How I Streamlined My Review Process to Better Serve Clients…and Make Some Time for Myself!

In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Nadine Burns, who has found that doing all annual reviews at the top of the year created more time in her schedule.

Nadine is a Master Member of Horsesmouth and the CEO of A New Path Financial, based in Ann Arbor, Mich. She is also president of the FPA in Michigan. In this conversation, we talk about her extensive background in branding and marketing…and how she’s applied that experience to growing her financial planning practice. And we pay particular attention to a big shift that she’s made with her client reviews: by compressing all of them into Q1, she has freed her time to do some of the other important things in her life, such as reducing her golf handicap and spending more time with friends.

You can listen to the full conversation in this video, or read the abridged version below, which has been edited for clarity.

How to market Nestlé Toll House cookies

Before becoming an advisor, I had a whole career in the corporate world, doing marketing for Nestlé and other companies. I served on the board of the American Marketing Association. So you ask me what is more challenging, marketing as an advisor, or marketing for a company like Nestlé?

Oh, come on, look at that Nestlé Toll House cookie dough. How hard is that to market? But there are key things we did when we had that. If you look at every ad that Nestlé does, you look at the target audience—what do they want.

On any Nestlé Toll House ad, we have the cookie pull—and the cookie pull is those streams of chocolate that you see—well, that’s iconic to Nestlé. And also in any T.V. commercial, you see little hands and little feet, little toddlers. Because the cookie dough was targeted to women who didn’t have time to do scratch baking, but had little kids who would be fun to make cookie dough with. A very narrow target.

Same as an advisor when you’re looking at who do you talk to. So many advisors who don’t understand marketing are talking to themselves: their brand and what they deliver and “I’ve got this designation and that designation and I do this and I do that!”

But the client wants to know “What’s in it for me?” So all of our marketing always is around questions about what the clients want. It is just like with the cookies: We knew who the toddler mom was, and that she needed the quick pre-made dough. And we knew that the grandma was the one who would make the cookies from scratch, using flour and putting the chips in.

Similarly, we need to know from our clients what exactly they want and what they’re looking for. And one idea is when you were working with women who are in their 50s to 60s, maybe going through retirement, how many advisors have ever asked that woman what she wants? How many have asked “Are you putting remodeling the kitchen or any remodels into your financial plan as you move forward?” No, they don’t ask because they don’t realize how much importance that woman places on her home.

That’s very important to her and maybe that’s what she wants to do. And she feels guilty for talking about, “Hey, I want to remodel my kitchen before I go to retirement.” And I, myself, I’m going through that right now, remodeling the kitchen because I’m not staying in the house without a nice new kitchen.

So the idea of marketing is we need to get into our client’s heads as opposed to focusing on what we’re doing for the clients. Because they don’t appreciate just what we’re doing.

When you’re talking to the client about what matters to them, it’s key and important, just like the little toddler does connected with Nestlé Toll House cookie and the streaming gooey chip. That’s what makes it essential. That’s what makes it different. And we need to find our essential differences when we’re doing marketing as advisors.

I stopped marketing

I mean, we’ve gone through the pandemic. I’m somebody who was in the office the entire time. I did not work from home. I’m still here in the office. My kids were living with us at the time and one’s an attorney and her fiancé, now husband, is a landscape architect. So they took up rooms of the house with their big computers.

I stayed here, and we were trying to market and do Zooms and things like that through the pandemic. And we found out we weren’t getting that client interaction—and I feed off of being with clients a lot.

So I stopped marketing. I stopped doing my White Glove seminars. I stopped doing, you know, classes at the college and everything. And I said, you know, we’re going to work on the processes we have here instead.

So I did a shift and we looked at everything everybody was doing internally. And we decided to change our review process in that momentum. We took those dollars that we would’ve spent on marketing. And we just kind of put those in reserves. We wanted to see where we were going to go. And then I changed the bonus and the pay system also for my staff. That helped as well.

Big shift with client reviews

When your clients want a review, they want that review at the beginning of the year, because they have to do their taxes. They want their tax forms. They want to see what they did in the markets the last year, because we benchmark things on a year-to-year basis, right? They don’t want to do a review on the anniversary of when they became clients with us. That’s no issue except to us; it’s not a big deal to them.

