Successfully Working with Clients in a Virtual Environment with Marvin Bulas Interview

Transcript of Podcast Episode 188

Hello, this is Bill Rainaldi with another addition of Security Mutual’s SML Planning Minute. In today’s episode, Successfully Working with Clients in a Virtual Environment with special guest Marvin Bulas. Marvin Bulas is a certified financial planner with over 20 years’ experience in the financial services industry. He is currently a strategic business consultant in the financial services industry, but he also works with clients directly, and he has also developed a system to successfully work with clients in a virtual environment. Marvin, welcome to the program.

Marvin Bulas:
Thank you for having me, Bill. I appreciate the opportunity.

Bill Rainaldi:
Well, it’s great. I know you’ve been in the industry for a very long time, and I wanted to talk to you today about how you work virtually with clients, because it sounds like this is something you’ve been doing for quite a while. And it sounds like something that you developed and started doing well before COVID-19 hit and it became more mandatory to do something like this.

Marvin Bulas:
Oh, absolutely. A lot of great things come from mistakes, or necessity, or just by happenstance. And this is no different. We initiated a national marketing campaign in 2007 to promote awareness about the Bank on Yourself concept, which is the concept I work with. It went out nationally. It went out to all 50 states. And believe it or not, we had overwhelming response almost everywhere, but here’s where it gets complicated. We only had about 200 advisors across the country at the time. And would you believe they weren’t everywhere the clients were? So, we naturally had to figure out a way to work with these clients without necessarily meeting with them face-to-face. And keep in mind, this was 2007. So, it was quite a while ago.

So, what we’d started to develop is a way of working with clients on the phone at the time, and using the computer to effectively communicate, to get across, to build trust, to work with somebody in a way where they were very comfortable working with us. And that’s what we did. I mean, we had to come up with an effective way of communicating quickly and it failed a lot, but it also succeeded a lot. Our goal was to teach clients how money really worked in their lives so they could make better decisions about how to manage it for themselves, their families, and their business. And it was a necessity of the time. And it’s really transformed the way we work because when the pandemic hit, advisors were all over the place, were scrambling to understand technology and psychology of this type of appointment while our advisors were already doing 90% of our business this way.

Bill Rainaldi:
Okay, Marvin, so I’ll take you back a little over two years, February of 2020. You may have noticed that things have changed just a bit since then when the pandemic hit us. And I’m wondering how different your communications are today compared to back then?

Marvin Bulas:
You’d be probably surprised to know that by that time, we were already doing over 90% of our communications virtually, through the phone, through the internet, through the computer, and nothing changed that much. We ended up with more than 90% of our business coming in there, and basically it was 100% at the time because there were no face-to-face meetings for a little while, at least. So, all of the systems that we put in place are important, but even more important than that, and you can probably relate to this Bill, is the psychology of the appointment. How you’re feeling and what you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with an extremely important thing in financial services, your retirement, college planning, the way that you look at money, the way you handle your own personal finances and net worth and wealth.

And it’s, “Man, oh man, I can’t believe I’m trusting this to a guy talking to a microphone over a computer, several states away from me”. But somehow, someway we managed to be able to communicate that. And like I said earlier, we failed a lot, but we also succeeded a lot. We found out that a lot of clients will trust somebody if that person is genuine on the other end of the line, if that person can be seen in more ways than one. And I have compiled a short list of things for both the financial professional and the client to look for when we’re dealing with working virtually or in a virtual environment, where you don’t see that person face-to-face necessarily.

Bill Rainaldi:
Oh, I’d love to hear this. Keep going.

Marvin Bulas:
Well, I’ve got a short list of things, but the first thing, and first and foremost in this world today is make sure the contact is genuine. And I’m not talking genuine as in the belief set or they’re really doing what they say they were going to do. We’re talking at this very first level, very basic. Fraud’s everywhere today. And you’ve got to make sure that person is legitimate. So, on the other end of the line, what you need to do is vet the advisor. You need to get out good old Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever you use and enter that person’s name, look for reviews on that advisor, make sure the advisor’s properly licensed for what services he or she’s providing to you. LinkedIn’s a good start for this if you want to go there, but there are other places as well. And you should definitely check with the licensing authorities for whatever you’re looking at financially.

