How Advisor Enablement Drives Client Success With Michael Jeanfreau

Michael Jeanfreau is the Director of Advisor Enablement at Mariner Wealth Advisors, a firm that provides wealth planning, investment management, tax, and estate-planning services to individuals and businesses. He leads strategies and tools to make financial advisors more effective and client-centric. Michael holds Series 63 and 65 licenses and has over 25 years of experience in financial services, spanning roles in wealth management and product development. He joined Mariner in 2021 and works to strengthen the advisor experience and support firmwide growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:07] Michael Jeanfreau discusses how Mariner Wealth Advisors helps clients connect financial goals with personal family goals

• [3:41] The role of advisor enablement in easing advisors’ workloads

• [6:32] Creating a new role to improve advisor communication and support

• [10:55] Challenges of last-minute client meeting prep and paperwork

• [12:18] Using Zoom AI Companion for note-taking in client meetings

• [15:01] Michael talks about measuring tech success by giving advisors more client time

• [19:20] Building a knowledge base with an AI overlay for advisor support

• [25:48] Real-world example of a digital agent automating compliance tasks
  

In this episode…

Many financial advisors are hindered by inefficiencies — from last-minute paperwork and disconnected tech tools to corporate-centered processes. These obstacles waste valuable time and limit the ability to deliver personalized service. How can firms better equip advisors with the tools and processes they need to thrive?

Michael Jeanfreau, an expert in advisor enablement, demystifies how streamlining workflows and adopting practical technology boost efficiency. He emphasizes that freeing advisors from manual tasks, such as filling forms or gathering scattered client data, is essential. He urges firms to implement AI-powered tools, such as digital agents and note-taking companions, and to establish stronger feedback loops between advisors and operational teams. For Michael, success means giving advisors more time to strengthen relationships and serve clients.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Michael Jeanfreau, Director of Advisor Enablement at Mariner Wealth Advisors, about creating better advisor and client experiences. Michael explains how AI and digital tools can reduce inefficiencies, why empowering advisors with time drives growth, and how fostering communication between the field and the home office leads to better outcomes.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Michael Jeanfreau on LinkedIn

• Mariner Wealth Advisors

• "[AI Series] Transforming Meeting Management for Financial Advisors With Arnulf Hsu" on The Customer Wins

• "Revolutionizing Tax Advisory With David A. Perez" on The Customer Wins

• "Secrets to Scaling SaaS Businesses With Patrick Hannon" on The Customer Wins

Quotable Moments:

• "My role is to help the advisors' lives be easier so that they have more time."

• "We really view tech as a way to enable the human contact that advisors have."

• "It's very common for an edict to come from the White Tower and people to say, why?”

• "We are a safer, perhaps feedback loop for you from the field, without the angry advisor."

• "I fundamentally believe advisors are going to be better at client interactions as they spend less time."

Action Steps:

1. Streamline advisor workflows with automation: Reducing manual paperwork frees advisors to focus more on client relationships.

2. Adopt AI tools thoughtfully: Leveraging platforms like Zoom AI or ChatGPT cuts inefficiencies and strengthens communication.

3. Build stronger communication loops: Two-way feedback between advisors and the home office ensures solutions truly serve everyone.

4. Focus on time as the key metric: Measuring success by time saved drives sustainable growth and better client service.

5. Encourage career evolution through technology: Shifting routine work to digital agents helps staff grow into more rewarding roles.

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests include Arnulf Hsu of GReminders, David A Perez of Tax Maverick, and Patrick Hannon of Fidelity Labs. Today, I'm speaking with Michael Jeanfreau, director of advisor enablement at Mariner Wealth Advisors. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.

Instead, get Quik!. Using Quik!, you'll be able to generate complete forms and get back clean. Context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right.

Today's guest, Michael Jeanfreau, serves as director of Advisor Enablement at Mariner Wealth Advisors, where he provides resources and operational expertise to support advisors across the enterprise. He began his career as a technical consultant to one of Oregon's first professionals, his father Alejandro, and has since built a broad background in financial services. Michael, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Michael Jeanfreau: 01:36

Thanks, Rich. Looking forward to our conversation. Appreciate the opportunity.

