Scaling Client Success and Capacity With Dr. Jon Randall
- Quik! News Team
- 19 hours ago
- 29 min read
Dr. Jon Randall is the Founder of XFA Coach, a coaching and consulting firm that helps financial advisors scale their practices and achieve extraordinary growth and profitability. He has been coaching and consulting top-performing advisors since 2004 and is recognized for helping firms overcome growth plateaus. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly two decades as a successful financial advisor, gaining firsthand insight into the challenges that advisors face. Dr. Randall is also a published author and holds a doctorate in performance psychology, which informs his approach to leadership and business growth.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:04] Dr. Jon Randall discusses how XFA Coach helps financial advisors grow and scale
[4:20] The theory of constraints applied to advisory firm growth
[7:03] Defining capacity in a financial advisory practice
[10:01] Client experience through contact frequency and segmentation
[13:01] Dr. Randall talks about identifying unprofitable clients with revenue per client
[16:01] Using a niche strategy to attract more suitable clients
[19:19] The psychology behind resistance to niching down
[21:56] Creating a high-touch coaching client experience
[25:47] Using CRM systems and team workflows for thoughtful follow-up
[29:42] How AI can improve efficiency and advisor capacity
In this episode…
Many financial advisors want to grow faster, attract better clients, and deliver a stronger client experience, but they often encounter hidden capacity limits. When teams are stretched too thin, growth stalls, service quality declines, and the wrong clients can consume excessive time. How can advisory firms scale without sacrificing the experience that drives referrals and long-term success?
Dr. Jon Randall, a coach and consultant to financial advisors, explains that the first step involves identifying the real business constraint instead of chasing growth tactics too early. He recommends improving capacity before adding more clients, using segmentation to match service levels to client value, tracking revenue per client to spot unprofitable relationships, and narrowing into specific niches that make referrals and delivery easier. Dr. Randall also emphasizes consistent communication, thoughtful follow-up, and leveraging technology and AI to streamline admin work so advisors can focus more on meaningful client conversations.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Dr. Jon Randall, Founder of XFA Coach, about scaling advisory firms through better capacity management and client experience. Dr. Randall also discusses niching down for stronger referrals, using CRM systems to create thoughtful client touches, and how AI can increase efficiency without replacing human relationships.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
The Extraordinary Financial Advisor Practice: Build a Business That Thrives Without You by Dr. Jon Randall
Attract More Clients, Better Clients: The Art and Science of Marketing Your Business by Dr. Jon Randall
"Empowering Advisors To Help Clients Live Fearlessly With Dan Zitting" on The Customer Wins
"How Brand Evangelism Drives Growth in Fintech With Diana Cabrices" on The Customer Wins
"Unlocking Money Wisdom and Intuition With Ellen Rogin" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
“The most important part is that people are getting results. That is the most important part.”
“People often work on things late in their process…when it's actually things earlier in the process that are the real constraints.”
“I always say, ‘If you think you're doing enough, think again, because there's always more.’”
“The number one constraint we see with financial advisors is capacity.”
“The human-to-human connection is not going away.”
Action Steps:
Identify capacity constraints before pursuing growth: Addressing capacity first ensures growth doesn’t damage client experience or overwhelm the team.
Segment clients by value and service level: Segmenting clients allows advisors to deliver a premium experience to top clients while serving smaller clients efficiently.
Track revenue per client to measure profitability: This metric helps advisors identify unprofitable relationships and adjust service models or referrals accordingly.
Develop a focused niche to attract ideal clients: A strong niche makes it easier to stand out, attract referrals, and serve clients with deeper expertise.
Increase consistent client communication and thoughtful touches: Frequent, meaningful contact builds trust and creates memorable experiences that encourage loyalty and referrals.
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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 have included, pardon me, Dan Zitting of Nitrogen, Diana Cabrices, the chief brand evangelist, and Diana Cabrice's Consulting, and Ellen Rogin financial intuitive at Create Great. Today I got to speak with Dr. Jon Randall XFA Coach and. Today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing.
