I started using Dynamic Planner’s Client Review at the start of 2020 and it has changed everything for me. It’s just brilliant and has transformed my review process.
It makes my life so much easier, because now I can sit and go through everything with the client in real time, whereas before I was having to give my paraplanners so much paper work after a meeting for them to input.
I now sit there with the client and say, ‘This is where you are now. This is what your portfolio was worth a year ago. This is what you’ve done in the last 12 months. And this is what it’s worth today’. We can recheck their attitude to risk and the whole process becomes much more interactive with the client.
We can find all the latest valuations and performance analysis of the funds, which again is interactive. I then ask, ‘Are the risk ratings as they should be? Yes. Do we need to make any changes? Yes, or no’. I can then go back to the office, tidy up the report and send it back to the client, who gets a copy. They sign it and the review is done.
I think why it’s so good is that yes, the client is getting a copy of a report, but they have already been talked through it. Once I get set up on Zoom and I can share my screen, that will make my life even better.
What Dynamic Planner does – and will do – is save me so much time. And it gives me a repeatable process, which ticks all the boxes. For example, the report includes all my charges, so I can ask the client, ‘Are you happy with them and do you want to carry on like this?’
How much time does it save me? Hours and hours and hours – and you and the client have a beautiful report at the end of it that looks really professional. It’s the way forward for me. I can’t wait for future enhancements in Dynamic Planner to be released, to streamline my business even more.
I haven’t been doing anything different really. I have continued to speak regularly with clients on the phone – but I have realized I need to get my technology more up to date. That is where I have struggled. I need a web camera on my computer, so I can have remote meetings with clients on something like Zoom and then perhaps stay in the office more and get on with other things.
Before the lockdown, I was about half and half: half my clients came into the office to see me; the other half, I went to see them.
I have been warning clients for the last 18 months that something awful was going to happen in the markets and that we were at the end of a bull run. I just didn’t know, of course, that it was going to be as bad as it was. Happily, my clients have been saying to me, ‘Don’t worry, you said this was going to happen’. If a client has needed more reassurance, we have talked it through and they’ve been fine.
What do you think have been the lessons, so far, we can learn from the coronavirus crisis?
We need to appreciate all our friends and family – that’s the lesson to be learned from this. It has also given me time, personally, to think about my business and how it’s running – and being honest, I can see that it has been running me for the last eight years and not the other way around. I have been running around like a headless chicken. But I feel very lucky, because I am surviving and not all small businesses might survive this.
What else has the crisis made me question? Do we need to travel so much and go on so many holidays? And I’ve realized how much money I waste and spend each month. I’ve got quite a bit more money in my pocket now.
