The Symptoms of Lackluster Value

My lack of value manifested in several ways during my first several years as a financial advisor. Maybe these symptoms look familiar to you too:

• Scrambling for materials while your client sits in the lobby waiting to meet with you;

• Meeting with prospects and hoping that by some grace, they’ll say “yes” because you don’t have a close;

• Spending the majority of the meeting talking instead of listening, hoping that if you spew enough verbal vomit, you’ll be able to overcome your lack of value;

• Hoping that a meeting reschedules so it's not on your plate while simultaneously knowing you need to have the meeting to keep your clients; and

• Seeing on your prospect’s face that they kind of like what you’re saying, but they have no idea where you’re going – and neither do you.

Until you have the core competency of delivering massive value, more technical knowledge won’t help you fix these problems. The best way to communicate value is through a systematized quarterly value-adding process.

What are value adds?

A value-add is a personalized document or report that helps your client better understand their financial situation.

The most valuable value adds are written in plain English, free from jargon (like percentages), and must give your client something actionable.

You can’t just send stuff to your clients, check a box, and consider your value delivered. If your deliverable contains any of the following, it does not count as a value-add:

• Short-term market commentaries;
• Any generic information that your client can easily find on Google;
• Language or diagrams too complicated for a twelve-year-old to understand; and
• A handout generated by fancy financial planning software that clients can get from any other financial planner.

Successful value adds are personalized toward your client's personal situation and take considerable time and planning to execute. Everything you send needs to be directly helpful for your client’s specific situation and needs actionable advice that your client can understand and follow through.

We live in an age where general financial advice is only a few swipes away. Your clients come to you instead of doing a Google search because they want your insights and respect your ability to make the best recommendations for their situations.

Any value adds your office sends out must respect the faith they have in you. Don’t blow this by sending generic articles filled with info that doesn’t apply to them.

Benefits of value adds

I send value adds to clients each quarter. Quarterly deliverables are frequent enough to keep my value at the top of their minds without overloading my clients with information.

It also allows me to stay one step ahead of my clients so that they never have to be the ones to bring things to my attention.

By streamlining my client communications like this, I know that all my clients are receiving the same information simultaneously, alleviating any questions about where I could be in the planning process with any given client.

A great example of this is beneficiary reviews. Most advisors will do a beneficiary review when a new client comes in, put that information on the back burner, and forget about it.

In my practice, beneficiaries are reviewed every two years when my office tackles the beneficiary reviews for my entire book of business by sending the reports to all clients. This report then becomes my focus for the next round of meetings.

This way, if anyone ever calls with beneficiary questions, or heaven forbid, I’m in the middle of an SEC audit, I know exactly when I last reviewed beneficiaries for each client.

Value adds help you in other ways, in that they:

• Demonstrate your value in an easy-to-understand way.
• Allow you to deliver value with hyper-efficiency by working with your schedule and leveraging all the other work you do across your business.
• Cover all aspects of financial planning for all clients – no one misses out on important information they need or falls through the cracks.
• Mean you’re never left wondering how long it's been since you took a specific action on an account.

Examples of quarterly value adds

I send clients value adds and also use these them as topics for upcoming meetings.

Here are some value adds I implement each quarter:

• Beneficiary reviews
• Tax strategies and recommendations
• 1099 reports
• Guardrails
• Long-term care

By using value adds to streamline your client communications, you truly begin to deliver massive value. Your clients can see, in dollar amounts, how much they gain each quarter by working with you.

Not only is this a big deal for clients, but it does wonders for the “head trash” you might have surrounding your practice.

Action items

If you haven’t planned your calendar for 2023, it's time to get moving! Take some time today to build your value-add timeline.

Create your value adds by building the output first, then determine the most efficient and accurate method of collecting data.

Matthew Jarvis, CFP®, started his career in financial services in 2003. Five years later he was still struggling to survive, up to his eyeballs in debt, generating just $300,000 of gross revenue with basically no profits. However, by 2017 his practice passed $1M of revenue, he was taking 50+ days of vacation each year (154 including weekends) and Michael Kitces described his practice as "highly profitable and hyper-efficient" (http://www.kitces.com/7). Today Matthew's practice grosses more than $1.5M while he works just six months a year. In addition, The Perfect RIA advisor training platform he co-founded with Micah Shilanski CFP® is one of the most popular in our industry.

Read more articles by Matthew Jarvis