Tuesday Email: The Client You Don't Actually Know

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

The thing we optimize for hardest is actually the thing our clients care about the least.

Ouch.

I know. It hit me hard just writing it!

We've spent our careers building technical credibility. Getting the certifications. Sharpening our analytical skills. Getting better at building financial plans.

And those things matter. But it doesn’t drive our clients’ decisions to stay or to go.

We've been building the wrong thing. Or at least, the incomplete thing.

A questions I constantly ask myself in client conversations is: Can I write the client's biography?

Not restating their balance sheet or identify their risk tolerance. It’s not even about writing down what they want to do in retirement.

Rather, it’s the story of who they are, where they came from, what they've been through, and why they do what they do with money.

Most of us can't.

And I want to be really clear, I’m the first one raising my hand on this one for not being able to do it.

This is something I’ve identified as a challenge point for me ever since I started doing this content creation stuff. And I continue to struggle with.

The reason for me writing about this topic is a bit selfish! I’m trying to learn how to get better at it. To improve along my journey. And along the way, I’m hopeful that me going through this experience can help others.

I believe I am not alone.

There is a massive difference between preference knowledge and biographical knowledge.

Preference knowledge is what clients like. Their communication frequency. Their asset allocation comfort zone.

Biographical knowledge is why they are.

Knowing their retirement date is not the same as knowing what they are terrified of leaving undone. Knowing their tax bracket is not the same as knowing what their parents taught them about money when they were nine. The first category fills a spreadsheet. The second one is what actually makes a client feel known.

And if we're being honest, most of the information and insights we have sit in the first category.

The Trust Equation

Trustworthiness equals credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, divided by self-orientation.

We're really good at credibility. We work hard for our credentials and stay sharp. Reliability too, we show up and do what we say.

Intimacy in the relationship is the depth of the relationship. Too often we worry whether we are “crossing the line” or “heading towards therapy.” But when intimacy is high, we don’t worry about that. We just feel connected with the client and the feeling is mutual.

But, even if we have a great deal of intimacy with the relationship with our clients, are highly competent and reliable… trust can be limited.

And self-orientation is the one that can quietly destroy everything else. Because it lives in the denominator. Any time a client senses we're doing something for ourselves, for the fee, for any reason that isn't purely about them, the equation collapses. It doesn't matter how credible or reliable we are. The fraction drops fast if we ever let self-orientation creep in.

Brad Klontz, who I’ve been fortunate enough to have on the podcast, has spent years studying what he calls money scripts. These are unconscious beliefs about money that form in childhood, usually during moments of financial stress or hardship. A parent who went bankrupt. A divorce that turned financial. Growing up watching money treated as something shameful, or something to hoard, or something always out of reach.

These scripts don't go away. They become our operating system.

We've all had the experience of building a plan that is completely sound. That financial plan where the math works, the recommendations are right and then we watch as our client does not follow it. They say they want to save more. And then they don't. We get frustrated. We wonder what's wrong.

Nothing is wrong. We just haven't gotten to the root.

Their default behavior isn't based on our financial plan. It's based on childhood programming that they may not even be able to name. And the only way to access it is through the relationship. The only way to understand someone's money scripts is to build enough intimacy that those conversations can actually happen. Otherwise we'll keep banging our heads against the same wall without ever knowing why.

Learning From Hospitality

Danny Meyer built some of the world's most respected restaurants. And one of his core operating principles is ABCD: Always Be Collecting Dots.

Every conversation is a dot. A kid's graduation. A trip someone's planning. A dish they love from childhood. The staff at Danny’s restaurants are trained to find these details and hold them. Not robotically. Quietly. The dot becomes part of that person's story inside the organization.

This connects to something I've always believed. Knowledge is the stars. Wisdom is the constellations. Stars by themselves are just data points floating in the dark. The magic happens when you connect them, when you can see the shape they form together. That's the wisdom.

We need to always be collecting stars (or dots as Danny notes).

Aman Resorts is another hospitality brand worth exploring. They operate an unpublished internal guest recognition system. No loyalty points. No app. Just profiles that follow each guest across every property worldwide. They track dining nuances, allergies, special dates, preferred service style. Staff study these before a guest arrives. The result is service that feels intuitive and anticipatory. Like the place just knows you.

They have 47% higher guest retention than comparable luxury properties. A 35% rate premium. And when downturns hit, they hold pricing while competitors discount.

All of that, from choosing to know people.

And what is most interesting from what Aman Resorts does, is that they are able to gather the data that is most necessary and translate across cultures and language barriers to ensure that experiences across the world are elevated no matter the country.

The Warming Heart

About six weeks before I wrote this, I was on the phone with a husband and wife I've been serving for years. They had a wonderful relationship with my dad, and after he passed, they became my clients.

We just hit it off. We'd talk three or four times a year — catch up on family, on life, on what was happening with their kids. The husband just had some surgery. But they seemed to be doing well. They were deeply in love with their kids and their one grandson.

During our conversation we were doing the normal joking around and talking about life. But they were also eager to move closer to their grandchild. That took up the entire conversation.

It was a lovely conversation.

A few weeks later, I got an email. The husband was in the ICU. And then the following Tuesday, he was gone.

I remember my heart just hurting.

And I picked up the phone and called his wife. I didn't hesitate. I just called, because I knew our relationship could hold that kind of conversation. She picked up. We talked. Just two human beings grieving someone we both loved.

It may seem strange to say, but those moments are the reason we do what we do.

In all my time with that family, we never really talked about the portfolio. That was never a desired discussion point or a necessary discussion point. We had something else. And because we had something else, I could be there for her in a moment that had nothing to do with finance.

If all I had been was a great portfolio manager, I wouldn't have had that relationship. I wouldn't have made that call.

We are building technical competence in a world where technical competence is becoming a commodity.

AI will do the math. It already does.

What AI cannot do is sit with a client who is terrified of ending up like their father and help them see that the plan actually protects them. That is still ours to do.

The next time you talk with a long-term client, someone you think you know well, I want you to ask the following question:

Imagine you're financially secure — more than enough, now and in the future. How would you live your life? What would you change? What dreams would you allow yourself to pursue?

Just ask it. See what surfaces. Let the answer lead somewhere. Then write down what you heard. One note. One field in the CRM. It doesn't need to be a system. It just needs to be somewhere.

That moment is a dot. Dots are stars. And stars, when connected, become the wisdom that lets us serve people in a way no spreadsheet ever could.

Me and my firm don’t have this figured out. We're still working on how to surface the right information at the right time. But the discipline of always being curious, of choosing to know our clients and not just know about them, that part is a choice we can make today.

Can you write your client's biography?

That's the question I'm sitting with.

I'm walking through that work the same way you are. One conversation, one dot, one constellation at a time.

The best is ahead!

-Matt