Episode #32: How to Engage Clients 150 Times a Year: Strategies from John Prendergast

Summary

In this episode of The Future-Ready Advisor, Sam Sivarajan speaks with John Prendergast, founder and CEO of Blue Leaf, a pioneering wealth management software firm that's reshaping client engagement. John shares his unique career journey and insights on using technology to enhance client experiences, offering a fresh look at what it means to be truly client-centered. This conversation dives into actionable strategies for increasing touchpoints, implementing a "noisy service" approach, and creating engagement loops that make clients feel connected, understood, and valued year-round.

Key Quote

"The most important lesson about client engagement is that clients don't register all of the messages you think you're sending." [33:44]

Main Topics Covered

• Blue Leaf’s Mission to Enhance Client Engagement – Learn about the inception of Blue Leaf and its focus on transforming client interactions in wealth management [2:46].
• 150+ Client Engagements Annually – Shifting from traditional touchpoints to achieve meaningful, consistent client contact throughout the year [6:16].
• "Noisy Service" Strategy – Why regular, value-driven client communications can boost satisfaction and loyalty [10:28].
• Creating Engagement Loops – Leveraging technology to establish continuous, impactful engagement with clients [12:50].
• Building a Strong Client Narrative – Techniques to strengthen client relationships and counter external influences with a unified message [18:04].
• The Role of Humility in Product Design – How humility and testing improve product design and client interactions [26:37].

Resources Mentioned

• The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge – A recommended read on systems thinking for advisors aiming to deepen client relationships [40:31].
• Blue Leaf Software – Discover how Blue Leaf’s tools enhance automated, personalized client engagement [41:15].

Calls to Action

• Subscribe to The Future-Ready Advisor – Don’t miss new episodes packed with insights for forward-thinking advisors! Subscribe on your preferred podcast platform.
• Connect on LinkedIn – Join Sam Sivarajan and like-minded professionals to discuss the latest in client engagement and future-ready strategies.
• Explore More Resources – Visit www.samsivarajan.com for additional tools, insights, and past episodes.

Hi, everyone. I'm your host, Sam Sivarajan, and welcome to

today's episode of The Future Ready Advisor. Today I'm here

with John Prendergast, founder of Blue Leaf, a wealth

management software firm with a focus on client engagement and

experience. John, welcome to the show.

Hey, Sam. Thanks for having me, man. I'm very excited

for this conversation.

Me as well. Let me quickly introduce you to our audience.

John is the co-founder and CEO of Blue Leaf, and he also serves

as the chief product officer. He is an experienced entrepreneur

and senior executive as well as an active startup advisor. He's

been part of six founding teams leading the product management,

marketing and finance functions, and it is his background in

banking and wealth management that has shaped that vision for

Blue Leaf. John I'm looking forward to this conversation. I

think client experience and client engagement is so

important in our industry and technology is going to play a

really critical part. But before we dive in, let's start. You've

had a diverse career before becoming the CEO of Blue Leaf.

Can you tell us a little bit about your professional journey

and what led you to start Blue Leaf?

Yes. Diverse. Some would say unfocused, though. For me,

I'd say I have always followed my muse, and I've been lucky

enough to operate at a pretty high level in in what I've tried.

And, you know, I've always loved finance. And I actually paid my

way through college and by training and made a fair amount

of money in the very early days of Apple and I got hooked. And

that's been a theme throughout. But of course, college for me

was a computer science degree and an economics degree. So I've

always combined those two things and then immediately while I'm

in school, I decided I know majoring in computer science and

economics. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open a

restaurant and I became one of the first Boston Chicken

franchisees, if you remember that business became Boston

Market and eventually was bought by McDonald's. But at I love

business just generally, I love building teams and I love

finance. And so I've explored all various aspect of of those

businesses. I spent a couple of years as an advisor, so I knew

how hard it really is. And I know that I'm not cut out for

that. But combining that understanding and my knowledge

of software and product development, that's what

eventually led to.

