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Steve Wershing:
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 talk with Brent Weiss, co-founder and chief evangelist for Facet Wealth. The firm was created or the creation of the firm was stimulated by venture capitalists from the tech world, and so they have interesting perspectives on technology’s role in an advisory business. For example, where many advisors view technology as an expense, Weiss views technology as a way of lowering expenses, enabling them to serve smaller clients profitably. We discuss client acquisition efforts, and Brent describes a great way to help prospective clients find the content that you might be creating. Brent articulates one question that every advisor should ask their clients, and that will form the basis of all of your referral efforts moving forward. Toward the end, we talk about Facet’s most intriguing business development program, which is acquiring smaller clients from established advisors. We discuss how both firms benefit from that, but most importantly how the clients benefit from it as well. It’s an episode that’s rich in questions you can ask yourself that will lead you to higher profits and tips you can use for a more successful business. Let’s get to our conversation with Brent Weiss. Brent Weiss, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Brent Weiss:
Steve, it’s an absolute pleasure and Julia as well, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to the conversation today.

Steve Wershing:
Let’s start off with this intriguing little thing. Your title is listed as chief evangelist. What exactly does a chief evangelist do?

Julie Littlechild:
That’s a big title. You have a lot to live up to.

Steve Wershing:
I know. I don’t know if I could live up to associate evangelism. [crosstalk 00:01:57]. That’s a big deal.

Brent Weiss:
I guess I was just looking for some way to achieve a C in front of my name here. Is there a chief planning officer? I mean, my background is as a financial planner. It’s the question I love to answer because most people in the financial services space aren’t familiar with what it is. It actually has its roots in the technology field coming out of Silicon Valley in terms of being an evangelist for new ideas and new technology. As a chief evangelist, there’s only three things that I do. Number one is, and I’ll break these down. Number one is sort of the keeper of the cause. Number two, as the spreader of the word. If you think about what evangelism is, you’re spreading some word, right? Spreading the good word, and the third thing is I am a champion for financial empowerment. If I high level break those down, keeper of the cause as a co-founder it’s near and dear to my heart that I make sure that we’re always staying true to our mission, vision and core values as an organization at Facet Wealth.

As a spreader of the word, one of my primary role is not only internal evangelism in terms of what we do, but external evangelism in the industry in terms of who is Facet Wealth, what are we doing, what are we provide from a planning perspective, what is this Fintech thing that we do? Then the final piece is just being a champion for financial empowerment. Prior to founding or being a co-founder of Facet, I ran a traditional wealth management firm and I’m just a firm believer in the amazing work that the competent, ethical high quality advisors do every day for the families they represent. I’m just a firm believer that everybody deserves access to this amazing thing called financial planning. That’s sort of chief evangelist in a nutshell, if you will.

Steve Wershing:
That’s great. Based on promoting financial planning, I think a lot more of our listeners ought to be evangelists about this too. I think that’s a great way to describe that. I’ve forgotten that that came out of tech. Wasn’t Guy Kawasaki the first person to be called an evangelist, or have a business card that said evangelist on it?

Brent Weiss:
I would say don’t quote me on this, but I believe that is the case. I mean, that’s the name that comes up in [inaudible 00:04:00]. The genesis of the idea for me is there was a period of time as we were growing rapidly as a firm and sort of I was the roving or the roaming outfielder, sort of in softball. There’s three position fielders and you have one that’s running around the field, just helping everybody and we’re trying to figure out where do I add real value as your organization scales. We hired a CTO, chief technology officer, and he said, within three minutes, he goes, “I know exactly what this is.” The saying goes, chief evangelist is not a job title, it’s a way of life. It’s sort of this idea that you smell the passion that I bring to financial planning, my belief in financial empowerment. He goes, “That’s exactly what it is.” It stuck about a year and a half or two years ago, now it’s on my card, and I would love, I guess if Guy Kawasaki listens to this, I would love to do a virtual coffee or lunch if you’re up for it.

Steve Wershing:
Guy Kawasaki, if you’re listening, we want you on the program.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, exactly.

