We see advisors who have some skills and believe they are not replicable. If this is you, you hire staff to do rudimentary tasks that they don’t want to do or have no time to do. Then you see that the salary you pay them is an expense. And once you see that, it’s no different from paying somebody to wash your toilet for you. And you know what happens to people who wash the toilet for you? They have enough, and then they quit. Then you hire again, and rehiring costs you 30 percent more as a cost to your business. I want to try to shift your paradigm to something more advanced: that you should free up time for innovation.

You need free time. You need to smell the roses. And while you do this, your staff should be trained to make decisions for your business, not just doing rudimentary tasks for you. Once they develop, they contribute. They have autonomy over their work, and you will feel like it’s an investment. You will shift their salary in your accounting from cost to investment. And when they see growth, they will stay. So you don’t have to rehire. Your cost won’t go up.

Does this happen to you? You have a good relationship with a client. She’s been buying many plans from you. And one fine day you find out she bought a financial plan from a banker five to 10 times the premium that she paid you, and then you feel disappointed. You put in so much effort. All those birthday cakes you sent meant nothing. You feel so sad. Don’t blame her, because the reason she paid a higher premium to the bank is because she’s not buying from the relationship manager in the bank; she’s buying from the bank. The relationship manager represents an institution. The client knows if the relationship manager is gone, she can still walk up to the branch and demand an explanation or request any servicing tasks.

But when clients buy from you, they ask if they should write the check out to your name. They see you as an individual. Because, sometimes, you do appear as an individual. Sometimes, you do think of yourself as an individual. Because it’s a relationship. But then you have to face that problem of feeling disappointed when they buy more. So make yourself an institution. Don’t exist as an individual. And the minimum you need to not be an individual is just two. Be an entity. Let the clients feel like there’s a team of professionals serving them. That means your staff member should also be a professional, should also have very specialized knowledge.

When people trust us, I always talk about the two C’s. First, they must know our character. We’re sincere. We’re kind to them. We have a good relationship with them. But the other C is about competence. They trust you also because of your competence. They trust your staff because your staff is competent. Your staff should have expertise in a specific function that is serving your clients’ needs. You are just the principal of your team. So sometimes my staff talks to my clients more than me. And I like that.

I’m the principal advisor. I have an assistant advisor. Notice it’s not “advisor’s assistant.” She’s also an advisor because she has knowledge about what we do. She might analyze the clients’ data. She might have solutions that she would provide for me as options, which I would then finalize to recommend to the clients. And then we have a service officer who will perform servicing requests and also data mining. Data mining is understanding what your demographics are, which segment you want to go for in your existing clientele. I have about 400 active clients.

When I see the client, I collect quantitative and qualitative information. I take the hard data, the numbers, and then I listen to all the secrets they’re going to tell me about their relationships. I bring this information back. My assistant advisor calculates figures and does some research. My service officer then curates the client’s portfolio. Then I go back, and I give transactional and non-transactional advice. Transactional means their products. Non-transactional means I don’t get paid. And so I’m not Top of the Table. Then the assistant advisor navigates underwriting. Sometimes, my assistant knows the underwriting of my cases better than me. I have to get briefed by her. The service officer starts to onboard the client.

I prefer not to call them my PAs or my assistants. I prefer to call them my staff members. What words you use will shape your mind.

Sell using service. I don’t mean giving good service and then sitting there waiting for sales to come. It means your action in service directly translates into sales. Show clients what they get after the sale. You have to show them a crystal ball of what it feels like to be your client before you do the closing. Imagine going to a condominium sales office, and they show you what they call a show flat. If you’ve ever been to these places, these show flats are furnished. They’re not empty. Why do they have to furnish it? Because they have to let you imagine what it feels like to buy that apartment.

Translate that to our service. If I could, I’d do a video using AI of my client lying down on a hospital bed and my giving him $2 million in claims, just to show him that 20 years later I’ll be here. So you have to show them what they will get.

Use succession as part of a brand. We always talk about death, disability and units, but we are human. Who knows? Maybe I’m the one who dies first, and the staff members will be the ones who will continue managing the portfolio. Sometimes, when my clients ask me, “Joseph, what if you die,” I know I got them. I know they will buy when they ask this question because I made them ask this question subliminally. So you’re not just serving them until you die. You’re serving them beyond your death.

Your staff members should also have your values. Sometimes, when you tell your clients that you want to serve them well, they might think that it’s a sales type of talk. But when your staff talks about you and exude your values, it’s a lot more convincing. And there’s another good thing about having the same values. You don’t need to micromanage your staff because you know they will make decisions for you as if you were making those decisions.