Work-Life Integration, Fulfillment, and Building Your Dream Firm

Maddy Roche: Hello, Kristin. Welcome to XYPN Radio. How are you?

Kristin Harad: I'm great, Maddy. It's good to be back. It's been a while.

Maddy Roche: It sure has. Kristin was on Episode 77, which is wild. Probably five or six years ago, Kristin.

Kristin Harad: Yeah, I think so. I can't even remember, pre pandemic. It happened before, not after or during. So who knows?

Maddy Roche: And Kristin, you and I are hot off of XYPN Live, our membership conference here at XYPN. And it was so nice to see you there.

Kristin Harad: Yeah, it was great to see you too. You did a great job emceeing and keeping us all excited and rallied. And frankly, it's just so funny because I've known Alan a long time and I just remember when you were hired back 10 years ago, so that, or it might even been longer. I don't know at this point.

Maddy Roche: Yep. Yep. You were actually one of the first contacts at XYPN I was put in touch with to help our advisors grow their firms. And that is why we have you back on XYPN Radio. So, Kristin if you wouldn't mind doing the honors, go ahead and just give the listeners a little bit of info about you and where you come from.

Kristin Harad: Sure. Absolutely. So, I grew up on the east coast, but I now live in California. So I grew up in Pennsylvania and lived in New York after school. And so that's where I got my start. I worked in marketing for Chase Manhattan which is now, JPMorgan Chase. Moved into advertising and moved to the West Coast and I had about 14 years total of corporate marketing and advertising experience, primarily with financial brands.

So I was like, okay, this is very cool. And then I wanted to help people for real, not just talk about the marketing behind things. I wanted to be in the trenches. So, I hung up my shingle out of nowhere. I had no idea what I was doing. There was no XYPN. I really could have used the help. And so I was around 35 and I started my own RIA focused on new and expectant parents and families with young children. So fast forward, cause I'm sure people, if they've listened to the other episode I exited that because I had gotten so much interest in my marketing expertise and experience with talking to advisors that I just started building up my marketing, coaching, and consulting and training business.

I've evolved over time. Now I've done some fractional CMO work for larger firms. and just this year I launched a new brand. I'm pretty excited about it.

Maddy Roche: Oh, I love it. We will get into that new brand but Kristin, tell us what you love most about this industry. You've had a really beautiful and diverse run within this segment and I'm wondering what keeps you so excited.

Kristin Harad: Great question. I like, I love working with entrepreneurial minded advisors. So that just the like freshness of it and the idea that people come in and because I've been in a few decades now, I just love seeing the new ideas and the new approaches and how technology is fixing, fixing things we used to have to deal with and how advisors just come in all shapes and sizes now.

And it's really fun to see. And I think my favorite thing is just our unifying, sense. And this is obviously with the advisors I work with and that you work with is that you really just want to do good, right? You wanna make a positive impact in people's lives and really help people feel that abundance that comes when you're, in charge of your personal finance.

And in my case when I'm helping entrepreneur advisors be able to run a business and fulfill a dream of what they want to create and help the people they want to help. I just love that whole through line the entire time I've been a big fan of that.

Maddy Roche: Yeah, absolutely.

Kristin Harad: It's fulfilling for me. So, just to interact with people like that.

And again, coming off the XYPN Live, that you just got a shot in the arm of energy and excitement and creativity. And I loved that.

Maddy Roche: Totally. And every year there just seems to be new energy and new ideas, like you said.

Kristin Harad: I know it's fun. And if you're open to just learn, if you go there and just Hey, I ran a session and I was excited to hear what people in the audience would contribute. And I was like tell me more about that. I have not heard that. That's interesting. I love that solution. I love how you've done that.

So that was really fun.

Maddy Roche: Totally so before we get to the new stuff you're working on, you spent a long time coaching advisors in the marketing space. And I'm, interested in your experience there. What were some of the things you saw as, the problem areas advisors would face as they tried to build their businesses?

Kristin Harad: The number one is a failure to decide who your target audience should be. So that's my number one. Like even as I work in different capacities, I still the first question I have for an advisor is, who are we trying to attract in? Who is the type of customer you enjoy working with and you offer the best value for?

So everyone, no one wants to pigeonhole. So that's hands down, right? That's my first and foremost. The next, the sort of macro problem is prioritization. There's so many options in the world of things you can do and so many ideas and the I'll say the challenge in our industry with marketing is that it is not, you're not selling shoes, right?

