Jordan Haines shares his experiences from the recent XYPN Live conference, where he joined Reese Harper and Carl Richards to lead a four-hour session on accelerating the pace of financial advice. Jordan reflects on how the traditional financial planning process—often taking up to 10 hours per client—may not meet the needs of modern consumers seeking quicker, more accessible advice. He explores innovative ways advisors can expand their services beyond the conventional model, such as offering simplified coaching programs or financial wellness initiatives for employers. Jordan invites listeners to think differently about serving clients and to share their ideas on delivering valuable advice more efficiently. Tune in to discover how you can help more people by reimagining your approach to financial planning.

Transcript

Jordan Haines: Hello friends and welcome to another episode of L mentality. I’m Jordan Haynes, financial vitals expert here at elements and your host for today’s show. And I need to start by apologizing. I am sorry that we are. Publishing this episode a few days late. I have a reason. Maybe you could call it a bad excuse and that’s okay with me. 

We were X, Y P N live last week. That’s Y that’s X Y planning networks [00:01:00] conference that they do every year. This is our fourth year representing elements at the conference. And guys, can I tell you it is so much fun. This is one of my favorite conferences. The reason it is is three reasons. Number one, the advisors that go to this are so awesome. They’re forward-looking, they’re looking at. Uh, different ways to serve the modern consumer. 

They’re thinking about new services. They’re interested in talking to the vendors and the technology providers there because the technology providers and the, and the service providers that are at X, Y, P N are so interesting as well. They’re thinking about the modern consumer and how modern advisors think. 

And it’s just wonderful. And then also the team at X Y planning network, man, they’re so fun. They’re awesome. Um, so this is one of my favorite conferences we go to every year. This year was a little unique though. Um, we spent the morning on Tuesday morning doing a pre-conference four hour session for people now. 

Yes. You heard me, right. It was four hours. And honestly I’m surprised people stayed the whole time, but we had a very engaging session. Um, it was myself, Reese, Harper, Carl Richards, all talking about the topic of [00:02:00] accelerating, the pace of advice. Specifically taking the angle. Of looking to new services, new ways that we can serve clients to accelerate the pace of advice. You guys, if we look at the last, say, 50 years in the world of financial advice, The way that we serve clients, the way that we deliver advice has remained relatively unchanged for that period of time. Right. 

I mean, go look at the CFP board’s process and let me be clear. It’s not bad. I’m not disparaging the process. I’m saying that that might’ve worked really well for the consumer of the past. There are so many people right now that are asking for something different and not receiving that because many of us financial advisors are very dogmatic in the way that we deliver financial advice. We don’t have to dive into that process, but there’s a lot of stats to prove this. Right. 

So Kitsis research does, I think every other year. And you guys hear me reference this all the time, but the average time it takes to deliver a financial plan. Guys is 10 hours. 10 hours, four of those hours are in financial planning software. Now that is fantastic and wonderful. [00:03:00] If you’re delivering a premium service, I always think of a Matt Jarvis, right. 

He talks about building the Ritz Carlton of financial advice. Now. That I think is a perfect opportunity to spend 10 hours and maybe even 20 hours servicing a client in their first year. But if someone doesn’t want to go to the Ritz Carlton, if you’re like me and you like your motel six, because you get a continental breakfast with the guys. 

My favorite thing is hotel waffles. They’re a delicacy. You only get them at the hotel. I never found them anywhere else. And for some reason they just are so good. They hit so well. But if you’re like me and you want motel six and not. Ritz Carlton. Well, what’s available for you. And in our industry, really what we have is we have this full service, wealth management, financial planning option that takes multiple hours and a premium quality of service. 

And that’s wonderful. I want to be clear, it’s a fantastic service and many of us are going to continue doing that thing. But then on the other hand, we’ve said, okay, well to serve those people, we’re going to create robo-advisors, we’re going to create technology to just self serve them. And I think that’s fine, but it’s also missing the [00:04:00] human element. 

There’s somewhere. In-between. Somewhere in between where consumers want to arrive. And we’ve received a lot of proof that people want this. In particular. We’ve worked with a number of advisors to build out a coaching service. Um, specifically for employers. Mean. They are selling. Uh, an employee, an employer sponsored. Uh, financial wellness program to an employer. At a tack on, onto the 401k. So let’s say for example, and we’ve talked to quite a few employers and got some really interesting feedback from them. But one of the employers that we were talking to works in the steel manufacturing industry. He has about 800 employees, let’s say, um, I think it might have somewhere around there. 

800 employees. We’ll just throw that out as a, an assumption 800 employees. And when we talked to this employer, And we say, what do you want? And we start ringing off, you know, financial literacy and education. What we find out from the employers. Hey, you know, our people just want to talk to someone that’s it. They just want to talk to someone about their finances. 

They want to know how they’re [00:05:00] doing. They just want to be oriented to their situation. Now they don’t use it in that, in those exact terms, but there’s a lot of questions. Like my people just want to know how, how they’re doing and they just want someone to talk to. Can you just offer that? And what we found is that if we simplified that program, we could just offer a program in which there wasn’t an annual review meeting. 

There wasn’t progress reporting. It was all it was, was using elements. To then talk to people and that’s it. That’s all it was. Now, I’m not sharing this as the way of the future, more or less, I’m sharing this as a way for us to expand our thinking a little bit, to think there are people out there that want something different than what we have to offer. 

It’s not going to look the same as the traditional financial planning process, and that’s not bad. In fact, many financial advisors that I talk to sometimes look at that and they think that that’s not valuable. Why would I do that? Right. I need to be very, very prescriptive. I need to look at the entire comprehensive financial picture. I need to spend hours of analysis time, making sure that I understand all the chronic issues to his client so we can address them. And because of that, we’re leaving people that might have one or two [00:06:00] acute pains that might not be the most important thing. But are so valuable to them. And if we can somehow expand our thinking and think of new ways to create service, to help them. I think as we’re going to have some amazing services out there. So my invitation to you all, and over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to talk about some of these unique services. 

You’ll hear me spend a lot of time here, but if you’re thinking of new ideas, new ways to serve clients, if you’ve heard of a different way to serve clients, I would love for you to let me know. There’s a couple ways you can do that. Reach out to us, reach out to me specifically on LinkedIn. It’s Jordan Haynes, H a I N E S. 

Not like the underwear. Just add an I. And then, um, or you can send an email podcast@getelements.com that’s G E T elements.com podcast@getelements.com. Um, Um, reach out to us. I want to hear about it. We’ll highlight it on the show. We’ll talk about it. There are so many unique ways to serve clients that are beyond this traditional financial planning process that takes hours of work. 

And I think guys, if we dive into there, if we explore these new topics, we are going to be able to [00:07:00] help so many more people and accelerate the pace of advice. Without everyone. We’ll see you on Thursday. See you later.