Ep 4: 4. Rethink: Brick and Mortar vs. Remote

Episode 4 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (40:37)

Episode 4 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Adam Holt and Derek Notman make the case that a virtual practice is not a compromise version of a physical one, and both moved before the pandemic forced the question. Holt describes keeping offices in Philadelphia that now run at roughly half capacity with almost nobody coming in, and traces his own shift back about fifteen years to a plain observation: his wealthiest clients were never available, did not want to visit an office, and lost the most from in-person scheduling. The organizing principle of the episode is that lifestyle should drive the design of a practice rather than the reverse. The hosts work through the commuting arithmetic, the staff-retention side of remote work, and the argument that a digital playing field removes geographic protection in both directions. They close with the production details that make remote meetings land and a meeting cadence that preserves some in-person contact.

What this episode covers

• Why wealthier clients often prefer remote meetings, and what that does to scheduling
• The commuting arithmetic, and designing a practice around lifestyle rather than the reverse
• What a level digital playing field means for competition and for geographic reach
• Lighting, framing, and setup treated as a client experience decision rather than a technical one
• A meeting cadence that mixes remote frequency with periodic in-person multigenerational planning

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, can you run a successful practice entirely? Virtually. Hey, Adam. Love the question. This is right up my alley. Short answer. Yes. Okay. That was the shortest podcast ever. All right. Thanks. Thanks for listening. Everybody. Thank you. We appreciate your attendance. We’ll see you next week.

There’s got to be more to that. Right? Yes. I mean, we’ve had so many questions about the future of this, how we got into this, how you got into virtual and remote pre pandemic. We have to unpack this for people. Yeah. Well, obviously it’s top of mind given the last 18 months. And I think there’s two key words here, six or two key phrases, successful practice and virtual. Cause there is a difference there. But I think let’s, let’s give the audience a little bit backstory of our journeys. And I believe actually you beat me to this party and you went virtual before I did. So I’d like to hear a little bit more about like, what, what motivated you, inspired you, what was the defining moment or idea?

Or was it just a blur that said, okay, I have a pretty awesome office brick and mortar office, but things have changed. Yeah. So it’s true. I mean, so my firm in Philadelphia still has its offices today. We have a hundred percent of our offices. They are 50% to capacity, right? Nobody’s coming. I’m not sure that that made sense anyway, because both of my mentors and partners are golfing four or five days a week. Anyway, they’re never in the office. I feel like they’ve been virtual for 20 years in a sense, but you know what was interesting for me? So I started it like most people moving after the high net worth clientele even 15 years ago, cause that’s where the business was.

Those are the people that wanted advice, maybe even paid for it, appreciated it and thought holistically cause they were dealing with legal tax insurance questions and investment wasn’t just about, can you manage my money? They were care of it. They cared about bigger planning things. So that was a sweet spot for me. But what was consistent for them, those clients is that they were never available. They did not want to come into my office. I did not want to go into their environment where I was a distraction. They were like literally trying to do 10 things that you travel up to New York city. If that’s where we were going and they give you 15 minutes of attention, half the time they’re late.

It was just impossible. So we noticed that a lot of executives were running meetings, especially the pharmaceutical side, they were running a lot of meetings using remote screen sharing for years because the pharmacists and the product managers, these people were all over the world and they couldn’t necessarily meet with them in a location. So they were used to this. And once I got introduced to go to meeting, probably 15 years ago, I was hooked. And I had, I think the real driver is something that you talk about a lot, which is lifestyle should drive your practice versus practice dictating your lifestyle. And I had decided even in my mid thirties, one of my bigger goals as we talked about vision boarding, my auditory goal was I wanted to be 35, make certain amount of income and work 20 hours a week.

I don’t know why that goal, but that seemed like an appealing goal to me. And I worked towards that. And once I achieved it, I was bored. I don’t know what I can do with myself. I’m a worker and not a golfer. I started actually really tinkering with technology. That’s kind of the roots of asset map. But I think the answer to your question was I just found such efficiency by telling people, because I was always screen sharing. I don’t know if you know this, I invested in a smart board about 15 years ago. I got one off the back of a truck, but my buddy said, taking these things to a school, they have one more than they bought.

