There have been many challenges for the advisors and investors in 2022, but nevertheless, advisors are finishing the year with accomplishments they can be proud of. Some of our Horsesmouth Master Members shared their wins for the year with Chris Holman, Horsesmouth’s Executive Coach. Here’s what they had to say.
1. Working to become a CFP: Xiao Lin
I took my first CFP test back in 2012, and did not pass. While there’s no excuse, there was a big reason that I couldn’t prepare for the test: my dad was sick during my prep time and I had to stay in the ICU to stay with him. So I did not prepare at all, just went into the CFP exam thinking OK, maybe this is just another license exam, maybe I could just pass. But no, I didn’t.
And then after that I had this problem with focusing. Because I had a physics degree and I found myself going into this career, and I had no experience in financial planning. I hated dealing with money—I felt it was very stressful and intense. So as I started out as an advisor, I felt like I had so much to learn. Finally, at one point, I joined Horsesmouth, and it’s been a really good eye-opening thing for me, because there is so much to learn.
The first things I got in touch with at Horsesmouth include Medicare and then Social Security, so much to learn! And then everything adds on: college planning, tax planning, IRA, I joined them all. Eventually, I became a Master Member. I love all the PowerPoints and things, but there’s one problem for me, there’s way too much to learn!
I work with World Financial Group and maybe some of you have heard about this organization. They tend to recruit more people than they can handle. This is my point of view, anyhow. But I found I accidentally have some “team members” under me that I have to take care of. So, here’s the dilemma. I enjoy learning myself. I love to learn. But if I spend time learning myself, I end up ignoring my team members. But if I want to train them, I don’t have the time to devote to improving myself. So I found there was never a time that I could sit down myself, study, and improve myself. I always have to steal time, feeling guilty when I would study.
But then the pandemic taught me a lesson. I talked to [executive coach Chris Holman] very emotionally. I lost one of my best friends, and he was young. He was only 65. I thought he was going to live forever. But he left and I realized that life is short. We have to really do something for ourselves.
So, I told Chris, ever since he passed away, every day I’ve been living—and it’s almost two years—I’ve been living every day as if it was my last day. So, every day I ask myself, what is most important to me right now? And I take care of it. And when I first looked back, I thought “CFP!” I always wanted to get that designation. So I allowed myself to set time aside and study for it. Amazingly, when I set time aside to study for the CFP, I actually had time to serve more of my clients!
This year, 2022, ended up being my best personal career year, so that was really fantastic. I was scheduled to take the CFP test in November, but I didn’t. I pushed it to March. The excuse was I had too many clients to take care of, which is good and bad.
So right now, I just have to balance between taking care of my clients and my CFP. After that, next year, I think I might train one or two people that I recruited, but that’s all. I’m limiting myself. I’m not training any more people than I have to, only when my time allows. Am I being “selfish”? Now I always put myself at the top priority because without me, there’s no team.
2. My hourly engagements have increased with little to no effort: Joe Downs
We had a very good year. We’ve been incredibly fortunate this year. Our hourly engagements have gone up. Our engagement with existing clients has gone up and we’ve done absolutely nothing to do it. We have no marketing budget because we choose not to have to market. Our website drives a lot of traffic and we’ve had a lot of client referrals. So it’s a very good thing.
So to kind of back up just a little bit, I brought another advisor on two years ago and it’s been a godsend. It was probably one of the best things that I could have done for business continuity, but also to make time for our existing clients, to have another live body here. And as a result, the fact that we’ve been able to bring on additional hourly engagements has allowed me to have a little bit more free time and so it’s all good. It’s all good. And probably the most important thing is that my golf handicap has gone down. That’s the most important accomplishment of the year!
My website is one of those basic “do it yourself” Weebly websites. So, we’re very fortunate in that respect that we haven’t had to do anything. We haven’t spent any money on it. And perhaps if we did spend money, then my associate could be even busier, because he takes all the new clients. But no, literally we’ve done nothing. I can’t explain it.
3. I saved a client a lot of money: Bill Spar
This year, I saved a client of mine a lot of money. This client actually is in our business. He spent 50 years with New York Life and just had an unbelievable career. We all know their pension system is great. He made millions of dollars. He did very, very well. And with that, as we all know, he has been taken advantage of from lots of other professionals, including tax guys, and CPAs, and so on and so forth.
