Caring For Our Clients: The Ultimate Virtuous Cycle
October 2021
In midsummer, I caught up with one of this newsletter's original subscribers, who has always been one of the most thoughtful and interesting correspondents I have. I actually initiated the contact, because I feared I might have fallen off the subscriber list to his client newsletter, which I treasure.
He responded that there had been no newsletter in over a year, simply because he hadn't been able to find the time to do it. Referrals, he said, were coming it at an “amazing” pace; revenue and AUM are up nearly a third since the beginning of 2020.
He went on to report that he'd been spending quite a lot of time since the onset of the pandemic with families who lost loved ones to the virus and other age-related illness—more than two dozen client deaths. In the next breath, he said that this has been the most gratifying period of his entire advisory career (which began almost exactly 30 years ago, when he was about 40).
I can only hope you see the progression here:
- Caring importantly for the financial and emotional needs of significant numbers of clients who had lost loved ones.
- Deriving from that experience the most gratification he's ever enjoyed in three decades as an advisor.
- A wave of referrals and incremental AUM, to the point where he couldn't make time for his newsletter.
Our friend certainly didn't convey these data to me in the form of a progression; I'm reporting them to you as such. Because that, I find, is exactly the way our profession was always supposed to work. That is, as the ultimate form of virtuous cycle.
The uncaused cause of this cycle is, of course, caring deeply for our clients as people rather than as economic units. (That too, of course, but only after the human connection.) Nor can the empathic impulse—much less the primacy of it—be feigned. “What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect,” says Emerson in “Behavior”; “what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these (emphasis added).”
The question for advisors, then, becomes twofold. First, do we genuinely and indeed unmistakably care for the people ahead of the plan—and miles ahead of the portfolio? Second, do the people we're attempting to care for respond appropriately?
With respect to this newsletter's subscribers, I take the former as a given. It's the latter I've been thinking about lately (as some of you will see/hear in our October 7 webcast). It is axiomatic that you cannot help anyone more than he/she wants to be helped. My point here is that you can't care for people more than they want you to care for them.
Your reserves of time and energy are finite, and so is your capacity for empathy. When you're expending those reserves on someone who doesn't fully appreciate them, (a) they're draining away, and (b) you are actively denying them to someone who might prove more receptive. At that point, the issue becomes one of your own self-esteem.
Do you “need” a person who doesn't respond to your caring in kind? Or do you believe that, if you began vectoring your empathy elsewhere, you'd eventually discover a potential client who genuinely values you? For let's never forget: we surely have to deserve our clients, but they also have to deserve us.
It remains only for us to enforce that rule. Excellence on our part demands clients who recognize that excellence, and respond in kind. Otherwise to some extent it's pearls before swine.
As this last quarter of the year begins, meditate on our friend, and start thinking about what it would take for you to experience more of his great personal satisfaction as well as his uptick in AUM and income. You may find that it isn't a question of doing more of anything. It may be just a matter of doing what you do now…but for better (in the sense of more deserving) people. Be assured that they're out there. Go and find them.