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How To Structure The Perfect 30-min Consultation

Host of Elementality, Jordan Haines, CFP® outlines a three-phase approach to structure the perfect 30-min consultation. He emphasizes important preparatory steps, such as understanding qualitative, quantitative, and contextual information about clients. Jordan also parallels effective financial consultations with best practices from the medical field, underscoring the importance of validated information and mutual understanding. The episode concludes with practical advice on being directional rather than prescriptive, ensuring that clients leave with actionable steps.


Transcript

Jordan Haines:

over the last, we’ll give you some context over the last three or four years. Um, since we launched elements and started offering it to financial advisors to use in their relationships with clients, what we have uncovered is that one of the [00:01:00] best places to use. Our specific system. Is in the initial conversation or the random impromptu check-in call that we have a client to prospects. Why. Because it allows me to have a basic snapshot of how a client is doing so that I can remove all the administrative burden before the meeting and after the meeting and focus on the things that matter. 

Most of that client now, recently, the last couple of weeks, couple of months or so I’ve had a lot of financial advisors and from owners come to me with really interesting ideas around. Um, helping employees at a firm or participants in a 401k or going down market and serving people that might not need the level of complexity and hands-on service that traditionally is warranted from traditional financial advice. And as part of this, they’ve come to me and they said, um, Jordan. 

I have 30 minutes. To have a conversation with a client or a prospect. And I want to make sure that I can provide value to them, but I can also get the information that I need to move them along to keep them going. And so it’s led me to create a [00:02:00] three part financial consultation. And for purposes of today, we’re going to call this the perfect 30 minute financial consultation. Now in our financial consultation, there are three phases or three things that we are going to do. I’m going to give you a high level, what these three things are their objectives. 

And then we’re going to dive into each of these individually. In the, in this episode, So phase one. We’re titling this uncover the purpose of your phase one is to uncover important context and to make sure that the client or prospect feels like you actually care about them and are validating the, the information that they’ve provided you so far. Phase two, we’ll call this orient. 

The objective of this phase is that the client should walk away. Being able to answer the question to themselves by themselves. How am I doing right now? And phase three we’ll title, this direct. And in this phase, the objective is that the client should know at least one thing that they should focus on. 

Those are the three phases. 

[00:03:00] So phase one, uncover phase two, orient phase three, direct. And in my experience. If you dedicate about 10 minutes to each of these, you’re going to have an awesome. Pers first time financial consultation with someone let’s dive into it. 

Now, before we get started, I want to draw your mind to a really positive interaction you had with the physician. 

Hopefully you’ve had one. If you have an eye. I’m so sorry for you. They’re hard to come by, but every once in a while you get a good physician, you have an amazing experience. My wife and I, um, brought a baby into the world. Uh, on leap day, this year on February. Um, leading up this, our third kid, um, leading up to this, uh, we wanted to, my wife really wanted a very specific delivery. Um, and it came with a lot more work than our previous stolen had. 

And so I was involved a lot in that. And so I went to a lot of the appointments. We researched our doctors. We went to, uh, we interviewed a couple of them. We found one, we really liked with some midwives anyway. So we go there for our first meeting. It’s pretty typical. The nurse comes in, um, she got all of our information. 

She asked questions, she took vitals. [00:04:00] She asked things like, are you sleeping? Well, how are you feeling? 

Just trying to understand what our situation was like. Well, the nurse had a nice little clipboard with papers in it and she took notes and she wrote things down and she entered it in her software. And then she said, okay. I’m going to go get the doctor. He’ll be back in a couple minutes and, uh, we’ll see you soon. The doctor comes in about 10, 15 minutes later, and he’s carrying that same notebook and he pulls up in the computer and he looks at all the vitals and he asks a few questions and he acknowledges a few things. 

It looks like your blood pressure was this and that. Okay. That’s healthy. You know, it’s looking good. And then he sits down on the wheelchair. He rolls right up to us and he says, the first thing he says is what’s on your mind. That’s what he asked. First thing what’s on your mind. How can I help you? 

We’ll talk about that in a second. 

The second thing that he does is he goes through a few, um, answers to questions that we provided the nurse. He says, you told the nurse that you’re not sleeping. Well, tell me more about that. You told the nurse that you’re only exercising once a [00:05:00] week. Tell me more about that. What he’s trying to understand is make me feel well. 