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Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right. Dr. Jon Randall has been coaching and consulting the fastest growing financial advisors in the industry since 2004. He's a published author with his book The Extraordinary Financial Advisor Practice and Attract More Clients, Better Clients. Prior to coaching, Jon was a seasoned financial advisor where he learned the ins and outs of the industry.
Jon recently completed his doctorate in performance psychology. We're going to have to hear about that. Jon, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Dr. Jon Randall: 01:39
Thank you Rich. It's awesome to be on. I'm a big fan of your podcast. So this is going to be exciting.
Richard Walker: 01:45
Oh, thank you so much. So for anybody who has never heard my podcast before, I just love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Jon, I want to understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?
Dr. Jon Randall: 02:04
Well, that is what every business's mission should be, right? How do we help other people? And I got a taste for it being a financial advisor, helping other people with stuff that they didn't know a lot about their money, how to invest it, how to save in taxes, all that kind of stuff. And the more I did it, the more I had other advisors come to me and say, hey, could you show me what you're doing? Could you show me how you do this?
How do you track clients? And I became passionate about helping other advisors and became such a big thing that after about 20 years, I stopped being a regular advisor and was on this train of just helping others. And what's neat about it is there was a finite number of people I could help as an advisor, right? I could only go so far. But by helping hundreds of others advisors, I mean we can influence hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans and help them have a much better experience with their advisor in a much better financial outcome.
Richard Walker: 02:57
So I love that reach, by the way, because that was the premise of me starting my software company. I was an advisor. I built the software. Everybody wanted it. And I had a question, can I help?
I don't know 500 clients or could I help millions of clients and thousands and now hundreds of thousands of financial professionals. So to me, it was a simple math equation. I'm like, I can help so many more people this way. I love that you took that approach. Was it hard for you to give up the financial planning or had it run its course for you?
Dr. Jon Randall: 03:24
I missed the relationships with the people. I really liked the clients. I mean, they almost feel like family members have to work with people for a long time, that it was hard, but they were in wonderful hands with the wonderful advisor that was my successor and took over. I was just so excited about helping others that I ran towards it. So it's always hard to leave relationships, but if you know that you're moving to something bigger and helping, you know, either the world or your industry, like financial industry, in our case, to move to something bigger, felt it felt important that, okay, even though I'm not going to help these individual families, I'm going to make a much bigger difference in our industry and improve it.
And that helped me. That helped me, made it easier to walk away.
Richard Walker: 04:05
Well, and you also had this incredible background of working with clients, knowing what it means to walk in the shoes of your client now. So it makes it much easier for you to understand it and, and create better behaviors out of it. So is there a formula to what you do?
Dr. Jon Randall: 04:20
Absolutely is. And after years and years of helping advisors, we've developed a very specific formula that's based on the theory of constraints. So if you think about manufacturing that car that's behind you, there's a lot of steps to make that happen. And so I find in the financial advisor business it's the same. But people working on the wrong steps, people often work on things late in their process of building the car when it's actually things earlier in the process that are the real constraints.
Richard Walker: 04:49
Foundational steps, the right platform. Right. So what does that look like in a financial planning world? I mean, we all think, oh, I got to go prospecting more.
Dr. Jon Randall: 04:56
Exactly. You're so right, Rich. Every advisor comes as they say, I want to attract more clients. I want to be like those big Barron's top 100 producers. You coach and acquire more practice.
Would you show me how to do it? And it's okay. Well, if you're not getting a lot of new clients and, and, you know, let's peel the onion back. What's going on here? What are we doing with existing clients?
And we find some gaps there. It's not really optimized. And we pull the onion back further. The number one constraint we see with financial advisors is capacity. And there's so many studies like investment news that did a study recently that just says these advisor practices are filled up and when they get filled up, it stunts their growth.
The client experience declines and they stop growing. So that's why the client experience isn't optimized, and that's why they're not getting a constant stream of new referrals or even in position to buy another practice. So I know they want to acquire more clients and they want to acquire the businesses. Those are some of my absolute favorite topics. I mean, that is where I love helping advisors grow in scale.
