Emanuel Whybourne & Loehr managing partner Craig Emanuel likens any client meeting to a chess game, whereby you must wait for the other player to show their plans move by move.
Emanuel Whybourne & Loehr managing partner Craig Emanuel told the Professional Planner Shape of Advice podcast about what he believed are the two most important qualities that make a great adviser, the first being a good listener.
“Don’t talk about yourself and about your firm, because any client meeting, it is almost a chess game,” Emanuel said.
“You don’t know what the client needs until they express what they need.”
One of the most common mistakes Emanuel sees advisers makes is “they will walk in, puff their chest out” and talk about themselves.
“Which is not the right approach,” Emanuel said.
“I think the less communication we have with clients, that trust begins to fall away and there’s a high risk of them going somewhere else as well.”
Emanuel emphasised a high level of empathy is the second quality that makes a great adviser. Meetings with clients who have recently experienced loss or trauma requires an empathetic approach.
“Empathy is, without question, probably almost above the level of trust.”
Maintaining client confidence through bad market periods is a crucial part of EWL’s service.
“The biggest determinant to any investors returns…it’s being able to control your investment decision making,” Emanuel said.
“I think where we can add the best value to our clients is convince them to not do something silly in bad market periods. I think it’s all about connecting with the client.”
Emanuel said value they can add is to educate clients about both market volatility and long termism.
Emanuel built his craft working at global brands UBS and Morgan Stanley as well as Macquarie, before starting his own firm.
He said during his time at these brands showed him “there’s a lot more outside of the Australian economy”.
He spoke about entering into overseas equity markets after moving from Macquarie to UBS and how it was “a really lightbulb moment”.
“It was a real education process during that period [at UBS]. Fortunately for us, we allocated about 80 per cent of our client money out of Australia from that year, 2009 and 2010 to global equity markets and global allocation,” Emanuel said.
“I’ve often said to all clients that walk in the door, we live in a beautiful economy, very fortunate economy, very low sovereign risk,” Emanuel said. “What do we do as an economy? We do nothing.”
Multi-generational perspectives
The other two partners that make up the EWL are Tim Whybourne and Ryan Loehr.
Emanuel said EWL has planned to be multi-generational, with of three partners having an almost a 10-year age gap between the three of them.
“The secret of a great firm is getting the right culture on board; I describe it as a very close-knit family,” Emanuel said.
Dealing with families is challenging for any business and EWL is focused on leveraging that multi-generational partnership model to help facilitate conversations between different
“Some [families] are very cohesive, some of them aren’t so and when a family builds up a significant amount of wealth, what’s their plans for that wealth?” Emanuel said.
CFS group head of distribution Bryce Quirk asked Emanuel how EWL as a business, built on large generational business, manages the risk of clients leaving.
“Something like only 10 per cent of the generational wealth that’s gets passed through stays with the adviser,” Quirk said.
Emanuel said continuing a connection with families is crucial and currently he had two advisers reaching out independently to a lot of next generation clients.
“If we don’t have a connection with those children, there’s a very high chance that the money just won’t stay with our firm,” Emanuel said.
“The difference in maintaining a great advisory firm and a multi-generational firm is the ability to connect to the personal level, garnish that trust and always act with empathy.”
Lessons learned
Emanuel admitted many mistakes were made when they started the firm, such as on the technological side.
“When you set up a firm like ours, you hurriedly start pulling the trigger and spending money on things which are pretty pointless. We’ve tried three or four different CRMs. We threw cheques at three different IT tech security firms which didn’t work.”
Quirk agreed and recommended new businesses to start with establishing what are core basic functions needed for the business.
“Then be a bit more experimental, a bit more cutting edge around what are the things you’re going to adopt,” Quirk said.
“That’s sort of what we see as more successful than those that try and jump out and change the world.”
When Emanuel left Morgan Stanley to set up EWL, within three months they managed to move 96 per cent of clients to the firm. Emanuel said the confidence displayed by their clients was invaluable when they first started.
Outside of the technical functions of running a business, Emanuel is a strong believer that good daily habits improve and talked about the personal habits he has adopted over the years.
He said he was a big proponent of a healthy lifestyle to “think clearly”.
“I’m always out of bed very early, 6am riser, at least a minimum one or one and half hours of exercise every day,” Emanuel said.
“I’m in the office, typically at the desk showered by 7:30. The best window of the day is that two-hour block before the phones start ringing.”
Emanuel said he uses this time to declutter, such as go through emails. EWL uses a system for emails – “so spilling off emails to begin with, we have different inbox where, if I’m not the main addressee, it’s spilled off to another inbox”.
