Are Your ‘Time Saving Techniques’ Just Pushing Work Back to Clients?

Without a doubt, the benefit of this approach is a great deal of time savings by no longer needing to travel from one client meeting to the next. But the reality is that the need for travel hasn't been eliminated, it's just been transferred from the planner to the client. Or viewed another way, you've effectively outsourced the "work" of travel to your clients.

Why does this matter? Because you haven't really eliminated the work, you've just transferred it. You've made it your client's problem. Yes, the good news is that you won't have to sit in traffic, getting increasingly frustrated, on the verge of a bout of road rage by the time you get to your meeting. The bad news: instead, you'll just put your client in that negative state of mind instead, making them sit in traffic, get increasingly frustrated, and arrive at your office on the verge of a bout of road range! And then ask them to sit in your office and try to be focused on what you're saying while you ask them to make crucial financial life decisions! Assuming, of course, that you can get them to take the meeting with you in the first place; how many client meetings are delayed, cancelled, or rescheduled because the client simply didn't want to do the "work" of driving to your office in the first place?

Outsourcing Data Gathering to Clients

In a similar manner, in financial planning we also have a tendency to outsource the data gathering process to clients, in an effort to make ourselves more efficient. Just as with the process of outsourcing travel, we have our justifications, like "if the client doesn't want to put in the time to gather data together and give it to me, the client couldn't have been that serious about financial planning, anyway"—even though the reality is that for some clients, helping them to progress through the stages of change to take their financial challenges more seriously is part of the key value proposition for being a good financial planner in the first place!

And unfortunately, just as with outsourcing travel to clients, outsourcing data gathering leads to similar dysfunctions in the planning relationship. Again, the reality is that the work isn't eliminated when we tell clients they have to gather all their data details up front and give them to us. We just make it the client's problem instead! And what happens as a result? Clients delay their financial planning meetings and getting through the process because they don't feel they have the time to do the "homework" we've given them up front, for which we often blame the client as though it's their fault!

In the second part of our post, we'll look into whether all of this is good efficiency or just really bad service. We'll also look into alternatives to client outsourcing.