We're not just Hey look, you could buy them in five colors, pick your one. Buy two, get one free. It's not like that, right? It's a, lifetime of savings or it's a foundation for a family. It's, like their well being and you're asking them to trust you with that. So it is the long game, right?

Marketing is consistency over time to show your potential clients that you are trustworthy, that you have the expertise, that you are able to help them and their family with what can be one of the scariest things in the world. Your money. I think that is learning how to figure out which elements to pursue and to be able to pursue them regularly over time. That's hard because people don't, advisors get excited and they want things to turn around and get an ROI immediately. And unfortunately, you just got to start putting the irons in the fire and wait. 

Maddy Roche: Yes. Yes. The patience is something we talk a lot about at XYPN and knowing our listeners, many of which are either they haven't launched yet. Maybe they're thinking about launching or they're early in their careers in terms of running their own firms. It is hard to help them understand that a marketing strategy is a strategy and that there's multiple components to it.

And so I'm wondering, say an advisor does know who they want to work with, how would you coach someone to identify what kind of the pillars of the strategy would be for them?

Kristin Harad: I think, when you have your clear audience, that reveals a lot because you can identify where those people live, right? Where are they? What do they do? What is, where do they spend their time? Where do they get their information? How do they like to receive their information?

So there's that layer of just really matching your marketing strategy to a place where your audience will be receptive to your message, right? You also want to look at where can you, where do you have energy around helping people like about dedicating yourself? If I asked you to write a blog and post a couple times a month and you can't even, the thought of stringing a few words together in a narrative is on a screen like it stresses you out then you probably don't want to be spending your time there but if you're like put me down in front of a microphone, no problem I'll talk to anyone who's across from me maybe we want to look at a podcast or we want to look at videos or some other path. So you have to look at aligning your strengths or energy levels, and especially when you're solo earlier on, and you can't say we know our readers only care about video.

I don't want to do it. But we have two other team members who can do it. So then we can rally the team. But if it's you, and you're by yourself, you have to do that balance of which thing will I actually complete If I sign up for it. And my audience will also resonate with. So we're we look at that and then, you have to make sure that you're not doing too many things, but you want to be probably in three to four different channels.

there's kind of two numbers. There's the old advertising, rule of seven, you have to be heard. Someone has to hear about you seven times on average before they take an action. And then there's also the sort of multi channel, stat of you need to be in three to five channels so that you're not just doing the same thing seven times over again.

It's like you got to show up in other, in different parts of And that can be over whelming. So, it's about let me prioritize the two or three things I'm going to do. Let me find the help I need. I know XYPN has tons of resources.

We have technology that can help us now. We have coaches, consultants, all kinds of people who can step in. but you got to prioritize and commit for like at least six months on something too.

Maddy Roche: Yeah, and to look at it like an experiment, you want to be tracking data, you want to see what the results are, and I'm so glad that you mentioned that you really want to be doing what feels authentic to you. Because one of the most powerful things I can do is tell an advisor you don't need to blog if they tell me they hate blogging.

Kristin Harad: I know. I know. It's so interesting because so many people come to me and they lead with, oh, I think I have to be doing video. Okay, do you want to do video? Do you, does your audience want it? Are you, everyone has video and people seem to want video. Okay, if people want video, let's talk about that.

Is there a different way we might use video that would be, that would fit for you? And there could be, there's more than one way to approach things, right? So I think that's really important. And honestly, Especially in the earlier years when you don't have as much support and you're trying to figure everything out.

I think, when you look at your calendar for the week and you're like, I have to market. I think the Kitces study, the Kitces survey showed, the high growth firms had 15 percent of advisors spend 15 percent of their time on marketing, whereas most advisors spend 10 percent or less.

I would say that number's way less. I think people might have inflated that answer. but the 15 on people who, 15 percent of their time on marketing, which that means you got to be doing something you like.

Maddy Roche: Oh, big time.

Maddy Roche: Kristin, I'm interested in your new iteration and then what you're working on now. And I love having known you for 10 years and that there can be new versions of what you invest your time in and how you leverage your expertise.

Kristin Harad: Yeah. No, I'm really excited to tell you that. And it's very similar to XYPN and that you too have been in 10 years now. So it's Hey we have new versions of ourselves and we're creating and adding and putting in new things. And that's really the impetus for me launching my new brand at the beginning year called a full advisor coaching.

