Kurt Dupuis:
This episode, we’re finishing up our series on building a service model and a minimum standard of care. We’ll cover mapping your client contacts throughout the year, we’ll also talk about building processes to ensure proper execution and accountability.
Steve Seid:
In the processes section we say general but it's really important that you think about how the machinery will work. When do the contacts get initiated into scheduled, what do the contacts look like, who handles the follow-up, etc. etc. You even have to think through things like what are your contingency and backup plans. It’s building a workflow and without it the model will never work.
Kurt Dupuis:
And building processes that last are a challenge. So you can always email us at thewholetruth@touchstonefunds.com because we’re here to help.
Steve Seid:
Finally we’ll finish the episode with some client engagement ideas, always a lot of fun - so ready everyone, let’s do it.
Disclosure:
The views expressed herein are those of the participants and not those Touchstone Investments.
Steve Seid:
And welcome everybody to The Whole Truth. I am Steve Seid and I'm joined as always by my good friend and partner, Mr. Kurt Dupuis. Kurt, welcome.
Kurt Dupuis:
Thank you, sir. How are we doing?
Steve Seid:
How are we doing? I don't know. It's weird times. These episodes are I guess supposed to last forever and those kinds of things. But we're recording it during a shelter in place, which is a weird time for everyone. I'm in the Bay Area, as you all know, and we've had some pretty tight guidelines, restrictions is what you would say. For a long time and there's really no end in sight at this point. How are things down in Atlanta for you?
Kurt Dupuis:
Work from home with two little ones is a challenge with number three coming around the corner. So, there's a modest level of some stress and anxiety and figuring out work from home life, but we'll figure it out day by day.
Steve Seid:
So, we're making lemonade out of lemons right now in the sense that our days of running around and going around and seeing people right now are non-existent. So, we have more time for the podcast and recording and all that. And so, this'll be a pretty productive time for us to do some recordings and what this episode is going to be about, we're continuing our client service series. And this is going to be about probably the most important thing, which is implementation and processes. We've gone through the design of the client service model, which is client segmentation. It's thinking about the types of contacts that you're going to do in your model and going down through each of the ABCDs and laying out the number of contacts and that makes up the service matrix and that's all well and good, but now you got to figure out, okay, when and how exactly do all these contacts get done? And that's what this episode is going to be going to be about. We're going to focus on a lot of those issues here.
Steve Seid:
And then, at the end of this episode we're going to come back with some unique client touch ideas that we've been doing over the last couple of episodes. If you get nothing else from this podcast, a bunch of really cool client engagement ideas you can take away.
Kurt Dupuis:
Well, and this episode is also going to be different because there's no one size fits all. It's going to depend, the first two steps of client services are going to dictate how it gets implemented. The firm you're at is going to dictate how it gets implemented. So, I really think we're just sharing some thoughts and best practices and things to think about when getting into implementation because we can't come up with an Excel spreadsheet for this that's distributable en mass because it's going to be customized. So, this is just tips and tricks on actually taking all the work that you've had done and implementing into your practice.
Steve Seid:
That's right. Two things we're going to focus on, let's start here. The first is mapping out your contacts over time and then the second piece is developing the processes to execute all this. So, let's start with mapping out contacts. So, if you followed us you've completed, as we mentioned before, that service matrix, which are your number and types of contacts. What we suggest you do from there is to pull out a sheet and map all these contacts by month. So, it won't surprise you, we have a tool for this. You can email us and we'll give you a spreadsheet that actually maps all these things up and automates it for you. But if you want to do it on your own, here's what it looks like. It's a very basic Excel spreadsheet. You have January through December and your tabs on the bottom and that's your starting point. And then what you're going to do is start to build out the contacts per month.
Steve Seid:
Now, when that's in place, there is likely going to be busy times in the year where you're not going to be doing client contacts. May not necessarily be the case for everybody, but here's an example. Around tax time. Some people don't want to do client reviews and so you pull that time out of that monthly, you may not even have April or whatever that is around there, the end of the year or...
Kurt Dupuis:
Holidays.
Steve Seid:
Holidays, yeah. Once you have your months pulled out, just just move out the times that you're not going to do the reviews, and then you actually get to breaking out the contacts over time. And there's a couple of ways to approach this.