Richard Walker: 01:40

Me too. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Michael, I want to understand your business and your role a little bit better. How does your company help people? Pardon me. Go ahead. Okay. Great. Sorry, I choked for a second there.

Michael Jeanfreau: 02:07

That's right. I wasn't sure you're going to repeat that. Well, ultimately, Mariner Wealth Advisors is serving clients who are financial planning, investment advisor clients. And so what we do is help them achieve their financial goals, which are tied to their personal goals. That's ultimately what we want to do, is serve their personal family goals by helping them with their finances.

And it's a pretty common occurrence. When we sit down with somebody, they have a burning need or a burning desire to get their finances in order. Maybe look at their investment portfolio, and they'll sit down with us and push their statements toward us, and they'll say, wait a minute, this is way too early. We'll push them right back and say, tell us more about why you're here, what this is all about. The numbers are the end.

They are a means to the end. The end is the financial goals that they have in their family. So that's what Mariner is essentially all about is helping those people achieve their financial goals that are tied to their personal goals.

Richard Walker: 03:16

Now your role.

Michael Jeanfreau: 03:17

Is. Go ahead.

Richard Walker: 03:18

No, I mean, for your role, you're helping the advisors do their work better, is what I hear when I think about your title. And I know you care about that end consumer and their experience as well. And I'm kind of laughing because anytime somebody has a problem, they just want to jump, right? Like, here's my problem, fix it. But you got to build the relationship and you got to go through that process.

But how does your role impact all of that?

Michael Jeanfreau: 03:41

Well, my role is to help the advisors' lives be easier so that they have more time, more, more capacity to help their clients. So when they're running into technical challenges, a great example is document filling which, which your firm does very well. If an advisor or their assistant is filling out paperwork manually, that takes extra time. That isn't client-focused. So my role is both on the technical side, looking at solutions that we have.

Are they as good as they can be? Are they integrated well, etc. but also processes and change management when things happen at the Home Office? A Home Office department decides, hey, this is a really good idea to make our lives easier. Our role is to say, wait a minute, it will make your life easier, but it's not going to make the advisor's life easier. So let's look at this.

Let's make sure that we're doing that in a thoughtful way. If it's necessary a compliance requirement, for example, it is what it is. We're going to have to implement that. Is there a better way to do it but also helping the field, the advisors and the assistants understand the whys of this thing. It's very common for an edict to come from the White Tower and people to say, you know, why is this?

Why did they do it this way? And our job is to kind of help that communication between the Home Office departments and the field to help the field understand why things are the way they are and help the Home Office departments understand, hey, the way you're doing this isn't working very well. Is there another way for us to approach this?

Richard Walker: 05:27

You know, a year after I started my company. So back in 2003, one of our clients called up and said, I'm trying to move to this new broker-dealer. I've got to bring over 1500 accounts. They're telling me I have to hand enter all the data into their system, because that's what's easy for them. And so they said, can we figure this out?

So we went to work with that company and said, well, if we automate the forms, which collects data from the CRM that they already have and pre-fills it all, then we can transfer it all to you. Wouldn't that make it easier on both sides of that equation, and that gave us the impetus to build transition products over time. But I totally understand that. Like, it's so easy for the home office to be like, hey, we want to save money. We want to make it easier for our operations team.

And then they choose technology without thinking about how it impacts that customer, meaning the advisor, which is typically a customer of the firm. So where do you play in that role in the sense of are you finding technology and bringing it back to the Home Office? Are they bringing it to you and you're vetting it? How do you get involved in that overall process to ensure success on both sides?

Michael Jeanfreau: 06:32

Well, the answer to that is I'm not sure yet. The role that I have is kind of a brand new role. Until June, I was the managing director of Oregon. So all the advisors and sales support people reported to me, and that was my function to support them directly recognizing the issues that we had with that loop of communication and Technology solutions. We created this new role.