Hey, I’ll sell it to you. I’m like, okay, I’ll buy it. It’s like true Philly style. I’m going to buy this thing off the back of the truck. It was a smart board. I didn’t know how it worked. And it was six foot touchscreen, basically 15 years ago, technology wise, that was like having the weather studio in my office. Amazing. And it was really cool. Actually, we would draw people’s lives upon their lives. So I knew that the screen interactivity really worked well, and I was comfortable with it. And it’s something we’re going to address in this podcast because being comfortable with the technology is really critical delivering an awesome experience when you can’t have the human face-to-face fallback.

So the short answer that I made a long answer is I did it because it was efficient. My office. And I said, listen, let’s just do screen sharing during your lunch meeting by any 30 minutes, 40 minutes. So I had to compress everything and it became a standard. That’s the way we did it. And we still have clients to this day that we’ve never physically met across the country. That’s brilliant. I love it. And likewise, I have the same. So would you say if there was one like linchpin there, Adam, was that the consumer basically drove your decision. Like you were already like you enjoyed tech.

And yeah, of course, as a business owner, you want to be efficient. But would you say like the main thing that pushed you as the consumer, like, Hey, like I just don’t have the time, Adam, make this easier for me. Otherwise it just isn’t going to work. I think that was a big one, but make it easy getting in the calendar, doing revotes. And nobody had to travel. It saved me an enormous amount of time. And I got addicted to that. I will literally worked nine to five. I was, I left the office at five, it don’t matter, which means a lot of people who work all day, they can’t meet you if you’re not available.

So a lot of financial advisors start doing the evening meetings, right? The five to seven PM meetings. Oh my gosh. Yes. You go where the client is available. Right. And so I was, I said, yeah, I can meet you two, three, four, five. You have to separate yourself, but you don’t have to physically come here. So just set aside 30 minutes. You go to the dentist during the day. You don’t go at night. Do you, did the dentist meet you in the middle of the night? No, it’s like two o’clock on a Friday. Like, okay, that’s when my, that’s what I did. I love it.

I love it. How about yourself? I mean, you, you, you got this bug earlier than most. I did. And so mine was not driven from a consumer demand, which is funny, which is actually really cool is that you and I arrived at the same place, but for different reasons, which I think is actually something I hope our listeners really pay attention to is that like, it’s, it’s not just one or the other. There’s lots of we can take this journey, but for me, I had my, my office, my brick and mortar office in Vermont. Like I literally bought a building on the main street in the city I lived in.

We were there, staff, everybody, client meetings and whatnot. Then I had an opportunity to move to the, to Wisconsin for business opportunity. That’s a whole other story because it miserably failed, but I was forced to, initially I was flying back and forth. So I go see my brick and mortar clients. I had a one-year-old at home and it was awful. I was gone a lot. It was really tiring flying these small tin can planes. Just it really started to wear on me. So for me, it was more of a life work balance. Like I’m like, I got to find a better way to run this business of the ways it’s going to run me six feet under.

And that’s what started me on that journey. And it’s a long journey, but you know, long story short, I figured out how to do all this stuff virtually. And my biggest fear, which I think a lot of advisors have or had, is that the clients won’t respond well to it and that they’ll disappear. Boy, was I wrong. I was mortified that they would just all leave and be like, just like I’d be out of business. I had one client leave and I went virtual in 2013. It’s been that long. I had one client leave because of it. So it was all in my head. And as you said, I mean, it’s just the efficiencies.

People want more time. They want to be able to do things. And if we’re talking about what it’s in for the advisor or the client, it’s like, we get our time back. We get to be more efficient. We can save money. Like there’s all of these benefits. And it’s kind of crazy that it’s taken a pandemic on a global scale to kind of get us to rethink this as an industry. Like, Hey, maybe there’s something to this thing that some of these people on the fringe have been doing for years. Yeah. Well, it is true. I mean, we did see some major companies move to creating accessibility for their reps.

If they’re part of affiliation with a broker deal or otherwise, I would say within the last five years, we saw Join Me pop up institutionally. Zoom didn’t really get a bigger hold until I think the past couple of years, although it’s so easy. I think it was pretty much a poo-poo because it was like too simple. It must have looked, didn’t seem professional, but I think that’s what the really consumer really said they needed. They needed to be able to just turn it on. One of the bigger challenges we had in the early phases is like, great, download this plugin, tell Beatrice, the 82 year old lady in Florida to go and download the plugins so they could run the virtual meeting.