Steve Wershing:
Anyway, you are chief evangelist for Facet Wealth, and so you have an interesting, interesting business model. Can you tell us a little bit about what is Facet Wealth and what sets it apart?

Brent Weiss:
Yeah, absolutely. As the evangelist, this is the one thing I’d love to do all day long, but before I go into sort of what we do, I always like to take a step back and talk about why we exist and what’s our purpose as an organization. We founded Facet a couple years back with the mission of making unconflicted, high quality financial planning more affordable and accessible to everyday Americans. It’s just our belief that everybody deserves access to this amazing thing that we call financial planning, and for so long it’s been sort of a limited thing and available… There’s been limited access within this country, and so we want to change that, along with other really amazing financial advisors out there.

When you think about what we do to achieve that mission, we are, what I’ll say is a human first planning first Fintech firm, right? Some people will go scratch their head and go, “What is that?” I’ll break it down. We are firm believers that the future of advice is human, right? There is this, I think it was about 10 years ago or a little more than that now that robot advisors came out, and financial advisors started thinking, “Geez, how are they going to disrupt my business?” What we realized is it didn’t really disrupt our business as long as you were building really strong, solid personal relationships with your clients. We are firm believers that while technology will change the way we do business, it’s not going to change the core of our business.

We start on the financial planning side. Every one of our clients gets high quality financial advice, personalized through a dedicated CFP professional. It is holistic financial life planning. The difference is we charge a flat fee, so it’s just subscription based pricing for our clients and we do it all virtually, so via video conference which has become a hot thing now in the last couple of months. That’s on the planning side. Then we also have a Fintech financial technology division that’s helping us build our own internal technology platform for financial planners with the idea of increasing efficiency and productivity with the goal of lowering cost, so thereby making it more accessible to families out there.

Julie Littlechild:
You came from, you mentioned this, a more sort of traditional financial planning firm and background. Can you talk to us about how you went from there to here?

Brent Weiss:
Yeah. The short version of the story is I spent about 10 years at, I got to say more traditional, but I say that now in relative to sort of a Fintech hybrid firm. Coming out of college, I stumbled upon this thing called the CFP curriculum and it blew my mind thinking, “Holy cow, I can change the financial futures of individuals and families and I can make a living doing it.” Got involved with a really amazing business based out of Baltimore, learned the business from the ground up, and what I saw in my 10 years there is a couple of things. Number one is the power that we have as financial planners. I consider myself a financial architect, right?

We’re helping our clients build the financial house of their dreams. Number one, I saw how amazing that was, but number two, I saw two things. There was just a lack of access in the industry, to families that really needed help the most potentially, but I didn’t know how to solve that problem. I thought about this in my final five years, and then out of the blue, I got an email from a former co-worker who had gone on and started a company in Baltimore, got involved in the entrepreneurial environment and said, “Hey, there’s a technology entrepreneur out of San Francisco that wants to talk to financial advisors. Would you be open to it?” There’s a funny story here, but to keep it short, I actually ignored it.

I was like, what does a VC, a venture capitalist want with little Brent in Baltimore? I eventually took the meeting, and what I thought was going to be just 30 minutes of coffee. He sat and said, “Hey, what if we could use technology to lower the cost of high quality financial advice so that more people in this country have access to it?” There might’ve been an expletive or two in my response, but I just said, “Holy cow, that’s an amazing thing.” That was the moment realized that there’s a there, there. That was the brainchild of Facet Wealth back in February 2016, and that was Andres Jones who’s now a co-founder and our CEO. Then he introduced me to one of our other co-founders, Patrick McKenna who’s our executive chairman and that was the beginning of this amazing and crazy story we call Facet Wealth.

Julie Littlechild:
There are a few things that you’ve mentioned that obviously are quite different from and some might even argue kind of go against the common wisdom of running, running a firm. One is that this model works more effectively, I believe for smaller clients. Can you tell us a bit about how the specifics of that model and how you’ve made it work?