First he’s trying to understand. Uh, what we’ve told the nurse and clarify anything and understand the context. And the second I’m walking away from that interaction feeling like, man, this physician’s actually trying to understand. I provided them a lot of information. He’s validating that work that I’ve given, and I feel a lot better at the end of this. Notice that the, that this process probably took no more than two or three minutes. And that physician probably learned a lot of things. Now let’s, let’s relate this back to financial advice. 

We have to get a lot of information to provide a lot of value. But I don’t think it needs to be that way. We can get basic information and still provide a lot of value, but the information we need, I think we need to break it into three categories. Not the two that most financial advisors will do. The three are qualitative information. 

Right? So feelings, goals, values. What’s important to me. Quantitative information. Numbers [00:06:00] figures facts. Those are the things I want there. And the third and probably the most overlooked as contextual information. Contextual is kind of blending the two of these together. It’s Hey, you gave me a balance. 

What do you think about that? How did you get that number? It’s trying to understand where I’m at trying to under, under uncover. W how educated I am or how financially literate I am. Those are the three things that I’m trying to uncover in phase one. Now in a perfect 30 minute consultation, I don’t have 90 minutes to go through and understand what’s most important to my client or do a full-blown discovery exercise. 

I’m not saying that those are bad. I’m not advocating against those. I’m saying, if you have a short conversation, you just don’t have time. To do qualitative discovery. A full length. So you need to limit this to at least one question. So the very first thing that you are going to do in your perfect 30 minute consultation is you’re going to ask one question. Here’s a couple of questions that you could pick from. The very first question. 

My favorite what’s on your mind lately. What’s on your mind lately. Now I like the word lightly, [00:07:00] not now because it allows me to reflect back and say, and you could even put a timeframe what’s been on your mind this week. What was on your mind last week? Right. Put a timeframe. So that causes me to think, oh man, what has been on my mind, what’s been causing me issues or challenges or things like that. 

I think that’s one of the best ways we can just uncover goals or concerns or stress. What we’re trying to attack is what is the most important thing that I can talk about here today that I can address. That’s going to make you feel better because at the end of this 30 minute consultation, I want. Nothing else. 

I want my client to feel a little bit better. Feel heard, feel directed, feel oriented. Those are the things. So the very first question what’s on your mind lately. Now a couple of the questions that I’ve used in the past, and I’ve heard advisors use as well, is. If you could walk away from this conversation with one feeling, what would it be? 

And then I would follow that up with what’s getting in the way of that. Okay. That’s that’s another question. Another question from there is what is the single most important question that you’d like to have [00:08:00] answered today? 

Another question. Probably the last one I have here that we can, we can discuss is what needs to happen to make this a good use of your time. 

Pretty generic. But what these are trying to do is just, is give the client an opportunity to say, this is what I want. This is what I want. How can we provide value as an advisor? If we don’t know what they want, why are they coming to talk to us? That’s what I’m trying to get at with this qualitative discovery. 

Now, again, limit it to one question. Don’t spend more than five minutes. It’s going to be tempting. If you’re an advisor that does it right. And really likes to understand what’s important to people. I am. So I’m so bad at this. It’s so tempting for me to go down the rabbit hole, to ask more questions, to prod further, to really corner them. 

And while I think that’s really valuable, it needs to be in the right place. It needs to be in the right place. And when I just have a 30 minute consultation, I just don’t have time to do that. So limit it to one question, maybe ask a followup if you need to, but don’t do more than that. If you need to set a timer, do no more than five minutes with this. 

No more than five minutes for qualitative discovery. Again, imagine the physician sitting on the wheelie [00:09:00] chair, just confirming. You’re not there to just answer their question about how you’re feeling. No, you’re there to get answers to your actual question, the problem that you’re feeling. And so I just need to uncover what that is so that I can address it. Okay. 

The second thing in the uncover phase is the quantitative review. Now let’s say that we’re going to time block another five minutes of this now. Many financial advisors know that if you use financial planning software, or if you do financial planning in general, if you’ve gone through the CFP training or really any other credential training for a financial advisor, There is a lot of information that we can get from people. 