Kurt Dupuis:
The most important thing is the buckets that you want to think about is separate the heavy lifting from not heavy lifting, right? The formal reviews are mandated by regulators and a lot of firms, you know you're going to get those in, but those are labor intensive, right? So, divide and conquer there in an in an appropriate way. But if you're implementing something like the Google alerts for gardening or something that your clients are into, maybe that's something that support staff can help with or a junior FA on the team can lead the way there.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, that's a great point. So, you think about something else like electronic communication, it takes no time at all to put together that communication and deliver it, if it's something that's coming directly from the firm. Kurt's point is exactly right, which is separating out the things that are going to take time. And so, you got to lay it out over time. So, let's say you've got 100 clients, you're going to do a certain number of reviews per year.
Steve Seid:
Sometimes that might be one, two, whatever. You got to break that out, and my general advice to you is just to start somewhere and it doesn't matter how, just have a method. So, let me give you an example. Some people start the contacts by going on the month of the client's birthday. Some people start it by, "Hey, when's the last time we did a review? And we'll start there." Some people do another way. So, the point is just use that as a way to start breaking out those formal reviews over time, and then you can fill in the rest of the contacts around that. So for example, if Kurt Dupuis, I'm doing his formal review in February because let's say that for whatever reason I'm doing that, and I have five other touches to do with Kurt throughout the rest of the year, well, it's pretty easy to just break it out. And just say, "Okay, every other month I'm going to put in those different contacts with Kurt." And so, I have a cycle for contacting Kurt throughout the year. But the important point is just to have a starting point.
Kurt Dupuis:
So, quick sidebar. Imagine how different some conversations would be if you went with your reviews on the birthday month versus market peaks or market troughs. That could be either the best birthday present you're giving someone or complete slap in the face and sending them to blow out their birthday candles in sadness.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, once you start getting these cycles in place, you can begin to set expectations for clients. So, if I know that I'm doing Kurt's review, he's an A client, so I'm going to do two formal reviews in a year or whatever, and I'm going to do it in February and June. I can set expectations to Kurt for that happening and say, "Kurt, we are raising our level of client service. That's something that we want to consistently do all the time for you. Each year you can expect better and better levels of client service and this year, we're just being more systematic of how we're trying to contact you. So, I want you to know that you're going to have certain number of reviews so, we're going to do these two formal reviews, we're going to do it in February and June, how does that sound to you?" And they might say yes, hopefully say... Whatever, you come up with this two months.
Steve Seid:
So, okay, great. So Kurt, you can expect a call from me the month before just for us to lock down a specific date. How many times do we, Kurt, talk to FAs and they say, "I want to do these contacts, but I can't get in touch with this client or scheduling's a..." It's something we come across all the time, so being systematic...
Kurt Dupuis:
But what's that old presentation phrase that you tell people what you're going to tell them, you tell them and then you tell them again what you've already told them.
Steve Seid:
Correct.
Kurt Dupuis:
And if you're setting up that expectation, so a thing to tease out of what you just said is tell people what you're doing. Tell people that you are elevating their level of service and that you're putting a new game plan and that in 12 months you'd like feedback to see how's it going. You're putting a lot of thought and effort into this. It would be good to get feedback, positive or negative, to help tweak the system on the back end.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, and what's the end result besides the client feeling like they're getting better services, your life's a lot easier because your scheduling is easier, their expectations are set, you know when you're doing it right. We always talk about time being your most important commodity and all this type of stuff is meant to save you time and unlock capacity for you in your day to day. All right, so let's continue on. So, you're following along, right? And so, you're building out these contact spreadsheets. I will admit up front, they're a little bit tedious for you to go through every client, map out each contact. It's a little bit annoying, you may want to incorporate some folks to help you in it, but here's what I can say. When you've done it, it's done, right? You only got to do it once.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Steve Seid:
And so, from there you can choose to, "Okay, do I want to put it in CRM", but just getting to the point where you've mapped out all your client contacts over a particular year is a really nice milestone, I would say, for a practice.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. So, a couple thoughts. And so, not all technology is created equally and some firms are further along with integrating these types of things into their systems. And so, which is again why we have to be a little bit more generic in what we're describing. But second aside is I have a client that actually backed in to the number of hours he had to dedicate on any given year to his clients, assuming a certain number of clients, a certain amount of time reviewing. He came up with basically Tuesdays and Thursdays every week. I think 49, 50 weeks out of the year is going to be doing just client reviews. And what that did for him is freed up time for him mentally to say, "Well, when I have this golf social on Monday afternoon, I can be okay with that because I have time to go out and do that because I'm taking care of the clients I already have." So, I thought that was a really unique way to think about it and document and establish a process.
