These 5 Questions Make Client Review Meetings Fun Again: Meghaan Lurtz

What You Need to Know

Review meetings with clients after a financial plan is created tend to be boring because they are repetitive.
One way to enhance those meetings is to create a strategy to help clients move from being just fine to actually flourishing.
Clients tend to want more connection with their advisors; people change but are often bad at talking about it.

Once a financial plan has been created, delivered and implemented by an advisor, the most pressing issues clients face have usually been “fixed,” leading the advisor and client to enter the monitoring phase, where they routinely return to the plan and make any needed adjustments during recurring review meetings, according to Meghaan Lurtz, senior research associate at Kitces.com.

Over time, those meetings can become boring, Lurtz said Feb. 7, during the Kitces.com webinar “Making Client (Review) Meetings Fun Again: Questions to Ask to Move From Fine to Flourish.”

After all, advisors and clients aren’t typically thrilled to meet repeatedly when there is nothing new or exciting to report, said Lurtz, who is also the founding strategic advisor at the fintech firm Couplr, a professor at Kansas State University and lecturer at Columbia University.

However, when clients hit the phase of the client-advisor relationship when everything is “fine” with the client, it presents the perfect opportunity to start conversations about how clients can move beyond being fine and “flourish,” while bringing some fun back to the client-advisor relationship, and even transforming those once-boring monitoring meetings into something inspiring, she explained.

Hearing that things are just “fine” is “not always the best thing we want to hear,” she told viewers.

The good news is that clients actually want more connection with their advisors, she said, noting people change but are often bad at talking about it. Advisors and clients also like chasing new goals, she said.

Review meetings don’t necessarily have to be about “fixing” something that is wrong, she noted. Advisors can instead work with clients on growth and meaning during transitions in the clients’ lives.

Questions to Ask

Advisors can keep in mind that there are five components of helping their clients to flourish that she collectively referred to as “PERMA” (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment).

There are several questions advisors can ask, she said:

1. What’s possible now?

This question helps clients discover their purpose and achieve autonomy, self-determination and optimism, she says.