Starting Your Fee Based Financial Planning Practice From Scratch (Part 2) FEE008

Transcription

1 Starting Your Fee Based Financial Planning Practice From Scratch (Part 2) FEE008 Episode Transcript Host: Scott Plaskett, CFP Okay. So let s get onto the feature segment. And this is a continuation from the previous episode where we were talking about what I would do if I was starting from scratch. How would I, would I change things? How would I run my fee-based practice? What would I do in order to get things up and running as quickly as possible? What do I need to put in place? Well, in the last episode we covered various items. We basically covered Photo by: ffaalumni Licensed Under: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic the most important thing which was a fee-based financial planning mind set. And you re the expert. Act like one. We re professionals. Act like one. You know, fee-based financial planning really follows a process that you want to incorporate. And, again, we talked about this in the previous episode but you know you want to educate and discuss. Go through your initial meeting number one, initial meeting number two. Then, at that point, you get their commitment. Move on to the plan presentation part one, plan presentation part two and what goes into those meetings. And then move on to a six month or annual review program. So that we went into great detail and you can, encourage you if you didn t listen to it already, go back to the previous episode and check that out. And that would be episode seven. Yeah. So head back to episode seven you can check that out. Page 1 of 14

2 Now moving on, we said we were going to talk about scripting your prospecting process, establishing your fees and committing to presenting your fee to the next qualified prospect. So let s talk about this in order. So, number one. We re going to talk about the scripting of your prospecting process. Now, left to your own devices, you will never present the financial planning fee to clients. If you re not used to doing it you will find every reason in the book not to do it. So you need to set yourself up for success. If you script the meeting, you will stay on track and not allow yourself to not present the fee. Fees are for financial planning. Okay. Don t think that the fee have anything to do with investments. So while you re going through the process, you re speaking with a client and whatnot, you don t want to incorporate any discussion on product too early in the process. Product only comes once you ve analyzed things. And so people are paying you to analyze their financial affairs. So everything you re talking [unintelligible 10:40] relates to a fee, the fee you re charging is for the financial planning process. Okay. If you rebate those fees and I ve seen it too many times and it frustrates me to no end, somebody says, oh, we ll charge you a financial planning fee. But if you then buy the investments, we won t charge you that fee or we ll reduce it or some way. Well, all you ve done there, you ve simply discounted the value of your financial plan and you re wimping out. I mean, you re basically saying to them, you re saying to yourself, I don t value the financial plan enough to have it stand alone to be worth the fee that I m charging. And if that s the case, then you need to go back to your financial planning process and boost it up. Enhance it. Make it better. I was talking with a journalist the other day who s doing an article on this topic and we were talking about this and I said, you know, the great thing about fee-based financial planning, if people can incorporate charging a fee for the financial planning into their practice, it s going to elevate the industry. It s going to elevate the quality of the planning that we as financial planners are doing. And that s important. That s, you know, if we can all do this, it s going to make the industry a better place. And as I said before in previous episodes, the industry has been tarnished. The industry is under some challenging times right now. People don t, aren t seeing the financial industry as a great industry right now. They can t, they see it with jaded eyes. And so anything we can do in order to help enhance and elevate the quality and value that people are receiving from financial planning, then that s going to be a good thing. So don t, don t, don t rebate your fees because it just simply discounts the value of your financial plan. So scripting the meeting is important. So you, you literally want to do is write out as if you were writing lyrics to a song, write out exactly what you would say and when. So how would you start the meeting? What would you say at the opening? Page 2 of 14