You’re wasting the first 30 minutes. And she’s trying to plug the computer in, right? What do you mean to plug my computer in? It’s already plugged in. What do you mean? You can see me. Wait, you can see me and my hair is not ready. I’m not ready for that. Is this on? Is this thing on, right? Forget whether you’re on mute or not. This is like working. And what’s interesting about this, there definitely were some technology trends that took the fear out of that for a lot of people. Remember, many people were already FaceTiming, their grandkids were Skyping, right? So they were over the last five to 10 years, the boomer population, I think we were really concerned about really adopting this stuff.

They were getting acclimated to it just a different way. So we had to find a platform. I think it’s really interesting to see how Ubiquitous Zoom and some of these other platforms have become as literally a verb because they are easy to use. And it’s basically, it sends a really important message to advisors, which is you need to make it easy. Now, I agree with you that there’s a lot of benefits to the advisor, right? When you ask the question, what’s in it for me? You said time. You said there’s clearly costs you don’t have, travel costs. You said life balance, work-life balance is much different, right?

My employees, by the way, don’t want to come back to the office physically. All the 25 people that are basically remote for the last 18 months, they’re saying, we figured out how to make it work. And by the way, when we check out at night, we walk into our living room and we’re with our family. Right. That’s it. As much as we are, I mean, let’s face it, America, especially here, we’re a capitalist society, right? I mean, we’re work, work, work, work, work. But I think deep down, most of us have this yearning to have more time with our family and pursuing our hobbies and having this balance that we talk about.

I know that’s a little hokey, right? We’re kind of getting into the touchy-feely stuff here. I’m sorry, guys. Pinch yourself. But it’s true. And I think that’s there. This is a way we can tap into that, but still be efficient at work. I use this analogy with other advisors. Think about it. What if you’re in the car only one hour a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year? Let’s say you take two weeks off, right? That’s what we do in America. We work the rest. Have you added those hours up, Adam? How many hours that is? It’s 250 hours a year that you’re sitting in the car.

And let’s face it, most financial advisors drive a lot more than that. Well, think about it this way. Use a standard 40-hour work week. 25 almost 40-hour work weeks a year. You were in a car. Maybe listen to our podcast. I’ll tell you. Yeah, but again and again and again. I get it again. Just repeating it because it’s my 30 minutes. Well, that’s crazy. If someone were to say, hey, you need to spend six weeks a year in your car as part of this job or eight weeks or whatever, you’d be like, no, that’s crazy. That’s time away from my family. I’m not making money driving.

It’s crossing me and I’m getting stressed. Put it in that light. You’re like, oh my gosh. By the way, you’re also risking the parent of your children. I mean, think about it that way. Think about the risk that you take when traveling. We’re just so used to it, but you’re in the road every day. I know people have gotten into car accidents. Don’t you? Oh, yeah. Even personally, right? It’s not our fault, by the way. But there’s a real, there’s not only the hard cost you mentioned, but there’s a lot of soft costs here. It’s interesting for me. I moved myself and my family into the city so that I could walk to work, walk my kid to school and not waste any time in the commute.

Now, the truth is for me, I have a hard time working from home. I’ve always had to have an office because I need to physically separate myself. Otherwise, I will live in the refrigerator every five minutes looking for something new to eat. I have no control. We’re cleaning your kitchen. You like to clean. You’re right. I love cleaning my kitchen. And somehow someone is always messing up my kitchen. It’s family members. They think they’re on my team and they’re just making work for me. I think this is like their job. I love cleaning the kitchen for some reason. No, I don’t love the, excuse me.

No, but you do it. I love a clean kitchen. Okay. And therefore I must solve the problem myself. Maybe that’s a future episode. Rethinking what a clean kitchen is. Yeah, maybe it’s true. How to remove neurosis from your life. Yeah, that’s my thing. Sorry, I like a clean kitchen because I like to start cooking anyway. But the funny thing about this is we also, it would be, we’d be remiss if we didn’t think also why we should support the brick side of it, right? What’s the, we obviously clearly have a bias towards the virtual, but now why have the brick? What’s the, what’s in it for the client for the brick side having a physical location and maybe what’s in it for the staff?

What’s in it for us as advisors? Yeah, I think there are some benefits there. And I think it’s going to be per advisor. Like this is a sliding scale. It’s not an all or nothing, right? And that’s what’s beautiful about it is you can customize it based upon your personality and your wants. But at the end of the day, I think we’re moving to this more hybrid model and that’s driven mainly, I would argue, by the consumer, partially by about like who you are as an advisor and your staff as well. But there’s credibility that comes with a physical footprint, but maybe that physical footprint’s a fourth of what it used to be.

