Jordan explains how financial advisors can implement a monthly service calendar to proactively monitor and communicate with clients about their financial health. ⁠The episode breaks down a three-step process – verify, assess, and report – that advisors can use to efficiently review and provide feedback on specific financial elements like savings rate and liquidity, typically taking no more than 4-5 hours per month for a client base of 100-150 people.

---

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Element Ality. My name is Jordan Haynes, financial vital specialist here at Elements and your host for today’s show. We’re gonna talk about something a little different today. In the past, we’ve talked a lot about prospecting and sales. There’s a lot of reasons why I would feel probably most of the people listening to this are thinking a lot about growth and prospecting and sales and getting new clients.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about that, which is why it’s naturally come up. But in the early days, and in fact even today, many advisors are using a tool like Elements to serve their clients, to create a service calendar or a standard of service that makes sense for their clients. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about about that specifically.

We are going to go through a monthly. Service calendar process. I’m gonna get pretty detailed. I’m gonna talk about a few things here. The reason I’m sharing this now is I’ve gotten a few questions from listeners recently about how advisors are using a tool like Elements to serve clients on a monthly basis.

The reason this has come up is if you go back and you listen to the original few episodes of Elements, you’ll learn that this was created within an RAA called Dentist Advisors. That’s the RIAI work for right now. And when we first created Elements within Dentist Advisors, there was no technology.

Elements was not technology. It was a way that we talked to clients and monitored their financial health. In fact, back then how it worked was a client would come on, we’d plug their information into our Salesforce CRM, in that Salesforce CRM, we had a lot of custom objects that would then feed into an Adobe InDesign, PDF.

Um, and there’s probably some old reports floating out there on the internet. Uh, you could probably search for them, but those PDFs. Would basically be, um, one PDF per element. So we would have one element, like let’s say for example, savings rate. And we would send that PDF, that element to the client in a specific month and we would wash, rinse, repeat, do that every single month for a different element.

But it had to do with that client’s specific situation. So back then, no fancy technology. It was just Salesforce, adobe, and really detailed manual processes that we filled out. But what we would do as an advisor is we’d bring on a new client. We’d talk to them, we’d, we’d do their financial health report, we would use elements to talk up to them about their finances and tell ’em how, how good they’re doing.

And then every single month after that, we would send them an Elements report, essentially, as a way to say, look, we are monitoring your financial health on a regular basis. Now many advisors are doing this today. Many of them have started and stopped. This is an intensive process, and I’ll go through and make it a little bit simpler.

For those of you who are interested, I’m happy to hop on a call and explore this even more. But let’s start foundationally as to why a financial advisor would do this in the first place. I think there’s a lot of reasons why, and many of you listening to this might already do some sort of a monthly or quarterly service calendar with people where you have a specific topic that you talk about in that timeframe, and there’s lots of different methods and means by which people do that.

In my experience, the number one, I mean the primary reason why someone should or would do a monthly reporting or monthly service calendar is this word proactive. When I talk to clients today, if they’ve ever worked with a financial professional, be it an accountant, an insurance person, estate planning attorney, um, or a holistic financial advisor in almost every single person, the biggest complaint that I hear about current professionals today is that they are not proactive.

I. Now that not, might not be true, right? I think in our minds we might feel like, oh yes, we’re as proactive as we possibly can be. That’s a client issue, but clients perceive it that way. Most often, I’ll, I’ll hear something like, oh, my financial advisor or, or my accountant, um, they’re great. They’re fine. I, they do good work.

I just, they’re not very proactive. I feel like I’m the one who’s always reaching out to them for things. People feel this acutely and that causes them to look elsewhere, to find something that is more proactive and relevant in their life. So the job to be done in doing something like this is relevance, it’s proactivity.

Now we’re gonna go through a few things because there’s only so much detail that we can get into when we have a process like this. And I’ll pick this apart one by one and we’ll, I’m gonna give you a lot of detail. This might be a longer episode and maybe we’ll do, um, maybe we’ll do like a video episode on this so you can see some things, but.

The most important thing that you need to keep in mind is that this is for people who need that proactivity or want that proactivity. Now, whether or not this is where, well, actually I’m gonna, we’ll tease this and we’ll talk about it at the end. There are a lot of times where advisors will try something like this, be it a monthly service calendar, quarterly service calendar or something, and the expectation is that, Hey, look, I’m giving you.

I want you to give back. And that give back is quote unquote client engagement. Whatever that means. It means something different for every single advisor I’ve talked to. But even if clients don’t quote unquote engage in the process, it’s still valuable. And I’ll tell you some stories here in a little bit.