What niche or hole in the market led you to create Blue

Leaf? What is it? What is the problem that Blue Leaf is

solving in your view?

Sure. I mean, when you talk creation, this is a very

different time. We've been around since 2011, 2012 when we

first served our very first customers. And at the time, the

idea of an interactive client portal was actually novel that

was new. And so that's sort of where we started. And that's

been a thread throughout. Which is why we talk about client and

engagement being sort of our North Star, because we believe

that everything that an advisor does is about the client. If

you're doing reporting, it's about the client. If you're

doing trading and rebalancing, it's about the client. Even if

you're doing billing in some back office processes, you can

draw a direct line from whatever you do in your practice all the

way out to the client. So, so that's what guides us. We think

about how do we help the advisor do more and better for their

clients, how do we enable them to do what they do and be more

focused? And a big piece of that, we realized, is how engaged

clients were with their advisors and how it was very challenging

for advisors to stay in touch with clients at the cadence that

is now required. And so so that became a real area of specialty

for us, an area of focus. And and really everything we do is

about supporting that that mission so that advisors can

better serve their clients.

One of the ways that advisors serve clients is this

idea of touch points with clients. And

Yeah.

when we talked before, you mentioned that a good target

number was it. To me an astounding number is a 70 to 75

engagements a year. And you make the point, which I totally agree

with, that quarterly statements and yearly reviews are not

enough anymore. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure. So I'm going to up that ante. I'm going to

say that actually double that would be ideal. So up to 150

touch points a year and that is what many of the very fastest

growing advisors in the industry do. And it's what Jason Wenk did,

the founder of Altruist, who was a customer of ours, and we

really learned from people like him. But if you think about it

to two things. One, if you imagine, you know, this 365 days

a year, maybe you send out four quarterly reports, you might do

an annual meeting or annual update with a couple of other

touch points. You might get 15 touch points a year on in a

typical advisory firm done traditionally. And so that

leaves, you know what, 380 days a year where your clients are

not hearing from you. So what is your service? What's your your

your your service offering your services? Actually, silence.

That's what you're delivering to clients. You're delivering

silence, yet results, etc.. But that implies that the client

will take those scattered touchpoints and put it together.

That, Oh yeah, I need to pay attention to the results Sam's

giving me. And that just isn't the way that people work. At the

same time, the world has moved on and world has really changed.

Where if you think about services like Netflix or

Facebook, my guess is you have an email or another message in

your inbox or on your mobile phone that has pinged you to

give you a suggestion or some other value added connection to

you that might tell you something great to watch on

television tonight. And that might tell you your friend just

did X and Y and Z. And we're used to being contacted almost

daily by most of our favorite services and advice, just

conceptually, advisors still live in the land of the thing

that I personally do with my client. And what we're

suggesting is the client engagement paradigm has shifted.

It's much bigger. It's how does you how do you engage, but how

does your firm engage, how to other employees engage with

clients? It's how do you create content that engages clients?

It's how do you support simple messaging and simple reporting

that engages clients so that they're hearing from you two or

three different times a week, but in different ways. I made a

post the other day on LinkedIn and got a comment, you know, my

God, I can't imagine. Come and go, you know, connecting with my

clients that frequently and then I laid it out how? Well, once a

week it might be the firm sending an email. Once a week it

might be a report that sent automatically once a week or,

you know, every other week. It might be an update about a

service that you delivered or another another member of your

team sending a video saying, Hey, Sam, we just did this for you.

Just wanted to let you know. And none of those are redundant.

They don't feel like you're hitting them over and over. I

think conceptually where we where we break and we really

think it's bad and clients would hate it is when we think about

sending the same message over and over and over again. And

that is not at all what we're recommending. No one would would

want that. What we're talking about is finding a way to make

your services more integrated with the life of your client.

I really like that. John. to your point, it's not about

hitting them over the head with the same message. It's about

being creative, imaginative and unobtrusive. One of the things

that you mentioned when we chatted before that really hit

home with me is this idea of noisy service. Can you talk a

little bit about that as as a as a way of dealing with this kind

of touch point issue that we talked about?