Brent Weiss:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that where I want to start is the whole premise was not how do we give less for less. If you charge less, most people think you’re going to get what you pay for. The idea was how do you take that $2 or $5 million client experience and just make that more affordable and accessible to individuals that might have $100,000 or $200,000, which we typically call sort of smaller clients. The way I think about it is they’re still hardworking, caring, deserving individuals and families that just happened to have less sort of wealth as it’s been traditionally defined. The interesting thing on the planning side is we don’t like to think about it as giving less service. It is still a dedicated relationship with a CFP professional.

It’s just done via video conference, so we don’t have a physical office location to go into. It is still comprehensive financial planning. We do have a different way of approaching it. It’s more of iterative and agile, versus the traditional let’s look at all 75 areas of your financial life and do it in 20 hours in the first couple of weeks. We break it into what we call best next steps to really make it actionable. I think the real difference here is how we’re thinking about the technology side of it, Julie just because when you think about how do you actually break down that cost, because the challenge is in other traditional wealth management model, you’re going to charge based on assets. If you do that, you think I need $500,000 or $600,000 in an account to generate revenue to make it profitable based upon my service model.

Well, that starts to break down when you work with families that have $200,000 or $100,000, or younger families that make good money, don’t have assets to manage it, you have to think, how do you change your business model? That’s where we said, you know what? The future is subscription based. The Wayne Gretzky quote, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it is.” The future of this industry, I believe is more flat fee, subscription based models, so that’s one way we’re different creating greater access, lowering that cost. Then the technology is an internal proprietary platform. I like to call it a financial planning engine, not a financial planning sort of outcome producer because it focuses on increasing the efficiency and productivity of our financial planners, so they can spend more of their time where it matters most, and that’s with our clients. Then it ultimately allows us to lower our costs, so our price point is lower than a traditional model. We can work with those clients with “smaller accounts” but lower account balances that still have complexity and financial life needs that we can serve.

Julie Littlechild:
Sorry, Steve. If you don’t mind, I just want to [crosstalk 00:12:31] ask a little clarification. You talked about iterative and agile. That is a really interesting concept. Can you maybe expand on that because it sounds like something that irrespective of model might be an interesting way to think about planning?

Brent Weiss:
Yeah. Well, thank you for asking to clarify because that’s probably the only two words I’ll ever use that are around technology because I am a financial planner at heart and not a technologist as, I think using the word technologist probably tells you. When we started this company and since we’re a Fintech firm, I’d never been involved in developing technology or building or designing things around it. Two of our co-founders were software developers and engineers, and they introduced this idea called agile development to me and it’s a way of building or developing technology. I’m probably saying that the wrong way, but I think people will get it.

Steve Wershing:
No, that’s good the way it is.

Brent Weiss:
The way you break it down is you have these two weeks sprints. It’s not like, let’s go build this massive platform and three years from now, we’re going to find out if it works. The real premise of it is sometimes we don’t know it’s going to work, so why don’t we break it in these two week sprints agile iterative development processes, where we say, we have a story or a premise or an idea. What we’re going to do is we’re going to rapidly iterate on it and build it out over time, and so every two weeks you’re saying, here are the three things we want to accomplish, let’s go build a plan for that. Let’s build it and let’s see if it works. At the end of the two weeks, you get back together and say, how did we do, right? Did we do a good job, do we have to tweak it? If you did a good job, what’s next?

If you think about it from a financial planning perspective, what you can say is most of our clients we start with goals and we start with cashflow, and so we’ll say, in the next two weeks, we’ll have a meeting and let’s really understand your cashflow. In fact, that’s the lifeblood of a financial plan, if you have available resources via cashflow. We’ll tackle cashflow, and then we’ll determine what the next goal is. Is it debt management, paying down student loans or credit cards, whatever it is, or maybe it’s looking at college savings or retirement, and so we have this really agile iterative development process for financial planning that our clients love because it’s not here’s a 100-page financial plan and you go to work. It’s been a really great thing for us as a firm and a really great thing for our clients.

Steve Wershing:
I’d like to dig into a little bit of that as well from a different perspective. One of the things that you mentioned, which I think is really interesting is using technology to lower costs. I think many advisors look at technology as a cost and something that they need to do to run better, but they don’t necessarily see it as a way of lowering the cost and widening the margin. I think you’ve talked about that from a… You’ve sort of glanced off that in a couple of areas, but could you expound on that a little bit too how you can utilize technology to lower costs overall?

