Lesson 1 | Key to get Team Together to Identify and Select Strategies (11:22 minutes)

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Strategy Session

Now, after your face-to-face meetings with the other advisors, you're teeing up what we call the strategy session. This is going to be the next step, when all the advisors meet together in the same room without the client present just to talk about the client's affairs and to come up with best ideas, great solutions to close the gaps between what the client said, he or she wanted to accomplish and where they actually are in consideration of their financial and estate planning and so forth.

We call this the strategy session. The key is you want to get all the team together, and ideally, especially for the first time, you'd like to get together face-to-face. Now, that just may not be possible if people are in different States and so forth. But if at all possible, try to get together at the same place. So again, you're still building trust, you're still building rapport, and that's just going to be an important part of your process.

Now, there are going to be some things that you want to do in advance of this strategy session so that when everybody shows up, they're ready to go. The first thing you want to do is agree on a time and place to meet. You can meet in your conference room; you can meet in one of the other advisor's conference room. Again, that's a decision that you'll have to make based upon the participants and what your preference is. But you're going to agree on a time and a place.

You're going to send out a report to the other collaborative team members in advance of this meeting. We typically send a discovery report. This is the report in our process. We go through the discovery as a separate fee-based engagement. And we create a report indicating where a client is today. We have the client's goals in this report. And we identify the gaps that exist between what the client wants and where the client is now. That report is something that the other advisors are going to want to have a copy of.

So, you have your own process. You do your own kind of discovery report. Whatever it is that you do, send that out to the other advisors in advance so that they'll have a chance to look at it before you get together for your strategy session. And then encourage them in the email, you'll probably send this out by email, encourage them to give thought to strategies that they think would be suitable to close the gap, the planning gap that exists in the client situation. And also, in this email that you're sending out, you might want to offer some discussion points, here are the things that we want to talk about during the meeting.

Now, I like to call them discussion points. I don't like to call them...I don't like to call it an agenda. You know, agenda is a word that has, in my opinion, some baggage attached to it. You know, people with agendas, well, have agendas. You don't really have an agenda here except to get the team together and to bring the best of your ideas. You don't want to come across as trying to control this process. You want to come across as trying to facilitate this process among a group of peers. So, your choice of words is important and I like to talk discussion points not the agenda.

So now, let's talk about what happens during a meeting. Everyone is together in the same room. How are you going to facilitate this meeting?

Facilitating the Meeting

Here's the way we like to do it. First, we like to talk about the client's financial information. Again, this would be part of your discovery plan, your written document, your initial work product. You're going to have some financial information. I like to start with the financial information because all the other advisors are gonna be comfortable talking about the financial information. You have to remember, again, they've never done this before. This may be their first strategy session ever. They really don't know what to expect. And so, I like to try to make them comfortable by talking about things that are right down their comfort zone, and the financial information is a good place to start.

The second thing I typically talk about is reviewing the client's goals. Now, they have some sense of what the client's goals are. Most of the other advisors have never developed a written set of client goals. And one of the things that we do at our four-phase model is, we always develop a written set of client goals. I mean, that's the bullseye. If you don't know what the bullseye is, how you gonna hit the target? So, we like to have those goals. We of course, develop that in our communication, through the discovery process with the client. We write those down, we send them out to the other advisors, and then when we all get together we review those client goals. And I want to know what the other advisors think about those client goals.

So typically, most of the goals is, "Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. That's good. That's good. That's good." But maybe spoken, or maybe unspoken, some advisors may think, "You know, I'm not really sure that's a client goal." Or, "You know, the client may have written that down as a goal, but I think the client was coached on developing that goal. I'm not really sure the client's committed to that goal." And these are the kind of things you want to get out on the table. If you're gonna get those other advisors on board, you need to be able to have a frank discussion about goals, and you need to open the door for the other advisors to talk directly with the client and ask the question, "Is this really important to you? I was kind of surprised when I saw that. You know, I think that should be fine." And they're gonna want to do that. I wouldn't try to prohibit them from doing that. So, the client goals is something you're gonna talk about in the meeting.

The next thing you would do is to discuss planning strategies. And when I'm facilitating a meeting, what I like to do is, "Okay, we've talked about the financial information and maybe made some updates, we've reviewed the client goals. Now, what are some of your ideas on what the client could do to solve some of these problems, and move in the direction of their goals?" And I stop. I don't start with my ideas. Do I have ideas? Absolutely I have ideas. I got my team together, we talked about ideas. I've got a list of four, or five, or six strategies that I think the client ought to implement. But I'm not gonna start with my ideas. I'm gonna ask the other advisors to start with their ideas. I want them to be in the spotlight. I want them to feel like they're making a meaningful contribution. I don't want them to feel like I'm just trying to get them to rubber stamp my ideas.