So when he came to me through a referral, he was a disaster and had a lot of things wrong. The old preparer had actually left him with a $300,000.00 tax bill due one year. And the existing preparer at the time instructed him to only send them $175,000.00 and that he’d try and negotiate the rest. And we all know what happens from there. Bells and whistles went off: fines, fees, and all the other BS that went down with it happened. And it tacked on about another $80,000.00 in fees.
And so again, by the time he got to me, it was just worse, and he was of course extremely upset. His new wife had encouraged him to cash out his $1.9 million pension at New York Life so that they could redo their house here in Scottsdale. And so obviously that’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make, as we all know.
So, we’re still kind of peeling back the onion layers of that program and trying to figure out what he owes and how he owes it. And apparently, their house is really great!
But with all that said, in the initial stages of working with this client, just through pure tax planning for two years, we were able to save him $54,000.00 and change, something like that. And so, he was happy to hear that, but we’ve got a lot more work to do.
4. Finishing up a third book: Russ Kyncl
I am near completing my third book. I thought I was done, but my editor told me I wasn’t done. But it looks like we’ll be done mid-December. It’s the third book that I’ve self-published. About half of the chapters are interviews of people who are still working past age 67, and the other half are people that are well-known in the public record. The oldest was here in Denver, and he worked every day until he was 107, owning chunks of downtown Denver real estate that he paid cash for! So he could have retired any time he wanted. He died of complications of a cold. He was the founder of Rockmount Ranch Wear, which makes the famous Western ranch shirts with snaps.
In our industry, probably my most fun interview was with Tom Thorkelson. If any of you were ever a Mass Mutual agent, he was the general agent in Orange County and he’s 89 years old, working 30% of his waking hours instead of the old 60. He is a survivor of three kinds of cancer and still going like a house on fire, so that was probably the single most motivating interview.
And all of us as financial planners, you can intentionally downsize and refocus your life if you choose to. You don’t have to retire as long as you’re healthy.
My dad was a Presbyterian minister, and preached his last sermon when he was 92. So I kind of use him as an example. In his last sermon, he was just covering a pulpit when somebody was on vacation, but I think the skills we need are pretty much the same as the skills a pastor needs or somebody that’s preaching a sermon in church. And so that’s my benchmark.
I’m 67, I’ve got a 20-year business plan, Lord willing. It seems a little bit ostentatious to push it out to 25 or 30 years, but we’ll see. It’s been fun. So, the book should be out by the first of the year.
The book that I am wrapping up is about people enjoying life, living life to the fullest, and they’re still working or they’re very actively volunteering. The working title of it is Thriving in Your Third Third. My wife retired from a 40-year career as a registered nurse and nursing careers are just not flexible. She was a labor and delivery nurse in the women’s health clinic here at the Indigent Hospital in Denver and they couldn’t give her more time off. So, she quit, and she would’ve gone longer probably.
But she’s a very active volunteer and right now she’s doing reading tutoring for first graders at our local elementary school. She’s a tutor in two different schools here. And we volunteer together. The Jesuits have, it’s about 35 inner-city high schools, and these kids, they work a day a week to pay half their tuition. Most of them are from immigrant families and they’re so much fun to hang out with—so we have a chapter about that in the new book, too.
5. 2022 was my best year to date: Scott Floersheim
This last year was the best I’ve had in my career thus far. I started the year with about $85 million of assets under management. That went down with the markets and I’m at $110 right now. So, it’s been roughly 45% growth of new assets. Probably about a third of that is existing clients consolidating, which could be inheritance or moving management of irrevocable trusts over to me, that kind of thing. But the bulk of it is new clients and I really don’t do much marketing.
I am a member of NAPFA, so I’m on their find an advisor website. Feeonlynetwork.com is an offshoot of that and I pay for a slight upgrade in my profile there. It’s like $300.00 a year and it’s worth its weight in gold. And then at my website I have Calendly to let people reach out to me there and schedule time with me.
I think sometimes the chaos in the markets gets people less confident as far as being do-it-yourself, and so they reach out more. But there’s been many reasons people have come to me, from divorce to inheritance, to retirement. There is all the great retirements going on.
I think the biggest new matter is a divorce in tandem with a qualified small business stock sale of some sizable dollars. And with that, there is the planning, but also helping a client understand the pros and cons of a donor-advised fund versus a private foundation with some of that money. My background is as a CPA.
It just brings to the forefront the need, as I think advisors are seeing more and more, to be well versed in the taxes and to keep up with lifetime learning. And to just be prepared for the different things that may come through the door. It’s just run the gamut. I’m working on one situation right now this morning on NUA of employer stock from somebody who retired from one of the oil companies.
The thing that may be the number one differentiator is being able to not only do the tax planning, but I do my wealth management client’s tax prep. So, I see it all the way through and right now I’m doing scads of tax plans as I head into year-end, because that’s how I make the return happen, in effect. And so come the spring, it’s kind of uneventful. The results have already been planned for. So, if there’s a surprise, I really got something wrong. I better not be creating any surprises!
This year, I was part of Horsesmouth’s Discovery Group and that also helped the growth of my business. I don’t onboard lots of clients; my marketing muscle can get out of practice and particularly discovery. And I think it’s really important to think through from the initial call, whether they schedule it with Calendly or if they just pick up the phone. Being able to handle that inquiry call and then deciding, is this a good fit for my practice to schedule a discovery meeting?
And I throw up a headwind for myself. I pretty much favor virtual. I do some in-person meetings, but I do them with masks still. And I tell clients, if you come in, if you want to meet in person, I’m going to be masked. If you want to, that’s up to you. So I don’t do myself any favors by being careful, I don’t think, as far as practice management goes. But the discovery meeting process and reviewing that through the workshop—it is valuable to think through exactly what you want to do there.
For instance, I tend to do too-long discoveries and I have to work at that. I tend to have more than a single discovery meeting sometimes it can go on two, three meetings and I need to crunch that down, particularly as my calendar fills up with my ongoing clients.
6. Color-coded time-blocking keeps me on task: Shawn Lorenzen
I have two things that have been wins for this year. First, one year ago through Horsesmouth I took the course from Teresa Riccobono about getting organized, and time blocking, and whatnot. So last year in December I took a full week and time blocked myself and I’ve been doing a pretty good job of following that for the year. And I have my next installment set in Las Vegas, my favorite place in the world, very motivating and going to have another week of time blocking, but to try to get more specific in what am I really doing in the time at my desk.
The other thing would be that I hired a sales coach, which has helped me tremendously in dealing with my assistant, personality types, and whatnot. So that’s been very, very helpful, someone else to keep me accountable where I keep all my clients accountable. So those are the two things for me that have helped have a good year.
Now, you might be wondering, “What is the connection between time blocking and Las Vegas?” Well, Las Vegas is a very motivating place for me. I sit there, I watch the fountain go off all the time, and I work all day. I’ve got a backpack full of markers and stickers for when I’m time blocking. And anyway, for me it’s a visual. Like my planner is full of stickers, and markers, and whatnot. I color code the time blocks, so green is work, purple is church, pink is family. So just to have things separated of what am I supposed to be doing and where am I supposed to be doing it at? so I take a whole week and that’s all I do is focus on my schedule and then at break time, I go gamble and try to earn more free nights to get back to Vegas.
I even did three other intentional weeks of only Zoom calls while in Las Vegas. I don’t do very well Zooming from my own office because I have too many other things to distract me. So having an intentional week somewhere that I love to be, that’s worked very well for me.
I am a very visual learner, which is why I think this, and a change of scenery has worked so well for me. My mom was a teacher and so I thought I always wanted to be a teacher. But no, the only part of teaching now that I have is stickers! When I send out client’s stuff, there’s a sticker and I have stamps that I use at different times. So, when you mail me back your envelope, I know when I sent it due to the stamp that I put on there; it’s Peanuts this month. Charles Schultz has all the Peanuts characters have stamps, so then I know when I sent it and when you mail it back. So yes, I am visual. Absolutely.
7. Working on the business rather than just in it: David Nifong
I recently joined Horsesmouth as a Master Member in September. I’ve looked at all this stuff for a long time. I’ve been running a practice just like everybody else and not spending enough time trying to better things. And so, I am very new to all this and just learning everything and trying to soak it up. And I’m hoping that next year I’ll have a much-improved story in terms of some good business practice stuff. I’m certainly open to advice, it’s kind of overwhelming with trying to balance everything with your schedule and all the resources you do have with the Master Membership. So far, I did do the Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare planning class in September and then the tax class.
This last year has been a big year of transition for me. We just moved into a new building. I’ve got an assistant and I’m hiring a new person. So I’m really looking to kind of ramp up the tax planning, that’s really where I want to focus, taking things a lot deeper with my clients and then some future prospecting.
Are you a Master Member that has done some great things this year? Share below and someone from the Horsesmouth team will reach out to hear more.