3 I think I went through a scenario or some scripting in the previous episode about what I say at initial meeting one and how I go through that process and how I start off by saying I appreciate you getting together with me and naturally we re going to go through a lot of information today. And I m going to be asking lots of questions. And obviously you re going to have some questions for me. But typically at the end of the meeting, we re going to come up with a decision. We re going to have to make a decision and the decision s going to be whether or not we feel it s appropriate to move forward. So typically, I m going to take a look at things and if I feel that it s appropriate to move forward, I ll tell you that. But if I feel that it s really not appropriate because of the services that we offer really aren t what our, properly aligned for what you re looking for, then I m going to tell you that as well. And I would hope that, you know, if you don t feel that the services that we provide are what you re looking for that you would tell me that it didn t make sense. And so let s agree now that we re going to come to a conclusion and we ll sort of make a contract so that by the end of this meeting, we ll know exactly whether or not it makes sense to move forward. Well, that scripting, I mean, that, I can go through that over and over again. And literally it s because I ve scripted it out. I know exactly what I m going to say and when. I know when I m going to present things. And so by following a scripted process, you now have a road or a track to run on. But when you have that track to run on, what that means is you re not going to miss the fee presentation process. You re not going to miss presenting the fee properly. So you re actually not going to and you won t present it too soon or too late. Because there s a certain sweet spot where people are kind of expecting it and if you don t give it to them when they expect it, then they re going to be wondering, well, what s he doing? Is he beating around the bush? What s his problem? So you do want to make sure that it s scripted properly. And really in my mind, initial meeting is all about just determining whether or not it makes sense to have a second meeting to look at the details. If anybody asks at that meeting, at the first meeting, well, what do you charge or anything like that, what I do is I come back and say, you know what, it s too soon for me to answer that question. We do charge fees and they generally range in from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars but at this point, I just don t know because I haven t seen the details. I ve only seen some high level information. If we determine that it makes sense to look at those details, then by the end of that second meeting you ll know exactly what it means to move forward with our services. You ll know exactly what fees, what time commitment, everything. So let s carry that conversation over to our next meeting. And it basically just says, look, I can t answer that right now because I don t have enough information which means they tend to appreciate that. Not, you know, they, you d think at first that they would be thinking, well, what is he, trying to avoid the topic. But you re not avoiding it. You re basically coming head on and saying I don t know right now because it s all based on Page 3 of 14

4 what work is involved. And so we want to make sure that we present that fee at the right time. And that fee presentation then takes place at the second meeting. So when you can script out your process and you know exactly what to say and when, you re going to follow it to the letter. And so it does take a little bit of work at first. You want to script it out and then you got to test it. You ve got to actually sit down and start doing it. What I would do sometimes is go through a mock scenario when actually I ve got some recording equipment that I do from the podcast, you could go through and you could actually record yourself doing it. And I would highly recommend doing that. Do things in this case. You re going to feel a little uncomfortable, actually. You re going to feel a lot uncomfortable the first time you sit down to present that fee. But if you ve got that track to run on, you re going to say, okay, this is my process, this is what I m going to follow and you re going to do it. And you re just going to say, come hell or high water, by the end of this meeting I m going to do it right. Well, you will find by doing that I know, I mean, I ve had situations where people have said, no, they don t want to pay the fee. But that s a good thing because that indicates that they re not in the right mind set or they re not really taking it seriously enough. And so I don t want to work with them if they don t want the fee. The fee, again, oftentimes is a bit of a filtering process. So definitely use the fee to your advantage and use it and script it. And script it exactly how you want to say it. Just replay this episode many times if you want and take the modeling of the scripting that I just went through earlier in this episode and in the previous episode and model your own from that. So see what you can do with that. Now, so the scripting of your prospecting process, vitally important because it makes sure you do charge the fee or go through the fee discussion at the right time. Now, let s talk about establishing your fees. So here s what s worked for me. Now, the first thing is, I go through this and I have it available. I ll just go through it then I ll discuss what sort of evolution has come from it. Number one, I map out what I call the a la cart plan component. So each part of the comprehensive financial plan is priced separately. So what I ll do is I ll put a fee schedule together and I ll say, okay, here are all the different components that are involved in a comprehensive financial plan. Then I map them out and I say, now, for this component, this is what the price is. And I just list them all. Page 4 of 14

