Ask Nick Sample 2023
October 2022
We want to inform you that we have decided to go in a different direction with our financial planning team. This decision has been carefully made over the course of several months. We are confident that this advisory team thoroughly understands our goals and is best suited to help us achieve them. Specifically, we have appreciated their attention to detail in tax, insurance, estate planning and unique cash flow strategies as well as assisting with researching Medicaid for our (health issue) sons.
We sincerely appreciate the work you have done for us over the years. Accordingly, we wanted to be courteous and let you know of our decision as the account transfers will occur shortly. If you'd like to call and discuss this with us at all, please feel free to do so.
I've never had this experience before, and I don't see anything in Scripts that addresses it directly. What would you advise that I do?
If you're asking what your options are in terms of inducing these people to reconsider their decision, you don't have any. Their explanation is lucid, detailed and authoritative—I suspect it may even have been drafted for them by their new firm—and it quite irrevocably closes that door. The account is gone—as you deserve. It's those last three words that are at the heart of the teachable moment.
I think you made two comfortably self-congratulatory assumptions in this case, both of which turned out to be quite wrong. Be encouraged to examine them in detail, for fear that they may be generalized throughout your practice.
The first of these two comforting assumptions was that these people were friends. They were quite clearly nothing of the kind. Indeed, there was so much distance between the reality of the relationship and your perception of it that this development has come to you like a bolt from the blue. They never even felt the minimal comfort and trust it would have taken to ask you about the panoply of issues in their email—issues that, without warning, they've engaged someone else to solve. Friends don't do that. Disappointed clients do that.
Nor will it answer for you to simply conclude, “All they ever had to do was ask me.” The incumbency to ask was entirely on you. Thus I reprint your inquiry here as an urgent warning (and reminder) to your fellow subscribers. At least once a year, it is absolutely vital that we ask clients directly, “How am I doing?” (Scripts # 46, page 135) When you re-read this script, you will discover—too late in this case, but for the balance of your career—that it begins with one sharply pointed question:
“For our relationship to be more satisfying to you, what is the one thing I am not currently doing for you that you most wish I would do?”
(Spartans, if you have not conducted this inquiry yet this year, see that it is winging its way to your entire client base by nightfall. Do not mistake this for a mere suggestion.)
The second comforting and perfectly fatal assumption you made is that what you quite correctly term “all the normal stuff” was sufficient. This may seem like a variation on the theme above, but it's not. The concept “all the normal stuff” is practice management as a series of checked boxes; it dictates what clients “should” be happy with. In that sense, it gives you unconscious permission to leave off improving the quality of your work. (And today you ran into a firm that hasn't stopped improving theirs, with the predictable result.)
The question to be asking ourselves here is, “How can I make even ‘the normal stuff' more vivid and impactful, thus relentlessly narrowing any remaining emotional distance between my client and me? How can I get even better at what I do?”
Chalk this up to experience. Like most really important life lessons, you had to learn it the hard way. (I can certainly relate.) But also like most really important life lessons, once you've learned it, it will pay bounteous dividends for the rest of your career and life.