We talked with Jackie about:

• Building a connection by helping clients identify their needs
• Recognizing clients' various personality types to provide better customer service
• Trading quotas for goals for your financial advisors
  
  

About Jackie Mazur:

Jackie Mazur stepped into financial services using an educational approach that has continued to serve her and her team throughout her career. A pioneer in flat-rate financial planning, Jackie wanted to build her firm, Guide My Finances, to be an accessible resource for her community. On top of that, she’s the founder of the Financial Behavior Institute, helping financial advisors identify the nuances around financial beliefs and building relationships that align.

Featured Resources 

• Jackie Mazur’s LinkedIn
• Guide My Finances Website
• Financial Behavior Institute Website
• Financial Behavior Institute Linkedin

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren Hong
Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. I am so excited to chat with you, especially after watching your recent talk that was given to hundreds of people in the audience. I know you shared it virtually as well. So specifically around this idea of really how to better connect with clients. Before we get into that, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your journey to where you got to today with your own firm and the research you've been doing, etc. So I'll let you share a little bit more to give a prerequisite before we dive in deeper.

Jackie Mazur

Yeah. So I don't know how far back I should go, but I started in the business—gosh, it's been almost 20 years. I was only 21 and I was just really finding my way, figuring out what did I want to do and how did I want to do it. And of course, at 21 you have no idea what's even available. So I started working for a company that was all about selling products, and I realized very quickly that I did not want to do that; I felt like a salesperson, not like an advisor. And so I ended up pivoting and at 23 I went out on my own, actually independent, under the supervision of a couple of veterans in the industry to make sure I wasn't getting myself into trouble. I also at that time went back and got my master's degree, got my CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ designation, and started teaching as an adjunct professor.

I was teaching financial planning and managerial finance at the college level. And it was really fun. It was a way, honestly, to subsidize my income at the time because I was trying to build from the ground up without a lot of help and needed to have that money coming in. But what I learned from that experience is how much I loved educating not only clients but also other advisors or other young professionals who wanted to become financial planners. And that was really the first time I had experience, I don't want to say coaching, but educating, teaching people who wanted to become financial planners in a way that felt really positive—to be able to expose more young people to our industry, to grow the financial planning network, have more people involved, and teach them about financial planning, not just about selling.

So that was really kind of the catalyst for when I started wanting to teach, but also when I started Guide My Finances. So my current financial planning firm, I started in 2009 after graduating and getting my CFP® while I was teaching, and I focused primarily on offering financial planning for a flat fee. At that time, nobody was doing that. It was something very new where I had advisors telling me, why would you take a residual business and make it transactional? You're making a huge mistake. And I said, well, that might be the case but I want to do the right thing and I want to be able to advise clients, so I'm going to do it anyway.

Lauren Hong 
Right.

Jackie Mazur 
Fast forward 15 years later and we've grown just so much. We now are managing almost $200 million in assets. I have a team of 800 people, I'm sorry, of eight people, not 800 people and we're bringing on five to 10 new clients a month. All organically, word of mouth, saying they want a financial plan that's unbiased. So it's through all of these experiences that I wanted to not only obviously continue to grow my practice but be able to teach other advisors how they can do the same thing.

Lauren Hong 
Mm-hmm.

Jackie Mazur
I was told not to do it this way but I think it is the way to do it. 

Lauren Hong
Well, you feel like you can best serve people and they can be well taken care of. Can you share a little bit more about your talk and getting to this idea of being able to really connect with clients. That's a lot of clients you're working with, especially to be able to bring on new clients. How are you cultivating those relationships, maintaining those relationships, even working with your team to be able to sort of pull out those nuances? Can we hear a little bit more about that side of things?

Jackie Mazur 
Yeah, so I think that for our existing clients, we know them really well. We really make an effort to understand what's going on in their lives beyond just the investments we're managing for them. We're a very goal-oriented firm. So when we're sitting down with clients at the beginning or every six months or every year or however frequently it is, we're really talking about what do you want to accomplish? And not everybody knows the answer to that. So it's figuring out how we help them get into that. An example is, I have a lot of clients who tell me I want to retire as soon as possible. 

Through asking questions and really engaging them and having that connection, what we find is that they don't actually want to stop working. They just hate their job <laugh> and they want something different but they feel tied to that or they're afraid to make a change. So by having these really open conversations with our existing clients, we can build this connection by helping them identify what it is they're communicating. They might say, I want to retire but they may not; they may just want to downsize their job, work a little bit less, have a more enjoyable career. Something along those lines. 