5 Then the comprehensive financial planning programs are shown. So each comprehensive program includes an all you can eat approach to financial planning. So while I go through the initial meeting, I make a note of each plan component that they need to address. So go back to the initial meeting where we re having the discussion about all the different areas of financial planning. Well, when I identify an area on my initial sort of my initial data gathering sheet, when I identify an area that is important and it deals with a certain area of financial planning, I m going to put a little note beside that so I know, yes, that s an area that s important. Some people don t care about business planning because they re not business owners. They don t have any plan on chart, of starting a business. So I don t even bother with that. So the business planning component s not important. I skip over that. Other people don t have children so education planning may not be an important issue. But identify the areas that are important so you can use them after the fact when you come back to the fee presentation process. You can then, you have a natural way of progressing through that. So I identify all the different components that they would need to address. Okay. So, for example, we go through, I guess, all the different areas. Retirement plan and investment plan, education plan, life insurance analysis, disability insurance analysis, long term care insurance analysis, critical illness insurance analysis, estate planning analysis, mortgage planning analysis, tax planning analysis, corporate planning analysis, retirement income planning analysis. These are all of the areas that we identify and we touch on through the initial meeting. Now, I ll put a little note beside each one of those. So if I identify, okay, that six or seven of those are important, then I ll make sure I have a note beside that. Then when I m presenting the fee, I ll tell them what, that they have two options. Option one is simply let s look at each component individually and do them one or two at a time. So we go through and say, okay, if you want to take a look at a retirement plan, an investment plan and an education plan, and we add all those up and say, okay, the fee for those three is going to be X, Y or Z. Okay. And we just add it all up. Then we go and say but option two is, we can look at it from a comprehensive standpoint. So a comprehensive financial planning program looks at every aspect of their financial plan so that nothing is ever missed. Whatever is necessary to look at now will be looked at when it s important to look at it. So what I mean by that is, we say, look, it s all you can eat plan. We re going to look at everything. Now, some of these things may not be important to you. May not be an issue for you right now. But they will be in the future. For example, maybe you have no need to really worry about a Page 5 of 14

6 retirement income plan analysis because you haven t retired yet. Well, that s fine but guess what? That day will eventually come. And when it does come, it s already included in your plan. So we go through that and we take a look at what, and we compare them together. Now why do I do this? Well, I price option one so that once they choose three or more components, their fee is now higher by doing the à la carte approach as opposed to getting the all you can eat plan. So it s important you do this and I did this because the reality is, it s not a gimmick or anything like that. The reality is if I m going to sit down and somebody s going to say to me I want to work on my retirement plan and my investment plan and my education plan. Fine. We do those three. And then they come back six months later and say, I now want to look at some life insurance analysis and that sort of thing. Well, guess what, if they want to look at their tax or anything like that, guess what, what ends up happening is I ve got to go and revisit everything over again. So it actually takes more of my time to do it piecemeal than it does if I do it all together. So, I basically price that in. I say, well, it s going to be more expensive if you do them individually. However, if you ve just got one item you want to do, fine, we ll deal with that. But if you want to do more than one or more than two or even more than three, then I m going to price it in such a way that I will actually get, you ll get more value from doing them collectively together through a comprehensive plan than you will if you do them piecemeal because people think, well, I ll try a little bit here, a little bit there. Well, we want to price that out so that we can encourage people if they do have an interest in doing it all, let s do it all together. So, that s why I do it. Not because it s a great gimmick that can get them into the comprehensive plan. But because the reality is, it s going to take more time. So I need to be compensated for my time if I m going to be doing à la carte approach. I ll tell you nine times out of ten, even nine point nine times out of ten, they will end up choosing the comprehensive plan because that s what they want in any event. What they re getting right now is probably a piecemeal approach. And they know that. They feel that. Especially after having gone through that, the initial process with you. They begin to appreciate the fact that you re looking at everything from a comprehensive standpoint whereas maybe their previous advisor is only looking at their investments and their insurance and that s all they care about because they re not charging a fee to look at their financial planning. Well, the reality is, people want financial planning. They don t want products. They know products are important in order to implement the plan and to make the plan a reality. But they just want the right products. They don t care which products they get. So talking about the features and benefits of the products, really, it s a secondary issue. They want to make sure that Page 6 of 14

