Why Advisors Lose Clients

What You'll Learn In Today's Episode:

  • The ‘rule of two’ is essential in client relationships, and financial advisors should practice it by staying connected with clients and addressing their concerns promptly.
  • Balance and recovery are crucial in all aspects of life, including work and personal endeavors.
  • Understanding the underlying questions and concerns of clients is more important than providing surface-level answers.

In this episode, Jamie Shilanski introduces the ‘rule of two,’ a valuable principle for financial advisors looking to enhance their client relationships. Jamie shares an intriguing anecdote about a fishing lodge, where strict management led to staff discontent. She cleverly ties this to the financial advisory world, illustrating how inflexibility can negatively impact client satisfaction. 

The episode goes beyond simple dos and don’ts. Jamie dives into the importance of meaningful communication and challenges advisors to go beyond surface-level interactions, emphasizing that genuine connection comes from addressing the heart of clients’ questions and worries.

Related: The Mirage of the Million-Dollar Dream

Transcript:

The Rule of Two. If you have lost a client, or if you feel disconnected from your clients, then you’re probably not practicing the rule of two. So if you stay with me through this podcast, we are going to talk about why the Rule of Two is so important and how you can set yourself up and your team for continual habitual home runs. Welcome back to UPR nation. . .

This is Jamie Shilanski an episode of Worlds to Conquer, and today, I am going to talk to you about how we avoid losing clients, and how we set ourselves, our team and our protege, financial advisors, who are coming up and building their book of business at Shilanski and Associates our RIA in Anchorage Alaska, ultimate success, old school basics, because how you do anything is how you do everything that is so important to understand and to always teach, especially if you are involved in young adolescents people’s lives today, you need to be driving this lesson home with everything that They touch, every endeavor that they do, because often it is really easy to excuse youth and laziness, because you can look at a person and say, Well, of course they didn’t really want to do the dishes, or, of course they really didn’t want to help with the lawn. It’s not their lawn. They don’t understand the pride of homeownership, but that is because you have ingrained in them it’s okay to be sloppy. And I don’t care if they have a career in finance. I don’t care what they do. In fact, just last night, I got a call from my spouse out in Bristol Bay, Alaska, and they got suckered back into being the head guide at the fishing lodge, even though, after 12 years, they had a little bit of a retirement, but the protege that was being trained to take over the head guide role became pregnant and was having their first child. So anyhow, my spouse gets hooked winked into going back out there and running the lodge for about, you know, five weeks of time. And when they go out there, there’s a lot of new rules that have been implemented that are just bogus. Now, the problem is, the protege and her husband are in their mid to late 20s, and so they have all of the confidence that undermines all of the expertise some of the people in the lodge have. Otherwise, what does that mean? Exactly, confidence always interrupts expertise. So in their supreme intelligence, they have decided that what they want to have all of the personnel that they employ, because they employ about 20 different people at this lodge. It’s a pretty big Fisher so this is housekeeping. These are guides. These are, you know, managers, maintenance people, boat hands, the whole the whole food works. And you’re in remote Alaska, so when you’re on this fishing lodge compound, it’s, you know, five acres, and that’s it. That’s the only place to be or where to go. And they’re open seven days a week. They have people constantly coming in, out of the lodge, checking in, checking out for a three day package, five day package, week long package, whatever people have purchased. So they decided, in their infinite wisdom, that they are going to institute having everyone be in the lodge at 5:45am every single day to arrive before the first guests show up for breakfast because they normally have a 6:30am departure, and then nobody is allowed to leave until 9:45pm when everyone comes back from their adventure and the last guest leaves the lodge after having dined and dessert and after drinks and playing pool and doing all of those things Now seven days a week, 5:45am to 9:45pm and by the time you leave the lodge, you still have to go get all your gear set up. So you got to figure out what you’re fishing for the next day, what fly out you’re going to go to, and then you got to go rig up for a completely different experience. And especially a lot of these guides, you know, you have people come out there and they say, Oh yeah, I’m an avid fisherman. That’s why I wanted to book this trip. It’s my dream Alaska trip, etc. Trip, etc. But they can cast maybe 20 feet in front of them, and you got to get that out 40 to 60 feet across a fast