But if we've got issues with clients in our, you know, how we scale, it's sort of, I relate it to trying to build a house on the second floor, right? You've got to have a foundation. You've got to have a first floor before you start building additional floors on the house or the building that you're building. So everyone comes in and says, I want to help with the second floor. But we say, okay, well, let's fix your foundation and then let's fix the first floor.
Now we can build unlimited floors as much as we want. So it's the same thing, but it's, it's our process is really just, just with helping hundreds and hundreds advisors, we consistently see the same things.
Richard Walker: 06:36
All right. So help me define capacity in the ways that you look at it. Because my first thought goes back to my partner's financial planning. When I joined him, he said, I have 52 clients. That's the maximum number of clients that I can handle.
And if I want to take on one, I've got to fire one. So I mean there's different aspects of this, right? Can you scale up and do 100 clients or is it more about getting higher value clients? Is it getting the right clients? How do you help clients with this?
Dr. Jon Randall: 07:03
Great question. Industry averages suggest that advisors are on average, working with between 147 and 149 clients. So that's it.
Richard Walker: 07:13
Pretty tight. 147 to 149.
Dr. Jon Randall: 07:16
All these studies say the same thing. I mean, they, they, they do they're all right there, whether it's investment. They all say the same thing. So the advisor that's doing everything themselves, right with no support, it's hard to work with that many an advisor that has everything handled for them. Hey, they could successfully work with 250 clients because all they're doing is talking to clients.
So if that's the industry average, you got to look at all right, well, what's the role? So I find advisors that are up to 1.5 million in revenue. We can see an individual advisor can grow to that level, but it's about the max that they can handle. They probably have one, possibly two people helping them out on their team. And at that point, it's just a time crunch of there's just no more time to help more clients at that stage to go to multiple millions, they're going to need another advisor on their team to help with the most time consuming thing, which is talking to clients.
So there's definitely these sound barriers we see or like glass ceilings, if you will, we see in our industry. And it just has to do with capacity. So if you're working with 50 super high quality clients, that's a great boutique business, right? And, and if you think about it like a plane with 51st class seats, if someone gets on, someone's got to get off. I mean, that's a really cool model, but not every advisor's access to really high level clients.
You know, the industry average client right now has about 1.66 6 million in assets with a financial advisor. So advisors that have clients that have over 10 million, and we coach some of them that have eight and nine figure clients. They've just cracked the code on accessing that level of client. They don't need as many to be due to multiple millions and be really successful, right? They don't need as many people on their team to be really successful.
Whereas the typical advisor is going to need a volume of clients to be able to get to multiple millions, and then it becomes a capacity game. So it's the founder having too much on their plate. And then the other part of capacity, if you're doing multiple millions, it's leveraging the time of the other advisors on your team and filling them up to run a million in revenue with around 150 clients.
Richard Walker: 09:24
All right, so look, my show is about Customer experience quite often. And I think of capacity as how it impacts customer experience. So you take that person that's got the eight nine figure person or families that they're managing, they are probably doing a higher type of experience, more touches, right? More quality, maybe more services, etc. so their capacity is actually diminished just in the nature of the services they're providing. Right?
Dr. Jon Randall: 09:50
Yes, exactly.
Richard Walker: 09:52
So how do you help your customer understand the experience that they want to create so that they can actually serve it from a capacity understanding?
Dr. Jon Randall: 10:01
So I find the fundamental in the client experience in the financial services industry first starts with what's the frequency of interactions. So on average, it's about four interactions per year. The typical advisor has with the typical client. And when you dive further, the top tier of clients on average is getting 8.1. Human to human contacts.
And it doesn't mean they're all really long, boring meetings. Some of them might be very short phone calls, but there's a higher frequency of contact. When you move up. So you're right. So that advisor works with eight and nine figure clients.
