001 Infrequently Asked Questions: What’s Wrong With My Delivery?

One of the things that I’m enjoying about this series is that many advisors in this space are friends – both new and old.  In this video I talk to you like I would if we were sitting together face to face, and you’ll get a real sense of how “excited” I am about faith based investing!

This week we talk about how you are sharing the message of faith based investing with your clients. If you have tips to share let me know and I’ll be glad to disseminate your ideas to the group. See below for resources mentioned in the video.

Full transcript below.

Transcript: How to talk to clients about faith based investing

Hi there, it’s Cassie Laymon here with LightPoint Portfolios and we’re here to discuss this week’s infrequently asked question. Lately I’ve had advisors who say to me “You know I’ve talked to my clients about biblically responsible investing, but they’re really just not interested.” So, the infrequently asked question, the question you should be asking is “What’s wrong with my delivery when I’m talking about biblically responsible investing?”

So, there’s some good news here, I believe that your clients probably are interested in biblically responsible investing, but the bad news is your delivery might be influencing their decision. So if you were here talking with me the first thing I would ask you is: how do you feel about faith-based investing? And if you are thinking about this as a marketing tool or “Hey I have one or two Christian clients, maybe they might be interested in this” but you are not convinced that this is something that you should be doing in your practice, or that you really want to do in our practice, then that’s going to really influence your clients.

You have the ability to take the lead and really show them all of the possibilities, oftentimes we think we just need to give our clients all the options and let them choose and the truth of the matter is that they’re looking to us for leadership. They don’t know what the right answers are. Just think about how many times your clients say “I don’t know what do you think we should do?”

So, the first thing I really want you to think about is how you feel about faith-based investing or biblically responsible investing? Because that’s a big influencer. If you have in your mind the idea that if I do biblically responsible investing my performance is going to be worse and my fees re going to be higher, that’s going to influence how you talk to clients about it. I don’t believe that’s true, not for a minute and that is certainly not how I would lead this conversation. But if you don’t think that this is a good investment that is absolutely going to come across and that’s really why I did so much research about this in the beginning because I wasn’t convinced that this was a good way to invest so I had to ask questions and interview people and just dig through every resource I could find.

So, if you just think “that would be a nice extra thing to put in my practice” it’s really going to show in the way you talk to clients about it. So, this is what we do when we talk to a new client, in part of our interview process we will ask them the question: Are there any companies or business practices you would rather not invest in because of your faith or other values?” Either they will usually say “Yes, and here’s a list” or they will say “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about” because they’ve never spoken about that before.

So, I will say to someone, “well there are certain companies and business practices that we choose not to invest in because we feel that they take advantage of other people.” We talk about addictions; that companies that promote addictions really take advantage of people and we don’t want to make money that way. And I spend a little bit of time talking about screening. I try to do it in a winsome way. I don’t do it with disgust or what we’re against or anything like that. I really talk about people and how we really want to love people and we don’t want to invest in things that do not promote human flourishing. That’s what I talk about.

And then on the flip side I talk about wanting to invest in companies that are looking to be a blessing in the world through the products that they provide, the way they treat their employees, their activities in the community. Your clients don’t need to be Christian to be excited about this and if you can’t tell I’m really excited about this and I think it’s infectious. So, if you’re giving this delivery that “Here’s something that maybe you might want to think about”, that’s not really compelling. You really need to understand what the offering is and once you do you will be super excited about it and you will be excited to tell your clients about it.

So, one of the other things that I do is I have examples of God-honoring companies. So, I’m going to show you. If you were at the Kingdom Advisor Conference, Eventide just put out this new piece called Portfolio Impact Highlights. And it talks about the different companies they invest in. I would not use these stories if you’re not investing in Eventide, let me just say that, but these are amazing stories that you can tell people and they get excited about the kinds of things they are investing it.

When I first started learning about BRI, I learned about one of the companies Eventide is investing in that is making progress in the area of muscular dystrophy. I was a physical therapist for years, I was treating these boys and knowing here you’re twelve years old and in 8 or 10 years you’re not going to be with us anymore because it’s a progressive and horrible disease. And now they are reversing the effects of muscular dystrophy, I mean I couldn’t imagine that, and it is so exciting and I get excited about talking about these companies with our clients. And then they love being able to follow and knowing that they’re invested in these companies.

Another thing we do for Beacon Wealth is we write a Shining Light company spotlight every month where we take a company and we tell the story of the company, how they got started. Many of them have Christian roots and it’s one of the favorites of our clients. So you want to have some examples in your back pocket to talk about and I think really the summary is: how excited are you about BRI and that is really going to influence how excited your clients are going to be.

There’s a quote and I don’t know who its attributed to that says “If you’re interested you’ll do what’s convenient, but if you’re committed you’ll do whatever it takes.” I started this journey I interviewed advisors, I asked them questions – How do you talk about this? How do you present this? How do you overcome this objection? In the Kingdom Advisor Resource library there is a BRI Community Group I did with Rick Laymon, Mike Kuckel, and Alex Ellis and it’s all about overcoming objections and it is rich with information from advisors who have answered these questions each and every day. So that library is a great resource for you also. Alright you want to talk about this some more, you have some question, just email me Cassandra@beaconwealth.com

Looking forward to talking to you next time! God bless!

 

Resources

Objections Call with Rick Laymon, Mike Kuckel, and Alex Ellis: The Case for BRI

Here’s another call resource I found in the Kingdom Advisors Archive – an interview with Rick Laymon and Todd Larson from Ameriprise, called: I Love to Tell the Story: Craft a Compelling BRI Message