COVER STORY

Producers share success stories of MDRT members helping

each other take a better look at their finances.
By Kathryn Furtaw Keuneke, CAE, and Scott Rogers

42 ROUNDTHETABLE.ORG MARCH/APRIL 2013

P
lanning the financial lives of others must be easier.
When you sit down with a client, you can clearly see
what needs to be done to put their finances in order.
There is no emotional attachment, only a rational take at what
needs to be done to put them on the right footing.
What happens when advisors turn their attentions to their
own finances, though? For many, the same clarity they present
toward their clients’ financial situations may be missing. As it
turns out, many advisors discover their solutions with the help
of a fellow MDRT member.
As the members we talked to prove, seeking advice from other
advisors helps them stay on top of their own finances, while also
serving as a tool to hold them accountable to their personal and
business goals. >>

MANY ADVISORS DISCOVER THEIR

SOLUTIONS WITH THE HELP OF
A FELLOW MDRT
MEMBER.

MARCH/APRIL 2013 ROUNDTHETABLE.ORG 43

 COVER STORY
couple in their 50s walked into a finan-
cial advisor’s office to complete their
first financial plan. They had a good
income with impressive savings and an invest-
ment portfolio. Although they kept careful watch
over their finances, they’d never sought a financial
advisor to take them through the formal plan-
ning process. “We were in an accumulation mode,
putting money away. We were doing many of the
right things that people who invest money do, but
without a real map,” the clients explained.
Perhaps clients like these have walked through
your doors. Perhaps you are this client. The one
described here is an MDRT member.
“I’ll admit, my retirement strategy was just
save — put money away and work hard,” said 43-
year MDRT member Donald M. Lawson, CLU,
LUTCF, of Bethesda, Maryland. With decades of
success in the financial services industry, Lawson
meticulously put away portions of his income to
build a nice nest egg and monitored his progress as
he approached the traditional retirement age.
44 ROUNDTHETABLE.ORG MARCH/APRIL 2013
Lawson is a member of a study group that formed
three decades ago. Today, the group has six active
members — all MDRT members — who meet
quarterly. When they decided a few years ago to
make financial planning the topic of discussion
at their next meeting, Lawson volunteered to go
through the process as a case study. He and his
wife met with two study group members, both
fee-based financial planners, revealing all their
personal financial information for inspection.
Both advisors took them through the process
and discussed their recommendations. The study
group discussed the differences between the two
completed financial plans. “We all learned some-
thing,” Lawson said.
He found the most valuable part of the process
to be the other producers’ perspectives, which
helped him look at some aspects of his own financ-
es through a different lens. “It gave me the opportu-
nity to say, ‘Hmm, maybe I should reconsider what
I’m doing in this particular area,’” he said.
THE OTHER PRODUCERS’ PERSPECTIVES HELPED
HIM LOOK AT HIS OWN FINANCES THROUGH
A DIFFERENT LENS.
As a result, Lawson has made some changes to
how he saves and invests. “It has impacted what I
do, financially, to this day,” he said.
Michael J. McNeil, CLU, ChFC, a 35-year MDRT
member from Fairfield, Connecticut, is a firm be-
liever in making sure his own financial plan is up
to date. Several years ago, a few members of his
office network study group approached him to ask
if he would be willing to prepare a plan for them
as if they were his clients. One reason McNeil
believes they did this was because of his service
on the advisory board for the financial represen-
tatives of Northwestern Mutual. During his 10
years on this board, he had the opportunity to
learn the ins and outs of the health plan options,
compensation and retirement options available
to the company’s field force. Like many working
professionals, his colleagues hadn’t drilled down
enough in their benefits package, McNeil said,
and they recognized he was just the person to
help them identify opportunities they might have
been missing or unclear about as they tried to
analyze their own family’s financial plan.
When McNeil met with each individual, he
suggested that the advisor’s wife be part of the
process — like most advisors would when meet-
ing with a new prospect. Advisors sometimes
fail to include their spouse or significant other in
their own planning process or even seek their in-
put, McNeil said. “While some spouses cede such
responsibilities to their advisor-spouse, I believe
many would appreciate hearing more about these
kinds of things than what they discuss at the din-
ner table each night,” he said.
McNeil met with each couple, sat down with
them and walked them through his fact-finding
document to develop their own personal needs
analysis. Once all the information was collected,
he met with each couple again to review the
results of their plans and made specific recom-
mendations.
None of McNeil’s study group clients discov-
ered significant gaps in their own planning, yet
in each case, the couples learned more about
how things were tracking relative to their goals.
He said he felt the couples also gained a greater
appreciation of their benefits, as well as discover-
ing aspects of their financial position that they
had been unaware of. In fact, one member was
motivated to enroll in a company-sponsored
income-deferral program that allowed him to
save significant money for his children’s education
expenses, based on McNeil’s suggestion.
Every member of MDRT can use some feedback,
as demonstrated by MDRT Secretary Brian D.
Heckert, CLU, ChFC, a 25-year member from
Nashville, Illinois. In 1997, with his success in the
financial services industry established, Heckert
began accumulating other businesses, including a
car wash, car dealerships and shoe stores.
Though investing in these various busi-
nesses seemed like a good idea, ultimately it
spread Heckert too thin. Between 2002 and
2004, these multiple investments eventually >>
MARCH/APRIL 2013 ROUNDTHETABLE.ORG 45
 COVER STORY