Yeah, he's talking to a lot of them weekly, right. There's a very high frequency of contact and service. They're doing a lot for that level of client. But a typical client is about four contacts a year with some, some work outside of that. And then of course, smaller clients need to be efficient with, right?
They shouldn't get the same level. They need to get less. So controlling time through segmentation is really key. That's how you can really enhance the experience for the really profitable clients, for the business, and not let the smaller clients steal away time. But that is the crux right there.
91% of practices are reporting productivity issues, and it's mostly due to unprofitable clients. You know, Fidelity came out with a study, said that over half of the clients of financial advisors are unprofitable. So if an advisor is caught spending too much time with those unprofitable clients, I always say you'll be far more efficient taking a pile of money and lighting it on fire in your parking lot. It's a much quicker way to lose money. Unprofitable.
But if we can reinvest more time with those better clients, maybe find a different solution or service to smaller ones in a different way. That's the key to our industry, right? How can we do more and create an even better experience for those top ones? That's what most practices are missing out on. And I always say, if you think you're doing enough, think again, because there's always more we can be doing, especially with the best clients.
Richard Walker: 12:00
Jon, you know, this all translates to my world in software. We have an interesting problem. We have been so successful at customer success that our customer satisfaction score is 99 to 100 consistently for four years running. And I actually confronted my team about that. I'm like, is that too high?
Because what does that mean we're doing? Maybe we're taking on too much work. Maybe we're becoming the crutch instead of the enabler of our clients to solve their own problems or to get through things, I don't know. It's a diagnosis, so it's a different type of problem than undeserving and not being able to perform at all. But I kind of go back to this kind of concept.
How do you identify the unprofitable customer in this realm? And this is a system that we're looking at as the smaller customers are harder for us to serve profitably. Yes. How do we identify that? How does your client identify it?
And then what do you do about that? How do you fire the client?
Dr. Jon Randall: 13:01
So a few things there. I think the most important metric that advisors should use is revenue per client, specifically ongoing recurring revenue per client. We're all trained to think in assets under management, right? And we all have great clients, but you could get caught with a client that has many millions in stock. They're never going to sell, and you're generating no revenue on it.
So it should be revenue per client should be your guide. And there should be some kind of barometer. A lot of industry studies show that about 5000 in revenue per client is the profit line. You know, the industry average client right now is producing 10,300 for a financial advisor average client in the industry. So look at what the big firms do because you don't want to kick someone to the curb, right?
Sorry. Good luck out there. Right. We want to care for people, make sure they have a home. Either you service them differently in your home or you help them find another home, right?
You do revenue share with another practice or I mean, there's a practice that will buy, you know, clients from you. But look at some of the really big firms, what they've done is they've created their own call centers, right? So they'll compensate advisors for a certain level of client and above and below that, it's meant for those clients to be serviced by a call center. They're just serviced differently. So they have a solution for them.
So the really big firms we work with, especially the eight figure plus firms that we coach, all have built their own call center. It runs differently, right? It's a higher volume of clients. It's more phone based than sitting down and having long meetings, right? It's just a different approach.
So we're still caring for those people. It's just in a different way. So, it's revenue per client, you know, which helps with profitability. But then it's also easy to deliver, right? Because if it is and look, advisors out there, you might have really high level clients that create a lot of revenue that's very difficult for you to deliver and you don't enjoy it.
And that's okay, right? It's okay if you don't enjoy the delivery, it's too much and you want to find another solution, that's fine. So I think it's definitely how you can create quality? How can you be profitable? But how can you really gravitate to the ease of, of, of delivery?
And I see practices kind of get to, hey, these clients are really easy for us or we have a lot of these. Therefore, because volume delivery or fulfillment is easier, right? Because more are the same. So we can deliver a high quality to the masses because they're similar as opposed to like everyone's completely different. So that's the two biggest things I see in revenue per client.
And then what's our ease of delivery there? We get those down. I think you can really find your sweet spot.
Richard Walker: 15:38
And I would presume the ease of delivery is pointing to the cost structure to do it as well internally.
