Finally, everything is on one page. One questionnaire is going to gather 95% of the information needed by your experts to do what they do best. There is no reason to have multiple people asking a business owner the exact same questions. This is what is so frustrating about the financial services and insurance industry. Take your time and completely fill out the entire questionnaire. If the client will not go through this process, then you will have nothing. Do not go in and pick one solution in the hope of getting the others later. This is not a successful model, and you are leaving all the money on the table. Putting everything on the model allows you to work with your team and find all the issues.
Our industry tends to go to a few areas. First is the exit strategy. Considering that 90% of all businesses never sell, I would not consider this sound financial planning. Second is the buy-sell agreement. I must agree that this is usually a great way to make a big sell, however we will address this in the planning process in a much better way and show the client how to pay for it. The third would be, “are you tired of paying too much in taxes?” All clients are tired of paying taxes. We must make sure this tax strategy fits into the entire plan. What if the client needs some liquidity, and you just send them in a different direction. What if you save then 20k in taxes, but the over plan with liquidity saved them 80k in lost interest payments? Look at the entire picture. Stop cherry picking!
