Jordan explores the concept of “solving for chaos” in financial advisory services. Drawing from his experience at Dentist Advisors, Jordan discusses how identifying and addressing financial chaos through organized, intentional processes can transform client relationships and deliver meaningful value.
Transcript
Jordan Haines:
Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Ality. My name is Jordan Haines, your host for today’s show. Today, I wanna talk about something that has been kind of swirling around in my mind the last few weeks, which is Solving for Chaos. Now, this kind of brings together a lot. You could say that this is kind of a case study, an applied thing of all the things we’ve talked about the last four weeks around customer or client or prospect, perceived value as a reminder.
That’s problem. That’s, uh, product, people, and price. We’re not gonna get into those. I want to talk about solving for chaos. Chaos being the problem, the solution are all the things that we’re gonna go through today. Now, this has come about specifically because this week I was talking to one of my colleagues here at Dentist Advisors.
And this topic came up around solving for chaos. Uh, this person was presenting to me a few solutions or things, initiatives that we were considering, um, that might go in line with what we are finding that we solve for now. At the beginning of every prospect conversation that I have with people, I start by identifying and isolating symptoms.
These are the presenting situations that they have before me as a couple. Examples. Here are four that I’ve heard this week alone. Um, I need to set up a retirement plan for my business, or my son is graduating high school soon and we need to figure out, uh, how we can support him. I have $400,000 in student loans and I need to figure out the right way to pay this down.
I’m making more money than ever and I need to make sure I’m using it right. These are just a handful or select few of problems that I hear from people, and sometimes I often hear all of these all at once. Right. So one of the first things that I do is I just bring these all out. Tell me everything. I wanna hear it all.
What are the things that are on your mind? What’s going on? I’m aggravating the symptoms a little bit. I’m trying to get all the, uh, situations out there. And then I’m using my, um, understanding of the industry pattern recognition from other people that I’ve talked to, to identify a theme. And that theme is going to be the diagnosed problem that we talk about.
And for most, I would say probably 80%, maybe even 90% of the people that I’ve talked to, the last three or four months, almost all of them, the core diagnosed problem, the pattern that that strings all of these symptoms together is chaos. Or many of you have heard me call this random acts of finance. It’s this feeling of grasping at straws.
Nothing seems to stick. Nothing seems to be intentional. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t know where to start. I don’t have a plan. Right? These are often the words that people use, but that core diagnosed problem is chaos. So what that’s enabled us to do here at Dentist Advisors is to say, we solve for chaos.
What are the best ways that we can solve for chaos? How can we be intentional in our service offering around solving for chaos? I. Now also, if many of you have listened to this and I’ve listened to quite a few episodes, you know, my feeling on quote unquote value adds, I’m generally pretty skeptical. I think most advisors do value adds.
Um, completely unintentional, right? There’s not really any rhyme or reason. It’s the same way you’d call this random acts of finance, apply it to financial advisors and say random acts of value ads. It’s kind of like we heard, uh, Matt Jarvis or Michael Kitsis, or anyone from XYPN. We heard them say this thing, so we’re going to do it and we’re gonna try it because that could be valuable.
Valuable to what? Right. What is that supporting, how is that supporting our core value proposition, the core job that we do, the core problem that we solve for people. So if I were to apply that to this situation at Dentist Advisors, if we solve for chaos, and I think many of you financial advisors listening out there, um, also solve for, if we solve for chaos, what does that look like in terms of add-ons or value adds that we offer?
Lemme go through a couple of them. Number one, I want to do a specific and, and, uh, differentiated or separated, um, get organized session with people. I want them to feel organized. I want them to feel the chaos being put into one place, right? Rather than this feeling of grasping at straws. I want them to be able to wrap their arms around all of their financial situation.
So I’m gonna have a separate set aside, get organized conversation with all onboarding clients to help them feel like they are organized and everything’s in one place. Now, this is different from advisors who might just send out an intake survey. I. Or have an associate or support advisor gather all this information, plug it into the financial planning software, and then present it during the financial plan meeting.
I don’t think that that needs to happen, especially if chaos is the thing that you’re solving for. Don’t skip that. What are all the things that people might feel chaotic about? And I think just having an organized data set might be that thing. So we need to spend time to have a get organized session.
That would be one add-on. Another add-on would be like an orientation meeting. You’ve heard me talk about this before. Obviously I prefer elements in this case, but can I take that organized information and present it to the client in a way that helps orient them to their situation? Again, no advice here.