Lauren Hong 
Go ahead.

Jackie Mazur 
I was just going to say it's helping them identify what it is that they're communicating and then developing the strategy to help them reach it. And there's nothing more rewarding for both parties than helping somebody achieve the goals they've set out to achieve. And that builds an immense amount of trust.

Lauren Hong 
Is there anything you're doing in the discovery? Are you doing away with the traditional discovery? Are you training your team about how to be able to sort of better pull out those nuances? What approach are you taking to be able to set the foundation? Is it even happening in the prospecting phase of it? What are you doing to make sure it's that right fit and there's I guess that shared passion between you and your team and what you can bring to the table and the prospect or the current client?

Jackie Mazur 
So, yeah. So I think that's two things. So one, we don't have a questionnaire we ask people when we meet with them. My first question to prospects when they find us is, why are you reaching out to a financial planner today? 

And then I think one of the best things you can do is just be quiet and listen to what people are saying and ask questions to engage them rather than selling yourself. I heard years ago that the best conversations people have are ones where they do most of the talking. This is how they remember they've had a great conversation. And so let people share, ask questions to show you're listening and you're engaged in what they're saying.. And really dig into the big picture versus asking how much money do you have? How much can I invest for you? How is it being invested? It's not about the investments, it's about the bigger picture. And then the investments can be the secondary piece of the puzzle.

Lauren Hong 
So let's say they're kind of deep into the sales process, right? In that first meeting with them, have you already collected information or are just literally day one? How did you find us—just in listening to where they're at? So it's almost like doing away with a traditional onboarding.

Jackie Mazur 
So during the prospect meeting or that initial contact we are having a conversation about what are they seeking? Why are they looking for a financial planner today? Not just in general but what today made you reach out. Cause the chances are they've been thinking about it for a while but something may have happened recently that has made it have to happen today. I've reached a breaking point, my mother just passed away, I am overwhelmed at work and I need to find a solution. There's usually a trigger. I mean, not all the time but I would say a good amount that has made this sense of urgency. 

So if you can just ask questions about why today, what are you looking for? What's worked or hasn't worked? If they're leaving their old advisor, why, what weren't they providing you that you're looking for? And really get away from how much money's in your IRA. How much—it's not about that question.

Lauren Hong 
Transactional side of it if you want.

Jackie Mazur 
Yeah. It's more about that. Now after that initial meeting, we've already built a connection. We've talked about their goals, right? Yes, you need to get a sense of where they are from an income and asset perspective without digging into all of it. But we've built this level of connection. We now say okay, we're going to build a financial plan for a fee. So it actually doesn't matter how much money you have. You can have zero money saved or 10 million saved. This is how much I charge for my time to build out a plan. 

And what we found is that very frequently clients say, oh, this is what I've been searching for. I want to be able to work with somebody who can help me develop the strategy without selling me anything and without me having to move all my money to them on that first day. And so it's creating this ability to not even need the questionnaire until we're doing the planning. We will actually email them a list of documents we need to start the planning process.

Lauren Hong 
Right.

Jackie Mazur 
We collect them all, get them to us before the next meeting so we have the data to ask more questions but we don't even talk about most of those things on the first call.

Lauren Hong 
So you've got a team, right? Are you role-playing with your team to kind of help them learn how to kind of probe these questions out of prospects? Because for some people it's just sort of a natural thing and for other people it's just not as natural. How are you cultivating that culture to be able to make those connections with clients?

Jackie Mazur 
So I think number one, nobody has a quota of how much business they have to close in a month. I think this requirement to bring on a certain amount of clients or a certain amount of assets creates a sense of fear in the advisor the clients can feel. If somebody feels I better close this client, otherwise I'm going to lose my job, that client can hear that and feel that without even realizing it. So there's no such thing as that in our company. There's no quotas. There's goals we have, but they're not required. For the first six months anybody's working with me they sit in on the meetings, take notes, and do the planning. So they almost shadow me for six months to learn how I communicate, what the process looks like. They're doing the financial planning and they're sitting in all the meetings to learn firsthand while supporting me, taking notes and doing all the things that I don't have to do. So it's not paying somebody to do my job, it's paying somebody to support me while they're learning.

Lauren Hong 
That makes sense. Yep.

Jackie Mazur 
And then through that osmosis, they end up gathering the ability to do the same thing and not everybody's a great fit. I mean, not everybody can fit that mold, but those who love it do; they really are attracted to it and do an amazing job.