So I'm in it as of June and we're making it up as we go. But I think the short answer to that is we've kind of defined our mission as understanding what the needs of the field are. Everyone. I have two colleagues. So there's three of us in this role, and we all come from the advisor side or supporting that advisor side.

And we're getting to know the Home Office departments, which we already had to get to know in our role as supporting advisors, as a managing director, for example, I had to figure out who at the Home Office could get things done for us or who was the person to go to and recognize. I have a kind of a background with some insurance companies as vice president of operations, marketing, etc. so I'm not just I don't just have field experience, I also have home office and operating experience. So I saw this as an opportunity to benefit or touch the lives of more people than just the role I was in by stepping into this. So to that was a long, long answer to the question of we. We are now having regular meetings with the Home Office departments.

One of the concerns we had at the beginning is that they were going to look at us as competition, or stepping on their toes and getting their work done, and I think we've done a decent job of convincing them that, no, we're a partner to you in affecting positive change in the field. And we are a safer, perhaps feedback loop for you from the field, because it's not going to be an advisor who might be upset about something or other, how difficult it is for their team to do some process that you've come up with as your advocate with the field. We can give that feedback to you. Now, this isn't working very well without the angry advisor call. Now, I'll have to say that.

One of the things I really appreciate about Mariner is that we're very jealous of our culture, and I have gotten to know people around the company, and I'm amazingly impressed by the quality of the people that I keep meeting. So it's very rare that you have an advisor who's shooting off like that. But with that, that function. So we're a liaison between the two, and then we are part of the process now of vetting new technologies. If you're going to enter a technology or bring on a technology, let us get involved in that so that we can help trial it, get feedback from advisors and things like that.

So a lot of projects now that we're getting involved in.

Richard Walker: 09:37

Well, Michael, I think you're part. I think your evidence of a shift that's been going on in our industry for the past couple of years, because I'm starting to see more chief Experience officer titles in financial services as a whole, not just wealth management. I'm starting to see more care about what the advisor's day looks like. In fact, one firm we were talking to, we found out their executives earned a bonus on how much time they saved the advisors. I'm like, wow. Because of my experience back in 2003, I went to the broker dealer and said, if you get this tool, you're going to save the advisors this much money and time.

They said, we don't care. That's their job. It's their job to fill out forms. We don't care how they do it. We care about what's, you know, good for us back here.

And that is such an important shift. I want to ask you kind of a different question because, I mean, you've seen the big picture, but back to the field. How much work is done by the staff or the advisor at the moment of meeting with the client, like the last minute, to fill out the forms, the last minute to produce the plan, the last minute to do some analysis because they don't have better tech, or because that's their way of doing it. How much of it is last minute work versus if you streamline it, they can do it faster and achieve that easier, or they can do it up front. Now, what's your view?

Michael Jeanfreau: 10:55

Yeah, there are still a large number of advisers who are meeting with clients and writing everything down on a piece of paper, and it's a blank piece of paper, so it doesn't it doesn't even have hey, we need your Social Security number. This, that and the other, if they remember to get it when they're when the client says, yes, I want to work with you. Terrific. Okay, let me gather some statements. It'll have your name, your address on it.

If we have your tax documents, we'll have your tax ID, etc. but it becomes, in a lot of cases, a hodgepodge of information that the advisors gathered and then turns it over to a CSA, a client service associate, to fill in the paperwork and do the necessary steps. So the short answer to your question is most offices are still in some version of that. Some might be better and might have a form that has the fields that are necessary to open new accounts. But in a lot of cases, it's handwritten notes and the CSA is following up with the advisor, or in some cases the client, and asking for information that they didn't have yet. That has to change.

That's one of the areas we're looking at.

Richard Walker: 11:57

Yeah. So are you saying, like, there's a lot of efficiency to be gained by simply having a better process and being more prepared for whatever task or whatever event is coming up? Versus you buy fancy tech that takes notes for you. I mean, where do you think the best efficiency comes from?

Michael Jeanfreau: 12:18

Well, certainly we're using zoom as our primary video conferencing capability and it has an AI companion. And I'm seeing more and more adoption. I certainly do it with every meeting that I have. I turn on the AI companion. So it's taking notes for me.