No recommendations. All I’m doing is helping them wrap their arms around it. I’m resolving the chaos. That’s what I’m solving for here. So if my orientation goes into, you know, helping them understand if they’re financially healthy across all of these different, um, areas of finance. Then that’ll be ultimately a good thing That’s supporting my core value proposition of solving for chaos.
That’s what I’m doing there. Another one is, when you create your financial plan, is this a bullet point list that runs three pages long, or is it specifically prioritized in a way that helps them understand exactly what to do next? Because yes, you might have a one page plan or an executive summary, but that might be organized in a very poor way that helps them feel like they’re not actually solving for chaos there.
And so when I create a financial plan, regardless of how I do it, I might using money or Right Capital or Money Guide Pro, I might do the Monte Carlo, I might do the forecast, I might do all those things. I’m gonna be agnostic in this conversation today about that. Whatever you decide to do when you present that to them.
Is it solving for chaos or is it making them feel more chaotic? And so those are, those are specifically onboarding type activities, financial planning type activities, but getting organized, doing a financial orientation, actually presenting recommendations or a plan. All of those should be solving for chaos.
And what this has allowed us to do here at Dentist Advisors is think very intentionally about our process. And question, does this part of our process solve for chaos? Does this part of our process solve for chaos? Because we know the common thread across most of our clients or prospects are going to be, they want to solve for chaos, so let’s help them solve for chaos.
Now, a couple other things that have come up, um, has been really interesting, uh, are like other types of services that we can offer people. I. Right. So one would be like business consulting. Do we want to offer business consulting to people? Does that help us solve for chaos? What about accounting services or bookkeeping services?
What about, um, in-house estate planning or, or like a, a private equity or something like that. So there’s all of these different add-on ancillary products. Now we’re allowed to do this here at identifiers ’cause we have a larger team. For many of you solo advisors, maybe that’s not an option, but that is something to think about as you’re thinking about adding something.
Two, your service offering. You should always think, what is the core job that I do for the vast majority of my clients? Frankly, you should get really good at identifying the clients that you work with. The best way to qualifying them out is to understand, are they looking for this problem? Can I solve this problem?
Is this the core problem that I solve? It would be akin to, you know, you’re a podiatrist, right? They work with feet and someone comes to you with a wrist problem. Well, you’re not gonna work with them because you don’t solve for that problem. So if you can get really clear on the problem that you solve, and in our case that is solving for chaos, then you can get really clear on the value adds that you offer that might be getting, and, and also refining the things that you already do, offer accentuating things that matter the most to that client, like getting organized.
It’s all about solving for chaos. Orienting to them. It’s all about solving for chaos, presenting a financial planning strategy. It’s all about solving for chaos, consulting, offering, maybe accounting, maybe doing a beneficiary review or whatever that is. It’s all about solving for chaos. So rather than just add value willy nilly.
I want you to take this and think about the core problem that you solve for people, and those are the things. Any value add should support that core job to be done. It should not distract the danger of willy-nilly. Adding value adds doing additional things for people is that those additional things might not actually solve that problem and might be a complete distraction.
And then you have clients that might have come to you for the right reason, but are leaving. For the wrong reasons or become stale for the wrong reasons because they don’t care about the thing that you are offering because it doesn’t solve their core problem. So hopefully that helps kind of bring a lot of this together and helps you understand this is one way that you can solve problems.
I highly encourage you all to think through and start to do some pattern recognition. Now, one of the ways that I came up with this is I interviewed a lot of people. I interviewed new clients. I. I always ask whenever we close someone, why did you decide to sign up? I interview people 90 days after they’ve onboarded with our team to understand what’s been the most valuable part of that process.
I, I interview a couple of our, you know, super big evangelists, people that have been with us for a few years that really like us. I interviewed people that are leaving and I try to understand why did you originally sign up? What was the first valuable interaction that you had with us? When did you realize that this was something that was gonna be valuable in your life?
And all of those conversations I’ve had and written down notes. Talk to AI to understand. What I’ve found is that I, the identified theme here is that we solve for chaos. We help resolve random acts of finance. We make things intentional. We help you feel like you have your arms wrapped around your financial life.
Now, that’s unique to us at Dentist advisors, but what is your unique value proposition and how can you solve for chaos? So with that, everyone, I’ll leave you, uh, with that thought and, um, we’ll talk next week. If you have any questions or push back on it, please let me know. Find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H-A-I-N-E-S, or you can email us at podcast@getelements.com.