Market Volatility Conversations: What Your Clients Need to Hear

Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial - I am joined today by Mr. Kevin Roskam. So, Kevin, give me your quick title and a quick backdrop of what you do here at the firm because that's definitely going to lead into our conversation today.

Kevin Roskam, Senior Advisory Business Consultant at USA Financial - Sure, so my title is Senior Advisory Business Consultant - senior, obviously, with the gray hair and gray beard - and I've been here now in my 20th year. I've been here long enough to have done a lot of the stuff on the operation side. As you know, Mark, I came in on the broker-dealer side. My job has evolved into working on USA Financial Formulas and then also USA Financial Exchange - working with advisors to look at how to allocate their long-term money, the stories involved, the different money managers that we use, who works better together, and working to really put together a diversified portfolio in the sense of diversifying by risk management styles as opposed to just the traditional way of spreading assets out. With that consultation role, four or five years ago, I started my own practice using USA Financial tools and also our money management and platforms. And that's really done amazing things for me in terms of having conversations with retail clients just like advisors have, going through the market volatility, having to react to client phone calls and hopefully be proactive with certain clients, and just working really hard at setting expectations at the beginning of the process so when we get to volatile times, a lot of the work has already been done.

Mark Mersman - And we're going to get into that, but I think you're right. So much of the difficult conversation as it relates to market volatility starts long before the market volatility hits, right? For today's conversation, in light of the market volatility that we've been experiencing recently, I wanted to sit down with Kevin. Kevin speaks with all of our advisors on a regular basis and really talking through how to have that conversation with clients. Obviously, we want the market to do well. We want their accounts to grow. Growth never happens in a straight line, as we all are very well aware. So, when it's not in that straight line and that line's going the wrong direction for a stretch, how do we have that conversation? So Kevin, I'm going to kind of set the stage with, you know, based on your feedback from advisors that you've spoken with over the past week or two, and obviously some of your own clients, how would you describe current investor sentiment? What should advisors be aware of emotionally before having these conversations? Because, obviously, nobody likes to see this account movement the way it is.

Kevin Roskam - Right, so you know, there's really two types of clients that we have. The first type is the folks that are still working. And the folks that are still working, although they may be aware of what's going on politically, economically, and in the stock market, it's not their biggest concern. And so when it comes to "Oh, my 401k is probably down a little bit based on what I'm seeing on the news". Those clients are fairly reasonable to deal with. It's more just reminder conversations. "Hey, you're still working. You still have an income. This stuff gives you the chance to buy at a discount. If you're investing in your 401k every two weeks, this is actually an opportunity". And those conversations are not incredibly difficult. The other folks that we tend to work with are people who are retired. People who may have the television on more than they should during the day. Those people have a different view of what's going on in the marketplace. And for those people, believe it or not, the first question that I ask is, has your income been affected? Because we know that the way we can plan to interact with with volatile markets is first of all make sure that our clients' income isn't coming from accounts affected by those markets. So when it comes to those clients, has your income been affected? And typically that question kind of re-centers them. "Wait a minute. My income hasn't been affected. Yes, my long-term money may be going through it right now, and of course might be down right now, but this market volatility isn't affecting my income". That helps with the conversation a tremendous amount.

Mark Mersman - Yeah, I think that's an important question. That's one to get in your repertoire is focusing on the income because, at the end of the day, that is the thing that's most concerning. There's in the moment today, and what's the next month, three months going to look like from my income standpoint? How much and what kind of effect is this going to have on my long term plan? What do you think is the biggest mistake advisors make when discussing market volatility with their clients? Is there anything that jumps out to you that they're saying or doing, or maybe not doing, as it relates to trying to address the concerns that their clients might have?

Kevin Roskam - One of the things that we forget sometimes is that we are advisors, not order takers. This might come out the wrong way, but we're not servers in a restaurant. We're not typically taking orders and then relaying those orders to someone in the kitchen to make the meal. We're advising our clients on what is appropriate for them. And so what I've really had conversations about over the last two weeks has been "My client wants to get out of the market. My client called, they can't handle the volatility. They want me to get them out of the market. So I'm sending in a reallocation form to move them to cash". Part of the reason we invest the way we do using the Exchange platform is so advisors can have a buffer between the positions a client holds and the advisor's emotions. And so I think the first thing that I talk to with advisors is let's look at the client account. Let's see where they're actually allocated. Does the client understand, depending on the strategy they're in, that they're already 50 % shielded from this market volatility or more? So the first part of the conversation I'm having with advisors is let's look at where the client actually is before we just take the order to lock in these losses.