Brent Weiss:
Yes. I think the biggest mistake, and I’ll pick on myself first because I don’t want to go out there and say, here’s the mistake you’re making, advisors. Here’s a mistake that I made in my career before Facet. What happened is I started from the wrong point with technology. I call it sort of playing the technology whack-a-mole game. What happens is most advisors sort of go out and they, and I’ll say what we dd is we put together six or eight pieces of technology. They didn’t work together and we’re thinking, “Holy cow, this didn’t do anything for our process, but you know what, we kind of need it.” We need a portfolio reporting system, we need a CRM, we need sort of online access, we need a vault, digital vault, all these things. The way we thought about it is, let’s really just first of all understand what our product is. What are we offering, then what is our process? How are we going to deliver that? What are the things we want to achieve? We took a cost up model and said, what’s the traditional advisor approach?

How do we break it down into its components and say, let’s build from the cost up standpoint. Then we said, now that we understand what this is, how do we build technology around that product and that process, and that really changed the game in terms of how you think about it. Most advisors, what they do is they go, there’s a couple things that we do, and I know I need some technology and again, the technology whack-a-mole, right? I have a problem with my investment reporting, so I go find Fintech that does investment reporting and then we have this, I forget the individual that was on your podcast a while back, instead of a tech stack, it becomes a tech pile. Then all of a sudden technology is actually not used to increase efficiency or productivity, it’s actually hindering your process because it’s not built to support everything that you do, your unique value proposition, that unique experience that you’re delivering to your clients to drive real engagement. It’s just a different way of thinking about utilizing technology.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Let’s talk more about the client experience. You’re leveraging technology that way to lower the internal costs. Let’s talk a little bit about what kind of an experience you offer clients, given some of the decisions that you’ve made about meeting virtually and leveraging technology that way. How would you contrast your approach to things versus how a traditional wealth management firm might approach servicing?

Brent Weiss:
Yeah, it’s a great point, Steven and I should clarify that I would say 80% of what we’re building now is really around the financial planner experience because that’s when you say a traditional advisor spends 15% to 20% of their time with clients. What we’re trying to do is say, how do you remove all of the things, the meeting prep, the wrap up, the research, how do you codify that in technology so that our planners can spend more time where it matters most, and that’s with our clients. Number one, I think that the key to our client experience is that human one-on-one relationship. If you look at the landscape, you have high net worth advisors, typically million plus portfolios giving that very high touch service. On the other end, you have digital solutions, robot advisors and there’s a gap in the middle.

We’ll call it the mass affluent marketplace. I don’t like the word or the phrase mass affluent, but advisors will understand that. Number one, the key is that, that human personal relationship, working with a dedicated CFP professional. Then from there, if we go back to this agile iterative financial planning experience, everything we build from the client side, you don’t log in and have a 30-page questionnaire that you have to complete, upload 50 documents. What we build is what we call our best next step. Our technology is designed around capturing the sort of just in time data to inform the financial planning process to make it easier, more seamless, and a better overall experience for our clients, and then focusing on the best next step they can take to improve their financial lives and ultimately empower them to achieve their goals.

Julie Littlechild:
Sorry, did you have another question on that, Steve because I was going to pivot a little into marketing?

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. When your planners are engaging with the clients and they’re going through that process, to what extent do you ask clients to load information into your system, or do they up upload documents a little bit at a time for the CFP to work with or put into the system? To what extent do you do ask the client to do some of that stuff to get into the system?

Brent Weiss:
It’s always a little bit of both. I mean, there is still a requirement to upload documents and there’s still an ask on clients sometimes to enter information. We have the typical data aggregation systems that scrapes that. We built our own sort of cashflow tool that our clients can use. We do require clients to, or ask them to upload documents as we go through the process, but again, we break it into sort of more actionable and achievable chunks, right? It’s this agile development process of a financial plan that is always changing, and so instead of again of you saying, “Hey Steve, I need you to upload your tax returns, your pay stubs, your estate planning, documents.” things that feel a bit overwhelming. We’ll say we want to start first with, you mentioned that you’re struggling with cashflow or maybe some debt, we’re going to focus on this.

