Well, I knew we could depend on Diane to increase the energy in the room, so thank you, Diane, for that. And, absolutely, oh, I can't do it on, my new friend, sir, can you increase the volume? Thank you. How's that? And thank you. Feedback, welcome throughout and after the presentation. Does that work? Yes. Thumbs up in the far left-hand corner. Tracey, can you hear me well, louder? How's that, ooh, terrific. So I want to say what a joy it is to be in this room of friends and colleagues, and I hope future friends. We all share a passion and deep curiosity about how we can do a better job for our clients every day, and that runs the gamut from the deeply technical to the soft skills which we're learning are just as important as those everyday technical platforms and knowledge that we bring to the table. And if I had a magic wand, I would just make one change, and I would wave that wand and pretend we were in Hogwarts Great Hall and make the sky blue above us and have little clouds floating along because the room is a little tight, but just imagine we have a blue sky and clouds above us as I'm talking and take a deep breath as we go along. We're all deeply curious about this issue of client service, client experience, client engagement. We know that because there are seven sessions at this conference alone that touch on this topic in many ways. I want to share a personal story that was a bright aha for me on what it is to have exceptional client service, exceptional client experience, and exceptional client engagement because I think we need all three to do what we want to do every day. I got a phone call two years ago from a friend who lives in Finland and he said, Cheryl, come to me with China. I'm going to the far western providence of Hunan to the mountainous area that borders Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam where I'm going to deliver Bibles to a group of ethnic minorities who've been sacrificing and doing translations for 20 years, and China has finally said, yes, you have to get permission to get a book distributed in China, yes, these groups of peoples can have a book in their own language. Never had a book in their language. So I said, middle of nowhere, don't speak a language, takes hours to get there, I love it, that's my ideal of a vacation. So I called my daughter and I said, hey, Hannah, if you can get your professors to say yes, will you join me in going to China? Now, this was a risk. She was 20, so yeah, kind of out of her teenage years, but not really, so a 10-day mom trip, daughter trip might have been a big disaster, but she too said, I'm in. So we do the classic plane, bus, train, car, and after two days of journeying, we arrive in a small town, and then the next morning, we get picked up in a series of Jeeps. There were a ton of us from Ghana, the UK, Finland, and the US going to these villages. And we spend the entire four and a half hours in a Jeep that bounced so much of a single dirt mountainous road that my Apple Watch went bing, bing, bing, you walked 120 flights of stairs, and I hadn't taken a single step. We arrive at our first village. There was a church, and we arrived to about three dozen men and women who had walked up to three hours to join us. They had an incredible, beautiful, embroidered indigenous wardrobes that they used for celebrations. And as we got out of the Jeep, they burst into song. And I had no idea. I remember I'm from the South, so gospel music is my backyard music. And my in-laws both sung at the Met. So I cannot personally carry a tune, but I recognize good music when I hear it. And this was an unbelievable choir. And apparently when you live in the mountains and walk a lot, you have great lung capacity, and you're a beautiful singer. So great song welcomed us. They invited us into a small courtyard with kindergarten-level tables and chairs and served us an eight-course meal. Now my challenge was I thought the first course was the meal because I thought, you know, these people won't have a lot to offer, so it was peanuts, boiled potatoes, and boiled eggs. I ate my fill of that first course. And what I didn't know in China is they kept filling your plate. You're supposed to leave something on the plate to show your graciousness and your gratitude for their hospitality. So, first year. But we had seven courses. They had cooked all week for us. Then we had a wonderful celebration. We got to share a book for them in a language that had not had an alphabet until a hundred years ago. And the joy in that room was amazing. So we had a great client service. They picked us up in Jeeps, drove us up the mountain. No one spoke the same language. We couldn't communicate with anybody on anything. You either spoke Mandarin, who are our hosts, or you spoke Wesley Siu, Bigfella Meow, Black Yi, so these different languages. So we couldn't talk to anybody, but we had an amazing service. We had a wonderful experience of a meal and music together. And then, what I didn't share with you is we did a lot of training before we went on how to be appropriate and respectful about the culture, to not come as Westerners, which is impossible. We are Westerners, but come as best we can for respect for how they want to engage with us, talk with us, celebrate with us. Well, we were told no hugging, no handshaking. This is not a people who naturally handshake and hug. And again, as Southerners, we were like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? Put our hands in our pockets. We're just going to go, whoa, when we meet people. So we didn't. We did a really, really good job. No hugging, no handshaking. And then, an 80-year-old woman came up to my daughter, whose husband had built one of the churches that we went to. He had lost his life in the Cultural Revolution, and she hugged my daughter. At that point, the engagement kicked in. We'd had a wonderful service from them. We'd had a wonderful experience, and now we were engaged. And you know how I know we were both engaged? Because my daughter on the plane home said, hey, Mom, on the last day when we were celebrating with all 11 villages, they gave a choice to each of the translators who had spent up to 20 years translating. The whole village had sacrificed that person working to walk, take a bus into town to work two weeks out of three months, for 20 years in some cases. So we'd each gotten a choice between a television and a washing machine. And they were all men, and they all picked a television. And my feminist daughter said, I think we need to buy every village a washing machine, and I will put some of my money into the pot to do that. So we sent all 11 villages a washing machine, and we felt we had come full circle of engagement between what the gifts they had given us and the engagement that we felt. So this doesn't necessarily relate to a client experience, but it does allow us to imagine these are people with whom I shared no language, very little culture, no expectations, and yet they nailed it on everything they did for us, service, experience, engagement. So what we can do for our clients, it doesn't cost us anything. It just takes purposefulness, training, and intention. So we're going to spend our time today, so why do we care? Why should any of us in the room care about client engagement? We're doing well already, exceptionally well, some of us might say. We're delivering a wonderful service to people who need it and are willing to pay for it. We probably have good to great service, good to great experiences, and for some clients we have deep engagement. And I would say the reason we care, we want to go home and make a difference and evolve what we're doing is the elements of value pyramid. This is an excellent resource, it's on the web by Bank Consulting, and they organize all the services and products that are