Mark Mersman - I think another mistake that a lot of advisors can kind of fall victim to is assuming that all of their clients are really worried. I think a lot of advisors, you have a day where you're having four, five, six of those conversations, and you feel emotionally beat down from it. You take a vested interest in your client's success, right? We obviously all want our clients to succeed. We want their accounts to grow. And so we can sometimes take that downturn personally because we don't want that to happen to them. But at the end of the day, some of the clients, if you've done a good job, aren't panicked about it. And so you don't want to infuse panic in them because some of them actually listened to you on the front end saying, yeah, this is a long-term play.

Kevin Roskam - That's such a great point because if I go back just three, four weeks ago, I actually fell victim to that. I had one of my clients who's closer to retirement send me an email - and I probably misinterpreted it because of how sensitive I was to what was going on already two, three weeks ago - "Just checking in, wanna make sure everything's okay". And what I actually did, rather than just worry about that specific client, I actually went home that night and called my top 20%. And of the phone calls I made - if I made 10 calls, literally eight of the 10 people had no issue with what was going on. A couple of them didn't even know what was going on. I created an awareness that it wasn't there. And so you're exactly right. We tend to think that our loudest clients represent all of our clients. And if we've set expectations properly, that's just not the case.

Mark Mersman - And that begs the question because I think it's a concern that a lot of advisors have is, what are the proactive steps that I should take from a communication standpoint? Because we've all heard, you know, you're not going to get fired if you communicate well. Advisors get fired for not communicating and not being available and that sort of thing. So it's the fine line of, you know, when do we tip people off and be proactive versus not cause the alarm. I still think there's a play for that proactive communication. So much of it comes down to messaging. What's the advice for proactive communication from your side of things?

Kevin Roskam - That's another great question because there is that fine line. And I think we're in a period of time right now in the marketplace where that proactive communication, it can serve two purposes. And I think the communication has to serve two purposes. It's a reminder of, "Hey, markets are volatile, but here is why we're prepared to interact with them. Here's how our accounts work in these types of situations. We planned for this. We prepared for this". The other part of the message is if you are concerned, by all means reach out. And if you have friends and family that are important to you and they're concerned, I'm willing to talk to them to try to make them feel better as well. I think the proactive part of this is you're okay and I'm willing to make sure that people you care about are okay.

Mark Mersman - It's a huge opportunity, to your point. As much as there's our existing client base that we have to deal with and address and make sure they're in the loop, there is certainly an opportunity when these times come to capitalize on the fears and the uncertainty that's out there - especially for those that don't have an advisor, that don't have somebody that is reaching out to them. I think you're right. Are there any stories or analogies or phrases that you typically try to encourage advisors to use to almost kind of bring this into terms that they can understand as we deal with this volatility? Anything that you try to try to coach people do to create some tangibility with their clients?

Kevin Roskam - The thing that I've been doing with with advisors specifically is reminding advisors, you know, when you're specifically using risk management that's active, like a lot of our advisors are, the goal of active risk management is to avoid the catastrophic. It's not to avoid loss. So, if the markets are down 10%, is that a catastrophic loss? It isn't. It's not fun, but it's not a catastrophic loss. So a lot of the last couple of weeks for me has been reminding advisors and asking advisors, "Did we plan for this?" If you had money exposed to the markets, this is something you planned for. It's not abnormal. It's something that you as the advisor planned for. Like we talked about earlier, if expectations were set long before we hit the last month or so in the stock market, you have the opportunity to be that reassurance to your clients, frankly, that they're paying you for. I used to tell the story when we first moved, which is 13 years ago now, it was our first two-story home ever. When the wind blows in West Michigan and you live in a ranch-style home, you hear it, but you don't feel it. When we moved - and the back of our house is exposed to the west and northwest - when the wind blows, if it's strong enough, the house moves. It creaks a little bit, and you hear noises that you're not used to hearing. That first year that we moved into that home and it was actually November 1st. So as the gales of November came calling, those noises were new to us. It was something we... is a window open? Is the house built well? Whereas 13 years later, you know, we had storms here this week. We sleep through them. It's something we're used to now. And it's the same thing - not just in the stock market. More importantly, it's the same thing when you're using strategies that offer active risk management that maybe as an advisor are new to you. Maybe you've only been using these managers for a couple of years. And so these first "creaks" in the strategy, these first movements where the strategy gets defensive or doesn't get defensive or hops in and hops out, it's new to you. Not just for clients that pay attention, but for advisors as well, it's been a time of newness and unfamiliarity. For me, because with a lot of the managers on the platform and just market experience, of course, being that Senior Advisory Business Consultant, this is normal. These sounds and creaks, this drop in the market, the way a lot of these strategies have reacted to it isn't perfect, but it's normal.