And by the way, that’s pretty important for the advisor to do, too. The advisor has to do due diligence on you. So don’t be surprised if that advisor’s looking you up as well. It’s very important to start a relationship off on the right foot and knowing as much as you can about each other is real important. So, there’s that.

Bill Rainaldi:
Yeah.

Marvin Bulas:
Now there’s another thing. If you are not comfortable with a person on the other end of the phone, you’re likely not going to get great results from either side. There’s a friend of mine that told me about this a long time ago, before we even started doing virtual stuff. He said, “If they like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.” Again, this works both ways Bill. If you are an advisor and you’re working with somebody who you don’t have a good feeling about, it’s very difficult to grow that relationship, which is what this is really all about. And same thing from the client perspective, of course. If you are a prospect or a client engaging with a financial professional and you end up wondering about this person, and wondering if this person is legitimate, or wondering if they’re telling the truth, or wondering if they have the right amount of education to help you out, well, that relationship’s not going to go very far.

Bill Rainaldi:
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I guess there are a lot more tools available today than there were even just a couple of years ago to do some background checking and going both ways with the background checking. I also think people are a lot more comfortable doing that sort of thing. And maybe now it’s almost expected. Would that be fair to say?

Marvin Bulas:
I hope it is. I hope that people understand, especially LinkedIn, for example, that is like a virtual business card. If you don’t want people to look at your LinkedIn profile, why the heck do you have it? But yes, absolutely, you should be looking and expect that somebody’s going to look you up as well. Here’s another really important thing, Bill. And it’s kind of ironic because this is a podcast and we’re not using cameras. But use your camera if you can. This is all about a relationship and building trust with each other. That street goes both ways. So, if you have a camera and you’re working virtually with somebody, turn that thing on, look at each other. At least you’ve got that as another piece to see, hey, this guy’s really talking with me and he’s not sitting in his pajamas or whatever. It’s important for that.

Now, a big thing with the client, when we’re using all these things and you can have a lot of distractions, so important for the client and for the advisor as well, shut everything else off, take your cell phone, put it in the other room if you can, silence it, do whatever you have to do. But if you have any distractions, that could hurt the meeting. Just imagine being at a live meeting with somebody and they’re sitting on their cell phone. I mean, we’ve all experienced it from a personal standpoint where you’re talking with somebody and they’re texting with somebody else. You would never do that if you really cared about the conversation. So certainly don’t do that on either side when you’re working together.

Bill Rainaldi:
Yeah. That sounds like just good general etiquette for a virtual meeting. And like you said, it’s something that you might not do if it was a face-to-face meeting, you’d never do something like that. So really if you’re not going to do it in a face-to-face meeting, you probably shouldn’t do it in a virtual meeting either, I wouldn’t think.

Marvin Bulas:
It’s a great rule of thumb Bill. What do you have to think about? Would I do this if I were sitting across the table from this other person? So very, very well thought out point there. And at the end of the day, from the client standpoint, ask yourself this important question. Did the advisor just listen to me and try to consult with me? Or did he just try to sell me something?

Bill Rainaldi:
Right.

Marvin Bulas:
You’re going to be able to share stories with each other. You’re going to be able to tell stories about your life, and that advisor should be doing the same thing with you, and getting to deepen that relationship by telling stories, getting to know each other better. My objective, when I’m working with individual clients is to form a relationship so I can understand who that person is, where they came from, where they’re at right now, where they want to go, and then use my knowledge of whatever products and services that I offer to see if it’s a proper fit for that person. And it’s very, very hard to do that if you don’t get to know that person. So, tell stories with each other, get to know each other and get comfortable with that person. If you’re not comfortable with that person, either side, it’s time to part as friends, instead of trying to push that relationship further.

Bill Rainaldi:
Right.

Marvin Bulas:
It is harder to connect. Some say being direct is a turnoff, but I’ve discovered it to be time saving for both parties, certainly stories and things to know each other and get to know each other are very, very important. But when you realize as an advisor or a financial professional, that you’re not going to be able to help that person, it’s extremely important to tell them right off the bat. It helps from a trust standpoint, even if it might be disappointing. And same with the client. If that financial professional is talking with you and you’re learning from him or her, and you realize that this may not be the path you want to go down, it’s really important to tell them because if not, you’re wasting one of your most important assets, which is your own time.

