Financial Planning for the Future

Taking a more standardized approach

With a set number of hours in the day, you must maximize the time available to grow your business. One way to accomplish this is by developing consistent, repeatable workflows to manage different elements of your practice, including financial planning and client service. Taking a more standardized approach can create greater efficiency in your office and more capacity to focus on the activities that drive your value.

In creating a process for financial planning, you can implement a holistic wealth management approach that’s triggered by various life events—when a client tells you they’re getting married, what do you do? What about when they’re looking to sell their business? Having a pre-determined workflow can benefit your practice in several ways.

Thoughtfully design your client experience

Devising your planning process allows you to shape a consistent client journey, no matter what stage of life your clients may be in. You can examine each major life milestone and determine what response, meetings, informational materials, and other considerations may be needed. From there, you can map out how they will all look together over the course of your clients’ lives. Each event can flow naturally into the next stage, which creates an experience where nothing falls through the cracks. Doing so can help clients gain a greater sense of confidence in their future and your ability to serve them.

Set client expectations

Once you’ve mapped the overall experience, you can present your holistic approach to clients and walk them through what your relationship will entail. Explain what they can expect from you in terms of communication, support, and preparedness materials for whatever they may face. If you have online account access or digital educational materials, show clients how they can stay connected to their finances even when they aren’t in your office. Laying out these parameters in advance gives clients a greater level of transparency into your services and approach, and reduces the amount of time spent managing one-off requests.

Save time and reduce rework

Having a standardized approach means you can automatically deploy certain resources when needed, rather than always having to craft a plan from scratch. It also means you won’t have to recreate materials for certain topics every time a client needs to address them. This isn’t to say you won’t include personalized elements for individual clients. Starting with a standard baseline will allow you to act quickly at a time when you’re needed most and increase the time you’re able to spend planning for any complex challenge your clients may be facing.

By creating repeatable processes that enable more effective client service, you can focus your time and energy on the tasks that matter most to you.