Steve Seid:
That’s great because anything that's really important, you should block out dedicated time to do it. That does not get violated unless there's an emergency "Okay, we mapped out these contacts. Okay, that's on a paper right now, right? It's in an Excel spreadsheet. It's going to live here." Now, you've got to actually figure out how to do this in your busy world. So, most of what we wanted to talk about in this episode comes down to processes. And so, the main point to take away is you should have a process. You have to design a system and process that encourages you to work through this in a systematic way or it's not going to work and you'll be back to square one where you were before you design the model.
Kurt Dupuis:
And I'll just reemphasize a point that we've made before and we'll probably continue making, this is why we are here.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
This is why we're recording this podcast. This is why, we have clients that are into that. You don't have to do this by yourself, we've done it a fair number of times and we're as both a systems engineer but also that accountability to the system, that's large part of why we have jobs and why we exist and why we take this seriously and enjoy it so much.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, absolutely. So all right, so we know we want to build a process. What's the starting point? So, the starting point to think about it as you've got all your contacts mapped out for a given month, what does that workflow look like? And I'll give you an example of one that's worked for some of my teams. They get their client contacts for the following month delivered to them the month before. So, it is December of 2020 and I'm going to get at the beginning of that month my contacts for January, 2021. What that allows me to do is it allows time to schedule, it allows times for preparation. It allows all those things. If I get it a month before, you may decide that two weeks before is fine or two months before is better, but having that lead time to get that set up I think is really critical and an important first step in a process.
Kurt Dupuis:
Little commercial for someone we have no relationship whatsoever, but I do have a couple of clients depending on your legal structure, you can use a service called Calendly, which actually lets clients get on your calendar.
Steve Seid:
Oh, that's interesting.
Kurt Dupuis:
So, you get this list on December 1st, you can email it out to everyone, say, "Hey, look on this link. Schedule your time for January." So, you don't have to have the back and forth with scheduling.
Steve Seid:
That's fantastic.
Kurt Dupuis:
They can look at Joe adviser and say, "Okay, I know on Tuesday the 13th at three o'clock they have an opening," boom, click it. It's then reserved.
Steve Seid:
And we've all been in processes like that. How much easier is that than calling and trying to figure out calendars, you can look at it once, you can click and it's done. When you've used them, and those things are pretty amazing. I love it. So, that could be part of your process. But as long as you're building that workflow, that's the key point. And what you're doing is you're mapping out the key items, in this case, when you receive your contacts, what steps do you take? What are the timelines, what are the accountability, those sorts of things? And if you could build that out, that's the where we want to get you. I know Kurt, this is high level but hopefully I'm being clear about what I'm talking about here.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, I got you. This is your jam. I have the benefit of being able to see your face on the other side and he's like pointing at his head. He is getting in the zone. This is optimum Steve Seid right now.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. I'm a framework guy. I don't know, Kurt makes fun of me for that, but I'm a little bit of a framework guy. I think if I took one thing away from MBA School, it was processes and framework. If you just open the book on consulting and all that, all it is is a bunch of frameworks and processes. So, I did learn one thing from MBA. No, I learned a lot. I love my MBA. Build out that process, that workflow. We can certainly help you to do that. What else should we be thinking about here, Kurt, as it pertains to building processes?
Kurt Dupuis:
You got to plan for the unexpected, so what are the contingency plans? When are you going to receive... We just used the example of receiving it the first of the month. Maybe it's the middle of the month. Maybe it only takes you a week to schedule next month's meetings. That's fine, but let's figure out who's going to deliver it. What are you going to do if clients don't respond?
Steve Seid:
That's a hard one.
