, to go out like Steve does and ask the clients what it is, and be able to take the key areas that are important to relationships, and be able to personalize those… big believers, for example… So that I don’t take credit for anybody else’s stuff… Pareto’s family, occupation, recreation and money… knowing those things, that form process.
We are big believers in active note taking and surprise and delight. So, that was something I think I learned from Matt Oxley, and being able to pay attention to where people go to school, who their friends are, where they do things. And then when we respond, whether it’s a gift or whether or it’s a personalized contact, we’re responding in the way that the client would want to or we’re paying… because the most important thing that I think, for anybody, is they want to feel heard. And so if we’ll focus on that, then I think that’s the best way to differentiate yourself is for… most marriages get in trouble because one of the partners doesn’t feel heard. Most businesses break up because of poor communication. And I think that for us, having advisors be able to… again, I mentioned Dan Sullivan and unique ability… having advisors be able to focus only on client-facing-things allows them to be better listeners, and that’s ultimately, I think, what enhances the relationship, and listening and then acting on what you hear is what can set you apart.
Again, thank you.
So building on that, what you hear, tell us what are some of the… what would you say are the top few learnings that you got from your advisory board since you’ve had one?
So in our most recent advisory board, one of the things that they focused on was our need to engage younger investors. So a lot of our advisory board members are we’ll say 55 and older, and they wanted us to engage their kids and their grandkids. You could tell that they had a concern about how they were going to handle money.
I think that the other thing, areas where they’ve given us really good advice are on… so we have an advisor scorecard that we use, but we also… we have a client scorecard that we use to help, and we’ve had them go through that with us to give us advice on how they would receive it, changes that we need, because a lot of these folks were executives, and so we really have run a lot of our new service offerings by them to see really whether or not we’re on the right track. You can kind of get caught in your own bubble and think that what you’re thinking is right, but until you take it to the people who are the check writers, it really doesn’t mean a whole lot what you think; it matters what they think.
Yeah. So we’re coming up on time here, Chip. So, Julia and I are going to maintain our unbroken record of not letting guests get to everything. But if you were to look at those-
Can I at least get those eight areas, because I really-
Sure.
I can’t stop this conversation without knowing the other six.
Oh, I’ll do two things, Julie. First, I’ll run through them real quick, and then for any of your listeners that have an interest, or for you, Julie, you can go to our website, maximumadvisor.com… you can do slash scorecard… and so, we’ll make it available that you can download them.
Oh, perfect.
And we’ll put that in the show notes too, so thank you.
So the eight things, then: client experience, practice finances, client acquisition, client retention, the positioning of your practice in your community, having a clear vision or where you’re headed, your ideal client profile, and then building the ideal team, because we think advisors work best in… my partner and I have been together for 21 of my 22 years, and that’s the single best business decision I made as a 23-year-old person. And in fact, all the best business decisions that I’ve made have been partnerships and collaborations with people. So, that’s the eight.
You talked about clients… so thank you for listing all those. And you talked about client experience probably being the most significant; before we close up, of those eight, which one would you say is the biggest game changer of the ones we have not yet talked about?
So I would say in the environment that we’re in right now, I’m going to give you two, if I can cheat a little bit. It is the client retention and acquisition. I think that we’re in a huge period of opportunity for people who are willing… kind of the Mission Impossible, the challenge if you choose to accept… it is very applicable right now. For folks who want to put in the work, I think that we’re in a… I mean, it’s easy to get a virtual meeting with a lot of people right now because folks are stuck. I mean, it’s easy for folks to get a hold of me right now.
And so, I think that being proactive, doubling or tripling the amount of communication and content that you’re putting out right now from a retention standpoint, particular… I’m a big believer that our clients ought to get our best thinking… and then really using this as an opportunity to promote yourself as different, to be forward-looking, and I think there’s a huge client acquisition back in… after the bubble, after the tech bubble, after the financial crisis, and in the midst of and after this, there’s going to be… there’s always been a huge opportunity for client acquisitions in times like these.
And so to bring it back to the theme of the podcast, what you’re talking about is getting referrals because of how you help clients get through a point like this. Is there a specific tip that you would give our listeners about how to remind clients or position yourself for referrals as we’re going through this difficult market?
So, what I would do and have done is two things. First, make sure that any communication you have has some sort of call to action for your client to be able to share it and forward it. Again, everybody is relatively immobile, and so passing on information… people are forwarding and sharing things now at a much higher rate than normal.
And then the other is… Mr. Rogers said, whenever you see difficult times, look for the helpers. And I think that we’re in a time now where offering to just be of service, to do a checkup with somebody’s kids, friends, family… people are a lot more receptive right now to us reaching out and just offering to help. But it’s got to be from a true place of service… but I think that’s a great opportunity right now.
That’s great. Well, Chip, I can’t think of a better place to leave our conversation. It’s been great to talk with you. We really appreciate you taking some time when everybody is spending all of their time calling clients and sharing some of your experiences on how you’re coaching clients get through this. So, thank you so much.
And if people want to find out more about the Maximum Advisor, you mentioned the website before, but where else can they find you?
Sure. They can find us on anywhere that you download, podcasts… iTunes, et cetera… or you can, again, check it out at maximumadvisor.com.
Great.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
Chip, thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. Take care.
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.