sold by companies. And these at the bottom are functional, so if you think about it, it saves time, makes you money, and organizes you. These are all things that are functional and I would say are easily commoditized, especially with technology. As you go up the ladder, you can see things that we begin to do in addition to make money. We reduce anxiety. In fact, when I went through this elements of pyramid with the firm, the big light bulb went off in my head and I said, I'm sure there are things we need to change to serve millennials, but we know, generationally, data driven, that they are a highly anxious group. So if Abacus becomes brilliant at reducing anxiety, and we're already pretty good at that, we can marry what millennials want on the data technology side with what we do really well on the soft skills side. And I think this is where we live. I think we live in life changing, where we're helping people self-actualize, we're giving them hope. I bet each one of us has a story where you gave a client hope, and probably multiple clients hope. So if we're living in the self-changing, life-changing social impact world, that's priceless. You cannot commoditize that. People will pay you whatever they need to pay you to have you help them on that journey. And I think that's where the difference moving from service to experience to engagement, you can live, when a client wants it, not every client does, in this very top of the pyramid. Don't worry about writing things down, they're all in the resources. Many of you know, my old friends in here, my mom's an elementary school librarian, so always have a bibliography of everything that we talk about. So, this is why we care about what we're doing. Julie Littlechild has done a great job, I think, in providing the 11 pieces of the circle, the pie, that you need in order to have deep client engagement. And obviously we don't have time to go over all 11, but I do think defining your ideal client or niche is a very important step. But if you haven't done that, don't worry about that, that will come to you with time. There are sessions and resources on that, and I'm going to focus on co-creating the client experience, defining core processes, and gathering client feedback. Because I think if you do those three things well, they're all simple, they're all cost-free, they're all things you can train on, you will go from great to exceptional. And just imagine in your mind for a moment, if you have a niche client, so for us, we used to work with families with closely held businesses, that's a niche. Then we got more specialized, we're working with families with illiquid shared assets, so it's a farm, it's timberland, it's a business, it's oil and gas. Then we got more niche-y because we realized, well, they all have generational issues, they have children who own little pieces that need skills and talents and values to go along with that. You don't have to have a niche, but if you do have one, or if you can imagine having one as we go through this process, you realize, wow, if I had a niche, I can make this scene at the big farm, yell people level, and not the happy birthday level that is going on at my house when there's a birthday, which is not pretty to listen to. We're going to go through these three areas, and we're going to talk about, first of all, sharing the client experience. My goal for you all is that each of you walk out in one of three modes. One is, thumbs up to myself, I'm doing all this well, and I feel good about where my farm is. That happens sometimes, and that's a very legitimate outcome, and I would love to hear more about what you're doing, and you can share with others when we go through our play time together. The second one is picking one to five items that you go, we do this great, but I want to do it exceptionally well, and now I have the next step I need to take on that journey. The third one is something you go, I never thought about that. There's one thing you've never thought about, but you can tell immediately, you've been walking around with a problem in your head, and that solves the problem. You're going to go back to your farm, and you're going to adopt it. Those are three goals for today, and we're going to spend time at the end, this is what Jessica really asked me to do, was how do you take home what you learn at a conference, and make it real? Because you've spent your valuable time, your money, to do this, and how do you go home, and you've learned so much, and you have so much to do, I'm going to sleep better, I'm going to connect more, all the things you're going to do, how do you turn that into day to day reality? Bob Veers isn't in here, but Bob always says, he swears he didn't say this, but he did. He said, Cheryl really never has an original idea, she's just very good at benchmarking other people's ideas, and turning them into reality. So you don't have to be an innovator, you just have to recognize a good idea, and go home and do it. So that's what Abacus is good at, we're very good at plagiarism, as I like to say. Michael Joyce says it's benchmarking, but I know it's plagiarism. But I do footnote, I do have reference to what I stole. Now my first co-creating the client engagement is going to be a very simple known truth, but it's the most powerful gift we have for our clients. Nicholas Christofskis just wrote a book called Blueprint, and it's about how societies evolve for good. Frankly, I need to read that right now, because it feels like we're not in a time period globally where societies are evolving to good, and it's a fabulous book. But he was a hospice doctor for many years before he became a sociologist and a professional at Yale, and wrote this book. And there's a quote in here from his years of holding people's hands while they were dying. And he said, I held all kinds of hands, gender, race, ethnicity, background, socioeconomic, and there were certain things everyone had in common. We all recognize these things when we read them, but what stood out to me was, for what we do, to tell one story to someone who will listen. So I would say, and Michael knows this, the number one thing that we train at Abacus and I think is most important to what we do is to listen well. And it's not easy, and you have to train it, you have to practice it. The biggest gift one employee said to me was, he's not client-facing, he said, I have such a better relationship with my wife, because when I go home, and I say, hi honey, how was your day, and she's a nurse anesthesiologist, and she says, oh, these five things happen, I just listen, affirm, give her positive love, I do not try to solve her problems. And you know what, your spouse doesn't want you to solve your problems, they want to be heard, and so do your clients. So we're going to practice a bit, I'm going to give you one tiny tip to become a better listener, but I would recommend that you personally train on it, you personally ask for feedback within your organization on it, and that you practice at home. Although my daughter and husband will go, wait until you're practicing on us. Alright, so, I want each of you to turn to a partner in the room, and share your most memorable experience, and I have one rule for you to practice, it's called the nine second rule. So Milo, you're going to have a partner, and your partner's name is? Annie. Milo, will you go first? Everybody's going to do this at the same time, and he's going to share with Annie his amemorable, or a most memorable experience, and at the end, Annie is not going to start talking. She's going to very comfortably and presently count to nine. And then I want you to switch partners, and do the same thing, and then we'll share out what that experience was like. Everybody have a partner? Eileen will be extra partner if someone needs that. Alright. Out