It's not perfect, but it does keep me from having to capture everything. There's something that really stands out. I want to make sure I'm catching that. I'll type that in in my own notes, but that still doesn't give you the structured data that we need to to process business. So it's a good note taking.

It has some of the information in there, but we really do need to move toward a more structured gathering of the specific data. And that would make us incredibly more effective and efficient.

Richard Walker: 13:09

Yeah. How do you and your firm evaluate the value of delivering more tech or better processes to the field?

Michael Jeanfreau: 13:21

That's a really interesting question. It depends on where the need for that tech is identified and recognized. Sometimes it's a home office person who's saying, hey, we need such and such. Sometimes we get feedback from the field. I've gotten introduced to the tech stack at Mariner, and because we're an acquiring firm, I'm the result of an acquisition by Mariner.

We were a Cascadia Wealth Management before and now over almost four years ago, joined Mariner, so we had our own tech stack. That got integrated into Mariner, and some of the tech got moved to the. Standard that Mariner has. But there's a lot out there that is not necessarily integrated. Some of the decisions are made to how we integrate this better.

Is there a tool that does the thing that these three resources do? But right now a lot of that is driven by the Home Office. There's clearly advisors who have feedback about it, but there hasn't been a very good place to capture that feedback and shepherd it through the system. Hopefully that's what our group is now doing. The advisor enablement group is capturing that.

Richard Walker: 14:34

So in terms of how you look at it, in your role of advisor enablement, are you looking at it in terms of I mean, I think you have a bias probably towards the advisor. And obviously you care about the Home Office, but is it the squeaky wheel that gets the grease type of thing because I always joke, everybody wants a new iPhone, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be better at tech. It's just fun. You have a new iPhone. So how do you evaluate which tech is going to make the difference for you guys?

Michael Jeanfreau: 15:01

It really does boil down to how much time are we giving the advisors back so that they can spend time with their clients? It's one of the things that we're exploring, for example, is the use of AI. Everyone is doing that. We're also exploring digital agents, and there's a lot of talk about people's jobs being lost from that movement. I really believe fundamentally, especially in a growing firm, that as you provide more tools to the advisors in the field to give them time back, which is the ultimate measure of success, are we giving the advisors time, their touch to the clients are going to be more impactful, more frequent, more personal.

So we really view tech as a way to enable the human contact that advisors have. So if we are. If we are giving them that time and giving their CSAs, their support staff, additional time to reach out for birthday cards or setting appointments, whatever it may be, that's ultimately the signal of success, and it's going to lead to client retention. It's going to lead to more growth. It's going to lead to better results, better client satisfaction, which is ultimately how we succeed.

Richard Walker: 16:17

You know, that fear of AI is so palpable among people. And yet I go back in time. I can't recall a single client telling me they fired somebody because forms automation was so effective for them. However, I've had my very first client call and say, you took me from 40 hours a week to four hours a week of handwriting forms, and guess what? That person went on to be the VP of marketing and get a CFP and become a much more capable person as a result of that freedom of time.

I've also had somebody say, I'm going to avoid hiring two more people, and I think AI is going to have that kind of impact. Like, hey, we don't have to hire as fast now, but do you really think anybody's going to lose their job over AI?

Michael Jeanfreau: 16:57

No, I mean, in a growing firm, I don't see that happening. And there's definitely a growing firm. So when I talk to people about what's coming and some of the things that may replace part of what they're doing on a day to day basis, that's only going to free them up to either grow their career or or provide a higher level of client service. Or in some cases, like you said, it is possible that we'll need to hire fewer people in the future. I don't see the people that are here as ones that are going to lose their job.

Now, we do have an A group of people. It's a very relatively small group, but a group of people, all they do is process business. They get information about the client, they fill in the forms, send it off. No client contact? No, no.

Outside of that, it's a very rote type of work. And those people will evolve from that. Or they may find the tech replacing a lot of what they do. We won't need as many of those people, but I fundamentally believe that it's an opportunity for them to move forward in their career and have other opportunities down the road that I find, frankly, would be more gratifying.