Lauren Hong
That makes sense. So one of the things we do here with our team is called DISC training. So you learn about different profiles and then you learn how to be able to better work with that individual based on the profile. And so you could be right in a meeting, you go, that's definitely a D person or that's definitely an I person. And so I sort of know this is what's important to them or this is a hot button. Now I know in your talk you've created these profiles of different kinds of people, right? Sort of avatars. Are you then also training your team on okay, this is that kind of avatar and these are the kinds of things they're gonna be looking for? Or how are you applying that kind of methodology toward your approach with maybe your recommendations or how you're fostering your company culture?

Jackie Mazur 
Yeah, so you mentioned this talk I did. I basically created the Financial Behavior Institute and through the institute I created a course to become certified as a Financial Behavior Planning Specialist. That course actually teaches client experience, communication, and financial planning, and does a deep dive into the eight different financial personalities or avatars as you said, to understand what certain clients are looking for, what their triggers are that have them walking out the door, how to best communicate with different personality types, etc. Everyone on my team has taken this course so they have an introduction to all of that, but when clients come in, we also label them within the office as a personality type. I know that for me personally, I don't love working with moguls or consumers. They're just not a good fit for me. And so if somebody comes in, and I see they’re a mogul, I send them somewhere else. Or hey, they're an architect, which to us means we better be really detailed with our explanation and our reasoning behind why we're making recommendations.

Lauren Hong
I think that was an engineer. Did you also coin that as an engineer in the talk?

Jackie Mazur 
The architect?

Lauren Hong 
Yeah.

Jackie Mazur
Yep. Almost all engineers are architects. I said I probably should have called it the engineer instead of the architect.

Lauren Hong
Because it fits.

Jackie Mazur
Then we have clients who are avoiders and we know if they're avoiders we better be very simple with our recommendations. Be very actionable and set things up in an automated way. So you may have somebody who's extremely detail oriented and relates more with that architect profile or somebody who's an avoider and just coming to you in the first place is overwhelming for them because they've always avoided their finances to begin with and they really just need someone to tell them, this is what you need to do. Let me set it up so you don't have to think about it again. Those are going to be two entirely different interactions.

Lauren Hong
Yes.

Jackie Mazur 
So if you're interacting this way with this person, it's not going to work or it's not going to work in the way that is going to feel supportive to that client. It's kind of twofold. It's identifying who they are, labeling this type of client, this client is this personality, and then knowing how to communicate and engage with that person or knowing they're not a good fit and sending them elsewhere, which is even sometimes the most valuable.

Lauren Hong
Yes, absolutely. Because then they're able to find that win-win for what they need and you know you're probably just not going to mesh with them in the right way, longer term.

Jackie Mazur 
Right. Exactly. It's understanding your core competencies and your company values or even your personal values and making sure they're aligned with the clients you're bringing on.

Lauren Hong 
Absolutely. Yeah. It's so critical to be able to have that authentic connection with who you're working with. 

Jackie Mazur 
Of course.

Lauren Hong 
Do you mind sharing a little bit more, because we talked a lot about I'll say a pre-client phase onboarding, but how about post-onboarding? What do you do to be able to maintain and continuously build those connections? Or do you have a cycle where you're doing outreach or are there client gifts or just quick notes to let them know you're thinking of them? What are you doing? 

Jackie Mazur
It's all of it. 

Lauren Hong 
Okay. Wow. So I love all the processes you've built into these concepts, but go ahead. 

Jackie Mazur 
So we definitely have client segments. And on the Financial Behavior Institute website, there's actually a client segmentation tool you can download if anybody is looking for how to do that. But we have our A clients, B clients, C clients, D clients, just like a lot of firms do. And depending on the tier, they are going to receive a different level of outreach, right? Everybody is going to get a birthday card or gift or something depending on where they're at. We are going to reach out to every single client at least twice a year, but we might be reaching out to our A clients once a quarter where our D clients we might be reaching out to twice a year. So it really kind of varies from there. I think the one key piece is how they fit into a different category isn't just about revenue, it's about personality and connection as well.

The clients you really connect with are easy to connect with and easy to spend time with and you're going to want to spend more time with them just by design, where you may have a client who is generating a lot of revenue but the interactions are not enjoyable, right? <laugh> So you might want to move them down a little bit down that list. So we have different strategies for each of those. I have a rule in the office: if somebody emails us, regardless of what category they're in, or if somebody calls, someone needs to respond within 24 hours, even if it's to say, we've received your email and we will get back to you in two weeks.