Go into our platform, we have a financial life dashboard for our client that tracks their financial wellness, not just their assets or investible portfolio and say, link your accounts. We’ll get a cashflow summary. We’ll understand your debt and let’s tackle that first. Maybe the next meeting is if they’re having issues with, or they got a big tax refund, which is now coming due, right? We can then say upload a tax return. Let’s take a look at that, see what you have to withhold or adjusted withholdings, if that makes sense. It’s just an iterative approach to how we do it, but our system then takes all of that data and can actually provide recommendations to our financial planner in terms of what is that best next step for our client, what are some recommendations that it can make, and then we get to deliver that as CFPs back to our clients along the sort of client experience.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, really interesting stuff. I’d love if I could change gears a little and talk about attracting clients to the business. We’ve talked to about the experience, and in particular would love to think about this in terms of the ways that all of our listeners, irrespective of model, could really gain some insights in how best to grow the business. Can you tell us a little bit about Facet Wealth’s marketing plan, the different channels that you’re using and where you see the most success?

Brent Weiss:
Sure, absolutely. Julie, there’s some things that are unique to us as a firm that may not translate directly to a financial advisory practice, but we can tie it back in. There’s essentially three channels that we have for client acquisition. The first is we partner with financial advisors and RAs across the country to what we say responsibly transition, as you mentioned earlier, Julie, the smaller accounts, the accounts that are difficult to serve profitably for your firm, but as advisors, we care about our clients and we want to make sure that they’re in good hands. We can help advisors in that case build healthier, more profitable businesses. I think that the two things advisors are always looking for is more time in their day and growth, and a lot of times if you think about that maybe some of those clients who aren’t fitting your ideal client profile and profitable, that’s one area of growth as we transition those clients to Facet. We can talk more in that model, if you’re interested. The second thing is direct to consumer. We provide a lot of content, we create a lot of internal sort of videos and webinars.

We do lead generation. I think there’s a lot of… If you look at SmartAsset, that’s a company a lot of people are aware of, we do some lead gen for that specifically in our target market and the mass affluent households in this country really defining what I’ll say as a niche. I like the word community, right? Define your calls, find your community. That’s a great way of growth for us because there’s not a lot of individuals competing in that, I’ll say sub $500,000 space that can build a very profitable business and still provide that really amazing high quality client experience. The final piece is, which is really exciting for us is we have an employee benefit offering for financial wellness. We go and work with large organizations to provide financial education and financial coaching, which are one-on-one sessions with the CFP directly to employees as an employee benefit of the business. Then if employees say, this is really amazing. They want to sign up for financial planning, they can then opt in to work with one of our dedicated CFP professionals ongoing as a more traditional client, if you will of Facet.

Julie Littlechild:
If we tackle those latter two in particular, you said that you’ve got, it sounds like a really robust content strategy. What do you find is working these days and whether that is the focus and theme or topic, or whether it’s a video versus articles. What are you seeing?

Brent Weiss:
What I’ll try and do here, Julie is tied to the audience and financial advisors in terms of what is relevant. I think the first thing is financial advisors at the core are entrepreneurs. If you think about what an entrepreneur is, I defined it pretty simply. It’s sort of defining a problem that exists in a marketplace, or for people, providing a solution that solves that challenge and adds value and then you ultimately get paid for it. Our content strategy is really about understanding our consumers. Every time a client comes on board, I mean, I look at this daily, I track the data for all of our clients. I know the average age, I know the income, I know who’s coming on board, I know the trends that are changing. We know who our clients are, and that informs our content strategy. One thing we do know is that we have a lot of growth, which is really exciting within the age group or the ages of 25 to 40, right?

