What were the biggest challenges preventing you from moving from Court of the Table to Top of the Table?

I went from being a regular member to Top of the Table, and then fell back to Court of the Table for a year and then back to Top of the Table. So, I skipped a step. For me, the challenge was case size and activity. When I first made Top of the Table, I had a couple of very large cases, and the following year I didn’t have those, so I fell back to Court of the Table. Then I raised my average case size and number of transactions to get there consistently, along with running assets under management and doing fee-based planning.

What are the most significant changes you made to overcome those difficulties, and how could you tell that the changes were working? What should others know about how to follow your example?

The single biggest thing is I charged fees for doing planning. Unless you’re going to do financial planning, I don’t work with you. I was not charging fees before; I was selling life, disability, long-term care and annuities, and I was doing planning, but I was not charging a planning fee. I did enough planning to understand the client’s situation so we could sell a product. So fundamentally now I do planning, and then we implement stuff that’s on the plan, but regardless they’ve paid me for my time and my effort to figure it out. And if they paid me to figure it out, they’re more likely to follow my advice and implement.

How to know it’s working is self-evident. Once you start charging fees, it does a couple of things. One is that people have a problem they want to solve. So people self-qualify. And since they’ve decided that that problem is worth at least what your fee is, you end up with a lot of implementations where people will say, “What’s the next step in solving this?” So it’s not all that much different, but it becomes more of a planning process.

To do this, first you have to be doing comprehensive financial planning. You need the skill set and the knowledge, becoming a certified financial planner and getting designations. If you’re going to charge fees for your planning, it’s basically charging fees for your knowledge and how to solve problems, so you must have the knowledge to know how to solve them. Then it’s just a matter of changing your language and your mindset to get paid regardless of whether they implement. My knowledge is valuable, similar to an attorney or a CPA. Therefore, I charge for the value I bring or for my time.

What roadblocks did you encounter during this process? What else had to be adjusted that you didn’t expect?

Mindset was the biggest one. You have to create and execute the process, and like anything else, having a niche where you’re doing the same thing repeatedly works better as opposed to being a generalist and doing planning for everybody. It’s better if you have a specialization. I have three, but by far the biggest one is retirement accumulation.

How did you utilize MDRT to help move to the next level?

Two really big things. One is without MDRT, I really would not have pursued doing fee-based planning. But at my first MDRT meeting, I found five other English-speaking people who were not from the U.S., and we went out to dinner. One of them said, “I can’t sell commission-based products because of regulations.” What he was doing was different types of fees, whether it was assets under management or planning fees, so I decided that I needed to, as a defensive mechanism, get my foot in that door in case our regulatory environment decided that commission-based products could no longer be sold. If that occurred, I wanted to be a couple steps down the path. As it turned out, it worked really well and became the primary focus of how I go to market. Then the second thing is that it’s such a diverse group that finding somebody who is doing something you’re not or something that you want to do, it’s relatively easy to find those people at a meeting and have a conversation.

How long did it take between when you first became a member and when you first reached Top of the Table? How long did it take to go from Court of the Table to Top of the Table?

It took five years to go from MDRT to Top of the Table, skipping Court of the Table. Then when I went down to Court of the Table, it was two years before going back to Top of the Table.

How else have you grown and changed was to get to where you are now, and how do you track these changes to measure your performance? What specifically would you advise to other members looking to make the same progress?

Track revenue per case in each market segment. Determine how to work a few segments with higher averages. Track value you are creating for each client and communicate that value often.

How have you engaged with MDRT during your membership?

I normally attend at least two, sometimes three, meetings. I am active in an MDRT book club, which has been very valuable. You develop both knowledge and friendships. The friendships lead to finding wisdom from different approaches.

How can MDRT help support members once they reach Top of the Table?

I think the Top of the Table Annual Meeting is good along with the special events at the MDRT Annual Meeting. The Top of the Table peer meeting once a month has been useful, when I can make it.

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Top of the Table Q&A: George T. Morris, CFP, MBA