It’s been discussed in many top Financial Planning circles that controlling behaviour and temperament are top priorities for Trusted Advisors and households that your practices serve.  The mental processes, the beliefs and feelings about money and all the discovery work that you do goes a long way in tailoring your approach to develop that Plan for clients.

Client Management: Execution

But one part of Financial Planning that is often overlooked by Financial Planners in client management is something counterintuitive and isn’t so obvious.  Most Planners are good at what they do and have a natural affinity for: having empathy, being good to great listeners,  attention to detail.

In other words, most Financial Planners are good at doing, executing.  And that’s just how it is, you’ve built your practice from the ground up, you had to do it all on your own at one point, building the website, building the brand, building your practice, hiring and training staff, doing webinars.  What does inherently get lost is that doing, executing to ensure your clients have their Plan in place is only part of the desire that your client want to take you on and stay with you.

Showing your Process

While most Financial Planners are great at executing on tasks, what does sometimes get left out in client management is the need to show the process unfold.  It’s beyond wanting and having the desire to be as “transparent” as possible with your clients — it’s much more than that.  Showing what you do, communicating the process that your practice takes to carry out clients Plan might be even more important than the Plan itself.

After all, the job of a Planner is to be the change agent that takes your clients from where they are now to where they are going to be.  Essentially, your practice and you are a catalyst.

A definition of a Catalyst is this: “a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.”

That’s pretty scientific, but the general idea is that you are the rock in which your clients will stand on as they move on up.  As many of you know so well, that change comes about in knowing your client and then tailoring that Plan to suit their’s.  On your way to being a catalyst is your ability to demonstrate and show that the process itself is not intimidating or frightening in any way.

Making that step-change from where your clients are to where they are going is going to be greatly supported when they are able to see in a simple way how they are going to get there.

Going a Step Further

Having a graphic representation and detailed Plan is great, but what take it to the next level in client management is the ability to revisit and show prior successes.  Most psychologists suggest that keeping a daily journal is a good way to work out your thoughts and to express them.  By having the ability to journal, record things that you’ve done, you and clients will be able to look at in the last 6 months or the last year and be able to be celebrate how far you’ve come along.

One way to do that is to create an actionable checklist, set goals, targets and as you complete them throughout the year, you can revisit and see and demonstrate to your clients just how far they’ve come under your guidance.

Find out more on how you use technology to support you being a catalyst to more clients and grow your practice.