Identifying the jobs that need to be done is the first step in delivering a service that prospective clients want. Just remember, a job is never solely about function, each job has powerful emotional dimensions. That’s why it’s essential for you to create experiences that align with what a client is trying to accomplish. Proving your value, and that’s what the client is willing to pay for, hinges on giving thoughtful attention to their emotional needs.
On this Elementality, Reese and Carl explain why every product and service has both a functional and an emotional side that are interwoven together. Clients will begin to recognize your value as an advisor when you meet their emotional needs.
Podcast Transcript
Reese Harper:
When you master the emotional jobs, you own the client relationship.
Carl Richards:
Yeah, for sure.
Reese Harper:
And the functional jobs that you’re so skilled at will continue to be replaced by technology, will continue to be scaled by technology.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
It’s not gonna be the place where you want to hang your hat deeply if you’re really trying to increase the value that you can charge for and be rewarded for in the market.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality. Each week, Reese and Carl share their philosophy about financial planning as they explore the emotional and functional jobs that need to be done. With the focus on the Elements financial monitoring system, Elementality will show you how to deliver a modern client planning experience and help you revolutionize how to grow your business. Enjoy.
Carl Richards:
Greetings. Carl Richards here and super excited to continue this conversation around the way with Reese Harper.
Reese Harper:
Reese Harper. Dude, I sometimes get confused for a Backwood Z Farmer, so yes.
Carl Richards:
[laughter] That’s true. I can see that.
Reese Harper:
Yes.
Carl Richards:
I can see that.
Reese Harper:
And for those of you who don’t know, that was the first 18 years of my life.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Exactly.
Reese Harper:
But now I’m a sophisticated city slicker.
Carl Richards:
Exactly.
Reese Harper:
It’s a…
Carl Richards:
Suburbanite.
Reese Harper:
It’s a paradox.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Of which my high school friends are still trying to figure out.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. So let’s talk about emotional and functional jobs, because they both matter.
Reese Harper:
Totally.
Carl Richards:
And we get this wrong so often. We think our job is to operate a spreadsheet or a calculator. And so let’s walk through, why was that important? Because this is just as a reminder, we’re talking about the elements way, sort of the philosophy behind the work we do here. And you’ll see sometimes we’ll link this directly to product features and design features that showed up in elements.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
But that’s not the important part. This is the… What I was super curious about this entire discussion that we’ve been having is, this is what informed the building of the software. The software is just an expression of the way.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
And so today we’re talking about emotional. Talk to me a little bit about why you feel so strongly about emotional and functional jobs, and even the terms you’re using there.
Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think we need to… This started with when I first met with David Weiss, who’s the CTO at Elements. He exposed me to some research that was done from two people. One person named Clayton Christensen, who’s a Harvard Business School, professor, God rest his soul. Beautiful human being. He just added so much… Emotional.
Carl Richards:
[chuckle] Yeah. Easy.
Reese Harper:
He’s a good dude.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
Reese Harper:
Anyway. Wow. I wasn’t expecting that this morning.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
And then Anthony Ulwick, who was his research partner, and I would say Clayton was the emotional and Ulwick was the functional. [chuckle]
Carl Richards:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Reese Harper:
And they both wrote this book called Jobs to be Done. And Anthony Ulwick was kind of the… He was the one that had the discipline to sort of prescriptively write the book and get it done. He’s a very functional thinker. And Christensen was a much more of a market research kind of behavioral specialist. He wrote books that were very kind of spiritual in nature, and they made a really great pairing. And in this book, I was exposed to these two main types of jobs that any product or any service is providing to a consumer. Some things are functional, and some things are emotional. Most products or services do more than one job for a consumer. There’s usually a core job, a core functional job, like for Cane’s, drive through chicken, it’s gonna be, Give me some chicken.
Carl Richards:
Correct.
Reese Harper:
Deliver high quality chicken that tastes great every time. Something like that. That’s the core functional job.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
But there’s an emotional job too in this experience.
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
And restaurants are highly emotional, I mean experiences. Especially the higher end restaurants. You go to Capital Grille, there’s a very intentional emotion that they’re trying to evoke. It’s a very deluxe elevated, traditional steak, modern flare, local artwork. There’s a whole emotion they’re going for there. And that is actually more important to most restaurants than the functional job, which is can they nail a medium plus heat on their filet mignon?