Richard Walker: 18:07

Yeah. What is Mariner doing or what are you thinking about doing to really enable more advisors and their teams to leverage AI and empower them to grow and evolve?

Michael Jeanfreau: 18:18

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I mentioned is zoom AI companion, which I'm strongly encouraging advisors. When I was managing director in Oregon, I was really pushing hard for them to start using that tool in their online meetings. In fact, we had a handful of advisors who would start a zoom meeting in a live client meeting at their office so that the zoom was recording and doing.

Richard Walker: 18:41

Just record.

Michael Jeanfreau: 18:42

In the background. Right. So that's one way that advisors are doing that. Of course, we're also finding a lot more use of ChatGPT and things like that in writing, maybe for improving a letter that they've written or, hey, I have to have an approach to this client or this conversation within an employee is maybe a challenging one. So ChatGPT has given some great ideas about that kind of thing.

Richard Walker: 19:12

Yeah. Do you have a vision of advancement and innovation that you'd love to see come true for the advisors out there?

Michael Jeanfreau: 19:20

Well, one of the things really automating one of the huge advancements is automating so many of those processes that are manual right now, that that would free up so much time. I think another area is the use of digital agents, which is part of that first answer, really, but having some task done by a digital agent that really is, is just taking information from one place and putting it in another. That's something that's not a good use of human effort. The planning tools that we have are, you know, almost any major software platform now having an AI overlay added to it. And I think we're going to see a lot of change in innovation there right now.

Mariners approach is, hey, let's tap into whatever's available. They're not trying to select a single AI platform or digital working platform to oversee all the work. They're saying, what are the tools out there? And let's start using them. And then we'll evolve and develop.

We don't know who's going to be winning in this whole whole effort of moving toward more digital. But I fundamentally believe advisors are going to be better at their client interactions as they spend less time touching the tech and having AI help them. Another area that we're working on right now is Mariner partly because of the acquisitions and the different technologies we have as a result of that, sometimes it's hard to figure out where to go to get something done. And we're building a knowledge base, which is something that has existed for a long time, but we're building a knowledge base internally. And ultimately, our goal is to have an AI overlay on that so that they can ask large language, real world questions. How do I open a 529 plan at American Funds?

And it would give the answer to that. So that's one of the projects that is kind of dear to my heart right now is to work on that, to make getting an answer to a question much faster.

Richard Walker: 21:30

I'll tell you something we're doing here at Quik!. We've been doing it for almost two years, actually. There's a product on the web called CustomGPT that's like customGPT.com or AI. It allows you to point it at a source of information. So we pointed at our knowledge base.

We did another one on our API guide. Another one on our field definition. I mean, we took all of our API guides and we pointed at this CustomGPT at it. And then it gives you an embed capability. So my API guides have a ChatGPT component to it.

It is powered by ChatGPT in the background. So you can go in and query or interrogate my API guide to get questions. And it could be as simple as the word DocuSign. And it'll say, here's how you do DocuSign or as complex as how I set up this feature, blah blah blah. And it will give you the full rundown and then the sources to that, that underlying source, where it came from to go look at that article or information.

It's super easy and it's so powerful. It actually helped my team as well as our customers, solve problems faster. I get no promotion out of CustomGPT. I'm just saying it's a really cool tool.

Michael Jeanfreau: 22:38

That's great. I will definitely look into that. You know, and that brings up a question that I have for you is when I first came across Quik!, Quik! in the iteration that I saw, it was a document filling, you know, came from the information, came from a CRM right into Quik! fill the document. It was terrific. We really enjoyed using it.

As I understand it, though, now you're a little bit more focused on the API connections. So that front ends that other people are using, whether they be AI or whatever it may be. This becomes a tool to communicate. And you don't have to have a front end that's consistent. The back end is what matters in the API connection.

And that seems like a very thoughtful and probably prudent way to go about the world. Now, with all that's happening in the I.