So the very first thing that you need to do is have a basic data model for whatever you’re doing now. I’m, I’m, uh, partial towards elements. Obviously, because this is elements, but if you’re going to use asset map, or if you’re going to use another tool, you just need to have a very simple data model in this first consultation. 

What are the basic things that you need now? For me personally, when I do a quantitative data gathering the three things that I’m very much focusing on. Our net worth. So getting a balance sheet, I know that there’s a lot to that, but most people can get close to it. 

Income and spending, right? So th the, [00:10:00] the two most important cashflow numbers what’s coming in and what’s going out. And then maybe if I want to get a little bit more granular on, this is the third area that I might focus on my quantitative review. It’s savings and debt payments. Now, ideally before I’m talking to them, I’ve already gotten this information, but I’m naturally going into this as a skeptic. If you’re a financial advisor, you’ve gotten data, you know that no one actually knows, right. 

There are a few people, even if they feel very confident, they’re very financially literate. They likely have preconceived notions about how things are, what a savings is, you know? There’s so much here. So their spending is going to be off. I know that I’m not going to have a complete picture. So what I’m trying to do is just clean it up. 

Good enough. Not perfectly good enough. That’s going to be the key here. Good enough to get the information I need to then provide value. So when I do a quantitative review, I look at my balance sheet. I pull it up. I might choose one or two assets that I have a question on or a balance or liability that I have question on. 

I’ll just ask them. Hey, you put this down. Is that right? Hey, I see this. Am I understanding that right? Um, for income and spending, I noticed that you make a hundred thousand dollars a [00:11:00] year and your spouse makes $150,000 a year. Is tell me more about that, what it is. Do you have any other sources of income that I’m unaware of or that you haven’t put here? 

Hey, I noticed you gave me a spending number of $120,000 a year. Where are you getting that information from? Where did you pull that number from? Oh, I see that you are contributing beyond your max for your 401k. Tell me more about that. I see that you are saving $10,000 a week a month into your, uh, this ally bank checking account or savings account. What’s that for? 

Is that for a car? Is that for vacation? Is that for your long-term retirement plan? Tell me more about that. Right. So what I’m trying to do is just understand context here. So on one hand, I’m cleaning up the data. So they’ll say, oh, you know, I put that in, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to ask you a question. 

Okay. Let’s do that real quick. Um, and I’m understanding context. And what I have found in almost every situation a client will put something in a prospect will put something in thinking that that’s the right thing to put in. And then I provide a little bit of education to help them understand. So savings. 

For example, one of the things in elements that [00:12:00] I want to calculate a savings rate. Savings contributions divided by income. What percentage of your income is going towards savings? Now, when I look at savings rate, I want to know what is being saved for longterm net worth growth. That’s what I want it to be. 

Now. I would not include saving up for a car, saving up for a boat, saving up for vacation in six months as a savings country. So I would more call that delayed spending. Now you might disagree with me. That’s fine. But when I go to a client or a prospect and they come to me and they put that item in, I will clarify that with them. 

Hey, I noticed that you put this in and you’re saving for vacation. Really good work. I love that that’s, that’s very responsible of you, but for purposes of this conversation today, I don’t want to include that as savings because I classify everything as savings as things that are going towards growing your net worth. 

And ultimately this is not going to do that. Is that okay? Right. So I’m educating along the way. I’m providing value in that way. And I’m understanding the context, where is this person at? Where are my gaps? And then I always follow this up. If I review net worth income, spending savings, debt, payments, anything like that. I’m always following it up with, am I missing anything? 

[00:13:00] 

Or I might just be more pointed on that and say, what am I missing? 

What am I still missing? What am I still missing? And when they are saying, no, I think that’s completely at, I say, great, let’s move on now. Again, this is very tempting to go down a rabbit hole because there is a lot of data and. Frankly, like let’s just take debt payments. For example, I love debt planning. 

I love debt management strategies. I loved going into the weeds on it and things like that. And there’s a lot of information about someone’s debt. If I could get a promissory note, I could spend so much time with that. And it’s very tempting for me to want to ask more and more and more when really all I want to know is what’s their debt to income ratio. So having your mind, what is the quantitative information that good enough quantitative information that you need? And only get to there. 

Don’t go beyond it and limit yourself. Give yourself five, no more than 10 minutes to do this process. And I think that that’s going to be really valuable. So this is the biggest danger in this process is you’re starting out by clarifying. And again, and it’s important that we do this, right. We don’t want to pretend, I think too many advisers. 