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
They’re intricate and interwoven in every product and service. And what financial advisors usually come from is one of the two backgrounds. Some financial advisors come from this sort of therapeutic coaching kind of background. And they tend to be really great with the emotional jobs and lighter weight on the functional ones. Some come…
Carl Richards:
Most come…
Reese Harper:
Most come from the background… There’s an adjacent industry that the CPA market that’s literally increasing its presence in the financial planning community because many of these jobs are functional.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
Reese Harper:
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding though, in terms of which one the consumer values most.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
Reese Harper:
And the consumer in my experience, the optimal consumer of premium services in financial planning is typically actually purchasing emotional jobs, more than functional.
Carl Richards:
Well, and let’s clarify. They probably wouldn’t say it that way.
Reese Harper:
They wouldn’t say it that way.
Carl Richards:
They don’t know that. But afterwards, when you ask them what they value, they don’t say, “Oh, those spreadsheets and calculators were great.” They say, “Man, the way that… ” In fact, I’ve got a great story. One of my friends was really… He invested money a certain way, which I think we would all recognize. He was passive and evidence-based.
Reese Harper:
Oh, nice.
Carl Richards:
And we all used to run around touting ourselves as a certain type of advisor that had access to that. We were really proud…
Reese Harper:
Differentiating through a functional job.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. We were really proud of it. And my friend was particularly good at being proud of that investment process. And he had a new perspective client come see him. And this was a woman who had built a really successful business, had 15 to 20 million to invest, and she was interviewing a couple different firms. And my friend went through the very specific, like, “Here’s the way we invest money and it’s evidence based, and really good.” But my friend’s office is really amazing, really good at making you feel, and my friend’s really intentional about every bit of design, the chairs, and how everything feels. But he still presents from this, like, “Here’s the way we invest.” And this woman calls after they’ve interviewed the three other firms and says, we’ll just pretend his name’s Matt.
Carl Richards:
He’s like, “Matt, we would like to hire your firm, but I want you to know it had nothing to do with the way you invest money. In fact, it’s in spite of the way you invest money. The reason we’re hiring your firm is because the way you made us feel,” which is shock. Now, normally that doesn’t happen that early in the engagement. But often later, if you interview clients after a year or two, people will often point to, “No, Carl knew my family. Carl knew my kids and what was going on, and Carl knew what this money was for.” That’s the kind of… And I always remember feeling like, what do you do with that? Well, what you’re pointing to here is that’s an emotional job.
Reese Harper:
Totally. And it would surprised you how many emotional jobs actually are happening that you’re unaware of as an advisor.
Carl Richards:
Amen to that.
Reese Harper:
You give them their first mobile, interaction on your TD Ameritrade website login, and they log into that account and they look at their phone. The way it’s designed speaks louder than the returns on the screen. It really does. That will surprise you.
Carl Richards:
Do I feel safe? Do I feel secure when I log into this thing?
Reese Harper:
Do I like the way this looks? Do I feel comfortable with this office. Is this person responding to me quickly? What emotional job do they have? There’s infinite ones. For them, it’s going to largely base… The things that they’ll value the most probably have to do with the way in which you communicate and the objects and images and information that you put in front of them. So the frequency of your communication, the duration, the brevity, the time that it takes to get a hold of you. There’s so many things that they’re grading that far outweigh the functional jobs that you do. I’m not saying that we should discount the functional.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Can I mention, I often get accused of discounting the functional. And I want to be super clear. I think it’s really important. I don’t think it’s discounting, I think it’s table stakes. It’s like a requirement. You gotta be good at the technical piece of your job or be partnered with somebody who is. And…
Reese Harper:
Now we’re putting it…
Carl Richards:
Now we’re just simply saying, and I think the value all lies beyond that.
Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think that often what if I ever add to what you’re saying, it’s never because I don’t agree with that. I actually agree with that statement fully. And I still think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to advance the functional jobs in financial planning in a way that reduces friction. Substantially.
Carl Richards:
Yeah, yeah, of course. For sure.
Reese Harper:
So it’s like, well, yeah, getting my beneficiaries updated on my will is a functional job. But there’s also an emotional job that’s served through that.
Carl Richards:
Sure.
Reese Harper:
But if the functional is too hard, if it’s too difficult, if there’s a lot of friction, if I have to log into a new system, talk to a new human, add another relationship into my professional community, that’s friction. And I’m less likely to do the functional jobs when they just require a heavy lift. If you’re just putting five more weights on the barbell, five more pounds of weight on the barbell, maybe I’ll lift it. As long as I’m already laying on the bench. But if you make me have to go to a new gym, like I don’t know if I’ll cross the street.
