Another great benefit to this “labor-intensive effort”, as you say, is that our internal book club is really fun as you get to know your other team members and what interests them. It’s always interesting to see the books team members bring to the table. This is a great way to learn about each other, what strengths each team member has, and how to apply those strengths into actualizing the Four Capitals. It’s well worth the time. It ties back to our team culture, a key component in living the Four Capitals.
Hortz: Can you give us some specific examples of books you chose to share with your clients and what they represent for your clients’ Four Capitals journey?
Yocom: There’s one book that covers all four capitals that I think speaks clearly to clients: Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. This short book is about the people of Okinawa and the lifestyle that affords them to have great longevity. Takeaways include eating healthy (fish/plant based), exercising, staying intellectually engaged and stimulated, and developing psychological space through the Okinawan village community that does things together on a regular basis. And oddly enough, it also touches on financial matters as well since everyone in the village chips in money into a community fund so that the community can help anyone in a dire financial situation. The book also encourages everyone to find their Why? - why they get up every morning.
The book could be so wonderful for connecting with our clients because it acknowledges how there are all these important areas in our lives that need to be attended to, but also that they shift over time. It does a great job of explaining how intellectual engagement can be satisfied by your job and career early on; but when you retire, it can be a challenge to engage that piece of your brain, your life, and remain active and fulfilled. We try to bring those concepts to our clients as they go through these life transitions. Life is always shifting.
Another book we’ve chosen to share with clients is Atomic Habits by James Clear, which distills how to achieve goals by breaking them down to small attainable habits. We took the concept of the book and created a series of blog articles on how to apply the strategies within Atomic Habits to actually achieve sustainable goals in each of their Four Capitals.
Hortz: What other ways do you work with your clients to support their Four Capitals?
Yocom: One way we seek to tie the other three capitals into Financial Matters is by understanding a client’s charitable goals. One example that comes to mind is where we learned about a family whose family member had cancer and was treated for a long time at a regional hospital. The family wanted to give the hospital a meaningful thank you, so they added a charitable gift to the hospital to their estate plan. For this family, the gift isn’t just an estate planning tool, rather it achieves a meaningful psychological goal of theirs to give back. We pair that psychological goal to give back with our wealth management clients to think through how do we gift charitably in a way that makes the most sense for this client?
We also consider the ramifications of this testamentary gift to the entire family. For example, we could flip estate plans on their head by mixing inter-vivos and testamentary gifts from various sources and, as a result, the client’s family could pay fewer total taxes so more wealth would stay within the family. The same charitable goal would also be achieved. As advisors, we’re compelled to dig into the why behind all of the things our clients tell us. It’s about the meaning and reasoning behind it and tying the Four Capitals all together to maximize solutions and benefits for the client.
As another example, we hosted a cyber defense webinar for clients which addresses Financial Matters, Intellectual Engagement, and Psychological Space. Our guest speaker was a cyber security expert who was an FBI Special Agent for over 20 years. We paid the speaker fee and offered the complimentary webinar to our clients and their family and friends as well as our business associates.
Hortz: Any other thoughts you can share on the importance of financial services professionals developing more engaging ways to work with their clients? What did you learn from how you engage with your clients?
Yocom: We would not be in this business if we did not want to help people. I believe finding creative and unique means of connecting with clients to help them leads to a more fulfilling practice.
What we learned as advisors is that it is critical to just slow down and really spend time thinking through a client’s situation. By applying our full intellectual engagement and time to the task at hand, we hope to uncover important things that will deepen the relationship and become part of this client’s life and legacy.
I feel sometimes that the typical “client engagement” - come to our suite at a baseball stadium, tickets to a basketball game, invite to golf tournament, etc. - all are part of some client engagement strategy, but I don’t know how sincere it is. Is this just another opportunity to try to build a book of business versus investing time and money in providing resources that demonstrate I am genuinely interested in you as a person and working in your best interest?
If your goal as an advisor is to grow your business as rapidly as possible and place all clients in model solutions, quite frankly, I think at some point in the future you are going to be outpaced by a robo-advisor anyway, so just let the robot do it. But if you are in this for the relationship and doing what’s best in the individual’s interest and providing custom solutions beyond what a computer algorithm can do, we believe it's critical to slow down, dig deep, and spend a lot of time getting to know a client before coming up with some model solution. It’s not one size fits all for any of this.
The old industry standard way of looking at Know Your Customer (KYC) has to be substantially upgraded. What we do to deepen our knowledge and relationship with our clients goes to show the kind of overhaul that the traditional KYC thinking needs to go to. You need to be a coach, a consultant, an advocate, a teacher, a friend.
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