Dr. Jon Randall: 15:43
Absolutely. Yeah. There's not much cost to do. It's highly profitable. Absolutely.
If there's not much time. Absolutely.
Richard Walker: 15:50
Look, I don't. I don't want to guess ahead, but I'm intuiting that if you're helping a client see these factors in their business, you're also helping them redefine their niche and who they serve. Is that part of your growth strategy?
Dr. Jon Randall: 16:01
Big time. Yeah, it really is. So when you dial in from a capacity standpoint, who's really the profit center? Who are your best clients, how can we optimize what you do for those best clients? Yeah.
Are there any commonalities among them? Or do you have clients that there's other people in the world just like them? And so that's one of my favorite things to get into. How can we duplicate those ideal clients? Because that's one of the most profitable things that can happen, right?
Organic referral to a top client. I mean, that's just huge. I mean, acquiring other practices, that stuff's fun. It does pay for itself. But there's a big cost to acquiring other businesses.
So the best thing that could happen is you're so good at what you do that people refer to other people like them, and it brings you more ideal clients, but it is really narrowing down to a target market, right? Being really, really niched and I, I put it at a level, I just did a podcast yesterday about this. It's about getting down to the level where you're the only fish in a small pond of like less than ten people. How could you be that level of, you're the one that can help those people? Because here's the example I hear so many times that financial advisors say, I work with business owners.
Awesome, right? There's over 28 million in America. That's a giant ocean. The sharks are swimming, right? The financial advisors are out trying to get these, these people's clients.
But how can you narrow your focus to a specific kind of business and go even more narrow. That it's so specific, this business and a specific area that there might be. You know, let's say 5 or 6 other people just like them. If you niche down that far. And those other people would be really good clients.
You can get some really, really great referrals. If you're the only one that specializes in that level of client. And it could be the level of not just working with people that own car dealerships, maybe people that own car dealerships of a specific brand, people that own multiple car dealerships of a specific brand in a specific part of the country. And there's only six of them, and one of them is your client. If you got that level, you can probably get access to the others, right?
The other 4 or 5 you could probably get, if you're the one that is the expert for exactly that person, you can get access to that, that other person. But if they just don't go deep enough, right? They're like, oh, I just help business owners. It's hard for you to ever get known, right? But it's easier to get known if you're the only fish in that really small pond.
So it starts with your clients. That's your access point. And not every client is going to have an access point. Not every client is willing to bring you into their access point or introduce others to you. But that's one of my favorite things because when you do get to other people just like them, you can deliver quality, right?
Because you already know everything about them and you can deliver quality at scale. When you have similar clients, I'm a huge fan of that. And some of the practices that have grown the fastest that bring in over 100 million in new assets annually just from referrals. It's totally what's happened. They're just further down the path of niching down and having a specific type of person that they help best, and then it just becomes scalable when they have more and more of them.
Richard Walker: 19:07
All right, so let me tap into your psychology degree. And I don't know if this is appropriate. Isn't it scary to go to that level of, of niche of, of saying there's only six possible clients I could win? I mean, that's got to sound.
Dr. Jon Randall: 19:19
And you don't, it's not that your entire business isn't based on that. But if you want to get to those other ones, you know, faster. You focus that and, and usually practices will have a few of these niches, right? It's rare that they'll have one that just crushes it. Like I know one.
Their office is across the street from this massive employer. Everyone at this massive employer is awesome clients and they dominate. That's rare. Not many advisors have that right. That's a whole nother level.
So you've got to have a few of these pawns to really focus on and go after. And if you get, you know, a bunch of those clients, that's great. Then you can move on to the next pawn. It either doesn't work out or, you know, most time advisors don't spend long enough in that pond, but either you maximize that pawn, then you go to the next one and build the next niche. So advisors are scared to go to that level.
They stay too high range. And it does go back to psychology. So I always joke and say, I spent all this time getting a PhD in performance psychology to figure out why financial advisors don't do what they should be doing.
Richard Walker: 20:20
I already knew the answer, but.