And, it came about because advisors were coming to me. I had this thread over the last four or five years where I was attracting in RIA leaders and advisors who had reached a certain level of success, whether they built it themselves from putting the shingle out and

working their way up a number of XYPN members that I've worked with or a second generation. I have a fair number of sons or daughters taking over for parents who are exiting or other more like kind of mid, junior partners who are stepping in and then there's a lot of advisors coming off of wire houses to go independent or corporate RIAs where they're like I want to have true freedom and be a fiduciary and represent my clients.

So, they're all coming with this kind of thread of we want, we're creating version 2.0 of themselves. So version 2.0 is the through line. And, the other piece that is essential is they're all looking to build something more successful and they have this vision, but they don't want to sacrifice personal fulfillment and satisfaction along the way.

So this work life integration. Is an important piece. I also don't say balance because we all live in the world to know that it's not balanced, but integration and how do they integrate life and work, to create what it is they want, right? And so, interesting tidbit about myself.

I'm also a trained life coach. And went down that path before I became a financial planner and thought I was going to go that route and then decided to niche into personal finance and use life coaching in that area. But it's fun to see that come back now as I'm like these are high achieving individuals.

Who also are full on in all parts of that, want to be involved in family, want to be involved in experiences in life, want to give back to their community, or make an impact, or highly engaged in faith or community or other endeavors, right? And so how can we as a whole person be high achieving and feel fulfilled?

So full advisor was about filling your cup, right? creating that. So to me, like how can you feel full? And that it's really taking what I've been doing and expanding the vision, right? And saying, okay, as a working with RIA leaders in this position, how do we take a step back and look at marketing?

And I'm still very marketing driven, but to me marketing has always been the full experience. Of the client's journey. So marketing, sales, client experience then everything that goes along with running a firm, productivity, leadership, things like that. So a variety of programs that go with that. And I can get into that, but it's really whether you're a solo, who's trying to figure out what's next for you, or you're a multibillion dollar firm and you want someone coming into coach advisors, it's the gamut, but the through line has to be about this work.

Life integration and growing without sacrificing fulfillment.

Maddy Roche: Tell me a bit about this without sacrificing fulfillment. Cause I witnessed that among my clients too, that there's a real desire to live a full life and I'm wondering do you sense that when you first get started, it's all on the line and fulfillment isn't really a goal and we're just trying to build the firm?

Kristin Harad: Yeah, that's how the engagement starts, right? I'm sure you see that too, Maddy. People come like, all right, I want to grow the firm. I'm going to do this. And then as we start talking and peel back the onion as they say, and we're talking, but I'd also like to be at my, I'd to be at my kids soccer games and, Yeah, I want to make sure I can take summertime off or reduce the time I'm spending or yeah, spring break.

I never take spring break. I'd like to do that. So it starts to come up and I'm like, all right, let's take a look at what would that look like? And sometimes it means, pacing the growth, right? Sometimes it means like, all right, we could still get where you want to go, but we don't have to go quite as fast.

Or it means, Hey, it's time to bring in a team member now who can take off some, take some of that load off your shoulders. And. you then can be home at 3:30 to pick up your kids from school if that's what you want. There's a lot you can fit in a day between nine and three. The school day is perfectly long, to fit everything in.

So it's how do you decide which activities are worth spending time on, which things you can let go of, which things you can delegate. So those are fundamentals on that sense. And then really looking at what are the areas of your kind of full, I call it the business development ecosystem.

But like when you look at a firm level of how a client comes through your organization, where is it that you can make adjustments that will, boost the client experience and kind of reduce the work on your shoulders? One really good example of this is I had an advisor who is out in Wisconsin and she was grappling with these things and she came in and she's I am always on the phone with leads, always like people calling in, doing things, which you're like, not sad about, right?

You're happy about it. But she's also I have to, run the rest, I have other work to do. So we did two things. This was all around, she's a lot of the leads aren't a good fit, and she's in town where people call in because it's a smaller town in Wisconsin and people call in.

They're not just filling out a form online, like 50 percent of the people will submit online, 50 percent will call in. And she's I'm just spending so much time with these people who aren't a good fit. So we did two things. She implemented a minimum on her business for the first time. The firm is 40 years old. Her dad had, it was her dad's way back when, like it might've been, I don't know if the actual RIA is 40 years old, but it's been around for a long time. She had joined it a while back and she's now running it. And she's like, all right I'm putting a minimum in. And at first she was going to do a hundred thousand of assets under management, which is how they charge.

