THIS BUSINESS SHOULD BE FUN. we’re helping people achieve their goals!…

You know, serving clients as a financialadvisor used to be fun.

So let’s talk a minute about the client experience and

making it a little bit more enjoyable for you and for

your clients. So my name is Mark. A little

I want to tell you something that should be obvious. And I think

when I go through this with you, it’ll be quite obvious that

when we started out in the business, we got into this business of

helping clients coordinate their financial affairs.

For some reason, that motivated you. For me, I wanted to make a

difference in the clients lives. But in the end, I thought,

wow, this should be fun with the clients.

I mean, we’re talking about their goals after all. I mean,

these should be the things that when they sit down with me, they’re thinking

ahead 10, 20, 30 years, and they’re envisioning this ideal life

that they’ve got pictured in their mind. And what am I doing?

I’m helping create a plan to get them from where they are now

to that ideal life. Now. When I started out

in the business in my young,

didn’t start out that way. I started out purely

on the investment management side. I worked for a Wall street based firm

and it was all sort of a stockbroker model for many,

many years. And then I shifted.

So about 25 years ago, I shifted away from

just doing investment management for clients to

what I would describe as truly comprehensive financial

services. And that means creating a financial strategy

to get the client to their objectives. I thought,

hey, this will be more fun than the dreary investments

and everything. And it’s true.

The conversation changed dramatically. I stopped talking

about alphas and betas and modern portfolio

theory and all the technical stuff. I just ditched all that completely.

And we started talking about their objectives,

and what do they aspire? I asked them to paint me a picture of

their ideal life. You get the picture. We’re talking about their goals.

It’s exciting, and it should still

be fun. My question to you is, is it?

I woke up one day and all of a sudden it wasn’t as fun anymore.

And the business had sort of taken over in the day to

day drudgery of just putting out fires

and client service issues, and it just wasn’t

as fun. And what I’m talking about is changing your attitude.

I realized that it’s all in my head. I get to

choose whether I come into each day approaching

this business as, hey, this should be fun. And, oh,

by the way, it’s my responsibility to make this

fun for my clients. And I

just want you to say that out loud. I want you to admit

to yourself whether you’ve kind of allowed the business to get a little bit more

dreary and therefore kind of routine and perfunctory,

and you just get up every day and put 1ft in front of the other.

Or are you literally creating

a client experience? So from the moment the

client walks through your door to the minute they

leave after a client progress meeting,

they are enthralled the whole time in

the meeting. You’ve established the entire meeting

so that your client will walk out

the door with an overwhelming sense of progress

that they’re making progress towards the objectives they’ve shared with you

and with a smile on their face that this was a fun

hour that they spent with you, so that they always

look forward to it. So I would just

encourage you to make sure that meetings are enjoyable

and if you need to redesign it, and we’ve

got some ideas to help you with that. But I hope this helps

and I wish you all the best in creating an extraordinary client

experience.