Yes, if there is a fee you should charge that fee to existing clients as well. Particularly your new Ideal Clients even though they come from existing client base. Some advisors offer their existing clients a preferred price on the first year’s planning fee because they are existing clients.

This is a common mistake of advisors who are new to the idea of building an Ideal Client Community and you are missing one of the coolest things about the Being Done™ Journey. If you only accept clients who meet your Predictable Minimum Annual Recurring Revenue now you will either end up with more total revenue/year when you get done or you can be done sooner. It is common for advisors during the Being Done™ Journey to realize that they need more revenue to build their staff and Deliverables Team, or that it’s nice to have extra money for quality of life things, or they use the excess to fund a foundation or some other worthwhile philanthropic goal. My advice is that you set a Predictible Minimum Annual Recurring Revenue number and honor it, rather than accepting clients who don’t meet your Ideal Client Profile, but will grow into it later.

You can partner with others in your office, firm, or community to deliver on the Values Based Financial Planning™ promise. The Values Based Financial Planning™ promise is a comprehensive, written financial plan, and implementation and accountability service and support. Who can you partner with to write the plan? Who can you partner with to provide the investment expertise? Who can you partner with for solid advice in various areas of insurance? Who can you partner with to take care of the tax and legal issues? We call this building your Deliverables Team. Your job is to be the Trusted Advisor and the Client Relations Manager. The Subject Matter, or technical experts, are your Deliverables Team. Nobody is smart enough or has the time to be an expert in all of the areas necessary to truly fully serve clients.

I am one of the people who would not only question this approach, but be appalled by it. Because what you described is most definitely NOT the point of Values Based Financial Planning™. The point of Values Based Financial Planning™ is to help your clients align their financial choices with their goals and values so they can make better decisions; not just about their money, but their entire lives. For example, the client's decision to hire you and have a written, comprehensive financial plan which they implement has a profound impact on much more than the client's money. Your job is much less about their money and much more about making sure they do the work required to achieve their goals. When they delegate their financial decisions to you this frees them up to invest this time for the much more important things in life than money. Check out the Quality of Life Enhancer Exercise® on page 82 of Values Based Financial Planning™ book. I appreciate, however, that you are new to...

If your survival clients provide you with enough money to keep you afloat while you build your financial planning business, then you turn the product business for non-Ideal Clients down. You might want to be prepared with a recommendation or referral to another financial professional so they get taken care of. On the other hand, if turning the business down will cause you to go broke, you do the transactions and at some point in the future you transition your non-Ideal Clients out.

The best way for a person to discover how Values-Based Financial Planning™ is different is by experiencing it for themselves. That is the purpose of the Financial Road Map Interview™. If you do it the way we teach it, it is an experience for the client. I discourage you from trying to replace experiences with explanations or presentations. This is a distinction between Trusted Advisors and Sales people. Sales People want to convince, persuade, explain, educate, and present. This leads to handling objections and then attempting to close the deal. Trusted Advisors operate very differently. We help people make smart choices by facilitating experiences that make the right decision easy, even if that decision is to not work with us.

Trusted Advisors have no reason to have a website. Advisors who have websites have them for two reasons: 1. They still think like old-school salespeople and marketers. 2. Work avoidance. It’s easier to work on a website than to ask for referrals, make follow-up calls, and conduct phone consultations. The false hope is that somehow the website will attract Ideal Clients. They don’t. Certainly not at a high enough level to justify the time and money invested. The same is true for advisors who work on personal branding campaigns to create brochures, press kits, and financial newsletters. These tools are not necessary, but some advisors tend to be attracted to creating websites, brochures, post cards, and newsletters that brag about their credentials and personal qualities to build little monuments to their egos. Really, they aren’t necessary. It’s supposed to be all about your clients, not all about you. Save yourself the time and money.

One a month is a good target for your first year, depending on how many you will be converting from your existing clientele. If you have a large clientele with many Ideal Clients, it may be much more than that.

Not similar enough to be very effective. A few have tried. Why do you suppose you haven’t heard about them? Because nobody copies it very well. I invented it out of necessity in the 1980s when I was an advisor and over 21 years of teaching it we have refined and pretty much perfected it. More importantly, we are very good at teaching Values-Based Financial Planning™ and supporting you with the necessary coaching to successfully implement and get big results. The most successful advisors don’t waste time trying to copy or reinvent anything. They find something that works and follow the process.

