It went off perfectly! But, to Henske’s shocked amazement, the client didn’t get the message. In fact, he refused to listen. “No, I’m very happy with you guys, and I don’t want to go anywhere else,” Henske vividly remembered him saying.
When they found out, Henske’s team was more than disappointed. They were downright annoyed.
So, a year later, Henske tried again. This time, the client finally did agree to leave.
But that’s not the end of the story. “He continued to call me for another two years,” said Henske, “just to double-check the advice he was getting from his new advisor.”
With some clients, there is simply no way to win.
When It’s Better To Cut Your Losses
Another example of how it can be better to cut your losses comes from Harold Evensky of Evensky & Katz/Foldes in Miami and Lubbock, Texas.
“My most difficult client was a couple who came in not long after the tech crash,” he recounted. “They were retired and dressed like they had just come out of a GQ makeover.”
Their clothes were expensive—tailored suits that fit to a T, he said. The man was wearing an ascot. Yet they were “beside themselves and panicked about their financial situation,” Evensky said.
They and many of their country club friends had invested heavily in hot tech stocks, believing them to be the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” But when the tech bubble burst, the couple had lost more than half of their savings.
Their dismay was certainly understandable.