Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Matt Krise
Jay Broeg
Traci Keiffer
Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Matt Krise: Traci Keiffer: Jay Broeg: Steve Wershing: Traci Keiffer: Jay Broeg: Jay Broeg: Jay Broeg: Jay Broeg: Steve Wershing: Jay Broeg: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Jay Broeg: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Matt Krise: Traci Keiffer: Julie Littlechild: Traci Keiffer: Traci Keiffer: Traci Keiffer: Traci Keiffer: Julie Littlechild: Traci Keiffer: Julie Littlechild: Traci Keiffer: Julie Littlechild: Traci Keiffer: Steve Wershing: Jay Broeg: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Jay Broeg: Jay Broeg: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Jay Broeg: Traci Keiffer: Julie Littlechild: Traci Keiffer: Steve Wershing: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Steve Wershing: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Jay Broeg: Jay Broeg: Julie Littlechild: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Matt Krise: Matt Krise: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Matt Krise: Traci Keiffer: Matt Krise: Jay Broeg: Julie Littlechild:
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. Before 2020, referrals arose principally from personal contact. Most firms we know had challenges when clients were distant from the office and conducting their relationships virtually; like when a client would move out of town, but maintain the relationship with their current advisor. So the pandemic presented potentially significant obstacles to getting introduced to new clients. That’s why a conversation with one firm intrigued us. Jay Broeg and Matt Krise were independent agents with Northwestern Mutual Life. They decided to get together and merge their firms in 2019 to become InTandem Financial. And in that same year, they committed to a specific initiative to focus on and improve client service. The result was that even though we had a pandemic, they had their best year ever. More new clients, more referrals, even though they could not get together in person and their clients could not see their friends and acquaintances in person.
On this episode, Jay, Matt, and Traci Keiffer, their Director of Client Relations and Marketing, tell us about the genesis of that project: what kinds of steps they took to elevate their client service and when and how they started seeing results. We discovered that their initiative was fairly straight forward. And while there was nothing really magic in the formula, most firms don’t consciously undertake a project like this. But if they did, they would likely see improvements similar to what InTandem experienced. So here now is our conversation with Jay Broeg, Matt Krise, and Traci Keiffer.
Traci, Jay, and Matt, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast! We’re really happy to have you.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
So we have a relationship, and we were talking a little bit and the catching up, and Traci, you had mentioned to me that 2020 was your best year ever for business and for new client acquisition, so that fascinated me. I’ve heard it from some advisors, but you were really emphatic about it. And so I wanted to dig down into that and the conversation. It made me realize we really need to share this with our listeners. So, can you tell us a little bit about what 2020 was like for you?
Jay, Why don’t you go ahead and field that question for us?
Yeah, sure, absolutely. So Steve, Julie, thank you. And I would say that 2020 is really… We laid the groundwork years in advance. I’ll take a step back and say back in 2018, Matt and I had separate financial practices, and we decided we wanted to bring those two practices together to create what’s called an ensemble inside Northwestern Mutual. And we decided to hire an executive coach; his name is Mitch York with ClientWise. And Mitch really just helped us think through a lot, Northwestern Mutual helped. They took us out to Milwaukee and helped us think through all the different parameters of doing this. But I would say during that time of executive coaching, we were reading a lot of books, and one of them was EOS.
So EOS is basically like a software for your phone, right? For small businesses and teaches you how to run a small business and “What are the processes? What’s the vision? What are your values? How do you have meetings? How do you put people in the right seat?” So 2018, 2019, we’re really just laying the groundwork, preparing us for 2020 and 2020 just happened to be our best year I think, simply because we put in the hard work. And we did a lot of coaching. We hired a marketing firm, and this was… I owe all this to Traci. She brought it to Matt and I, and she said “Hey, I was listening to Marie Swift. She gave this webinar called “When It’s Time to Hire a Marketing Firm.” And for us, that became “Okay, we need to do this.” Right?
