Our Lead-Up and Meeting Process
People work with people that they know, like and trust. We’ve got hundreds of videos online on our website, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook so we hope you’ve watched a few of those and gotten to know us a bit.
We also hope that I’ve built a bit of trust with you by giving straight-up, honest information about some complex financial topics without being sensational or doing dumb spammy things to get clicks. Our whole company at Safe Pacific is just like that – straight up, honest and level-headed.
Today we’re going over what happens next after you send us a message or schedule a meeting time with us. This way you can know the process and next steps if you want to work with us.
First things first – our industry has a stigma of being pushy and high-pressure sales and we try to be the exact opposite of the stereotypical insurance agent or financial advisor.
What does this mean?
Well it means we aren’t going to call or email you a hundred times. I know some people out there think that’s what we’re going to do, but I’m here to tell you that ain’t nobody got time for that. If you don’t want us to call you, trust me we don’t want to call you. We spend our days talking to people who want to talk to us.
So what do we do when you send us a message through our website? First off someone on the team is going to email you within 24 hours on business days. We’ll also follow up with a phone call to make sure we connect with you. I can promise you now that it’s a real person in our office who will email you and call you, not an automated robot and not a call centre in another country.
In that email you can expect to receive a a scheduling link to book a time in one of our calendars and take next steps and see if we are a good fit to work with you and if you are a good fit to work with us.
For this first meeting you can either schedule a fifteen-minute intro call, or a proper discovery meeting which takes about 45 minutes – 1 hour.
1. The Discovery Meeting
So, what happens in that first discovery meeting?
The discovery meeting is to get a better understanding of your current situation, your goals and concerns and also if we like one another and want to work together.
We’re going to ask you a lot of questions and let you do most of the talking.
The questions we’ll ask you are different than the standard financial advisor questions. We go much deeper to find out about your goals, your concerns and your value system around money. The questions we’ll ask break down into 4 main categories.
The first bit is your standard vital statistics stuff where we’ll ask about your assets and liabilities, if you’re married and have kids, do you own your house, any debts and other investments you currently have. This is your standard banker questions stuff and is important for us to know.
You don’t have to have exact numbers and statements for all your accounts yet, so don’t worry if you don’t have those available, but please have a general idea of your numbers.
I’ve got to mention now that anything we talk about in this first meeting is kept private and confidential. We don’t share your information with anybody and we take this privacy seriously.
We mentioned about trust at the beginning of this post – it's important that you trust us – but it’s equally important that we trust you. We sometimes get people who reach out to us and don’t want to share any information – this is a massive red flag for us and a quick indication that this relationship is not going to work.
The next part of our discovery questions gets into some more fun stuff – we start talking about your goals and concerns. We want to know what you’re trying to do in the next couple of years, what are you trying to accomplish? We break these goals down into personal goals, financial goals and professional goals.
We also want to know about your concerns or any obstacles that could prevent you from accomplishing these goals. We need to know about these so that we can plan around them.
The third part of our discovery meeting is my favourite and what makes us stand out. I don’t think too many other financial advisors get into these types of questions.
What do I mean? Well, we ask more philosophical questions about how you think about money and your value system around money. For this part of the meeting there are no right or wrong answers, but it’s really important to talk about what you like and wht you don’t like, how you view money, how you think about money. This really helps us present solutions that are tailored to you and towards your values.
For example, it wouldn’t make sense for us to recommend red, if you tell us you hate red and only like blue.
The last series of questions we’re going to ask you is around your financial power team. If finances is a team sport, we want to know who else we’re playing with? Do you have another investment advisor, who’s your accountant, lawyer, mortgage broker, realtor etc. Who else do you get financial advice from.
We want to know this because if we propose to you go left, we don’t want your other trusted advisors to tell you to go right. That wouldn’t make a good plan if everyone’s not on the same page and going in the same direction.
Once we go over all of this, we get to work and take all this information and put together a customized proposal based on what you’ve just told us.
2. The Proposal Meeting
Our second meeting, which we call the proposal meeting usually happens about a week later and takes about an hour.
In this meeting we’ll go over everything we talked about in the first meeting to confirm that we heard you and understood what you said.
Then we’re going to make some recommendations based on what we talked about in the first meeting. These recommendations will be tailored to your exact situation and will include numbers and price quotes for anything we present.
At the end of the meeting we’ll give you all of the paperwork that we went over including any quotes and numbers so you can keep that and also its so you don’t have to remember everything and take notes during our meeting.
One of our company values is to be very educational in our approach – so we really want you to understand the recommendations and ask any questions.
In this meeting you still aren’t signing anything. We want you to take everything we said, go home and think about your options. Talk to your partner, husband, wife or whoever else needs to be involved in the decision to move forward.
After this meeting if you want to see different numbers or scenarios we are happy to re-run the quotes and show you what happens if we do more of this or less of that or whatever other options you want to see.
We’re in this for a very long time so we are very happy to take an extra hour or day or week upfront so that there are no problems in the future. The last thing I want is for us to rush now and you to call 5 or 7 or 10 years down the road and be unhappy with something we’ve set up today that could have been easily fixed.
That leads us to the next step which is putting the plan in place.
3. The Application Meeting
This 3rd meeting is the application meeting. This is where the rubber hits the road and we start applying for insurances and opening your investment accounts and whatever else parts of the proposal that we’re going to implement.
Sometimes we implement all the recommendations at once and sometimes we start with some of the recommendations now and do more of the recommendations later. Everybody’s life and timelines are different so this is all really dependent on your and your current situation.
If we’re applying for insurance we’ll complete these applications now and then send all that information to the different insurance companies to start the underwriting process. Just because you want insurance doesn’t mean you can have it. You have to apply and the insurance company has to approve you.
The underwriting process can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months depending on your health and depending on if the insurance company needs more information from your doctor. Often times we’re applying for big insurance policies and those often require more underwriting.
What’s good is that since COVID the insurance companies have really relaxed their quick issue underwriting and for basic insurance coverage we can get a lot of stuff approved much more quickly than before.
As we go through the underwriting process we’ll keep in communication with you if there’s any additional information required or if anything comes up that could delay a decision.
For setting up your investments, opening the accounts is rather simple and we can do it quickly. We’re very digital and we have a digital forward platform that we use to manage investments and can do most of the account opening online and through Docusign.
What can take a lot of time is if you’re transferring money from another investment account to us. We are quick, but the other institution that’s currently holding your money can often take a very long time to send it. It’s actually kind of brutal how bad other companies are at sending over the money. They’re very quick to take it and very slow to let it go.
But you don’t have to worry about any of that. As part of our service and expertise we stick handle the entire process for you and make sure that things get done as quickly as they can.
That’s it. That’s what it looks like if you want to work with us. We’re very consistent with our process and we’ve dialed this in over the past 12 years doing it. Also if you ever refer someone to work with us, know that this is exactly the process that they’re going to go through as well. We do this with every body and we never skip it or skip any of the steps. This way we know that we get all the information we need and we know things are done right each time.
Next Steps:
At Safe Pacific Financial, we specialize in helping Canadian business owners, incorporated professionals, and investors structure life insurance for maximum wealth protection, tax savings, and business growth.
If you'd like to work with a team who is trustworthy and has your best interests in mind, schedule a no-pressure Discovery meeting with one of our advisors using the button below.
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