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This is The Anderson Files on PodClips.
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The Anderson Files is a look at commerce, investment, economics and retirement issues that affect each and every one of you.
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Your host is Mike Anderson, executive vice president, president, retirement services, and partner of Finestone Partners.
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Finestone Partners is an independent firm with securities offered through Four Point Capital.
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And now your host, Mike Anderson, this is The Anderson Files on PodClips and I’m your host, Mike Anderson.
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My guest today is Carrie Lauby, and co-hosting, Mark Alyn, who may be jumping into the conversation.
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Carrie, good morning.
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How are you? Welcome.
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Good morning. Carrie
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She is president.
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Very good.
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Is president of Boost Performance and Success Solutions based in Los Angeles.
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Carrie’s practice focuses on training, management, consulting, lead generation, customer service and support, negotiation, strategic planning, team building and leadership development.
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And today Carrie and I want to talk about some of the positive things and building things that companies may adopt during this COVID-19 crisis.
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She and I met several weeks ago and we were actually going to talk about this subject, but in the context of when the economy was strong, markets were at an all time high, obviously, with COVID-19, that has changed.
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So we want to cover the same subject but from a different, coming at it from a different angle.
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And with that, Carrie, you know, we we had talked about looking at, in part, what companies can do to invest in their people and it may not be during this time of crisis in the domestic economy, the world economy, people’s health, their personal lives.
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But for companies to step back for a moment and say, you know, what can we do to invest in our people? And it may not necessarily be dollars.
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What do you think companies can and should be doing? I think, I mean, what this whole time has brought it out for a lot of the clients that I work with is an opportunity to sit back.
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And not only are we looking at, as you mentioned, Michael, our personal lives and what we value out of that, they’re looking at the people that are in, you know, in their business, and as well as the sales side, but I also see them sitting back and a bit hitting kind of the reflex button and looking at who their key people are, what are the strengths, you know, of the best and highest use of everyone, as they’ve had to sometimes make some tough choices.
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And I think when they look at investing in their people, they understand that investing is not only from a financial standpoint of what they’re going to be paying them and how they can afford to pay them now or not pay them.
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Now, they’re also looking at other opportunities or ways of maybe trying to strengthen any existing contracts that they have with employees.
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Some of them that were recently hired, you know, that are, they’ve discovered are real assets to the company.
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They want to make sure that they don’t leave and take another position.
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And so they’re adding things onto, you know, on to the relationship as they, you know, as they’re capable of doing just to try and kind of trying to reinforce the longevity of the company.
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Are you seeing, with the firms that you work with, and granted, you know, we were, were 6,7,8 weeks into COVID-19, we may be several weeks, if not months ahead of us we’ll still be in it to some degree.
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And are you seeing the firms and staffs really coming together as opposed to breaking apart and kind of breaking at the seams and under very different and difficult circumstances that due to human nature, do you see firms pulling together? I think they, what’s been interesting is I see within each firm, within, you know, within the firm itself, certain individuals, you know, are bonding together and then the ones that aren’t sticking, the firm is really starting to look at the productivity of the firm.
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It’s kind of hit the restart, you know, that reset button where they’re looking at, you know, are we, you know, is the firm made up of the 80/20 rule? Do we need to do something about the 80 and then looking at the performance of the individuals and do we need to let go of certain individuals because maybe they haven’t been performing for a period of time and now the firm needs to be leaner and leaner and tighter.
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And so I see those people gathering together from that standpoint. And with the relationships tied into various firms, clients partnerships, you know, from service companies to professional firms to manufacturers, distributors,
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what can companies do to maintain and build those existing relationships and those partnerships, and possibly make them better in the situation that we’re all in? So much.
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I mean, there is so much they can do.
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And I think one of the conversations I was having with someone in my field and we talk about our personal families and how this situation has in some aspects, forced us to reach out to those grandparents to those loved ones and have those Zoom calls and actually have conversations with them.
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The question that I wanna, you know, propose, is why wouldn’t you then do that to your most important clients, you know, why are they any different than your, you know, than your family, and so running things like a client, you know, value review process, many firms don’t have that review process set in stone where they’re doing on a certain cadence.
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And so this is now the opportunity to set that into place and to really start to see, you know, where is that client, how are they feeling about their security and their safety and their confidence of where the economy is going to be going forward? And Carrie, are you seeing clients that you work with coming to you being a trusted individual to their operation, to their effort and coming to you for advice, guidance, resources at this point in time regarding subjects that you really don’t touch.
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I’ve had client, corporate retirement clients come to me saying, OK, my corporate bank relationship for 30 years, just shut me out of getting to participate in or to even file for the paycheck protection program.
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Can you refer another bank that will work with companies that are not current clients? I’ve got people coming to me with those types of questions, something I would rarely ever touch.
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But hey, you know, with the network, you find resources to help these companies.