Bill Rainaldi:
Yeah. All right. I want to move on a little bit, Marvin. We’re talking here about initially meeting and getting to know a client. What should a client expect after that as far as follow up goes? Are you still meeting virtually? I guess there’s always going to be some paperwork and whatnot that have to be exchanged some other way. So, what’s the next step, generally speaking, do you think?

Marvin Bulas:
This is a really interesting conversation here and where it’s going, because this actually happened to me personally, Bill. I worked with people in New York because we didn’t have any New York advisors at the time. We certainly do now, but we didn’t. So, I was sitting in my office in Michigan, talking with people and trying to build trust, trying to build relationships. And by the way, it’s not important what format of meeting room you use. I see here, we’re using Cisco Webex meetings and we use GoToMeeting, we use Zoom, some people use join.me. There’s so many out there right now. The important thing is that you use something, you use something so you can show your client proof of what’s happening. And then you send your client that information, so your client has that everything that you talk about in writing. And from a client’s perspective, you should expect something like that.

Now, once all of this is done and great, let’s start this relationship. Let’s implement some of our recommendations for planning or whatnot. What actually happened to me was I worked with a ton of clients in New York. And again, I’m in Michigan. And it was all at the time in 2007, 2008, it was all papers. We would send things in the mail, they would sign them, they would send them back. And that was our level of communication. And one day I thought, I really want to meet these people. I want to see if they want to meet me face-to-face. So, we had a client appreciation event in New York and we wanted to see who would come. So, we opened that up and we had an event and we had some people come in and I was blown away at how many people wanted to meet with me face-to-face, some people to find out more about me personally, some people to thank me. But some people just out of curiosity. It was just a really fun event. But that’s really what we did.

It’s very, very important to follow up with people, and always at the very minimum, do six-month reviews using the meeting software so you can see the person, sharing with that client updates. And as a client, you should expect to have full access to your financial professional, working in a virtual environment. You can communicate with people more ways than one nowadays. You don’t just have to have a phone. You have email. Some advisors and professionals out there use text for communication for certain things. There are so many ways to reach people now that it shouldn’t be a relationship of, okay, this is it. And once every year, if that, or maybe even less than that. That’s not appropriate. The levels of communication should always be open between the two parties.

Bill Rainaldi:
Got it. But just to emphasize, the face-to-face meetings are not completely passe, they still have to happen once in a while, I would think. And that’s what you indicated with your event in New York?

Marvin Bulas:
Sometimes they do. And I have clients whom I’ve never met face-to-face who are comfortable with the situation. The important thing is the communication lines have to be open regardless. If your client wants to meet face-to-face, you should be available for that.

Bill Rainaldi:
Right. Absolutely. Well, that’s good. Well, listen, Marvin, I think you are way ahead of the curve here. And I think what you are doing sounds like what’s going to be going on a lot more frequently with a lot more people in the future. And it seems like people are just now starting to get comfortable doing virtual meetings through Zoom or whatever. And it seems like your way is becoming more popular every day.

Marvin Bulas:
It is. And it’s an important way to be able to communicate with other people. We’ve seen it in our personal lives, being able to do FaceTime on the phones. I’ve got a sister in Switzerland who it’s wonderful to be able to see her now virtually because we just can’t do it any other way. It’s pretty expensive to fly there and back and time consuming. But the biggest thing, Bill, I guess if you take one thing away from this whole conversation: be yourself. I can’t stress that enough. It’s hard enough to build a relationship in person. You’re trying to do it virtually from both sides. I mean, it’s like online dating in the early 2000s. It’s very, very difficult to do. And a lot of times, not very effective if you’re not yourself. So please be yourself on both sides, it helps out tremendously, and great relationships have been formed by doing this and continue to this day.

Bill Rainaldi:
Wow. Well, I think we should just leave it on that, Marvin. I think this has been absolutely fantastic. I think it’s been really enlightening and I wanted to thank you personally for joining us today.

Marvin Bulas:
My pleasure Bill. Thanks for having me.

Bill Rainaldi:
Okay. Take care. Bye.

Marvin Bulas:
Bye.

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