Absolutely. We love the idea of noisy service. So if

you've never heard of noisy service, this is the idea that

most of the things that you do in your firm for clients are

silence. That, again, is the service you're tending to

provide. It's it's. It's nothing. It's that tree falling in the

forest. But what noisy service does is it says, okay, add 30 to

60 seconds on that, that moment of service in the back office

that might be a quick review of accounts. It might be a quick

analysis to see if if something needs a rebalance and then

simply report that to the client, maybe grabbing your phone and

doing a quick little video that says, Hey, Sam, we just reviewed

your accounts. We were trying to see if they need to be

rebalanced. They look really great, Keep doing what you're

doing and just want to check in. Whoops. And and you you touch

them. Now you've made an intangible service, white,

tangible. Not only that, but you've started to create a

relationship potentially beyond you with the rest of your firm,

with your service teammates and the people who also support your

clients. It is a complete game changer. And we use a video

service called Loom to do this. There are others. You could do

it, and advisors that are doing this today have reported all

kinds of benefits. The advisor gets their time back. The

clients more comfortable talking to other other service members.

The the client refers more because they feel like they're

getting more service, even though it's the same amount of

services before. They just know about it for the first time in

most cases. So that's noisy service.

I want to pick up on something that you mentioned,

this is the emails that you get from Netflix or Spotify that

we've suddenly become used to, And this is the idea of an

engagement loop that

Yes.

Netflix or Spotify does. Can you explain the term and

expand on how Blue Leaf captures that concept in the financial

advice world and helps advisors create those sort of engagement

loops?

Yeah, absolutely. So if you think about most client

portals or even mobile apps, they are kind of standalone

experiences and they sit and they wait for somebody to show

up because, oh, that client must have a better question. But

Facebook isn't sitting there waiting for you to show up.

They're reaching out. Netflix isn't sitting there waiting for

you to show it. They're reaching out, reminding you of the value

available to you and then creating simple ways for you to

connect back. Right. So it's that outreach with a simple way

to connect back that creates the loop of engagement. And with

that, you can see engagement rates skyrocket, client

satisfaction skyrocket. And we believe that all systems should

be doing this. But of course that isn't the case. And maybe

that's my product background come to come to bear here. But

what we wanted to do is make sure that advisors were

delivering to their clients the very best possible experience.

And where you see that is in consumer services around the web.

So we took that concept and we applied it squarely to a

financial advisory business.

That's an interesting concept, And when you were

talking, it reminded me of my own experience. So I've signed

up for a credit monitoring app, and something as mundane and

relatively one dimensional as your credit rating and what's

happening to your credit rating. This apps sends me one email a

week at least, to say, hey, there is potential, new credit

card that I could sign up for or say There has been activity in

my credit report and, do I want to engage with it? So the idea

of sending I would say, different types of touch points

that encourages the client to at least have the choice whether

they choose to engage with that or at the very least, it's a

passive reminder that, I've got a team of a wealth advisor and

their team working for me. Even when I'm not paying attention. I

don't have to do anything more than just see that email, delete

it. But I still register in my brain that I'm getting a touch

point and I reach out for my firm. My advisor.

Right. And I think the trick here and you used a really

good example because in that example, you both had service

oriented message and then promotional messaging and

generally what we're recommending to most advisors is

to, you know, severely limit the promotional messaging. What you

want is lots and lots of value added content. So it might be an

automated report that just simply says, you know, this is

how your your your likelihood of your succeeding in your plan

changed over the last month. It could be a message. That's the

here's how your balance sheet changed or here's what happened

this week in your account. Three very, very, very, very simple

and it could also be on the content side. It could be you

take your marketing, which most good marketing is going to be

problem solution oriented. You know, did you just receive our

use? Did you know that our issues can create a tax problem

for you? If if so, here's the ways that you need to think

about it. You should give us a call and we can help you and

connect you with a tax professional, that sort of thing.