And so we interviewed three local marketing firms, and picked one, and they helped us create a logo and a brand and put together a brand book, and they surveyed our clients and did a lot of work, and it was just really good insight to help Matt and I bring our practice together to create InTandem Financial. And what Matt and I wanted was we wanted to be able to cast a vision for our team because we had two separate practices to, “How can we be rowing together? How can we…” You know, we created the name InTandem Financial because we all wanted to be rowing in the same direction, and that was really great.
I remember there was a time where Matt and I were casting the vision. We basically told our two teams like, “Hey, we got to burn the boats. We’re not looking back, we’re moving forward.” So it was just really a lot of time of preparation. And then when the pandemic hit, it was probably 20, 30% drop in the stock market. And so clients were anxious. And so Matt and I were reaching out to them, being proactive. And then one specific initiative that I would say, Traci, if you want to talk more about this, was we really looked at, in 2019, looking at our top clients that are really engaged in financial planning with us. And we’re just trying to think through how do we deepen the relationship? And that really led to, Steve, a 2020 that was just our best year ever.
So let’s go back a little bit and you’d made reference to EOS. So for the listeners who don’t know what that is, can you tell us about EOS?
Sure. Yeah. It’s Entrepreneurial Operating System, and EOS is a book that was very helpful. There’s EOS implementers, which are people who basically help small business owners walk through that book and the process of implementing EOS. Matt and I just did it by reading the book and using Mitch as a coach. And we also have a friend that’s local, Brian White, who’s an EOS implementer, but that that’s really what it is, is just going through the book, and helping you think through every part of your business and put a process to it. And absolutely recommend it to anyone.
That’s the same sort of structure, same thinking as in the book Traction, right?
Same group. Yeah. I know this because I just went through it last time.
Oh okay, well there you go. And so can you tell us what the pieces of EOS are with the sort of the steps of it are? Matt, do you want to take that one?
Matt, you want to jumped in?
Yeah, I think one of the things that has really helped us is processing everything. So whether it’s an agenda for a client meeting, or whether it’s an annual review, we have a very similar process for each one of those components to our practice, which might seem like it’s a little mundane, but when you go into a client meeting and you know “Okay, I know the last time I talked to them, there’s going to be a note about what we spoke about. I know that their ages, their kids’ ages, where their kids go to school, the last vacation they’ve been on, whether they took our recommendations to update their estate planning documents.” All that’s going to be on a one-page document that, if I have two hours to look at it before the client meeting, or I have two minutes before the client meeting, I know everything is going to be there, recapping what happened last time we spoke, and over the last two years.
So our team has really embraced processing those types of agendas, client meetings, which is allowing us to continue to deepen the relationship with the client, and avoid those missteps when we have to backtrack on what happened six months ago, or all those conversations that we should be aware of from in the past.
It’s interesting that the first place you went when we talked about growth was really structure and process and how easy it is to forget that that’s the foundation, right? It seems like you’d agree. You need to be prepared for the growth. I’m going to let it happen. You also mentioned an initiative of deepening relationships. Can you talk to us a bit about that?
Yeah. Traci, why don’t you take that? Because that was really your…
Sure. Basically Julie, I had watched a webinar of yours.
Oh, good for me.
Yes! Good for you! Prior to 20, and so that was part of our 2019 initiative was really, really looking at our processes and making sure that we were looking at it through the eyes of our clients. And you gave a really fabulous graph that talked about moving from client experience into engagement and really looking at everything that we were doing. How does this make the client feel? What might they be thinking at this time? What obstacles? So after we had worked through that, and then also done seven major client events in 2019, and three of those were really large events, one as a brand launch, one in collaboration with two of our professional partners; a CPA firm, and also a law firm, to bring together clients and prospects. People that we felt like would be mutually beneficial for all of us to know, we were intentional about building a community around our brand.