So, I just like to start with asking them for their ideas, and I really encourage you to do the same. What are your ideas for how the client could move forward? Sit back and let others talk. And it might be a little quiet at the beginning. Who knows. You know, maybe the other advisors were kind of really expecting you to lead the charge with all these strategies, and then you don't. So, they probably have their ideas, but they weren't necessarily ready to just come right out with them. But when you're pausing, then they realize, "Okay, well I guess you really seriously are interested in our ideas," and they'll start to come out.

So, then you're writing down, you're taking notes, "Okay, that's an idea." I wouldn't start judging any of these ideas at the beginning. I think of this more of a brainstorming session, and you know the rules of brainstorming is: don't criticize anybody's idea, just write them down. "Okay, that's a good idea." If you don't think it would work ... you know, sometimes you're gonna think, "That's a lousy idea. That's crazy." You don't have to say that. What you can say is, "Okay, okay, that's interesting. So how would that work? Okay, well then what would happen?" And let them ... you know, they may come to the conclusion themselves that it's not a good idea. Don't make that judgment right now, just keep the ideas flowing. My experience is, in a strategy session like this, which by the way will go minimum of an hour, sometimes two hours ... and by the way, as a parenthetical thought, you might want to establish an expectation on the other advisors of how long this meeting would run. I would allow two hours. I think that's long enough to really develop some ideas, but short enough not to be this super marathon session.

So, let all those ideas flow. You're gonna make a list of 10, 12, 15 ideas. Just keep writing them all down. Then the key is, as you're running out of time, you're gonna have to make a decision on which ideas you want to go forward with. And the challenge is, you don't want to step on anybody's toes. I mean, who's gonna decide which are the good ideas and which are the bad ideas? And so, I'll tell you the way we've done it. As we reach the end of the meeting, and after we've had a productive brainstorming session, we've got a lot of good ideas, I would typically say something like, "I think this has been a really productive session, thank you all so much for your participation. This is a great, great start. Now, we've got a lot of great ideas here. In fact, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 ... we've got 12 ideas here. My experience is it's probably not a good idea to go to the client with 12 strategies. It's just like overwhelming, they can't handle it. I would recommend that we try to boil this list down to maybe the top 4 or 5 strategies that we really feel strongly that the client ought to recommend. How does that sound?" And almost all the time they're gonna say, "Yes, that sounds right. It's gonna be overwhelming to the client if we give them all of these strategies."

So, now they've given you permission — I think, this is the way I do it — to pick the strategies that I felt were the best. And so, what I'll say is, "If it's okay with you, what I'd like to do is kind of give you my impression of what I think we as a group agreed on as probably the best ones. Does that make sense?" They're all gonna say yes. Remember, you're the facilitator, you're the leader. They're seeding to you the situation of leadership, because you've taken the initiative to establish this collaborative process. And so now you would go through and say, "Okay, we talked about strategy number one, and I think that would be a really good one to start with. And then number four here, and we talked about that one." And kind of run down your list. Of course, to do this, you're thinking all through the strategy session, all through the meeting, the discussion of strategies, which ones you like, which ones you don't like, which ones ought to be on the short list, etc.

It takes a little practice, but that's what you're getting paid for. So, you're gonna come up with that list, and you'll read that back to the other advisors, and say, "How does that sound?" And now, we can make changes to this later, this is not etched in stone at all. But one of the next steps in our client development process is to develop a report, to develop an analysis that would indicate to the client the potential outcomes if the client implemented all of these things. In our firm, we do that. So, I need to have clear marching orders, clear specifics on what strategies we're gonna choose. And I'm gonna ask them if they're in agreement with these, let's say five strategies, and they almost always say yes. And especially because I make it clear that we can change our mind if we look at the outcome of these five strategies and it's not what we were hoping for. Well, we're gonna have to go back and make some changes. And that's just fine.

Now, the last thing we want to do in this strategy session is agree on next actions. So, the lawyer will have some duties, the financial advisor will have some duties, the CPA will have some duties, maybe the trust officer. I mean, whoever's on this collaborative team, everybody will agree on what their duties are, and perhaps even give thought to when we want to get together again. There probably should be some discussion on how long these next actions are gonna take, so that we'll be ready when that time comes to meet and continue the strategy development process.

So that's how we do the strategy sessions, and it's worked really well for us.

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Strategy Session:

Facilitating the Meeting: