Advisers should spend less time with most of their clients

I have a new client facing a common challenge. The firm has over $2.5 million in revenue, but the founder is feeling overwhelmed and unable to successfully scale the business any further.

I asked some questions about the firm’s client service model. Did they have defined levels of service? Did everyone on the team know which clients received which services, and how? And, perhaps the most critical, did they spend as much time as they would like with their top clients?

The answer for this client to the last question was no. So I asked him to consider holding a new kind of client event, one that more accurately reflects the service the firm is delivering.

“For your next client event,” I said, “identify your top clients and place a gold star on their name badges. On the night of the event, sit one top client at each table among the rest of your clients. When you get up to the podium to thank everyone for coming, tell the attending clients that instead of thanking you, they should find the person at their table with a gold star, and thank them instead. After all, they are the ones subsidizing your relationship with our firm.”

When I offer this suggestion in my presentations at industry events, the response is inevitably: “No, we wouldn’t say that, because that would be awful client service.” Then: “Oh wait, that’s kind of what we’re doing now. Well, we don’t feel good about that.”

(Stephanie Bogan video: The first thing you need to do to change the outcome you achieve)

To offer a sustainable solution for the firm, we need to go beyond the typical “what’s happening here?” and become more conscious of “what’s happening, really.” The firm’s advisers were so busy serving all their clients that they lacked more time to spend with their best clients. Again, this response describes a symptom, yet fails to identify the real problem: There are no rules of the road.

The firm says yes to client requests and needs, whether they are in scope or not, because the firm has never set a standard.

Like most advisers, the founder does not know how to say no or charge for additional services. The adviser believes he is serving his clients, but is doing so in a way that isn’t fair to the clients or viable for the firm.

The adviser isn’t saying yes to every request because there is a business case for it. What’s really happening is the adviser has spent decades avoiding the possibility of confrontation, disapproval or rejection by a client through the simple, unexamined strategy of saying yes without boundaries.

(Stephanie Bogan: Time to change the conversation on fees, referrals)

Sadly, not only do many advisers operate with this mindset, they do so under the guise of excellent client service.

Every adviser I’ve ever discussed this with explains to me how caring and right it is to take the call, check the email or allow the interruption. Not once in 20 years has even one adviser acknowledged that one client’s work is being set aside in order to serve the next.

What’s really happening is a lack of self-worth, self-perceived value and confidence to take back control of their time. The mindsets you bring to your practice determine how successful that practice will be.

New learnings from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral psychology show that this outcome wasn’t intentional, and in fact happened unconsciously. The adviser’s mindset has been driving the car while he sat in the passenger seat looking out the window for 15 years. His autopilot was engaged until he woke up one day and realized he didn’t really like the view and would like to be on a different route.

Once you understand the business of your brain, and learn how to master your mindset, you’re able to lean in in ways you never have before.

Stephanie Bogan is the CEO of Educe Inc. and has spent 20 years helping advisers unleash their potential to build successful firms and lives they love. Contact her at [email protected].​