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Are, are you finding that as well? Yeah, I think most of the clients are, the situation has caused them to reflect on what, you know, what they were doing from a marketing and a sales strategy standpoint.
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So, whereas they may have had a certain strategy and had, you know, been going after a particular kind of client, if you will, whether it’s on the business side or whether it’s on the direct client side.
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I think this has caused them to step back and look at their different, I wanna call verticals, or different types of clients and what those clients they need today versus what they needed in February.
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I think it’s a very different and so the conversations that they need to have with those clients are very different now.
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And where they think they’re going to make their money looks very different.
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So I see firms starting to look at ancillary services that they may be adding to, you know, that they’ve never offered before.
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And so we’re having those kinds of conversations about, well, where, you know, where is our business going to go? You know, we thought we were going to grow in this area, but now we’re not so sure where are we seeing the disruption happening, where we can potentially maybe grow out of, you know, new partnerships and acquiring those partnerships in house or grow in a different way from a services standpoint. And from the standpoint of just how unique the circumstances of what’s happening really is on the country and the world? The is there a part of this or might be several parts of this that is really surprising you in terms of, on the upside the downside, how companies clients, your colleagues are reacting and dealing with this and you know, are you seeing more of, you know, keep calm and carry on, or is it momentary panic and freak out, and then calming down and moving forward? Are there certain parts of this that are kind of surprising you, either in a positive way or a negative way? Well, I mean, one thing you do learn, is you learn a lot about how people handle things under stress and when they’re extremely anxious for a number of reasons, right, whether it’s on the finance side, you know, financing the business and losing the money around and figuring out what to do with the people.
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I think honestly, in my view, I mean, everyone started out, you know, like you said, we were going to have a totally different call about how positive things were from a financial economic perspective, and how businesses were at a place where they wanted to invest more in their people and they wanted to make acquisitions.
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I think that what’s been surprising to me, they’ve done absolutely everything they can to maintain the people that they have.
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And because prior to this, I mean, the market, there weren’t many qualified people on the market.
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Right.
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But I think what’s also really surprising is that I’ve just seen some really smart fiscal decisions.
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I haven’t seen a ton of, you know, anxious, fast decision making and panic.
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I’ve seen, you know, I think they all realize now though that it’s going to look very different from a business perspective.
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And I don’t, as you said, I don’t think we’ve even begun to see, you know, the business fallout or effects of this.
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We’ve seen the personal side in people’s personal lives.
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You’re listening to The Anderson Files on PodClips.
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I’m your host, Mike Anderson with guest Carrie Lauby. Carrie, to make an observation, and comparing to 2008, 2009, with my, our, corporate client base and all the various types of companies that I work with, some firms decided, OK, we’re in the Great Recession.
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Let’s, this.
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I don’t have the energy, I don’t have the capital.
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I don’t have the inclination, the drive to rebuild.
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And some firms where, you know, the owners, the key people were kind of the life blood of the operation and it may have been, you know, a law firm.
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It may have been as a service company of some type where it was really them, they just decided to retire or close shop. Do you think, you know, from your perspective, we’re gonna see kind of, something similar to, are you seeing coming into formation something similar possibly happening now and over the next few months? Well, I definitely think it will accelerate the mergers and/or acquisitions, I mean, kind of tying in with what you’re saying.
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I definitely think it will accelerate that.
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I also think it will accelerate people’s own reflection on, you know, the firms that they’re working for and whether or not they want to continue, you know, from a sales perspective or from a advisor perspective, if they’re, you know, potentially not so happy, I think it will prompt people to reflect on what they’re doing and try and find, you know, happiness and whatever that ends up looking like for them.
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Definitely.
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And I think they’re looking at it from a point of opportunity.
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I mean, that’s really where when I sit down and start coaching clients on the business side of things, we’re trying to look at it from a point of opportunity, meaning what strengths do we have, what needs to be changed, right, from the client mix, from the product mix, from the service mix and who do we have that can make those pivots and adjustments and then what’s happening in the market, you know, what is their competition doing.
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I have some, I definitely see some of my clients’ competition is just kind of, you know, a ready to close up shop as you mentioned.
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And so if that’s the case now, is the time to finally have, you know, make those phone calls and talk about acquiring their client base or, you know, finding creative ways to partner and/or bring in people that might provide services that you haven’t, you know, that you weren’t ready to take on in the past.
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Yeah, that’s a really interesting perspective.
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And as you were describing that over the last, I’m thinking just over the last 3, 4 days, I’ve received just a raft of emails from various industry consulting firms, whether we would be interested in merging or acquiring other registered investment advisor practices.
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I’ve just gotten, I’m getting about three or four a day and which is, I don’t normally get that kind of volume of that type of correspondence, but I’m just, a tsunami of these have come in right in line with what you had just said, an opportunity to acquire, to sell those that say, you know, this is the time for me to retire.