We want to be like, okay, we got everything right before we get into the conversation. And I don’t even address that. I think that’s a [00:14:00] missed opportunity because when we sit down with someone and we confirm what we’ve already been given, we validated the work that they put in to giving us that information. 

We make sure that we’re not calling on things that don’t matter to them. Right. We’re giving them an opportunity to clarify why they gave us things. I had situations with physicians, right? So we had that really good example, but there was an example, a few years earlier, we went to the emergency room and I just felt like the physician wasn’t addressing anything that we had provided. 

They weren’t listening to anything that we said, because they were never reflecting back. They’d come in. We gave the nurse information, they’d come in and say, you need to do this. We’d give the nurse more information. The doctor would come in and say, you need to do this. And I just felt like, no, one’s listening to me. 

I’m providing information. So it’s really important that we do this, but it’s really equally as important that we don’t get pulled down. Down the rabbit hole. Set your timer no more than 10 minutes for this part to the uncover process. And I think it’ll be good. Okay. We spent enough time on that. Let me just summarize real quick phase one. The objective of phase one is to uncover important context and clarify information for you. 

The advisor and the objective for the client is to make sure that they feel like you actually care about the work that they put into [00:15:00] giving you information. The three parts to this, as you want to uncover qualitative information, uncover quantitative information and uncover contextual information. And again, you want to find a good enough state and go no further than that and spend no more than 10 minutes there. 

That’s phase one. All right. Let’s move on to phase two. Phase two, we’re titling this as orient. Or orientation. Now, many of you have heard me talk about financial orientation in the past, and I wish we talked about this more in our industry, financial orientation. If I’m going to define this, I would say it’s an opportunity to just help someone understand how they’re doing and make them actually understand what their financial data means in their life. 

Right? So many financial advisors will do a quote unquote getting organized session or conversation with someone. And the purpose of that is to just make sure that I have everything. Do I have your tax return? Do I have your investment policy statements? Do I have your insurance policy documents? Do we know what your budget is or your cashflow or your spending transactions? 

Right. Do we just have that all in one place? Maybe it’s a file folder. Maybe it’s not. There’s a lot of cool systems like asset [00:16:00] mapping, I’m sure. Right? Capitally money, money guide pro all of these tools that many of you use probably have some way to, for me to just kind of get a snapshot of everything. That’s great. 

That’s first step we need to get organized. The second step is helping a client make sense of that. That’s the step that’s most often, miss we often will go from, get organized to giving recommendations. And that’s a huge missed opportunity because in between there, if I get organized and then I help a client actually understand what all of this means. That’s when I have something. And frankly, I think in our personal licensed financial advisors, we have the luxury of knowing all the comprehensive nature of financial advice. 

Right. You have taxes, you have insurance.

You have budgeting, you have debt, you have savings contributions, you have qualified retirement accounts. You have liquidity, you have real estate, you have businesses, you have retirement planning. You have all of these things in our financial life. That for most people, it does not make sense. 

And you can talk about it. They understand the topic, but they don’t know how it relates to them. So the purpose of orientation is to help someone understand how they are doing. Now, let me refer back to this perfect [00:17:00] doctor appointment that I had after that doctor uncovered some basic information. He sat back on his wheelchair and said, okay, let me help you understand what this means. 

Your vital signs said this or this. This thing that we measured does, this is what that means for you. Right. Your body mass index is X. And, uh, what that means is it’s going to be difficult for you to do X, Y, and Z. Right? So he’s taking it beyond just getting the measurement, getting the information he’s helping us make sense of that. And apply it to our lives. 

That’s orientation, frankly, if, if there’s any one thing in the perfect 30 minute consultation that I would have any of you take away, it’s this, that you want people to walk away from this understanding how they’re doing right now. That’s the question on your mind? So when we go through orientation, we just want to help that client understand how they’re doing right now. Now I have a couple of things that I want to talk about this. 

When you are going to orient someone on their financial situation, you need to have a visual ready. You need to have something visual to show them. Yes, you can talk, but showing someone, someone a visual is really valuable now. Again, I’m partial towards [00:18:00] element. I really love our scorecard. I think it does a fantastic job, especially in a conversation. 