Mark Mersman - It's funny you say that because as I look back at my tenure in the industry, I got started right on the heels of the dot com bubble, right? So I'm coming into the industry right at that downturn there. And then I've been through the financial crisis, you go through the Covid chaos, and now we've got this. With every single one of them the feeling was, "Boy, this time it feels different". Because every one is a little bit different. But in the grand scheme of things, this is not something that is uncommon for the markets to experience, right? And every single time through that, it has done what it's done and it has been resilient and come through. And in my mind, there's really only two things that are gonna come of this: either we're going to come out of this like we've come out of every other bad stretch before, or the economy or country is going to collapse, the whole nine yards. And guess what? It doesn't really matter at that point. I don't mean to sound too crass about it or nonchalant, but at that point there's really no point in all the savings that you've accumulated if the country's going to crumble and our dollar is going to be worthless. The other piece of it too, Kevin, one of the things that I know that we try to emphasize is, we have an image that we put up, a Venn diagram that we frequently use and a lot of the collateral that we create focused on the things that matter with the overlap of the things that you can control and really trying to re-emphasize to clients, this is where we have to live. We have to focus on the things that matter and the things that we can control. And guess what? We can't control some of this stuff, but we can control our emotions a bit. We can try to taper that. We can try to control whether we're short-sighted or long-sighted and understanding that a big part of what matters is their income. Is their income affected today, tomorrow, the year ahead? If that's something that's important and we've addressed that, we are focused on the right things and we have to focus on the things that are in our control, which brings me to a question that I think a lot of advisors are going to be wrestling with. And if there's an argument for "this time it's different", I think one of the things that feels a lot more different today with what's going on is the political undertones that exist with this one. It feels like more so than other past big market movements there's a little bit of a political underbelly that people are attaching politics to this. How do you coach advisors or how are you having conversations with clients to address what's going on with the tariffs without making it be overly political? Because certainly a lot of advisors have clients that are on both sides of the political spectrum and might feel strongly one way or the other.

Kevin Roskam - The first thing to understand is with so many of the unemotional strategies that most of our advisors use on the platform - and I actually got this complaint the other day - the strategies aren't focused on politics. They're not focused on the specific days where something is going to happen. They're focused on market data. And as much as a complaint that that is, to me that's reassurance that the data is telling a lot of our strategies, whether they measure stuff out on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly, whatever it may be. The data is measuring the market's reaction to politics, the market's reaction to news. It's measuring how the market is reacting to the different events out there. And because formulas don't have emotion, sure it can mean that they're not paying attention to April 7th and who's giving a speech on the 7th of April. But they are paying attention to how the market reacts to those things. And so, regardless of your politics, the market is gonna move in the way that it moves. It's going to react to all the different things that go on in the marketplace and in the world. And if, as an advisor, you are trying to use your brain power versus your emotional being to move your client's assets around, I think that's the worst position you can be in. If you have a client that says, "I am afraid that because of what's going on in politics, the market is going to go down for the next 60 days, I want you to move me to cash". I'm not sure that's an argument worth winning. I'm not sure that you should keep a client invested when they're so desperately uncomfortable that they want to get out of the market. I think at some point as an advisor, although I talked about not being an order taker before, I think you also want to be conscious of the fact that, okay, this is what we have done for you, Mr./Mrs. Client. This is how you're actually currently exposed to the market. But if you're not comfortable with that, it's more important for me in the short term for you to be at least in a spot where you can sleep at night than it is for me to be right 60 days from now when the market has corrected and you chose to not participate in that correction. I'm gonna take notes on that. I'm gonna verify with the client. If you want to get out of the market today, that's great. And you're worried about the next 60 days, that's fine. Let's reconnect in 60 days and we can talk about how you feel and where the market is then.

