Jordan describes how to get started building a stand-alone coaching service for clients that may not be a good fit for traditional financial planning services. Jordan explores why these questions must be answered before you build anything:
- What is your motivation for this program?
- Why would someone need this service over your core financial planning service?
- What is the clients’ core job to be done?
- How will you know if your program is successful for you and for the client?
Transcript
Jordan Haines:
Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Elementality. My name is Jordan Haines, financial vital specialist here at Elements and your host for today’s show. I’ve got a special show for you today. I wanna explore some concepts, some ideas that I think are very foundational, but before I do so, welcome to you who have just started listening for the first time.
I’m excited to have you here. And for those who are returned, uh, repeat listeners, I’m excited that you stuck around and I haven’t bored you yet. Now I want to revisit something for a moment. In the intro, which most of you probably don’t listen to, even if you’ve listened to it for the first time today.
Um, we have three objectives from Element Ality. So Elements is, you know, a tech company. You know, we sell to advisors, we help financial advisors have better conversations with their clients, but this show in particular, we want it to be valuable to you. And there are three primary objectives of the show, and this matters for what we’re gonna talk about today.
And I’ll, I’ll tie that bow in a second. The first objective is we want you to find ways to improve the financial health of your clients, or the financial wellbeing, or the words that we use of your clients. Number two is to create a relevant service offering. A service offering that responds to the unique needs of your clients.
And number three is to know. Rest easy knowing that your clients are on track and, okay, if I were to attach a word to these, it would be financial wellbeing. We wanna help that. We wanna help your clients improve their financial wellbeing. Um, relevance. We want your service offering what you actually do for clients to be relevant.
We talk a lot about that in this show. Number three is, um, monitoring. We want, you’d be able to monitor the financial health and the financial needs of your clients. And the way that we’re gonna do this is explore a better way to respond to the needs of your clients. Now many of you, and we’ve talked about this on this show many times, we reviewed different service offerings.
We’ve talked about this with Abby Morton, and we’ll probably have her on again here very soon. Many of you have reached out and decided to use elements because you want to create a financial coaching service, a standalone service for clients that maybe are not a ready fit. For your traditional financial planning service offering, the words I’ve often heard this program called is a membership program, a downmarket service offering, uh, financial coaching, uh, subscription service.
Think about it like this. Many of you have come and have thought, Hey, you know what? It’d be really interesting to have an offering that’s only 50 bucks a month, or $20 a month, or a hundred dollars a month for my clients, and it would not be as in depth or as customized as a traditional financial planning service offering, but it would respond to their needs.
These are people that don’t usually fit my service. Now, if you’ve ever thought about that before, maybe you’ve tested it. Maybe you’ve tried it Today, I wanna talk about what you need to do, what you need to know before you create this service. The first step in thinking about a service offering like this, these are some questions we’re gonna explore four questions today that we actually went through recently at Dentist Advisors as we’re kind of revamping our dentist money coaching program.
That’s what we call it. So I’m gonna go through those four questions. I’m gonna talk about my experience with other advisors and what I’ve seen work and what doesn’t work, and we’ll get into it. So if you have any questions, please, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And if you are someone who has thought about creating a separate standalone service for clients like this, then listen on and we’ll probably explore, uh, these ideas and concepts in future episodes as well.
So let’s get started here with the first question, and I think this is the most important question of all. Now, this is somewhat supply side, uh, meaning that this is kind of not involving your client. This is specifically for you. But whenever I have an advisor that comes to me and says, Hey, you know, Jordan, we’re, I’m thinking about, or we’re thinking about creating a service offering for clients that looks like this.
What do you think? I always ask this question, what is your motivation? Why do you want to do this? Why do you wanna create a separate, I mean, if you have something that’s going well for you, why would you shake things up? Why would you not keep the main thing, the main thing? Why would you do this additional service?
You’re gonna spread yourself thin. You’re gonna be distracted, so you better have a good reason, a good motivation as to why you want to do this thing. So always start there, right? What is your motivation? Now, lemme tell you, in my experience, there are three responses that I hear. The first and least common is altruism.
