What makes a client event successful?

What Tehranchian does, and doesn’t, include in her events

For Tehranchian, client events are a chance to leave her clients with valuable information. When she hosts larger group functions she ensures that there is a speaker or presenter who can teach her clients something interesting or relevant related to their wealth management experience. That might be a portfolio manager talking about AI, a lawyer explaining powers of attorney, or a physician talking about longevity and health. Of course she works to make sure that there’s good food and drinks for all her clients, keeping the events light-hearted and social, but at their core she wants clients to come away having learned something of substance.

Events designed purely around ‘fun’ like golf days or axe throwing are something Tehranchian prefers to avoid. Instead, she’ll organize more intimate dinner events with one or two client families at a time, bringing her family as well to connect more deeply as people. When the event is larger, she wants there to be substantive information, and when the event is meant to be fun she wants it to be more intimate.

Can a third-party organizer add value?

Tehranchian now has her events down to a science, with tried and true venues and formats. She says she hasn’t needed to use some of the third-party event planning services currently marketed to advisors. Matt Haze, however, believes there is room for an external event organizer to help advisors stand out.

Haze is a Chicago-based creative consultant, who has specialized in events for financial advisors on both sides of the border. Like Tehranchian he believes in the value of in-person events and has found a host of advisors who agree with them. His view, however, is that a third-party event planner can help ensure an advisor has time and capacity at the event to actually connect with their clients. He believes that advisor events that follow a rote ‘wine and cheese’ formula can bore and even alienate clients. He believes that advisory events can borrow from engagement strategies that have been successful in other fields.

“One thing I’ve been starting to talk to some advisors about creating a speaker series of their own for their community of entrepreneurs within their town,” Haze says. “There is a speaker series… called the CFO Series, where every couple of months across the US, CFOs get together and do this very intimate private speaker series. It’s like what happens at CFO Series stays at CFO Series. And I’ve been talking to some advisors about doing something similar.”