Dr. Jon Randall: 20:22
The biggest thing I learned is just how we are as humans. So the human brain craves equilibrium. We like these routines that we have when something new and different comes along. Our brain says that's not the way we do things around here. We do it this way.
So we're predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over again. So what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing, expecting a different result. It's just how we are as humans. We're going to keep doing the same things.
So something different like this that whoa, I can never niche down that far. Well, divisors that do win, the visors that don't, they stay in that same results that they continue to get. So it does seem scary. It does seem different, but the ones that do it win. We see it consistently and the ones that don't struggle are.
Richard Walker: 21:13
I guess this is why I'm an entrepreneur, because the idea of doing the same thing over and over again just terrifies me more. I need new things all the time. I'm on a roller coaster every week. Like, yeah, no. Yeah, everything's dynamic and changing and I love that.
Okay, I want to go back to your business a little bit differently now, because one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is I wanted to hear how you create experience for your clients, because a lot of what we're talking about is how you help them create experience for their clients, right? It's understanding who they are. It's focusing on who they are. What is something unique about your world and coaching that you're maybe modeling or exemplifying in the customer experience and the journey?
Dr. Jon Randall: 21:56
So there's a few things there that have really worked. And coaching is a tough industry. I read somewhere that only 4% of coaches generate more than a million in revenue. So to build a multi-million dollar revenue coaching business, it's tough. But here's some of the things that have worked for us.
The most important part is that people are getting results. That is the most important part. So we've built our process. It's specifically designed to help people grow fast because that's what they want. They want to grow.
They want to scale. They want to ten x their business in 5 to 7 years. And that's exactly what we help them do. So number one, we got to have some quality, right? Just like you are rich.
You're really great at quality. Your delivery. So that's number one. And then the second is the frequency of interaction just like financial advisors, right? We have to have a regular cadence of, of communicating and moving things forward.
So we're really good about keeping a regular cadence of coaching sessions, but also have touches in between. And I think that's what sets a lot of businesses apart from the expectations. We're going to have a coaching session this many times, but to get an extra text or email to check on them, you said you're going to work on this. How is it going? Hey, you're going to have that tough conversation with someone on your team. How did that go?
Those little extra touches really stand out and something that an advisor said to us is really what we try to emulate. Somebody said, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm your only client. You know, everything that's going on. You're like reaching out to me like, you know, how do you do that? And that's really for, I mean, that's the ultimate compliment for, for any business that has a lot of clients that you make me feel like I'm your only client.
So that's where we really try to model for advisors and help them feel that some of the other smaller things, I mean, gifts are, are, are okay. I mean, listen, people, successful advisors can buy stuff, right? The clients of advisors, they can buy stuff, right? It's not about that. It's more about the thoughtful touch, right?
So thoughtful touches are time. It's not about sending an expensive gift. It's more about, I was thinking of you and it's a surprise. It's out of the blue. So we copied a lot of those things from the Ritz Carlton.
I had the complete enjoyment of going to their Service Excellence program and they show how they deliver, right? And they're not perfect. They say, hey, we mess up a lot. And it's about how we recover from those mess ups. It's about creating long lasting experiences.
So people want to come back to the Ritz Carlton. That's what the ladies and gentlemen are delivering there. So those extra touches do help. And a lot of times advisors get home and say, oh my gosh, I'm going to do this for my clients. And we're like, yes, that's what we're trying to model.
You should do that for your clients. You can, you can use the exact same GIF and give it to them. Your best people love that. So it's that. And then for us, it's the community.
Then we get our community together virtually once a week and talk about things and work on things as a group. And then once a year we get together for a big in-person workshop that has, you know, hundreds of people there. It's really fun for them to be around each other. So that's kind of like the end of the day. That's kind of like the glue that really keeps people together.
But, but that's, that's really what we found. You've got to deliver quality. You've got to have a consistent frequency of contact, extra additional touches that are unexpected between whether they're a text and email, a surprise little thoughtful touch or a gift, something like that. And then having some community that really worked for us.