And then we wrapped up 2019 with a huge event to have all of our clients be included. We rented a movie theater, and that was just so fun to have our clients come in, their families be there too. But as we planned for 2020, we realized that we had spent a lot of time and emphasis in 2019 building our brand and where we really wanted to move in 20 was to put an emphasis on building relationships. And that really takes quality time. And it takes an intentional. You have to be really intentional about doing that.
So again, a webinars just happened to pop up about that time. And I think it was Michael Kitces actually, who did an interview with Matt Oxley, talking about really putting structure toward building client relationships, by creating a relationship building calendar. And so we spent the fourth quarter of 2019 and we identified who are the client relationships in the firm where it would have the most impact on the firm if we lost those people. If they left and we had to make up those assets under management, like with those, those relationships, we knew that we wanted to keep.
So we made a spreadsheet and we put those clients’ names on them. And then we brainstormed out what’s everything that we know about them, about their family, about their interests, what are things that they love to do? And what do we need to know that we’re lacking that prevents us from being able to go deeper with them? So to make this really practical, Jay has a physician client, and we work with him all the time and have done deep planning with him, but his wife hasn’t been engaged in the process. And so as we looked at that client relationship, that became our strategic goal for 2020 for that client, was to build a relationship with his wife. And we knew that they love baseball. So that became our goal. We got the calendar out. We targeted the month of May for Jay to set time to take them to a baseball game. And we went through strategically with each one of those clients and set goals. What are we missing? What do we want to know about them?
So that’s a big undertake, I mean you’re talking about now, right down to the client level, individual strategies. And sort of ballpark, how many clients did you think about in this way, versus your other sort of one to many types of communications?
I would say we probably isolated the top 40 relationships.
That is still a lot, right?
It is still a lot.
Yeah. And what was that process like? You sat around the boardroom table, you pulled it out, who was involved in that conversation, and did that cause you to start gathering information on other clients differently? Because it looks like you were looking for the gaps in those relationships in a way.
Yes, and I think one of the tools that makes that helpful, we did sit around the boardroom and we found that to be a little tedious. So we broke the lists down into the clients where Jay’s the primary relationship manager… Or Jay or Matt. And then they actually did case notes. So they just did a Copytalk, Did a case note and talked out everything. And then we maximize our CRM process and went back in. If there were fields available in our database, we filled those. And if not, then we have this little sticky note description box and we just brain dumped all of that information in so that every single person on our team, when they pull up that client record, knows all these little details about our clients.
So what were the… once you did that and you identified specific things that you want to do more deeply with individual clients, how were those interactions different? How was a meeting with them different after you initiated this than before?
I’ll step in here Steve. I would say that it just helped us to connect with them on a deeper level. People always want to be pursued, and we were proactively pursuing them, to get to know them, to deepen that relationship. And we deal with a lot of data and a lot of information and a lot of things about their money and their finances. But people also want to build a relationship. They want to know their financial advisor, they want to… Yeah. To know that someone cares and is helping them with their finances and this crazy thing we call life, but that they truly do want to deepen the relationship, that they care and we’re building levels of trust. So I would just say it came down to just getting to know our clients more intimately and getting to know them the better.
I was just going to say that we recognized a couple of years ago, just through some website analytics that when someone was visiting our website, the number one thing that they were doing was visiting our team picture page. And it wasn’t, I guess, super surprising to us because our marketing firm had said “Your number one biggest priority is to spend money on photos because your prospects and your clients want to know who you are.” So we tried to update our bios with things that were less about our professional expertise. While that’s obviously pretty important, I do believe that clients want to know that they can enjoy spending time with you, and that they’re not going to feel like you’re a robot just sitting there doing some analytics on a software program and cranking out financial plans. So we’ve twisted that in a way and just saying, “Well, if clients are really… And prospects are really wanting to know more about who we are, then how do we get to know them and let them know us better?