Cause you don’t need to have such a big space anymore, right? You have community amongst your team. That’s something that’s important to you. If you want to be like really like Main Street USA and be part of that community, there’s some value there too. So I think there are some benefits there, but it’s going to have to be that sweet spot combination. I mean, there’s so much data coming out about how people just would rather work. As you said, like I can turn my computer off and walk into the next room and be with my family now. I don’t have to drive across Philly to go see you in your office today cause I just don’t feel like it, but I still want to meet with you, right?

So there are all these benefits. I don’t know what you think. It’s interesting because when I think about the going remote, I’ll tell you that our client meetings, 95% of our client meetings in the last five years at the firm level, granted, I’m no longer the managing partner of the firm, but that still happens today. 95% of them are virtual. They don’t, that was before the pandemic. Oh, that’s awesome. In the last 10 years, we did this study, 70% in 10 years were remote. We ran them from our office. So we had our infrastructure and our cameras and we had our setup. So we could, and we had found that physically for us as advisors, we really liked the idea of putting on our suit or dress shirt, going physically to work and then leaving physically work.

Even if we were doing remote meetings the whole time, that worked for us really well. And for the clients that wanted to actually feel like they were being hosted, like come to my place, sit down with me, have a coffee and let’s talk. Having that physical location wound up actually, I think, lifting our overall preeminence. It gave us the legitimacy that you mentioned as a legitimate organization, not just some person on the end of a phone. I could be in India, you don’t even know nothing from what I’m doing. It could be on the beach with a backdrop. I mean, there is, I think, a sense of professionalism that I think a certain generation expects.

And that generation tends to have a lot of the money right now. And so if you’re an asset manager or you’re in the wealth management side, big surprise if your clients are going to be boomers. I don’t know that that, I think the big question for most of you listening is at what phase are you in your, we’ll call practice. And is the credibility there enough where you can disconnect from the physical location? We do know that clients have moved at record pace, right? Clients are either snowboarding or they’re going to their dream worlds or they’re downsizing. They’re going to cheaper environments for lifestyle or cost of living.

So they’re moving, okay? And they will be moving just so you know. So you need to be able to promote remote. That’s a nice rhyme as promote remote. Promote remote. By the way, that’s a good question. We’ve used this term interchangeably. We say virtual meetings and remote meetings. Which one is it? What’s the right one? Interchangeable. I think it really is. They’re interchangeable. It’s just, I don’t know, tomato, tomato, right? Can we rethink that word, please? I really, it drives me crazy. Virtual meeting. I’m like, no, it’s a real meeting. I’m here, you’re there. We’re just remote. Okay, that’s what I… So I think the word is it’s a remote interaction.

It’s a remote delivery. It’s a remote delivery. It’s a virtual delivery. Yeah, that’s right. It’s virtual delivery. It’s not virtual delivery. It’s like real delivery of advice. You can virtually pay me. I mean, I want you to reality pay me. You can remotely pay me my Venmo. Sorry, I get stuck on the words. It’s part of my kitchen cloud habit. Yeah, your neurosis. That’s great. So let’s kind of talk about this. That was a good history. I think you guys understand, everybody understands where we’re coming from. Let’s rethink this for the next five minutes before we talk about actions and what you can actually do to invest in your practice.

What you need to execute or decide upon because that’s going to be important. Where is it going? Right? You’ve done a lot. You’ve been speaking a lot about this. I’ve been following this and certainly have great reading articles on this through Connector and your organizations there. Where is this going to go? Like paint a future for us in the next three, four years. What is advice going to look like? Well, as you put it, it’s remote. Thank you. I like how you’ve coined this. Maybe you coined this term. I don’t know, but the delivery of advice and that’s what it is. So I think we have this shift.

No, this shift has been going on for over 20 years. We’ve been in a mega trend for over 20 years. If you don’t know what a mega trend is, Google it. It’s very interesting. But we’ve been in it for 20 years and there’s been this massive shift. The pandemic brought it to the forefront and actually it just really brought the financial advice, insurance, investment industry into or up to speed with where everyone else already was. But it’s a pendulum. Think of it that way. And I think the pandemic pushed us all to this remote virtual environment almost entirely. But remember, we’re human beings and we connect with other human beings.

