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Welcome to a special episode of Soundbites, brought to you by Investment Executive and sponsored by Canada Life. This week we continue our series with Chris Reynolds. Chris is the co-founder and executive chairman with Investment Planning Counsel. He’s well known in the Canadian financial management industry as host of the Turning the Page podcast, and he’s the author of The Six Circle Strategy: The Entrepreneur’s Journey to Wealth and Freedom. Today we’re looking at the second circle: Trust. We talk about becoming trustworthy, the importance of trusting your staff, and we started by asking why you also need to learn to trust yourself.

Chris Reynolds (CR): If you read The Art of War [by Sun Tzu], it says, ‘Know thyself, know thy enemy.’ For advisors especially, by trusting yourself, you have confidence in everything. You have confidence in your tactical judgment, your professional instincts, your ability to guide clients. And the first thing in trust is self-awareness. What are you good at? What are you bad at? What are your blind spots? What don’t you like? And try to get rid of those. Because you’re going to have times when things are happening — things in the market, things at work, things with your team — and you should know how you react to them. So, number one is, trust yourself. But the other thing is, how are you consistent? Brand is about consistency. Are you showing up consistently for your clients, for your team? Do you follow through on commitments? Do you stay aligned to your process and to your principles? Or is it all over the place? Because brand is about consistency. The other big thing is emotional regulation. Do you have the ability to keep calm even when markets and people are not? So emotional regulation is really important. And the last one is courage. Believe in yourself. Believe in your decisions. I go by the 70% rule. If you have 70% of the information and it’s positive, then make a decision. When you trust yourself, your clients and your team feel safer, they trust your guidance, and they believe in your leadership.

Active questioning

CR: Active questioning is really asking open, curious, non-leading questions. What you’re really trying to really understand is that person. What are their real goals? What are their fears? What do they value? How do they make decisions? People want to be heard. They don’t want to be sold to. A lot of times people ask questions because they’re just confirming assumptions they already had, or they want to steer them to an answer, or, even worse, they’re trying to sell them a product. But in my view, that goes well beyond what you should be asking. You should be trying to know everything. Now why is it so important? Why does it build trust? When I think about it, I think it signals respect. If you ask a lot of questions, you can get rid of the assumptions. Just ask what people are looking for and try to fill it in. The other thing I think is good, is it demonstrates humility. You show your clients you’re committed to understanding their world before recommending anything. What you want is engagement. And I think that technique deepens engagement. When you ask great questions, clients and team members feel understood, and trust naturally follows.

Trusting your staff.

CR: If you can’t trust your staff, you can’t scale. You can’t get bigger. In fact, you can’t really do anything well. If you trust your team, here’s what happens. You get to free up your capacity. If you’re not micromanaging, you get to spend more time with your ideal clients, you get to see prospects, you get to focus on the client experience. If you’re doing all the micromanaging and telling people how to do their jobs, you have no time for what’s really important. The other thing that happens is, when you trust your team, decisions happen faster. Also, morale improves. If you really trust your team, you have a strong culture, because it becomes reciprocal. You have trust. And it becomes — right across the whole business — that everyone trusts each other.

The importance of transparency

CR: Transparency accelerates trust, and trust is your brand. So, the more transparency you can have, the better. And, well, I’ll use price. We have now total cost reporting coming over. A lot of advisors are panicking and how will it’ll affect their business. Clients know that they pay something. If it’s outrageous, then they’ll probably change. But if you’re not transparent about it, people will automatically distrust you. So, what happens when you make a recommendation and it doesn’t work out? In other words, we’re hired to make people’s money grow, and if it’s not growing to their expectation, what should you do about it? The more specific you can be and more plain that you can talk to people, the more trust will be established. And also explain the why. Because there was a why behind the advice and as long as that why exists today, then we should continue down that path. Nobody expects perfection, but they do expect accountability. You’ve got to go back to the why. Why did you make that recommendation, or why did you give that advice? And does that why still exist in today’s marketplace? And if it doesn’t, then you have changes to make. But be transparent about it.

And finally, what’s the bottom line when it comes to building trust?

CR: I think we all recognize that trust is created through consistent behaviours, not impressive presentations, not graphs, not charts. If we’re in the wealth management business, our whole job is to create a brand of trust. And if you think about your own situation, the companies you do business with and the people you do business with are the ones you trust the most. Who do I trust? Who do you trust? I trust advisors who tell the truth, who communicate clearly, who follow through reliably, and I can count on them and who genuinely care about my well being. Those are the people I trust. Your brand is simply the trust clients have in you, and trust is a core product of every great business.

Well, those are today’s Soundbites, brought to you by Investment Executive and sponsored by Canada Life. Special thanks to Chris Reynolds of Investment Planning Counsel. He’ll be back soon to walk us through another circle in his Six Circle Strategy. In the meantime, you can get more insights from Chris at his “Turning the Page” podcast site. You can even schedule a ‘virtual coffee with Chris’ to discuss issues specific to your practice. You’ll find that at IPCC.ca/TurningThePage. Join us again next week for another episode of Soundbites. Thanks for listening.

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