InTandem on How One Firm Experienced Unprecedented Growth During the Pandemic

Show Timeline:
06:17 How the Entrepreneurial Operating System helps create process for every aspect of your business
09:08 Initiating a deeper relationship with your clients to move from client experience to engagement
13:44 Looking for gaps in client relationships in order to connect on a deeper level
18:04 How endorsements over referrals are your key to growth
20:31 Ideas on fostering endorsements and building your network virtually
27:01 Ways to respond to prospects that will bring comfort
30:06 Providing clients with ‘guide rails’ to leverage technology
32:25 Importance of continuing to push initiatives forward and ensuring you don’t stop doing what works

Links:
Website:            https://intandemfinancial.nm.com/ 
LinkedIn:          https://www.linkedin.com/company/intandem-financial/about/

Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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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. 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.

Steve Wershing:
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.

Steve Wershing:
Traci, Jay, and Matt, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast! We’re really happy to have you.

Matt Krise:
Thanks for having us.

Traci Keiffer:
Thanks for having us.

Jay Broeg:
Yeah, thank you.

Steve Wershing:
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?

Traci Keiffer:
Jay, Why don’t you go ahead and field that question for us?

Jay Broeg:
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.

Jay Broeg:
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?

Jay Broeg:
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.

Jay Broeg:
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.

Steve Wershing:
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?

Jay Broeg:
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.

Steve Wershing:
That’s the same sort of structure, same thinking as in the book Traction, right?

Julie Littlechild:
Same group. Yeah. I know this because I just went through it last time.

Steve Wershing:
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?

Jay Broeg:
Matt, you want to jumped in?

Matt Krise:
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.