And a great example of that would be… I played golf this morning with a client. We had been trying to do his annual review for about six months and he hadn’t scheduled an annual review. I called him and asked him if he wanted to play golf, and it took about two minutes until he was like, sure. And he said, “Now we can talk about my accounts while we’re playing.” And honestly, we talked maybe for five minutes about his accounts while we were playing golf. But I learned things about him today that I had never known. He learned things about me, and I really feel like that type of relationship building was a lot more valuable than me telling him he had X percent rate of return last year because he knows me now. He knows a little bit more about how I operate, he knows more about my family. Just a much deeper relationship than we would ever had in a conference room.
It sounds like it’s allowing you to go deeper into these relationships. It’s presumably driving deeper engagement. But how do you think all of this then connected to it being your best year ever? I mean, where did the growth come from in all of this?
Yeah, I would say one of the things that we started talking about two years ago when we merged our practices together was the idea of not trying to get referrals, but trying to get endorsements. We’ve been brought up in an insurance company mentality of: you have a meeting, you ask for referrals. Typically, that’s an awkward conversation with somebody. They’re trying to think of who’s going to be able to talk to you that they’re not going to offend. Right? And we just thought that’s not really how we want to grow our practice.
We’re at a point now, both Jay and I are about 15 years into our career, that we really wanted to get endorsed by our clients. We want them to tell other people, “You should talk to Jay and Matt.” And I think by us building a relationship with our client, the client knows so much more about us and our firm, that they can feel really confident saying, “You should really talk to Jay, you should really talk to Matt. I understand the way they’re doing planning. I know them, I know what makes them tick.” And we’ve seen that.
I mean, we’ve been… This last year in 2020, we had referrals to our better clients to their family members, to their coworkers, to professional acquaintances that they have even outside of those attorney CPA referrals, we’re getting family members telling other family members “You should talk to InTandem Financial.” And colleagues saying, “You should really, these guys can help you out.” And they’ve been endorsed already, so when they give us a call or when we talk to them, there’s really not a lot of convincing of our capabilities. It’s more of trying to see if we’re a good fit for them and if they’re a good fit for us.
Yeah. So I was interested in finding out about that because I understand how getting more deeply engaged with clients will help make you more referable and have them talking about you, but in this year, when we couldn’t physically get together with each other, how did you find that that clients were finding the opportunities to refer?
You said one was family members. So of course we’re still talking to family members. How else did it come up with, for example, colleagues and other advisors and things?
Yeah. So I’ll step in here, Steven, take that one. I don’t know that there is a specific way that I can think of it to say “Okay, this is exactly what happened.” We just got to endorsement the other day where some clients that we had done some planning for, their friends contacted me and just said, “Hey, they said, great things about you and…” They’re contacting us. So getting back to the shutdown and the pandemic and how do we get endorsements? I would say it was a lot of that groundwork, that foundation that we laid. It just naturally was coming up and we were getting these endorsements and someone would email us or call us and say, “Hey, I want to schedule a time with you and talk to you.”
The only other thing I could say that we could point to maybe was, we re we really pivoted to social media, and we did go after that and say, “Okay, well because we can’t have these client events, because we’re not out mingling with people and having drinks and talking and making connections, what can we do?” So we decided to create a interview called Going Further Together, which is our tagline at InTandem Financial. And we decided to interview small business owners in our area and just give them a platform to say, “How are you doing? What’s going on? How’s the pandemic in your world?” And just take really good photos and to put that up with what they’re telling us. And so we turned into basically like exactly what we’re doing here, which is being able to let them tell their story. And so I think that has been huge for us in creating a bigger social media presence when we weren’t able to get together in person.
We’ll get back to the show in just a moment, but I wanted to make you an offer in the meantime. This is Steve Wershing from Becoming Referable. You know, with everything that’s changed over the past year, your clients’ needs and priorities have changed as well. How has their outlook changed? Their goals? What do they think of what you’ve done well during this trying time, and what can be improved? A virtual client advisory board will give you those insights and more. Our proprietary system will teach you who to invite to your board, how to invite them, the best questions to put on the agenda. We’ll facilitate the meeting and give you five deliverables. Just send me a note, Steve@TheClientDrivenPractice.com and put CAB that’s CAB in the subject line, and I’ll send you my free report. That’s seven tips on making your virtual client advisory board a success. Ask us about our virtual wine tastings too send me a note at Steve@TheClientDrivenPractice.com and put CAB in the subject line.