Mark Mersman - There's two points here. One, the documentation side of it and reiterating that, because the truth of the matter is we don't know where it's going to be 60 days from now. It's a coin toss on whether the client's right or you're right for telling them to stay the course. I mean, acknowledging that, and I think sometimes clients, especially with advisors who may put a little more emphasis on performance and return, I think they assume that an advisor knows more than what they actually can know, in terms of their ability to predict where the market's going. And the truth of the matter is, an advisor who is claiming that they know what's going to happen, they're setting themselves up for failure. We know that. And if their emphasis is the wrong way, then they've structured that relationship on a poor foundation. But, I think the bigger challenge with doing that is trying to determine when that re-entry point is. You and I were talking before this, we both had some money on the sidelines, and it's that million dollar question of when is the entry point, right? And for a client who's really emotional during this timeframe that says, let's go to cash, do you advise for an advisor to have the conversation to say, "Okay, we can do this, but I want to understand your feeling towards when we get back in because that's the biggest challenge with navigating this kind of a thing is yeah, we can get to the sideline, a lot of our strategies do that. They go to the sidelines, but there's kind of a prescription for when that re-entry is going to be. When do we start to do that?" What's your advice for coaching an advisor coaching their client through that re-entry point?

Kevin Roskam - The first thing is that if they're involved in the exit, you have to tell them that they have to be involved in the re-entry. That's the first piece. That's why, whether it's 60 days, 30 days, whatever it is, we need to revisit this together to gauge your feelings so we can have a conversation about what our exposure is going to be going forward. The whole point of the way you're invested is to help control your emotions. Short-term emotions kill long-term plans. That's where, if the first goal is to keep them, I don't want to say keep them invested, keep them participating in the investment strategies that they're in. That's the key. Because first of all, a lot of the strategies that they're in most likely are out of the market right now. Or they're in some sort of a defensive position right now. And again, unemotionally, they'll determine when exposure happens. But if a client is so nervous today, and especially if they've called a couple different times to get out and you've convinced them to stay invested, but they're still not sleeping well - I may be overly cautious, but I don't want my keeping them in an investment to cause a complaint to come down the road. But again, the expectation has to be set that we are going to discuss when the entry point is. And it's a determination we'll make together. And 60 days from now, if you still don't want to be in the market, then we need to find somewhere for you to be as opposed to just sitting in cash.

Mark Mersman - There's a chart that we've used in different presentations and it's been around for a long time, the Cycle of Investor Emotions, right? And, going from optimism to this thrill to euphoria when the market's on a high, all the way down to panic and desperation and depression. And, as it starts to cycle back up, the hope - I think showing that to an existing client just to walk people through probably the feelings that they're going to be feeling or have already felt that may be coming in the future. The thing that jumps out at me about that simple little chart, right? That any investor who's gone through these cycles can look at that, especially with the benefit of hindsight and say, yeah, I remember feeling that, I remember feeling that way as this happened. But the thing that jumps out at me about that chart is when you're feeling the best, when you're euphoric, when that market has been on that tear for however many years, the reality is that's the point of maximum financial risk. Most people don't think that way. Whereas when that market's in that bottom swell and you're feeling at the worst, that's arguably the point of maximum financial opportunity. And it's part of why the messaging is buy more. Now you can go in, you're buying at a discount, but it's contrary to how people are feeling. We've all been there. I know I've gone through that cycle every time, riding this ride both from a client perspective and a personal perspective. And Kevin, there's something that you've always said over the years, and I know it's a conversation that you have with with your investor clients, the truth of the matter is as much as an advisor can say to that client, "I care about your money, I care about how well you're doing", nobody cares as much about that money as that investor. You you tell that story - how do you set that up? How do you try to elaborate on the importance of, you know what, I understand you're emotional about your money. How do you try to set that up with at least still having some kid gloves on?

