When is joint work in the best interest of your clients and when is it not? MDRT Executive Committee members Gregory B. Gagne, ChFC, MDRT Immediate Past President and a 25-year MDRT member from Exeter, New Hampshire, USA, and Clay Gillespie, CFP, CLU, MDRT Second Vice President and a 23-year MDRT member from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, explained how they know when the time is right for collaboration and how to maximize the success of a partnership. (Hear the full episode at mdrt.org/podcast.)
Gagne: If you want to level up your business enterprise, one thing to do would be to find somebody who’s ahead of you and let them help and mentor you through the process while you ride in the shotgun seat. Really ride to learn. Don’t try to drive the meetings and/or the engagement with the prospective client. Repeat that process several times before you determine that it’s time for you to fly solo and do it on your own.
Gillespie: My idea of joint work is slightly different. I did what Greg said earlier in my career because I was learning what to do, and you want to learn from people who are better than you. So, I spent a lot of time doing joint work at the start. Now joint work is required when they come in, and it’s not my specialty. It’s like a general practitioner doing heart surgery. I may know a little bit about it, perhaps more than the average person, but I shouldn’t be the one doing it. So, if you really are trying to do what’s in the best interest of the client and there’s somebody else at your firm or somebody else you know who’s better at it than you, it’ll have a better outcome. It’s always nice getting 25% of something rather than 100% of nothing, and the client is better off.
Gagne: A lot of the joint work that we do involves professionals from other occupations, more so than somebody in our firm who might be a little more knowledgeable in certain areas. It’s more of a team approach that we utilize to drive to desired outcomes.
Gillespie: Yeah, the joint work is with the lawyers, the accountants — and working with them rather than against them.
How do you determine when you are or are not the right person?
Gillespie: This is pretty simple for me: My No. 1 prospect is somebody five years from retirement. My No. 1 client is somebody retired. So, there are a lot of people who come in and don’t fall into my specialty. They say, “Oh, I’ve got this problem.” I’m thinking, those are young-people problems. I don’t deal with young-people problems. I’ll refer them to somebody who deals with that area. It’s part of the process. If I don’t understand it, I don’t do it, and I send it on to someone else. I remember early in my career I would take on a case that I shouldn’t have. You spend 20 hours working on it, you’re reinventing the wheel, and you may or may not get the case because they’re dealing with another advisor who actually is good at it. There’s no winning this game. Do what you’re good at.
Gagne: An example of that for me would be when it comes to college planning. I have two younger advisors that just recently wrapped up their college degrees. They know firsthand because they just lived it what it takes to get through school, what our financial-aid application process looks like, what the lending opportunities might be, how to work with some of the colleges, etc. That is not my wheelhouse. Like you, Clay, I work with people who are about five years or so out from retirement and/or retired already and would like to stay that way and make work optional. I have a difficult time relating to the college-planning process at this point in my career, so handing that ball off to somebody who is good at that allows me to spend more time working on the clients I can best serve.
Gillespie: Yeah. It has added benefits where my staff knows exactly the process the clients are going to go through. They know what reports we’re going to run. They know what advice we’re going to give once the reports are done. It’s so systematized, and I can’t be out-retirement-incomed, because unless there’s somebody who specializes in it, I’m better at it, because that’s all I do. That’s the phrase I always use with my clients: “The big difference between you and me is you retire once. I help people retire every day.” I’ve seen the good and the bad, both emotionally and financially, about retirement. I want to deal with people who are like that, and I’m good at it. But if I have to do a disability policy, that would take me hours of research and study while the guy down the hall knows exactly what he’s doing and it’s the back of the hand for him. I have no idea. If you actually want to go into a new specialty, that’s when you sit in on meetings and you learn. But you can’t be good at everything, and I have no idea why people try.