The level of concentration each couple gave to

caught up to him. He hit a brick wall. There were
times when Heckert’s credit card was declined, an
extremely humbling experience for him.
“While insurance sales were good,” Heckert
said, “I was having significant cash flow issues
because of the outside businesses.”
Luckily, Heckert’s study group took the initia-
tive and confronted him on how he was spending
his money. The group forced him to reassess his
investment strategy and make him look at what he
was good at — how he initially got to this point.
“We’re successful at what we do, but we’re
miserable at what we need to do for ourselves,” he
said. “I was able to finally see clearly that I should
focus on the business most important to me —
financial services — and get rid of those that did
not complement my practice. Because of this
advice and direct help, I was able to turn things
around and have been substantially stress-free
ever since.”
Heckert knows he’s not the only one who has
gone through a situation like this and said he
hopes others can learn from his mistakes.
“I want other MDRT members to look at
their own planning as much as they look at their
clients’,” he said.
their finances became the biggest advantage for
the couples McNeil worked with, he said. Having
the advisor and his spouse together for the meet-
ings allowed McNeil to get them talking about
various what-if scenarios.
“Even if you’re good at what you do, you still
don’t know it all,” he said. “We’re all human. We
can make mistakes on assumptions, just like our
clients do.”
The process got the individuals thinking
about areas of their own finances they might not
focus on in their own practice, such as their will
planning, whether they need to set up a trust and
even how their life insurance should be owned. “I
think a lot of people in our business just run too
fast, and they don’t take a lot of time to carefully
look at their own situation,” McNeil said.
Once they’ve gone through the analysis, Mc-
Neil explained, it is up to the individuals to follow
through on the plan. “If I’ve done my job, they
know how to implement the recommendations,”
he said, adding that they might follow up with an
accountability check every five to 10 years.
McNeil suggested that all MDRT members and
their families might benefit from such a “second
opinion” approach by asking another trusted

Reasons to consult another advisor

Fresh perspective — A second tain type of planning. This makes
reviewer might catch something you an expert for those you work
you’ve missed or look at the same with, but are you an expert in the
data differently than you do. areas you need help in?

Specialization — You’ve Logical approach — An out-

accumulated years — perhaps side advisor can approach your
decades — of experience in finances with logic and eliminate
working with a specific market emotion from the decision-
segment or specializing in a cer- making.

46 ROUNDTHETABLE.ORG MARCH/APRIL 2013

 “I WANT OTHER MDRT MEMBERS TO LOOK
AT THEIR OWN PLANNING
AS MUCH AS THEY LOOK AT THEIR CLIENTS’.”
member for help with this process.
“Companies spend millions of dollars every
year to double-check their financial decisions.
Would it not make sense to have a peer you trust
sit down and spend the time to go through it, just
as if you were a client?” McNeil asked. “The worst
that comes out of doing something like this is that
you find out things are as good as you think they
are. If that’s the worst thing that happens, then the
only real cost to the advisor is the time invested
going through such a process.
“Yet, if as a result of going through the pro-
cess, the couple discovers even one important
thing that was of particular value to them, then
the time they spent doing this would have been
worth it.”
McNeil, himself, gets input from other MDRT
members through his participation in a national
study group. The group, established in 1946,
makes it a point to share personal financial in-
formation. “We incorporate a financial checklist
during one meeting each year for comparative
analysis with our peers,” McNeil said.
Some members of the group are uncomfort-
able with showing the direct dollar amounts of
their personal finances, but this hasn’t stopped the
group from finding a way to work around this.
Instead, the members present their figures in the
form of ratios and percentages, though McNeil
notes, “The more data you have, the more valuable
the financial evaluation can be.”
Among other processes, the group exam-
ines business concerns, such as their operating
expenses vs. revenues and getting a handle on
recurring vs. non-recurring revenue streams.
Sharing these details keeps every member of the
group in balance, McNeil said, and on track with
their business goals.
— BRIAN HECKERT
Lawson’s experience going through the financial
planning process with his fellow study group
members has provided a natural opening for the
group to begin sharing more financial infor-
mation as a way of learning from each other’s
experiences.
The group prides itself on creating an open
dialogue where members feel they can share what
they are doing differently with current products
and strategies. As a result, all of them benefit from
each other’s advice as they apply it to their own
finances, as well as their clients’.
The group kicks off its quarterly meetings with
discussion of how each member’s business and
family are doing, before switching to all business
talk. Lawson said the group is like a family. “It’s
all out there; we know the good, the bad and the
ugly,” he said.
Now, at age 67, Lawson is mentoring a successor
and dividing his time between Maryland and a sec-
ond home in Florida, while practicing many of the
strategies shared by his study group. “The advice
given to me by the study group has been helpful to
me when working with my own clients,” he said.
“When I met with people after that, I was able to
incorporate some of the fact-finding techniques.”
Lawson recommends that MDRT members go
to each other for help with their own planning.
“I’m sure they would love to do it,” he said. “That’s
just the nature of the people in the Round Table.
We help each other.”
MARCH/APRIL 2013 ROUNDTHETABLE.ORG 47