Right, like, I just wanna help those who are not traditionally helped by financial advisors. I wanna help the people. This is why I got into this industry, to help people, you know, help those that are not traditionally served. And that’s a great reason. None of these are bad, by the way, I’m gonna go through these because I don’t think that they’re bad.
I just think it, it helps you determine how you’re going to structure this service. But we always wanna start here. So altruism is just, I wanna help people. It’s not because I wanna make money from this, it’s not because I wanna get more people in my service, it’s just I wanna help the right people.
Sometimes you do this as a pro bono service or whatever it is, but I think it’s important to start there. The second, um, least common motivation that I hear from people is, I want to create this as a standalone profit center. Like this is going to be a standalone profitable service. Now, I’ll tell you what, with this one, if you’re gonna do a separate go to market strategy, go to market, meaning like you’re gonna go and you’re gonna sell this as its own standalone service, that’s gonna require a unique person, right?
So if you’re a solo advisor and you’re like, I’m gonna create a whole entire separate service model that’s profitable in and of itself, that’s gonna be difficult. You’re spreading yourself thin in that case. So one of the, the considerations here is maybe you need to have someone dedicated solely to the service offering.
Right. That’s, that’s why that, that question is gonna be important to answer there. And then final, this is probably the most common motivation that I hear from advisors, Jordan. I want to create a service that’s somewhat of an incubator. I. A program that nurtures clients and gets them ready to work with me.
In my traditional financial planning service offering, this is the most common, I would say it’s 95% of advisors that are creating these types of services are doing it because they want more qualified clients. So they see this as an opportunity to capture clients early on, to get paid in the process and have them ready to work with them long term.
And I think that’s important to understand upfront because it’s gonna change how you build this program. So that’s the first question. What is motivating you to create. This service. Let’s talk about the second question. Why would someone need, well, actually, lemme go back. I wanna answer these as we go along.
For us dentist advisors, our rationale for creating this service offering is to. Create more qualified clients, right? We want more qualified people, get them ready to work with us in a full service financial planning capacity. That’s what we want. And so we’re not expecting this to scale. We’re not expecting this to be fully automated because this isn’t gonna be a standalone, profitable, um, service line.
We want it to just be a place where we can go to, to get people to upgrade into this other service. All right, let’s go to question two. Question two is, why would someone need this service over your core planning service? So we’re, we’re kind of shifting from supply side, what I want as the financial advisor to demand side, what the client actually wants.
What are they expecting? What are they gonna get out of this? Um, why would someone want this over your other core financial planning service now? This has been really acute an an acute problem in my life right now. So, as many of you’re well aware, I, I handle a lot of our prospecting sales, um, and, you know, bottom of funnel, uh, prospecting motion at Dentist Advisor.
So I do all of our consultations. What I have found very difficult is because we have these two services. We have our dentist Money coaching program, and we have our full service financial planning, I would say 10 times outta 10, I’m going to prioritize selling and pushing people into full service financial planning.
And I’ve really struggled in the past to know why someone would want to sign up for this service. Financial coaching over our other service, financial planning. There are some times where I feel like what we created is financial planning light. You know, it’s like just a less robust version of what we had before.
And why would anyone want a less robust version of my core service offering? So you need to have a clearly articulated reason as to why someone would need this service over your other one. Why would someone look at both and intentionally save? Say, Hey, that coaching service or that membership program that’s gonna solve my needs better than financial planning.
You need to have a clearly articulated reason why. Let me tell you my, our, our clearly articulated reason as to why we think people would want this over others. I. And you’ve heard me talk about this before, in the world of finance, there’s foundational finance and there’s financial optimization. The diet and exercise essentially is foundational.
We want to help people in financial coaching do the diet and exercise first. They need to have that ready before they can ever work with us as a financial planning, uh, agreement, right? If they’re not saving, they’re just not gonna get a lot of value out of our full service financial planning service. So that’s why I would want someone to, to self-select into this.
If they say I’m having a hard time saving, I feel like I’m overspending, I’m disorganized, I don’t have enough liquidity, help me there. That’s gonna be someone that qualifies for that core service. So you need to know, reiterate this question, why would someone need this service? Your coaching, your membership over your core financial planning service.
