Jordan shares how simply helping prospects understand their financial situation can create those powerful “aha” moments.

Jordan dives into why orientation might just be your new secret sauce, offering a fresh value proposition that cuts through the noise. Tune in to discover how explaining over advising can transform your practice and foster deeper client relationships.

Transcript

Jordan Haines: Hello friends and welcome to another episode of L mentality. For those of you joining us for the first time. I’m Jordan Haynes, financial idol specialist here, elements and your host for today’s show. Now many of you will know. I serve. In addition to the work I do here at elements as the director of financial education at dentist advisors, that’s just a fancy way of saying I handle all of our prospecting. And so I spend a good portion of my time. Um, in conversations with dentists that are interested in hiring dentists advisors as their financial advisor. Now last week, I had a number of really interesting conversations and there’s one in particular. 

I want to reference here that kind of comes in line with a lot of the things we’ve been talking about the last few weeks on the show. Particularly around. I alternate value propositions from the traditional quote unquote comprehensive financial planning service offering. So, let me tell you a little bit about this prospective client in the world of dentistry. 

There are really two types of dentists. You have your associate dentists and you have [00:01:00] your just normal practicing dentist and associate dentist is usually one that does not own a business. They don’t own their practice. Some of them are in a transition phase where they’re spending the last couple of years outside of dental school before they buy or. Um, transitioned into practice ownership, or many of them are career long time career associates. This particular associate was older, meaning that they were a career changer. 

They were coming into dentistry, having teenage kids and deciding they wanted to make a big change in their life. Having been graduated from dental school for just a few months, they were starting to make good money and associate dentals dentists can make decent money. There’s still a lot of, um, challenging and comprehensive, complex financial things that need to be situated, especially if practice ownership is on the table, which it was for this doctor. Now in the conversation, it was the dentist and his wife who, uh, she managed most of their personal finances. 

They both had lots of questions. We went through the whole thing and. [00:02:00] They had a lot of concerns ranging from student loans and debts and, uh, education for the kids and retirement. And homeownership and, uh, questions about that transition into the dental practice, lots of things that were going into that. 

And I could sense this insecurity. Now, these folks have never worked with a financial advisor before. This is the first conversation they had with a financial advisor. And I talked to them and ask them questions about their situation. They wanted to know more about our fees. I spent some time talking about that. 

They wanted to know what it looked like to work with a financial advisor. I went through kind of our services. They ask questions about investments. It spans the whole gamut. We probably spent an hour. Then the last 10 to 15 minutes or so. Um, I asked them if they would be interested in doing a, sort of a financial orientation. An opportunity for me to kind of look at their full picture of their financial vitals, to just kind of help them understand how they were doing now. I was clear that I wasn’t necessarily going to give them prescriptive recommendations or advice [00:03:00] about specific things. 

And that would be something that if they choose to work with us as financial advisors, we could certainly do for them. But I let them know that it might be interesting for them to just kind of see how they are doing and see how they’re doing compared to maybe other people that, um, I had talked to in the past. They agreed. 

And so I pulled up their profile and just asked them a few basic questions. We spent two to three minutes just going through and, you know, confirming the value of their home, the retirement accounts, they had the cash accounts that they had in their bank. Any other investments, things like that, getting a general idea of their student loans, their mortgage, their debt situation. 

I asked them about their income. What are they making? I asked them about their spending. What do they estimate that they spend. Um, I asked them about how much they save into certain accounts. And then I asked them about debt payments. All in, again, this took three to five minutes. I was not looking at a totally dialed in precise data set, but I had good enough information to speak to them and have a conversation. And then what we did is we went through the next few minutes talking about their financial [00:04:00] situation. I started with total term. 

And for those of you who have never heard that before, shame on you go to our website, get elements.com, scroll down a little bit. You’ll see a, what we call that periodic table or that scorecard where you can click on these and get a brief description. Total term there is on the bottom, right? It’s the green one and we use it to help measure. How prepared someone is to make work optional. 

It’s the retirement readiness score. And I explained what that was and it was low and that was fine. We then moved over to the left side of the screen. We talked about liquid term, which essentially measures how long someone could live on their liquid assets. We then talked about their savings rate. What percentage of their income was going towards savings? We talked about their debt rate as well. Overall things were looking okay. But their liquidity was a little low. 

