3 Lessons We’ve Learned From the Corona Virus

Happy Wednesday everybody. If you are like us here at Thrivos Consulting, then you have been quarantined to your office or home office, and since all of our in-person meetings and workshops have been canceled, the only way we can educate and entertain advisers is through our videos and our zooms. So we’re going to have a little fun today on the whiteboard. I want to talk about the three lessons we’ve learned from the Corona Virus the past two weeks.

Lesson number one. Advisors aren’t having conversations with their clients. I’ve talked to a lot of advisors in the last two weeks, especially the last week around the types of conversations they’re having. What questions are you asking clients to gauge their emotional state? Have you pinpointed the clients who are pessimists versus the clients who are optimists and tailor your messaging to each of them? And most advisors have said to me, we’re not really having conversations with clients.

Clients aren’t calling us. They get it. We’ve trained them to understand that when you play the long game, this is what happens. My message to advisors is that clients who are not calling you proactively fit into one of two camps. Either, yes, they are the clients who have been trained properly around planning, they get it. They’re not going to call you because they understand that the market will recover eventually and their longterm goals are still there and they’re on track to hit them. But most clients, the average American affluent family, the average investor who isn’t adept to understanding difficult financial concepts fit into the second camp. They are not calling you because they are busy talking to their neighbors, Googling online, watching YouTube videos, talking to their coworkers, talking to their neighbor who’s an advisor who’s been dying to get them as a client and now they found the opportunity because the client is speaking to them and not their real advisor, you. Those are the clients we have to worry about.

My message and lesson number one call your clients. Here’s the point. Your value proposition as an advisor is that you are an expert and thought leader and advocate as it relates to anything wealth management and finance and economy and personal finances related. Here is your one opportunity this year, your first opportunity to prove your value proposition. If clients aren’t calling you because they get it and you’ve trained them well then great you did your job, but that doesn’t mean you stop doing your job. So that’s lesson number one.

Lesson number two and yes, I’m writing backwards. Working from home works. It’s a message I’ve been telling advisors and firms for years. Wow. Surprise, surprise. If team members understand the objectives of the business, understand what they have to achieve in this limited amount of time that they’re going to be out of the office and then we allow them to go work on their own and achieve it. Guess what? They get it done. Remember Parkinson’s law, it’s a concept I talk about a lot on these videos. Work expands to fill the amount of time we have to complete it. So if we have nine to five in a corporate firm that we go to every day, then all of our work and tasks and action items are going to take us that nine to five to complete or sometimes nine to five and then the next day nine to five and then the next day nine to five. If somebody is working from home and they know that they have to go pick their kid up at three o’clock guess what? They’re going to get what they have to get done. And if they don’t, they’re going to come back and finish it. And so I want advisors to think about the lessons they’ve learned during this time or that they will learn because this is going to go on for a little bit more.

The lessons they learn about productivity and efficiency during this time with most people working from home and having to be tech-enabled. And I – actually, when you all are back in the office – I think it’s critically important for you to do a check-in on what worked and what didn’t and what lessons can we learn and now implement into our culture moving forward.

Lesson number three, let’s see if I got this right. Yes, I did. What we’ve learned is that people like to position themselves as experts. I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter and social media all day and all I see is talking heads in the industry posting stats and facts and information and my message to those folks is if you are a person in the industry whose audience is me, the consultant or other executives at other companies, fine, but if you are an advisor whose audience needs to be the consumer or the client, then stop posting on social media to impress all the other people in the industry and instead spend your time building a landing page on your website. Here’s your website with, you know, our services about us and a new landing page, there you go, that talks about making powerful decisions during rocky markets. And on that landing page, list out all of the facts and information about 2008 and the past markets and recovery and the reality of staying invested that you want. And by the way, get up in your conference room like I’m doing and post a video that you can put on that landing page that essentially teaches clients powerful lessons during this time.

So lesson number one, call your clients. And by the way, if you’re not hearing from them and you don’t know which camp they fit into, it’s powerful to ask them whether they’re not calling because they feel comfortable or they’re not calling because they don’t want to bother you and they don’t know what to ask. Number two, working from home works, consider ways in which you can implement the productivity lessons that you learn during this time into your business. And number three, stop trying to impress others in the industry who are your peers and instead try to impress your clients during this time. It’s a perfect opportunity to do so.

So I hope those lessons were valuable to you. I will see you probably next week. Same place, same time. Take care, everybody. Bye.