7 the analysis is done up front that tells them they even need the product to begin with. Let s see, let s identify what s important to look at and let s look at things from a comprehensive standpoint. So that s why the pricing model that I use is set up that way. Because I just realize that if I do it piecemeal, it s going to take me more time because every time I come back to that piece, I m going to have to look at everything again anyway. So it s just going to end up costing people more. So now we ve gone through the establishing of fees and as far as pricing, you know, how much do you charge, that for me has been an interesting experience. Because when I first started out, I needed to make sure that I was higher than what most people would do. And a reason why is because you need to identify yourself as a professional. You need to identify yourself as different. So, if I price myself like everybody else which was either for free or very, very low, then people kind of caught onto, well, it s not really serious. All of a sudden when I increased my fees and I priced it pretty high and I m talking like maybe $1,000 when I first started, I can t remember back that farm but let s say it was around $1,000 for comprehensive plan, well that was a big number back then. Now my average fee for a plan is probably in around $2,500 to $3,500 and I ve had them go as high as $10,000. But that s just because of the level of work that I m doing. I mean, so I get a chance to take a look at everything in advance through this process so I can assess what the proper appropriate fee is going to be. So, pricing your fee is interesting. So the one thing that I ve done as well and this is just, I ll just share this with you, is that I ve never increased my annual renewal fees for a client. So if they started with me ten years ago and whatever fee they were on back then, that fee is what they re paying today. I haven t increased it on them. And that s kind of my way of saying I m going to, I value the fact that you ve been a client for so long and I m not necessarily going to increase it because people have asked me, well, what about the annual fees. I know the initial fee, it s kind of set. Well, I say them, look, whatever fee you start at is the fee you are going to remain at. And the only way that that fee is ever going to increase is if I increase that fee for everybody across the board who s at that point. So, in my experience, I ve, so far I ve never increased a fee for anybody. Now, that doesn t mean my fees haven t increased because as new clients come on, I will be increasing fees and I tend to go every year I increase my fees a little bit. Now, I m doing that for Page 7 of 14

8 two reasons. One, because the value of what we provide is constantly increasing and I m constantly adding new technologies and new processes and new things into my financial planning programs. So it justifies the higher fee. And number two, I m trying to find that point at which I get resistance. And I ll be honest, every year, I increase the fees and I don t get any resistance. And so I keep on saying to myself, geez, I m not increasing them enough. I m not increasing them enough because ultimately I think you want to get to a point where your fees are high enough where people really have to think about it but not too high where they say no. I haven t got to that point yet and I don t know why that is but I don t really have a lot of resistance or any resistance once I go through this process to the fees that I m charging. So, again, I encourage you to really take to heart what we ve just talked about so that you can start incorporating those fees into your practice. Now, commit to presenting your fee to the next qualified prospect you meet with. So, once you ve gone through this whole process, you now pretty much have a framework for what you need to do in order to properly present the fee. You know that you can do the work. You know the planning process is good. You know you re a good financial planner. The difficulty is getting that information across to a client so that they re saying yes to a fee that you charge them. So, bottom line is, if you don t charge a fee to the next prospect you work with, you never will know. So I get it s a terrifying process. When I had to present my first fee, I think I talked about it in a previous episode. My first fee was actually when I incorporated it I decided to go to fees. We went to our existing clients. And not only was it not a new person, it was an existing client that s been working with me up to that point for free. So I went to them and I presented my fee and I said, look, we now need to start charging a fee for the financial planning work that we do because we re just not getting compensated for that and we need to do that. And I got a lot of resistance and I tell you my first two meetings were horrible because they actually, I lost them as clients. I mean, and I thought, oh, Jesus, I am definitely on the wrong path here. Then my third client, that s when they came in and they actually said thank you. And I said no, no, no, no, I don t think you understand. I m now going to be charging you for what you weren t paying, you weren t being charged for before. I m now going to be charging your credit card. And they said, oh, yeah, I know, I get that. And I m saying thank you because now I know you re not going to go out of business. Now I know that you re going to be around for the long run because I can t afford to not have you as my financial planner. That blew me away. That s the experience you re going to start to have. People are going to start to appreciate and respect what it is that you re doing for them. And the relationship is going to get stronger and stronger. But I get the first one is a terrifying experience. You re sitting there. You know it s coming. The client has no idea because they re coming in for either a Page 8 of 14

