At the risk of sounding boorish, client behavior needs to be regulated. We’ve got to be gentle bullies. Every client’s lament is the same: I wish I had started sooner. There is never a convenient time to invest, clients never have enough information to make a decision and clients always have conflicting needs for their money. The client does not know that the biggest single investing mistake is not starting and the second biggest single mistake is not going all the way. When your child is three, college is a mirage. When you’re forty five, the gold watch and rocking chair are mirages as well.
Controlling client behavior is essential to controlling the relationship. If you don’t control the client, he will control you. It’s all too common in down markets that we begin to doubt ourselves. After enough doubt creeps in, we lose our assertiveness. We go to bed one night and things are fine. We wake up in the morning to find the client in charge. He’ll tell us he wants to wait until things get better. He’ll stop contributing to his children’s educational funds. He’ll balk at our recommendations. Because we’ve lost some certainty, we find ourselves powerless to reassert ourselves and our client begins to lose his most precious commodity, time. And left to his own devices, he will undoubtedly fail.

For nine years, Joe Carbone was Kobe Bryant’s personal trainer. For four years after that, he was the strength and conditioning coach for the Los Angeles Lakers. At the very peak of success, he decided to walk away. It was the day he overheard his youngest son say, “I want to play basketball, but my dad hasn’t taught me yet.” He is now teaching fifth graders at a school in a low income, predominantly Hispanic area of New York City. He was recently quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying, “With the Lakers, I was mainly fine-tuning. I mean, it doesn’t really matter who trains Kobe at this point. Here, I might be teaching the basics, but you know what I’ve learned? The basics are pretty important.”

A lot of little things equal one big thing. If it is your long-term goal to rise to the top of this profession, break that journey up into a lot of little journeys. Accomplishing a lot of short-term goals will help you maintain confidence in yourself as you head unerringly toward your long-term goal. Accomplishment and the wonderful sense of self-worth it generates will keep you on track.

An Advisor friend told me about an interesting evening he recently spent with a few of his top clients and a few of their friends. This Advisor likes fine cigars, as do a few of his clients. The Advisor and his wife hosted a dinner party for those clients and their spouses; and allowed each client to invite a cigar smoking friend and spouse. At the dinner was a professional cigar roller, in this case a fellow who had learned his craft in Cuba. After dinner he rolled several cigars of various types, much to the enjoyment of everyone there. It was a fun evening, new friends were made and the time was more
than well-spent.

I recently had dinner at a restaurant a friend had highly recommended. The restaurant was small; it had no sign outside advertising its existence; the food was outstanding and the experience was wonderful. When his duties as chef ended for the evening, the owner went from table to table thanking folks for being there. When someone at our table asked him about his odyssey, he told us that he had come from Italy a few years prior to work at Disney World. When his stint ended he returned to Italy, but he soon realized he wanted to be back in the United States. With his mother’s encouragement, he returned to America and to Disney. He shortly thereafter was offered a job as a chef consultant with a major grocery chain. While there, an executive of the firm took Giuseppe under his wing and taught him how about money, how to make it and how to use it to his advantage, as a complement to his culinary skills. Thus the restaurant came to pass. It had been open seven months when we dined there. He told us about his cooking lessons for single people only. He invites in for the evening eight men and eight women and the result is a different, fun night for everyone. While describing some other innovations that were successful as well, he began talking about how his clientele had begun to change just a few short months after opening. Whereas the initial diners had been rather demanding, his more recent customers were much more accommodating. When we asked him why, he said that he thought it had a lot to do with his attitude. “You know,” he said, “the better I treat my customers, the better customers I get.” That simple line blew me away. He was simply stating what everyone intuitively knows but most fail to capitalize on: superior service does indeed make one stand out. Be great!