Building something that is relevant and valuable to clients take a period of inconsistency that can oftentimes feels chaotic. Today, Jordan advocates for inconsistency in a “pre-scale” phase of developing effective services for clients—an effect

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Element. My name is Jordan Haynes, financial vital specialist here at Elements your host for today’s show. We got a little bit of a facelift coming to the program here soon. I’m gonna have some other people here in the coming weeks next week. Um, we’ll have Abby Morton on the show.

Uh, many of you know Abby, I. Uh, she does a lot of work at Elements and has been very close to, um, the Elements Money program that we’ve been building. Um, so we’re gonna share a little bit about that. We’re gonna talk a little bit about, um, employer sponsored plans and, and, uh, soliciting and going to employers and, uh, building health programs and lots of fun things around financial coaching and things like that.

So just a little bit of a teaser towards next week. And then in. The coming weeks Beyond that, I’m gonna have other people in this program to talk about their client journeys, ranging from marketing to sales, to new client onboarding, and then to client service. We will talk about how some of them are using elements, uh, but that’ll be a minor part of the conversation.

It’ll be mostly about how they’ve created a relevant and modern client journey. So we’re gonna pick ’em apart. They’ll probably be a little bit longer and, um, hopefully really valuable for all of you. Uh, so hoping that I can get good feedback from you. If you have any questions or if you want us to discuss something in particular or review something, just reach out to me.

You can find me on LinkedIn or you can just email us podcast get elements.com, but we don’t need to talk about that anymore. Let’s get to the meat of the program. Today is gonna be my last solo show show for a while, and I wanna talk about something that’s really important to me. Something that I’ve noticed with financial advisors over the last four or five years I’ve been working with them.

And this came from a conversation I had with a financial advisor just this week. Um, and I’m recording this a week before this comes out, this financial advisor, good friend of mine, I’ve known him for quite a few years, um, launched his own firm, had gone independent within the last year or so, and, uh, wasn’t hurting for clients, doing great, bringing on new clients, um, but express to me.

An uneasiness around the service offering around their client journey, feeling like it was inconsistent that the experience every new client was getting was different from the client before it and the client after it. And that that was really stressful to this advisor. And he was feeling like he was at the point where he wanted to create some consistency.

And I paused and just. Talk to him and ask him some questions around what he’s learned from having an inconsistent process. And I’ve asked some variation of this question to many advisors over the years, especially those that are launching something new, whether you’re launching a whole new firm or you’re just launching and trying a new service line, whether you’re using elements or something else, I ask that, what have you learned from being inconsistent?

And they’ve learned a lot. Inconsistency when applied at the right spot. A form of testing. A few weeks ago, I talked about prototyping. I think this was, um, episode two 13. It was the one that came out on, uh, May 1st, I believe. So it was about four weeks ago. Um, I talked about prototyping. Specifically about an important step in creating a service, offering a step in which you can test and try new things.

I think I mentioned there, um, the story of James Dyson, who was one of my favorite founders. He created, I think it was like a thousand prototypes. Again, don’t quote me on that, before he had something that was workable that he could sell to the public and things like that. And I’m sure if you were to look at those prototypes, some of them would look very similar and many of them would look very different from each other.

There was a lot of inconsistency. The consistency though was in his approach in testing and trying new things. So what I want to advocate for here is finding peace in inconsistency, knowing that there’s going to be a phase in which you are not consistent. Now the title of this show, you notice I mentioned when scale and consistency destroy progress.

Now I use that. Intentionally because the advisors I’ve seen fall into the biggest pitfalls over the last few years as they’ve launched a new line of service or a new type of service for their clients. Where they fail the most comes when they try to apply automation or scale or consistency to early on, because if we apply it too early on, we become rigid.

We become and lose curiosity. And yes, it can feel chaotic when we’re inconsistently consistent and trying new things, but the whole point of that is we’re creating a relevant and valuable service to clients. So I think there needs to be an inconsistency phase. We’ll call this the prescale phase of developing, developing an effective service.

Um, last week we talked about starting a coaching business. For those of you who want to start a coaching service, a membership model, a subscription service, whatever you wanna call it, if it’s something new, you need to have this prescale phase where you are doing inconsistent things, but you are not just throwing stuff at the wall to see what.

What, um, sticks you are actually intentionally learning from these experience. What problem are you solving for, for the clients that you’re trying to do this for? What worked, what didn’t? What solutions actually solve the problem? You need to be intentional about that inconsistency so that you don’t get too outta control.

There are stark binaries on each end of this. You can be too inconsistent and operate an entirely inconsistent business where nothing happens and you can’t scale beyond yourself. Or you can scale too early on and honestly just not gain traction from services or things because you’re too rigid at and you’ve defined things too early on.

So have a clear inconsistency phase, a prescale phase that allows you to develop effective services. Remember, the keywords here are relevant. We want these services to be relevant and valuable to clients. It needs to actually solve a problem that they need. Now the reason I wanna share this today before, um, we apply a facelift to a, a facelift, apologize for my words to the program over the last, um, few years, those of you who have listened to ality for a long time, and if you haven’t, I highly encourage you go back to the first few episodes and you’ll notice that today it sounds very different than it did in the past.

We have had a lot of inconsistency with this program, and I’ve done a lot of learning along the way. In fact, when I first took over Element. Um, little over a year ago, a lot of it was just interviewing other, other people in the industry and it probably felt very similar to programs that already exist.

And I found myself feeling like I want a little bit more control over this. I need to figure out what is the message that people want to hear. I. What are the things that we can say that’s relevant to them? And so for the last few months, you’ll notice a lot of these episodes have been solo, been me talking about interesting things.

It’s been highly inconsistent, and that’s been intentional. And we’re just entering outta that phase where we can be inconsistent and start to have a consistent story to tell. And I think friends, you’re all gonna really love it. So again, any feedback you have for me, if there’s certain topics that have really resonated with you, I would love to hear that.

I’d love to hear what type of topics you’ve enjoyed hearing about the most, whether it’s me, Carl, Abby, Reese, or anyone that we’ve interviewed over the last few years. I’d love to hear what has resonated with you most. That’s going to dictate a lot of what we do here in the future, but again, have a lot of fun things planned for you without my friends.

We’ll see you next 📍 week. If you have any questions for me, again, you know where to find us. Element Ality, which is podcast get elements.com or again find us on LinkedIn or just go to our website. You can schedule a demo and I’m happy to chat with you that though. We’ll see you next week.