there. No wonder I yelled and y'all didn't hear me. So I know not everyone got a chance to finish, but I hope, first of all, you have a new friend that you didn't expect to get to know intimately. Anyone want to comment on the power of pausing for nine seconds, and what happened in that space? Milo? So we did not pause. Ah. And it was interesting. Absolutely. And so in a normal setting, someone shares something powerful and intimate with you, or they say something affirming or responsive that reflects you care and you heard. But the nine second rule is powerful, is when someone is talking and they come to an end, and you think they're done, but they're really not. And I'll show you three places where this is very powerful. I have two very cerebral clients. One is a professor at MIT, he was on a Nobel Prize winning team. The other one is a PHMD, he's way up the ladder at a technology company. So quite successful introverts. Almost always on phone meetings with them, but even in person, I will ask them a question, they will slowly give me an answer, and then I pause for nine seconds, and I promise you that eight and a half seconds, these highly cerebral, introverted men in both cases always have something deeply important to share next. You've got to create space for certain kinds of clients. The second thing that happens where we use it in leadership training in the firm. So we have staff meeting, we share leading staff meeting, and if Jeff were leading it for the first time, I would meet with him, I'd say, Jeff, I only want you to do two things your first time at BAT. I want you at every agenda item, you start with gratitude, I want you to share gratitude first. It seeds the conversation, be vulnerable, throw out some gratitude, it'll get the juices flowing in the firm. Second rule is, for every item that we have, I want you to pause for nine seconds before you go to the next agenda item, because someone in the room always has something else important to share, or to say about what we've been talking about, because people process at different speeds within our organization. So that's the second important space to use it. And the third thing I just learned yesterday, what did we learn about the seven second rule? They've got to be married somehow. You give yourself seven seconds to remember something. So if a client is sharing something personal and deep with you, and you pause for that nine seconds, you're getting two wins. They feel space to truly go another level deep, and you are much more likely to remember what they said. So I think the seven second and the nine second rule are somehow connected. And the fourth thing I forgot to mention, it's not really part of this, but how did the energy in this room feel? How did you feel? We've been talking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're all tired, it's almost lunch. All of a sudden the energy went up, because those of you who know Judith Glaser, this is her research. She wrote a book called Creating Wing. It's all about conversations, and the neuroscience of conversations. And when we talk to one another, our brains begin to mirror one another through MRIs, and if we're having positive conversations, we release endorphins, the feel good stuff, for free, dopamine, oxytocin, and it's a way to get a deeper engagement with your client when you're having a healthy conversation. So remember those things, we are humans, and biochemically we are wired to have conversations, and when we have healthy, positive conversations, we automatically create feel good endorphins, which make us leave the office of our financial advisor feeling happier, less anxiety, better informed, ready to make a smart decision, as opposed to an immediate decision. So start with three seconds. It's more about our discomfort, I've never experienced a client feeling discomfort, it's not appropriate in every situation. You're joking and riffing about something, stay with the game, we all recognize that. But when you're asking a client a question like, you know, what do you think about this, or I'm curious, or share more, those kinds of conversations, give it a pause. Lots of people aren't comfortable with nine seconds, so I would say two things, just experiment at home with your dogs and pygmy goats, and your puppets, and secondly, just start yourself at five seconds, then go to six, just tiptoe in. But I would encourage what I like to do, jump in the deep end of the pool. I'm gonna mess up some today, because we're gonna do a lot of experimenting, because I want to try some new things. So I'm gonna fail with y'all today. But I fail, where else can I feel safer to fail than here? And I feel the same way with our clients. They're gonna give you a pass a lot of times. Helpful. All right, so just if all you walk away is determined to be a better listener, I feel good. Eileen, how much time? Thank you. Eileen is a member of Abacus's team, but she's also with Genesis here, helping with the conference, and she's graciously partnering with me today. So thank you, Eileen, for keeping me on time. Amen to that. This is from Dan Solomon, and I used to have this taped to my phone. In addition to being very good at plagiarism, I would say this is the second reason that Abacus is successful. Pretty simple. Show up on time. You've heard this throughout the conference. A client doesn't show up, their bottom hits the seat of the chair, they've already had their coffee or drink order, and the team is walking in to meet them. No, showing up on time is super important in everything you do. Do what you say. What does Suzanne teach us? As leaders, keep your commitments. I think this is the best networking tip available. Whenever I'm out networking, I always make a pinky promise on something I've learned through the nine-second rule about somebody, and I go home and I immediately keep that promise. You can do what you say, keep your promises, and use please and thank you throughout your organization. You're not gonna have any trouble succeeding. Everything else, yes, we have to learn and master, but these are the basics, and you need to train it for all your team members. I forgot one important thing to share earlier. I actually talk too much. Is that a surprise to anybody in the room? So we did an exit interview, when team members leave, they get an exit interview from our corporate psychologist, and a very talented member left, and he went to a job he was much happier in, and he said, Abacus is a great place to work, and they do such an exceptional job of listening to clients, but they don't always listen to their team members. And I went, oh wow, that is so true. So we've been working and working on that, because we're always trying to improve, and I've got a chess clock. So when I'm in team meetings with my leadership team, I time myself. So I get to talk 20% of the time. I'm trying to reduce that. And I forget, I'm interesting, and no one challenges me because I'm the boss. So I have to learn, I'm actually not funny, I'm not that interesting, no one really cares about what happened to my pygmy goats yesterday. So I have a chess clock, and that keeps me in line. So I'm not saying any of you in the room need one, but if you need a little help on talking less and listening more, I love my chess clock. And it's also pretty cheap, they're like $8 on Amazon. So that, to me, is the basics of client service. Now let's talk about the next level up client experience. How many of you shared a bad memorable experience in the room? Because memorable can be bad, right? Memorable does not have to be good. And we've all made mistakes in our organization. In fact, I can't remember a week that's gone by when we haven't had something go wrong in our organization. And I used to say, yes, I'm CEO of Abacus, I'm the chief error