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This is just a moment in time and circumstance and this is it.
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And there’s some value to my practice, to my company, to my operation, to our operation and see what we can do to find a merger or an appropriate party to buy us.
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So I’m, my mind is spinning in that direction for, you know, for acquisitions.
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What would you say, you know, to even have the wherewithal to look out at this point to make an acquisition? What would be a few of the key pieces that you would urge companies to look for in terms of what to look for in an appropriate sound acquisition.
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Well, from my perspective, meaning on the side of what I, what I provide and working with the, with the producers, right, with the team and with the advisors.
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One of the things that I see is often, I mean, totally missed in the acquisition process is actually doing some due diligence and or assessments of the key performers of the company that you’re looking at acquiring.
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And so in the work that I do, we have some, you know, proprietary assessments that are designed for, you know, financial service professionals that will give us a look under the hood.
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It actually gives us an MRI from the behavioral standpoint of how strong this individual is in their sales skills and their communication skills in their you know, closing and/or you know, up selling cross or selling skill levels.
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And so if you’re able to do that, pre acquisition that really tells you what kind of, you know, what kind of baseball team you’re acquiring and what you’ll be able to do with them. And whether they’re a major league team or AAA to be able to, you know, assess that.
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Yeah, I mean, an acquisition is done for a number of reasons.
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Right? You’re acquiring because you want the client base, right? For example, you’re acquiring because you want the services suite, things that you do that are unique.
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But you’re also acquiring because of the people that are in there.
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And what’s important to understand is they may have the client base and they may have the services suite, but they may have individuals that if I can, you know, without sounding too negative individuals that are, we’ll say they’ve been riding on the train too long, and they won’t produce and bring in the business that you might expect when you, when you, acquire them.
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So you, when you run these kinds of assessments, you’ll understand that it’s possible they acquired all of their clients five years ago, and the teams that they hired in the last three years, you know, maybe they brought in their client base, but that they haven’t really grown the business.
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Right.
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Right.
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And Carrie, as we work our way out of the COVID-19 period, do you see possibly pent-up demand for your services where we come out of this and companies that were looking to do this, they were looking to launch that.
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Do you see us pent-up demand or anticipate that occurring? And we’ll see a rush to make the decisions as opposed to being more cautious at this point?
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I’m not, you know, totally sure what you mean by rush versus cautious.
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What I do see is, I see the service aspect of businesses, you know, in the financial sector being becoming increasingly astronomically important.
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And what I do see is that if a firm, for example, starts to launch a new service suite, right? Their team of advisors oftentimes lack the ability to talk about what that service is and to effectively sell well.
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We don’t like the word selling, they don’t like sales people but effectively to communicate and close business within that service suite.
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And so as these mergers happen, I think it’s very important to, I want to say, retrain or get, you know, the merge teams all together so that everyone’s using a uniform language.
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Now of representing the firm, a uniform language is showing the added value and then getting, you know, those new services in use by the existing client base.
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And that would, and that would be something that I mean, would you consider positive if, if anything positive coming out of COVID-19, that would be a set of positive things that could occur in a company in a practice in a difficult time.
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Oh, completely.
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I think a lot of positive things are going to come out of this outside of the reflection of the advisors looking at themselves and, you know, what makes me happy? What am I, you know, the happiness, the personal side, I see the firms, you know, looking at their people, the best and highest use, right? And moving people around because they effectively need to from a cash, you know, from a cash flow basis.
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But then I see it expanding out to the service to the end clients and really then being able to service the clients at a much higher level than potentially they had before.
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I think, you know, down the line here, once we’re through the next couple of months, it will be a very positive thing for everyone involved.
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It might not look like how they expected the outcomes to look.
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But that’s, you know, that’s what change is. And Carrie, how, how is how is life for you on a daily basis under the circumstances, with the quarantine, and we’re so limited in moving around.
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How are you operating from day to day? You know, this has not affected my day to day much.
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I come from a very, very deep background of founding and growing tech companies.
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So for me, my practice always was both virtual and in person, right? Depending on the firm, depending on the you know, on the practice, whether I was going in person and working with everyone or whether we were doing a combination of virtual.
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So for me, it has not affected much, I’m actually working more than I ever have, but I know everyone else, you know, in finance can say the same thing.
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So, yeah, and could you share your web address for Boost Performance and your email for those that may want to make inquiry? Sure.
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The email address is boostperformance@sandler.com.
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And that’s the same for the web address.
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It’s boostperformance.sandler.com.
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Great.
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Thanks, Carrie.
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Thanks so much for sharing a few minutes with us today.
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Our guest Carrie Lauby on The Anderson Files on PodClips with host Mike Anderson.
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Thanks for having me.
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You’ve been listening to The Anderson Files with Mike Anderson, visit us at PodClips.io and check on the Financial box for more information on The Anderson Files.