Speaker: James Baltzersen, President, Riverstone Financial Group
Why did you begin working with Pareto?
James Baltzersen: I started working with Pareto after a one-to-many session that was sponsored by my broker dealer after going through the self study course and seeing all that Pareto had to offer, I decided it would be a good idea to make the financial investment to hire a personal coach.
Can you share your coach's name and describe your experience working with them?
James Baltzersen: My coach's name was Mike Cy. And, after working with him for a few weeks, as we began to put action items in place, he would send me a follow up email every time we met, to give me action items to go through, to check off, to make sure that I was doing what I needed to be doing to stay on track for the course, which helped me not only push to a deadline goal, but pushed me out of my comfort zone a little bit quicker than I probably would have on my own.
Can you describe the most significant challenge you've overcome with Pareto's guidance?
James Baltzersen: Probably the biggest "aha!" moment for us was when Mike really focused on segmenting our business. We've been in the business a long time and I always felt like segmenting would alienate certain clients. And Mike explained to me the purpose and the reason for it and in realizing how much time we were spending on clients who weren't really engaged in our process to begin with. This made a huge difference in the efficiency that we provide here to our clients. Probably going from an 85% capacity down to a 70% capacity allowing us to bring on more clients with the existing staff that we have.
Can you share a success story from your work with Pareto?
James Baltzersen: One of the pieces Mike focused a lot on as we began to build our meeting process, is making sure we don't rush the process and taking our time through it with everyone. In doing that, we had a client that was already a client, and was going to inherit a little bit of money from their parents, but as a result of the process that we established, the client deliverables that we had designed, and walking slowly through the process with the client. We received a 10-fold transfer. More than we thought. And at the end of it, our client said, "Man, Jamie, we've been waiting for a long time to be able to do this and we appreciate the time that you took to walk through each of the pieces that you could provide and help us with." So that was a really big success story from going through the, the overall process.