Richard Walker: 25:21
Oh, I love this. What a, what a great layout. Let's go to this cadence of communication because those small touches of like, hey, how did your move go this weekend? And you know, what's going on with your client? Those really matter.
But man, I'm terrible about that. I don't remember birthdays, anniversaries, etc.. So how literally how do you manage that information so that you can act on it? You guys just have big brains?
Dr. Jon Randall: 25:47
No, no, not at all. Not at all. So this is where a solid CRM helps, right? And having team members helps too, to know what we're going to do. So we try to program as much as possible. So it is a minimum level. When we do coaching sessions, I mean, we take some notes and we kind of have organized.
You said you were, you know, Rich, you said you're going to do A and B. Okay, well, we write down A and B in our CRM. So we know we're going to do A and B. So the worst thing that happens is someone on our team can say all right it's time for touch with Rich. Let me go see what he's working on.
And I could just send him an email or text that says, how are you doing with A or B? Right at a minimum, like a team member could do that for you. So having the information somewhere is, you know, an important starting point.
Richard Walker: 26:38
Part of the process is your team is consistently going through this process with your, your on going clients and they're looking at notes and they're saying, okay, how do you automate it? What's your next step then if that's yes.
Dr. Jon Randall: 26:50
So, our team's really split in delivery. And then, you know, on the front end, you know, marketing and sales. So delivery they're watching. How often are we communicating with the client? Are they showing up to our group stuff?
Are there any gaps? Right. And if there's gaps, then it triggers even more outreach for them, right? It might even be a phone call from someone on our team and say, oh my gosh, Rich, how are you doing? What's going on?
He knows he hasn't been to your, you know, your last coaching session, haven't been on the weekly thing. We haven't heard from you. But I mean, we'll know if someone's going on a big, you know, European vacation for a month with their family or something like that. We'll put in our CRM, but we've just tried to automate it. We've really tried to automate it.
And I've tried to leverage some people on my team to make, you know, make it seem like it's coming from me, even though it's a team member. That's like sending the email or sending a text from our main line and, and clients. I mean, they love it. They will respond back, you know, they spawn back a lot. If it's once, if we send a blast email to everyone that, you know, no one even reads it.
It's really low engagement. But if we do send individual things. And so that was kind of like step one of programming it. And then it's and then every week we talk at a team like we do it Wednesday mornings. I talked to my team members before we recorded this podcast today.
And we'll look at, we go through clients with the, the, you know, our delivery team and we'll look at anything special going on. Is someone buying a big practice that we should give some extra touches to? Is someone you know, working on something big that we can remember? So we'll kind of go through, which is what the Ritz Carlton does. They do a daily stand up meeting and they'll talk about the ladies and gentlemen that are there, maybe some VIPs that are checking in that day and they'll talk about, you know, some of them that, hey, the Walker family's checking in.
They always get room service breakfast, they order the same thing. Let's just go ahead and have that ready for them so they don't have to order, right. They'll know they'll keep notes on some of this stuff in their database and they'll be prepared for it. So we've just tried to copy the same thing of what can we proactively do that isn't reactive? Because I'm definitely not gonna remember any of this stuff, right?
I'm definitely not. You've got to kind of program it. And then the same in the financial advisor business, right? They need to program some of these things too, but it can totally be automated and you can leverage, you know, administrative team members to help deliver a very high quality experience.
Richard Walker: 29:05
All right. New achievement I want to unlock. I want to be remembered in the Ritz Carlton database. For what I eat so consistently. They already know. Yeah. They know. Yeah. It's called the mystique database.
Dr. Jon Randall: 29:17
They have it. Man.
Richard Walker: 29:20
Jon, look, I'm running out of time, but I want to just briefly, briefly talk about artificial intelligence because there's so much movement in our space with freeing up advisors time to give them capacity and communicate with their clients more, etc.. What is your view? How are you seeing AI impact the customer experience and what you've been teaching people all these years?