9 regular review meeting if you re going to be going back to your existing clients. And we can talk about that at a later show where how do you present to your existing clients versus new clients because new clients, well, they don t know any different. So to them, it s all good. But your existing clients, well, they haven t been paying a fee up to that point. Now you re going to be asking them to pay a fee. So that can be a challenging time. But especially if you come from a commission based model, if you re coming from that point you ve never had to disclose fees before. You ve never had to talk about it before. If you did, there was always these easy ways around it where it just it kind of got hidden in everything. And that s the problem with embedded fees is they do get hidden. And so people think they re actually getting a lot of stuff for free when in actual fact they re not. Well, long story short, we kind of get that. You re listening to this podcast because you get this as well. The long story short is that, after a while when you want to start to do things and people get resistance from not being able to do it because there s going to be deferred sales charges or there s going to be charge backs or something like that, suddenly they start questioning things and they don t trust you as much and then that really is a negative spiral that happens with that. So what you want to do as I said before, script out your process and follow the script. This ensures you get the fee presentation process. You get to that point where you re actually presenting the fee. And you re going to be amazed at the result. Once you get your first fee under your belt, you will be excited to write that financial plan. You will put your heart and soul into that plan to ensure it s worth the price that the client paid for it. Remember though, they re not paying for the plan. They re paying for the financial planning process. Or to put it another way, the planning experience. So this is important that you understand that. It s the process they re paying for. They want somebody to walk them, hand hold them and walk them through the whole process and to analyze everything to make sure that they are on track. And they re willing to pay for that. Ultimately they don t care about their investments, which investments you choose. They just want good investments. They don t care which insurance company you choose. They just want a good quality product. They recognize that when you re working for them and they re paying you, you re going to looking for the best products. You re going to be looking for the best implementation tools. So script it out. Get that first fee under your belt. You ve got to commit to that. So if you know you have over the next few weeks, if you can spend some time on going through and mapping out what s the process that you go through, what s going to happen my first meeting, put agendas together, what s going to happen at the second meeting and then get to the point. You just have to present the fee. Because you know, once you ve got the plan to write you re going to write it very well. And how you present the plan, again, I recommend that there s, you do it in two Page 9 of 14

10 stages but how you do that is up to you. But the hard part is meeting number two where you ve actually got to present the fee and the second hard part is meeting number one where you have to talk about a lot of things but not give them the fee because you don t want them at that point. It s just too soon to know for certain. You want to take a look at the details. And I encourage you to tell them at their first meeting, don t bring your detailed statements with you. I don t want the details. It s going to be a high level conversation. Again, doing that, makes you just different in the marketplace because right now I guarantee, 99% of the advisors out there, when they are meeting with a person they re going to say, okay, bring your statements; bring your insurance policies so we can take a look at them. Well, you want to differentiate yourself and make yourself look different. So what do you do? You say, look, don t bring those. I m not concerned about the details right now. Have an idea of what it is that you have, but I don t want to look at the details because we re not going to be talking about product at this point. We re going to be talking about you and talking about you is what s important. I want to get to know what you want before we take a look at what you ve got. I can analyze that after the fact but I need to find out more about you. I tell you, it s a breath of fresh air. And prospects perspective clients will really, really embrace that. Then map out what it is you re going to say. Script it out so you know exactly what it is. Practice it. Go through it over and over and over and over. Even if you have to, put together a bit of a, call it an advisor script that you have in front of you. Now, not the wording and all that sort of stuff but sort of bullet points or check points that are going to remind you to go through things in a certain order. Map that out so you know, okay, this is what it s going to be and then it just goes very simply and I ll go through that final process, the process one more time. So they come in. The purpose for the first meeting is to really kind of educate and discuss, okay. So that s really what you want to be doing is just educating yourself and discussing their situation. Then they come in, so they come in. They go through, you talk about their issues. You talk about their concerns. You map out everything but you talk about them in different categories. So the different categories are all the different, the planning components that we talked about, the retirement plan, the education plan, investment. And you ask them how they feel about that, each component of their overall affairs. So I ve actually put together sort of a whole process that I go through and a questionnaire and all that sort of stuff. And I encourage you to do the same thing where you map out, this what you talk about. Ask them in the questionnaire, what do you know about, how you feel about your tax situation? Or explain to me about your tax situation and do you know anything about it? Are you using all the legal tax loopholes? Are you using, what are you using? Ask them these questions and give them a way of answering where they either circle yes, no or don t know. And Page 10 of 14