And maybe we’ll do a separate episode on that. But you can use tools like right. Capital your money, money guide pro you could even use it like an asset map. Um, if you’re, if you’re getting very specific about something, let’s say this, this is specifically a tax conversation. Maybe you something like holistic plan. There, uh, some tax summary document, right? 

There are a lot of deliverables that you can use to just help them understand now. A few elements to this as is, it should be comprehensive. It should be simple. It should be easy to understand. And in fact, if you go, um, I don’t remember what episode is maybe last week, week before that, where I talk about the six elements. Of fantastic deliverables. 

Go reference that, go listen to that, because that is going to be the thing that if you have those things in place, you’re gonna have an awesome visual ready. It’ll be easy to understand. They could take it and they understand it more. That’s really valuable in this process. The second thing is you just want the, the w the number one thing that you want to answer at this phase is just, how am I doing. Now I have a systematic way by which I do that and how I help them understand how they’re doing as I referenced the helmet scorecard, [00:19:00] and I answer three underlying questions. And these I found are really helpful for most people. 

Number one, question, number one, am I prepared to make work optional? Whether there are specifically asking that question. I find that that’s just really helpful to address for most young people. They’re not ready. They just want to know if they’re doing the right things to be ready. But it’s important to start with that. Number two, do I have the right mix of assets? 

And number three, am I using my income? IZEA these three questions I find are sometimes the most common three questions, help people understand how they’re doing now. You will often find in your first phase that uncover when we’re doing what’s on your mind. You’ll find what they’re trying to answer. And that’s what I’m trying to answer here in the orientation. 

And in most cases, how am I doing? How am I doing. Are you prepared to make more optional or you use, do you have the right mix of app? 

Do you have the right mix of assets? Are you using your income wisely? Those are the things that I’m trying to answer here. And then finally I will reflect back everything to them. So as I’m explaining things, I will always ask, what do you think about that? So, let me give you a real life example of this. 

Um, I was talking to a client, uh, [00:20:00] this would have been probably March, April time. Uh, well, not a client. It was a friend of mine and she had some questions about insurance and investments. And just was wondering if I could help him. I said, sure. Can you, do you mind going through this, uh, short, like 15 minute exercise with me, I call it a financial orientation. 

Just, just as a way for me to help you kind of understand all the moving pieces in your financial life, because it’s complicated. And I just want you to understand that before you make a decision on your investments or your insurance, he said, sure. So we sat down, I had them go through elements again, I’m using almost as an example, just replace elements with something else. 

If you’re not in elements, user shame on you, if you’re not, but if you’re not that’s okay. You’re in the right place. Um, so I had him go through elements. He answered some questions, got a scorecard, and then I started an orientation part of this. So I reviewed some of the data for a few minutes. And then I said, Are you fine. 

If I just help you kind of understand how you’re doing right now? He said, yes, I’d love that. So we go through and we get to, uh, my favorite element liquid term. We get to liquid term. He has a 0.6 liquid term score. Um, for those who are unfamiliar with that go to our website, you can look up how we’re calculating, but we just do a liquid assets divided by spending. Essentially [00:21:00] 0.6 tells us how many years you can live off your liquid assets. 

So 0.6 is six months. Uh, five. You know, actually 0.5, it’d be six months about a half year. Uh, but 0.6 is a little bit over six months. So when I explained it to him, I said, Your liquid term score is 0.6. Now you’re 30 years old. You’re young. Um, This represents about six months of living on your liquid assets. 

What do you think about that? How do you feel about that? And this client, like their eyes widened and they said, oh, That makes a lot of sense. And I said, tell me more. And he was, he went off to tell me about how he’s just felt uneasy. He’s wanting to take advantage of a few opportunities to come his way, but he’s never been able to, and he hasn’t been able to articulate why. 

And we talked about how his liquid terms, making him feeling now. That only came up because I gave him an opportunity to respond. To think about it a little bit more. Right. This is the most important part. This is the most often overlooked thing. Usually when you approach this, like a, I’m just going to read off to you, all the things about your financial life and assume you understand. 

No, we can’t do that. We have to tell the [00:22:00] story and then we have to ask them what they think about it. And frankly, in almost every situation I’ve done this, the client has something to say, and it’s something that’s interesting that maybe they never realized before. It’s a time for them to actually understand how they’re doing. 