Dr. Jon Randall: 29:42
Yeah, I think it's an incredible enhancement, right? I think advisors can be even better. I think, to help with preparing what advice they're going to give to clients, running portfolios, doing administrative tasks, right? There's so much it can do. And I really see firms being a lot more profitable going forward because they won't need as many people on their team per, you know, revenue that they're running.
So that's going to drive profitability if the revenue per team member is much, much higher. I see it as a big enhancement. People ask me, gee, am I going to get replaced as an advisor? And there are studies around this that the human to human connection is not going away. Listen, things like, you know, retiring with your millions of dollars, am I going to be okay?
Humans don't want a computer to tell them that. They want to know that they're going to be okay. And there's a lot of emotions tied to it. So that part is critical. People talking to clients is not going away.
But I think that there's rapidly so many enhancements for administrative tasks, preparing for meetings, right? So many things that can be done writing, right? It can write incredibly like emails and content. I mean, it's, it's just awesome to see what's happening. So I think it's a wonderful enhancement.
I think it's going to propel our industry forward very quickly and very rapidly, but it will never replace that human to human interaction.
Richard Walker: 31:00
Do you actually see it adding capacity for people to take on more clients then? Do you see it? They can add 10% more clients, 30%. Do you have any ideas?
Dr. Jon Randall: 31:08
I do. I mean, the time talking to clients, I mean, that's still a time constraint, but I see it for their teams, right? They have people that are helping them prepare for meetings. Well, you know, you can have someone do that, someone that's writing a touch email to a client. I mean, that can all be automated, right?
AI can do that for you. So I see it at multiple levels. The advisors that are doing some of the prep are writing an email themselves or, you know, doing a portfolio review or preparing financial planning recommendations. Those advisors probably feel it the most. But just keep in mind the time talking to clients isn't going to change with our larger firms.
We're just seeing, you know, all the other people behind the scenes or just won't need to be as many of them, which means you could grow with the people you have, right? They could have less work. You could scale in ten X and not have to hire ten x number of people. maybe only need double the people to run a business that's ten times larger.
Richard Walker: 32:03
So that's one of the most exciting things to me about my own business, is AI is going to help us go faster, bigger, stronger with fewer people. And I don't mean letting go people, I just mean I won't have to hire as fast. I'll be able to scale faster as a result. Okay, look, I have to wrap this up, so I'll get there before I get to my last question. What is the best way for people to find and connect with you, Jon?
Dr. Jon Randall: 32:26
Our website's the easiest. We have some free stuff out there for people to check out. We also run what we call scaling workshops about every other week. Most of them are virtual. Sometimes we do it in person around the country.
But there's some information on there. So see if you qualify to come to one of our workshops. They're not quiet all day. They're like a 10 to 2, 10 to 3 kind of thing. But we go through and help people identify their constraints and how they can grow faster.
Richard Walker: 32:51
Nice, nice. All right. I saved the best question for last. I just love asking this. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Dr. Jon Randall: 33:02
It's without question a gentleman named John Cotton, who's the number five Barron's ranked advisor in the industry. And he was actually one of my training managers when I started as a brand new advisor in New York in 1999, straight out of college, knowing nobody knew my girlfriend and her parents, who's now my wife and my mother and father in law. But. This guy cares and goes to a whole nother level. So he's got a massive business doing about 125 million in revenue, about 17 billion AUM.
He's really built a massive business, but this person goes to a high level. So it's a privilege to work with them on their growth path. But in exchange, we've learned so much from them and specifically from him. On his leadership style of just never leaving any stone unturned, always going deeper and always helping everyone on his team go to the next level.
Richard Walker: 33:56
Oh, I love that. You know, bring everybody with you. You gotta bring everybody with you, I love it. Alright, look, I hate to wrap this up. I've really enjoyed talking to you, but I'll give a huge thank you to Dr. Jon Randall, the leader and consultant of XFA Coach, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins.
Go check out Jon's website at xfa.coach. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier. I hope you've 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. Jon, thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Jon Randall: 34:32
Thank you Rich. Keep the podcast going. I'm a huge fan.
Outro: 34:36
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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