Let’s say you meet with any one of these clients in person once a year for one hour. When you include preparation and follow-up, you are looking at three hours minimum per meeting. That leaves you eight hours to manage the relationship for the remainder of the year.
So how can you create a highly satisfied client that wants to refer you to her friends, family members and colleagues when you have just eight hours to spend on that individual? Eight measly hours to develop, prepare and execute a knock-their-socks-off marketing plan to some of the pickiest people on the planet. Easy right?
We all know it’s not, but now at least you have a clear picture of the task before you, even if it’s through this very simplified example. The only answer is to get systematized in your relationship management—to provide high-touch service to 300 clients by running just three or fewer service models.
And the only way this can work is if you use high-net-worth psychology to identify one, two or three personalities among high-net-worth clients that you work best with, and then develop one relationship management plan for each of them, using it again and again on hundreds of affluent clients. Again, think of their goals, interests and personal affinity with you.
Working this way is easier, more efficient and more profitable, and it helps you create a business model that’s easier to sustain.
Working with clients like you feels less like work, and they, in turn, recognize your natural interest in them. And what you might not realize is this: You’re already unbelievably skilled at working with them. You already know how they want to be treated.
This approach also helps you with economies of scale—because you can create one service model and apply it to everybody (or big segments of your client base). You can streamline it, simplify it and get systematic. That allows you to focus your mental and physical energy on all of the other issues related to financial advisory management and business development.
Contrast this with creating a new service model for each new client, reinventing the wheel each time and using up significant energy doing it—energy that ripples through the rest of your staff as they handle each new wheel and its set of issues.
That’s why if you take on a client that doesn’t fit, there must be several million very good reasons justifying the incremental additions to the service workload.
We are not saying you shouldn’t take on an affluent client just because he or she is not like you. But you do better when you actively cultivate referrals from clients you relate to.