These are young professionals or early sort of mid-career families, and so we go, what content is going to make sense to them and let’s go develop it because it’s relevant and it’s meaningful, and they’re going to go, “Aha, I want to listen to that.” My carry over for financial advisors is really identifying who your client is, and this goes back to understanding your ideal client profile, what is your unique value proposition? Ask yourself one question, what one problem do I solve? What one challenge do I solve for my clients? Really understand what that is, and then creating content around that specifically, so that it becomes relevant. Again, find your calls, find your community, and then provide really meaningful content to them. For us, because we track this data internally, we know who’s really saying, “Gosh, I want to pay for financial planning. I don’t have a ton of money yet, but I know I need it. I want to build that foundation and grow wealth. Oh, there’s a company with a flat fee.” We’re telling stories for that community and advisors, I think can be much tighter around the kind of content that you’re creating for ultimately the people that they want to serve.

Steve Wershing:
Then how are those people finding that content? How are you getting that content in front of people so that they start following you and consuming it?

Brent Weiss:
I’m not the expert on that. We have a head of marketing here, Steve just full disclosure. I’m sort of the one of the heads of creating that content. I work with our CAPs. We have a really great media and PR company that helps us get out there and do interviews and be quoted in Wall Street journal and sort of Fortune and Fast Company, some really amazing places. We put some content out there. We have some really great distribution partners. We were just named NerdWallet’s 2020, I think it was online financial planning firm of the year. We do a lot of sort of co-content creation with NerdWallet. We have some other platforms as well where we are constantly producing it on other people’s platforms. I think the thing for us right now is leveraging other well-known reputable platforms where people are already going, right? You have hundreds of thousands, millions of unique viewers going to those sites every single month looking for content, and we’re using their platforms to sort of magnify the voice of Facet, right? It’s much harder to create your own platform. It takes more time. We went out and said, what are the platforms where people are already going, and then what’s our unique story on that platform that will drive people to Facet.

Steve Wershing:
Well, I think that’s a really great message to send out there because of course I’m a big fan and Julie, I believe is a big fan of content marketing, but the question is, how do people find it? I think really the good insight here is that you find other people who have big platforms and figure out a way to leverage an affiliation or some kind of relationship there so that you can get your name in an already existing large platform. I think that’s a really good point.

Brent Weiss:
Right. Then eventually, people then start knowing your voice and your platform, and then you can build your own. It’s not to say you can’t build it from day one, but leveraging existing voices to magnify yours is a really great way to start, and then over time you build your own and maybe after, I’m going to make up a timeframe, five or 10 years, you have a really amazing platform because it doesn’t happen overnight to amplify your own voice and your own medium, your own way. It’s been very successful for us and I think financial advisors could really benefit from that.

Julie Littlechild:
You also mentioned the employee benefit offering, can you tell us a little bit about how that comes about, how you make the offer?

Brent Weiss:
Yeah, absolutely. The interesting thing here is, if you go back, Julie and you look at just industry trends and research, the number one stressor in workplaces is money, it’s finances. As entrepreneurs, we said, what are the biggest challenges out there, and then how do we solve them? We said, we know that wellness is now a big topic for employers. They want to take great care of your people because if you do that, your people can be your greatest asset. We saw there’s a trend of wellness overall, the number one stressor is finance. Well, why don’t we put the two together, financial wellness in sort of iterative format, this agile thing. We started reaching out to companies and people we knew and said, “Hey, first of all, does this make sense?” The answer was, “Of course it does. We believe in that.” I said, “Well, what if we could offer this kind of solution?” It actually took us, I’d say only a month or two to really figure out the offering, but we didn’t know the answer at first, and so we talked to business owners and said, what’s your problem?

They said there is a financial stress issue and we said, “Okay, here’s what we think we can do to solve it.” We eventually worked with them to figure out a really amazing offering that provides online sort of do-it-yourself education portals combined with one-on-one coaching with a CFP via video conference that employers pay for it with the ability then sort of if you want to move on to ongoing longer term relationship with a dedicated CFP, you can do it. It was a really iterative way of doing it. The other way to think about it too is it really scales access to a marketplace. Instead of going, I’ll say hand-to-hand combat, cave to cave and trying to find one client at a time, we can go into an employer and they say, “Here’s 200, 500, 1000 employees that we want you sort of marketing to via this financial wellness platform.” It’s been a big win for us.