Problem, solution oriented content, that's a very value add

it, right? So so we think it's more about the value added touch

points with information about how to solve problems,

information about what's happening in my accounts,

information about the kind of services we are providing to you,

even though you're not aware of them in the in the background

and in creating a volume of messaging based on that and it

becomes quite powerful. And you also set at top of mind, you

don't get referrals unless you are top of mind, right? That

just doesn't happen. And what we've seen is the consistency of

referrals really ramp up and or the volume. So it's it's quite a

powerful combination.

No, indeed. The advisers are working, as you say, when

they're delivering what they're doing, when they're providing

this quiet service. What they're not aware of in many cases are

they are aware they're actually struggling behind the scenes

with the narrative their clients are receiving from external

sources, whether it is the, the latest influencer on social

media, CNBC or Jim Cramer. so this is happening that the

client is getting influenced or inundated with these messages.

The adviser is perhaps not responding or not proactively

responding to some of those things. How do you advise

financial advisers to counteract these external influences and

maintain client trust?

Yeah. So when Jim Cramer honks his horn, when the latest

influencer on Tik Tok, you know, tells your client that this is

an and this is an insurance secret of the rich, you know,

we've all seen these, right? When that happens, you have to

be there. Alongside of that message, you have to be in your

client's inbox or or otherwise contacting them with what we

call a counter-narrative. So basically, this is the idea that

you need to repeatedly tell your clients story back to them and

how their money fits into the world and what's really

happening so that they have a base narrative that they hang on

to, that they then compare all of these other stupid messages

to because then. It's your narrative is their narrative,

and that is now the story that they live by. And those silly

things coming in from media are a fact finding story. The

problem when you don't show up in their inbox is the story is

created

Yup.

by, you know, Jim Cramer or some Tik Tok influencer and

that sort of becomes a jumbled mess

Yup.

in their story. And now when you say, don't worry,

that's the fact fighting the story. So we advise creating a

counter-narrative, the idea of a story, story, simple story,

right? This isn't like paragraphs, but this idea. Look,

your money is not the market. There are no secrets. There are

simple tactics that, on repeat, get you where you need to go.

And by sticking to this and being focused on the prize, eyes

on the prize, you're going to get there. Anybody who tells you

different is a charlatan and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Right. That's how you make your clients resilient to that

nonsense on tech talk.

Look, one of the interesting things is as much as

that nonsense is there on TikTok if you get that core message of

your story right, you're actually being provided

opportunities to create touchpoints or have touchpoints

with their clients. Because this narrative from Jim Cramer or

influencers, etc. is a weekly thing. I mean, you don't have to

respond every week.

Daily. It's daily. It's daily out there. The

You've.

media never sees.

An opportunity to you have an opportunity every time there

is or periodically when you get these narratives to use that as

a touchpoint. One of your hundred and 50 a year, etc.. I

use that as an opportunity to provide the counter-narrative,

but that becomes one of your touchpoints.

Exactly. And look, we're not saying that anybody needs to

go from, you know, 15 touch points a year to 150. But, you

know, a ten tax increase just start. Right. The thing that you

can add, right, if you if you're a new customer on blue Leaf, you

might add those automated, you know, financial updates. If

you've got marketing materials. Bill, take a look at that. Could

those be repurposed to point directly to to clients? In many

cases they can, and they'd be very value added, right? Just

find the next thing and take that one next step. Right. You

don't have to go all the way to the top of the mountain, you

know, climb up 100 feet, see? See what you think, see how the

air is. And but take it a step at a time.

Totally agree. All of this is small wins. You don't have to

run a marathon, as you know, one kilometer at a time. It isn't.

Exactly.

You don't run it all at once. Now, let's shift gears a

little bit. Technology is, a very important part of all

industries, but particular wealth management. But I would

say the retail or the high net worth wealth space. Technology

often gets criticized for poor service pricing and usability.

But the end of the day, if the advisor and the client are not

using the technology in the way it's designed, it's not fit for

purpose.