Kurt Dupuis:
Do you have a plan there? Yeah. Something to think about there. And most importantly, because a lot of people are going to fall into this, especially when starting something new, what happens if you fall behind?
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
What are you going to do if it's March and you're already behind? You haven't been doing the reviews, like you said you were going to do back in December, what do you do?
Steve Seid:
If you don't build in those contingencies, what will happen is you'll break the model. If you start falling behind in this, it's death and then you're back to the beginning, which is chaos, which is no plan at all and no model at all. So, I think you've got to think through all those things. I think the toughest one for me is thinking through what to do with unresponsive clients. My advice to FAs on this front is it depends on how unresponsive they are. Yeah, I always find it interesting and crazy, and I know this happens for a variety of reasons because people are people and you inherit accounts or whatever, but some people just say like, "Oh, my clients don't respond to me at all." What do you do with that?
Kurt Dupuis:
We see that a lot. I don't work the compliance department, but I think of what kind of risks. We talk a lot about who's going to be more litigious, your your best clients or the people that never respond if things were to go sideways? So, I don't know. I hear stuff like that and it's like, "Is whatever incremental revenue they're driving to your business worth that?"
Steve Seid:
That's a key point.
Kurt Dupuis:
But that's a complete another sidebar.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. And the other pushback... The thing to think through is like, okay, you build this model. What about clients? I hear FAs say, "Oh, this client doesn't want to be contacted that much." And the pushback I have is you can reduce the amount of contacts to some degree, but you got to find a way to be relevant to your clients. If you've got an A client and you're going to tell me you only want to see them once a year, I'm going to push back to you and say, "You better figure out a way to be more valuable to that person." That's just the way I think about it.
Kurt Dupuis:
Well, I think of it as if we're developing a system here, it should be an opt out system. So, if a client is very vocal about not wanting... If they are an A client, you've decided you've got two reviews and one client appreciation thing or whatever those touches look like and they come out and tell you that that's too much? Okay, that's fine. They can opt out. But that is your default system versus an opt in system, whether you go and ask all your A clients like, "Is this okay?"
Kurt Dupuis:
It's like, no, you're not asking permission here. If they really against what you're trying to deliver to them then they can opt out I guess. But it should be an opt out system, not an opt in system.
Steve Seid:
And I think that makes sense and I would even give limits to that because the idea here is to build an experience that you are driving, that again we talk about minimum standard of care, but your model should be delivering some kind of experience that you're driving. And so, you don't want a portion of your clients not to have that experience if they're important to you, which they should be. So, let me sum up. In this segment, we talked through a couple of things. The first is mapping out the clients over time and then the second part, which is equally important, is building the processes to execute on that service matrix and on that model. Two very key parts to implementing a client service model. So, when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about processes. Just wrap that up a little bit and then start to get into a couple of other final points around client service. This is The Whole Truth. Stick with us.
Steve Seid:
And welcome back everybody. We want to tie a little bit of a bow around this idea of processes so we're going to bring up a couple of topics here. The first is we're going to talk about, you've got this model in place, you've laid out the contacts, you've got your processes, but what happens when you end up talking to a client for whatever reason earlier on. You had a formal review scheduled with that client in June, you end up engaging with a client in March, which happens all the time.
Steve Seid:
It's a really simple answer. You can check that off your list but I get that all the time. Its like, "What do you do about the future contacts?" Well, you talk to a client, go down and just check it off. And I think that's worth mentioning. The second thing I want to bring up has to do with structure of the meetings. Now, we will get into this in a future episode for sure, because this is something that people always want to know, is what's the ideal client meeting? But what I would say is just make sure you have a structure and we could talk about best practice in the future, but make sure you have a structure to these engagements, whether they're formal reviews or anything else.
Kurt Dupuis:
Well, and the other thing that I think we want to emphasize and I think we can do, it's the same questions and the answer's the same on both. So, how do we answer the question of, are we doing this well, but also how do we get better?
