“They gave the lawyer 15 minutes?” Jason Roberts rhetorically asked attendees of a packed Tuesday afternoon session at the annual Excel 401(k): The Advisors’ Conference in Las Vegas.
Roberts, CEO of Pension Resource Institute (PRI) and partner at Retirement Law Group, spoke about differentiation strategies during his quick chat entitled “Enhancing Client Retention & Prospecting through Plan Governance.”
“I started out my legal career as a defense attorney for advisors and kept seeing the same litigation, the same complaints, et cetera—just almost cookie cutter—leading to problems for advisors. We started reverse engineering that,” he said. “What is that worst case scenario? And how do we reverse engineer that worst case scenario in order to head off problems before they happen?”
Informed by legal considerations, PRI developed an educational 10-step guide, dubbed G-MAP (or Model Administrative Procedures). It’s designed to be used as an actionable framework to systematically make plan-related decisions and document the processes.
“It’s all about the process,” Roberts said. “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be prudent.”
The steps relate to both fiduciary and non-fiduciary services that fall into one of three buckets: Investments, Administration & Reporting and Service Providers. The broader the scope of the advisor’s services and entrenchment within the plan processes, the greater their perceived value and the better off the advisor will be in terms of warding off competitors and retaining that client (not to mention, justifying, if not upping, the level of compensation).
But for those with 10-plus plans who are aiming to provide 15-plus services, how can it be done in a scalable way?
“That’s why we laid out some steps for getting your plans on a cycle where you’re coming in and showing that you’re delivering on each of those services—not just checking the boxes—but leaving deliverables and going through exercises where you’re generating documentation for your client. That’s how you’re going to be able to execute on those services and create that scale,” Roberts explained.
From a retention standpoint, it’s worth it, he argued.
“If you are the glue, if you are the quarterback, and all things run through you, it is very difficult to dislodge you.”