As time goes on during that first year, use every opportunity to insert yourself in the process. When you, the clients and your seller join together in meetings, you and the seller should be sharing the meeting-that is, leading the discussion and answering questions. Later in the first year, you should be playing an even more prominent role, with the seller sitting by quietly and speaking up merely to clarify points or assist occasionally with an answer that you may be struggling with. You are a team. The clients see you as such, and are developing ever-greater confidence in you. And they like you personally, too, because after several meetings they've learned things about your family, your hobbies-things not directly related to your competency as an advisor.
The counterpart to frequent meetings during the relationship-building phase of the transition is a rapid response system. If you don't already have such a system, you should implement one that allows all of your clients to find you easily. Nothing builds relationships faster than frequent contact, and ease of access is a prerequisite. Therefore, you should consider having a toll-free phone number, an easy-to-remember e-mail address and a "find me" phone service. The latter is a service, such as Freedom Voice Systems (www.freedomvoice.com) or EasyTel (www.easytel.net), that essentially follows you wherever you go, trying your office phone, cell phone and home phone sequentially. You have total flexibility as to how you program the system, and you also can preview callers to determine whether calls are clients or solicitors.
Other kinds of "virtual" systems can improve your accessibility and response time, as well, which becomes particularly important if the client base you are buying is geographically widespread. In the case of my own sale, my clients were located in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and in New Mexico, and a handful had scattered themselves about the country as long-term clients often do, moving to the sites of new jobs or to retirement communities. It's necessary to meet and stay in touch with these clients as well, even though a lack of geographic concentration makes it more difficult.
Although it's advisable to make the investment in traveling to meet these clients in person once or twice early on in the transition, as Behn and I did, staying in touch thereafter will depend more upon e-mail and phone contact than it will with other clients. If these widespread clients, and other new clients as well, are computer literate, you can increase their feeling of connectedness by setting up a client-access Web site in which clients can find continuously changing communications from the buyer-seller team, communications that-like in-person meetings-eventually shift to being signed by you alone.
In my own transition I remain listed on Behn's site as an officer of the company, but ex-clients now understand I'm doing behind-the-scenes marketing for the firm via my writing. They've all formed close relationships, first with Behn and later with the employees he retained from his second advisory firm purchase in 2002, so that my old clients seldom ask for me anymore. If they do, I will occasionally call one to say hello. Does the seller really want to be involved, even peripherally, three years after the sale? If he has financial incentives he does, but that's a whole 'nother article.
The last piece of the relationship-building puzzle to consider, if you have far-flung clients as Behn did, is to set up a local presence, or office, where those clients are concentrated. Behn maintained a Washington, D.C., office in an executive office suite center for one to two years following our transaction. Clients could take comfort from the commitment made to an office right in their midst, in spite of his company being headquartered in another state.
Remember, close personal contact as much as competent advice is what binds all clients to us, so you can't go wrong in following this same formula for newly acquired clients. The only difference is that you're trying to accelerate the bonding process to coincide with the date that the seller is contractually allowed to disassociate from the buyer's firm completely. All of the above strategies will help you accomplish that.
David J. Drucker, M.B.A., CFP ([email protected]) and a fee-only financial advisor since 1981, is a principal in Practice Merger Consultants Ltd. (www.practicemergers.com), and editor of the Virtual Office News monthly newsletter (www.virtualofficenews.com).