officer, because I found myself giving the apologies, which have to happen, and they have to happen in a structured way. So if you want to create a client for life, I'm not advocating screw something up on purpose, but have a process and a tool for responding to that error, to that misjudgment, to what drop ball, whatever it was, in a professional manner, and you will have a client for life. There's an article, James Grubman and Wade Ballantyne created something called the proper apology. It's in the Journal of Financial Planning, you have a handout that has the algorithm and the words on the back. Every time I have to make a call to a client where we have disappointed them, caused them anxiety, any of those emotions, and we've made a mistake, I go through this algorithm with myself, because I need to be calm, and the power of knowing this tool is huge in acknowledging an error, listening to the error, identifying the emotion that created in the client regarding the error, and then, after you've done all of that, go to problem solving. Our nature is to get on the phone and say, I'm sorry this happened, blah, blah, blah, we're gonna fix it this way. The client wants an opportunity to tell you what happened in their own words, and they want space to identify and share their emotions about what happened, and then they want acknowledgement of that emotion, that mistake, they want an apology and problem solving at the end. I won't go into detail how to do this, we could do a whole session, but there's a fabulous article on it, Michael's taught it before, and this is sort of the shorthand version of it, but the second thing you can do, if you can go home and teach everyone in your firm, Eileen does a beautiful proper apology, and she sometimes emails me, because sometimes it's an email apology, and Eileen, what would you say the one thing sometimes you forget is to identify what? The emote, the emote, because she writes a beautiful one, and after two tries, she's beautiful, she does a monologue, so I'm not chief air officer anymore, anyone in the office can give a proper apology, and we have rating fans when we can do that, the book rating fans, so to me, this goes from service to experience, the client's experience of a bad memory can be a positive outcome, and I would really encourage you, now I'm chief encouragement officer, I like that CEO title much better. Well, this is something we all do, so I won't spend tremendous amount of time on it, but that's goal setting, so the core and the beginning of what we're told to do, certified financial planners, is to set goals with clients, and this is an incredible opportunity for engagement, I've shared with you all three of the tools that we use, one is mind mapping, the Kender Institute life planning questions, and if you get a client to get colored pencils and draw for them their perfect day, what if you had $100 million, I know how to increase that to a billion, some clients are like 100 million, what if you only had five to 10 years to live and regrets, and they will draw you a picture of each of those, and you go back three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years later, they have told you everything you need to know about them, and in fact this particular client said what, if they only had five to 10 years to live, they would retire immediately, they would travel, and they would spend more time with all these people, and they would go on mission trips, I had no idea about that person, I'm gonna give you a couple of other examples, these are the Murphys, they just had children recently, we only had the couple for a while, and they come to all of our staff meetings, they come to our strategy days, and they're our client avatars, so we remember when we're together who's important to us, and when Mr. Murphy did goal setting with me about 20 years ago, he walked out of the room, and a week later he called and said, I'm leaving my company, and I'm starting my own corporation, manufacturing corporation, and 20 years later, that's been a success, and they've gone from employing 50 people, to over 250 people, in a small town that was dying on the vine, so that's the power of goal setting, I had nothing to do with that, I just opened a door to imagination, pretty cool, I know you want a hold Mr. Murphy, Mrs. Murphy, this is a child, I haven't gotten as used to using it, Mrs. Murphy didn't do anything about that goal setting, but about five years ago, we gave every client again, where will you be in five years, and we did goal setting, she came back to the next meeting, she said you know what Cheryl, I've always loved, I'm not a professional social worker, but I think trauma healing is so important, and she started a non-profit, that does trauma healing around the world, engaging with another group, so not this doesn't happen every client meeting, but the power of that between this couple is unbelievable, now sometimes we have bad outcomes from goal setting, guess it depends on your definition, we've had three clients lead goal setting, and come back and say we're getting divorced, when you ask the most deeply important question to somebody, they oftentimes find out, this is not the life they want to live, very painful, it's happened three times, but maybe it's a gift, I don't know, that's a deeper question than we're going to answer today, but Mr. and Mrs. Murphy have very powerful goal setting, and I'm looking forward to doing it with their children, yes, so we experiment around with this, you'll see there's also a set of questions, so we oftentimes send, Milo, Milo asked do we do this in the office, or do we have them do it outside the office, if you're asking me the optimal way to do it, I would have them come into the office, and do it in that space, because when you send it to them, they feel color pencils, tell the truth about myself, is this not where they want to be, but if you just say you can have a graphite pencil, just make a list, you'll be surprised at how they find the space, and then they share it with you, we also have a list of questions, some people I just know are not going to go there with us, early on, so that list of questions is in there, and then you see we also have the money history questionnaire, which also comes from Dr. James Gerbman, for people that we know are coming to us with trauma around money, and if you, Addie Kramer in my office, believe it or not we gave an all day marketing session, a vet group asked us to come speak all day, I thought all day on financial planning, oh my gosh, we took a risk, and we started them out, and they all sat there and answered the money history, they picked three questions, this group of men and women went at it, and shared with each other their most intimate relationship, and anxieties around their history of money, their worries about money, and their bad habits around money, so it can happen, but it really is powerful, if you're willing to go there, the engagement you have with someone, you know their most intimate relationship with money, and again you're working in engagement with them, you're living in hope with them, you're reducing anxiety, you're moving up that elements of value pyramid, in my opinion. Okay, so that's engagement, if you can get them to do powerful goal setting, we have won the day on engagement in my opinion. Just a moment on co-creating, and what I mean by this is, how do you engage clients in their own experience? At Abacus, I'm married to an architect, which I'm fortunate, so don't worry about do this at home, you can do your own riff on this if you find it appealing, we actually have three conference rooms, we have the classic traditional conference room, we have a dual soft comfy couches in the back, but tables and chairs in the front, and we have a complete family living