So I think there will be this swing back a little bit where it’ll settle in the next couple of years. I really do think hybrid will be the sweet spot. People want to work with humans, but they don’t want to be stuck driving across town. They don’t want to have to cut their vacation short because they got to meet with their insurance person or whatever. So it’s this delivery, this new medium to conduct business is really the sweet spot. At least in my crystal ball, I think that’s where it’s going to be. And for those that are listening, you have a choice. It’s pretty clear what the consumer wants.

The technology has evolved. It’s there. The expectation, the comfortability, whatever you want to call it is all there. So now either we meet clients where they want us to be or they will find someone who is. There you have it. That’s where I tend to think about it. I’ve already decided for myself because we did a pre-pandemic that this is the future. And every firm I’ve talked to or guided or spoken to, I have been pushing them to move this way forever. Okay, fine. It’s not just me saying it’s not just you saying it. Okay, we’re here. Now what? What is this going to mean for new things to defend against opportunities to exploit?

I would say game theory this out with me. If everyone moves remote, what does that mean for competition for advisors? Well, one, I don’t think we’re actually really in competition. I think there’s enough business for all of us out there. I mean, just do the sheer math on the population of the United States 18 and above that could be potential clients than how many advisors there are. There’s enough business for all of us. So now it becomes not so much about competition. We are on a level playing field. We’re on this digital playing field. But are you playing the game? Are you sitting on the sidelines or are you still on the old brick and mortar playing field completely?

And maybe you need to have a feed on both fields. That’s how I see it, Adam. I think that that’s… You and I made those decisions a long time ago, but either you embrace it and you run with it and just have people coming to you or you don’t. This whole internet thing, I’m not so sure about it. Maybe it’s not going to stick. I think we’re going back to fax machines here. com bubble blew up or that today’s statement? Both, right? Yeah, like, oh, this internet thing is just a fad. It’s going to go away. Someone asked, actually, they called and they said, what’s your fax number?

I said, well, what time zone are you in? I mean, what time zone? What are you in, this decade or the last decade? I don’t have a fax machine, but I think it’s interesting. I want to push everybody to even think further than that. So here’s what I mean by that. If everybody’s remote and physical presence doesn’t matter, well, two things happen. Number one, financial advisors can now actually expand to their market. So the market does expand. Number two, it creates fantastic accessibility, as you said, for those who want advice to now get it because there may not be the ideal advisor physically located next to them, which was a precursor in the past because you had to physically go to your advisor, right?

If you didn’t feel comfortable with the people you knew in your network, like, I can’t talk to my dad’s advisor or every advisor I know is this kind of salesperson that people have these preconceived notions. Now, all of a sudden, they can actually go shop for advisors that could be located all over the planet. We’re not talking about in my state and licensed. We’re talking about advisors that could serve you anywhere, which creates a very interesting competition for cost and service delivery and client experience. I think a lot of advisors have gotten by on physical proximity, relationship, and history. And they’re going to start competing with service delivery and price and accessibility.

And if we’re not thoughtful enough as advisors or how we make it easy to do business with us with these technologies tools, it’s not just enough for me to deliver my same old 80-page financial plan now over the internet. This is not going to cut it, guys. You must maximize the expectations that consumers are having now for speed, interactivity, engagement. And I would say that the next skill that we need to work on, the soft skill that we need to work on as financial professionals is production value. Think about that. If every meeting is going to move or a preponderance of meetings is moving either to a screen on my wall because I’m actually still breaking water or I’m sharing my screen and we got little pictures of us, you and me on the corners there and I’ve got a screen.

It is literally like watching a reality television show that’s gotten me as the storyline, okay? And my financial life is the storyline and you and I are character actors in this reality television show and the production value of it better be good because if it’s kind of garbagey, I’m judging it against all the other video I’m watching all day long, a subconscious level. And now people think like that, Adam, you’re crazy. You don’t have to produce the way Netflix does, really. If you’re not maximizing audio quality, visual quality, ease of getting onto this meeting with you, you might as well basically have me say, okay, you know what?