Richard Walker: 23:30

Knowing Michael, I made a joke about this. What pencil do you use? Do you really care what pencil you use? I mean, does the brand of pencil matter? You just want it to work if you need a pencil.

I think the same thing about forms. And I'm making fun of my own company in a way. But does the user care, the brand, the software that generated the form. They just want the form to work. So I viewed ourselves that way and said, and actually we started API, our API driven business, in 2004, and most people don't realize we're 80, 90% of our revenue is from APIs.

And we're behind the scenes. We're white, labeled by all sorts of partners and customers. And it's funny. I'll meet somebody who's like, oh, Rich, I have this system. I'm like, yeah, I know that's us.

You just don't realize it. It's us behind the scenes. So I have viewed this problem as I don't want to become the platform that replaces the CRM and all the different stages of the technology that interact with the need to ultimately fill out a form. Instead, let me just provide the form engine. Let me be the bridge over the water on your road.

Let me help you connect the dots. And that's what I love about APIs, is it's truly a modular, component based system to connect things underneath it all, and then you keep the user experience totally seamless and the user doesn't have to care. So that's how I viewed it, I think. I think this is also kind of funny. I have this view that a customer will do what a customer can do, and if they want to go to a partner of ours to get the solution, great.

That's the one they want. Let them have it. I don't have to worry about having to build the whole system for them. So yeah, I appreciate the question because it's fundamental to how you build tech. And so many of the questions out in the advisor field is, how do I string all these things together?

I've got my CRM and I've got my planning tool, and I've got this, you know, calculator and all the websites, blah, blah, blah. How do you put it all together? And I think for the last 15 years, that's what this industry has been trying to do. And that's why you see other companies coming out there saying, let us be the data hub, let us do all the connectors for you. I want to go back to something else you were talking about.

You're not the first person to say that you're playing around with or trying to implement a digital agent in the field. So first of all, I'm curious from your standpoint, what does that mean to you? What's the definition of that agent? What does it look like? What do you think?

Michael Jeanfreau: 25:48

Yeah. It's interesting. I'm learning more and more about this. We've had a couple of trials already with real world tasks. And as I'm understanding better the capabilities, the possibilities are mind boggling.

But let me give you a real life example of what we're doing. We have a risk tolerance questionnaire that we would like all the advisors to fill out on their clients. It's part of the fiduciary responsibility. We have to understand their risk profile because that's required. We have to have some way of figuring out that we actually have that document, that it's in place, it's completed, etc..

So what an operations person has done in the past is look at the client folders, which are all hopefully in a standard structure, looking for something that's called risk tolerance questionnaire or risk or risk tolerance, whatever it may be. Opening it up, looking to see that it's complete. Is it scored? Then going over to another system and saying, okay, we do have in fact a risk tolerance questionnaire. And here's the score that the client had.

So we can use that as a metric down the road. So we've got a compliance box checked. And we also have a metric to use when looking at client portfolios and saying, hey, does this portfolio seem to match the risk tolerance. Is it within a range? That's a very manual process.

It takes somebody ten 15 minutes typically to go through that. So we are working with a firm who is helping us develop this digital agent, which is doing that same task but all automated. It's looking for names of the documents. If it doesn't find risk tolerance, it starts looking through each document and saying, oh, this is a risk tolerance questionnaire. It's just named poorly.

And then it goes through and checks. If it is, it is completed. Is it scored? And then checks the box in the system to say yes we have that.

Richard Walker: 27:39

So this isn't simply automation of hey can we find a file that represents a questionnaire? This is intelligence. Looking at it, evaluating it, scoring it, determining if it was completed or not. When was it completed? It's getting the intelligence out of the information more than just checking a box.

Like there's a document that exists that pretends potentially. Is that right.

Michael Jeanfreau: 28:00

Yes. And of course, there's a lot of secret sauce there that I don't know, I'm not part of that process. But they're literally training the agent. Oh, hey, you missed this. And I don't know how that works exactly, but they say you reviewed this document, but you miss this.

