A Question from Hellyer, Part Deux

In a conversation with BJ at the 2024 Annual Meeting, he asked the question: "How do we keep advisors focused on what they need to be doing every day to grow profitable practices, especially in the valuable 5-19 space?”. That question drove the topic of Driving FPP #9.

Coming off of a GREAT annual meeting this month, I decided to make “A question from Hellyer” a recurring annual event :). This year our conversation was about increasing advisors’ overall lives production. Northwestern is doing a great job of putting an emphasis on growing New Clients, and both MPs and the HO are putting their money where their mouth is by removing the cap on the NC bonus, as well as the new New Client Grid Enhancement bonus we discussed in Driving FPP #20. NCs truly are the lifeblood of ANY business. I have yet to have someone give a viable answer to the question “What is the best company you can think of, that you would invest in today, that is showing slow to no new user movement in their business?”

I am not going to go deep in this message on growing lives for newer advisors, as I think we’re all probably aligned on that answer. Beyond an obsessive prospecting mindset, packaging DI and Life together for income protection, and having at least 25 facts per month, I will add just one thought for your consideration: How quickly do your mentors recommend to young advisors that they ‘move up market’ to grow?

I am all for continually increasing the quality of the prospects new advisors are in front of, and working at the edge of their capabilities - that’s how they learn. That said, everything we know about the science of learning also teaches us that new knowledge and skills build upon existing knowledge and skills, and when they don’t have a firm enough foundation upon which to build at each stage, they can regress, become discouraged, and begin to spiral backward. Prospecting up too dramatically and too quickly can have a very negative effect on productivity, and eventually retention, if it’s not a supplement to lateral prospecting while cementing the basic skills of becoming an effective planner/salesperson.

For career advisors, my advice to increase lives production is to stop doing Annual Reviews! Stick with me on this…

A Plan - Noun, a singular deliverable

Planning - Verb, an ongoing process

Early in my Home Office career, Rick Zehner, who was in Actuarial at the time, beat into my head that “words mean things, Frankl”. When I say the words, “Annual Review”, what immediately comes to mind? If I change the words to “Ongoing Planning Implementation”, or “Planning Update and Next Steps”, what immediately comes to mind? Ask any Advisor, in any office I’ve worked in, and they will tell you it is my mission to remove the words “Annual Review” from their vocabulary altogether! An advisor’s value in a client’s life is to help them continually move in the direction of their goals/desires - it’s to evolve their planning with their changing lives and help them make the good decisions over time that will help them achieve the best outcomes for themselves, their families, and their businesses. Look at the 4* and 5* Pathfinders and you’ll usually see this process baked into their culture!

I’ve observed two major areas where this falls down, not because of a lack of belief, but rather because of a lack of focus or process:

1. As advisors are beginning to grow their investment book, and beginning to talk to prospects of more substantial means, they start acquiring the assets first, and think 'we’ll get to the insurance next’. Then, either because of a lack of real process, or occasionally not wanting to feel ’salesy’, that follow-through doesn’t happen.
2. As advisors begin to integrate Service, Lead, and/or Entity Advisors to work with their existing clients, to create capacity and focus their work on finding an increasing number, of increasingly higher quality, new clients.

Absent a real, ongoing, documented planning process, these growing advisors and second line of advisors can frequently fall into the role of reviewing the asset allocation and performance, and managing the relationship to ensure client satisfaction with decisions they have already made…which is absolutely important, but doesn’t move the ball ahead for clients, or the firm.

It’s common that, as advisors move from having a practice to growing a business, it’s rare that they take the time to step back and document their beliefs and create a process that will allow them to grow purposefully. We go through a really interesting exercise with Advisors of all stripes that is both eye-opening to them, and helpful to their growth as business owners and thinkers. It follows this process:

• Write out your beliefs. For example:
  • Pick the target market(s) where you’re focused.
  • All client situations are unique, but what do you believe are the ideal outcomes for that market?
  • What mix of products are ideally best suited, as they are integrated into the plan, to produce that outcome, short-term and long-term?
  • Do you believe that a certain percentage of income should be allocated to their financial plan?
  • Do you believe that their income should be protected during their earning years, no matter what happens, so that they don’t derail their goals if an income is lost, either permanently or just interrupted for a year or two?
  • Do you believe that best outcomes will be achieved if they have a bullet-proof base income in retirement?
  • Do you believe that there needs to be non-market correlated assets in place to protect against down markets in the distribution phase and to keep them invested all the time?
• Utilizing the answers from the above example, write a narrative of your planning philosophy that aligns the outcomes.
• Having a formal planning beliefs narrative allows advisors to:
  • Be accountable to a process that can remove emotion or fear, and create confidence around recommendations.
  • Create clarity for your Service, Lead, and/or Entity advisors around the firm's philosophy.
  • Create development plans to ensure their skills in executing on the firm’s philosophy.
  • Create performance plans that reward outcomes that align to the firm’s philosophy.
  • Set firm production goals that align to that philosophy.

Now that everyone has clarity around who they are and what they believe, production conversations can be much more impactful. Conversations that feel more like you’re bringing help to align their actions with their values are significantly more impactful than conversations wondering why they are not writing more lives. One feels like it is about them, the other feels like it’s about me…

I thought Ed McGill did an excellent job of modeling this in his annual meeting main stage talk when he showed how they build McGill/Junge's product level goals based upon the outcomes they believe best reflected their planning outcomes philosophy - it’s well worth a re-watch when it comes out on AVHQ!

Side note, Annual Meeting was amazingly impactful for me this year! From talks like Ed’s that tied together the emotion and logic that it takes to build a firm like theirs, and Zach Burton speaking from his heart during his Pathfinder Leader talk (despite being 7 years younger than me, he modeled who I continue to strive to be when I grow up), to Mel Robbins walking us through her 5-second rule and Let Them theory (I read a lot, but haven't read any of Mel's work yet…they are on their way from Amazon now), I took away a tremendous amount!

In closing, thank you BJ for always being open to having conversations with me around the priorities you and your team are working on, and giving me good topics that are of interest to your peers! I’m also going to ask each of you to practice Mel’s 5-second rule with this message. If you found this of interest, know you need to help your career advisors understand their planning values, and have permission to help them align their actions to those values, let’s have a conversation. I’m more of a missionary than a mercenary - you may need my help, you may not, the point is to help your advisors reach their full potential in helping their clients meet theirs. If I can help you think through that, then I’m living my values.

So….

If you found this helpful, then:

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Push reply and let’s set a time to talk!

Think Differently,

Steve