So let’s go through the process. Every single month, lemme give you an outline. Every single month I. We would review a specific element, but you can take this and say we review a specific topic. We like elements. Elements. Provides a good framework to be able to do that. And I’ll walk through why, but every single month we go through a specific thing.

For example, back in the day in January, we always reviewed our client’s liquid term score. So with our liquidity, and in February we would talk about savings rate. And then we would have a different one for every month after that. So those are the two elements specifically I’ll kind of pick apart. I have some good examples, some templates and things like that that we’ve used in the past that I know advisors are using right now.

This process looks something like this. If you are going to implement a monthly report tomorrow, what would that be? You would have three steps. Step one would be verification. This is where you’re collecting or verifying the client’s information that is relevant for that topic. Step two is analysis or assessment.

This is where you review the relevant information for any errors, right? You’re identifying clients that need attention via like a personal interaction, and those who don’t, we’ll call this two thumbs up. Then step three is your reporting. You’re actually sending the report to clients with your assessment and next steps.

Those are it. We’re gonna break these apart one by one, and then I’m gonna talk about it and kind of bring it all together here at the end. Let’s start with step one, verification. Your objective here if you’re doing a verification with uh, clients, is you wanna collect or verify needed information for that given topic.

That’s it. Now some tips here. Um. One thing that I found really helpful is we send a blanketed email to all clients, right? This is a mass email. It goes to everyone. You are going to explain three things. What do you want them to do? How do you want them to do it, and why should they do it? You’re asking, you’re, you’re essentially selling here.

Right. You’re asking them, they’re already paying you, but they’re also gonna pay you in time right now. So what do you want them to do? How will they do it, and why is this topic important? Let me give you an example of an email that I had sent in the past for savings rate, right? If I’m reviewing a client’s savings information, this would be a very simple email that I sent in the past.

Hi, client, in preparation to review your savings, will you please review and update if needed, the saving section in your Elements app, because that’s what I’m using for this year. Here’s a short video that will give you instructions on what to do. Providing this information will help us assess if you’re on track to meet your financial goals or if you should make adjustments.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Notice what I did there. We talked about what we want them to do, so I want you to update your savings section. I showed them how to do it. I recorded a short one minute video, which I’ll get into in a second, and then I told them why providing this will help us do blank.

Please lemme know if you have any questions. So couple tips that make this really impactful. And I do this for any data gathering, and I think we’ve talked about this a few weeks ago when I went through data gathering. The biggest thing here that I found most helpful is to have a short video, um, that you can send to anyone.

Just a generic one. It doesn’t have their name on it, but just a short video. Now, whether that’s them engaging with precise fp, if that’s what you’re using, or some planning software or elements, or honestly just putting it in a spreadsheet, record, a short video of you doing that thing. Sometimes as easy as it sounds to us, it’s very difficult for people.

And they just need that certainty, that clarity, that, oh, okay, if I do this thing, this is exactly what’s gonna happen. Sometimes I’ll even create a gif, and that’s pretty easy. GIF that’s what I mean. Go and Google gif creator, and you can create, uh, do like a screen recording or a screen grab, and then turn that into a gif and embed that in an email so they can see exactly how to do it in that email.

And then the biggest thing here with verification is follow up one or two times. Now a, a note about data gathering. I know that it’s tempting for us as financial advisors. I’m gonna call this A CFP brain at work to feel like we need absolutely everything up to date, perfect and current in order to move forward and provide any value to people.

And that is absolutely not true. So. The tip here, the biggest encouragement, don’t spend too much time doing verification. Only follow up one to two times. So when we were doing this, when I was doing this with clients, I would send my initial email, I’d send one three to five days later, and then I’d send one more three to five days later.

Now, it was not surprising for me to only get a 30 to 50% response rate, meaning that only 30 to 50% of the clients that I reached out to would actually update their information. That’s not uncommon, and I’ll talk about why that is and how we can remedy that. It’s okay. It’s okay everyone. You don’t need to stop the process because people aren’t giving you what you need when you need it.

And I’ll describe why that matters here in a second. But that’s step one. Verify the objective here. Collect, verify information needed for that given topic. Step two is all about analysis, and this is where my friends, this is where advisors get hung up. This is where we end up spending too much of our time, and this is where people give up the purpose here, this is the purpose.

It’s to identify the clients that need attention via a personal interaction. That’s the purpose. Most commonly, I see advisors that do something monthly like this that’s personal and custom. They feel like they need to have a custom written letter for every single person about their situation, which is absolutely not the case because remember.