Listen, meet me in this back alley room. I found a room that’s available. Let’s have a meeting there and there’s like no lighting and like junkie walls. Like, well, you wouldn’t do that in physical world. Why would you do that in digital world? So you have to think about the production value of this experience because who’s setting the stage? The people that are creating all the content, people are watching Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, right? Their stuff is awesome. Clean, beautiful, thoughtful, has my name on it, got picture that represents me. You have to think like this now. Can you imagine this? I’m telling you in the next three years, we’re gonna have to think like this or sooner.

It’s this massive personalization that is happening. Why is it happening? Because people love it. People want it. Look at all the different streaming services. I had some friends over this weekend. We were joking about how like our streaming bill every month is like $400,000, you know? Because I’ve got 400 different, yeah. You need an advisor, buddy. 400,000. No, you have too much time on your hand. Go back to driving to your meetings. I’m thinking about like, I have choices now and if I don’t like this streaming service, I’m just gonna stop it. I’m gonna go to one that I do like because it’s personalized and I’m getting what I want and I get it now and.

Yeah. Well, but that’s a perfect example. We’re seeing clients cheat on their advisors all the time. Now you might be thinking, no, my clients don’t cheat on me. Yeah, right. Your clients use you for the money and the legacy they’ve had with you forever and you provide a service once a year. And then they’re on mint and personal capital with money that you don’t even know about basically because they wanted to get some technology delivery of accessibility when they wanted it and they didn’t think you were available. That is what’s happening. I’m finding again and again, when I talk to people, they’re like, yeah, I have three or four advisors.

Do they know about each other? No, are they getting the best advice? Well, who knows? Because the client is basically hoarding because they think they can get some other experience. They have a Coinbase account. Now they have a crypto account. Now they have like a currency account. Now they have like some bonds they bought direct from their cousin and they bought a private equity deal because their brother was involved. Like there’s all this stuff that’s not getting to the financial advisor and it’s because the advisor is not as engaging as all these great marketing tools and ease of doing business. Well, it’s been gamified, right?

People love the personalized, gamified nature of it and they don’t want that 80 page financial plan. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. Whether it’s a paper or anything, it doesn’t matter. So let’s be good. So we promised you that we would give you some takeaways, everybody. So we have a couple here. So Derek, what are some takeaways that financial professionals, advisors can use to let’s say either prepare themselves or to address this for themselves? So we mentioned about this digital playing field. Advisors must invest in their digital presence. What is that? Have an awesome website. Have great social media presence. Use automation for marketing like an email and things of that nature.

Even if you just do these couple things and do them really well, if you don’t have a digital presence it means you don’t have a digital storefront or maybe your digital storefront just looks terrible. And then we don’t go into it. Like the only reason you bought that thing out of the guy’s truck was because it was your friend. But how many people wanna go to that truck down the alley and buy something? I don’t. You wouldn’t even know about it. You wouldn’t even know about it. I use this line all the time but you may have the best cheeseburger in town but if the front of your store looks awful or you don’t have a store then people aren’t gonna know about it.

Or a marketing. If nobody knows about it, marketing is just awareness. It’s awareness. They have to have it out there. Invest in those things. Don’t just be doing them in five minutes and be done doing well. Define who your ideal client is. We’ve talked a little bit about this before but your ideal client will help you drive a digital presence. Once you know who you’re talking to then you can create a brand and messaging and everything around that. It really does drive all of it. Take a step back and get super clear on who your ideal client is. Don’t minimize this. This is not a five minute back of the napkin conversation mind process thing here.

You actually got to spend some time on this. And then as you alluded to earlier, get comfortable with, well, we must call them remote meetings now. My friend here is very particular. We can say virtual for those disagreers. Yeah, whatever. But again, you mentioned that as a client experience and if you’re in virtual meeting the audio is terrible. There’s bad lighting. You’re looking at someone’s couch behind them with like dirty laundry on it or whatever. That just feels awful. And if that feels awful subconsciously even like they’re wondering like is this person’s advice actually going to be any good? Like if I really want to climb on you with this person.

So those are the three things that I would take. And part of that virtual meetings thing would be great infrastructure. Right computer. Got it. All that stuff. All right. So I heard investing in digital presence, digital reputation, which we’ve talked about on prior podcasts too, right? So making sure people find you. Number two, you said who’s your ideal client? And also I think that makes sense for thinking about maybe my ideal client wants to work virtually and doesn’t want to work physically, right? So clearly if it’s going to push you one way to invest, you might say, I don’t work with anybody physically. So sorry, it’s not a good fit.

