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Hello, and welcome to the PracticeLab podcast, where we talk to top advisors about what makes them successful, so that you can apply those lessons in your own business.
I'm your host, Melissa Phipps, and today I’m handing the mic to Wassan Kasey, a practice management consultant here at Capital Group. Wassan talked to Ben Wong, a CFP and AIF with Mariner Wealth Advisors in Pleasanton, California, about ways he has worked to future-proof his practice. This is a big topic of interest for Wassan and her team, and Ben is a great example of many of the different ways advisors are evolving and adapting, expanding their teams and their client base. Ben has been in the business nearly 40 years, going from a solo advisor to an Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction, or OSJ branch, supervising others in his broker-dealer’s region while building his book of business serving what he calls “salt of the earth” clients. He makes it a point to not prejudge clients, and his firm serves anyone who is serious about saving, which has helped the firm retain multiple generations of clients and grow steadily with referrals.
In this episode, you’ll hear about the ensemble approach that Ben’s team takes, and the impact that has on service. It also helps with efficiency, and he’ll talk a bit about his love of analyzing workflows as well.
This conversation was so great that we broke it into two parts. Find out more about his succession plan and hiring tips in part two: A succession plan that creates wins for the team, with Ben Wong. With that, let’s join Wassan and Ben in the PracticeLab.
Wassan Kasey: Ben Wong, welcome to the PracticeLab.
Ben Wong: Thank you.
WK: It's great to have you. One of the things that we've been doing a lot of research and information gathering on… we’ve been finding ways that advisors can future-proof their practice. And so you've been doing this on a few fronts. For example, you recently sold your firm, and you've been through a consolidation. Maybe we should start by talking a bit about your firm and your approach, and how it will look going forward?
BW: Sure. I guess, if you look at the firm in general, I started as a solo practitioner. So, not unlike so many people that came into the investment business just as an individual, gathering clients, and so forth. With time, I ended up building kind of an OSJ-style branch. And I think that was just kind of a natural progression back in the day. You really just did some supervision and collected an override. That was typically the model back in the time.
But, probably over the last 15 years, we spent a lot of time (and I think it was an organic transition) as we moved to become very much an ensemble-style practice where we worked as a team. The clients were all part of the team. And each person took different responsibilities.
I think that one of the differentiators is if you really consider the practice as being a client-first type of practice where decisions are made, really with the client at first and in mind, then the team approach really makes sense. That when somebody calls the office, and if they're looking for service, they're looking for help, really looking at how would you want to be treated? Or how would you like that experience to be? And I think that's what we spent a lot of time doing. And that just naturally evolved into a team approach where when a client calls, I think they want to be served, they want to have their questions answered promptly and not necessarily funnel you to the person, and if he's not available, not be able to have access to that person. So I think it started as simple as that.
WK: Walk me through that. What sort of made you see that client’s perspective and how they would be affected by the service model and how you made shifts along the way for that?
BW: I think that's probably a pretty easy question. I spend a lot of time thinking about what annoys me when I deal with service professionals, right? It's as simple as, I think the most annoying thing for me going into the doctor's office is when you get handed that clipboard to fill your name out 15 times and the insurance number. So we tried to avoid that. And we don't have the clipboard out. We really tried to have somebody interview them or come up with some method to provide the information that's comfortable for them. And nowadays, a lot of people are comfortable just inputting into a PDF form. We actually have a question/answer-type factfinder with video. And it's not that painful for clients. We try not to make that that painful.
Another thing was, that was early on, I always thought when I called somebody, I really like to get the answer and get something done when I'm on the phone the first time. And I think in our business originally it was very difficult to even find out what a client had in their account. In the early days, we didn't have a CRM [customer relationship management software], we didn't have account aggregation on the screen. You had a bunch of different accounts with a lot of different vendors. And even to tell the client how much money they had in the account was a process. You'd have to call them back, assemble a spreadsheet. So early on, we started doing downloading. (As a matter of fact, American Funds was pretty instrumental in this. I don't know if you knew this, but American Funds was one of the first people to provide advisors with DST [data storage technology] data directly from the feed. So we started downloading data from you back in 1993. If you can believe that.)
And then what we were able to do is, when a client calls, you can do something and another advisor could do was tell them how much was in their account at that point in time, and then they felt like they got their question answered. And you efficiently did it without having a staff person or somebody call back two or three times.
So, I mean, those are just some of the things is just always thinking and being in the client's shoes. What are they trying to accomplish? And how do they feel that they're being served?