Kevin Roskam - Well, that's again, very early in the conversation. As an investor, you're looking at retirement, you're focused on what that money has to do for you. It's normal. You saved all your life to have an emotional attachment to those assets. It's normal. But as an advisor, we spend hours together before we ever invest any of your money. And as an advisor, as we build this relationship, I have an emotional attachment to your money, too. I just think it's dishonest if an advisor says that he doesn't. Or, if an advisor doesn't care about you as a client, that's probably not the advisor for you. But the thing is, because I have an emotional attachment to you and an emotional investment in your financial plan being successful, that's why I hire unemotional money managers. Because the money managers don't see you. They see the asset and they see the market. So the reason we set up the accounts the way we do, and personally the way I set them up for my clients is, we call it multi-dimensional diversification. But the whole idea is that we want different money managers doing different things at different times. Because that gives us the chance to be right somewhere all the time. But also, it gives the opportunity for our assets to be working, getting in and out of the market, being exposed to different asset classes, without the emotional roller coaster that I as an advisor feel. And when we get to this point where we are in the market now, however far it's down, the first thing I do is think, "Should I make a change? 25% of my clients' assets are exposed to the market all the time. And there's been days in the last week where I've thought, should I get that 25% out?" I don't want to see that. I don't want to see it go down. But it gets back to the whole point, did we plan for this? This is exactly what we planned for, and if I don't believe in the plan I put together, how can my clients believe in the plan I put together?

Mark Mersman - I think that's a big part of it. So when you think about plan, rather than portfolio. Creating some distinction there with those words for a client, because a plan is beyond just a portfolio, right? And I think there's an element of going back to your grade school and high school days where you have to show your work. I think there's an element that, and I'll ask you, what are some ways that an advisor can show their work or demonstrate that there's a plan, even when the market's a bit chaotic? Is there anything that you try to do or you try to coach advisors to to kind of show that client that there is a big picture plan, that we have planned for this, rather than just words? Are there things that you try to steer people towards?

Kevin Roskam - Well, what I do a lot of is, and I mean it is more words, but it is more of the "Ok, one of the money managers that we use, they went defensive on February 20th. But you've been worried about your account being exposed to the whole market. Well, a quarter of it already went defensive a month ago. Another quarter of your portfolio on March 10th actually went defensive. Another quarter of the portfolio is 75% in bonds and cash. And the other 25 % is exposed to the market. And so just with those three, you've got over 60% of the portfolio is already defensive. And that's exactly what we planned for. We didn't plan on never losing money, not with this money, because this is securities. This is long-term investments. We didn't plan to never lose money. We planned to be able to get defensive so our money could be protected if things started to move in the wrong direction". And it's just a reminder of the plan that really makes a difference.

Mark Mersman - Obviously you couple that with the "did your income get affected" conversation. I think also revisiting that risk tolerance questionnaire, risk score, whatever tool you might use, all of those tools ask questions surrounding, "Hey, if the market goes down this percent, how are you going to feel? How would you react?" and revisiting what they filled out when they were in an unemotional state. Because now all of a sudden, if you ask everybody to fill that stuff out, their risk tolerance just dropped. It might've dropped 25% just because we're in that zone, which I think speaks to maybe one of the flaws with those, right? We've talked about that over the years that oftentimes those scores are kind of a moment in time type of score, not indicative of how they'll really feel at different times. Are there any charts or graphs that you like to point to? And I know you're much more of a big picture, 40,000 foot, conversation guy when you have these conversations. But is there anything that you try to point advisors to use or consider using with clients as they have these conversations?

Kevin Roskam - The biggest thing is the chart of the S&P 500 itself. You can go back as far as you'd like, but I mean, for me, like you mentioned, let's go back for the last 25 years. Knowing then what you know now, how would you have invested in March of '09? You know, March of '09, the absolute bottom of the market, what would you have done then if you could go back? Look at March of 2020. When everyone said the second quarter GDP was going to be down 32%. And for some reason, beginning in April - March 26 was the bottom - the market took off. What would you do different now, knowing that? And you can look at the market and see these drops in the market and consider the fact that had you been in cash and stayed in cash for even six to eight months after that absolute bottom, you hurt yourself. Your plan was affected. And it's that chart to me, as simple as it is, that really puts things back into perspective because if you look at the last month in the market, or even year to date, and then you stop and say, wait a minute, what do the last 12 months look like? What do the last two years look like? The concern to me is, and that's a great chart, but every year our clients get older. And because our clients get older every year, their time horizon, their ability to absorb losses in the market does get more difficult. And that's why we use these risk management strategies. That's why we're using these strategies to avoid the catastrophic. If your client has decided a 10% loss is catastrophic, they're in the wrong investments. And there's other things you can do. You can look at interest rates. You can look at history. It comes down to you as an advisor believing in the plan you set up.

