In the first year, everyone advised Stephanie Woo and Alex Fyon not to do this. Although business multiplied during the second year, their superiors warned that the growth wouldn’t continue.

But by year three, those managers were changing their tune.

“At every meeting, they’re encouraging people to look at the partnership model we’ve built and saying, ‘You guys should partner up with somebody who complements your skills,’” Woo said.

Woo and Fyon, both three-year MDRT members from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, are doing what seemed redundant at first: They’re taking every client meeting together. Duplicate advisors in the same client meeting would seem to be wasting one advisor’s valuable time and cutting revenue in half. But Woo and Fyon’s production together has them ranked second in a company of 7,000 advisors.

How have they done this, and why does it work so well for their 1,700 clients?

The beginning

The arrangement started in 2018, and it was closer to an exit strategy than a growth opportunity. Fyon, a friend and co-worker, agreed to service Woo’s clients while she was on maternity leave. Woo wasn’t sure she wanted to come back. Six years after somewhat unintentionally entering the financial services profession, she was unmotivated and unhappy, and indicated as much to Fyon.

Yet when she returned in 2019, Woo found not only that the financial side of her work had been protected, but she had a renewed energy and purpose for the clients, who told her they loved her, but they really loved Fyon. After dealing with one client’s particularly complicated needs, the pair realized Woo excelled at the more emotion-driven, qualitative side of advising, and Fyon was gifted with handling the numbers and quantitative side. Woo focused on young families like hers, and Fyon worked with business owners and medical professionals in the Jewish community. They discovered that their combined strengths complemented each other and delivered a superior client experience.

The idea of partnering with someone who complements the other isn’t new, but such partnerships usually result in separate operations. But Fyon and Woo joined together to create a unit that’s great at everything for everyone.

How they do it

For each meeting, the advisors call themselves “the sandwich.” Woo is the bread on each side, and Fyon is the meat in between. More specifically, Woo opens, builds and closes each client conversation, ensuring the client has room to talk about goals and the people and causes that are important to them. Fyon provides the concrete direction for fulfilling those priorities.

Previously, Woo didn’t want to get into administration or investments, and Fyon lost clients by forgetting to emotionally connect while getting to the point. “I used to vomit information way too fast, way too soon,” he said. Now the colleagues allot time for not just what the client wants to do but why they should do it.

“Alex says he can understand what to do for a client within 30 minutes, but I’m like, ‘What if the person wants to retire and go to Portugal? What if they want to buy a boat in two years? Have more kids? Buy another house or investment property?’” Woo said. “I extract the dreams, the vision for their goals, to match Alex’s vision for their finances.”

The secret sauce

When other firms ask the pair to speak about their partnership, they talk about how most advisors team up with someone just like them and collide (which happened to Fyon with another partner, who wanted the same control he had). Or they partner with a total opposite who doesn’t fill in the gaps. It might be hard for someone to relinquish part of their role or admit that they aren’t working in the same way a typical advisor does, Fyon says.

But that’s why it works.

“Steph allows me to take all the client time to structure them properly and not butt in, and I won’t butt into the goals and relationship part because I know that’s important too,” he said, noting that he talks for maybe 50 out of the meeting’s 60 minutes. “It’s tough to stay silent in a meeting, but it’s so important to not jump into the other person’s lane.”

It’s not just balance in conversation; it’s also values like work ethic. For example, says Woo: Are you both willing to work late nights, early mornings and weekends, without counting the hours? The second time Woo went on maternity leave, the two messaged constantly about building the business. This hands-on approach even occurred just before the baby arrived.

“A week before she’s about to give birth, we’re trying to fix our schedules for the 47 meetings happening in that week, and she texts me, ‘My water broke.’ I asked her, ‘Does that mean we have to cancel our meeting?’” Fyon said.

“I’m about to deliver a baby, and I’m texting for a meeting,” Woo added.

The pair was able to resume all their meetings a week later. In fact, their mom clients loved that authenticity during the pandemic. All their meetings were on Zoom, and Woo was caring for her child while in pajamas with messy hair and no makeup, so the clients felt comfortable to do the same.

Roadblocks and replication

Fyon and Woo have had conflicts because he leans toward being an action-taker and she is the planner. Thus, during a recent retirement investment season, Fyon only wanted to consider cases they could execute right away while Woo wanted to look further ahead to set the course for the next quarter.

“Sometimes I don’t feel heard,” Woo said. “Alex is trying to go fast and build a multimillion-dollar business, and I’m still human and have emotions involved and am like, ‘You didn’t even hear my goals or plans, and that’s important for the business too.’”

They both sometimes struggle with listening. Fyon says in the six years they’ve worked together, he’s never seen Woo answer a phone call (no matter who’s calling). Woo says this stems from her tendency to avoid the sort of administrative or procedural work that Fyon specializes in, and it caused considerable friction between them at the beginning of the partnership. While that friction has mostly subsided, the pair has learned there’s just no avoiding that the night before every big presentation (delivered frequently at medical clinics or small businesses of 70 to 100 people), there’s going to be anxiety and conflict between them. By maintaining respect and perspective, however, they recognize where they each are wrong in certain situations and grow faster together.

It’s a connection that many have tried to copy only to discover incompatibility or simply an unwillingness to use the formula that works so well for Woo and Fyon. Maybe it’s that they also have two additional advisors who handle the family clients while Woo and Fyon (with help from two administrative assistants) take on financial services for medical professionals and business owners. Maybe it’s the additional
professionals, from attorneys to mortgage brokers to notaries, who provide further expertise.

Or maybe it’s the way they take time to celebrate successes and remember to build fun into their journey as advisors. That could mean a team lunch or a virtual reality outing or even a scavenger hunt at IKEA.

“We were each individually alone for the first four to five years in the industry and had nobody to bounce success or hardships off of,” Fyon said. “Having fun in this process is better than being lonely.”