And then she's like, all right, I'm gonna do 250. Which was good. And then so she put that in. So the volume of call, like we put it in on the Calendly and put, polite like we work best with people who have this, who are approaching retirement or in retirement and they have saved at least this amount of money.

And, we had the Calendly screener in place, right? So we had that set up and then we put some language on the website. So pretty straightforward. Here's a good fit. You go through the questionnaire, answering some questions. She was able to massively reduce the number of calls coming in, but boost the quality.

And then secondly, she enlisted the help of a team member who takes the calls and she trained her on what questions to ask. Do the 15 minute screener before moving them to her calendar, and then when she's on the phone with them, it's highly likely they're at least a good fit for the firm and she's cut back quite a lot. She picks her kids up from school now twice a week. and she's I do it and I pick them up and I'm done for the day. I'm not doing anything else. I get to pick them up and go home and do it. And so that's all part of the of an example of, Hey the business is doing better because we're getting the right, we're not wasting time and we're getting the right quality of lead for the stage of her business.

And she personally is I feel I can now go and not have my kids sitting in daycare until six o'clock. So, yeah, that's an exciting. I love seeing that one come. That's the kind of thing I like, yes, that's how we want it to come out, 

Maddy Roche: And it sounds like you work with folks that have several years of their business under their belts. I'm interested, how do you help them prioritize? What is most important to work on? Because once you have a full fledged business, there's all different areas you could, zone in on and improve.

How do you personally help them prioritize?

Kristin Harad: Yes. Usually we start with what is the growth goal. So we do look at that because people do come to me for that reason. And then we take a look at like I said, the kind of macro view of marketing sales client experience. and we look at that. And I like to assess, I do this audit with advisers and we really look at what are you currently doing and what do you want to be doing?

And I have them literally work through a worksheet that kind of ranks each of the initiatives at a high level, like it's like, all right, how much, how fast can you implement this effort that you're doing? how valuable is the effort that you're doing, just based on what you've done in the past.

Like, how valuable is it? What's the level of effort to get started? What's the investment? Is it low? Is it high? and I really have just like low, medium, high on each of these. And then, what is your interest or energy level in doing the initiative? Whatever it might be, right? So, Those are some of the factors we put into play, just to look at, step by step, what are you doing today and how would we rank each of them?

And then we can look and say, all right, if we really wanted to dig into making, improvements, let's take a look at what are the quick wins. that you can take off your plate. Right away you get implemented in 30 days or less. maybe it's putting a question on your Calendly screener that will let someone know if they're in the right place.

There's things that are the, what's going to have the biggest impact. Which one's going to get you in front of or talking with more of the right people or making a bigger difference in your client experience. So that's another thing we look at. And then, like I said How energized are you about the initiative?

Do you have an interest or energy in it? Or does someone on your team so that they can take the ball and run with it? And I think that's a great way for established firm owners to get younger or more junior advisors involved, not necessarily younger, just junior, more junior advisors coming in because they might come in.

I just had this happen when I was out in Minneapolis, I met with one of my clients out there. It was really fun. I got to meet, the partners in person for the first time. And then I met with their junior advisors. They had two junior advisors and so they came in and one came in and he was very passionate and interested in doing COI outreach.

So center of influence reaching out. And so he was asking me questions about that. And that's an area where he's able to take ownership of that. Begin learning how to do business development, and I was talking with him about different ways he could do communication and what kind of content he could send them and different ways to do that.

But he can own that for the organization and kind of carve his own path. Obviously, the partners are open to that type of thing. Another gentleman came in and he was very into video right so he was like, I want to take on video. I think this could be really interesting. And, again, Partners saying, great, we just want to have, a clear plan on who's doing what, but it's something that I think can help the newer people to the firm who want to, do more than just run plans in the back office, right?

Running and putting into the software if they have an interest or energy behind something, it's a way to start getting exposure.

Maddy Roche: Absolutely. Do you see any themes among kind of the areas particularly around like the systems and the processes that need improvement at this point in an advanced firm's growth?

Kristin Harad: I'll say in any firm, it's that lead to client conversion timeframe, right? So someone's raised a hand and shown an interest in your firm by either downloading a free guide off your website or signing up for your newsletter or coming to a webinar or an event that you have. And then, they don't just magically become a client and call you up and say, all right, I'd like to sign.