Mark Mersman - I think the whole notion of just zoom out on the chart, I think going through that exercise with clients can be helpful. I think to your point too, you said, I forget the exact bottom date during the COVID chaos - was it March 26? So, if you take a client back to that day - and it's not so long ago that we can't remember it. Candidly, that was a pretty memorable stretch of time. And March 26, we were in the thick of it, right? It was pretty much, we got the COVID death tally, we're on lockdown, all this stuff, right? It was different. It was really concerning. We had a global pandemic and to be able to ask that client, "Hey, how did you feel emotionally right around this day?" Because we all felt pretty like, oh boy. And to think, a lot of those clients wanted to pull out at that time. What would you do differently today? Or what would you tell your future self who's went through all of it, how to respond to that moment? And you almost want to get them saying the words and articulating it rather than you being the one. Take them back to that moment in time and say, if, knowing what you know now about how things reacted, what would you do? How would you handle it? They're logically going to start to navigate over the fears, hopefully. We're not trying to necessarily sell them on something they have to do, but you have to help them see the bigger picture to how markets work. And candidly, there's a lot of economists that will say, well, the market was already overbought. We were due for a correction with or without the tariff stuff. Some of our clients want to get engaged in that conversation, but for a large percentage of them, they just need to have their emotions brought in check and hopefully you have done that long-term plan. Any final parting shots or words of wisdom you wanna throw out there as it relates to this?

Kevin Roskam - You know, the thing I say all the time is I don't know where the market's going to go. I'm not in a position to pick winners and losers. But the most important thing that I have done for my clients is I've assigned experts to manage their money. And as soon as I overlay my emotions on top of those experts and I make changes because of the way I feel, it gets very expensive for the client because now not only are they paying for the money management, of course, but they're paying for my emotions. And that's what I have to remind myself of every day. I mean, you know me. I'm emotional. I make decisions pretty quickly that sometimes don't turn out. And as an advisor, I want to make sure I'm not doing that for my clients. You said something very important that really it's been running back in my head because I know that I've reacted because of it. One or two clients making noise doesn't mean all of your clients are concerned. It just doesn't. And it's so important that if you know you as the advisor, if you know you've put a good plan in place and you know you've prepared for market volatility, this is what you prepared for. This is it. You knew it was coming and that's what makes you intelligent. You knew it was coming and you put together strategies that would react to what is happening now. Not perfectly, but they would react and that's what's happening.

Mark Mersman - And as you think through your communication plan and strategy with clients, obviously the personal touch is important. You know, we're not discouraging you from making that reach out. Quite the opposite, right? You don't want to just stay silent. For those advisors that have a larger set of clients, maybe you can't always get to every single one of them personally. You know, there is something to be said for crafting a message very carefully - whether you do it through a video that you record and send out or you draft an email just to let them know, "Hey, we are watching this, we anticipated this as a part of a plan, it can happen at any time. And if you are really concerned and want to talk individually, let's certainly do that. But for the lion's share of you, we understand you know that this volatility is a part of the game and we plan for it long term". So I think that's, it's a really important thing. We've got to make sure that we are communicating, but we also do understand that just because a few clients might be really emotional and concerned about it, it's not reflective of your entire set of clients because some will be unfazed.

Kevin Roskam - The other thing too, we need to communicate in good times as well. Because if we're communicating in good times, communicating in bad times is not an alert. It's it's part of the process. That's the other part of that, that as an advisor we need to consider. We need to be communicating more than just when the markets down, because if we're only talking to them when the markets down then we're always sending the red flags. Communication needs to be, I won't say constant, but it needs to be done in good and bad market conditions.

Mark Mersman - Yeah, I would agree. Awesome. Well, hey buddy, I appreciate your time. Hopefully everybody got at least a nugget or two from from our time together here. Like I said, if you are interested in exploring a little bit more about USA Financial and what we're doing, we'd love to have that conversation. This is obviously a big part of what we do, working with our advisors to navigate the conversations that they're having with their clients. So Kevin, appreciate the time and we'll certainly have you back at some point. Maybe when the market's doing really well, we'll revisit how that conversation should go. 

-- 

The Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook is a podcast/video series for high-performing financial planning professionals that are committed to improving their craft, helping their clients, and growing their business. Hosted by Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial, this series contains a wide variety of content – from quick win ideas to long-form interviews, each episode provides actionable marketing ideas and insights that can be implemented easily into your practice. From digital marketing to traditional direct-response marketing, each episode delivers straight-forward and engaging content that any financial professional can use to improve their bottom line and grow their practice.

Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook is also a podcast! Subscribe today via Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast listening service for easier on-the-go listening.