You know that upfront. Don’t take the business and try to meet at Starbucks. Okay, that’s just not going to work long-term. And then you said the infrastructure. I actually agree with you. There’s two things that came up for me when I thought about this. Customer journey is really important and it makes sense to manage it down. If you’re going to do it in your office, we have an advisor who uses Asimaf. He always tells me he has everybody’s, he knows every one of his clients’ preference for drink and food. And he has it there for their meeting whenever they show up. So that they’re coming almost to like his home when he’s serving them hors d’oeuvres and the drink specifically that they like, even if it’s alcoholic, by the way, right?

He literally, you go there for an experience. Well, I think that’s, we need to do, that’s what I meant by production value. I actually hired a coach when I went to virtual meetings a production person from television production. I said, coach me on how I deliver this video meeting. Cause I want it to look like an anchor on NBC. That’s awesome. And get my lighting right. Get it, get the space, right. Get the angles. Like I don’t want to have my head. And I literally made my clean kitchen. Okay. I made it very like, I knew that experience when I was walking in and it’s predictable and it’s deliverable and it’s top notch.

And I don’t have to think about it cause I coached on it. I didn’t know all the answers. I asked for help. The second thing I think is ask your clients and your staff, what they prefer. If you’re really thinking about going virtual, right? Get the feedback from the clients. I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of support, but you won’t know that for sure until you set forth a standard. Here’s the way that I do it. I tend to tell, my example is I tend to meet my newest clients when I did this more in person, face to face. But then I told them in the very early phases, we have found it much more efficient for us to have remote meetings.

We’ll do them two, three, four times a year as opposed to once a year, this wasn’t a huge meeting. We’ll use remote, et cetera, et cetera. Every probably two years or three years, we’ll physically get back together, have a big family planning meeting. You’re going to bring your kids and your parents. And that’s the time to really focus on relationship, right? It’s what I’m thinking multi-generationally. I save those in-person meetings for meetings where we really like, we’re going to order lunch and we’re going to have a working meeting. Everybody’s going to get acclimated and get to know each other. Why? Cause I want that next generation’s business and they’re going to remember, hey, you remember going to Adam’s office?

It’s not just- So I use that as a leverage point. A special moment is when you physically get together, but we’re going to include some serious people because we’re going to put effort into it. It’s like a party. So I think that those are my two takeaways. Hopefully some of that stuff is really valuable too. As the theme of this program we’ve put together at Rethink is we’ve always asked our community to contribute. We had some really awesome contributions recently where advisors and professionals reached out. Derek, this one, why don’t you share what came to you over LinkedIn from Joe? Yeah, this is an awesome question from Joe that I received recently actually.

I’ll just read a verbatim for everybody here. Hi, usually I don’t connect with people I haven’t met, but I heard you on the kids podcast. So I feel we are pals. Smiley face. My wife, I love it. I love it. Yeah, that’s good. It’s character right there. By the way, that’s actually a little tip folks add personality into what you’re writing. Anyways, my wife and I are having many of those same late night conversations you were probably having in 2013. As I sit here today, I’m missing in my clients and coworkers. I can do the work remotely and most of my clients know that I’m out of the state and don’t appear to care.

I find myself literally missing being with them since they were friends in addition to clients and coworkers. Did you find this to be a struggle for you in the early years? How did you get over this? I’m also not sure if this is a post-COVID hangover or just missing all the people. This is the same experience you went through at the time, perspective. Really heartfelt, wonderful question. It’s probably top of mind for a lot of you both from a virtual remote perspective but also just missing people in general. So I would say it’s probably more of a post-COVID hangover. Personally, that’s how I feel about it.

Adam, I’m keen to get your feedback on this but is it a struggle to not see all your clients in person? I think maybe, but for me, my clients were always clients more than they were friends. Did some of my clients turn into friendships? Of course they did. I’ve been to client weddings and whatnot but we always knew that there was a business relationship there first. For me personally, my whole life, I’ve always thrived on personal connections with my family and my friends and that’s where I want to spend my time away from work. So when we’re stuck in our houses for 18 months or whatever because of lockdown, I think we’re all going to be just jonesing to get out and see people again and be with our friends and whatnot.