What would you say about that? And about a concept that I just

laid out? And how is your company addressing these issues

to provide a more seamless and efficient experience for

advisors and their clients?

Yeah, there's. There's a lot to unpack there, Sam. So. So

let's take the idea of. Of usability usage and usability.

You know, this is one of the reasons that we're so focused on

client engagement, right? One of the biggest complaints we hear

from advisors is I've got a I've got a portal and no one use it

uses it. And some advisors assume that's because my clients

aren't online or they don't want this because they haven't asked

for it. But of course, they're on Facebook. They're doing a

bunch of other things. So it's very clear that your clients are

online. It's just that the thing you've handed them just isn't

engaging. Right? So. So not all technology, not all client

portals are created equal. They just aren't. And it's why very

few companies like us provide engagement statistics. Ours is

right on our dashboard is we think you ought to know. So so

one is you have to actually have engaging technology for all of

this to work. The other disappointment, of course, is

pricing. Many advisors this year in particular have experienced

big price increases from some of the larger players in the

industry. Why? Because they felt like they could, right. You know,

the consolidation of TD and Schwab made everybody feel like,

oh, look, consolidation. Now there's less choice. So let's

let's, you know, jam prices up and they're pretty big price

increases. We have a pretty different philosophy at Blue

Leaf. We've held our pricing for years since 2014 when we we

haven't had a price increase. The only increases our customers

experience are if they buy additional services or if they

use the the system more. We think that's fair and it's the

right way to do business. We're not trying to gouge. We're

trying to have a fair, very long term relationship. And we've got

hundreds and hundreds of customers that have been with us

between five and ten years. So, you know, we're clearly doing

something right. You know, the other thing. Technology alone

doesn't solve these problems. Right. Technology is a tool, but

technology by itself does not create. You know, It's all right.

Drill as an example. Right. The drill by itself doesn't create

the whole. Right. You need the drill. Plus plus the person. And

so this idea of support, right, that you mentioned is really,

really critical. And everybody talks about having great support.

And but it's such a hard thing to evaluate at the outset. So we

talk a lot about our own statistics and how we've got

between 92 and 98% client satisfaction on any given month

that we have time to time to resolution of under 10 minutes

are on our queue. But I think structurally, the thing that is

so different about what we do at Blue Leaf is unlike virtually

every other provider, we actually directly support your

clients. Right? So if your clients are on our platform, you

don't support them. You don't have to deal with password reset

or questions about account aggregation or any of those

things. Our team does that for you as an extension of your team,

and that's really, really unique. And we've had to do a lot of

gymnastics to organize our team to be able to stretch that far.

Because if you think about it, that means a blue leaf support

team for the same number of customers. Our number of

advisors is is supporting somewhere between 50 and 100

times more users than your typical, you know, support team,

which we're quite proud of.

And along those lines, simplicity and product design

and incorporating the behavioral aspect of client interactions is

very important.

How do you create a simple, yet effective engagement system with

blue leaf?

Yeah. So if you want to create an easy to use service or

product, there's just one word you need to bear in mind.

Humility.

Now, what do I mean by that?

It is about suspending your assumptions about what that

client needs or what that user needs, what that adviser needs

in our case. You know, we we we have obviously advisers and

clients as users, and it is about actually testing that.

It's not even necessarily listening to what people say.

It's watching very carefully what they do and being humble

about what we think we know and what we don't know. And we rely

very heavily, heavily on testing in order to do that. So that is

that is a huge key because most adviser software is built in the

land of shoulds. You should have this, You should do this. You

always need this. And what we've found by being humble and

focusing on direct research is that most of those are just

illusion, just nonsense. The other thing is, and this is kind

of the bonus tip if you're trying to make something really

simple, focus on the little tiny details. And what I mean by the

little tiny details in, say, a piece of software and its

interface, little details like what is that button called?

What's that menu item labeled, Right. How many clicks do I need

to get? That's an obvious one. But the little elements of copy

and the language that you use is that the language that your your

customer uses, your client uses.