Steve Wershing:
Cave to cave, there’s an image. That’s very interesting spin on that. Of course, we’re a podcast all about referrals, what role does referral play in your business development strategy?

Brent Weiss:
The exciting thing is, and this is oddly enough something we didn’t do early enough. We get referrals, I’d say 15% to 20% of our clients are referring. I don’t know the numbers, but they are referring. We do NPS scores or net promoter scores to understand the sentiment of our clients. We have not had, historically, do not have a formal program around it. We are now going through the process of having a formal referral program for our clients. The way we think about it is, and Steve and Julie, I’ll love your input on this too, because this is what you do all day long. The whole idea, and this is actually I’ll share a story first from my previous company where we actually were thinking about how do we drive more referrals? We sent a survey out to our clients and said, “We’d love to know what you think we do for you.”

The amazing thing we got back is 80% of our clients couldn’t clearly articulate what we do for them, and so if you think about it, if you want to create your own brand ambassadors or advocates or evangelists, whatever you want to call them, and they can’t actually tell the world what you do, it’s going to be very difficult to refer people. We look at it as number one, let’s make sure we clearly help our clients understand what it is that we do, find the right points for, I’ll say introductions, not referrals. I think, Steve you said don’t ask for referrals. We think of it as looking for introductions to people that could benefit from the amazing experience that they’ve experienced already, and then they can make introductions seamlessly to us. We are building that out currently and incredibly excited because we have thousands of clients in all 50 states, and we believe that we’re delivering a different unique service model and we’re excited to see where that referral program goes.

Steve Wershing:
Well, I want to make sure that everybody listening hears that because you put your finger on a problem that many, if not most advisors have, which is their clients cannot articulate what the main value is. I think that was a very smart move, and you, who are listening, do what Brent did. Ask your clients how’d they describe what you do because you will learn really important things, and if you find that there’s any fuzziness about that, then that’s going to be one of the best ways of increasing referrals is to help clarify that. Thank you for mentioning that. That’s really brilliant.

Brent Weiss:
Of course. Just real quick, because I want to just on your end. I know you’re all about client engagement. The funny thing is when we were talking about our client experience, I went to our team and said, “Can we just forget about satisfaction for a minute, can we talk about engagement?” My team thought I was crazy. They’re going [crosstalk 00:33:31] to me and I go, here’s the thing. I know this from my previous company. My client might be satisfied with me. They go, I met with Brent today, that was great, but if they’re not engaged, if they’re not coming back and calling you or interact or go into your website or checking on their plan in an iterative way, you’re really missing out on an opportunity.

I said, “Let’s drive more engagement from our clients, get them coming back to us, get them coming back looking for that relevant advice that we’re generating.” Then all of a sudden you have an engaged client, and if they’re engaged, they’re thinking about you. You’re becoming part of their life, and then they get to share that story with somebody else because it changes the way they experience financial planning. It’s more about life planning than it is just about finance, and then they become an advocate, an evangelist and they will spread the word for you, which ultimately benefits you. I believe that comes through engagement first and yes, you have to satisfy them, right Julie? Engagement first, if they’re engaged, they’re engaged because they love what they’re getting from you, and that will go very far.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. I mean, satisfaction is ultimately a backward looking, not as a metric, but looking in a rear view mirror, kind of a measure of how you’ve done, and engagement is far more active. I think there’s so much data that we’re seeing increasingly about this role of being actively engaged with clients that changes the picture. In fact, I was going to also mention just from the data geeks perspective. You were talking about defining your value or being able to articulate your value and we see evidence in our investor research that when clients say that they can articulate the value their advisor provides, it’s actually quite strongly correlated with a deeper engagement and even higher confidence. There’s a quantitative connection there, not just quality.

Brent Weiss:
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more.

Steve Wershing:
Well, there’s a whole lot of other things that we’d love to talk about, but we are limited in time. One other thing I would like to touch on, and we were going to need to, unfortunately, to do this just briefly. One of the things you put out there on your website, you put out there when you all speak in public, and that is that you partner with other advisors essentially to service the smaller clients in their portfolio that may be taking a lot of their time. What actually are you putting out there and why would an advisor want to partner with another financial planning firm like yours?