That’s question two. Question three is somewhat of a spinoff of that, and this question is what is the client’s core job to be done? What are they trying to get out of this? Why do they want to even work with you on this? So many of you heard me express this in the past. One of the core jobs to be done for our clients from a financial planning capacity is getting organized.
They want to feel and stay organized. That’s one of the main reasons people end up working with us as a financial advisor. So what’s the core job for FI someone in financial coaching? I’ll be honest, I don’t know a hundred percent what this is. I think what it is, is they want general direction and guidance to know what they should do with their income.
Right. So the core job to be done is, am I using my income, right? Help me use my income in the right way. I’m somewhat hypothesizing, we’re still really early stage on understanding this question, but it’s really important what is their core job to be done? Go back and listen to demand side sales. Where I reviewed that book, this would’ve been January.
I was releasing a lot of episodes about this. This is very top of mind for me. Then what, in their words, what is the thing that they want out of working with you? So that’s the third question. What is your client’s core job to be done? Okay. Question number four, and this is the final question of today. How will your program, how will you know if your program is successful for you and for your client?
What are the measurements of success? What are the KPIs Fancy corporate speak? What are the things that you’re going to look to, to know if this is being successful? If you’re having a hard time finding ways to measure the success of this program, it’s gonna be really difficult for you to justify sticking around with it, if I’m honest.
So some things that we’re looking at in our service, because this is more diet and exercise, the specific things, and we use elements to do this. The specific elements that we’re looking to, to know if this is successful is if we see savings rate increase, burn rates decrease, and liquid term score at around a one.
OB object. That’s really objective, easy for us to measure. Now, I can go to each one of those clients, let’s say once every three months or six months, and I can see what is their savings rate, what is their liquid term score? Have they increased? Where’s the trend? What’s going on here to the client?
They’re seeing this as their, their core foundational financial habits are doing well or going up or training in the right direction. I can see this as a financial advisor and see, hey, you know, really you don’t really qualify for this program. You are ready. You are ready for full service financial planning.
Now that works for me because our motivation, which is why that’s question number one in creating this program, is to nurture and incubate people and get them ready for financial, full service, financial planning. That’s our core service. We want people to get ready for that, and so the indicators I’m looking at are specific indicators that I can see and objectively measure to see.
Are you ready for that service? Now, if you’re using this out of altruism, it might be more of an emotional measure. That’s okay if this is more like a profit center. I mean, that’s gonna be like traditional measurements that you’re looking at. How do you know if your program’s successful? Well, are you profitable?
Right? Are you saving time? Those types of things. Is the client receiving value that, that’s the kind of stuff that I would look at. So those, that’s question number four. Let me reiterate that or restate that. How will you know if your program is successful for you? The firm and for your client. Now, friends, these are the four questions that need to be answered before you ever create the service.
Let me, let me restate these one more time. Your first question, what is your motivation for creating this program? The second question, why would someone need this service over your core financial planning service? Question number three. What is the client’s core job to be done? And question number four, how will you know if your program is successful for you and for your client?
I cannot state this enough and emphasize this before you jump ahead and do any sort of value added service to clients. I mean, whether it’s financial coaching, membership, subscription, whatever you wanna call it, or if you want to just add something else. Start here with these questions. What’s your motivation?
What do you want people to get out of this? Why would they want this over what you currently offer? You need to know this, especially for those solo advisors out there, because this is going to be a distraction if it’s not core to what your core service is. So you need to have these questions answered, and if you can clearly state and articulate what the answers to these questions, man, the rest is gonna be so much easier knowing what you actually do for people, what the onboarding process looks like, your client journey looks like is going to be changing dramatically.
I think over the next few weeks I’m gonna share we’re, we’re kind of ironing out, cleaning up our client journey here for Dentist Money Coaching. Um, I’ll probably share that with you. I’m gonna hopefully have Abby on and a few other advisors on here in the next few weeks to get a sense for what their client journey has been with a service offering like this.
And I think. Having these questions in your back pocket pocket, knowing what these are in the back of your mind I think will be really helpful as you start to understand and try to understand, you know, the best way to do this service. So with that, my friends, let me know if you have any questions.
Contact me on LinkedIn, uh, Jordan Haynes, H-A-I-N-E-S, or you can send us an email at, uh, podcast@getelements.com. And with that, my friends, we’ll see you next week.