What to Expect During Your First Year With a Financial Advisor

Choosing a financial advisor is an important decision, but many people aren’t sure what happens after they say “yes.” In this guide, we’ll walk you through what to expect from a financial advisor during your first year together—from onboarding and account setup to ongoing meetings, investment management, and long-term financial planning.

Lesley: [00:00:00] Welcome everyone to our next webinar in our series. I’m joined by Christopher Mallon and Andrew Randisi. They’re both certified financial planners here at Pennsylvania Capital Management. We’re gonna talk to you today for a few minutes about what it’s like when you become a client of PCM, just to give you some understanding of how the steps go here.

I’ll start us off and just say we generally… So we have several meetings as we first meet you to get to know you and learn about your family and your finances and your goals, that kind of thing. Lots of meetings in the beginning. You then, hopefully, decide that you want to work with us, so we send you an agreement.

We do that usually via DocuSign. It’s pretty simple to do. And then from there, w- we move into more paperwork. We have to open you accounts at Charles Schwab, which is our, the custodian that we use. It’s all done digitally these days, all through Schwab’s portal and interface. Very easy to open accounts and sign agreements, and we’re here to walk you through the process too [00:01:00] if you get stuck, obviously.

So I’d say in the beginning, lots of meetings and admin kind of stuff, and then eventually we get into a rhythm after the accounts are open and then generally speaking, we meet with clients once a quarter either via Zoom or in person, depending on how you would like your meetings to go.

Some people do some meetings Zoom and come in for some. Some prefer all Zoom meetings. It’s really, it’s up to you as the client how you would like to meet with us on the quarterly basis. And not all clients… We have some clients that only want to meet with us twice a year, and that’s fine too.

It’s really your comfort level. Chris, do you want to give us some ideas of what-

Chris: Y- yeah, I think those, yeah, those first couple months is a lot of interaction. There’s the, there’s the meetings, and then there’s the work between the meetings, and then micro projects happening in the background.

So agreements are signed, accounts get opened up, dollars get transferred in. As the assets start to come in, the investment committee, we will all, look at the assets as they come in and then make recommendations to the clients on based off of their risk [00:02:00] tolerance questionnaire they had done, based off their goals and conversations we’ve had.

So we’ll form that in the background and then meet and present those ideas. And then while that’s happening too, I’d say there’s the investment focus and then the financial planning side, so it’s prioritizing those things. They’re all happening pretty simultaneously. Really addressing any of the glaring issues in the plan.

Really in that first year, I’d say we address pretty much, any of the significant, call it the low-hanging fruit we can we can do. And yeah, a lot of that stuff happens either between the main meetings. I’d say that first year we’re, talking to a new client probably, every two weeks or every month.

I’m not saying that’s required. And by talking to them, hey, I might be on the phone for 20 minutes ’cause, “Hey we need a statement for this. We’re trying to transfer that in. Oh, here’s what we think of the investment portfolio.” So a lot of shorter calls and such, and then, yeah, getting into the regular cadence once the, the foundation is built and then addressing new things as they come up.

It’s always being flexible too, right? So as, new ideas, priorities, things change as life changes and then we’re, adaptable and can adjust as well

Lesley: Andrew, anything [00:03:00] to add on the beginning stages of becoming a PCM client?

Andrew: It’s mainly a lot, as getting to Chris’ points, a lot of data entry and getting to know y- getting to know you, more importantly.

We wanna know how you think so we can be in sync on how we’re talking about your financial plan, what new things might be going on the horizon, the int- the dif- the overall investment strategies as well, too. We wanna be on the sa- we wanna be on the same page with you as we work with y- as we walk through your financial life together.

Lesley: Yeah. We really see this as a partnership. It’s not us, dictating how you’re gonna, deal with your finances, we make suggestions. You tell us if you like the suggestions. You give us more data about, “Oh, my daughter’s getting married, and I need money for the wedding.” Okay, this is how we’re gonna budget for that.

It’s really a back and forth between us, and we see it as a partnership. And I did wanna mention, too, we meet internally as a as a f- it’s called the investment committee, twice a day, and we go over we talk about [00:04:00] clients in those meetings. In that case where a client calls and says, “My daughter’s getting married, I need to budget some money,” we’ll look at your portfolios and start to come up with some ideas so that then when we have our next call with you, we can say, “This is what, we would recommend where we’re gonna pull the money from for your daughter’s wedding.” And and also in those investment committee meetings that you generally Chris, Andrew, and Steve are talking about portfolio composition.

Do you wanna talk about that at all, Chris, about the

Chris: yeah. That’s gonna be We’ll, yeah, say the internal meetings we’re looking at is gonna be either, the order of operations there is gonna be, okay, any short-term cash needs that any of the clients need, and then it would be, okay, any, planning projects we’re working on for any client, especially if there’s any sort of upcoming meetings or, tasks we have outstanding, making sure those are all addressed.

And then we’ll dive into, client accounts and stuff if things need to be changed and, across the whole board for how we have portfolios allocated or for each individual client rebalancing, making sure all the accounts are humming along in the right direction. It’s how the typical [00:05:00] meetings go.

And we do that twice a day and then, depending on what, what takes up more bandwidth, then we’ll see. But yeah. Usually how it goes.

Lesley: Yeah. And then we’ve got a whole list of recommendations and topics to discuss with you on our next call. Yeah. And often those topics were generated on our internal meetings that we’d use to prepare for your client accounts.

Chris: Yeah. Said.

Lesley: Great. Any final thoughts on the first steps of becoming a client? I think we covered it I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew: The one thing we will say, Rome is not built, was not built in a day. So it’s not gonna be one or two, one, two or even three meetings we’ll have everything all built out.

It’s, and it, as for this would be for the, a prospect or a new client if who’s watching this right now. It’s gonna take about, and Irvin says this best, 12 to 18 months to get everything all completely ramped up online, humming along. Because we don’t know how [00:06:00] the market, we don’t know how the markets are gonna be the first six months.

We’ve had several occasions it’s, cl- a new client has started, markets have just taken a tumble down. That’s no one’s fault. We’ve seen it’s gone up, or we’ve had choppiness. It really takes a good 12 to 18 months to see how are we aligned together with you on that, working with your family.

Lesley: Yep.

Well said. Makes sense. Takes a little time to, to get to know everybody. It’s true. All right, thank you for joining us today. We look forward to helping you on your financial journey. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about this topic or any other topics, and you can reach us at pcmadvisors.com.

Thanks, everybody.