Jordan explores the nine essential elements of creating an effective main job statement for financial advisors, breaking down how to articulate your primary value to clients through a structured formula: verb + object + clarifier. He explains why defining this statement correctly is crucial for guiding all business decisions from value-adds to marketing initiatives, ensuring they remain focused on what truly matters to clients.

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Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends, and welcome to Elementality, A show where financial advisors explore modern and relevant client journeys. I’m Jordan Haines, and today we’re going to talk about how to articulate. The main job that you do for clients. Now, if you wanna know why this matters, just go back and listen to the last few episodes. Last week we talked specifically about how to understand what’s most important to your clients. The three ways that we can do that is we can interview people, we can send out surveys, or we can guess.

And all work, depending on the situation that you’re in now, I tend to prefer an interviewing structure. All you need is three to four conversations, and that’s enough to understand what clients actually want. Now let’s talk about why real quick, and then I’ll go through these, uh, specific elements.

There’s nine elements to create and articulate a main job. The importance of this is that as you create a strategy, a client acquisition strategy, a growth strategy, whatever you wanna name that as you create a strategy, it will hinge on the J main job that you do for your clients. Every decision that you make as it relates to growth, every expansion opportunity you take, every value add you decide to implement in your business should be viewed at from the lens of the main job.

This is the primary reason your clients hired you. So it’s really important to get this one thing right And the reason what, that we create a very structured way to articulate this main job is it makes it much easier in the future to be able to make these decisions. So today I wanna talk to you all about how to create a main job statement.

Okay. Now, assuming you have interviewed people or you’ve surveyed people and you have information about your clients, you know, what’s generally most important to them? Let’s go through the work of creating a main job statement. Now to create a main job statement, it’s pretty simple. There are three aspects of it, and we’re gonna do it in this or order.

This is the formula to create a main job statement. It’s this first, your verb plus your object. Then add your clarifier, and that my friends, is a main job statement. Let me give you an example of this. Um, one of the firms I’m working with, uh, in. I think, uh, in Minnesota, one of these states, uh, the main job statement that they have for their clients in a very specific tight world is to comply with the regulatory require requirements for paid family leave.

That is the job of the clients that they are working with. Most of the people come to them through that job statement, so everything that they do is centered around that main job statement. Lemme give you my main job statement. My main job statement is, well, not mine. Uh, for advisors that I work with, their main job is to build a scalable acquisition strategy.

So think about it this way, build a verb, client acquisition strategy, the object, scalable, the clarifier. That is, it seems simple, but how do you know if what you are saying is right and has legs, and you could do something with it. So let’s talk about the nine elements of an effective job statement.

Element number one is causal. Meaning is there a causal impact of your business on the job? Can you directly influence the effectiveness of getting this job done? If they, if their job to get done is build a better yard for my house? I’m sorry, you’re not a landscaper, you’re a financial advisor. You have no influence over that job.

So you need to understand first, what are the jobs that you can do. As a financial advisor, do you have impact on the job? The second element is pragmatic and somewhat related. We’re gonna call this element pragmatic. Does the job statement have the right level of abstraction? What do I mean by that? Think macro versus micro.

We can keep asking why over and over and over again, and eventually we’re gonna get into the realm of religion and spirituality and the meaning of life. And while that’s important to a lot of people, it’s a little too abstract. It’s something that I, I, you know, it’s not really pragmatic for me as a provider, a service provider, a financial advisor to do anything about.

So we wanna find the right balance of abstraction. Is it pragmatic enough that I can do something about it? But is it big enough that I can. Create a bigger strategy. Now, typically, most advisors are gonna be at a really nice, sweet spot. Let’s take one of the examples I gave a few weeks ago, which is like financial peace of mind.

Now again, that’s in the words that I would use as a financial advisor. Not necessarily what a client would use, but that is something that I can do different services, I can create solutions, I can explore different realms. So you want it to be pragmatic. That’s element number two. Element number three is relevant.

Does the statement reflect the job performer’s perspective, meaning your clients? Are you using their words and the ways that they would describe the job that they want to get done, not your own right. Financial peace of mind actually is a really good example of this. Obtain financial peace of mind.

First off, it’s a little too abstract. Second, most people aren’t walking around saying financial peace of mind. They’re thinking, I want to feel better. Right. That would be a good example of something that’s a little bit more relevant to your clients. The fourth is your job statement action oriented. Does it begin with a verb?

That one’s really easy to understand. Does it begin with a verb? If your statement doesn’t begin with a verb, it’s not action oriented. Now, one thing, well actually we’ll get into this here, which is that next one. The fifth element is finite. Now, you use that word intentionally. Is there a beginning and an end point to the goal?

This is a job that can be finished, not one that’s always ongoing. So learning about something or maintaining something over time, that’s not a finite job statement. You want something that people feel like they can get done. And this leads to the next element, which is objective driven. Meaning if you were a client, you might think.