Interesting idea, because if you just tease that apart a little, right, you’re endorsing certain businesses by getting it out there, which I assume they appreciate. You’re telling people that you work with small business owners, right. That you support them. And you’re telling everybody that you understand the problems that are going on. So it’s just interesting how a single initiative like that can really do all of those kinds of things. Did you go into it with that kind of intentionality as you thought about it and are small business owners your sweet spot? Or is that just a key focus for you?
Yeah, we, we definitely target and work well with small businesses. So one of the things that was an unintended consequence that we thought was going to happen, but we weren’t a hundred percent sure as we were getting people telling us when we saw them or talk to them is, “Oh, I didn’t know you worked with so-and-so.” And the secret behind all of it is, we probably didn’t work with 75% of the businesses that we highlighted. But there was an association with… Well, if you’re allowing them to post on your social media pages, then you guys must have some relationship.
And the relationship was more just friendly, but it built this huge network of people that we were telling stories for, and it allowed our clients and our prospects to see, “Wow, they’re really, they’re really well connected. They do a lot of different types of businesses.” We were featuring restaurants, we were featuring companies that had debt that weren’t essential or that were completely shut down and talking about how they pivoted and were creative with things. So, it was specific to small businesses, but some of the consequences of it were much bigger than we thought would ever be.
And can you just tell us just the detail of that? So people thinking about it, was it video, where did you post, how did you go about the specifics of that?
Traci, you want to take that?
Sure. We create a list of questions, maybe some information that we think would be helpful to know, and then usually Jay or Matt or Minta have conducted those interviews. And they really just have a conversation, just like we’re doing right now to find out what those businesses, what their challenges are, how they are leading in the community. And we’re just so inspired by the initiative that people have taken to pivot and to… We just wanted to keep it positive. It was great to put out success stories at a time when so many people are struggling, and then we’ve put it out just on our social pages, we’re on Facebook and also on LinkedIn, and then we will turn that into a blog as well, that will be posted, and it allows us to keep those stories out there.
Starting to think that just basic curiosity is one of the best marketing strategies there.
Absolutely.
Exactly. And so what did you find people were calling you about? When one of your clients would introduce you, endorse you to somebody or somebody was responding to one of these interviews of a business owner, what kinds of things were they wanting to talk with you about?
Yeah. So last year, it might be overtly obvious, but everybody wanted to talk about what the market was going to do, how it was going to react.
And you had those answers.
I was just going to say like…
And you tell them exactly what was going to happen, which is… That’s awesome!
Well, that would explain the increase in business.
Just wait until July, and it’s all going to come right back. So I think we were very honest with our clients. Like, we have no idea what’s going to happen. Here’s what we think could happen. And we’ve also been very honest this year to tell them it didn’t happen the way we thought it would. It happened a lot quicker when the market rebound. People that were calling us, honestly, probably the biggest concern for the clients that we engaged last year was how does this impact my long-term financial plans?
And because what we have done for the last probably 10 years of our career has been to focus on a financial plan for every client and how does what we’re doing for them fit into their overall financial plan, those are really easy conversations to have with people that were calling us saying, “I’m not sure I’m on track for retirement anymore. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the amount of risk I have in my portfolio.” So it’s really just… I don’t mean this in a negative way, but there was a lot of insecurity out there last year with just a getting punched in the gut and saying, “Am I going to be able to withstand this? If this happens again between now, and when I retire, should I be doing this on my own? Or should I be engaging an advisor?” And we’ve got some different opportunities from a fee-based planning model to software that allows us to do financial planning; no different than most other firms, but it allowed us to be able to answer those questions for those prospects in a way that helped them answer those questions.