So when I say this is your savings rate, it’s 6%. Typically I see someone in your range at about 15%. What do you. Think about that. It gives them an opportunity to address that concern, address, that feeling, address, that gap, whatever it is so that they can get bought into. What’s going to come next, which is the direction part of this, more of the recommendation part. 

But right now I’m just trying to help them understand how they’re doing. So the entire focus of orientation is to have something simple and comprehensive that you can reference to answer that question. How am I doing? And to reflect back to them and ask the question. What do you think, how do you feel about that? Those are the three things that if I do that in an orientation, Your clients are gonna walk away, feeling so much better, because think about it. 

How many financial professionals actually do this? 

I can’t think of barely any, unless you’re listening to this and you’re doing it now. That you’re doing some good things with that. [00:23:00] 

Okay, let’s talk about phase three. This is the last one. Phase three is direct. Now we’re not looking at time bands on this, but usually the last two phases, we’ll say that the remaining 20 minutes of the conversation, sometimes you spend a lot of time with orientation where there’s a lot of things that maybe they have questions on, and that’s a lot of good value to them. But the last couple of minutes is where I usually spend some time directing them. 

Now notice the word I’m very, um, specific about this word. And I want to draw to a very clear distinction here. But your objective indirection is to give the client or the prospect, at least one thing that they should focus on. They should know what that thing is. They should be able to, you should be able to talk to them in three days from now after this conversation and ask them, what is the one thing that, you know, you’re supposed to work on. 

They should be able to tell you that that’s what I, that’s the objective of phase three. So let’s talk for a second about the difference between prescriptive advice and directional advice. If you’re listening to this, you’re likely a financial advisor or you work with financial advisors. Our name [00:24:00] is financial advisor. 

We give advice, we tell people what they should do. We tell them the direction that they should go. We give them guidance. That’s what we’re paid for. The problem that I see with a lot of financial advisors is we tend to gravitate towards prescriptive advice. What I mean by that? Um, Let’s let’s draw an example on a retirement readiness. 

Let’s say. If I’m working with a 35 year old person, and let’s say they want to retire at 65, pretty classic. And they come to me and they say, Hey Jordan, I wanna retire at 65, say, okay, that’s 30 years from now. Um, I, there are two things that I could do. One is I could do a fancy time value of money, retirement calculation. Where I understand what their spending needs are going to be in retirement. I do all my fancy time value, money equations. 

I back it out and I come to the client and I say, Hey, look in order for you to have, let’s say $3 million. By the time you retire at 65. 

Let’s say, uh, they need to save $600. 38 cents. Very specific number in order to have $3 million. By the time they retire. [00:25:00] That’s prescriptive advice. Now think of all that went into that. I need to make a lot of assumptions. I need to understand a lot of details, like how much they’re going to spend and what their lifestyle expenses are and things like that. 

And you don’t understand all of that ultimately to get to a specific value of $638 for the spending. Okay. That’s prescriptive advice. It takes a lot of time. Yes. It’s very specific and a lot of people want that specificity. That’s fine. Directional advice on the other hand is more directional in nature. 

What do you mean of that? Well, we might know exactly what their savings rate is today. Right? Let’s say that in the prescriptive example, a 600, um, Uh, 600 a dollar a month. Yeah, savings contribution represents a 15% savings rate. Let’s say that in the directional example, they come to us and we get all their information. 

We understand that today. Their savings rate is only 6%. Well, I know in the back of my mind that from working with people that that’s low now, do I know exactly what that needs to be? No, I don’t, but I know that it’s low. So what I can do to the client, and as, as I can [00:26:00] say, Hey look, your savings rate is only 6%. I generally think that’s pretty low. Why because most of my clients, when they’re really, uh, getting ready to make work optional, Um, they are saving upwards to 15 or even 20%. Okay. 

What have I done here? I have I told them exactly what they need to save. No. I haven’t. Have I told them the direction that they needed to go. Yes, I have. Now this tees up a perfect opportunity. If you are a full blown wealth manager, financial planning advisor, and this is like a prospecting consultation. This provides a perfect opportunity for you to say. And I will help you get there. Okay, so be directional. 