room as a third, and you can tell how different they are from each other, there's our ego wall, you know, chairs, mahogany, ah, there's our duo wall, so we can sit around a conference table, but if you wanna move to the back and hang out, you can do that, you can use it either way, and there's our living room, it's fascinating how clients self select into which room they want, some people wanna bring their briefcase, and put it on the table, some people have physical problems, they need to be in that more traditional room for the way they have to sit, how they can get up as they're elderly from the table, believe it or not, my CEOs love that middle room, they go right back to the couch, put their feet up on the poof, and start talking to me, it's very strange, I would never have figured that one out, and finally, this is where I love to meet, because I feel I'm so relaxed in that space, I can be present, I'm not there as a font of all wisdom, I'm there as a person talking with another person. Why don't you have the chess clock there? Well, you know what, we do have four clocks in there, so another tip, you might think that's weird, but wherever you sit in an abacus conference room, the client can tell what time it is, so they're not anxious about, are we on time, are we getting out of here, and I can tell what time it is, so I don't interrupt a conversation, go, oh, I've gotta get out of here in seven minutes, again, it may seem weird, try it out, don't be surprised at how it reduces stress and anxiety in the room. So, three tips for service, basic things, engagement, I mean experience, the proper apology, and engagement's something we already do, but do it profoundly, goal setting. So we're all in this as a business, we need to have exceptional service and exceptional profit, and I can tell you the way I think that happens is making all of this a process. So, those of you who know me well, I have a friend who says, Cheryl has a checklist for the women's bathroom, that is true, and I walk into the women's bathroom, I want it to be like the Ritz, and I want everything sitting there as if I was in a fabulous hotel, so I'm making a list of everything we have to do before we go away, so we can freak out in some kind of order, and that's why I have a lot of processes, we have a very chaotic, reactive business that we can be in, so how do we create order, and sustainability, so that we can deliver service, experience, and engagement consistently, and sustainably, that's why you do processes, and that's how you create trust, if a client knows you'll always return their phone call by the end of the day, if a client knows that you'll always be there if they die, all the things that you can do for the client that are sustainable, and consistent, that creates trust better than anything else, and that's where processes come in, now we could have a whole session on processes, and I could really get everyone bored, but I did do two things I thought would be powerful, I'm gonna give you some examples of simple processes, because sometimes that sounds so complicated, I don't mean that, so I'm gonna give you a checklist, an example of a workflow, and a template in your handouts, and if you want to learn more about how to create processes, my favorite nine minute talk is how to make toast, it's in the resources section of the handouts, and it's a nine minute talk on how differently people draw making toast, how everyone over does it or under does it, and how you can make a better toast process by involving multiple people, and it all involves post-its, you don't need a fancy system, and you can knock out a lot of processes in a short amount of time using how to make toast, and some post-it notes, e-myth, we know that iconic book, there's a handout that's on the web, that also talks about developing process, which may be more to your taste, and finally IBM Blueworks, when we find we're having a lot of errors in a certain system, or a lot of internal complaints, we pull out the Blueworks and map out all the stages that that system or that process touches, all the people it touches, all the touch points of decision making, it's an excellent program, I think it's $199, so if you really need to map something out, Blueworks is ideal. The other thing I would talk about training for a moment, a process is a great way to train new people, how to make toast is even better, so if you think about it, when you're training someone, you wanna tell me how this works, that you're gonna get a little bit of it, show me how it works, you're gonna learn a little bit more, and involve me is even better, so as an example, if you tell me, here's how to get the mail out every day, in a certain way, and then you show me how to do that, that's a deeper level, but if you involve me, and I want you to come back and give me feedback on how we can do that better, you're gonna have much deeper learning than if you don't, so let me give you some, so we use process not just for delivery, it is the best training tool we have, so people accelerate their development within the organization, and delivering the model, they're sitting in front of clients more quickly, they're doing work they like more quickly, and they own that process, and they're changing, involving it on their self, in fact, in the handout, you'll see our foundation year with Abacus, and thank you, Susan Bradley, I heard somewhere, she was talking about foundation year, I thought, changing the name from first year with Abacus, to foundation year, so another example, if I stole something from somebody, we are totally re-evolving our entire foundation year, everyone in the firm's gonna be involved in this, and there was two reasons for that, one, it had gotten a little stale, and two, a lot of the new team members didn't know why we do some of what we do, so if everybody works for three days, we're gonna go off site, we're gonna use how to make toast, to change our first year client's experience, think how much better all of us will do at that job, it'll be a better service, and we'll have better delivery of that service, so just to give you a couple of examples in your handout, you go through, you can see I'm getting myself, to me, as we go through this, all right, so, we're gonna co-create a little bit, and we're not gonna get up, but you're gonna pass them down, I thought, I can tell you what Abacus does for, to me, if you want a process for client service, a simple one is acknowledging milestones, so what's a milestone that someone in here acknowledges for clients? Birthday, milestone birthday, so you send a birthday card to every client, right, we do books at milestone birthdays, so those are sort of at a client anniversary, client anniversary with Abacus, we do $100 to their favorite charity when they've been there 10 years, at 20 we do something different, so I want everyone to write down, you've got beautiful sharpies, and you've got neon post-its, and write down one or two very cool things that your firm does around a milestone, and we're gonna post them up there, and then y'all can photograph what everybody's ideas in the room are, and don't worry if you think it's obvious, if we've got 27 people saying birthdays, then we know, boy, if we're not doing birthdays, we better think about doing birthdays, because everyone else is doing that, or if you're thinking, well everyone's doing birthdays, how do I do that different, so you'll just take 30 seconds, and then pass them down to the end, we'll collect those and post them, and we're gonna do that for several things, so we're gonna crowdsource, process, and ideas among the group, because I know I need to steal some new ideas, and this is my way of doing that. And you can do, and if you don't have something, if you're newer to the profession, and you don't