If you go back to our original purpose of this whole entire process, it’s to make the clients feel like we’re being proactive. Now, that does not need to come in the form of a personal letter to them reacting to their situation. So the big question that I’m asking when I go through this, so for example, I use um, elements.

Elements is a really good way to do a quick assessment and ask the question. This is the very first thing I ask when I go through this to identify the right clients. Is this healthy? Is this healthy? A specific question I might ask for savings rate is, does this client save enough? If it for liquid term, are they maintaining enough liquidity?

I would have really clear standards that I could look at. So you’re, what you’re going to do in this phase is just have a bullet point checklist, right? Review each client at a high level and determine if they need attention or not. I. So that’s you’re, you’re basically dividing your clients into two categories.

One that needs attention and one that is what I call two thumbs up needs attention is you just notice something that’s out of the ordinary. Maybe it’s missing information, maybe it’s they’re just not doing the right things, or maybe it’s overly healthy or something changed. Two thumbs up is just like everything checks out.

We don’t need to take any personalized action limit the amount of time that you spend on each client. When I was doing this. If I had 50 clients, I would go through that list and I would say, I’m gonna spend no more than one minute per client, no more, which means I need to look at high level indicators to make my assessment.

So let me give you an example of this. As many of you’re well aware, we use elements, we’re gonna talk about liquid term, let’s say in the month of February. I’m reviewing liquid term, meaning I wanna understand if my clients are maintaining enough liquidity. I have three questions that I would look for.

Number one, do they have enough emergency cash? Number two, do they have enough business cash? And number three, do they have enough liquidity for upcoming purchases? That’s it. I ask that three questions for every single person, which means I pull up their liquid term report. I see. Okay, how much personal cash does this person have?

How much business, cash, if their business owner do they have on hand? And then do they have enough liquidity for upcoming purchases? If the answer is no. To any of these, that’s where I, I flag them as needs attention, red flag. So, oh, this person does not have enough emergency cash. This person does not have enough business cash, or this person does not have enough liquidity for upcoming purchases.

Flag that if I were doing this for savings rate, the one question I would ask is, is this person, does this person fall between or, or have a savings rate of at least 15%? Okay. If they’re not 15%, if they’re 10, flag needs attention, I’m gonna reach out to that person. That’s all I’m trying to do. Again, I’m just trying to bucket them into a column.

So imagine you have a list of people with these different topics and you have data out to the right, and you could just go through really quick, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And what you find at the end is out of a hundred people, 10 need attention. 10 need attention or 20 need attention. Okay, now what do we do?

Now we move on to the report. So that’s analysis. Again, don’t spend too much time here. You’re just trying to find the people that need attention. And then what you’re going to do is you’re gonna send this report. Now, this is going to be the remedy to actually getting more information from people, if you remember from the verification stage, it’s not uncommon in a, in a service calendar like this, that is very frequent for people not to give you the information that you need when you need it.

And so. Most often what I find is that if you have a good reporting process, when when you’re actually wrapped it all up and you send the reports out, if that is good and it’s articulated well enough, that’s where you’re gonna get a lot of information. As annoying as it is, it’s just human behavior. We get a lot of that information when we send out those reports.

The reason why is for some reason, as as human beings, we have an innate desire to correct the record. If we see a report with our name on it, that’s incorrect, we’re gonna want to correct it. We’re gonna want to correct it. And if it’s presented in a way that’s really easy for me di to diagnose if that’s correct or not, then I can just send a quick email.

I can update it as the advisor, boom, send out a correct report. So just know that in this phase you’re gonna get a lot of verification information. So the purpose of report is to send one to many engagements and to send one-to-one engagements. So. Remember we created our needs attention and our two thumbs up group.

Now we’re going to send a one-to-many to our two thumbs up, and we’re gonna send a one-to-one to our needs and, um, uh, needs improvement. The way that you’re gonna structure your report is an introduction and the purpose of this specific report. In the case of elements, maybe it’s a specific element.

You’re gonna include any observations that you have and you’re gonna ask any follow up questions and next steps. I’m gonna give two examples here. So let, let me give you an example of if I were to send a generic one to many email about savings rate. Assuming that you, let’s say that my, my standard was you need to have at least a 15% savings rate.

This is the email that I would send to someone. I would say something like, hi, client, we’ve reviewed your savings profile and the savings rate element, which indicates the percentage of your annual income going towards savings. It’s important to periodically review this as it helps us determine if you’re on track to meet your future goals.