Lauren Hong 
Yep, yep, yep. 

Jackie Mazur 
Little things like that make an enormous difference. I know I've reached out to people and I don't even know if they got my email and I'm then a week later, hey, did you get this? Hey, did you get this? And meanwhile it was on their docket but they just didn't tell me.

Lauren Hong 
Yes.

Jackie Mazur 
Communication is huge regardless of the personality type to say, I've got it, I'm working on it, I can get this back to you at this period of time. If you need it sooner, let me know. And most people are not in a rush. They're happy just to know that you're working on, received it.

Lauren Hong 
Yeah, absolutely.

Jackie Mazur 
So communication is really important. I don't really do client events or anything like that, so it's reaching out via phone, reaching out via email. We work with a lot of clients who work for publicly traded companies. We track their stock and if a company's stock jumps 15% in one day, we're going to reach out to all those clients and say, hey, I don't know if you realized but your company stock jumped 15% today. Why don't we log into the system and see if we should sell any of it?

Lauren Hong 
Mm-hmm. 

Jackie Mazur 
And that's something I think a lot of advisors, at least the ones I communicate with, don't think about. So it's not, this is what we're doing for everybody, it's how do we connect with and serve and support our clients who have different needs.

Lauren Hong 
That makes sense versus it being sort of tiered by assets.

Jackie Mazur 
Correct. Yep.

I mean, obviously assets and revenue are how we run our businesses. But I have some clients who maybe we're making less money on but because we have a level of connection, they refer me a client a month. I'm not kidding. And so that is an A client for me, even though they specifically don't have enough money to be in that A tier. They're one of my top clients, they're my ambassador. So I don't want to only send them a birthday card or only reach out to them once a year because they're supporting me. I want them to feel supported. Those are your best clients, honestly.

Lauren Hong 
It's this correlation between connecting with clients and customer satisfaction that then ultimately creates longevity and referrals and sustainability.

Jackie Mazur
Yep.

Lauren Hong 
Oh my goodness. So fun. We're about at the top of our time but I feel like we could talk for quite some time on this. For anyone who’s looking to sort of better connect with clients or tools, I know you mentioned there's a few tools you've created that folks could glean from you. Do you have any quick wins if you will, or if there's one thing you would do, do you think it would be the 24-hour responding rule or that sort of thing? The one takeaway for connecting with clients.

Jackie Mazur 
I didn't prepare to answer that question, so let me think. <laugh>

Lauren Hong 
I threw it at you. 

Jackie Mazur 
I know. I do think the 24-hour response is huge. Think about when you reach out to somebody and you don't hear from them, how that makes you feel. Or if somebody replies to you immediately, how supported you feel by that person. So I think that is a very big one. I also think asking open-ended questions and then using active listening to actually hear what people are saying instead of waiting to talk is a huge communication skill and technique financial advisors should have or should try to develop because I think very often we have so much to share that we do so much talking and we end up overwhelming our clients instead of just letting our clients share their fears, their goals, what they're feeling, how they're feeling, and then listening and connecting with that.

And there's a communication technique called mirroring, which is sometimes the cadence you speak or the demeanor you have but other times it's just connecting on a similar situation. A client is sharing a fear of the market or something and you can share a story about a feeling you had that was similar or a client who had a similar experience but how you were able to help turn that around and build that connection through storytelling—without being overbearing with your stories and making sure they've had a chance to talk too. <laugh> That's a nuance, right?

Lauren Hong 
<laugh> Yeah, it's so true. It's this balance. It's that empathy side to be able to make sure people feel heard. And sometimes people just need a trusted place where they can be heard. And if you can become that trusted place to hear what they need, then it helps to create that win-win. 

Jackie Mazur 
Exactly. Exactly.

Lauren Hong 
Oh my gosh, so fun. Thank you so much for sharing about what you've done. I admire the way you've built your firm and the courage you've been able to take to be able to do so, especially at such a young age to where you are today. It's proven in the success you've had. And I also admire that you've put together this whole formula. I think it's an interesting model for others to learn from, sort of an approach around building connections. 

Jackie Mazur
Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that and I appreciate your time today and reaching out.

Lauren Hong
All right. Well thanks again, Jackie. We'll make sure to include all the notes below and links for folks and all of that. So thank you again.

Jackie Mazur 
Thank you.