know, think about something someone did for you for a milestone, that was special, a gift you got for graduation that was unusual and memorable, a wedding that you went to where something was done that was special and memorable. And while you're doing that, I think this is just plain old client service, you're recognizing an important milestone in their lives, you have a relationship with them, they're going to delight in that, but at some level it's plain good service, when I go to a hotel, and I'm signed up with Marriott, and it's my birthday, and sadly I have been in a hotel room on my birthday on too many occasions, they'll send up a nice note, sometimes a bad bottle of champagne, and I think well, here I am, I will toast myself, thank you Marriott. So we expect it from the hotel, you absolutely ought to expect some kind of milestone acknowledgement from your financial advisor. You can also put up things, and employees, so when employees have a child, everybody in the office signs a birthday card for that child, and we give them a dollar bill for every age they are. So if you're 12, you get $12. If you're six, you get $6. So we're communicating what? Happy birthday to an abacus family member, and we're all about money, and here's some for you. And it might spark a conversation with their parents, age appropriate about money. So we're trying to weave in lots of things when we do something. So these services, remember you have to show it to your employees. What does Suzanne say? You've got to role model basically behaviors. So if you're asking your team to give great client service, and you're not providing great employee service to them, there's a big disconnect there. Big disconnect. We have sabbaticals at Abacus and when you go on your fifth sabbatical, that's all you get. You get a month. But on your 10th, you get a $1,000 check to spend on that sabbatical. And on your 15th, we give a beautiful piece of jewelry to women and we had our first man get his 15 years. Like, oh, what am I going to do? I'm sure he doesn't want jewelry. So we found out from the guys in the office he wanted a new rifle. We bought him a beautiful, memorable rifle. Doing something for employees on milestones. When you've been at Abacus for a year now, because we all learn as a tool how to write a sympathy note, you get personalized stationery. It's your first year, here's personal stationery. Michael, did you want to add something? No? Okay. No, you're good. Five years, right. And I'm not saying that you would have a sabbatical, but do something fun and acknowledging, because they know it's their five years. They know they've been there five years. And we have, because I like process, it looks like we're nice people, we actually have a big gift bin. And they're pre-wrapped. So we can just go into the warehouse, grab a book, baby book, someone's born, we send the baby book. We have our weird puppets we give away. All kinds of things, books, et cetera, that are on our list. If you're not, my love language is gift giving. That's not true for most people, that they have a pick from the list menu. It's a process to do this. Client experience, I just, go ahead. So I just want to share a personal situation with actually Cheryl. So when I had surgery, Cheryl knew about it, and her and one other new people at her firm, both wrote me these personalized, that's probably it. I just wanted to share one other thing they do, and I didn't hear you touch on this, but when I had surgery recently, Cheryl knew, and someone else at her firm knew about it. So they sent me these lovely little cards, like thinking of you cards, not like your typical card, and it had beautiful quotes on them, and then they put a really personal, like really well-written, not like the typical, we're thinking of you, we're praying for you kind of thing. And a basket, a blessing basket, made from Africa. Uganda. And it was so touching, and it sits in my office today. And means so much to me. You know what I love about the blessing basket is that it is made by women in Uganda, so they're getting money from their talents, and people will put out their blessing basket when they're terminally ill, and other people will drop a note in it for them. And I have mine by my bed, so at night when I'm being a good person that I'm planning to be, I get my blessing basket out, and all the people that I know need my care and attention for me prayer, I go through that list and just have a moment with that person and their experience. So if you want a great way to go to sleep, to go through all the people that you love and that love you, it's a powerful, I drop off to sleep like that. Thank you, Jessica. And it made me feel more part of how to be a part of your experience and assist in any way that we could. Absolutely. Because you feel helpless when people are in pain and suffering. You do. Okay. So the foundation here, I just put in our client service, what we do for our clients. We have the first meetings. I'm sure many of you all do it differently, not recommending you change anything. I just want to say what's engaging about our client experience in the first year is two things we've added that are optional, a family meeting and a human capital module. So if the client wants to have their adult children come in and talk through the estate plan, which we encourage, and their plans for aging, we have engaged them at their deepest core. Because the kids want to know what the plan is. Nobody wants to break that topic. The kids don't want to know how much money am I getting. They want to know what are my roles and responsibilities when this happens. So the family meeting, total engagement when a client goes through that, and the human capital module where we sit down and we talk with someone about what are your skills, your competencies, your talents, and help them formulate a next step in their career journey. So those two things go beyond the experience to engagement, in my opinion. Finally, again, we'll put some things up here for transitions. Susan Bradley is amazing and is a part of what we do. We're dealing with people who are widows and widowers. We're dealing with clients who become terminally ill, clients who are retiring, clients who are having their first grandchild, clients who are laid off. We could go on and on and on about transitions. Janet spoke this morning about that with John very beautifully. If you know how to be with a client during a moment of transition and you train for that and you understand what those needs are, you're going to go from experience to engagement. So if there's anything you all want to add around what you do during a time of transition for someone, they lose a loved one, they are retiring, for lots of people, right? That's a transition. We have, believe it or not, a pastor CEO. He says he's a pastor, but he has 300 employees. And so if you try to think of him as a pastor, you would totally get it wrong. He's a CEO first and foremost. And he left his church, properly transitioned, and he is utterly miserable. And my job right now is not about his portfolio. My job right now is how do I support him in that transition to happiness where he has always lived and joy. He can do it. We just got to muddle through it together. So all those things we do for transitions, that's when we engage. We have to train. We have to have tools. Abacus has lots of them. So do you all. We'll photograph those at the end. Okay. I am winding this up. So you have to have a process for everything. Oh, age triggering. I forgot to mention there's age triggering worksheets in there for you all. So we have them for 18, 21. I forget all the ages. Now the computer creates all these to-dos, so no one has to remember this. The e-mails are templates. But if you can automatically know when your client child