Anticipate What Your Clients Appreciate

Susan Clements

Executive Director, E-Myth Benchmark

“Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.” – Lao Tzu

November is a month filled with anticipation. For those of us in the less temperate climates, we anticipate the full onslaught of winter––quietly nipping at the daylight while frost and snow start to slather us with their own crystalline brightness. For me, anticipation of the holidays turns my thoughts toward appreciating good food and the time I will spend with clients, friends, and family. It also makes me start to anticipate the new year just around the corner.

Anticipation of a new year provides you with the opportunity to pause and consider what your clients appreciate about you and your business, and what you can do to grow that appreciation going forward. Being intentional about designing business systems to provide your clients with reasons to appreciate you (and what you do for them) can be easily implemented and managed––if you foresee their needs.

Clients appreciate you because they perceive and experience you as their:

• trusted guide
• fountain of information
• advocate for their dreams and objectives
• beacon in the storm

As a trusted guide, you work with your clients to navigate the route towards the future they desire. Your role in the journey is to schedule the rest stops along the way, check the map and gauge their progress, point out the barriers to avoid, and identify the vital entrance and exit ramps that enable them to arrive at their destination. Your business systems should ensure you have pre-scheduled meetings with your clients to review their progress and that you provide an experience that validates their trust in you and your company.

Being a fountain of information is a delicate balance between trickling out too little information and being a fire hose blasting out too much. Your business should have a system for providing consistent “touches” of information to your clients that give information and insights about investing, debt, wealth, employment, retirement, and interest rates. If you don’t have this system in place, put that on your to-do list for next year. Consistent communication with your clients should provide them with successful ways of thinking about the dynamics of finance, as well as supporting them in their decision-making––all the while enabling you to work with them more productively.

Actively advocating for your clients’ dreams and financial objectives will result in them feeling connected to you in a meaningful way. I have a client that once verbalized the desire to spend a month living on a houseboat in Seattle with his wife. If he continues the work of designing his business to work without him, he can realize his dream. He has appreciated the fact that not only do I know what is important to him, I take a genuine interest. In inquiring about this dream on a regular basis, I have been able to keep that goal in front of him by working with him to grow and prepare his financial services business to survive without him. His dream has connected him to the fuller vision he has of his future and created an anchor of communication in our relationship. Your client relationship systems need to be designed to ensure you know your clients well enough to establish a similar connection.

You will be your clients’ beacon in the storm, guiding their way through the rocky shoals of investing if you design your business systems in a way that enables you to be their trusted guide, fountain of information, and advocate for their dreams and objectives. In order to achieve this, you need to take action now to design your business to ensure your clients appreciate you. Doing so will lead to a practice that is designed to not only help your clients reach their objectives, but also to ensure you reach yours as well!

Susan Clements is Executive Director and co-owner of E-Myth Benchmark, a business coaching company serving businesses in the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, and the UK.  As a business coach Susan has steered client businesses through growth initiatives, sales and marketing strategies, management restructuring, personnel issues, customer service challenges, and action plans for growth and change. Leveraging a personal and professional experience platform of business ownership and management of businesses in both the private and public sector, Susan has designed a revolutionary coach training and delivery system that tools E-Myth Benchmark coaches to actively engage in results based coaching with business owners, leaders and managers leading to greater freedom and flexibility.  E-Myth Benchmark provides E-Myth Mastery Impact™ business coaching, business management and leadership workshops, trainings and seminars.  Contact Susan at www.e-mythcoaching.com or sclements@e-mythcoaching.com.