WK: Yeah, I mean, it's such a human approach to the business. And, you know, I was, as you're talking about this, two words, struck me: not painful. So how has your staff evolved to help with this type of service model? What sort of evolutionary aspects have you put in and training, etcetera?
BW: Yeah. I'm going to say where we were different, possibly … I think the least what I see out there is an advisor, and for lack of a CSA — client service associate — is a common term I think people have. I always wanted the person picking up the phone to be able to answer most of the questions that I can answer. And so, we would hire people. And typically, I was looking for licensed people. Maybe advisors that weren't necessarily, you know, salespeople, rainmaker-type advisors, but were great advisors. They’re great advisors. They're good at financial planning, and they knew tax, they knew investments. And I really wanted them to be available to answer questions on the phone. Especially if you want to scale — there’s only one of me. So if I get people with the, who had the skills to do that, we would hire them.
And so we ended up building out more of an employee advisor model. So I've got a lot of advisors that were employees. They're hired not to necessarily build a book, but to service the clients.
WK: I mean, that's such a, clearly a strong business model. And when you thought through that, and structured everything out, were there any immediate results that you saw with the client relationships? Or did it take a bit of time? Walk me through what you saw with your clients when you started building all this out?
BW: Yeah, that's a good question, too. I think, as advisors, we think our clients can't do without us. And we do the best at everything we do, right? And I think at the beginning, clients are a little hesitant to talk to somebody else. But as they build relationships with the advisors, I find that I have a lot of clients now that barely ask for me. They're typically very comfortable. And one of the things that I talk to the clients about is that we have a team. We're all here to help you. When you call, you can ask, let people know what needs to be done and what you're looking for. And we'll make sure we'll get you to the right person. And if Ben's not available, hopefully somebody who can get that taken care of for you, really without speaking to me unnecessarily.
But I found that clients actually will gravitate, like I said, and they'll pick. And we left it up to the client; we didn't assign an advisor to a client. We typically, we had a little profile sheet. So I would introduce those client-facing team members to the client with the sheet or in person if they, if the advisors were in the office. And then, as they were attracted or wanted to work with someone. They called Wassan the first time, they liked working with Wassan, they were free to call Wassan in the future. And we would just, we just let it organically happen that way.
WK: So I want to pivot a little bit. I know that everybody you work with gets a financial plan, and you don't have asset minimums. And you work with, in your terms, “anybody who is serious about saving.” So, along those lines, do you have a typical client? Or do they tend to come from all types of backgrounds?
BW: It's funny you ask that one, because if you'd asked me two weeks ago, I would have said, “Well, they just, they come from all different backgrounds,” which I still think they do. But we actually ran some metrics last week on it. So you're one of the first people to probably hear the metrics, but we went through it. And I was actually a little surprised. It's pretty diverse still. Number one, though, they tend to be managerial, white-collar-management-style people. Another big portion of the client base are involved in education, teachers and so forth. And that could be just because we have that office up near University of Sacramento. And we had, we just have an abundance of teachers, we noticed, and a lot of people in the medical profession, not necessarily physicians, but working in all sorts of areas of the medical field. But those were the three big ones that we found out recently, because we just did some demographics on it last week.
WK: That's great. When you think about your client base, and you think about the cross section between the clients you serve, and then the communities that your offices are in, what sort of alignment do you see? From that perspective? Do you think that your client base, you know, typically represents the broader community, aside from their job function?
BW: That's another thing. This may sound really sappy, Wassan, and it's one of those things is maybe even sound canned because I say it quite often. But, you know, I think one common denominator between most of my clients is I always describe them as being “salt of the earth.” That's always been my description. People ask, “What are your clients like?” I just kind of have a good, “salt of the earth” client base. I'm going to say in general, most of them didn't inherit a lot of money. They earned their money. The money's important to them; their financial resources are important. They're careful with it. I don't have a client base of ultra-high net worth clients, you know, C-suite type people. But I'm going to say in general that's it. They're just people that are concerned, and they worked hard for their money, and they want to take care of it, pass it on and pass those things on to the children, too.
WK: When you think about that sort of wealth transfer from your clients to the next generation — or perhaps they got a transfer of wealth to them — how has that impacted your business, if at all, as far as either servicing, retaining assets, you know, working with that next generation? Has that impacted you at all?
BW: Yeah, I think that's one of our strengths. I think we've done a real good job of retaining multigenerational clients. We have clients that the grandparents, the kids, we even have great-grandparents and great-grandchildren at this point in time. We've always wanted to CRM, where we could do a web where we could actually graphically see all the tentacles that go out. But we have a lot of families. And I think part of it is just the client has been with us so long, and they want to impart that same experience on to their children. And so they bring the kids in. The kids want to impart that on the grandchildren. And I think part of the same thing is we don't have a minimum on those kinds of clients. We don't turn them away, especially if they're if they're part of a part of a string of clients, you know, generational clients with us.