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
And in both cases, I think the answer is you measure it.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
So, am I doing this well? Well, you can measure this by asking your clients. It's something I think we're both big advocates of having a consulting group made up of your own clients, right? An advisory board where you're asking, you're talking through these ideas with them and telling them what you're going to roll out and then after you've rolled them out, you're asking for feedback on what you've rolled out. So, measuring that and having those conversations with clients and have them give you a score. Come up with some sort of survey that puts definitive structure around their perception of what they're getting.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, there's all kinds of ways that you can measure things, but it's important to measure. Another example of a measurement, how much free time and capacity are you creating from year to year? Are you getting better? From having your formal reviews, how quickly do you get through the action items relative to what you did before? Make sure you're measuring it, make sure you're raising your game. You should want to get better at this each and every year, and the only way that you'll know how to do that is if you measure it.
Kurt Dupuis:
I'd be curious if you run into this much, but I believe in everything that we just talked about, but I live in the South.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
And sometimes things just move more slowly. I can think of people on both sides, people that are highly efficient and run the tread off the tires of their practice, and I can think of folks that have three hour client reviews. It's just the world I live in down in the South. Do you run into that in the Bay Area at all or are you more of A type people that just want to get in and get it out?
Steve Seid:
Yeah, I don't think you need to rush the client engagements. The types of things I think you want to optimize is after the client leaves the processes, the things that you have to get through just because you don't want to draw out the action items, the processing of paperwork, all those things. Those are the things that if we can tighten up, I think most people, regardless of where they live would want to streamline, I would think. But you should never want a streamlined how long...
Kurt Dupuis:
The relationship.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. Maybe sometimes you feel like with some clients you want to streamline.
Kurt Dupuis:
Maybe some times, yeah.
Steve Seid:
I think my wife wants to streamline her relationship with me. Yeah. In summary, those are just a couple of things, the questions and comments that we get brought up that we thought was worth mentioning in this episode. But again, the key takeaway is mapping out the contacts and building your processes and we're certainly happy to help you with that. So, we're going to transition there, Kurt, and we're going to do it in the final part of this section. We're going to throw around some client contact ideas because we've done this before and I think you and I both agree, it's really fun to do and our audience takes a lot out of it. So, you want to do top five, top three, just throw them out there? Last time we had thumbs up, thumbs down and we had everything was thumbs up. So, what's your approach here?
Kurt Dupuis:
Let's do three and I'm going to start with my weakest and see if I can get a thumbs down from you.
Steve Seid:
Okay.
Kurt Dupuis:
A practice that is as old as time and I think a lot of people talk about it. I think very few people do it. Handwritten notes.
Steve Seid:
Considering I had that on my list, I can't give you a thumbs down. I love handwritten notes, I love it. And I am guilty in my own business of saying I'm going to write everyone a handwritten note and I don't do it as well as I should. So, I've got to get better at that, but I am a huge fan of handwritten notes. It just says something about the importance of the relationship or the importance of the interaction when you know someone is sitting there and writing that note. God, it's hard to write these days. Have you ever written extensively after... It's not easy.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, because I decided I want to do this for a week and I get like 20 cards in and I was like, "Okay, I'm done with this for a year." My hand is going to be after this.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
So, let me tell you two stories about handwritten notes. One is when I first started wholesaling, I traveled with a guy at my previous firm down in Florida that had this reputation, had wholesaled for two or three decades. And after every meeting he had, he would write a handwritten note. It doesn't matter if he knew the advisor for years and years, he'd write a hand written note. So, I'd be driving with him in his car. He'd pulled down his little wind visor and he'd have just a stack of cards that in the hotel the night before, he was just cranking them out.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, that's impressive. It really is impressive.
Kurt Dupuis:
That's really impressive.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
The other story, so my wife went to Virginia tech, she's a hokey. And the former basketball coach, before he got a job, rags to riches story, he was the equipment manager for a few different teams. Every week, he would write 20 notes to prominent head coaches in the country. Just asking for a shot or just saying what he learned that week. And he would cycle through about 100 different names, but every week he'd write 20 cards and sent it out. And he did this from college through when he got a head coaching job, which is 10, 15 years later.
Steve Seid:
It's amazing. And you think about something like that and you'd say, "Oh wow, it's really hard to get jobs in college basketball and blah, blah, blah." And so, so many people want them. And a lot of our businesses are like that, there's competition for clients, there's competition from our side and getting advisors' time. But I always find it interesting that in these hyper competitive places or spaces, how easy it is to differentiate. Now, I'm not saying writing a million cards is easy, but that's not rocket science.