turns 18 and you have a to-do that then creates an e-mail for you that you just tweak and send that says, hey, Jeffrey is turning 18 next month. You know in South Carolina or Iowa the age of maturity is 18. You no longer can make his health care decisions for him. He needs to complete the attached statutory health care power of attorney before he goes on his trip to Singapore or the Appalachian Trail. Right? That's what you want to do. And we've captured all those things one by one over the years that we know clients care about at those trigger point ages, and they're automatically in a checklist. It can be that simple. For us, we've just turned a checklist into working with our CRM to automatically create the dos based on the ages of people in the system. So age triggering is so simple. It's milestones. It's transitions. If you can be proactive about those, it takes no time. It's automatic. It's a lifetime experience for the client that you cared about them that much proactively. So a birthday card is nice. A health care statutory power of attorney is even better is the way I look at it. So the third thing I think we need to do, the first is engage, co-create the experience with clients, listening, knowing how to apologize properly, engaging them through goal setting. The second is process. Have basic processes for all the things that are expected. We have a template for answering the phone, and we train, train, train on that. And, in fact, in your little package, you'll see there's a daily huddle. Our first impressions team, every morning at 845, they meet for five minutes. All the people who are going to answer the phone that day or deal with intake. And they go over these questions. So they are prepared for anything that walks in the door. So it's a process. It's a simple one. And they are consistently able to make people feel like they're the most important person that just walked in the door, whether they're a homeless person that walks in off the street, a brand-new inquiry, a spouse, or a client. And we train, train, train for the simplest things. And that's one of the ways we do that. Gather client feedback. So are you providing any experience or engagement or service the client is appreciating? Are you meeting your objectives and doing that well? I think we all know we can do better. We want to know how. We want the gift of feedback. And I've got three recommendations for you that are all simple to do. And some of these you've experienced yourself. The first is, and I think this is just measuring service, the net promoter score. How many of you all in the room know the net promoter score? If you don't know it, you've experienced it. It's that e-mail that you get that says, on a scale of 1 to 10, rate your, how satisfied were you with your experience? You can do this through SurveyMonkey. I've given you in the resources a great website on this. The net promoter score works this way. All right? This is what we ask at Abacus. How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or a colleague? And what you really care about are the 9s and 10s, right? They're your promoters. And you steeply care about your detractors, which is 1 through 6. The passives, 7 and 8s, not that they're not important, but they're not out there either promoting you or saying, Abacus is okay, but I wouldn't go there. I'm going to stay, but I'm not going to promote them. And what you do, I'm going to read you the, if I can find it in my big mess. This is why I'm not allowed to have paperwork in the office, as Eileen knows. Okay. So what you do is you tally up all the responses, and then you subtract your detractors from your promoters, right? And that gives you a net score. So you could have a negative score. We're getting ready to do this on some things that we think may be a problem in our office, and just start sending certain clients when they come in and they engage in a drop-off of something, or we've opened an account for them with Schwab. What was their experience of that? So if you think you have a problem, you can narrow this down. It also teaches you what? Who's happy with you and who isn't, and you can pick up the phone and talk to the detractors. Very powerful tool, very simple tool. Don't overuse it, right? I don't like those all that much. I'll do it once or twice. But it's very powerful in two things. What's going wrong? Who are your big advocates? You can fix what's wrong. You can provide more resources for referrals to the promoters, and then you can mark trends over time. So if you put a new initiative in, you want to know, is it worth it? Is it working? Is it succeeding? And this is a great way to do that. There's a session after this one on DFA survey. That's an easy one to opt into, too, if you're a dimensional fund advisor. That's the tool that we are. We're a shop. Whatever the word is, we use those funds. You can participate in their big survey, but that's anonymous, right? And so you really get trends and big pictures. But for me, I get that information. It's powerful, but if people list things they're not happy with or they give a low score on something, I kind of have no way to follow up on that. I kind of go to bed with ontological dread, like, oh, my gosh, what are we going to do about this? This helps you get right at it because you have a space for comments. What I really think is powerful that we do is we use appreciative inquiry and we do a face-to-face assessment. And I put the surveys in your handouts. And appreciative inquiry is when you are asking questions to elicit what was positive or successful. Sometimes we spend all this time working on what doesn't go well. And if 90% of the things you're doing go well, you need to know that, too. It's also a way of asking a question that leaves a better experience in the client's mind. So there's a book. It's like tiny, tiny, tiny, thin book of appreciative inquiry. It's a powerful book not just for asking clients questions, but working internally within your organization on problem solving. So it has a lot of powerful attributes. And what we've changed now, we always did it at the end of the first year. How was your first year experience? And some detail around that, as you'll notice. And then we used to pick 5% of our clients, ask them out for lunch, dinner, or breakfast, and do a deeper face-to-face, different set of questions once they've been a client for a few years. We have more and more clients say, I'm happy. I don't want to go to lunch. I don't have time. You know what? People don't. So we've now changed. So at the end of the third year, which is two years after they took their, so at the end of the sixth, the tenth, and the fifteenth, we have a separate set of questions that we ask them just at the end of a regular meeting. We say, do you have time for 10 minutes to meet with our chief operating officer? He has a handful of questions he wants to ask you in a safe space to give us feedback so we can do a better job for you. And everyone so far has said, we just kicked this off. Absolutely want to do it. So we think that's the kind of feedback that is more powerful to us is that face-to-face. We've also had on engagement some group of focus, client engagement, where you're co-creating something. So when we do a new website, when we do something big and different, sometimes we'll have clients come in as a focus group to give us feedback on a new idea early in the process. That's another way of getting a feedback loop. One mistake I've made in the past is unwittingly I invited all my engineering types to a meeting. And, you know, it was a great meeting, but after we created what they recommended, I realized we were creating for a niche, right, that other people didn't necessarily want that. So you have to be careful with this, but it's a very powerful way to