WK: And you know, that sort of low minimum, plan-for-all approach, and you said that it specifically helped you grow your intergenerational business. So when you think about growth of your practice, how did it impact that? What would you say, I think more specifically, what would you say to advisors who may balk at accepting low-minimum clients?
BW: I would say, “Just don't prejudge." That would be, that would be my … there's so many clients we look back on that we just took care of them. I mean, they weren't big profit centers. But they were serious about what they were doing. And they've blossomed into great clients. And sometimes just the referrals from that person, they may not have been the person generating direct revenue, but their uncle or this person that they knew that inherited money, they're the first people to refer them to you.
I think, this comment comes also from the luxury of being in the business a long time, but is that I have advisors that are coming up in the business, right? And they need their “at-bats.” They just need to practice. you need to hone your skills. So having a younger client, somebody that situation that isn't maybe that difficult or complicated is great for at-bats for a newer advisor.
WK: And what about the growth as a practice? How has that helped the growth of your practice, specifically?
BW: Oh, we, I mean, we have done nothing but referral for probably 20-plus years. And that just comes from the internal base. I mean, we do have outside referral sources too. But most referrals come from within the system.
WK: That’s fantastic. That's such a testament to you and the rest of the team and the way that you service everybody. And it seems to me that you just have a really approachable practice, you know? It's one that's aligned with the broader subset of the community. That's pretty remarkable.
You were talking before about the service. And I think when you and I talked one-off, you termed it as “over service.” And you're very proud about your level of “over service,” when it comes to your clients. Can you give us a couple of examples of what that looks like?
BW: Sure. I think one of the lines I always use with clients on the way out is, “Please call when you have a question.” I mean, that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to help you make those decisions. When you call, I’m going to encourage you to call. We don’t hit a button when you call, and you don't start getting billed or in 15-minute increments. Call when you have a question. If we can help you with it, we’ll help you with it. It’s that simple. If it’s a lease arrangement on a car, education. And I think a lot of the questions that we get sometimes aren’t that financial, if that makes sense? Maybe it’s marriage. It’s how do we budget? How do we discuss the budget of the wedding with the daughter? You know, how do we decide how much educational money we want to set aside for grandchildren? And how do we divvy it up equitably? Those kinds of questions.
But when it comes to just paperwork, things that clients are unfamiliar with, it's even at retirement. If they're retiring, and you get that retirement package from your company that you have no idea what to do with, because there's 40 pages. I'll say, you know we do that all day long. Whenever you give one of our advisors a call, XYZ will spend the time to walk you through that document package. So we can get you through that in 10 minutes, where you'll spend two hours. And they really appreciate those kinds of things.
And I think that goes through all, I mean, even loan applications. They just don't understand the terminology. We deal with it all day. Feel free to give us a call; somebody will sit down with you and walk you through that. And for them, sometimes it's just an overwhelming situation. But if they've got somebody to help them and walk them through, they really appreciate it. But we'll do those things for clients.
WK: I love that, because what you're ultimately saying is that you're not just there for financial advice. You're really there for, sort of, life advice, too. I mean, you know?
BW: I think more of it, more of it becomes life advice as our business is transitioning, I really do. I think the softer, the softer skills become more and more important.
WK: Yeah, I mean, ultimately are making their lives easier. And I think that is so remarkable, because oftentimes, maybe clients aren't as cognizant of the value in that. And they don't quite understand that part of what they're paying for is everything that you just outlined, you know, budget for wedding, thinking about grandkids, education, how to equitably allot for that. You're truly making their lives easier. And I think that's a pretty remarkable thing.
BW: I think one thing that we always felt, or I always feel good about, and everybody in the office feels good about, is if a client says this: “I feel so much better since I talked to you.” And that's usually when we feel everybody knows they did a good job if the client says, “I feel so much better, I was so nervous when I came in, I just feel so much better after speaking with you,” or anybody else in the office, we feel we did our job there.
WK: I love that. What a great mark of success.
Melissa Phipps: That’s it for part one. Thanks to Ben Wong and to Wassan Kasey for the great interview. If you would like to hear more, check out part two, where Ben gets into specifics about hiring and his succession plan. He’s a great talker, so I know you’ll want to hear more.
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I hope you found this helpful, and I look forward to joining you on the next episode of the PracticeLab podcast.
