A 47 year reflection
Don’t view this as a marketing plan…it is a life plan.
The goal of that life plan is to create a velcro-strong relationship with every family you represent.
“Really understand and respect the people who already love your brand”. (Vitalie Taittinger)
And read between the lines…they are saying to you:
“I don’t need so much to know what you know, but I need to know that you care”.
Aristotle’s “ethos” refers to your establishing authority, credibility and trust through your character and ethics.
“It’s not that we are so good; it is that everyone else is so bad”.
These words were spoken many decades ago by the then-CEO of Nordstrom.
“Talent hits a target that no one else can hit; Genius hits a target that no one else can see”.
Arthur Shopenhauer
Distance yourself from the standard industry definitions. Redefine your persona to your clients. Here are some alternatives:
Change agent: agent of change. Our job is to increase the success and happiness of every client.
Glue-maker: we know our clients and create affiliations amongst them.
Innovator: we stand out because of our ceaseless commitment to redefining our industry. This is a very deliberate exercise: I start each day of the third week of each and every month by staring at the wall in my office. My mission is to invent something new by friday, and I have successfully been delivering that for the last 2 ½ years. We keep an innovation log and each idea goes through ideation and beta-testing. If successful, we launch across the practice.
Once you have a bona-fide good idea: lock on it like a heat-sensing missile until it is implemented.
Truffle pig: you need some time to be a truffle pig…time to just nose around in the dirt and see what your senses can fall upon. Ferret around randomly looking for something you haven’t seen before and get lost for a while. The thing that is “missing” is the hardest thing to see! Use Frank Lloyd Wright’s design philosophy of expansion followed by compression to see things differently. You may come away empty-handed; but you might find that truffle that will inspire innovation that sets you apart.
So…what does this really mean? E.g. open your word and excel template files that you give to clients. Stare at them, and most importantly, ask “what’s missing”? How can you improve and increase value in these documents?
Goal-setter and scorecard: One of your jobs is to coach/coax your client into keeping an eye on the future and also for you to create metrics of attainment.
Reinvent your annual, year-end client meeting, so that they don’t view it on par with a root canal. I always opened client annual meetings by saying “You and I have great things to achieve this morning”…stage is set! Something special is going to happen!
Add new, non-traditional topics to the agenda:
· Introduce management accounting, if appropriate, to their business analysis
· Build multi-year comparative metrics to track progress
· Dip a toe into their strategic planning process. Maybe they don’t have one! That’s an opportunity for value-added
· I always close the meeting with the wild-card question, “So…what’s not working”?
Regular practices
Things my poodle taught me: When my wife and I travelled, we never kenneled our dogs, but brought in a resident dog walker. The best part of a vacation is the first 5 minutes back home, when you come through the door, and the dog looks up and sees that mom & dad are back. She immediately runs to locate her toy, and then ensues a major love fest for 3-5 minutes, after which she returns to her bed and everything is now back to normal. So, first…give gifts. We give away 3-400 books a year to our clients…on various topics, including finance, health, longevity, mindfulness, etc. We also find interesting, different consumer products. Second, greet every client that comes in the door like our poodle did. Make them feel that they are the most important person in your world.
1. Nick Murray inspired me to send out one hand-written thank-you note every week, and I have religiously done so for over 35 years.
2. I recently experienced some personal tribulations and came to realize that society these days is very much me-oriented and not at all empathic or empathetic. This “ah-hah” moment has added a new ritual to my life: every month I now scour my world of affiliations and ask the question: “Who’s hurting?”, and I reach out to them.
3. Annually, for over 25 years, we have hosted a client appreciation weekend at a world-class local resort. Attendance is approx. 110 people. I call it the annual reunion of our tribe. We spend approx. $70,000 in 24 hours with this event, and it is my favourite weekend of the year!
4. Ex-Covid, we organize an annual client road trip… a 5-7 day excursion for 8-10 participants, guided by one of us. Destinations have typically been here in Western Canada, but also included two trips to the art capital, Santa Fe New Mexico.
5. We formed a semi/retired men’s organization, called PIER (Partners in Engaged Retirement). I personally host each summer 6 deck dinner parties, each with approx. 12 attendees (see also Glue-maker).
6. “To surprise and delight” is one of my personal commitments.
Building your own house
Read-read-read… I have been reading forty non-fiction books a year for the last 40 years. Take notes! Elsewise, all those reading hours are merely entertainment, not advancement.
Spend productive time mixing with yourself. Historically, I have taken 3 3-day retreats per year at a nearby spa resort. I pretty much lock myself in the room, with meal room service, and read, think and write. I keep what history would call a “Commonplace Book” – updated to iPhone notes technology – where I regularly notate thoughts and ideas for future consideration at my retreats.
You need to mix with others, too…preferably bright folks and, no offence, I spend very little time mixing with professional peers. Get outside your genre. There is the story in the US about a conference get-together across genres…between vascular surgeons and pipe-fitters. A key pathway to innovation is cross-fertilization. Become an intellectual hunter/gatherer.
Approach innovation with an open mind and heart. Embrace this: There is no such thing as a bad idea! It’s just that some ideas are not quite good enough to execute.
On hubris and group problem-solving: Our model works like this – “we are two half-wits who, together, make one fine brain”. This eliminates ego about who is the smartest person around the table, and who is the genius that solved the problem. By the end, none of us can re-construct the thought processes contributed by all.
Fame
I received a life-time achievement award a few years back, and was obliged to say a few words. I opened by saying that I was very honoured, but wasn’t quite sure what the fuss was about for whatever I had done in my career. I said that my goal every day was quite simple: “Do the RIGHT THINGS and DO THINGS RIGHT”. And somehow, that turned out to be special…
Fortune
Money’s good. My income at the end of my career was 3-4 times greater than I dreamed of as a young man…perhaps you can blame that on low expectations! If you embrace one thing that I have written here, it is this: If you do the RIGHT THINGS and do THINGS RIGHT, the money will follow…do not chase it, as that will become transparent to those who pay you.
Two-thirds into my career, it was time to shift goals. For the last 15+ years, my goal, simply, has been to create beauty…all around me…beauty in my relationships…beauty in the financial health we build for our clients…beauty in the physical worlds around me…beauty in the wider world around me through philanthropy.
Lastly, at age 70, clients ask me if I am going to retire? My response is:
“No…there are still TOO many things that I haven’t thought of yet. I promise to retire when I have thought of them all…”
Don’s book on personal finance: The PloughMan and the Astronaut, the Evolutionary Journey to WealthNess was published in 2023 click here to buy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ploughman-Astronaut-Evolutionary-Journey-WealthNess/dp/1039187900
