Jordan shares insights from his recent presentation at a dental conference where he introduced a unique approach to financial consulting inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s book “Getting Naked”. Rather than leading with firm credentials and services, Jordan demonstrates how starting with clarity about clients’ current financial health and actively listening to their concerns creates more meaningful connections.

The episode highlights how this consultative approach, combined with practical tools for assessing financial health, helped dentists better understand their current financial situation, even those who already had financial advisors.

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends and welcome to another episode of elementality. My name is Jordan Haynes, financials, vital specialist here at elements and your host for today’s show. I have a couple of things I want to share with you today. I just got back on Saturday from spending a good portion of my week in Huntington beach, California, attending a dental conference.

And I learned a lot. I presented there, we did a dinner seminar and it was really fun, really fascinating, a lot of good things came out of it and I, and I learned quite a bit and I want to share that with you. But before I do so, I want to share some things I read from a book over the weekend that will apply to my experiences at this conference last week.

So let’s get into it. Many of you might have read this book. I think it’s on Michael Kitsis’s recommended books. It’s called getting naked. It’s by Patrick Lencioni. Those of you who know me know that I’m a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. Organizational health, I think is really important. I’ve read, I think almost all of his books.

This was one that had been on my list for some time that for some reason I hadn’t read. So I downloaded it on audible and I listened to it over the weekend. Great short, listen, good, short read. If you want to buy the book and, uh, all of his, all of his books are really good and they read like a story. And then he kind of makes a point at the end.

The story really quick high level synopsis. There’s a consulting firm. Um, they’re very large. They’re very classic old school, right? Like smartest person in the room, classic selling skills, all sorts of things. There’s another firm that’s smaller that tends to win a lot of the business that they lose a lot of clients to.

And, uh, the firm owner decides to sell to this larger firm. So, um, the story follows a consultant who then is in charge of the Mike, uh, migrating everyone over to the new firm, yada, yada, yada. One thing leads to another. And he discovers that the way that they consult people is very. Vulnerable, very raw.

And one of the things that stood out to me the most, obviously, because right now, a lot of my mind is thinking about sales and prospecting is how they go about prospecting, they start consulting from the very beginning, rather than tell them a lot about their firm and what they do and the services they offer.

This new firm starts by just. Answering their questions and listening and helping them and adding value, as we might call it in our industry. And I really like that framework. And in fact, this is something I’ve somewhat unconsciously fallen into the last few weeks of rather than starting out and saying, here’s my firm, here’s dentist advisors, here’s what we do.

And here’s all the features that we offer, yada, yada, yada. I’ve almost started just saying, tell me about yourself. What’s on your mind. What problems are you trying to solve for? How can I help be a consult for you to make better decisions, even if you don’t hire us? And it’s led to a really interesting, uh, framework that I’ve built into some of a pitch deck.

And I’ll go through that just real briefly. And then I want to tell you about my experience, um, at this dental conference, pulling up my slide deck here. My, um, slide that goes through a couple questions, a couple points. And in all of these, I’m doing it like a case study. So the very first thing that I do in these quick 20 minute short conversations, when people sign up to, uh, learn more about dentists for the first time, very first thing I do is I ask the question, um, What’s on your mind today?

Right. What, what caused you to schedule this? And then I jump into, you know, after listening to them and trying to understand their situation, most of the time I could boil their problem, the thing that they’re thinking about to one of three statements. And this is how I present it up. I say, these are the things that we most often hear from the dentists who talk with us.

Number one, I just had my best month of production ever. And I’m now realizing I don’t know what to do with all the extra income. Number two, I’ve done a good job with my money so far, but after talking to someone recently, I realized there’s a lot more to do and to consider. And number three, I feel like there are a lot more big money decisions to make, like buying a house or a practice, paying down my debt or investing in the future.

And then I asked the question, how are you different from these statements? And this usually creates some level of alignment. Oh yes, you totally understand it. That’s exactly how I’m feeling right now. And frankly, 90%, if not more of the people that are actually interested in working with us, dentist advisors, these are one of the three statements that they do.

Now go back and listen to my episodes on demand side sales 101. That’s kind of where I pulled this from. I’m not going to go through the rest of the deck, but after this, I start talking about, you know, what are the options? What are the options people consider? They can do it themselves. They can work with like a financial specialist, or they can work with a dental specific financial advisor.

And I go through those options. I help them understand. We spend a little bit of time talking about the results of people who work with us. We talk about how we help people, um, accomplish the jobs that they want to do. Um, and then we go through pricing and, you know, more nuanced things. So that more or less is my initial conversation with a lot of people.

So what I did in this conference, so, um. In Huntington beach, I was presenting to a group of, um, about 70 to 80 dentists. And in there, I wanted to talk about the foundations of finance. The title of my presentation was the four foundations of finance. And I started out with those statements. I said, listen, um, as a financial advisor, I talked to a lot of dentists and these are the most common things that I hear dentists say to us.