co-create and engage the client in the service you're delivering. So you need feedback, you need process, you need to co-create the experience. But Abacus spent an entire year on this process. We call it Abacus Planning Group University. We read Raving Fans and Disney's Be Our Guest as our background tools. And guess what the best idea that came out of that entire year to empower everyone for great service and experience, to deliver it immediately, rather than waiting for Cheryl to say something or create something, 1%. If everybody in the office came up with 1% change of an idea, we've had it nailed. And they can be as simple as, right, someone mentioned this earlier, when clients, it's raining and you see them drive up, go out with the umbrella to the car. That wasn't my idea. We already had umbrellas. So if everybody in the firm or you go home and it's just a 1% change and you do that routinely, that's all you have to do. It wouldn't go any bigger than that unless you just feel you have the energy capacity for that. But I love that notion, all I have to do is 1% different. Listen 1% better, respond 1% better, you're going to get where you want to go. Call to action. So Jessica asked this question and I've given a lot of thought. What is it that I do that when I get home I'm doing implementation almost right away? So I have a call to action to you all. First of all, you have to think to yourself, is this a personal evolution or something that's going to happen firm-wide? Because it's personal, it's a different path to firm-wide. Is it a habit to develop? So I'm going to get more rest. Well, we know that habits take 21 days to develop. And then you understand developing a habit is different than implementing something at your firm. So you go down a completely different path if it's a habit of listening better. Is it a technique to master? So Natalie Choate had a pre-conference. Susan Bradley had a conference, had a whole session on transitions. Mastery takes what? 10,000 hours. So mastery is going to be a longer journey than a habit sometimes. And you need to know where you're starting out so you can pace yourself and be patient. So to master what Susan Bradley is teaching us about transitions is 10,000 hours in my opinion. We've already gotten maybe 5,000 of those just by what we do. We've got another 5,000 to go. So what are you going to read? Are you going to sign up for her training? What are the things you're going to do and map that out? Figure out how many hours you've got left of that 10,000 and mark it on your calendar how you're going to do that. Is it a culture shift at your organization or is it a 1% improvement? You need to understand that. Leading cultural change is one of the toughest things you can do. I put abacus's cultural norms and behaviors on the little card for everybody. We have to talk, lead, train, tell stories all the time. We survey all the employees, how are we doing on a scale of 1 to 10? So a culture shift would be empowering client service at every level instead of top down. It has to be bottom up. It took us a year of sessions twice for two hours once a month, reading, talking, co-creating. Eileen can answer any question you want about that. And we finally shifted to refine how we are to I personally every day want to make a difference in our clients' lives across the organization. We're not there yet, Milo. I think we're at 78%, Eileen. I don't know. What would you say? So we have a ways to go. So we've already spent a year. I gave this talk because I want to learn more about this. This is part of my culture shift. There's a great book called Leading Change. You've got to empower and delegate. You cannot do enough of that. And I love this last one. Am I out of time? I'm so sorry. I'm going to stop right now. Oh, I've got a few minutes. Okay. Janet Brea and I, I don't know, 15 years ago, we both decided we wanted to read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. And that's where I began to play more. Got the puppets. Always have a pink Sharpie. And I would never read that book on my own, but I said to Janet, do you want to read this? She goes, I would love to read this. And we met once a month by phone. We read a chapter. You can do that in your organization. But if you're trying to learn something new, having an accountability, you know this, show up at the gym with your friend who lives down the road, meeting you there, you're more likely to go than it's rainy, it's cold, you don't feel well, going on your own. So I think having an accountability partner on whatever you decide to do is incredibly powerful. So tonight, or right now, stay in here before you go to lunch and write down five points of evolution. Go through your notes and star those five things. I wouldn't pick more than five. You can type them all up and then pull them out of a drawer in a year and go, oh, I got three of them done, now I'm going to pick five new ones. Don't pick more than five. Pick three items from the resource list that you're going to actually get the book, listen to the webinar, read the article. And block time on your calendar, do it. I always put personal activity because the team doesn't know what I'm doing and it's sacrosanct. And then double how much time you think you need on your calendar. That's something I've learned. If it's a culture shift or any change you're making, share it with your team. Remember, they didn't hear you. You have to say it seven times. You've got to email it, post it on Slack, Yammer, talk about staff meetings over and over and over again. Other team members are leading things right now and I'm experiencing, like, I didn't know that. And they're like, we told you that in this meeting and on Yammer. So I'm now experiencing, since I'm not leading, what it feels like. I didn't hear anything. What good leaders do, we create a sense of urgency. If you're leading the firm, set deadlines, make people accountable. You've got to create this. We've got to do this. We're always good to be slightly paranoid about where your organization is going and that creates a sense of urgency. And my favorite one, and I appreciate you all doing this with me today, is you've got to live in beta. You're never going to be 100%. You've got to be comfortable starting at 50%, 25%. Dan Sullivan has a great book. It's 80% works. Just do something. It's not going to be perfect. Get more and more comfortable living in beta. Beta is about change, right? And if you just keep that monster in the back of your head, I think you will have joy with all this evolution and not the sense of a burden to get it done and be playful with it. And then tell me ideas that you had so that I can learn and go back and steal your ideas and make my clients think that we're fabulous at Abacus. The only thing I'll say about the resources, two I forgot to put on there, raving fans. It's really, really easy and good. And then the elements of value by Bain. But you can Google both of those and get them. And I'm really embarrassed. I don't know how the new gold standard from the Manchester Statistical Society of 1957 got on there. But true confessions, I haven't read it. I think I emailed my assistant something, and that's what popped up. And you can tell I'm not a good proofreader. So we don't have time for questions. I apologize for that. But I didn't expect so many people in the room, so I thought it would be a little more intimate. So you're welcome to come ask me questions, Eileen questions. We'll PDF the handouts and put them on the NAPFA website since we have people who didn't get them. And the Sharpies and the Post-it notes are yours to go home and play with or to give to your children or your next-door neighbor. Thank you.

client service

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positive client experience