The APS™ is constantly looking for qualified attorneys to work with other APS™ non-attorneys financial planners, CPAs, mortgage brokers and their clients.  There are literally hundreds of non-attorney planners who are part of the APS™ and who can refer several high-income/net worth clients to C.A.L.M. certified/approved attorneys who are willing to help clients with their asset protection and estate plans.

 

If you were wondering if it is a good idea to become involved with the APS™, I can state with confidence that if you know how to help clients with the appropriate wealth preservation topics, you will very much enjoy network marketing with non-attorney APS™members as well CWPP, CAPP and MMB advisors.

 

To become involved with the APS™ or simply to learn more about it, please Email Us

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I’ve recently had a number of advisors ask me about the C.A.L.M. Sales Platform and I thought it was time to do something I’ve not done before and that’s not only explain C.A.L.M., but let you download and look at (click here) a typical C.A.L.M. memo that you would use to work with and move a client forward.

 

Working with high-income/net worth clients

 

Nearly every advisor wants to work with high-income/net worth clients. Why? Because they have more problems to solve and when you solve them you earn more money. Plus the clients you’ve helped typically will refer you other affluent friends for you to work with and grow your practice.

 

Is it simple to work with high-income/net worth clients? Not really, which is one reason many advisors don’t even make an effort to go after them.

 

Why isn’t it easy to work with the affluent? This list is long and can seem daunting.

 

1) Many advisors think that affluent people already have good quality advisors and therefore, what could a new advisor bring to the table.  This is patently false. I can tell you from my own personal experiences that many affluent clients do not have any advisors and the ones they do have I can guarantee you are not doing a very good job most of the time.

 

2) Many advisors are afraid to go after affluent clients as they don’t think they have anything of unique value to bring to the table.  This may be true to some extent and is one of the main reasons I created the CWPP™, CAPP™ and MMB™ certification programs.

 

There is nothing terribly “advanced” about advanced planning.  The basic tools the top attorneys and other planners use to help a 10-20-50 million dollar client are not hard to use or understand. The problem is, until I created the WPI, there was no educational body that focused on this type of education. Understanding Freeze Partnerships, Defective Trusts, FLP Discounts, GRATs, CRTs,CLTs, Captive Insurance Companies, Dynastic Trusts, is really not too difficult if you have good material to read and someone or a team to look to for an explanation of how the topics work in the real world.

 

3) Many advisors are afraid that if they get in front of an affluent client’s “other” advisors, it will be clear that the advisor is “out of his/her league”.

 

Again, like 2) above, there is nothing that difficult about advanced planning and I can state with confidence that if you know the basics of asset protection planning, you will have a leg upon the most important topic to an affluent client and one that 95% of the time their other advisors will know nothing or very little about.

 

4) Many advisors have tried to work with affluent clients and have found them not to be able to “pull the trigger” to move forward with planning.

 

It seems as though affluent clients have a habit of never being able to make a decision on important and large financial/estate planning decisions. I hear many stories each year from advisors who say they spent weeks/months working on an affluent client only to have the client talk with 5 other advisors about the same topics and in the end not be able to make a decision.

 

Try using the C.A.L.M. Sales Platform

 

What is C.A.L.M.?  It stands for Comprehensive Asset & Liability Management.

 

Fundamentally, C.A.L.M. is a sales platform with Five Levels.

 

Why did I create C.A.L.M.? Honestly, I created it after I started the CWPP™ and CAPP™ courses because I had the following comment from many of the people who attended my seminars: “Roccy, that was the best educational program on the best topics I’ve ever been to. I’ve been home for 3 weeks now after the seminar and I can’t figure out away to communicate the topics I learned to my clients in a manner so I can help them and move them forward with proper planning.”

 

When the advisors who take my courses have a need, I try the best I can to help and that’s when I came up with C.A.L.M.

 

The foundation of C.A.L.M. is Level 1which is a memo a client can purchase that will typically be a 7-12 page comprehensive memo outlining the problems with a client’s estate, income tax reduction, and asset protection plan and solutions to fix those problems.

 

What’s really neat about the memos for the client and for the advisor delivering the memo is that at the end of the memo there are recommendations in order that the client should implement to become asset protected, to save on income, capital gains and estate taxes, to protect money from downturns in the stock market, to fix an incorrect corporate structure, etc…..

 

Who creates the C.A.L.M. memos?

 

Most of the time I create the C.A.L.M. memos with the help of my educational board (including a top 100 ranked attorney by Worth Magazine) and the oversight of the advisor who is most familiar with the client’s situation.

 

For attorneys who know the subject matter, they can draft the memos as C.A.L.M. certified advisors for their own clients (and I can oversee and add input when needed).

 

The C.A.L.M. sales pitch

 

Imagine after introducing yourself to a new client telling him/her that you have at your disposal the ability to have created for them or create on your own a C.A.L.M. Level 1 memo which will do for him/her what is described above. If an attorney wants to do the memos, they can, and if needed, tout the fact that as part of the team they have an attorney who is a nationally recognized expert in advanced planning, has written three books, founded the only educational institute in the country that educates advisors on advanced planning for the wealthy, and Co-Founded the Asset Protection Society (a society to protect the public from asset protection scams).  (This paragraph is not meant to pat myself on the back, but is simply meant to illustrate that working with a credible advisor to help your clients can be a powerful tool).

 

What’s a client going to say to that? No, I just had a memo created for me the other day by someone who’s got a better pedigree and that they don’t need such a memo? No (and I’m speaking from real life experience), most clients are fascinated by an advisor’s ability to bring such a team to the table to create a memo that the client knows deep down he/she is in need of and has been for some time.

 

Do you think any other advisor of your client or potential client can bring this to the table? No, and because of that you will in deed be unique in your local area.

 

I don’t have time in this news letter to explain in detail Levels 2-5 so instead I’ll direct you to a website where you can read about the other levels in detail To read about levels 2-5 (and more on Level 1), please click here.

 

Can you read a C.A.L.M. memo?

 

I’ve had this request hundreds of times and to date the answer has been no (unless you ordered one for a client). In an effort to help advisors understand the power of a C.A.L.M. Level 1memo, I’ve decided to put one up on the internet for you to read.  Please click here to read the “Joe Client” memo I created.

 

The memos are different for every client, but there are many items which are the same or similar. If a client doesn’t have a will or trust, they get the paragraphs explaining what they are and why a client needs one. The memos are custom for each client, but there are only so many fact patterns I will run into so it has not been hard to template parts of the memo so I can create them rather quickly.

 

Should you use C.A.L.M.to go after and grow your business in the affluent market?  That’s up to you. I can state with confidence that C.A.L.M. memos will make you unique and will give your clients a road map to a complete and comprehensive asset protection, tax reduction, and estate plan.  The memos are a “call to action” and you can literally sit down with your clients and the memo and ask them which one of the recommendations they would like to start with.

 

Conclusion

 

There is nothing too advanced about advanced planning when you have some baseline education and a sales platform to work from.  Solving problems for affluent clients is little more work than solving problems for non-affluent clients, except when you solve them, the payday for the advisor is higher and the thank you from a client is louder.

 

Whether you are in the affluent market now or want to get there, the C.A.L.M. Sales Platform is a way to make you unique when trying to pick up new clients and/or move current clients forward with plans you’ve been trying to get them to implement for years.

 

By: Roccy DeFrancesco, JD, CWPP™, CAPP™, CMP™