Had the best month of production ever, making more income than ever, making more money decisions, um, feeling like there’s more than I need to do. And most dentists, when they get to this situation, these are the, the, the options that they’re considering. They’re considering to do it themselves. They’re very smart.

These are great for people who have time, interest, and ability. They want to hire maybe a local or generalist financial advisor, or they want to work with the dental specific advisor. And in this presentation, I basically framed this up as today. I’m going to teach you how to do it yourself. You don’t have to hire me at the end of this.

I want to help you create a strong financial foundation. And if at the end of this, you want to talk to me more, I will hang around. You’re welcome to talk to me, but we’ll go through it. So how I started out, as I said, whenever I work with someone or whenever I go through like a consultation, here are the three things that I do with them.

The first is we get clear. The second is that we get focused, and the third is we start to build a foundation. Now go back and listen. Um, one of the most popular episodes we’ve done is called the Perfect 30 Minute Consultation. I think I recorded that back in October or September. And this essentially follows that format.

We start by getting all the data in one place, then we get focused, we get oriented to the situation, and then we have recommendations, or then we build our plan. And then what I did through the rest of the presentations, and I started with getting clear. Okay. Let me teach you what to get clear about.

What’s your actual income, where does your money actually go and what’s your net worth? So I went through a quick worksheet so that they could do that. Um, and then we went through an orientation. So what does this actually mean? The big question that I asked here is, do you understand all of the pieces of your financial situation and are you financially healthy?

Do you know that? And honestly, when I asked that question, just blank stares, right. And people shaking their head. Like I’ve never thought about this before. I don’t know if I’m financially healthy. I don’t know how I’m doing. And then what I did is I took them through an elements exercise. So I let them all download the app, um, flash the QR code up there, onboarded quite a few people.

I probably had two, two or three dozen people sign up. Um, and they onboarded their information, went through everything themselves. And then at the end of that, we went through four elements scores. We went through total term, liquidity, savings rate, and debt rate. And I talked about those scores and what they mean.

We went through kind of healthy ranges and let them ask questions. And honestly, we spent most of the time, 45 minutes, just going through these scores because they had so many questions. And then we ended it and I stuck around. We had a booth outside the conference hall. This was a small kind of a niche conference.

And I stood there and I said, um, anyone who has questions about your information or how you’re doing or just making sense of it all, just feel free to pull me aside. I’ll be here for two days. Happy to talk with you. And this is the point. This is the reason I wanted to share this. Because during the rest of the conference, um, as many of the people who attended this presentation came out and talked to me, many of them already had a financial advisor or some sort of a financial professional, be it a tax account, a bookkeeper, someone that they confided in financially that they, they thought of as their financial helper.

And at the same time, most of these people could not tell you if they were doing okay or not. And most often the comment I got was something like this. It was a really helpful presentation. It’s one of the first times I’ve thought about my finances that way. Um, something that I, you know, I really like my financial advisor right now and he or she has done a lot of work for me.

They’ve gotten, they’ve created my financial plan. We’ve kind of made sure that we’re doing okay for retirement and they’ve told me that I’m okay, but I just like, don’t feel that way. Like, I don’t feel like I’m doing okay. And these scores, these things that we did, this exercise we did was one of the first times I was able to see my life right now and understand if I was doing okay.

And that’s the point I want to drive home in today’s episode, the value of just helping people be clear. On what they’re doing right now, not 30 years in the future, not tomorrow, not 20 years, but right now, and those of you who follow maybe income lab or have listened to episodes in the past know how we feel about Monte Carlo and projections.

It’s not that those are a bad thing, but in a lot of cases, that’s not what people are wanting. They just want to know how they’re doing right now. They want you to talk to them in their words. They want to make sense of this information. For them. And that’s where elements in particular, let me shameless plug.

This is elementality. So why not elements can be a really valuable tool. That’s what we created it for is to help people understand how financially healthy they are today. So whether you use this in your onboarding process or with existing clients, or whether you do something like this and prospecting, which is my preferred method.

People want to have clarity, and if you can help them have clarity and see that they have clarity, the likelihood of them taking action and doing things with you in the future is going to go up. And in almost all of these situation, I followed that up with probably a dozen consultations after this. And I have the opportunity to talk to quite a few more dentists to help them sort through their information, see what matters and, um, getting back to the beginning of this conversation where I presented the, uh, getting naked book.

The whole point of this is to. Consult, we want to help them understand how they’re doing. We’re going to give them value by just giving them a framework to base their financial decisions from. Let me know if you guys have any questions, if you want to push back, you’re welcome to do that. Uh, feel free to find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S, or send us an email at podcast, get elements.

com. And with that, we’ll see you all next week.