In most cases, it's the language that the product team or the

engineers thought they should use, as opposed to being careful,

very thoughtful, and again, using that as a bit of a

research element when people are using your software to figure

out is that what does that do what they thought it did based

on the name, if not, find another name, right? So that so

that the function and the intention are aligned right.

Those are those are the two things that I'd say you'd need

to do to create really simple software. And what you'll notice

is in both cases it requires a lot of extra work. Right.

There's a lot of extra research and observation and patience,

which is in short supply, particularly in technology and

it and it requires you to understand that you're going to

be wrong and be willing to iterate and fix things quickly

so that that's what we've learned.

that's a great point. And I can see the parallels from the

technology side of the equation to even the way advisors are

interacting in their practice or with their clients. I mean, this

idea of testing approaches, testing, terminology, testing

and, getting feedback from clients, what resonates with

them, what their key pain points are, there is a danger that we

all make in assuming that this is their pain point because the

industry tells us, or even assuming that the pain point

that the client expressed four years ago when they signed up

with you continues to be their pain point. So I think this idea

of testing and asking and being humble enough to say that, the

world is changing and that we need to be aware perhaps of how

that's changing is pretty critical.

That last point is so important. This

most experienced advisers have this sort of danger point that

they flirt with all the time, which is experience. And

experience is the enemy of humility. And what I'd ask

experienced advisers to do is to go back and recheck their

assumptions from time to time about what clients want. I don't

think your knowledge of managing money or anything that doesn't

change that much. The environment does, and you need

to keep up with that. And I would think about clients wants

and needs in a similar way, right? That's the environment

you're operating in. You can't simply assume that what people

needed 20 years ago is what they need and want today. And most

advisors take silence as a cent right silence, because my my

clients didn't ask for this. Or they didn't tell me they wanted

X, Y, Z. It's not their job to tell you what they want. It's

your job to go find out.

Totally. And as you're talking, it reminds me of an

experience I had a number of years ago at the firm. I was at

we were trying to win the CEO of a public company as a client.

And after many unsuccessful meetings, it was one of my

investment counselors who figured out that it was the

CEO's wife that made the personal decisions. So she then

started to build a relationship with the wife, and that led to a

long standing, successful billionaire client, all because,

as you said, she challenged our initial assumptions and she

looked at things. She was humble enough to look at it and sit

there and look at it clearly and objectively to say is is what we

think the case really the case? And I think experience is

important. I think it is so important. I'm such a big

believer that you learn more from experience than anything

else. But if you want to continue to learn, we always

have to have a degree or a dose of humility that sits there and

says, okay, is this still the case? Right? Is this still the

right belief in this case?

And experience can lead to assumptions, Right? And to me,

one of the greatest business lessons I've ever learned came

from a movie in the seventies. The Bad News Bears, Right. If

you've if you've never seen it, there's a there's a scene where

they talk about no assuming because assuming makes an ass

out of you and me. And I replay that an awful lot in my in my

business life, because every time I've gotten bitten, it's

because there was an assumption that went unchallenged.

True. Too true. What's the most important lesson you've

learned about client engagement throughout your career?

The most important lesson about client engagement is that

they don't

register all of the messages you think you're sending

that

maybe one out of three or four messages lands and they remember

it. Maybe if you're really, really, really lucky. So even if

you are sending 100 touchpoints a year, they might register that

you've sent them. You know, a couple of times a month. I know

that sounds insane. It's showing up in your inbox. But people

aren't thinking about you.

Mm hmm.

And that's actually the point.

Mm hmm.

Right. No one cares about what you're what you're doing or

the things that you've done. They care about their life. They

care about their problems. And it's only when you're present,

when they need something like what you've got, where they

connect the two. Otherwise, it's just noise and it just gets

suppressed. So you need to be there an awful lot to make them

feel like you're there even a little bit.

That's an interesting point. So because they're not

registering to all of your outreach or engagements. one

solution, as you say, is to send and to end up with the less that

they're getting. Is there something in the content or the

type of messaging or how your messaging that can help,

increase, call it the open rates or the registering rates that

their clients may have?

