While I was writing my last post on advisors and the different levels of cooperation exist I started thinking about our Clients and their role in the collaborative process.
The thought occurred to me if our Clients are not collaborative ready, then it makes little sense for the advisory team to collaborate on their case. Collaboration must start with the Client. When they are ready to collaborate with you, it’s likely they will accept and embrace collaboration from their advisory team and those they work with.
We were working with a sibling partnership several months ago. I suggested that we bring in some collaborative team members and as a result of the recommendation ended up getting fired. The Client said that because I wanted to bring in other team members it was obvious that I was not competent to solve their problems.
At first I was confused by the statement. In the last week my thinking on collaboration and how it works best has helped me understand the dynamics of what happened. The Client in this particular situation was not ready to work with me in a collaborative manner. They expected that I would be able to read their mind and instantly put together and implement a plan that would magically solve all of their needs.
As I reviewed their actions with other advisors it was obvious that these Clients were not willing to work in a collaborative manner. They had not shared information they had with their attorney who had worked with them for over twenty years. We were not allowed to share our preliminary report with this attorney or the CPA who serviced them. In fact, it took us over thirty hours to piece together the information they sent into a format that we could understand.
This family purposely kept their advisors at arms length and only shared a little bit of information with each. We were the first advisors they worked with that reverse engineered their entire situation and was able to show them where they truly stood. Once we understood the information it became apparent this Client could gain a great amount of value from their advisors working in a collaborative manner.
The problem was the Client wasn’t willing to work with anyone in a collaborative manner. Even the relationship between the brothers was one of distrust and lack of communication.
I’ve recently come to understand that the reason this relationship didn’t work out was because the Client was not collaborative ready. They weren’t willing to share information or look at their options in an open manner. This was a guarantee that they would not get an elegant result. We could provide them with a result, but not one that would provide a fraction of the true value they could receive.
The lesson that I’ve learned is that before we move the Client towards a collaborative relationship with other advisors they need to be ready to collaborate with us. Our practice requires a collaborative thought process with our Clients. We now need to develop tools that help us understand whether a Client is truly collaborative ready. If not, we then need to let those Clients know we aren’t the right place for them to be.
Josh Patrick
Filed under: Ethics, For Business Advisors, Value Creation, Wealth Management | Tagged: collaboration, cooperation, sibling partnerships