11 oftentimes you re going to see people are going to be circling the don t know quite a bit. Because they don t know. They don t know how their portfolio is allocated. They don t know when they want to retire, what they can retire on, if they re going to, you know, they just don t know these questions. Well, again, that s what the planning process is. So that s what you re going to be doing in the initial meeting one is overview high level 30,000 foot. Establishing, starting at the beginning, I appreciate you coming in today. Naturally we re going to, I m going to ask you a lot of questions on certain financial planning topics. Obviously you re going to be having questions for me and questions are going to come up along the way and I encourage you to have that communication back and forth with me. And then typically by the end of the meeting, we re each going to establish whether or not we re going decide to move forward together to the next meeting. So typically at the end of the meeting, I ll know whether or not it makes sense to have a second meeting to look at the details. I ll tell you if I do feel that it is worthwhile and if I don t think it s worthwhile I ll tell you that as well. And number two, you can have a chance at the end of the meeting to say to me, you know what, I either really love what you have to say and I want to make, move forward and take a look at the second meeting. There s no obligation for the second meeting and I get that. But now I want to make sure that you have a look at the details or they re going to say, well, you know what, I don t think it s appropriate, I don t think it s what I m looking for and that s fine. You can part company. But air that out, get that out on the open up front because that s going to give them some comfort in knowing that they have a way of saying no and it s not going to be threatening because you re going to be looking for that answer. Then you get to the second meeting. Now, in between the first and second meeting I would recommend that you do send out some sort of a communication that just basically says, you know what? Here s maybe a summary of what we talked about at our meeting. Because that gives them an understanding that, you know what, you were listening. And if your summary has come key points that they were really their hot buttons, really the things that were important to them, then, again, that s just going to tell them that you are listening to what they have to say. So when the come back in, in the second meeting with a listing of different briefcases and file folders of all the information you ve asked them to bring in and at the end of the first meeting I encourage you to give them a checklist and say look, go through this checklist. Bring all this information in. They re going to come in with a pretty thick stack. And so they come in and the agenda for the second meeting is just going through the details. Take a look at every single document that they bring in. Tax returns, investment statements, retirement plans, company benefits, group benefits, all this sort of stuff, you want to look at it all. Page 11 of 14

12 Just touch it all, make sure you ve got it. If there s anything missing on the checklist you know, their wills or taxes or anything like that, then just make a note of that so that so they can always follow up if it makes sense to move forward. But then at the second meeting you re really going to go through and say, okay, now I ve got all this information. I ve seen what you have. I have a better understanding is, about what it is you want to accomplish. At that point you say to them, look, I either feel that we can help you or I really don t think we re the firm for you. If you say I don t really feel we re the firm for you because it s not really our sweet spot where we re...then you want to make sure that you have somebody you can refer them to or at least a place that you can refer them to. But if you do say, you know what, I think we re, everything that we offer is ideally suited for what you re looking for and I know we can do a great job and you re going to find a lot of value in that, then that s, just kind of encourages. Okay. What the next step is with the fee and then you can say, okay. For the fee we ve got two different ways. We can go an à la carte route. We can go the comprehensive route. Go through the charges if you did it à la carte, add them all up. And what I do is I just simply say these are all the areas that we identified were a concern of yours. I add up the fee for all those areas. It generally comes out to be three or four time what a comprehensive fee is. Then I come back and say now you can do those individually. And this is what the overall if you did everything over the course of the next few years, this is what your overall fee would be. Or we can do everything at once and never have to worry about missing anything as it comes up. And this is what my fee is going to be. And have it priced accordingly. And then they re at that point going to say yes or no. Put your letter of engagement together and when they do say yes, have them sign it. You sign it. You write in what he fees are. Everything s laid out in black and white. They ve never had that before. Nobody s ever laid out everything they said in black and white so that they ve got a document that they can take with them. It s absurd to me that people wouldn t do that. It s amazing how, as soon as we brought in a letter of engagement, that letter of engagement actually became a marketing tool for us. Because one of the questions we can ask in advance was, well, when you signed your letter of engagement with your previous advisor, did it lay out what their fee schedule was? Well, then they look at you funny. Like what do you mean letter of engagement? There was never a letter of engagement. Well, a letter of engagement is a powerful tool. So make sure you have that letter of engagement because it will set you apart. So then they signed the letter of engagement. Now you re off and running. Now you re basically all set to go through. Write the financial plan. Have them come in for the first draft. Have them come in for the second plan presentation meeting where you re going to be going Page 12 of 14