Kurt Dupuis:
Well, there's a difference between simple and easy.
Steve Seid:
That's right.
Kurt Dupuis:
That's the paradox I think we run into all the time, because nothing that we're talking about is extremely hard. It's thoughtful, but it's getting it down to the implementation level that the rubber meets the road and it becomes really difficult.
Steve Seid:
Some people are willing to sit there and sign those thank you cards and some people aren't, but I'll tell you what, they matter because every time I've gotten one they've mattered. So, that's enough on handwritten cards, but big thumbs up there. Completely agree with you on that. All right.
Kurt Dupuis:
Then you're up, since you've got one fewer now.
Steve Seid:
This one's going to be around client events. So, I've been to hundreds of client events. I'm sure you have too, Kurt. The social ones are fine. They're interesting. They're usually a good time. We check the box. The best client events that I've been to are ones where it's where you're accomplishing something or you're learning something or you're taking something away because...
Kurt Dupuis:
Steal something from me.
Steve Seid:
We've all gone to the nice dinner and the appetizers and the drinks and the cocktail party and the next morning you wake up and you're like, Oh God. Anyway, so it's like, what are you taking away? But if I went to an event where I actually accomplished something or learned something, that's something that's impactful. And let me give you an example. I have an FA who does workshops for clients' kids. Let me share a couple of workshops. One, they brought in a teacher that helps write college essays. So, think about, you know what time of year that kids are getting into this, right? You got 200 clients. You shoot an email out to your clients. You say, "Are any of your kids applying to college?" if you've got a big book, there's going to be someone. And then they did workshops about writing college essays. I also saw a workshop that's related to that around interviewing for their first job. Which by the way, doesn't have to be college kids. Everybody can be better at interviewing. Is there someone in your life that is interviewing for a job or whatever. I will tell you this, if you help someone in my life, my kid, my relative, my friend, that's major.
Kurt Dupuis:
You get tons of mileage out of that.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
I literally had written down learned something new.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
... as a client’s event type thing and I was thinking of harvesting the relationships you have. If someone owns a coffee shop, doing a little talk on coffee, what are the beans come from? What does the process look like? If someone that owns a brewery, same thing, right? Having that shared experience amongst your clients where they can learn something new and not just sit around and eat a steak dinner.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, and even if it's the cocktail thing, you could have people talk about the wine or the whiskey or the beer or whatever. And so, learn about beer making and things like that.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yes and yes.
Steve Seid:
You're like, I would like all three of those things.
Kurt Dupuis:
Those are all sounding good. Client event, practical and I just think sounds fun. Shred party.
Steve Seid:
Oh, I've heard of these.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. Have we talked about this? So, clients bring their shreddable documents, you cook a big pig, you have shredded pork.
Steve Seid:
So, for the vegan in me, I hate this idea, but continue.
Kurt Dupuis:
I'm in the South, people eat pulled pork. So, you've got pulled pork and shredding documents.
Steve Seid:
There you go.
Kurt Dupuis:
It's a twofer.
Steve Seid:
Again, you're accomplishing something. And especially in the area of people stealing identities and identity theft and all that. I think that's a great one. This is a fun one. Maybe it's not super unique, but I'm going to throw it out there anywhere is movie night where you rent out an entire movie theater. It's usually around Star Wars or some big movie like that.
Kurt Dupuis:
Or if you're like me, it's Frozen.
Steve Seid:
But you get to an important point. Again, are we just doing our finances or are we helping us with our kids? And with our... You know what I mean? It's like that type of stuff...
Kurt Dupuis:
And helping create experiences.
Steve Seid:
That's exactly right. Okay, so you want to do one more piece and then close up on this?
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, I've got a good one because it's something a friend did for me when we bought our first house. And so, last time we did this, we talked about milestone events in someone's life. Buying a house, obviously a big event. Either personalized stationary or some sort of stamp with your return address. Not only is that a pain to have to write your return address every time, the stamp can be pretty and a really thoughtful thing to do for people.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, that's a great one as well. Okay, and I will throw one more out there. So, there's two I'm thinking of, but what we'll stick with this one. A charity lineup. So, the idea is not to get a bunch of charities in the room and push your clients for donations. In fact, you almost want to say that donations aren't going to happen at this. It's like learning about the different charities, so you can bring your clients in because most really wealthy people have their charities, but they also... Where do you learn about new ones? Either get invited. So, lining up...