moving river. So they’ll rig up for two scenarios. One, if you end up being a supreme caster and you’re able to spay that thing clear across the river and not get held up, fantastic for you. But if you’re not, and they’ve got to make a quick switch to another type of gear so that you still have a positive outcome for that day, they got to be able to do that too. So they leave at 9:45pm and they got maybe two hours of additional work, rigging up and getting things ready, lunches packed, gear packed, emergency stuff packed for the very next day. That’s exhausting to do for six months. In fact, it’s really, really challenging. And so they’re 30 days into instituting this new policy with a crew. And then, you know the husband and wife, they leave the lodge, they come into Anchorage, because you can’t have a baby in the village, I guess you could, but you’d have no medical support. And they want my spouse to enforce this rule of making sure everyone shows up at 5:45am but here’s the problem, my spouse thinks it’s a bogeys rule. It’s absolutely insane, and you can’t work people to this level and expect high performing individuals seven days a week to show up with the best attitudes possible. And so now they’re having to institute a policy they don’t agree with, and they’re not going to be around for the outcome, and they already know the mutant is coming. They already know because it’s really, really early in the season, they already feel the disgruntlement of employees. And when employees walk out, it’s not like you have this massive job pool to get to remote villages in Alaska. You could start just plucking people and having them fill roles. So my spouse is out there, and they’re trying to work with the people that are in town, talking on the phone and stuff, and saying, Hey, listen. And I respectfully disagree with this policy. I think that, forget the labor law infringements, but you’re going to have, you know, real Muni here once we get into August, because you’re not giving people time off to refill their cup. You’re not giving them an opportunity to really refresh, regroup and come back in a positive spirit, because your recovery is just as important. If you ever see occupation, a hotel, a spa, or excursion, rafting, any kind of these scenarios, you know, you’re having the same conversation every single day. Hey, did you grow up around here? You know, are you married? Do you have kids? What do you like to do? You’re having the same conversation all the time. So now you’re putting this group of people and asking them to have the same conversation with this with different groups of people, three times a day. You’re having it for breakfast, and you’re having it on the excursion, and then you’re having it for dinner, because everyone’s going to rotate around these groups. And it gets exhausting, you know, it gets really laborious to have to do, and that’s why you’ve got to be able to recover. You got to blow off steam, you got to come out, you got to decompress, and you get it’s just like being in surge. For us, you cannot be in surge 365, days out of the year, you will burn out. You will burn out. It’s just impossible for us to show up every single day being our absolute best, because our recovery is just as important as the grind. It really is. The people that show up absolutely on fire, they’re not like that 365, days out of the year. Instead, they’ve learned how to balance and how to refuel for the show up on game day when they are ready. Do you want to see somebody that just burns out and fizzles is because they have no idea what refills their cup, and they’re so confused why they feel so tired, so unenergetic, and why they just really don’t feel the drive and passion for things that they used to well, because what you did six weeks ago is impacting who you are today, and you’re not showing a mastery of that schedule. And so when my spouse is relating this to the new management team, they’re like, No, absolutely not. They have nowhere else to be. We’re paying them a salary, and they should be working, you know, those hours, blah, blah, blah. And so their confidence is really interrupting my spouse’s expertise of saying, Hey, listen, I ran this launch, you know, very successfully for 12 years. I put this entire crew together, and here’s what you’re missing. Here’s the important part of being able to recover, so that they can show up and grind but that confidence factor that, no I know wordly this that’s so, so cruel to be able to overcome. So about a month into this new policy and trying to implement it, trying to listen to, you know, the the young proteges and management try to really not rock the boat, because it’s their idea, and at the end of the day, it’s their lodge to have to run. And so they’re given the best advice possible. And you know, it was like, Listen, I’m running into, like, roadblock after roadblock with our team. They’re not showing up. They’re they’re like, I don’t care. Then fire me. Kind of attitudes about this. And then so they said, What do I do? How do I talk to them about this? I need kind of professional advice here. And I said, the only thing that you could do right now, because if this is the policy that you’re going to institute and enforce, then here’s