And if they do, it's amazing and so rare, but it can happen. So I think my talk at XYPN the last year in Atlanta was around this concept, like, how do you take a lead to a lifetime client? and it's, this idea that you cannot communicate enough with people who have indicated an interest but have not yet scheduled a consultation and then have not yet become a client, right?

So there's two parts, right? There's the people who you know they become a lead. So they get on your list in some form or fashion from something you've done in the world. And then it's mapping out that communication system from the time where they initially say I want to download your free checklist, download checklist,

what are all the communications they're getting? How is it that you're staying in touch with them and really taking them through prompting? Okay. What happens once they schedule a consultation? What happens after they come in? They have the consultation. What is your thank you? How do you follow up? What do you do after that next meeting?

How are you following up? If you have another meeting, how are you following up? And then what happens in the instance where you don't hear from them? How often do you follow up? At what pace do you follow up? And what is the message that you're saying? So, as you get more sophisticated and you know the milestones and the triggers, you can create templates, you can have scripts for people to follow to reach out and really clearly hold the hand of that lead to say, hey, and when you're ready, the next step is that we schedule a consultation.

Okay, now that you've had your consultation, the next step is that we have this more in depth meeting where we talk through this and you don't yet have to decide if you want to be a client to where the done with this meeting, whatever your process is, right? I've seen multi meeting process. Then after that, what is the next?

The next step is that if you're ready, when you're ready to move ahead, we'll sign this paperwork and you'll enter into, we'll move ahead and here's what those first 90 days will look like. And so being very clear every step along the way with a follow up message because the fortune, and this was the title of the talk, which is the fortune's in the follow up 100%. Because you're like, I don't want to bother them. I don't want to bother someone. And that is the biggest thing. I had trouble with it when I first got started in my RIA. And, I was like, it really stressed me out. And it's really, when you can put it into a process and just go okay, I take the human element out of it.

Okay, I've had my consultation. I know I need to, reiterate two personal things and send a thank you. Okay. All right. Next step is coming in for the meeting. Got it. And so you've just followed the plan. And AI can help a lot now, for instance, I just talked about this in my talk the other day, which was really interesting.

You can have your one hour meeting that is okay, this is the in depth and you're in and run the phantom note taker, whoever you use, get the summary, send a very well articulated summary back to that client, essentially reiterate back to them. I heard you and I'm looking forward to meeting with you.

And then, I'm looking forward to helping you and working with you and you play it back. So I think just being very clear on that follow up system will really move the needle for a lot of advisors who are like, I don't know. People are stalling. They didn't sign the paperwork. I don't know how often to follow up all of those types of things.

Maddy Roche: As I've worked with advisors who feel like they've made it and they're ready for 2.0, I'm interested in, is growth always their goal? Is like new clients always what they're looking for?

Kristin Harad: Not always but there's a certain amount of kind of like net new assets they get to kind of account for attrition whether by death or especially as your base ages, it becomes more important. So to cover for, just stay ahead, right? Like just a little bit to stay maintaining.

You have to grow some to account for anyone who's left or, left at the highest level, right? So I do hear that. So there's various levels of that. some people are just like, you know what, I'm good. They set a certain client number. And as long as I have X number of clients, and that's what we have in our firm, that's what we want to maintain.

And we don't want to be adding more advisors. This is just what we're looking at. And so, yeah. There's still an effort of making sure people are coming in the door, but the focus may not be on what we traditionally call top of the funnel marketing activities, like getting out there and trying to run ads or have a seminar series or be networking with COIs it may not be about that for you. It may be that you're really digging into your client experience and saying, how is it that we can't deliver all-star client service and really make people feel like we're delivering massive amounts of like our experiences above and beyond that of others.

And sometimes firms, they love the relationships. People got into it because they wanted to be in these relationships and help and guide people. So it's really about making sure that, those groups of people stay in the firm and they, if they have other ins, like more money that they inherit or something changes, they get more share of wallet.

They refer their friends who are like them. So that's helpful, just nurturing a client base and letting them know you are still taking on clients like them, can be a very straightforward way to I won't say tread because it doesn't, it's not that easy, right? treading water can be tiring after a while but like you, you can sustain, right?

The goal is to create a sustainable firm. And if that sustaining for you means to continue to grow. Great. But you want to know that it can hold its own and you can have that, you no longer have to like chase after everything, can we just make it so that we know what's coming in and we know what's going out and we've got a good sense and we're trying to really, deliver on these relationships, which is what a lot of people just really want to be servicing clients.