Carl Richards:
Correct.
Reese Harper:
There’s just a level… Functional job completion largely has to do with the difficulty of the friction. The many steps you’re gonna make me have to do, the number of people, the time it’s gonna take. And I think we can do a lot better on that and I’m really excited about that future, but I think that… Where I agree with what you said is, no matter how far we advance into the number of jobs and the frictionless way that we can complete them for people, there is still gonna be a feeling of commoditization that will always exist with the functional jobs. There’s always… Eventually, eventually, everything that used to be a valuable service becomes a commodity. It only takes time.
Carl Richards:
Don’t you think like when people refer to pricing pressure that, my reaction to that has always been, “I get that because you’ve… ” what I’m begging advisors to believe is like, you’ve misunderstood where your value actually lies. The pricing pressure’s coming from feeling like your value is in the…
Reese Harper:
Functional.
Carl Richards:
Purely functional side of the business.
Reese Harper:
That’s perfect. Yes.
Carl Richards:
And if you’re feeling that, it’s just because you’ve miss… And I believe… Maybe the better way to do it is if you’re feeling that you’ve got a huge opportunity to lean into this other piece, which we talked about in past episodes around values and purpose, anyway. One of the ways to get to understand the emotional jobs a little bit, one quick way to them, is through values and purpose. But just this idea of understanding why gets us to the emotional side of that job sheet, if you will quicker. And there’s no pricing pressure there.
Reese Harper:
Yeah. And I think what… You could say values and purpose are the… Extracting someone’s values, like getting, documenting someone’s top 10 values in prioritization order is a functional task. But it’s also mostly an emotional job that it’s servicing which is, I want to feel peace of mind, I want to feel confidence, I want to feel aligned. You helped me feel aligned, Carl. I liked how I feel with felt with you. It’s cool ’cause I did a values exercise with you and extracted your purpose statement, your financial purpose. But they’re not gonna say I… They’re not gonna come to you and ask for the purpose statement, the values…
Carl Richards:
That’s the piece that’s so important to me is no one asks for this. I often like, well… When’s the last time somebody showed up at your office and say, “I’m here to cry in your couch?” It never happens.
Reese Harper:
And over the next 20 years, 30 years, I think it’s gonna be more clear to the public that, as therapy continues to like grow and it’s awareness that we actually need to…
Carl Richards:
There may be a day.
Reese Harper:
There may be a day where people are like, “Well that is misaligned with my core values.”
Carl Richards:
Yeah, exactly.
Reese Harper:
It’s like, well, we’re not there. We’re not even close to that.
Carl Richards:
We’re just pulling a series of, I like to call them righteous or noble tricks to help them understand that that’s actually what matters in the first place.
Reese Harper:
Yes. It really is. So just remember… I guess the way I’d pin a bow on this for me, and I’d like love to hear your last thoughts. I feel like we need to do a better job of realizing that most of what we do is emotional. Most of what we do. And I’m not saying that’s the number of tasks are mostly emotional. I’m saying that the value that the consumer will pay for is servicing emotional jobs. And those emotional jobs can’t be serviced well without a strong technical and functional set of comprehensive skills, jobs and skills to complete. And they have to be fine tuned to values and purpose. But the interesting thing about this framework to me is, if we were to ask like the, what’s a… If we were to define what is a comprehensive, in air quotes, “financial plan,” we would fill that with functional jobs that if we didn’t complete, we’d probably be slapped on the wrist told we’re not worth our CFP title. Like there’s just a list you gotta do to be comprehensive. You didn’t cover the health insurance conversation. That’s not comprehensive. But you could cover all those functional jobs and still have someone at the end of that going, “I don’t know if this is worth it.”
Carl Richards:
Oh. All The time.
Reese Harper:
“I don’t know if this is worth it. It’s, I don’t know if this is worth paying for.” And you could do literally one thing with a customer. Align their values and purpose Yeah. Or respond to them within five minutes of them texting you. Or show up on time for the meeting well prepared, looking well and have the room smell nice with some essential oils coming outta the corner or something, and someone goes, “Wow, it just feels great to be here. I don’t know why. I just love coming in and talking to you.” And you do no functional jobs and they walk away going, “That was amazing.” Now that’s both a blessing and a curse, because we don’t wanna have an industry that only depends on emotional jobs and clients coming in and feeling great and then leaving with no functional completion. We’re not making progress.