See, we're not talking about that. What we're talking

about is human behavior and human cognition. And I don't

know if there's an advisor out there who knows how to change

that. Man, we need to talk. I bet there's $1,000,000,000

product in that. But this is simply the way that people work.

Right. If you think about the example of the Netflix or

Facebook services that we've talked about.

Even as many messages as you receive. My guess is you can't

recount that many. When you think about it, yeah, I see them

often, but you have no idea how frequently it just. It doesn't.

It doesn't stay. It doesn't stick. Right. What sticks is the

sense that that's a service. That I'm connected with, that

that's touching me frequently. So, yes, you want to increase

the relevance of individual messages? Absolutely. No

question. But there's a real limit to how much one message is

going to be perfect and it's going to land and everyone's

going to cheer. No one cheers for your content. No one's going

to cheer. Oh, wow. That is a great quarterly report. Have you

ever seen that happen? Of course not. That that is. That just

isn't how people work. But people remember how you make

them feel. They don't remember the facts. But they remember how

you make them feel and how you make them feel when you're

sending out value added messages about them, about their money,

about problems they may have, about things you've done for

them. They feel cared for. They are sure you care about them.

And many advisors do a good job at making their clients feel

cared for. Don't get me wrong. But this is another way to

ensure across the entire client base, if you've got 100 200

clients that they feel that this is the way to systematize

And scale.

that sense of caring and scale it. Yeah, exactly.

On that note, can you give an example of how an adviser

that you work with has used your platform to transform their

client service model? What, perhaps might have been their

specific challenges? And how did Blue Leaf's platform help them

overcome them.

Sure. This is actually an older story, but it's one of my

favorite favorites because it was it was well ahead of its

time. But the best transformational story that that

comes to mind for me about how Blu leaf changed a business or a

service model for an advisor is an advisor. You know, $100

million firms, a good sized firm, not huge, not not small. Who

wanted to simplify their quarterly reporting process.

They came to us for automated reporting, very traditional need.

And within about six months, I saw a story on the Wall Street

Journal, their online edition, that highlights advisors. And it

was a story about this advisor who killed the quarterly report

and and essentially eliminated the traditional quarterly report

in form in favor of more frequent touch points. And this

saved that firm. I think what she told me at the time was a 3

to 4 man days a month that they were that they were spending to

sort of make sure that all of this stuff was was together. And

more importantly, she said, was it really ratcheted up their

growth and their referrals.

Great.

So you land on the cover of the Wall Street Journal and

your business is better off. That feels like a win win win.

Sounds like it to me. John We're coming to the end of our

podcast, so I have a few final rapidfire questions for you that

I ask all my.

Sure.

So number one, professionally, what is the most

important lesson you've learned over the years?

Systems thinking. So everything that we do or operate

in is part of a larger system, which is why so many things that

we attempt have unintended consequences. And if we start by

thinking about the end goal we want and trying to understand

the system we're operating in. We tend to be much more

effective. There was a wonderful book by a guy named Peter Sanga

called The Fifth Discipline. It is about systems thinking. It

changed the way I viewed the world. And I would highly

recommend it.

Right. I know the book and I totally agree. It's a

wonderful book. What is one practical tip you would offer

listeners keen on applying your insights on client engagement?

Pick up on either noisy service as a model or on

repurposing your marketing content to be problem solution

focused and sending that to your clients. Either one will get you

another 25 to 50 touch points a year and your clients will be

better off. You could always come to blue if and get some

other automated stuff, But. But those things are things you can

do right now to day to change the way that you engage with

clients.

It's been a great discussion. If listeners want to

learn more about you or find out about your work, where do they

go?

Easiest place is LinkedIn. I'm just, you know, John

Prendergast is my handle on LinkedIn. We're active there

every day and it's very easy to get hold of me there.

Awesome. John, thank you for joining us today on the

Future-Ready Advisor podcast.

My pleasure. It was really fun.