13 through all the other areas of the financial plan and I think we talked about that at the previous episode. So if you didn t, haven t listened to that yet, go back to that episode because it goes through in great detail what we look at at each plan presentation meeting. And then once you ve got everything done, now you ve got a complete financial plan for the client. And they re ecstatic. They re happy with everything they ve got. They ve had a great experience along the way and they know everything s taken care of. When you make the recommendations that they implement certain things. You know 99% of the time they re going to say, okay, let s do it because they paid for that advice and all of a sudden everything just starts to work. So from a business planning standpoint, your revenue per client is going to go way up because people are going to simply start implementing more because the planning process is going to make them realize that it does make sense. So that really covers it right now. So from, starting from scratch, if I were starting from scratch, this is the initial process that I would go through. I would gather all these together. I would script out my process and I would put it all together so that you can, you have a track to run on. And then that is going to allow you to make sure that you re presenting the fee properly. You know what, you may stumble a couple of times. I would recommend that you just take the next prospect that comes your way, go through that process with them. If they, you know, I ll just, a comment that or a thought that just came to my mind. I do remember that when I first started doing, this I, you know, you are spreading things out a little bit more. And people, sometimes they want, they figure because they re kind of conditioned to it, they figure that, they re going to know whether or not they re going to move forward with you after the first meeting. But when you say to them, okay, we re going to take this, take this slowly. Good things take time. It s going to take a couple meetings for us to get to know whether or not, you know, you will sense that you re actually pushing them back a little bit because they are, when they come in for the first meeting, it s kind of like they want answers right then and there. And here you are pushing them away. Well, I found that by pushing them away a little bit, they come back even stronger and when it s appropriate, when they recognize, wow, I really want this, that sense of scarcity that, wow, I really want it now. And I want it to get going quickly and you re pushing them back. Then when they finally come back it s like, okay, can we get this started, can we get this started? And then all of a sudden it s going to go very well and so the motivation level is going to be extremely high. Page 13 of 14

14 So take advantage of that and hopefully that s given you some, a framework that you can use to develop your own process and develop your scripting. Get out there. Start testing. I d love to hear how it goes. I mean, I d love to hear about when you do your first presentation, go to the comment section of the website and say, hey, did my first one. Here was what my fee was. Client said yes or whatever or did my first one and it completely flopped. And this is what the story was. You know, I want to know both sides because I ve been there. I ve experienced it all. If you want, me directly if you don t want to have it on the website. You know what? Let s just get this going because people need to understand that others are going through this as well. And we can all go through this together. And I ve been through it before. I know it works. I know it s a fantastic model to use. The quality of your clientele is elevated tremendously. Share your experiences because other people will probably have questions along the way. And if they start seeing that there s other people doing it, that will maybe encourage them to do it. And we can all really build and elevate this industry to become a better place. So go to feebasefinancialplanningmastery.com now and click on this episode. There you can post any questions that you want me to answer. If there s any topics for upcoming episodes or if you want, just me directly. But let s communicate. Let s talk back and forth. If you get a chance, I d love it if you could go over to itunes and just put a rating there for that. I know we ve had a couple five star ratings come on so far and I m really happy about that. That was completely unexpected. So love it if you can go can go and rate the podcast because I m having fun doing this. I m sensing that there s a lot of people. We re getting a lot of traction. We re getting some exposure all over the world. I know we ve got people listening in the UK, in New Zealand, in India, in the United States, in Canada, across Canada. So it s just a wonderful experience for me. I m building some great relationships with some great planners out there and I really think it s turning into something great. So as I say, this I really just a, has been a hobby for me that I started that has sort of taken off. I m really happy about that and if there s anything I can do to help make your practice a better practice, just let me know. Ask any questions and I m more than happy to help. So check out the fee-based financial planning mastery. Check out the resources, recommended resources that are there. The tool box. Because I ve put everything that I m using is there. Click on those links and start building yourself a better practice. Copyright Disclaimer Copyright Scott E. Plaskett 2012 All Rights Reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced without Scott E. Plaskett's written permission. Page 14 of 14