S1, E5: The power of cross-collaboration for financial advisors

This is the last of five episodes in the first Philanthropic Insights series. This series offers advisors an intro to planned giving and dives into how to leverage donor-advised funds for long-term impact. 

In our fifth episode, Kim Ledger and planned giving expert Kyle Christopherson, MBA, CFP, head of Strategic Growth Services at Ren talk about how and why financial advisors can collaborate with other professional advisors to make a powerful charitable planning team for their clients.  

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Until next time, keep giving wisely.

Transcript

Welcome to Ren’s Philanthropic Insights video podcast series. Made to help financial advisors make the most of their clients charitable giving I’m your host Kim Ledger, Ren’s VP of Complex Assets and I brought in one of our experts from Ren, Kyle Christopherson, SVP of Client Growth, to dive into the topic of different ways advisors can leverage DAFs for long-term impact.

Give you some background on Kyle. He has over 20 years of experience in pretty much every aspect of creating and administrating various charitable gift instruments. He’s a frequent presenter at national and regional conferences educating financial professionals and planned giving officers on how to create effective charitable planning strategies. Welcome, Kyle.

Hello, Kim. 

Yeah, this is the last episode of our first series, and thank you for being my first guest. 

Absolutely. It’s been a lot of fun. I enjoyed having the conversations. 

Me too, me too. We’ve talked a lot about charitable giving, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time on donor-advised funds. So today, let’s talk about how financial advisors can collaborate with other professional advisors when it comes to the charitable planning. 

I know when I was an advisor, one of the things that was always important to us was being involved with the clients other professional advisors - their state planning attorneys, their CPAs. Spent a lot of time with those folks as we worked on a holistic plan for our clients. Do you have any advice to the advisors out there on how they can engage with other professionals?

Yeah. And again, this is from my time at Ren and talking with different financial advisors. advisors, what’s worked for them, what hasn’t worked for them, what options they have worked through. And I think a lot of the financial advisors when I’m speaking to them, they talk about, it’s the importance of the referral, right? And to do that, you really have to build up your, the trust that you have with the client themselves and make sure that you’re providing the good service, so you’re taking care of their goals and accomplishing those goals, and then they can refer you over to their CPA. And a lot of times you’re going to have to have those conversations when it’s estate planning and tax planning, you have to bring in the other professionals, the CPA, the tax preparer, the attorney that’s going to be drawing up those trust documents if there is going to be additional tools utilized. That’s the only way you’re ever going to get a truly comprehensive solution for the clients. 

I mean, without buy-in, they can put the kibosh on some great, pretty great plans. Right at the beginning. 

Oh, absolutely. Trying to fly solo, and then they take the plan to their CPA or their accountant before you have a conversation with you, you know, it could be misalignment, right? 

I mean, I watched it happen. A financial advisor did not get the CPA involved. We were working on a $20 million complex asset gift and literally the night before the gift was going to be made, the CPA said, "It’s too risky." And they didn’t understand what had been put into place, what, you know, the planning that had been done. And so one of my first words of advice is, get with a tax advisor as early in the process as possible. 

Absolutely. And then they have access to details that you may not have access to. So always a great strategy, but that’s an opportunity for you to be introduced to, you know, other professionals, for you to start to build a relationship. You’re working on a common goal to accomplish the needs of that mutual client. And, you know, it’s a great way to build that relationship. And then over time, you can refer additional clients to maybe that accountant that doesn’t, for a client that doesn’t have one, or to that attorney, for a client that doesn’t have an attorney, and you know they’re going to need one of those professionals. So it’s just a great way to start that referral network source. 

It’s great to have a good, a good resource at your fingertips for your clients. Just in general.

And then I would say there’s the other aspect of that from building your referral network is you want to start getting out there in the community and starting to build your network with local professionals. And that could be, you know, numbered from ways that you could do that. Obviously, you can go to some regional events, conferences, things like that where you can local mixers - Local mixers, like local business. A lot of those, yeah. And you have professionals that have their own firms and they’re coming out to support the community. It’s a great way to be introduced, wine tasting events. Ever gone to one of them?

Oh, yes. 

But also maybe a professional organization. There’s some organizations out there that have planning councils, absolutely that have attorneys, accountants and, you know, CPAs and financial planners involved. So that is a great opportunity for you to just start to network and build up your referral network because, you know, maybe you’ve got a unique client situation that one particular attorney really has a specialization in. 

That’s a great point. What about educational opportunities? 

Yeah, and that’s actually a common request that we get a lot of times, Kim, is financial planners are coming to us and they’re putting on an educational event for CPAs or for attorneys. And you know, I think that happens a lot in the industry where you’re trying to provide some different topics on financial planning that, you know, maybe would be helpful for the CPA or the attorney to take part in too, you know, expand their knowledge base as well. But sometimes we get those financial planners that are coming to us, hey, can you help us put together a presentation for, you know, these other financial professionals that I’m going to get in front of and talk about charitable giving, talk about donor-advised funds. 

Getting those CE credits, you know, providing CE credits is always a great way to make friends. 

Absolutely, and of course, you know, you always have the online platforms, right? So, like LinkedIn, that’s another avenue that you can take as well, where you’re just building your online network where you’re connecting with local CPAs and attorneys. But to do that, you really want to make sure that you’re going to be active on LinkedIn, make sure you’re posting relevant content. Content that’s going to be helpful and beneficial. So they’re following you. So they’re reading up on those posts. And it’s a great way to showcase your knowledge level and what you can bring to them. 

