How Duncan Financial Group (Cambridge OSJ) Completes Estate Plans In 5 Days and Made Estate Planning a Core Offering to Clients

In this article:

• Case Study Summary
• Challenges
• Solution
• Results

Summary

In this case study with Duncan Financial Group, we sat down with Kristen Hull (Associate Director of Financial Planning) and Thomas Block (Associate Director of Business Development) to discuss their firm's long-standing challenges with client estate planning procrastination, and how estate planning became a core pillar of Duncan's offerings.

What's Duncan Financial Group?

Duncan Financial Group is a family-run firm and Cambridge OSJ. For over 45 years, they've offered it "all under one roof," from insurance to estate planning and tax planning.

Challenges:

• Many clients failed to complete their estate plans, despite detailed planning sessions with advisors and frequent reminders of the importance having an estate plan in place.
• Advisor referrals to attorneys often went nowhere, with little to no follow-through on clients' parts and lack of communication from attorney partners.
• Existing estate planning software for advisors were either too expensive or overly simplistic, failing to balance affordability with effectiveness.

Solution:

• An estate planning platform that puts advisors at the center of clients' estate planning experiences from start to finish without needing to refer out to attorneys (unless absolutely needed).
• A way to help clients complete their estate plans while avoiding unauthorized practice of law (UPL).
• An easier, highly effective way to end client procrastination once and for all (clients, until the end of time, will always drag their feet on their estate plans; can you blame them for not wanting to think about their own demise?).

Results:

• No more procrastination: client estate plans done in 4 to 5 days, not years. Encore covers all 50 states, so advisors can run the exact same process wherever they and their clients are in the US.
• Higher client engagement: clients appreciate the fast, advisor-driven process, which removes the typical stress and blockers to getting their estate plans done.
  
• Compliance confidence: Duncan Advisors felt secure using a vetted platform that has safeguards in place for advisors against unauthorized practice of law (UPL).
• Trusts are now properly funded: Encore's turnkey deed filing service removed the stress and complications of advisors and clients needing to do the paperwork dance with the county registrar's office.
• More referrals, more money (and AUM!): many estate planning clients teed up introductions to beneficiaries and trustees, which gave advisors at Duncan a larger stream of potential new clients.

Challenges

Despite advisors' best efforts (that were also best practices!), clients kept procrastinating on their plans

Cambridge OSJ Duncan Financial Group is known for putting their customers first, always. For Kristen Hull, Associate Director of Financial Planning, that spirit of customer dedication can be seen in the work she and her team do day in and day out.

In today's demanding "What will you do for me today and tomorrow?", advisors have to provide nothing short of comprehensive and holistic financial planning. And with clients expecting expecting more all the time, and the firm needing to make sure all of its service offerings were effective and driving revenue, Kristen identified a growing gap that needed to be closed with all due haste.

"We did a great job planning for clients' estates, putting together flowcharts with them throughout ClickAdvisor, throughout eMoney. And for most clients, even the ones that we weren't doing estate planning with (just clients who needed to have their legal documents), what we found was that we could lead a horse to water, but we couldn't make them drink."

As you guessed, Kristen and her teammates had already nailed down the people and process parts by executing all of the right estate planning motions:

• Checking in with clients' estate plans as part of their periodic reviews.
• Asking clients the right questions to see if there's anything Duncan Advisors might be able to help with.
• Connect clients to estate attorneys to push their estate plan completion along.
• Follow up as best possible on the status of those attorney referrals.

But, Duncan needed a tool that actually solved for client procrastination.

"And we would make the connections to attorneys. We would have those introductory meetings and two, three years later, the estate documents were still on the open item list that were never completed. So finding a solution for us to help create the implementation and really help expedite the implementation for clients was a huge problem for us in a solution that we were trying to find as quick as possible."

Solution

An estate planning platform that empowers advisors to project manage everything in their clients' estate plans

Before Duncan partnered with Encore, Kristen and the team "looked at a couple of different options" as part of their evaluation process (firms often compare Encore to Wealth.com, Trust & Will, and Vanilla). 

According to Kristen, Duncan landed on Encore for a number of reasons, but for them, it was really three key benefits:

Benefit #1: Truly Ease of Use

"My 13-year-old daughter could complete one of these plans for a client."

Kristen continues, "The process is it truly is that it does not take a rocket science."

Benefit #2: Pay As You Go Pricing: Only Pay When You Get Clients' Plans Done

"We really liked the pricing structure. We are so boggled down with subscription costs that having another subscription costs or another monthly fee for something that we may or may not use frequently just was not an attractor for us. So the pay as you go option ended up being a really nice benefit for us. "

Benefit #3: Encore's Support Team and Dedicated Resources

"The dedicated resources that they had and being able to ask those questions [on estate planning]. Having that instant connection, having some of those resources available to us was really what set Encore apart and was what made us want to use them."

And to add the proverbial cherry on top, Kristen and her team found that Encore delivered one more benefit that positively changed Duncan's prospecting strategy:

"What was interesting is because we really looked at this for more of the implementation solution for our planning clients. But that's actually shifted to now somewhat of a prospecting strategy for us as well. How can we use Encore, use the estate implementation element more as that quiver in our arrow, additional ways that we can help folks. And it's really led to some nice opportunities for us as well."

By helping clients complete their estate plans, advisors at Duncan gained access to beneficiaries, trustees, and executors – all potential clients in need of financial planning. According to Thomas Block, "Every time you create an estate plan, you gain at least one referral opportunity."

Results

Client estate plans completed in days at a fraction of the price and more opportunities and assets surfaced

Since implementing Encore into their workflows and processes, Duncan has been able to:

• Complete their clients' estate plans at a higher rate than other methods (e.g., client DIY, doing with estate attorney) that historically had low success rates.
• Use Encore as a prospective opportunity generator and asset mapping tool to uncover previously hidden away assets.
• Introduce estate planning immediately to clients as part of the other side of the financial planning coin.

According to Kristen:

"What we find is if clients are engaging us for financial planning help, it's taking a look at everything comprehensively and helping them with all the next steps.

There's such a high amount of clients that they either need to have wills updated or have to need to have wills put in place. So we're just going to offer that to them as a solution right at the forefront."

That's not all: Encore has enabled Duncan advisors to uncover new prospect and asset opportunities from existing clients, and act immediately on them.

According to Thomas:

"[Estate planning] is what's going to help you win more business because you're going to see through that lens of everything that that needs to be known up front as well as a referral basis to get more people to work with you.

That's why you do this. And what does it cost you? Time? That's it time that you probably already have, but not time to have to go through and develop documents."

The insights Encore reveals for advisors, coupled with how easy they make estate planning for both advisors and their clients, empowers and motivates Kristen and the Duncan team to help their clients even more.

"I will say to this point, there's nothing that has really made us change direction. If anything, just seeing how simple it is [with Encore] and having clients really just say, 'Oh gosh, I'm so glad that I got this done with already. I don't have to worry about it anymore,' just makes us want to do it that many more times and help out more clients."