And so most of the people who are calling you were do-it-yourself-ers? And finally realizing maybe I should get some help on this?
I wish that was the case.
Oh, there’s still a lot of do-it-yourself-ers. What we’d found in the last couple of years is that we have to be nimble enough and agile enough to offer a service or a value ad to those people who want to continue to do things on their own. So those who want to continue to manage their own assets, still need a financial plan. And that’s where we were able to step in and say, “If your desire is to manage your own assets, go for it. We can provide you some guardrails. We can tell you that here’s where headed. And these are the things you may want to stay away from. And this is where you’re going to be at, if you likely do these things.” Which has been huge, and Jay can probably speak a lot more to the fee-based planning side of things, but we do feel like that is an area where we’re getting a lot of endorsements from our clients to say, “You should really talk to these folks about your financial plan.” More so than them managing your assets or putting a life insurance policy in place.
Is that just a sign of the times you think, or is this a mindset shift that we’re seeing?
Yeah, I’ll hop in there. I would say Julie, you’re right on track. It is a sign of the times. It’s there’s a lot changing in our industry, and in our world and technology is speeding everything up. People have access to the stock market on their phones and they can make trades and zero commission and all of this. And so that came up with Robin Hood and some recent stocks that went crazy and then came back down to Earth. But it’s just something where people have access to a lot of technology and a lot of information, but they’re looking for guidance.
Like Matt said, we’re giving them those guide rails where they’re cruising through life and that they need someone to give them a roadmap to say “I’ve got all this information at my hands and on my fingertips and I can make trades, and I can do all of this, but how am I doing with my debt? And can I build up my emergency fund? And how much do I need to be putting away for retirement? And what happens if I die or become disabled? And what about my estate planning and my wills and all these other…” So there’s so many things that they can’t tackle all of them. And even though there’s a lot of good stuff out there and do-it-yourself-ers, they’re still really wanting to pay for advice and get some guidance and get a roadmap and get a financial plan and recommendations. So, yeah. I would say that’s a sign of the times.
So it sounds like you got the foundation in place through EOS, you went deep with your existing clients, kind of shored those relationships up and then thought about what’s now expanding and growing. So none of those things are just one and done. What are the big priorities for you now, as you think about making sure that next year is also your best year ever?
One of the things that we’ve continued to talk about is not stopping something that we know is a good process.
Well, there’s an idea. No I haven’t thought about that.
Well that’s so different than most advisors, like me. You know, it worked so well I stopped doing it. Again, They’re, they’re probably going to require you to pay something for this, but the Stephen and Kevin Show did a thing one time about CPA referrals and why so many advisors struggled to get CPA referrals. And they said, it’s because you ask one time and wait for the referrals and it never happens. Right? So we recognize, we’ve talked about it a little bit here, but with social media, if you make one post and just say, “Okay, that’s going to be the post that’s going to… Every physician in town is going to want to hear more about that.” Then it would be of no value. Social media would be… That’s how everybody would do business, but I feel like we’ve recognized in 2020, then order for us to continue to push forward with some of these initiatives that we have to have a long runway. That just doing a social media campaign for a month is never going to work.
You might get the anomaly where somebody will call you and say, “Hey, I saw that post. I really want anyone to have to talk to you, but if you keep dripping it for twice a week for years, then it’s going to start to gain traction, and it’s going to start to gain followers, and it’s going to become something that people want to be involved with.” So, maybe not completely answering your question, but we’re going to try to not stop the things that we started, because we’ve been having some success. They become a priority.
It’s a real answer. I think that’s the best answer. Yeah, that’s right. Well, this is so great to hear. I love hearing stories of people that have succeeded over the last year, but it’s interesting as you went back right, and talked about what was in place before that. And I think that’s really the big lesson for a lot of people. It’s not magic, it turns out. Sorry, listeners. There’s hard work to be done. But thank you so much for your time. It was a real pleasure talking to you today.
Thank you all for joining us.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
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.