what you could do. You could go back to the why basics. And you could go back to telling them why it matters that they show up and give their absolute best. You could talk to them about how you do anything is how you do everything. And so you go up to these young men and you say, Listen, I know that you guys don’t want to be, you know, we whacking out here. There are a million bugs. That is an actual number, if not more. And, you know, it’s hot and you’re already tired, you already have all these other things that you’d rather go do, and it seems stupid to have to weed whack out and, you know, burst away Alaska when you’re inside of villecom. And you don’t think it matters, but here’s why it matters. And talk to them about the prestige, talk to them about the 10s of 1000s of 1000s of dollars that people pay to go out there for the opportunity to have this excursion, and then also tell them about how much it matters for their social reputation, because what they don’t see at the tender age of the regaining 20s is how the people that they are interacting with that come out to the lodge. And if you’re going to pay 10s of 1000s of dollars go fishing. You’re pretty big wig. Either you’ve scraped and saved every penny, and this is your retirement dream, and sometimes that happens, or you’re showing up in your private jet because you got a tickle that said, let’s go to Alaska and go fly fishing. So they’ve got really prominent people that come out there. And so when you’re around those prominent people, you’re giving them a showcase to see who you are. I cannot tell you how many jobs my spouse has been offered because they are absolutely exemplary at their job. They’re fun, they’re social, they handle problems. You know, they’re not always composed. I think you know what best describes our lives together is beautiful chaos. We’re both super clumsy, we’re both really fun. We just like to we just like to have a good time, and we never try to take anything too serious, especially ourselves. And that conveys to other people. People want to be around other positive people. And so the best piece of advice I could give was go back to them and talk to them about the why. Talk to them about why it matters to show up and how many connections they could possibly be making, but not if they show up and they’re the lazy person, they’re disgruntled, you know, they’ve got kind of an attitude, a chip on their shoulder. People will be super dismissive and not hire you in a heartbeat. You want to always put yourself in a position where people are attracted to you and want to work with you. They want to see you. They want to be a part of your life. Do you have to be perfect in every single endeavor? Do you always have to be, quote, unquote on No, that’s not what this is saying. But this is saying that if you verbally committed to do something, then you show up and you give it your absolute best. And we allow our youth, we allow young professionals to be kind of sloppy sometime, because we think that time alone will give them experience to change in the future. That’s not how this works. In fact, I credit a lot of my success to my biggest mistakes that we ever made, and my baby brother, Micah shilanski And I, you know, at the tender age, just like these two trying to step in and run the lodge. You know, we began to have more and more authority at our ra up in Anchorage, Alaska, and my god, the liturgy of mistakes that I could sit here and tell you that we made over and over again because we were young. And yes, the expression exists for a reason. You’re young and dumb, but our confidence wouldn’t allow us to listen to anyone else’s expertise on the subject. And that had it, they’re good, they’re really, really good, and they allowed us to take enough hits to prove a lesson. And when we took those hits, they’d come to us and say, Great, now how are you going to fix it at any time? As I look at any time, they could have stepped in and fixed most, if not all, of the problems that we had self created in trying to become young professionals, but they didn’t. They allowed us to fail and then to know how we were going to get back up after we failed. They were there as a sounding board. They were there to listen, but they didn’t tell us what we had to go and do. They said, great, how are you going to fix it? And you can see this a lot in little adolescents. In fact, I was just having to remind my mom and dad this weekend, because, by the way, if you have parents that are not grandparents, yet, enjoy your time with them, because when they have grandparents, they will become completely different, new people that you have to go learn who they are. I watched my dad hand feed a pancake to a two year old this weekend who could clearly use a fork and had absolutely no problem I was flat casted. He made them waffles and pancakes because they couldn’t decide which one they wanted, and they got both. Do you know what would have happened if I asked my dad growing up for to make me two breakfasts? I would have had zero. That’s how that math works. So who your parents become once they are grandparents, is completely opposite. But how fun is it to meet the brand new people that show up, and they’re really just hoping that you