After our review, we didn’t see anything immediate that needs attention, but if you have any questions, you can reference the savings section in your app, or please feel free to reach out to our team. Right? So essentially it says, Hey, we reviewed it, we looked at it. We did the look and we didn’t find anything that needs attention.

But if you have any questions, you can reach out to me. And oftentimes clients did, oh, hey, you know, this was wrong or whatever. They’ll reach out to me and they’ll correct the record or they’ll say, Hey, we need to talk. And oftentimes it’s like. I’ll send out a savings rate report and they’ll ask me about debt, or they’ll ask me about their real estate.

It just allows an opportunity for me to be relevant. So this is the one to many, two thumbs up. This is what you’re sending to most of your clients, and I know a lot of advisors today that this is all they send. They’ll say, Hey, we, we’ve just reviewed your savings rate profile. Let us know if you have any questions.

We will reach out to you if there’s anything burning, or we’ll chat about this on our, you know, regularly scheduled surge meetings or whatever that is. A lot of advisors only send this email. And I think that’s fine as well. But if you were to send like a custom email, let’s say for example you notice that there’s something that needs attention, here’s what I would say.

It’s gonna sound very similar to the first one, but it might add something at the end. Hi, client, we’ve reviewed your savings profile and the savings rate element, which indicates the percentage of your annual income going towards savings. It’s important to periodically review this as it helps us determine if you’re on track to meet your future goals.

As we reviewed your savings rate, we noticed that you are still only contributing $300 a month into your brokerage account down from what it was last year. When you get a chance, let’s get something on the calendar and see what’s going on here, and I might paste a link to my calendar on there. So notice really simple.

I’m just calling out something particular, something in specific, but it’s giving my clients the chance to know that I’m being proactive. Okay, so that’s it. Wrap it up. The steps that we just went through are step one, verify, step two, assess, and step three report. This can be very simple if you run it well.

Many people have asked me how much time does it typically take to run a process like this? Well, the verifying process is not. That hard. I mean, it’s building the infrastructure. It’s making sure that clients can self-report, they can put information, they can update it really easily. Maybe it’s a secure upload, maybe it’s a bullet point list, maybe it’s a spreadsheet.

Whatever it is, make it as easy as possible and you’re just sending, you know, one to maybe three emails or text messages out to clients. The assessment phase is gonna be the part that takes the longest, but if you’re diligent, you can keep this short, right? Like. No more than an hour, maybe two hours. And then the third is reporting.

And that can be pretty simple if you have a custom or standard report that you can send out to everyone. And frankly, it doesn’t necessarily need to be reported. It might just be an email. Hey, we looked at your information in your E-money profile or your right capital profile, or your elements profile.

We looked at your information about specifically this topic and everything’s looking okay. When you get a chance, go and look at it and let me know if you have any questions. I think that’s totally fine, right? So if you look at that process, typically what we see for someone who has a load of a hundred to 150 clients, right, let I, I would expect to see this process take no more than four to five hours of work.

Total in a month, right? So four to five hours. And that’s, that’s, um, I’m being generous with that estimate. Uh, that’s a lot of time to dedicate to something like this, but the impact on your clients is productivity. They feel like someone actually cares, and you can dial this down. You can make it more simple.

You can make it more generic, and you can make it more hands, hands-on. I knew advisors that every single month they’d meet with their clients. They would schedule a call, they’d review a specific element. Things like that, this can have a great impact. Now, I’m not encouraging, I’m not gonna stand here and say everyone should do a monthly service calendar.

I don’t think that needs to be the case for a lot of clients. And in fact, many people who have dentist advisors included, who used to do a monthly service calendar have um, gone away from that. And that’s okay too. But there are many today that do something monthly and have a lot of success. Now one of the big questions, and I’m just gonna kind of tease this for another episode, one of the big things that a lot of people do is they do something quarterly, right?

So they, they come to me and they say, you know what? Monthly is kind of a lot for me. I don’t wanna do something like that. Um, is there something I can do quarterly? And yes, unequivocally yes. There’s a lot of advisors right now that are doing something like this quarterly. The thing that you’re gonna wanna do is find what are the topics, what are the general themes that we can talk about in that quarter?

The process is gonna look very similar. And next week I’ll go through what I’ve seen work really well, doing something quarterly with people. But for now, hopefully this gives you a good framework. There’s a lot that I went through here. Um, I’ll see if I can get some resources out there. Reach out to me if you have questions or if you wanna go through this in more detail.

If you’re considering something like this or you currently do a monthly reporting process, I’d love to hear from you. That’s podcast@getelements.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn at Jordan Hayes, H-A-I-N-E-S-C-F-P, and without everyone. We’ll see you next week.