How have things changed at Foster Group in the past four months? Below are a few thoughts on what has changed… and a brief comment on what hasn’t.
A New Way of Meeting with Clients
Prior to the coronavirus crisis, we met nearly all our clients face-to-face. We preferred this. It seemed like our clients preferred this. In the past four months, our connections to clients have been almost entirely virtual. Many of our clients have discovered they actually prefer meeting this way. They don’t have to travel. Spouses/partners can connect to the meeting from two different places. One could be from work and the other from home, for example. They are able to talk about all the things they would have talked about in a face-to-face meeting. In some ways, this came as a surprise to all of us. We and our clients didn’t know how good virtual meetings could be, until we were forced into this situation. Moving forward, we’ll work with all our clients to determine the best way to meet.
A New Way of Meeting with Colleagues
At the start of the crisis, there was a high need for teams to meet in order to problem solve. Every day came with its own set of issues that needed to be discussed and decisions to be made. For the first month, we organized daily “check-ins” for our teams and for our entire firm. Over time, we moved these daily check-ins to every other day. Recently, we moved many to weekly. In addition to solving problems, these check-ins have been opportunities to share stories about great, or not-so-great, conversations with our clients, questions our clients were asking, ideas on how to do things better, articles our team had read or podcasts they had listened to, or just to share how we were doing. As the Lead Advisor Manager, I’m going to continue these weekly team check-ins indefinitely, because of how fruitful they’ve been. I’m wondering why I didn’t do this before.
A New Way of “Doing Business”
“Never miss the opportunity a crisis affords you.” I’m guessing most of you have heard this, or some variation of this. From the start, we’ve tried to have a “what-can-we-learn-from-this?” mentality. As mentioned above, we’ve tried to be open to what we’re learning about the most effective ways of meeting with our clients. We’ve also had to adopt new approaches to meeting with people interested in becoming clients of Foster Group. We’ve had to figure out how to jump-start a new offering (CoreWealth) in the midst of a crisis. We’re starting to talk again about the hires we put on hold for several months and how to do this in a largely virtual environment. The construction of our portfolios and service-model has continued to evolve. All of these things are not only opportunities to experiment and learn, but opportunities to put into practice new ways of serving current clients, managing our teams, hiring future employees, and staying connected as a firm in the future.
A Chance to Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is
One of our three corporate “Uniques” is The Constant Pursuit of an Uncommon Experience. In some ways, our commitment to this hasn’t changed, but I honestly believe we’ve focused on this unique more than ever in the past four months. In the midst of a crisis, what do we need to do to provide our clients with an uncommon experience? Moving forward, in view of everything we’ve been learning, how do we need to change to provide our clients and potential clients with an uncommonly great experience?
I don’t want to diminish the challenges of the past few months or make it sound like working virtually doesn’t have its drawbacks. The truth is, we miss seeing our clients face-to-face, along with the small, and not so small, talk with our colleagues. We look forward to seeing each other, our clients, prospective clients, and our friends in the professional community on a more regular basis. Human interaction is such a good thing. Nevertheless, the past few months have been incredibly insightful and hopefully have helped us take steps to get better at what we do.