But I think the client piece, I don’t know. I think this might be more of a post-COVID hangover as he puts it here. How do I get over just that struggle of making the transition? What goes back to the infrastructure and your points about production value and just making sure that things are really good so I can still have really meaningful conversations with people that I haven’t seen in a while. And for those of you listening, Adam and I have known each other for about only a year now. We’ve never met in person, Adam. But we are able to see each other. We’ve had wonderful conversations.

We joke around. We mess around. It’s good stuff. So it’s amazing what can happen if it’s facilitated correctly. That’s true. I think you probably like each other more virtually than in person. We probably annoy each other in person. That might be. Who knows? We’ll find out. Why can’t I mute you? That’s interesting. I didn’t even think about that. It’s true. We have built relationship virtually. It is possible. Derek and I text each other and call each other and have personal stuff the way friends do, right? So I consider you a friend now. Despite the fact you called me a brother from another mother at a different podcast.

I do remember that. So a lot of feedback on that. My take on this from Joe, and I appreciate it, Joe, we’ll be sending you a shirt. We got to get your size, a rethink shirt. Everybody who submits a question, we choose it. We’ll send you a shirt just for fun so you can walk around with a big rethink on your chest. This is interesting. In my financial advice, I did build a lot of relationship with people. I found that that was really satisfying to me as well. I felt like I was part of their journey. I felt like I was helping them. I was like that tour guide on a guided tour in a city or a country you’ve never been to and you build relationships and you become pen pals with these people that are on your bus tour.

You know, like that. Do you remember like if you ever been on one of those tours, that’s the way I looked at it. I mean, we got talked about family and my process, if anybody knows about it, was really driven by structural asset map. We talked about the family the entire time. We didn’t talk about products, performance. We talked about why are we doing what we’re doing. So I really think it depends on how you run the meeting. You can get your connection out of it. By the way, all this technology doesn’t stop you from being human. You still have to remember to do the human things, right?

Maybe it’s getting together with them physically, not talking about business if you have such a relationship with them. Have an event. Maybe you get everybody together at a golf or a sporting event or a mind-tasting thing and that’s your physical connection. You save all the money on your infrastructure, put it into an unbelievable physical experience, right? And that’s how you actually get people together in a kind of camaraderie environment as opposed to saying, Sometimes it’s simple things, Adam, like this. Like I’m showing Adam my hat right now. It’s Adam’s asset map hat that I have and this is one physical tangible thing that’s connected back to Adam here.

So it’s little things like that. People thrive in these little things. That’s true. Yeah, we can do these things. So yeah, Joe, I know a lot of people are kind of expressing this to kind of deal with the emotional outlook of this. It’s important, by the way, nothing stops you from communicating with your clients that you feel like you miss them too. Like we don’t have to stop being human just because it’s a technology format for us communicating. We can express that and maybe there’s solutions there. Maybe we can say, listen, we’re going to get together once a year. We’re not going to just see each other remotely.

You don’t have to decide that. What you do need to decide is what are you going to invest in infrastructure-wise and decide where you’re going to position your business to satisfy the needs over the next five to 10 years. So that’s something to think about. Any other thoughts before we wrap up here, Derek? No, man, this is longer than we normally go but there’s a lot to unpack here and I think it’s, heck, you and I could probably go a lot longer. I still, I really want to dive down in your neurosis. Thank you. Just mess up my kitchen. I will be sure to clean it.

Nah, just clean dishes a little bit. We’ll try this up for our listeners, yeah. Yeah, sure. So I agree with you. What’s coming next? We’ve had a lot of questions that are coming to us and please keep them up. So we’re asking that you guys get involved in sending us questions through LinkedIn or otherwise, or emails, or figure out how to do it in a Pony Express or put a smoke signal up. Communicate with us and expand this community so we can rethink all of this together. Please do that. In fact, I’ll offer your opinion as well on any of these threads. Just start writing and we’ll refer to it.

But I think one of the things that’s coming up in Derek’s and my conversations is this idea of access to advice. And there’s this real question about trust and advice and how do we couple this and how do we get the right fit, I think, between the advisor and the clients. We’ll be exploring that podcast. There’s no question I’ve been told for years is the 80-20 rule, use the 80-20 rule or fire not ideal clients or how does a client actually find us? We’re going to be discussing different techniques for this. So please stay tuned. Definitely subscribe. And Derek, I look forward to rethinking the next topic with you.

Yeah, likewise. My man, Adam, my brother from another mother. All right, see you, brother. Have a good one. Thanks, everybody. Cheers, guys. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.