get to do all the hard stuff. You get to do all the disciplining. And so we see this a lot of times where, you know, my mom cut the two year old, and there were two four year olds, and the two four year olds were trying to show the two year old how to use skin work. And my mom is a nervous wreck. She is just out, and she’s watching. She’s like, Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know, you know. And she’s just fretting over them potentially getting hurt. And I had to stop her. I said, Stop, let them kind of figure it out. They’re not in life threatening danger, they’re in skin your knee danger, and they’re not going down a hill. They’re going four or five feet, they need to kind of problem solve this together. And when they did fall a couple of times. Do you know what they taught the two year old? They taught the two year old to sit on his knees on the skateboard and use his hands instead of his feet, until he learned the balance, and then he got on his knees and rose up a little bit, and then as the day progressed, he ended up being on his feet. But we don’t allow ourselves to explore and to fail and to learn. Now I’m not saying put your kids in life threatening situations, but I am saying, for the young people in your life, give them the gosh darn opportunity to figure things out for themselves. It doesn’t have to be the right answer. You could come in later and give them different information, but give them the opportunity to exercise that brain and become problem solvers and become people that help other people. Because you recognize a problem and you want to collaboratively solve it together, that’s what should happen. So now you’re probably asking yourself, Jamie, how does this correlate to mean losing clients or not losing clients. All right, let me tie it back. We got to have those foundational basics. We have to have the knowledge that how we show up to do anything is how we will go on in life. To do everything, we have to be collaborative problem solvers. We have to get our group together, and then also we have to check our freaking ghost. We cannot allow our confidence to interrupt somebody else’s expertise on subject. So in our office of two, and I used to lament doing this. I dreaded doing this when I was a young professional. Is every morning because, you know, this is the internet’s around, but it’s not as robust as everything is today. And so every single morning, we would have an 8:15am, meeting, and every employee at my parents firm would gather in the conference room, and we would have to go through a list of who called in to the office and what came in the mail and what interaction happened with the client from the day before. And I couldn’t stand these meetings. I found them incredibly dull. Of why? Why do we need to know who called in? Why do we have to know what came in the mail every single opportunity? If so and so is doing their job and they’re taking care of it, but my dad was religious. He wanted to hear the pulse. He wanted to hear the tick of who was contacting the office. Now, why did he want to know that well, because clients are how we make a living, and how we make a living is how we afford our personnel paychecks. And he was the sole steward in the office of that we had multiple reps, but he was the biggest income earner. He was a lion share. It was his income that was providing payroll for everybody else at that firm. And so he needed to always know if we were on the verge of a client leaving, or if we just settle up and do something differently with a client. And as you become a financial advisors, if you have been in the business for 15 or more years, you know, you know that when a client calls in with a certain type of question, where that question is leading to, and it’s only so many categories. And so, for example, today, you know, we had an advisor end up losing a client, and it was based on in, you know, six months ago, and they asked about the wrap fees. What does this include? What does it not include? What are the trading fees? Where does this go to etc. And so they asked all of those type of questions. So if you’re an advisor out there, you’ve been around 15 or more years, you know that when a client is asking about wrap fees, what are they really saying to themselves, am I getting what I’m paying for. Am I getting what I am paying for? Because our fees are expensive, but our value is unprecedented. And so they said, you know, the protege advisor says, Hey, could you help me out? I’m not sure how to respond. How do I navigate this situation? You know? Etc. I said, Yeah, absolutely. So I start digging through the file, and I start looking at this, and I see, in October, they emailed into a service person in our organization asking about fees, and then I see that the advisor recorded a video and answered their questions and sent it to them. Should you ever record a video and send it to somebody who’s asking about fees, or should you pick up the bloody phone and call the client? You should pick up the bloody phone and call the client, because then you’re live, you’re responsive, you’re going over, and you’re addressing any of the other questions that they might have at the time. And then as it progressed, I’m seeing that the