Brent Weiss:
Well, great question because that’s what we get in the marketplace. To keep it brief, and by all means if anyone wants to talk after this, they can reach out to me. The bottom line is this, if you look at research in terms of the biggest challenges or opportunities that advisors face, they always say, I want to grow. Growth is number one, but actually that sort of switches number one and number two with time leverage and capacity for the time. If you look at it, it’s 80, 20 rule, right? 20% of your clients are generating 80% of your revenue, and so it’s one of those things that we go out there and say, what if we can help you actually give you back time and capacity in your business to focus on your ideal client to really deliver value. It’s going back to having a unique value proposition, a voice that you can share that other people can sing from the mountaintops to drive more referrals to you.

By the way, I know you care about these clients, but there’s a firm that exists now that was built for them and it can increase your profitability, the health, sustainability, give you time back in your day, allow you to grow, right? These are all things advisors go, “Holy cow, that makes a ton of sense.” We’re here as, what I’ll say as a responsible transition, because we’re going to care for the clients. They’re still going to get a dedicated CFP professional, high quality financial planning, all of those things, and we are, I always say, we are better together because we’re going to give the client potentially a better experience. We’re going to help the financial advisor sort of find their groove and get into the place where they can start driving better engagement satisfaction referrals, and improve the health and sustainability of the business. To us, it’s sort of a virtuous circle that really helps all parties involved.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:37:59] I can imagine a lot of advisors may have the objection that they signed on with me and I made a promise to them, and they’re going to feel abandoned. They’re going to feel like I’m getting rid of them because they’re not important enough or something like that. How do you respond to those kinds of concerns on the part of advisors and what’s your experience of how the clients actually experienced that kind of a transition?

Brent Weiss:
What I always say to advisors is number one, first of all, I understand. I’ve been an advisor myself. I’ve built those relationships and I care deeply about the clients that even we transitioned. Even my previous firm goes through that because it’s really about, the number one thing we care about is making sure that the client’s getting the best solution, right? When we talk to those advisors, any advisor will say, “Well, sometimes I really struggle to find time. I’m not spending as much time with my, if you do the ABC traditional segmentation, with my C clients compared to my A’s.” Other advisors see clients become our As. They get the TLC, the advice, the love that they really got into this for, and so we’re here to give them the time, the love, the financial planning love, if you will that they really deserve.

Advisors start to feel, “Okay, I get it. This is the best thing for the client.” Ultimately, what we do is we start small with advisors like, “Hey, let’s transition a few clients.” You’ll understand how the conversation goes, and then we want to share the feedback with you from the client. We’ve had clients who actually, unbeknownst to us, emailed their previous advisor and said, “I just want to thank you for introducing me to Facet Wealth. They’ve been fantastic and this really wasn’t my best interest and I’ve had an amazing experience.” As soon as we show an advisor that, which that’s the first hump you have to get over, they started to go, “You know what? That does make sense.” I deliver a really amazing experience to the right kind of families and let’s make sure that every single individual or family out there is getting that unique, valuable, relevant experience that they deserve.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s a great way to close that off. Brent, just for our listeners, if they want to connect with you or learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way to connect?

Brent Weiss:
You can find us just on our website, which is just www.facetwealth.com. There is actually an advisor page there, which will put you in touch with our team, or frankly because of a financial advisor and I love talking to other advisors that are helping families, you can email me directly. It’s just brent@facetwealth.com and I’ll say it’s Brent with an N, B-R-E-NT because I’ve had clients for 15 years and still call me Bret. To be clear on what that actual email address is, I’m not sure where bret@facetwealth.com would go, so make sure there’s an N in there when you send me an email.

Steve Wershing:
That’s great. Brent, thanks for joining us here. It’s a lot of really good information here, a lot of great tips and we really appreciate your joining us and sharing that with us.

Brent Weiss:
Well, it’s my pleasure. Again, I love the work that the two of you do in terms of helping advisors here. I hope this is valuable to the advisory community, so we can all go out there and change lives throughout this amazing thing we call financial planning.

Julie Littlechild:
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 becomingreferrable.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.