Merge teams
To make the merger a success, Markham and Holt had to combine their teams into one cohesive unit, and they started with themselves, which was key.
“We tried to get to know each other quickly,” Markham says. “So many of the things that other people are hung up on — do I pick up the phone for this, do I not pick up the phone? — after we had developed a relationship, it became easy to pick up the phone and get an answer quickly.”
They spent a lot of time around each other and had many conversations about themselves but also about their respective businesses.
“The relationship part at our level was important because that translates down into how our associates feel about each other,” Holt says.
Once the two of them were on the same page and felt comfortable working together, then they started looking at the numbers. Just the fact that Markham had about 500 financial advisers handling $28.6 billion in assets under management and Holt had 10 client managers meant they would have to go through a coordinating process to get them working together.
“We identified very early on that there was expertise on each side,” Holt says.
There were different products and a little bit of a different focus, but they focused on how to leverage the expertise and the relationships that Markham’s advisers had in the business community. They started tracking the referrals from Markham’s business to Holt’s. In 2010, they realized that for every 100 referrals his team made to Holt’s team, about 15 generated revenue.
“We used the process of referrals from Jeff to my world and built out and figured out what worked and what didn’t work, and once we got it right, we flip-flopped,” Holt says.
To help people trust each other and feel comfortable leaning on each other for business, Markham and Holt hosted a number of lunch get-togethers and cocktail hours as well as having educational seminars. They also created teams, so now each one of Holt’s client managers has a team of someone from Markham’s side as well as someone from U.S. Trust and someone from the private bank investment group.
They say the key to building a cohesive team when you merge is communication.
“Communicate early and often,” Markham says. “You can almost overcommunicate. Make sure you’re sharing the vision — that it’s not just that there is a vision, there is a strategy behind this. When you’ve got uncertainty like that, people do want to be a part of something larger than themselves, and we’re all created that way, so they’re going to tie into that vision and strategy. Some of them will happen further down the line. Some of them will jump in there quickly. You overcommunicate and begin to share capabilities and really point out the most important thing to both cultures and that is we’re a client-first organization.”
When Markham and Holt communicated with their people, they made sure it was clear and candid.
“I try to compare it to something the group has been through before, if it’s possible,” Markham says. “It’s not always possible, but if you can compare it, to make it relative, I do find that to be helpful in many ways.”
And they made sure that they kept saying the same things so people would really get it.
“My rule of thumb is that you have to tell people 11 times before it sinks in, so we go back and check with people,” Holt says. “Once I can hear my client managers kind of rolling it out with their broader team, then I know it’s starting to sink in.”
