Lesson 3 | Clarify Next Steps (4:04 minutes)
The Importance of Clarifying Next Steps
I want to talk about the importance of clarifying next steps, now that you're at the face-to-face, advisor-to-advisor meetings, and you're going and meeting all these different advisors. It's critically important at this point in time that we talk about where do we go from here? Let's clarify next steps, and let's set the proper expectations.
Number one, they've got to make sure that they commit to this collaboration and really want to be a part of this thing, and I think that's going to be a natural event that's going to play out of here. But they have to know what they're committing to. There's clearly going to be a number of additional meetings for all the advisors, depending on the circumstance and what you're working on, that may need to be a number of meetings, but it may be only need to be a few meetings, if you're very on point, structured and working very, very well together. You've got to set the tone that this is going to require additional meetings with the other advisors. Clearly, there's an intention to bring everybody together for a team briefing, because at this point in time when you're going out and meeting these other advisors, you've already conducted the discovery, you've already got the lay of the land that there are other advisors. You've done discovery in the form of really clarifying their goals, their objectives, the things that are key to them to address, and you've had a relook at all their current legal and tax structures, and the different strategies that they deployed.
You're coming in with a landscape of everything that's been done to date, and clarity around where do they want to go in the future. So, when you're bringing everybody together for that team meeting, this is a very important thing to kind of embark on that and start to talk about ideas and how we can actually move forward and help them get to where it is they want to get to, the client, that is.
The last part of it is, really, is that you're going to talk about how we're going to deploy a collaborative strategy, and I think one of the things that's important to that is to allow everybody to participate in that. Now, clearly through the LINK program, we're providing you a process, an approach, right, a process that you can bring to your collaboration, step-by-step, with a number of tools and resources that you have at your side, and that's fantastic. While there's no ... While no other advisor is actually bringing their own process or things like that to the table, then you can actually bring yours to the table and say, "Here's how we've done it in the past, and here are the resources and approaches we've used that we've found to be very, very successful, and you will have access to that process."
But at the same time, you might find that some of these other advisors actually have some great ideas and some great approaches that have worked very, very well. So, don't close them out to that. Allow them to be a part of that and to be able to bring their ideas and bring tools and processes that they've actually deployed that have worked successfully in their prior interactions with other advisors, and maybe even collaborations. Invite that, welcome that. But again, it's really important when you leave this meeting to set clear expectations, where do we go from here, and as you're done meeting with the other advisors you'll be calling everybody together for kind of that team briefing where you can share all of your findings in the current situation, and then you can look at deploying the collaboration that's going to work best for you in this project and working on behalf of this client. But, that's exactly what you need to do, and setting those clear expectations for where do we go from here before that meeting ends. Thank you.