Don’t be prescriptive. If we are prescriptive, it will take too much time. It will introduce too much complexity. It will introduce too many unnecessary questions from the client. Now many of you are going to say, well, Jordan, If I’m not prescriptive and my fiduciary, am I being honest with them? Yes, you can be honest with them and be directional. [00:27:00] You could say, I don’t know exactly what your savings rate needs to be in order for you to retire with an ambiguous $3 million, whatever that is that they say, or even if you never ask for you to be perfectly prepared for the future. 

I don’t know what that is, but I do know that 6% is low. That’s what I can tell you. And that’s good enough for most people. So the client is now walking away with one thing that they know they should focus on. Do they know exactly how much they should do? No, but your clients are smart. Your prospects are smart. 

They can figure that out. Or if they’re not. That’s a perfect opportunity to introduce now there’s a problem to solve. Right? The problem is increased savings rate. Or increased liquidity or, um, reallocate investment portfolio, whatever that thing is that you find and you direct them to focus on. You can say, I have a solution for that. 

And if you work with me, I can solve that. So in prospecting, that’s fantastic. If it’s a client, you can easily get. Give them that direction and they’re smart enough to figure it out. In my experience with clients and I’ve worked with completely financially illiterate people. I’ve worked with very financial literate people. 

And in every situation, if I can be very clear and orient them on their what’s. What’s going on. So they actually understand it. And then I can give [00:28:00] them direction and judgment about that and say, look, you have a low liquid. Uh, low amount of liquidity, you have a low savings rate. Your debt rate is a little high. 

What do you think about that? How are you going to improve that they will come up with better answers, better recommendations than I ever do. And almost every situation. I, I specifically remember a client. I did this with, I think they had a 4% savings rate. They were a young associates, associate dentists. Um, and when they came to me, they had this 4% savings rate. Uh, they were feeling uneasy. 

They had a healthy amount of cashflow, so they had plenty of money to throw at it, but they were just accumulating cash and spending things. Willy nilly. Um, and so I said, look, your 4% savings rate is low. Most people that I know preparing for practice ownership. I typically expect them to have about a 20 to 25% savings rate. That was all I said, that’s all I said. And I said, what do you think about that? 

And the client, I’m not kidding. The clients came to me. The client said, oh yeah. Okay, but we need to our butter button gear. Um, I could probably throw probably another [00:29:00] $10,000 a month in our savings. I did the calculation and I think it equated to, and I’m, I’m giving you really rough numbers. I think equated to like a 31% savings rate, I would have never recommended a 31% savings rate. 

I was just looking for them to get closer to 20%. That was it. I might’ve gone way lower, but they were willing to do more. And when I left it open-ended and I said, directionally, this is where you should go. How are you going to get there? And how can I be a guide to help you, man, they came up with the best recommendation possible. So don’t discount being directional versus being prescriptive. 

I’m not saying being prescriptive as bad, I’m saying in the. Perfect. 30 minute consultation. You don’t have time to be prescriptive. You only have time to be directional. Remember your, your objective in this third. Uh, phase is that they should have one thing that they should focus on. That’s what we’re trying to do. And that my friends is a 30 minute consultation. We spent about 30 minutes talking about it. I’m sure there’s a lot more to this. I think someday I’ll do a webinar or something about this. If you want one, just reach out to me and, um, let’s talk more. 

Let’s talk more about this. So let me just kind of summarize this real quick. The 30 minute [00:30:00] consultation. You should walk away. With having three objectives figured out in phase one, your objective is to uncover important context information. And then help the client actually feel like you care about them, that you understand their data. Phase two is orientation. The objective there is that the client should be able to answer the question. 

How am I doing right now? They should understand how they are doing right now. And phase three is direct. The objective here is that the client should have one thing that they should focus on. The focus here is to be directional and not prescriptive. And at the end of this, I guarantee you, my friends, if you do this with people, they will feel better. 

The purpose of the 30 minute consultation is to provide value. And I challenge you to come to me and tell me why this would not be valued to be valuable to people because I’ve yet to talk to someone that it’s not. So without my friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you can go and apply some of these things. 

You don’t need to use all of them. I think elements is fantastic. So if you want to use elements, reach out to our team, I’ll show you how to do that and how to use elements in it. Perfect. 30 minute consultation [00:31:00] that you can use in prospecting or in responding to random client requests throughout years. 

And with that. Have fun. 

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