Lesson 8 | The Shared Process (2:53 minutes)
The Shared Process Recap
Todd talked about the shared process, and I just want to review some of the key points of the shared process. This is a great process to use because it fits so well in collaboration. There are four phases, and the first of the four phases in a shared process is the discovery phase. This is where you meet with a client and learn about family, you're learning about goals, you're learning about assets, income, income taxes, cash flow, legal documents, estate planning, charitable planning, insurance planning. If you're doing comprehensive planning, those are the things that you want to be asking about.
You want to then identify the gaps that exist between where the client says he or she wants to go and where they are now with respect to their current planning. Identifying those gaps is a really important part of the discovery phase. In our shop, we complete this process before we ever start collaborating. We do this on our own. We may reach out with client's permission to other advisors to get information, but we don't talk to the other advisors at this point about collaboration. We're just asking for legal documents, we're asking for financial information and so forth. You want to be ready to collaborate when the time comes, but you're not ready to collaborate until you've finished The Discovery Phase and until you get hired for the plan.
Phase two of the shared process is The Creative Solutions Phase. This is where collaboration really begins. What we want to do here is mutually develop strategies with the other advisors. We want to reach consensus. We want to resolve any issues, disagreements, and be ready to present our findings and our recommendations to the client together.
The third component of the shared process is The Strategy Deployment Phase. Some people call this the implementation phase. This is where documents are drafted, new account forms are set up, insurance would be placed, titling of assets, funding of trusts and so forth. Everything that needs to happen in order to implement the recommendations that the client has agreed to move forward with.
Each advisor is going to have a role in this. The money manager will have things to do, the lawyer will have things to do, the accountant will have things to do and so forth. It could take a few weeks to get this done, depending upon the scope of the engagement, or it could take sometimes a year or more to get this done. That's the Strategy Deployment Phase.
Finally, there is The Results Management Phase. This involves periodic review of the plan. It could be quarterly, it could be annually, it could be maybe every three to five years depending upon the nature of the engagement. The point is to stay in touch with the client and to stay in touch with the other advisors so that you can monitor changes and update the plan when it's needed.