So we sent out letters to all of our clients and we did it in waves, top clients down. We sent it in a big yellow envelope, one of the colors of our firm. And in that envelope, we said, it’s time for your review. We want to do a review with you in these next few weeks, at the beginning of the year. And in that letter, we said, tell us the top two things you want to talk about.

And then we offered some thought-starters, by the CFP areas like protection and estate planning and things. And we had some questions under each section, for instance to say, Hey, do you want to talk about a 529 for the kids? Do you want to talk about life insurance? So it gave them a place to checkmark…and got them thinking.

Then on the second page, we asked them to give us the name of their accountant, the name of their estate planning attorney, and an emergency contact—you know, somebody who could make any changes on their behalf. But we clearly indicated that that was something that we wanted in case we couldn’t reach them. Who else should we be talking to? So we sent them that letter.

(And we also had an opt-out, so that they could opt out of their annual meeting if they preferred. And a couple of people chose to do that. They’re busy. They didn’t have time.)

The clients sent those letter back very, very well. We had a process with our office manager, Julie, that if the letter didn’t come back at such a time, she’d email the client and say, “Hey, the letter didn’t come back.”

But then when she got the letters, she scheduled a meeting for the client and she copied that letter, gave it to our paraplanning and service team so they could look it over and see if there’s anything they had to do.

Maybe we had to get life insurance quotes, maybe theirs. They wanted to, to ask about something specific. So we had that prep work done because we knew then what the client wanted to talk about.

300 client reviews by April 30^th

At that meeting, if they were retired, we were asking them, is their income sufficient? Do they need to turn up the dial on their distributions, you know, to make their income, or do they need to maybe put more money in savings? You know, their target income.

Maybe they changed their retirement date. Maybe they put it up. Maybe they made it early. We were able to talk to them exactly about what they wanted to talk about during this time period. And, you know, we got almost all of our reviews done by the end of April for the entire firm, over 300-some clients, all those reviews were completed.

We did most of them on Zoom, but toward the end of that time period, if people wanted to come in, we were vaccinated. They could come in with or without masks. And we finished those reviews and guess what? We had a summer, we actually had summer! And I could go golfing and my golf game has improved! Not all the time, but I could get out of here early to make a 5:30 golf date with the ladies league! So that was totally wonderful!

The clients like it, because we were talking to them in the time period that they were talking about money. Right when they were hearing about taxes on the news and things like that, as opposed to summertime in Michigan, which you only get the short season. So that was good.

And then if there was something very complex we needed to do with them, let’s say that we needed to do a life insurance quote, or maybe there was an old retirement plan we needed to do. We moved that toward that summer service time so we could spend more time with them. So it allowed us to do those reviews, go through things. And then we could table some things until the summer and early fall to go deeper with them. And they really appreciated that.

Roth conversion meetings in November and December

And then we also put all the people on a list for Roth conversions, because after the Secure Act, the Roth conversions can’t be undone. So you should probably do November and December just to see what the clients had in income this year. Did they get any surprises? Did they win the lottery? I don’t know, but we touched base with them and then determine with them exactly how much we’re going to convert. So we have a whole list and Julia will contact all those people at the end of October to schedule November and early December meetings for conversion.

So all of this changes our process. It’s changed how we’re doing things with our staff. And it really has added some lubrication to the whole thing. And if new clients pop in during that early time, we actually put them off and say, “Unless you have a tax issue or something you need to address, we’d like to talk to you in May when we can give you more time.”

So we put our current clients first, which is, you know, what people should do. And we don’t think about that. We always want the new client, but we put our current clients first. And then we got new clients. It was great. And we’re still onboarding new clients.

Zoom shortens client meetings

Zoom let us do half-hour meetings. I mean, clients are gone in about a half hour with everything that we needed to talk about. Think about a client meeting: Our clients would come in, Julia would greet them, or the staff in front of our office, they’d get them a water or a coffee. They’d sit down at the table. They chit chat with me about the grandkids or the kids or whatever they were doing, or their hobbies. We’d get into their things. They’d ask questions. We seem to be hanging out for over an hour in our meeting. When they leave, easily an hour-and-a-half to two hours would have taken place.

You want to still create their relationship, you know. I mean I was a big hugger. My clients—I’m really in their lives and like to be there. I’d like to understand when they have grandchildren and or when their kids graduate or do something or when their pet died. I want to hear about that. I made sure that I still have that warm-up at the beginning of the conversations.

