Jordan discusses the crucial balance between offering enough features to meet client needs while avoiding the trap of overcomplicating services, using an insightful analysis of the relationship between added features and perceived client value.

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends and welcome to another episode of Elementality. My name is Jordan Haynes, financial vitals expert here at Elements, your host for today’s show, and I want to share a conversation that I had this morning with a new financial advisor. Little background here. At Elements, I talk to and train most of the new incoming financial advisors, people who have never used Elements before and are learning for this just the first time.

This particular advisor I talked to today, um, really cool advisor, had been with a larger RIA and is just now launching his own. RIA and getting in the process of getting registered and having XY planning that we’re helping with that. He’s just starting out with elements and trying to understand and figure out what his service offering is.

During our conversation, he asked a question. This is a question I get from a lot of advisors. I’ve gotten this question from almost every advisor over the last couple of years, and that question takes this some form of. At what point do I use elements? And at what point do I use my existing planning tool?

Like write capital or e money or money, get pro, you name it. And really at the core of that question, the heart of the question, if I push and I prod and I ask most of the time, what I’m, what I’m getting from people is look, elements, sir, Jordan is simple. It’s easy for me to have conversations. It’s not complex.

It’s not deep. I would describe it more as broad. But not deep, whereas my e money or my right capital that is both broad and deep at the same time. It’s highly complex. It can handle a great deal of information and it allows me to go deep when I want it to. Now, I don’t know in my service offering where to plug in elements, where, where, where elements begins and where it ends and E money or write capital money pro begins.

This is the core of the question for most people. And I’ve talked about it and I’ve done well. There’s plenty of advisors out there that just use elements. And I’ll talk about why that is. There’s plenty of advisors that almost entirely use e money and maybe use elements as their conversation tool. Um, and I don’t have a strong opinion either way, but I want to talk about what I did to frame it up with this particular advisor this morning.

Now I’m going to try my best to do this. Audioly, audible, audibly, audibly. That’s the word I’m looking for. Let’s try my best to do this audibly. Um, although this really helps to write it down and to visualize it that way, what I’m going to describe to you is an X Y axis chart. So vertical line Y axis I labeled as value to client horizontal access, the X axis I labeled as features.

You might substitute the word features with benefits or value ads. These are just additional features that you add to your service. Sometimes if I just think about this in terms of time or complexity, the deeper I go, the more complex I go, right? That’s, that’s the way to think about all of these words.

But in this particular case, I just labeled it as additional features. And then I drew a line in the middle and the line started very sharply up, right? So it went up very quickly and then it started to taper off and then flatten out for most. Of the distance. So kind of this curve that goes up and then flattens out over time.

And what I did is I talked to this advisor. I said, well, I’m not going to talk about it. I’m just going to talk about to you guys. The way that I think about this line is this is how our clients perceive value and what they actually want, right? Again, what we are in the business of doing is giving and providing value in exchange for payment.

To people, meaning they have a job that they want to do. And if we can help them do that job, we can get paid for doing that job. Now, the interesting thing about financial services is as, as, as it exists today, apologize, my word salad there is that most of us come through this from like. We finished the CFP program.

We’ve done the work. We know how to do a comprehensive financial plan and we create it from like the supply side. We say, Hey, look, we have this service. Everyone raise your hand who wants this rather than approaching this from the demand side of what do you actually want? What is the value you are expecting from this?

And so what I did with this, uh, advisor is I drew this chart and then I put a dot there right when it started to peak off and start to taper off. And I said, this is where most clients want. This is what they’re expecting. They want this value. This value is easy enough to get to, right? It does not take a lot of time.

It is not a lot of features, not a lot of benefits. If you can get really clear on the job is that you’re trying to do for people and do that job and nothing else, you’ve done most of the value now over here. And I drew a dot on the entire. Uh, the very far end of the line, I said, this is where most advisors are trying to get to.

And I believe this truly, when we talk about adding value and adding features and adding benefits, I think this is what we’re trying to do is we want to add more features and more benefits because we think that directionally quantity is going to equal quality of value. Where that’s not the case, there’s a point at which like the law of diminishing returns.

There’s a point at which it starts to cap out. And I say, look, any additional value is going to be very small. I’m not going to add that much value for adding more features over time. And I think this matters because as we are prospecting, as we are creating really interesting services like financial coaching, is there a point at which we are just trying to get our service offering to good enough?

Can we get it to good enough? Where is that dot? Where is that dot that our clients want to get to? And how can we easily get there? Now, what this enables us to do is a lot of things. The downstream effects of this are really interesting to me. One is Our service is simple. It’s easy to articulate. It’s easy to talk about.

We know exactly what it is that we do for people. There’s not a ton of additional benefits. There’s not benefits that distract. That’s the second part, too. If we continuously add, right, that marginal value, that very little value that we’re actually adding to the client, it’s just more distraction for them.

I, I would guess that in some situations, there’s a point at which that value goes down. If we continuously add more, there’s a point at which we’ve peaked. And now it starts to decrease a little bit because now we are, we are distracting the client from what actually matters. And so, for example, if what actually matters to my client is me helping them articulate and navigate this next stage of their life, we’ll call it the growth stage of their life.

And if what I’m doing is. Um, talking about a financial topic that does not matter to them. They start thinking that that is the important thing. And it starts to decrease the value in me because then they can compare me to other people and so on and so forth. It is easy to distract people what the core value proposition actually is.

So as you’re thinking about your service offering, what you do for people, um, how you navigate conversations. Number one, I want you to think about what is the most important thing that you can do for them. What is the job? At the end of the day, if you could eliminate all your features, all your quote unquote value adds, all of your benefits, if you could eliminate all but one or two of them, what are the one and two that you would stick with that would get you good enough?

And then number two, I want you to think about all the additional value adds that you offer. Are they actually supporting your core value proposition? Are they distracting you? Are they distracting your client from that core value proposition? Right? A fancy, in depth, Monte Carlo projection, financial planning y money, could be a really valuable thing to people.

Or, it could be a thing that distracts me from delivering what matters the most, which is a conversation. If I’m spending six hours creating the financial plan, when I could be spending six hours developing a relationship, which is what they really want from me. Where’s the higher value of time. 📍 So something to think about for the week.

That’s been on my mind lately. Again, let me know if you have any questions, find me at LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S, or you can email us at podcast at get elements. com. And with that, we’ll see y’all next week.