They only had about a 0.3 or a 0.6 somewhere within there. So they only had about three to S. Or 0.5, sorry. Then about three to six months worth of liquidity. And it was that liquidity that was causing them to react and to [00:05:00] feel a certain way. And I made a comment. Um, after describing all of these areas, which again took me maybe two to three minutes, I made a comment about their liquidity and their savings and their debt. And I said, I mentioned something along the lines of, in your life, a lot of the things and the challenges that you’re bringing up to me right now. I could probably draw a straight line back to your liquid situation. 

I mean, you don’t have a lot of liquid assets. And it’s that thing that’s causing you a lot of stress about your debt. It’s causing you a lot of stress about these things, because if I look at your debt rate, it actually is pretty healthy. All things considered. It is not in a bad place, but it’s your liquid term score? 

That’s a little low. And that’s probably what’s causing you to feel the way that you’re feeling right now. And I watched them on the zoom screen. Kind of start to like, breathe like a sigh of relief, like, oh, I’d never seen that before. And the wife who managed their finances and had a pretty good grasp of how things were said. 

I never thought about it that way. I never really understood it this [00:06:00] way. And I was able to react now. Let me be clear. I did not give them any advice. Any advice whatsoever in this conversation. All I did was explain how they were doing. I showed them the different things that are affecting their lives. I presented something that maybe would be a consideration. And then, because this was a prospecting type conversation and a situation in which we were pushing for them to become a financial planning client. 

I said, these are the things that we would help you with. We’d help you build your liquidity in the right areas. We’d help you get your savings rate to the right place. We’d help you come up with a debt management plan and the client seemed a lot more interested. After we went through that orientation. Now we could also take a different direction with this client. At Dennis advisors, we have a dentist’s money coaching program for people that might not be ready or, or really ever be ready for a full financial planning relationship. 

It’s an opportunity for. It’s essentially for them to just have financial conversations with a. Um, Dedicate or not a dedicated a financial [00:07:00] coach about something that they have on their mind. And that certainly could be an option for them. But for that to work, the one thing needs to be clear. The value proposition needs to be there. And the value proposition is orientation. 

And many of you have heard me talk about this in the past, but this is one. Possibility one potential option. For an alternate value proposition. Then financial planning or financial advice. So I want us to pause for a second and think about situations in which you have gotten that aha moment from your clients. Where was that? 

Was it in a. Specific prescriptive. Advice recommendation that you gave them. Was it in a time that you explain things and it finally made sense to them. If that’s the case. How can we double click on that value? How can that become our special sauce? How can we filter out all the things that are just fluff that are noise. 

Things that will distract people from our core value proposition, which in my specific [00:08:00] situation, in the dentists that I work with, the people that I’ve talked to it’s so often just orienting someone to their situation, helping them understand how they’re doing. So my friends, I want you to walk away from this conversation, this, um, uh, solo monologue I’m doing here. Um, I want you to take away one thing from this, not one thing is. Think about orientation, think about helping people understand their situation for the first time. As one potential value proposition that you could lean into. Are there people out there. That don’t understand actually how they’re doing and that’s all that they want. Could you create a service, offering a financial coaching, a financial wellness, you name it, whatever you want. 

Could you create a financial service? That allows you to lean into that very thing. And still deliver on the human element that so many people are wanting. 

Next week, we’re going to hopefully have Abby Morton on the call. I want to have Abby give us an update on elements and the great things that they’re doing in [00:09:00] the realm of coaching and employer wellness and things like that. We met a few weeks ago. Many of you remember that where we talked about the case for financial coaching. 

So this week I’m going to get an update from her on what’s going on, on their end. Uh, things that are working, things that are not, if you have any questions for me or for Abby, and you want to ask that, please feel free to reach out to us. Um, Let’s go to podcast, get elements.com. I think that’s a great one. 

Or you find me on LinkedIn. You can send me a message there. Again, if you have questions, concerns, challenges, things that you want to bring up, please bring it up to us. We’ll make sure that we prepare time ahead of time to talk about that. Otherwise. I hope you all have a great week.