Maddy Roche: Yeah. I see that among a lot of advisors that after several years there does become a question of like, how do I continue to add value to these longer term relationships? I'm wondering how you would coach an advisor to do an audit around the client experience. Like how does someone improve a client experience?

Kristin Harad: That's a great, that's a great question. And I know, I think it's Julie Littlechild has done a lot of work around this. If you've never looked at her work, she talks a lot. She does a lot of data tracking in that arena. what I'd like to do, I think about it in terms of, a lot of things I think about are in terms of communication, right?

How are you communicating with clients? What is it, how are you involved with them? And I think, I think that year one is your most critical year, right? In terms of when someone has decided to turn over their life savings to you and they've never, especially if they've never hired someone and they've essentially entrusted you with their family's wellbeing.

I think it behooves you as an advisor to make sure that it is super clear to that person what's going to happen. They're probably scared to death and they've taken the leap of faith, no matter how confident they are in you. It's handhold, sit down with them, even over Zoom, this is exactly what's going to happen over the next 90 days.

It's, going to be the timing isn't exact. We're going to have some paperwork. There's going to be some money moving. And the whole goal is by the end of this period, we have this and then we're going to show you our, the next process. And here's the plan. And you just outline each of the steps and say, this is going to be really exciting.

We're going to get through this. It's going to, you're going to have to do some work. And so you step it through. It's very clear, especially year one, right? Cause they're most likely to refer in year one, to give a Google review in year one, any of those things that will help you sustain. But then in terms of adding value after that, I think it's a lot around communicating again.

More often than you'd expect, right? Because a lot of times people go oh my clients don't want to hear from me, right? Oh, it's fine. Now that we've been together a long time, you still want to let them know that you're doing work for them, that you care, that you make a difference. So luckily technology is super helpful now.

It's not that hard to quickly record a little video that says, Hey Maddy, I just heard, I heard about the passing of your mother. I'm really sorry to hear about that. I know how close you were. And I just wanted to reach out and extend my condolences. And record, send it, something very personalized and special.

There's also, just letting people know, this is a common one like letting people know what you're doing for them. It's like they've hired you and they could even be a few years in but you're like, Hey by the way, Maddy, we checked, we went in and we took a look at your portfolio allocation.

And as we always try to be in the 65 35 range, and we did a few adjustments, you're all set, or that you look and you go, you know what, we took a look to see if it makes sense to convert your Roth IRA, doesn't make sense this year, we're not going to, we're not going to recommend that, carry on, like all of those outreaches like that.

I did, I too, have a podcast, the Full Advisor Coaching Podcast. And I think, it's not out yet but it will, I think it'll be around episode 20, I'm nowhere near, as established as you all are in XYPN, but I did an interview with, John Prendergast who runs Blueleaf, the wealth management software.

So he and I had a really fun dialogue, about he was saying that the Altruist, Jason Wenk from Altruist was saying, you should reach out 150 times a year to a client. So 150 touch points, right? Which could be tiny, right? It could be any small thing. So he and I were having this conversation in this podcast where I'm like, how do you get to 150?

And you'd be surprised, it's Oh, we have the newsletter. Okay. We have that. Oh, we sent out, a birthday card cause it's her birthday. And then you go on and go, there's also we send the quarterly statement. Okay, that's one. But then you start getting into to just outreach of hey, this is your, your RMD, we've got that ready, or we did a trade or hey we've taken a look at your portfolio.

Nothing's changing. Good to go. it was super, it's a fun one because, John and I are like, Tallying up, trying to get to 150 going. All right. And the concept as he referenced, I can't take credit for that, is around you don't really get upset with Netflix when they continue to say, Hey, you liked this, you might like this. Or Amazon where you're like, you've purchased these things. Did you know, we have these things that would be great for you. Other shoppers, so it was like proactive serving, staying in front of top of mind. it doesn't mean you're like it's a big long diatribe.

It's just touch points. It was very interesting. That was one of the better ways of thinking about it. that I hadn't quite, I hadn't quite heard before.

Maddy Roche: Interesting. I hadn't heard that either. the 150 touch points. Yeah, 

Kristin Harad: that's once every three days. Not even, it's like once every two and a half days, something like that.

Maddy Roche: Yeah. And I'm interested in, your perspective because as I've witnessed advisors advance their firms, we're often working on doing less. 