Are there benefits to collaborating with other professionals? 

I think absolutely there’s benefits. And probably the biggest benefit is to the client, right? So... 

Which is obviously the best. 

Most important, because that’s going to make sure that the client is getting the best plan because you’ve got all of the experts on all sides that are coming together to collaborate and provide the best strategy.

There might be things you’ve missed. You don’t know. Maybe "missed" is the wrong word. But things you just didn’t know about. Things you didn’t know. Because the client hasn’t told you.

Minor details that are left out, even though you maybe have asked the question three times and you were told something different. 

But... Maybe you just didn’t want to disclose it. 

Yeah. So yeah, it’s always good to know. So it’s a great way to make sure there’s no confusion, there’s no facts that have been missed, and the client is the one that’s going to win-win out of that. But it’s also a way to ensure that there’s no surprises, right? You’ve got the best plan. 

Well, like the one I described. 

There’s not going to be surprises after the tax year is done and realizing something did not work the way it was supposed to. But getting new clients, you know, you’re going to be referring your clients over to those CPAs and attorneys that you’ve built up in your network. And also a reciprocation from that is you’re going to get some financial planning referrals as well from those professionals.

Especially as you build credibility. 

Yeah, absolutely, and it takes time, right? This isn’t something that you can do overnight. It’s, you know, years in the making where you can build up that network and gain your credibility and trust in the community.

And then also, it builds, like to your point, it just builds those meaningful connections then for the future.

Right, absolutely. 

When you, I know that you speak with a lot of advisors. Do you find that there are some options for collaboration that are more effective than others? 

Yeah, the methods that we hear the most about are going to be those educational events that they’re putting on for other financial professionals. And, you know, a lot of times that’s just simply because they’re coming to us and they’re trying to get the material and get some assistance on putting that presentation together, making sure that they’ve got everything ready to go.

So I’d say the educational webinars - in fact, I was just speaking with a financial advisor yesterday that put on a donor-advised fund webinar for a group of CPAs in his community. Some of them have already heard about a donor-advised fund. Others have heard about it but didn’t really understand how the donor-advised fund works. So it was a great opportunity for him to make them aware of, hey, if you’ve heard about a donor-advised fund, you know, I’m a way that can help you out on that. And if you haven’t, here’s a great strategy that you can start looking at for your clients that’s growing in popularity. 

And I would say also just building that referral network. And that’s what we’ve seen time and time again when a lot of times we are working with these financial advisors in developing these charitable planning cases. So for example, I know you’ve been involved in these Kim when a client comes to us and they’ve got a closely held business that they’re looking to sell. And here’s their goals that they’re trying to accomplish. And you’re going through the goals, you’re going through the process. And naturally the financial advisors pulling in the CPA, they’re pulling in the attorney, and they’re collaborating together. 

It’s one of the things I insist on right away. Because there are elements to all of that that really requires a tax advisor’s input that I’m not going to give advice on. So it’s imperative to have that person involved. 

Do you find that there’s a natural time to be connecting with the other - I mean, we’ve talked about, you know, obvious things like the, you know, if you’re selling your business or you’re selling a capital asset, maybe there’s a better way to say that - you’re probably working with your tax advisor. Are there other times? 

There are. And I think the biggest and most important time of the year when you want to engage with those other professionals is year-end. Because that’s when everything is coming due. You got to get everything done by 12/31. So it’s in the current tax year. So getting ready for year end, being prepared for year end, it’s just a great opportunity to reach out to the clients, a CPA, their accountant, and say, hey, I’m just wrapping up the financial planning for the year. Wanted to make sure and verify, is there are any tax events or tax issues that we need to plan for ahead of time. Just so you’re not scrambling at your end. 

Yeah, and you’re more than likely, I would think advisors are doing some of that anyway, and looking at tax loss harvesting, you know, what makes sense in the portfolio. So it’s a great time to have the charitable giving conversation as well. I would think. It seems natural to me anyway. 

It does. And year-end is the, you know, what, 60% or more of the charitable giving occurs just in the last couple of months of the year, so.

Yeah, or less six weeks, isn’t it? It feels like it’s the last two weeks. 

It feels like it, right? It’s always a rush.

It is. So I guess our advice would be plan early. 

Plan early. Start the conversations now.

And I realize we’re talking about year end, you’re looking at what the income, but I’d start that conversation in November, sometime in November. And we have a pretty good idea. And the last thing you want to do is start that conversation on December 27th. 

Yeah. At that point, you might be too late.

It happens. It happens. 

Still can get it done, but it’s going to be stressful, right? 

And there’s no guarantees. 

Right. Yeah. Yeah. 

Well, thank you, Kyle. You have been a wonderful guest for my first series, so I appreciate it. 

Yeah, I appreciate you having me. This was a very enjoyable experience to talk to you about the different terrible planning topics. 

Yeah, it was great. Thank you.

Thanks for watching, or if you’ve tuned in via podcast, thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about Ren and how we might be able to help with your philanthropic program needs, visit reninc.com or email us at consulting@reninc.com.

We’d also love to hear if you have questions or topics about planned giving you want us to talk about. And, of course, don’t miss the great information we have in our Advisors Philanthropic Insights newsletter. Sign-up at reninc.com/advisorinsights. 

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Until next time, I’m Kim Ledger. Give wisely.