"As a flat fee advisor, how you avoid getting overrun with client questions and demands, to where it's not operationally efficient?"

Welcome to the Flat Fee Advisor Weekly, a collection of the 52 best questions asked at Immersion2025.

This week's Flat Fee advisor practice management question:

"As a flat fee advisor, how you avoid getting overrun with client questions and demands, to where it's not operationally efficient to run your practice as flat fee?"

Here's what Immersion2025 attendee Steven Fox, founder of Advice Only, had to say:

• "When working with clients on an ongoing flat fee service model, we found it to be critically important to set clear expectations for clients about what we’ll work on together over the coming months and years. It’s not enough to be reactive and answer clients’ questions whenever they come up, or to schedule periodic meetings where we’d review past action items and investment updates.
• If clients are continuing to pay us, then they deserve to know what they’re getting for that money. We can’t clearly communicate that to them if we don’t ourselves know exactly what we’ll be providing.?
• Part of our solution to this was to split up the year into 3 blocks of 4 months each, with a set list of topic areas that would be reviewed for each client during the period. For example, Block 1 might cover tax planning, disability insurance, veterans benefits, and student loans.?
• Clients knew ahead of time when they should expect to cover each topic with us. Of course they were always free to reach out for help as needed at other times of the year, but this approach served as a minimum backstop to make sure that no important area went too long without review. Clients appreciated our proactiveness, and we enjoyed better operational efficiency."?

Thank you, Steven.

BOOM - there ya go - there's this week's Flat Fee tip!

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P.P.S. Is something stumping you about running your practice as a Flat Fee Advisor? Attend our next virtual meetup on April 9th, 2025 and get your questions answered live by our community!

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Here's to Clear Progress!

-Sara G

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