Jordan discusses the number one reason advisors struggle to unlock the next stage of growth: understanding what their clients’ “main thing” is—what’s relevant to them.

Learn how to avoid the cycle of sad solutions and build a client journey and business that is what your clients actually want.

Transcript

Jordan Haines: Hello friends, and welcome to Elementality, A show where financial advisors explore modern and relevant client journeys.

I am Jordan Haines, and today I want to talk to you about the elephant in the room, the thing that many of you have seen and have questions about, and that is my recent shift away from dentist advisors and frankly, full-time work with a team here at Elements to Launching Advisor Relevance. Now, this episode is not meant to promote that service, and this podcast is not meant to promote that service, but instead, I want to give context today and discuss a challenge.

I’ve seen many of you listening to the show Encounter. But to be clear, I’ll continue to host this show and help financial advisors and firm owners find success using elements in their business and with their clients. But if you can’t tell by the topics I discuss so frequently on the show, I’m currently on a mission to help advisors supply services that clients actually demand, essentially bridging what I call the supply demand gap.

And hopefully because of this shift, I’ll be better equipped to help those of you listening to the show build more relevant client journeys. So with that, let’s get into it. What’s the challenge that I see so often with financial advisors? Yeah. Over the last four or five years that we’ve launched elements, I have seen what I call the cycle of sad solutions appear time and time again with financial advisors.

Let me describe this cycle in many firms, specifically, those that have had some success, growing initially oftentimes to a point at which the financial advisor decides, maybe I need to add team. Maybe I want to grow this beyond myself, or. I want to kind of keep the small and keep it lifestyle, even if it’s having one or two support people.

Typically, that advisor hits a point at which they have to decide whether they want to grow beyond themselves or scale beyond themselves to remain lifestyle. But in either situation, the thing that they often are looking for is this fancy word that, frankly, I don’t love, but many of you know what it means, scale.

Yeah, we want to scale beyond ourselves. What does that mean? Many of you might replace that with efficiency, might replace it with, um, capacity to grow, but essentially it’s, it’s building a business. This is for those of you who have listened to or read the book, um, the E Myth. This is essentially that book.

It’s, it’s turning your practice, your firm into an actual business that can grow beyond you, whether you decide intentionally to keep it small or to build a multi advisor firm. But scale is the solution that people are looking for. But so often, and I’ll talk to you why I think this is, we enter what I call the cycle of sad solutions.

The cycle of sad solutions really just has three steps to it. The first is what, uh, I’ll coin as a hopeful optimism. Right. So you go out there and you’re looking for a solution that will help you scale. Maybe it’s something that you want to scale your marketing engine. Maybe it’s, um, a solution that you want to scale your sales process.

You wanna build a sales playbook. Maybe it’s a solution to help you streamline and, and make your onboarding process more efficient, or a solution that’s going to help you service and maintain relationships to help you expand and ultimately get referrals in the future. You are out looking for a solution to scale and you have this whole pull optimism that a solution is going to help.

So you go out and you look at the Kitsis mind map or whatever that thing’s called this tech map that he has 500 different solutions. Or you find what all, what’s all the rage and in the advisor community, or you talk to your advisor friend and you find something that you’re really excited about. It looks great, and then you have some doubtful realizations.

So we close out this hopeful optimism and we realize that maybe this isn’t everything that I hoped it would be. Maybe it’s not actually solving my problems, maybe it’s distracting from what I actually do for my clients. Maybe it turns out to not be as efficient as I hoped it would be. And then comes the final state of things, what I’ll call demoralizing cancellation.

And many of you have experienced this when you kind of get on this trendy bandwagon. And for those of you listening to this, elements is new and many of you probably. Ca. I mean, those of you who listen to this are probably sticking around and you love this, but many of you came to elements hoping that it was gonna solve all your problems, feeling like it was a silver bullet, having some doubtful realizations that maybe this isn’t relevant to your clients, and eventually leading to again, what I call the demoralizing cancellation.

And thus the cycle repeats over and over and over again. And many of you have seen this. You’ve felt it. You’ve been there. The result, there is no scale, no growth, at least beyond you, the founding advisor, and no solutions that seem to work.

So where are you to go? You still need to scale in order to move to this next point of growth, whether it’s keep it small and lifestyle or grow beyond yourself. Scale is needed. But where do we go? How do we know what solutions actually work? And that my friends is where I believe, and this is where you hear me talking about this time and time again.