client called in a couple of other times regarding their RMDs, and they had a little bit of a tax withholding situation. The client was confused. They had a big tax bill the year before, prior to working with us, they wanted to avoid doing that again this year, and the financial plan was set up beautifully so that they wouldn’t, you know at the end of the season, that’s great. But as I’m reviewing the communication between email and phone calls, I see the two phone calls coming into the office. I see the two emails going back and forth with the operations person answering the client’s questions. But here’s where I think it broke down is the advisor is thinking, Oh, this is handled. The client had a question, and our operations team handled it, answered the question, and we move on. Now, is that always the case with the clients? No, no, it is not. Sometimes there’s some fundamental concept that they are missing and not connecting the dots. And so sometimes, even though every normal operations person gave the client was 100% polite, it was accurate, it was concise, it was exactly what the client needed, but it’s not what the client wanted. What the client was wanting was to understand the concept of RMDs and why we were making the decisions that we made on the withholdings. This is where the financial advisor should have picked up the phone and had a 10 minute conversation, because it would have given them an instant home run, an instant home run. This is the rule of two if a client asks two times we pick up the phone and we call them, something is not connecting. And so often I see an email volume back and forth between clients asking questions, us giving answers. And then it may be maybe weeks or months go by, and then the client finds the thread and asks that a question, and they’re like, oh, no, probably, you probably forgot the answer here. And then we just this back and forth, copy paste of I already asked that, or did I already answer the question? But did you really question the underlying question that the client has? Seldom are questions black and white. They are far more complex. They are far more complex, and we have to really practice and utilize the art of getting clients to extract what they’re really concerned about. Was it really a concern about wrap these? No, no, it was not. It was I’m paying for this, but I’m not getting the level of service that I thought I was going to get, and client type financial advisors, it is for our knowledge, our expertise, and also our ability to offer concierge level service. Because guess what? Most people all of this by themselves. They can This isn’t rocket science. It’s not surgery. Most people buy a home, get an automobile, get their jobs, negotiate, pay their regular bills, and they do it all without a financial advisor, so they are competent in the way money moves, but what they are looking for is somebody in their corner giving them expert advice about the things they know about the complex topics they don’t understand, Social Security, Medicare, tax any how do I move my shy 1k once I retire? How do I do Roth conversions. These are the things that intimidate them. It is their fears we are for. We are solving to eliminate their fears eventually success by providing them with expert advice. That is what we are doing. It speaks nothing to the fact that the person can or cannot figure this stuff out for themselves. We assume everybody possibly could, but they have come to us for some concierge level of service. I can stay at a Motel Six and get the very same tangible items, a bed, a shower and a toilet, but my God, if I don’t love a Ritz Carlton, if I don’t love that, the Bellman makes conversation with me, and by the time he gets down to do his reporting, a concierge person is saying, Michelle Lansky, understand that you’re only in Boston for two nights. The wicked is completely sold out. But did you know Kevin Hart was here? Can I orchestrate getting some tickets for you? If that appeals to your sense of humor? Those are the experiences I’m paying for somebody else anticipating my needs and making sure that I’m taken care of. And when it comes to financial planning, that is what we are doing. That is what we are doing. We are taking care of our clients and making sure that they have somebody advocating for their financial success and pointing out potential pitfalls and perils that might appear in their future. That is what we must be committed to doing. And so if we are so detached from our clients, and we are so dependent on other people operating and taking care of what is considered, you know, the the administrative task, quote, unquote, of that client relationship, then we are missing the bigger connection. And so we go right on back to the 8:15am, meeting. There’s a reason my father wanted that meeting. There’s a reason he would pick up the phone and he would call the client randomly if he noticed there was a volley back and forth. And it’s kind of like when you call at your doctor’s office, that nurse practitioner is probably the one running the show. Might be the doctor’s name on the door, but you, you and I both know there’s a practice administrator or nurse practitioner that is running every faucet of that business, but