How you get paid is up to you. What’s clear is that the old-school model of getting paid big commissions up front is not good for the client and it’s not good for you. Whether you charge for the plan or do the plan as part of the annual compensation paid by the client is also up to you. It’s done both ways very effectively. The real decision you have to make is do you want to stay in the old world or move into the new world. If you want to move into the new world, you’ll do comprehensive financial plans to become a real financial planner, versus an investment or insurance salesperson who uses planning as a vehicle to sell products.

Under no circumstance should you ever make a cold call. If you have had success cold-calling then you most certainly have the communication skills and the self-confidence to go to your existing clients, your friends, your family, and every person you meet in the course of running your life, i.e.: your dry cleaner, your dentist, your doctors, etc. and do a Financial Road Map® with them. There are specific scripts that teach you how to do this.

As soon as possible with existing Team Members and during the interview process with future potential hires.

You have to decide whether your primary allegiance is to your clients or to your company. Who do you think your clients think your primary allegiance is to? Make new friends. Hang out with different people. But, whatever you do, put your clients first and behave like a Trusted Advisor and not a salesperson.

During Commitment to Hire Conversation™, when they ask how much you charge, simply tell them that you do not charge a separate fee for the plan and that your annual fee of % of their net worth or assets includes you creating their plan.

Maybe you don’t need to. How are you currently being paid? Is it enough? If it’s not enough, then sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and tell clients the truth. It could sound like this, “After taking my business planning to the next level and re-doing the math, both in terms of time and money, I have discovered that in order to truly serve my clients at the highest level I can only have number of clients and each of my clients has to generate $ amount of revenue per year in order for our business to work and to pay me enough money to achieve my family’s financial goals while I help you achieve yours. Here’s how it will work in terms of the value we will provide for you and how much it will cost… (explain it to them). What do you think?" My experience is that people are happy to pay for the value they receive and very much appreciate people being candid with them. Trust the process. We have been teaching this for 21 years. It works.

You will need to very proactively engage in the referral process, including the self referral process. Your Accountability Coach can help you with this. It’s really not as big of a problem as it may feel to you. You simply need to make contact with everyone you know, do lots of Financial Road Map Interviews™ and get hired and paid to do your work. You should be highly motivated to do so… everyday. Be careful not to waste your prime time thinking about what you need to do instead of actually doing it.

The treadmill you describe is very common. We spend our lives coaching advisors who are in exactly the same predicament to get off that treadmill forever. Follow our process for organizing your calendar. It is well described in your Mastery Series™ 1. Never abandon one important thing in your business to completely focus on another. It’s career suicide. One third to client service, one-third to client acquisition and one third to building and leading your Deliverables Team – what you call your back office. We have the resources, programs, and services to help you with all three. Let’s say that you work 45 hours / week. That means that 15 hours – not a minute more – is invested in client service. 15 hours – not a minute less – is invested in referral-based client acquisition, and 15 hours to running your business. The average Financial Advisor spends less than 2 hours / week engaged in meaningful client acquisition. It does not take long when you consistently do Committed Advisor work...

We teach a very specific and very effective referral process which is much more efficient. Talk to your Accountability Coach about whether or not you are ready to move into this area of what we teach.

There is a certain truth that business development is a numbers game, but that doesn’t mean talking to anybody with a pulse and hoping to stumble across an Ideal Client. You most definitely want to keep track of your activity and results. Our most committed advisors do this through a very robust spreadsheet in our Committed Advisor Study Group program. This group of advisors averages one Ideal Client for slightly less than every 5 referrals received. This is a very cost-effective and productive way to build your business.

When you do this all by referral only you enjoy a much better response to scheduling appointments. We teach a Phone Consultation™ based on understanding the personal motivators of the people you are referred to. When you understand a lot about a person because your clients tell you what matters to them, people are much more receptive to your calls and to meeting with you. Otherwise, they will push back and reject your offers because it feels like a generic sales pitch. This is all very well explained and demonstrated in the Mastery Series™ 2. Work with your Accountability Coach to determine your readiness for this program.