Adding a paraplanner to client meetings

And the other thing we implemented was our paraplanner. We had an intern come in that we, have moved to a part-time position. He is just new out of college, getting licensing. And he sat in all my meetings, and advisors that don’t have a second person in their meeting, boy, are you missing something! Especially educating young people. He would take notes at every meeting. He would compose the notes and then I would check them and we’ve put them into Redtail. And those notes always had our next steps on them. You know, are these people Roth conversion candidates that we need to schedule in November? Are these people that need to talk about an old 401(k) they left behind? All those notes would be in there. It would also signal in Redtail who needed to work on those service items, so that helps.

So I encourage every advisor to have the second set of ears there at the meeting, because there were things he picked up that I overlooked. And having him do the notes and having me look over the notes, maybe there was something he forgot. We do a good job because we’ve teamed up there. And it gets him ready for taking clients eventually.

Generating ‘K-clients’

Another great thing about having this second person in the room was that conversation with our clients who are 50 and above, who now have adult children—we were able to say, “Here he is. He is someone that’s taking care of our next generation clients.” And suddenly we’re getting more calls from those parents to say, “Hey, my son just changed jobs and he’s 26. You wanna talk to him?” Or “My daughter’s getting married.” Do you want to talk to her and her spouse?

And we’re writing the things that, maybe, a lot of firms don’t think are very lucrative—like term life insurance and 529s, you know, for parents. But honestly, now that we’ve got the entire family, they’re sticky to us.

So I don’t look at it as this is the money I’m making from this particular client. And we’ve coded all those clients “K-clients” for kids up. So, anybody under 35 is in that category since they’re leaving the nest. But, I would want someone to take care of my daughter and now son-in-law the same way. I want them to make sure that they get, you know, a life insurance policy, if they’re getting a mortgage and starting a family.

So now that I’ve taken care of those kids, the parents are like, “Oh, thanks for taking care of, you know, Johnny, I really appreciate it. Can I put money in his Roth IRA?” And I’m like, “No, you have to give it to Johnny. Johnny will put it in his Roth IRA.” But, that transition is happening and you’re keeping it with you. So with their RMD, now we’re putting that money right in, and we’re doing it all kind of, you know, as a family account.

How client reviews will work in 2022

Client reviews are going to be in the first quarter from now on, forever. Yeah, that’s it. So we already had the letter almost drafted that we’re going to send out at the end of December and that’ll go out instead of doing waves. So I think we might do 50% and then 50%. But, we’re going to get them out faster than we did last time and just deal with the influx as it comes.

Because people need different types of meetings. We are going to let them choose Zoom or in-person, but we’re going to limit the in-person meeting explaining to them that, hey, this is the review meeting. Deeper discussions will happen later in the year, if you need something more specific. It’s very, very personal still, but it’s not like spending two hours with someone.

Taking care of each client’s particular needs

I still want New Path Financial to be a place where clients come in and we help them. We’ve added in another office. We sublet to an attorney, an estate planning attorney. I was a busy woman. I worked at Nestlé as a director. I worked. I was in the American Marketing Association. I taught nights.

I did those things that busy moms do. I have my mother who’s in her eighties that we, you know, we’re seeing my in-laws are 87 going to be 88. I think we women take care of the world, right? I want to be in the place that we take care of the mom, and she is not going to just take that referral to the estate planning attorney, we found over the years.

So instead we have the estate planning attorney here, and the state planning attorney walks into that meeting, or gets on Zoom with us and says if you’d like to use me, my paralegal is going to contact you and set up a meeting. We’re looking to add tax.

One of our advisors is, licensed as a special needs advisor, certified for special needs. She’s also a CFP and she works with the widows. So anybody who comes in with those issues, Deb takes care of and so on. What we want at New Path is, people come in from different places and we help them find the advisor that’s right for them. So we’re looking for advisors that are really good, really into college planning or into other areas, maybe business clients.

I do a lot of the professionals because I’m a business owner, but we’re looking for somebody who, for instance, wants to always work with teachers or something. So as folks talk to our firm, just find your thing, like the cookie dough, you know, find your little niche.

Who is your client? Is it the mom of toddlers that uses cookie dough because your kids have a short attention span? Or is it the grandma that’s going to mix the flour and sugar, put love into it, like patient grandmas can? So find your niche. And we’re trying to be a place where a client comes and they find the right advisor. That right niche.