you know what? Who do we feel more gratified by the doctor calling us or the nurse practitioner? It just is what it is. There’s a hierarchy in an organization, in our operations team, our relationship management team, they did everything right. They did everything right. They called the client back immediately. They got the client all of the information, but the advisor was never made aware. That’s not true. They were made aware they didn’t understand the underlying question, and they didn’t know how to turn it into a home run for themselves. And at sometimes that’s just about picking up the bloody phone. And that doesn’t mean that we’re doing a full client appointment. That doesn’t mean we’re deviating from our search schedule. That doesn’t mean we’re breaking processes, but it does mean that we are becoming acutely attuned to what the real questions are, how to answer them, and how to make sure we continue to deliver massive value to people. TPR nation, when we preach about this, we talk about, you know, The Perfect RIA and what we are. This is the pursuit of perfection. This is about us getting better and better and better and going back and looking at the lessons that we shrugged off because our confidence outweighed somebody else’s expertise, the 8:15am meeting, and looking about why it worked and what we needed to change. Now. Do I think we need to go back to a daily 815, meeting. No, not at all. Absolutely not. In fact, my baby brother, Micah and I, we designed the Infinity CRM. So this is our CRM. That is the brain trust of our organization. And one of the very first things is, when you log in, you have your dashboard, and your dashboard has all these widgets. And my dad, you know, as he’s coming around, adapting to this new technology, he just couldn’t quickly see what clients had called in. So what was the very first widget we put on his dashboard? We put in on all the incoming calls. And guess what? He loves to check. He’ll just log in and see who called, and if something kind of pops up like, oh, that client doesn’t normally call in between meetings, then he’ll go check the notes, and he can kind of sniff around and see what’s happening. What’s happening. And that is the level of, you know, trust but verify that we should be attending with our clients. That doesn’t mean habitually, we’re calling every single client every single day, but it does mean we’re asking curious questions, how is this handled? What happened? What is the Rule of Two? Did it go back and forth? And the reason that I don’t you know this is kind of hard, because the advisor I was working with, he said, shows this has become a running agenda with the RM and the ops team. And I said, No, I think she meet with them one time a week, and you should get these pulse points for these different clients, because you’re going to hear two different things, and when they’re together, those things are going to correlate the RMS in our office, our relationship managers are responsible for the relationship with the client. For the most part of the year, they have the most interactions with the client. They do not offer financial advice. They cannot do that part. But this is book appointments, change of address. Can you help me get this form? Follow up with the state planning attorneys, get my taxes over to you. They do all of these logistical, administrative things with the client, and therefore are on the phone more often with the client than anyone else in the office. Now operations team, they are responsible for the movement of money, so they will have those meeting clients go logistics. They cannot offer advice in our office. Some we’re not. But as a whole, they don’t offer the financial advisors responsibility, and they will go over six of paperwork. Financial Advisors in our office don’t fill out paperwork. Why bad at it? People bad at filling out paperwork? Because you got 100 sheets of paper in front of you, you’ve gathered four signatures, and you’re like, yeah, it’s enough. It’s enough. You sign to Let’s go. And so we put our service team members with them, so that way the service team member can go through every single part of it and make sure and make sure that we get every i dotted and every T crossed, I will get bored filling out paperwork. I’m not capable of doing it. Just know that I’m gonna get bored doing it. I’m gonna want to rush along Pro Tip one that at first I thought was being chauvinistic, and then when I ran and really built my mind to it is freaking genius. But my brother said, hey, you know, I want all of the women’s paperwork find in pink, and all the men’s paperwork fogged in blue. And when we do this with clients, and it doesn’t really care about what kind of gender organization is their relationship, it works beautifully. And pink client B is blue Next, because people identify people. Our office, if you’re not doing it, do it. Do it immediately. It is genius. Now you can do like I did and try to fight. Why do we do yellow and green? Why don’t we do non gender specific? That’s just a stupid argument over it. That’s just your confidence interrupt the pink and blue thing works. People identify it, and you move on next. And as I learned from one of my clients, she said that it wasn’t