Kitces Advisor Value Summit Review and Highlights

Michael Kitces and Taylor Schulte hosted the Advisor Value Summit this week and Sean, from our team, attended it virtually. He had some highlights and takeaways from the speakers and he’s agreed to let me share them with you.

Matthew Jarvis

You may have already heard of Matthew Jarvis; I think he came out with a book recently. As advisors, we often evaluate a strategy or a tactic for a client and then decide whether or not it makes financial sense for them. Many times, the best decision is to do nothing. Michael Jarvis said, “if you do the dishes at home, but your spouse doesn’t know, do you actually get credit? The answer is no.”

So, as it relates to us as advisors, if you evaluate a Roth conversion and decide it doesn’t make sense for your client, they should know about it. Even though we change nothing, sometimes it’s seen as valuable in our client’s eyes if we let them know about it. So, we’re going to make more of an effort to do this at Streamline.

Dana Anspach

Another highlight came from Dana with Sensible Money. Her website is really good, click here to check it out. She has a section (about halfway down the page) that allows prospects to self-segment or self-select themselves. Doing this can help qualify or disqualify your prospective clients so that you’re really only spending time with people who could be potential ideal clients.

Now, this self-selection is going to look different for your firm and for our firm. We’re not going to use this on our website because we already have a pre-meeting questionnaire that people go through that pre-qualifies them. But we do plan on using this sort of verbiage on intro calls that we have with new clients.

Matthew Jarvis (again)

This next idea is another thing that adds value throughout the year for your clients. For our existing clients at Streamline, we do a one-page beneficiary audit for our clients each year. But what we haven’t done is list the dollar amount that the beneficiaries stand to inherit at that point in time, given the net assets after state taxes and such. Most of the time we just list percentages. But if we listed a dollar amount, I could see that being really valuable for our current clients because they don’t think in terms of percentages either. 

Jeremy Walter

Jeremy does his One-Page Plan in a way that really delivers value to existing clients. I really like his layout, how he lists live, give, and grow. He also shows how people are using their money and lists the values. Farther down on the page is a section with action items in a checklist and it all just looks really good together. I really like what he’s done.

At Streamline, we use a simplified version of the One-Page Plan and we really only use it as part of the prospect engagement meeting. That’s because we also use the Advisor Value Formula, along with the One-Page Plan. We’ve found that this is the easiest way to communicate and increase our value far above the fee that we’re charging.

Hopefully this quick recap was helpful to you. Be on the lookout for Kitces; if he does this again, I would sign up. Sean paid $300 or $400 and I’m sure the course is going to continue to improve each year.