Transcript

Mike :

So the first thing in the financial planning world of the first step, and this is going to be, or it should be about the same with anyone you talk to. And that is we call it a discovery meeting. Other people or other advisors may call it something else. But for us, it’s a discovery meeting. And the purpose of that meeting, there’s only one purpose. Well, I might say too, we need to get to understand you anytime we’re delivering content. I like to say that we, our goal is to deliver information, but it’s not advice. Right. Right. Because in order to deliver advice, I mean, we’re fiduciaries. If we’re going to deliver advice to you, we have to understand your unique situation. We need to know where are you today? What are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? And what’s getting in the way of you accomplishing those objectives.

Mike :

Sure. What happens is I’m going to ask you questions, like, you know, tell me a little bit about where you’re at right now with your planning. What are you doing really well? What areas of concern do you have? You know, kind of like if you were a business, you’d want to do what they call a SWOT analysis, what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So where are you today is step one in that meeting. Now, step two of that meeting is trying to determine, well, where do you want to be? You know, paint me a picture of what the ideal future looks like for you now, does that mean that you’re going to be able to accomplish the ideal? Maybe, maybe not. Right. But if we don’t know both where you are and where you’re wanting to go when we’re kind of spinning our wheels on our way.

Mike :

Sure. So some of the things that I hear a lot of the times, too, just to give you ideas, I say, tell me about what your ideal future looks like. Well, I want to travel in retirement. I want to spend time with the grandchildren. I want to go out to dinner with my friends. You know, then I was like to ask the next question, which is, so tell me more about that. You want to travel? Tell me more about that. What does that look like for you? Where are you going? What is it going to cost? No matter where you are, whether you’re young or old or whatever, whenever you get to that goal part where that advisor’s asking you, what do you want this to be? You know, what do you, what do you really want to look like? Paint me that picture, you know, it should be motivating, right? It should be awesome. Think about what you’d love to have happen. And then let’s find out if financially we can make it work out. And then the last step in that first meeting is just learning a little bit about what are the gaps? You know, what’s preventing you from getting there. And then we share a little bit about our process and how we do things to determine whether or not it would be worth continuing.

Zach:

Right, I am glad You brought that up at the end, because as much of this initial meeting, being about an opportunity for them to learn about us, we want to share our, you know, process in great detail just to make sure the services that we provide can be a good fit for them.

Mike :

Yeah, that’s right. Because you might not be looking for what we do. You may say, wow, this has been a great conversation. I love it. But if, if the services we provide are not a fit for what you’re looking for, or maybe the price structure is not a fit, then it’s great. We can be friends. But that doesn’t mean we need to work together and I’ll tell you this. Here’s the other thing be where the financial advisor that is looking to take on every person they talk to. It’s really important that you find a fit. Not everyone is a fit for each other. The other day. I had a great couple of very, very nice couple and they actually they’d saved a lot of money, like a couple million dollars. But at the end of the meeting, I had to say to them, I said, look, I really like you guys.

Mike :

You’re really good people. And I enjoyed our conversation at the same time. I also don’t believe we’re a good fit for each other. And they’re like, what, what are you talking about? I said, well, the reality is is we have such different personalities. If we ended up working together, I’m going to drive you crazy. And you’re going to drive me crazy just because we have different personalities. We’re not a good fit there. And there are plenty of advisors, you know, who would be a good fit. You need to go find one of them. Now, if they would have been a good fit for one of the other people in my office, I would have recommended that they talk to one of the other advisors in the office. They weren’t right. They just had a different type of mindset and

Mike:

They just weren’t for us. And that’s okay. Because regardless

Zach:

Because regardless If we work together, we always want to provide value.

Mike:

First step is discovery coming next. We’re going to talk about initial analysis, the first draft plan. So we will be right back.