Carl Richards:
Yes, we do. Yeah.
Reese Harper:
But I think we need to start being aware of the fact that if there’s enough value there to where some people could literally only do that and the client wants that and is willing to pay for that and wants to show up and get alignment, and feel heard have a specialist coach them on decision making. There’s a chance that some of you listening to this call are gonna be the outsourced partner commodity that the person that when you master the emotional jobs, you own the client relationship.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. For sure.
Reese Harper:
And the functional jobs that you’re so skilled at will continue to be replaced by technology will continue to be scaled by technology. It’s not gonna be the place where you want to hang your hat deeply if you’re really trying to increase the value that you can charge for and be rewarded for in the market.
Carl Richards:
Yeah, I agree.
Reese Harper:
That’s my opinion.
Carl Richards:
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And the only thing I would just add… Like add a little bit as we wrap up is that every job you do, like that’s the thing that the insight that I got out of this conversation, is that every job you do… So I remember we used to send this report. Like once a month we’d send this report, we called it our 17 point wealth management audit.
Reese Harper:
Okay.
Carl Richards:
‘Cause I come up with a name, and I thought that like a 100 % functional. Right?
Reese Harper:
You thought that that was a 100% Functional?
Carl Richards:
Yeah. I wouldn’t have even thought of like, this was a… And then we never got any response from anybody. We’d send it every month and we never got any response. He would just say something like, “Hey, I’ve gone through your 17 point wealth management audit. Everything’s fine. Let me know if you have any questions.” Never got any responses. So I was, after like a year and a half, I met with a group of clients. I’m like, “I think I’m gonna stop doing that ’cause nobody responds. Nobody cares.” And they were like, “No, don’t stop doing that.” I was like, “Why?” He was like, “It feels so good to know somebody looked at our stuff.” And so I was like, “Wow, what I thought… ” So I would say like, the beneficiary designation is such a great example. That’s the most like mundane functional thing in the history of the world [laughter] is changing a beneficiary designation. Gosh, I feel so good knowing that it’s going to the right place.
Reese Harper:
Yeah.
Carl Richards:
So I just think like starting to look at that both ways, like, the thing you think you’re doing has a bunch more value because of the feeling it’s generating. And that’s important just to recognize it… Thinking of ways to communicate.
[overlapping conversation]
Reese Harper:
Yeah and if you don’t communicate that, you didn’t care if you didn’t communicate that to your client, the emotional job wouldn’t have been triggered. You could have done the functional job like, hey, like how many times do people listening to this do things they’re not getting credit for? By credit for, I mean, the client’s not… You’re not.
Carl Richards:
They don’t even understand that.
Reese Harper:
There’s no emotional job being done for the client.
Carl Richards:
Totally.
Reese Harper:
‘Cause they’re not aware.
Carl Richards:
They’re not even aware that you were thinking about that.
Reese Harper:
I started doing all kinds of crazy tests about 10 years ago on this topic. Like, every time I would open my browser and look at a client’s account, I would just send them a quick note, and I just had my iMessage open and I was like, “Hey, just wanted to let you know, I’m thinking about you just checked out your account today, I think we’re good, but if you have any questions, let me know.”
Carl Richards:
Yeah.
Reese Harper:
Dude. Like, it was like that last one minute of add-on time.
Carl Richards:
Yeah. Was all the value.
Reese Harper:
Made the 10 minutes that I spent on the functional thing I was doing. I got all the credit, all the value, all of the impact. And so at Elements, I mean that’s really what’s the core of this philosophy is about is we’re trying to say, design the way we present information, the way we talk, the frequency in which we communicate, the subject matters that we communicate about. All of these things have both functional relevance, but perhaps more importantly emotional impact. And that’s what we’re trying to marry these two things together. Because traditional business models and traditional platforms haven’t been as emotionally aware they were born out of the calculator age.
Carl Richards:
For sure. I think the only thing I can say to that is amen. Amen. Reese.
Reese Harper:
Carry on. Thanks, Carl.
Carl Richards:
Yep.
[music]
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.
Carl Richards:
This reason that we focus on wellbeing along with wealth is a financial return or beating a benchmark or having a certain, those are not financial goals, right? They’re arbitrary ideas that for some reason, and I think you’re right, we do have a problem in the industry because we’ve been trained and the public’s been trained that our job is focused on wealth without asking the question of why. And I think that’s why this is so important to me.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality’s executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.