And so they're literally training it in. And once it's trained though, like a human, of course humans make mistakes, but like a human, once it's trained, it goes off and does the job. That's a very small iteration. I'm actually working with a group of CSAs who reported to me. Well, they're still reporting to me until the end of the year, but.

and starting to go through all of the tasks that they do and identifying steps that they go through, what systems do they touch? How do they do this process to see what other opportunities we have for automation? And it's all the way from reading the document to filling in, etc.. So it's not just finding it and checking a box, it's very much working like a human does.

Richard Walker: 29:08

So if I'm interpreting what you're saying, you're looking at automation plus intelligence in the advisory workflow to say we need an agent who does that thing. You're not trying to create the super agent that does all things at once for everything. You're looking at a problem by problem, task by task and saying standard automation is not enough. We need intelligence. Is that fair?

Michael Jeanfreau: 29:31

I think it's fair. I think as you train more and more of the steps in the overall process, you may eventually get there. It may not be one digital agent that does all the work, but you may have a series of steps that are automated that get passed on to the next automation agent. Now you can see all kinds of ways that can be difficult. If you have, if you're opening a special kind of trust that has a bunch of beneficiaries, that may not be very easy to train a digital agent to do.

But I just see that capability continuing to get better and better and better, and more of the steps would be done by agents. I don't anticipate that we'd have one agent doing that whole process. But once you get it going, it kind of like you said, it doesn't matter how it gets done. I just wanted to get done. So if it's ten agents that end up with the final result or one agent doesn't matter, I don't care.

I just didn't have to do it.

Richard Walker: 30:29

Yeah, yeah. Man, I'd love to keep talking about this. I have to wrap up the show, though. So before I get to my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you and Mariner?

Michael Jeanfreau: 30:39

Well, Mariner's Mariners' website is mariners.com. So it's pretty easy. And I am Michael John from j e n r e a u. I always have to spell it. No one knows that.

On LinkedIn. So you can find me pretty easily. There's not a lot of John.

Richard Walker: 30:57

Yeah. I'm imagining. All right. So my last question was one of my favorite questions. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Michael Jeanfreau: 31:08

I had a leader at Lincoln National who just kept showing a lot of trust in me and belief in my abilities beyond what I thought I was capable of. And he, for example, advocated for me to join the MBA program at Kellogg. So I was able to get my MBA and be supported by the company in doing that. But I think the whole idea. His name was Tom Fitch.

And Tom helped me believe in myself. And he also showed me how to believe in other people. And that's I think one of the things that I took away is seeing somebody and seeing their potential versus where they are right now, today, and getting a little bit of a side of them. Errors they might be making or the characteristics they may, may have, that are a little challenging. I will say.

Another thing is that I, you know, in my religious upbringing and training, the whole idea of love and approaching people with love and using that as a an overarching way to view the world, it's not easy to say in a business environment, but honestly, if you love the people you work with and love doesn't always mean accepting. The idea here is not accepting bad behavior. It's recognizing that they're better than that bad behavior. And how can I help them get to a better place? That's kind of how I view that love.

But that comes from, of course, from my religious background. But an important part of, I think, how I approach things and a little bit of my success is, is because of that.

Richard Walker: 33:02

And I know I love that. I think it's super important. And actually, you inspired something in me to, to think about, which is believing in somebody is a certain amount of extending trust to allow them to be them and to go make those mistakes and learn on their own. I mean, even as a parent, my wife and I are talking about, should we let our child have more freedom to ride his bike around the neighborhood without us knowing? You know, that kind of stuff.

And she's like, well, he doesn't look across the road for cars coming. And I said, maybe we're his safety net. Maybe we have to believe that he can do that and trust him to do it. Anyway, it's a whole nother episode. We could have.

Michael. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Michael John, director and advisor. Sorry for advisor enablement at Mariner for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Michael's website at Mariner.com and don't forget to check out Quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Michael, thanks for joining me today.

Michael Jeanfreau: 34:08

Rich. I really appreciate it. You know, conversations we had prior to this were always enjoyable and this is more formal, but it's been a thrill and really enjoyable. So appreciate the opportunity.

Outro: 34:21

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