Go listen to the episode we did two weeks ago, uh, episode 2 21, about value adds. This is where understanding what is relevant to your clients matters more than anything in the world. For so many of you listening, you have gone to the market with a supply of financial advice. You maybe have sat for the CFP exam.

You’ve gone through that curriculum. You’ve learned what it means to be a financial advisor. You know how to create and deliver a comprehensive financial plan. But at the end of the day, that’s approaching your client relationships, your market, the people, your ideal client profile. From the supply side saying, look what I have.

Hopefully you want it. And that is why you cannot scale, because without understanding what the main thing is, I’m gonna use that word. The main thing is for your clients. Think about that as your client’s core job to be done. Your client’s core relevance, what they actually want, your core value proposition.

Without being able to clearly articulate and fully understand on an intimate level what that core value proposition is, what that main thing is, you’ll never be able to scale how to talk about the main thing. You’ll never be able to figure out how to deliver repeatedly on the main thing. You’ll never learn how to scale the main thing, and you’ll never be able to go to market consistently with the main thing.

It all starts with understanding the main thing. Now, I want, I’m not gonna get into that today. I’m sure we will talk in the future about how you can uncover what the main thing is, but in my experience, you’ve heard me talk about this, those advisors that use elements, for example, oftentimes their main thing is what I call orientation.

It’s just helping their clients understand how they are doing. And so then using a tool like Elements works out really well because you know what the main thing actually is. But if the main thing for your clients is student loan planning, for example, maybe you’re better suited to create a spreadsheet that works for them.

Or if your main thing is very tight and it’s budgeting, maybe using a tool like Monarch money is good enough in either situation. It all starts with understanding what your client’s main thing is. So again, rather than get into that today, let me give you a book. I’ve, I’ve referenced this book a lot, but to understand what your client’s main thing is, you can read a book.

Uh, it’s a short read, uh, jobs To Be Done Theory by Anthony Olic is a great one. That one’s more broad, big picture or if you want to go read, uh, demand Side Sales 1 0 1, that’s a really practical way to interview, and he spends about half the book talking through how to interview clients or customers that have bought your service.

And goes through exactly what you can ask them to understand why it all starts there. And if you can articulate clearly what your main thing is, then you can create a sales playbook. You could learn and scale how to actually talk about this. So if you have a young advisor or if you have someone that you want to have qualify your service or frankly you don’t wanna spin your wheels, customizing your sales process.

It’s gonna start by understanding what the main thing is and creating that sales playbook. Something that you can consistently talk about. If you understand what your main thing is, you can figure out how to deliver repeatedly on that main thing and avoid any distractions along the way. This gets at the conversation we had two weeks ago about value adds, rather than have all these distracting value adds, deliver on your core Main thing.

If you can figure out what your main thing is, you can now scale it. You can now create efficiencies around that rather than scaling the wrong thing, you can scale the right thing, the main thing, and finally you can go to market with the main thing I. If you know what these things are, the catalyst events, how to talk about the main thing, well then you can go to your people, your ideal client profile and you can start to talk about it.

I have found time and time again with advisors that adopt a tool like Elements, or I mean name, any of the other big tools out there that advisors are using nowadays. If they can go and adopt that product and understand what the main thing is from their clients, they’re going to get so much value out of that solution understanding.

That it actually solves the main things that their clients want. So I’m gonna leave this with a promise. If you can understand what’s relevant to your clients, what is the main thing that they want? What are they demanding? What are their core job to be done? What is your core value proposition? If you can clearly articulate that main thing, which is easier said than done, you can now grow beyond you.

Again, whether that means keeping it tight and small. Or growing to multi advisors that my friends is going to be the formula for growth. It all starts with getting ready for growth. And growth doesn’t happen until you know what your main thing is. And I am here to tell you that your main thing is not the broad things that we honestly always hear in our industry.

Peace of mind, financial confidence, a comprehensive holistic financial plan, uh, clarity about your future. I’m talking something specific like, you help me avoid random acts of finance. You help my life feel a little less chaotic. Those are kind of the things that are going to be the main thing for your clients.

So more to come with this, we’re gonna, again, we’re gonna highlight. Really unique client journeys on the show in the future. I’m not gonna talk about advisor relevance. I just wanted to give you some context today about things that I’m thinking about and what I’m talking about constantly with advisors.

And hopefully this is relevant to you. Hopefully this show is relevant to you, and 📍 if it’s not, please, please feel free to reach out to us. But with that, my friends, I think we’re gonna just end this episode and conclude by saying, go find out your main thing. What is the main thing that you do for clients that is unique and independent and differentiated?

From other financial advisors. With that, we’ll see you next week.