Kristin Harad: Yes. Yeah. And so,

Maddy Roche: Not providing less value, but doing an audit of, what can you stop doing? Because if we're trying to save you time,

Kristin Harad: Yes. Yes. So those a lot of those things can be automated, right? So he talks through a lot of the platform and he's if you can't automate them, you don't want to, it's you're not looking to add on your plate, right? It's there's lots of things that you can, use segmentation and technology send out, obviously on the Blueleaf platform you can do that as well.

That was one of the things, but that was it's like you'd automate that in and put that in and just have that mindset around things when you're doing it. But things that are, another one is I had another client who takes clients out to lunch. Every week she's taking clients out to lunch multiple times a week and there's hundreds of clients in the firm.

And she's like well I'm still doing that. And I'm like, okay, we need to take that off. I was like, if you love it great. But think about the amount of time, like what's different? How could you do that differently? How can we think about scaling that back? Can we do once a month that we invite a certain number of clients to a breakfast?

Can we, can we make it once every couple of years, you meet a client for a meal. Like, how is it that you can start to shift off of that? And do, they feel obligated? Do they really want that? Her audience is older, so maybe they do, but is it necessary to the degree that you think it is?

Maddy Roche: I'm interested in your advice around gauging success of initiatives. How do you coach advisors on determining if something is valuable or not?

Kristin Harad: Ask your clients, right? Survey your clients, have conversations with them, make sure you're finding out from them, getting a temperature read from them and asking them outright.

You can do literal quantitative studies where you'll send out a questionnaire or just qualitative where you're asking a few questions every time. So, those are just some of the ways. I think. To your point, looking at the flow of the client through the experience and tracking the key conversion points along the way and then getting a satisfaction metric of some sort.

It's, probably your baseline on how to look at that.

Maddy Roche: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I've found that even just asking people if are you enjoying these lunches? Are they valuable to you? Is like a super fair question to ask if, getting, bringing people out to lunch is time consuming. So, cool. I appreciate that. Any other things you'd like to let the audience know about what you're working on and what you're seeing that we haven't covered yet?

Kristin Harad: I think that just that I really, want advisors to remember to commit and go all in. And then as you hear about the really fancy thing that your friend and your study group is doing, put it on the back burner, put it on in Asana in the pending to revisit in next year's plan or Revisit in July, commit to things to do from say, January to June and be like these are the three things max that we are focused on, whether no matter which part of the ecosystem it is, whether it's marketing, whether it's improving your prospects, doing some training of advisors or client, like just pick your three things, set your milestones, And work toward the goals, right?

And then re evaluate and all the other things, just collect them and then re evaluate later and say, Oh, do I want to add that in? Yes or no? I think that's one of the biggest things you can do to just make your life a whole lot easier.

Maddy Roche: Absolutely. I see advisors all the time going after that shiny object. And it is hard in our industry too, because as much as we preach community, it can also weigh us down by hearing about all these new things and staying true and committed to your goals and where you want the firm to go and to continue to define what you want the firm to be for you and not others is so important.

Kristin Harad: I think that's really important at coming back kind of full circle to the work life integration. You and your friends and you're hopefully they may have different goals or be at different stages or, have different life priorities. And so it's really about remembering, that your personal goals and fulfillment are as important as a business.

And it all goes together. And it's so I like, set your goals and milestones on both sides of the ledger as it were.

Maddy Roche: I love that. Kristin, your wealth of knowledge I so appreciate having you on XYPN Radio. And you have been a speaker at XYPN Live many times. So audience, listeners, if you are interested in hearing more from Kristin, we'll certainly link in our show notes to all of her resources. And you can certainly find her back at XYPN Live because she's there often.

So, any last words of wisdom to our listeners, Kristin, before we depart.

Kristin Harad: No, I just invite anyone who wants to learn more or get some free resources. I do have some available at: fulladvisorcoaching.com/resources So free tools, templates, trainings, a few podcast episodes that I think one from the Kitces platform. I've probably have the XYPN one on there, it might have aged out by now, so maybe we'll put this fresh one on there.

But, that would be great. But otherwise, if you haven't connected with me, I'm out and about on LinkedIn all the time. Happy to connect with anyone, answer questions, help you out however I can.

Maddy Roche: Awesome. Thank you, Kristin. Thank you, listeners. We'll see you back in a few weeks.