until the late 1950s that pink became a girl’s color. It was always a boy’s color. It was always the color of young men. And so a lot of times in royal paintings and things, anything that is rose color or purple or pinks were given to the males in the family because they were the most sought after and uncommon colors and dyes that you could find. So there you go. There’s gender equality for you. So we have a lot of people in our office that interact and talk with the client, but it’s not always the financial advisor, and for the most part, that works. That works 98% of the time. But then you get into this 2% category, and you really have to pay attention to what’s happening with your clients. Now, if somebody’s going to leave over fees? Are they going to leave no matter what you do? Maybe, probably, that’s really hard to say. But you know what would have happened had the financial advisor picked up the phone and just called and say, Hey, listen, I know RMDs are new for you guys. You know, it’s kind of a weird concept, especially over the last couple of years. And laws have changed. And so, you know, it used to be 70 and a half. And a half and 72 and 73 and who knows, pretty soon it could be 8578 and you have this kind of conversation, have, you know, meeting, but say, hey, I really wanted to address the main problem that we were solving for, which was the tax liabilities that you had in the last year. So here’s how we’re going to structure things, and had they had the opportunity, this would have been a 10 minute conversation, and would have set them up for an absolute home run, because seldom about the fees, sometimes it is, but it’s about value and connection. And when you don’t show value and when you’re not connecting with your clients, you’re going to lose them, because there’s always going to be somebody else who’s willing to do those things at a cheaper cost. Now, how did we send this client off? We thank them for the opportunity of working with them. We pointed out a couple of things that were not done in the financial plan. And by the way, the client said, You guys have done an exceptional job the best financial planning that we ever had. The expenses are too high. We’re just going to move on. And they already found another advisor. They already went through this process. And so when we talk to them about it, we say, great, you know what? This last year, we spent a lot of time kind of cleaning up a lot of the beneficiaries. Please make sure when your accounts transfer, that we don’t disinherit your two children, because there’s a little oddity happening in the way that they’re disbursing funds upon their death, and we want to make sure it ties into your estate planning. And then please keep us in mind in the future, if you find that Mr. Financial Advisor over here does not provide the same value later and you need some additional advice, we will be here for you. And then we exit graciously. We thank them for the opportunity. We point out things so we can deliver value one more time that they didn’t have completed, or that we were worried about when they transferred accounts, and then we poised ourselves so that in the future, if they ever need somebody else to work with, we would be honored to work with them again. Not all goodbyes have to be bad goodbyes. It doesn’t have to be a fu, well, I didn’t want to work with you anyway, but could this have been avoided? Probably, I really think so. Had we escalated things using that rule of two, had we had those weekly check ins with our team, and had we had the courage to pick up the phone and have that conversation with the client instead of recording a video and thinking that we’re addressing things? Yeah, I think it could have been avoided. I think we could have salvaged that relationship. Now, here’s what I do know. After I had the debrief with the protege, and we went through the entire file, and I said, here’s what’s happening, here’s what’s going on, here’s how I would have done something different. Here are the things that you need to learn about. Guess what? I think they’re going to adapt that. I think that this person is, though confident, will listen to expert advice, and they will say, You know what, I want to do things differently. I’m going to embrace that strategy. Thank you very much. This is what I’m going to look at doing if you feel your similar situations, if you feel that you’re losing for clients to go find a new advisor that they like, renegotiate fees, re transfer accounts. I mean, this is why everyone is so unsatisfied with their CPA, but stay for years, because they don’t want that pain of having to go find somebody else to do it. And so if a client is going to take those steps, there were probably moments that you could establish a relationship before it came to that and so escalating, using that role of two, not allowing your confidence to interrupt somebody else’s expertise, learning from your mistakes, because how you do anything is how you will be perceived as doing everything. Those are core values that we could take away and really, really really change a bunch of people’s lives. TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of World to Conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.