From Intake to Stewardship

Everything up to here has been about conversations. This module is about the layer underneath them. What happens between conversations, who does it, and by when.

It is the least glamorous part of a practice and the part clients actually experience. Most people cannot evaluate whether your strategy was optimal. Every single one of them can tell whether you did what you said you would.

Routing a First Enquiry

Target: a first conversation on the calendar within about three business days. Past that, intent decays fast.

• Record where they came from, and if it was a referral, who referred them. That matters later
• Invite the spouse or partner explicitly, by name if you have it
• Confirm the invitation was accepted, and that the video link works on a phone
• Tell them there is nothing to prepare and no documents to bring

Do not send financial paperwork before a first conversation.

A questionnaire arriving in advance changes what the meeting is. It signals that the agenda is their money rather than their life, and it converts an exploratory conversation into an audit before anyone has spoken.

Routing the Outcome

Within a couple of hours of the conversation ending, it lands in one of three places:

• Fit, moving forward: next session scheduled, confirmation sent, file opened
• Fit, needs time: a follow-up task with a specific date they named. Never open-ended, because open-ended means never
• Not a fit: an honest referral to whoever serves them better. Log that you made it. This is a commitment, not a courtesy, and it is the cheapest reputation you will ever buy

The First Ninety Days

Three touchpoints, all scheduled at delivery rather than improvised later. The dates are a workable default, not a rule. The discipline is that they exist at all.

Around Day Seven: The Settlement Check

Fifteen minutes. Is everything in force, has funding cleared, does their login work? This catches the small broken things while they are still small and still easy to fix without embarrassment.

Around Day Thirty: The Welcome Session

Longer. Walk the whole picture: what they have, where the documents live, how to reach you, what a review looks like, what you will do without being asked.

Around Day Ninety: The Foundation Review

By now they have lived with it. Questions have surfaced that could not have surfaced on day one. Confirm it is operating as intended, answer what has come up, and set the ongoing rhythm.

The Ongoing Rhythm

• Annual review, every client, every year. Performance, structures, beneficiaries, tax posture, and whether the plan still matches where life actually went. Book the next one at the end of each one
• A lighter quarterly touch: markets, life updates, anything on the horizon. Fifteen minutes or an email, calibrated to the person
• Beneficiary check at every annual review. It is the most commonly stale item in any file, and the one with the largest gap between effort to fix and cost of not fixing

Life Events Change the Plan

Marriage, birth, business sale, loss, windfall, diagnosis. When one is reported, a re-alignment task opens the same day.

The point of this being a documented protocol rather than an instinct: the client should never have to know what to ask for. Knowing what to look at when something changes is the job they are paying for.

How Referrals Actually Happen

Not by asking for names. That request converts a relationship into a transaction in one sentence, and people feel it.

Referrals come from having done the unglamorous things above. The weekly note during the silent stretch, the review that was already on the calendar, the beneficiary nobody else caught. When someone introduces a person they care about, they are not doing you a favour. They are staking their own credibility on you, and they only do that when the evidence is already in.

• An introduced person gets the same first conversation as anyone else. No shortcut, no pressure
• Log the referring client on the new record
• Thank the referrer personally, from you, not from a system