Client experience
The annual review is the most repeated event in a practice. In most firms nobody has ever decided what it is for.
The annual review is the single most repeated event in an advisory practice, and in most firms it has never been deliberately designed. It exists because it is expected. Its agenda is whatever the reporting software prints first.
That is how you end up spending forty minutes on performance the client cannot influence and four minutes on the beneficiary designation that is wrong.
They are not there to hear a return figure. They can see the return figure. They are there to find out whether they are going to be all right, and whether you are still paying attention.
Those are the two questions underneath every annual review, and neither is answered by a performance page. The first is answered by connecting their money to their life. The second is answered by you raising something they had not raised themselves.
The order matters more than the content, because attention is highest in the first ten minutes and you should not spend it on the part that requires the least judgement.
| Order | What it covers | Why here |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What changed for you | Health, work, family, plans | Everything downstream depends on it, and it is the part software cannot tell you |
| 2. Are we still on track | Progress against the plan, not the market | Answers the real question before performance can distort it |
| 3. What we did and why | Trades, rebalances, tax actions | Shows the fee working; most clients never learn what happened between meetings |
| 4. Performance | Returns against a benchmark that fits | Now it has context, so it can be discussed rather than defended |
| 5. Housekeeping | Beneficiaries, documents, contacts, access | Boring, and the source of most real damage when skipped |
| 6. What we will do next | Two or three specifics with dates | The client leaves with evidence the meeting produced something |
Housekeeping is fifth on that list because it is boring, and it is on the list at all because it is where the genuinely bad outcomes live. An ex-spouse still named on a retirement account. A trust that was drafted and never funded. A successor trustee who died. A client whose spouse has no idea who you are or how to reach you.
None of that shows up in a performance report. All of it shows up eventually.
A short note, within a day, listing what was decided and what happens next with dates and owners. Not the presentation deck — a paragraph a person will read.
It does two things at once. It confirms you were listening, and it creates the record that the conversation happened, which is the version of the meeting your file will need if anyone ever asks.
Pick a client you reviewed six months ago. Without opening the file, write down what changed in their life that year and what you agreed to do about it.
If you cannot, the meeting was a report. That is not a criticism of you; it is a description of what happens when the agenda is set by whatever the software printed first.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Book 20 minutes with Kyle