Kurt Dupuis:
The same thing myself, that's great.
Steve Seid:
We did an event where my wife volunteers for what's called the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County where they rehabilitate seals and sea lions. How cool was that to do a talk on that? And then, there's a million great charities. You got to figure it out and you don't want to put pressure on people to donate. It's almost like, take that off the table.
Kurt Dupuis:
It's just information.
Steve Seid:
This is an information session and a way to learn about some cool charities that are happening.
Kurt Dupuis:
I think that's great.
Steve Seid:
Yeah.
Kurt Dupuis:
I'm going to throw one more in there while we're at it, because I have a little bit of bias because my cousin does this for a living but in home cooking classes.
Steve Seid:
Oh, that's great.
Kurt Dupuis:
So, you could have three, four couples. Say it's one client and a spouse and they have to bring one or two other friends. It's great for getting referrals and great, whether it's their house, your house. Really good blurring the lines of personal and professional, but in a good way.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, that's fantastic. And one thing we didn't talk about with metrics in our service model before, but you made me think about it now, is referrals. So, looking at the number of referrals you're getting should increase if you're doing your client service model in an optimal way, and you should see that happening.
Kurt Dupuis:
Well, that's another episode. We'll do a whole talk on referrals.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, there's lots of discussion to be had here, but let me sum up the episode before we get to Costanza's Corner. One is, as we move down this path of designing your client service model that started with segmentation that moved into your service matrix, what we talked about in this episode is then mapping out your contacts over time in a way that is rational for your business. All right, you're doing it on a monthly basis. You'll pull out the times where you don't want to be doing contacts. And then, what you want to do is build the processes in your business to execute on that model. Setting expectations with clients, setting the appropriate way to execute on all these different contacts in a way that gets better each and every year. In a way that makes your clients feel like you're raising your level of service. And so, those are the takeaways from this episode. The other takeaway is we were throwing out these client ideas. Pick one, each episode, we'll throw out these...
Kurt Dupuis:
Book it.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, exactly. When we throw out all these ideas, just pick one that you might want to start to use in your in your practice that's going to raise your game. So, we're going to come back with as always our uplifting because Costanza's Corner. This is The Whole Truth. Stick with us.
Steve Seid:
And welcome back everybody. We're in our Costanza's Corner, our uplifting segment and Kurt, I've got a good one for you today.
Kurt Dupuis:
All right.
Steve Seid:
You're going to appreciate this. So, I think it's fair to say that just about everyone knows someone who has cancer or has dealt with that. It's so prevalent. Is that fair to say?
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. I love how we always start on the dark side.
Steve Seid:
We start pretty dark.
Kurt Dupuis:
And ramp up the sunshine at the end.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, but this is going to be some sunshine because I do think that we have a really good shot of cancer getting cured in our lifetime.
Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.
Steve Seid:
You talk to people and the rate of progress is now moving in a big way, and a lot of this is happening in the biotech...
Kurt Dupuis:
[inaudible 00:35:36] curve, right?
Steve Seid:
Yeah. So, I'm going to read two paragraphs of an article on a study that was just released. So, researchers have developed the first blood test that can accurately detect more than 50 types of cancer and identify in which tissue the cancer originated. Often before there are any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease. So, this is before you even have cancer, just identifying it before it happens. Think about that.
Kurt Dupuis:
Wild.
Steve Seid:
In a paper published today on March 31st in the leading counsel of annals of oncology, the researchers show that the test, which could eventually be used in national cancer screening programs, think about that, has a 0.7% false positive rate for cancer detection. Meaning, less than the 1% of people would be wrongly identified as having cancer. In other words, highly effective. So, think about what the future could look like. Before you even have it, you can do this screening and I'm going to guess if we know that it could come, we can take a lot of steps towards preventing it from even happening.
Kurt Dupuis:
It's really incredible.
Steve Seid:
All right. Thanks everyone. We appreciate you being with us. This is The Whole Truth. We'll see you next time.
