Explain yourself
Michael Perlmuter can’t give a client great service at Cedar Brook Financial Partners LLC if he doesn’t know what that client is looking for. But the 53-employee firm’s managing principal says many companies in the financial services industry try to do it anyway.
“The worst thing a financial adviser can do is have a client walk in the door with a check for $1 million and say, ‘I’ll take this money, and I’ll invest it, and I’ll tell you what happens next week,’” Perlmuter says. “That’s the worst thing they can do, but that’s how the majority of our industry works.”
So what’s the leadership lesson in all of this? It’s the fact that you need to do more than just tell your employees what to do. You need to explain to them why they are doing it and what the end result should be.
“If you walk around and people raise questions or raise concerns and they never hear back from you, they are going to stop raising issues,” Perlmuter says. “They are just going to say, ‘Everything is fine because I’m wasting my time voicing my concern anyhow.’”
So what’s the right way to handle a client with $1 million?
“Say to them, ‘I can’t invest this money until we have a meaningful conversation about your goals, your desires and where you want to be in one year, five years, 10 years or 20 years,” Perlmuter says.
How to reach: Cedar Brook Financial Partners LLC, (440) 683-9200 or www.cedarbrookfinancial.com