The object is verb, meaning the job is done. I can clearly say it is completed. Whatever that end status looks like. It needs to be finite, it needs to be objective driven. Um, what are we on? I think we’re on sixth or seventh. Yeah, we’re on seventh. The seventh element is focused. Meaning is the job statement one dimensional without compound concepts?

This one’s hard. The honestly for me, this one’s really difficult. I sometimes wanna include two things in here. This is where it’s really important to separate your needs or your requirements about the job from the actual job itself, right? So, so one of the examples, uh, I have here that will really help drive this home is you remember that job statement I gave earlier about that firm in Minnesota?

Um. As a re as a reminder here, the job statement was comply with regulatory requirements, right? That’s the job. Now, what I found myself doing is creating this statement. I found myself saying, comply with regulatory, reg regulatory requirements without disrupting the day-to-day operations of my business.

That’s two things going on at the same time. So one is I wanna comply with requirements and I don’t wanna disrupt the day-to-day operations of my business. That is a compound subject. So what I need to do is pair that out. Now as you go through it, if you can get good at identifying a need, a requirement for a job, it makes it a lot easier.

So in this situation, the job was comply with regulations. The needs were without disrupting, uh, my business. So I would have a need statement, which is just reduce or minimize the disruption to my business. And it allows me to get very focused on my statement because it can get easy to get distracted because what if I go down the realm of avoid disruptions to my business?

That’s not the main job that they’re trying to do, right? They’re not walking around thinking, how do I not disrupt my business? That’s just a requirement to complete the job, but I could, um, if I leave it in there inappropriately, then I, as a financial advisors, I create additional value adds and things like that.

It’s gonna be really difficult for me to decide which direction do I go in. Do I go in the direction of helping people be compliant with the service or do I go in the direction of just making sure people, uh, can run their business the same way? So that’s an example of a focused job statement. The eighth or the second to last is timeless.

This is one of my favorites. Would people have phrased this job statement like this 50 years ago? So this, this essentially completely separates out the solution In this situation, you are not talking about your solution, you’re not inserting your services, you’re not talking about technology or anything like that.

You just wanna know, is this timeless? Are people trying to comply with state regulations 50 years ago? Well, yes, that’s exactly how they would describe it. Um, and then the final one, the ninth one, is circumstantial. Does the job statement define when and where the job will get done? Right. So that’s the clarifier.

Do I know when and where? This, this allows you to get more specific about things, and this is where, as a financial advisor, it can be really nice to, uh, to distinguish yourself from other people that might be similar to you. So like at Dentist Advisors, there are multiple financial advisors that work solely with dentists.

And so in circumstances we can get very specific about who we work with and how we work with them, and we can do that job really well. So really quick review. That’s all of the. Nine or so elements of an effective job statement. The first is causal, and I’ll just ask the question, is there a causal impact of your business on the job?

Number two is pragmatic. Does the job statement have the right level of abstraction? Number three is relevant. Does the job statement reflect the job performer’s perspective? Number four is action oriented. Does the job statement be, begin with a verb? Number five is finite. Is there a beginning and an end point to the goal?

Number six is objective driven. Uh, might the job performer think the object is verb? That’s in quotes. Um, number eight. I don’t even remember what number we’re on. Please forgive me. But the the next one is focused. Is the job statement one dimensional without compound concepts? The next is timeless. Would people have phrased the job to be done like this 50 years ago?

And the last one is circumstantial. Does the job statement define when and where the job will get done? And that my friends, is how to articulate a main job, create your job statement. Then imagine a checklist where you go through each one of these aspects so you know exactly if you have the right job to be done statement.

Now, I promise you as you go through this, this is where it gets really fun is once you have this statement, then you know what value adds you need to add. Now let me be clear. I’m not against value adds. I know it probably sounds like I am. I don’t love that language because I don’t think it automatically means added value, but those of you listening know what a quote unquote value add is.

It’s just an additional thing that you do for clients. Do the things that are not going to distract from your main job. It does. If it’s not relevant to your main job, it’s not relevant to your clients and ultimately will be a distraction to them and to you as a business owner, as a financial advisor. It goes the same for doing marketing initiatives, sales initiatives, anything like that.

You need to understand your main job and then make decisions around the tech that you’re going to use. The initiatives that you’re gonna engage in, the, the things that you’re gonna do from a service perspective, all of those will start to fit into place. Maybe next time I think we’ll go through how to create a job map.

How to understand from your client’s perspective how they go about solving their problems. Once we understand that, man, that’s when it gets really fun. So stay tuned. We’ll get to it next week. I’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions about this or concerns or thoughts or questions, anything, please feel free to reach out to us.

You can find us at, um, I think it’s podcast@getelements.com or you can find me on LinkedIn. That’s Jordan Haines, H-A-I-N-E-S. But with that, my friends, we’ll see you next week.