Summertime planning tips: keep your clients away from barbecues

The holiday break may have been a good time to get out of the office, but Nick Bruining reckons it’s a disaster for planners. He offers some tips in deflecting any concerns clients may have picked up over summer.

OK punters. You can forget about sleeping in, watching the Pommy cricket team cop a “BT” on the telly or just lazing about in the sun watching the moles on your hand change from brown to pink to green — it’s time to get back to work.

In case you hadn’t noticed, most of your clients have lost a fortune over the past few months. While you’ve been able to placate them with your wise words of wisdom and they’ve been busy saving up for the next margin call, things have happened in the past six weeks. By far the worst of these is that they’ve been to a barbecue.

Dangerous things, barbecues. Quite apart from the flames and the chance of your new Christmas K-Mart polyester shirt going up like a small tactical nuclear device, barbecues are where blokes stand around and talk.

You can always tell when a barbecue is going well. Four or five blokes will be standing near the hot plate with the runt of the group, generally the bloke who brought vegetarian stuff and is drinking mid-strength beer, down-wind absorbing most of the smoke.

Every now and again there’ll be an expletive muttered, and like a Mexican wave at a day- nighter, they’ll all jump up in unison. This usually indicates that one of the sausages has detonated and the K-Mart polyester shirt now has a cauterised hole just where it’s most visible.

Next, there’ll be a general debate on whether to flip the steaks. Of course if you have an idiot in charge of the Wiltshire Barbie Mate (I once thought that a Wiltshire Barbie Mate was the adult version of a plastic doll), the steak will have already been turned over as much as a life policy in the 80s and look just as sick.

Once these necessities are out of the way, there’ll be a wistful stare at the volcanic rock, a pregnant pause of about 20 seconds and then someone will say:

“‘Ave you buggers got your super statement yet?”

Following this there will be a string of expletives. The women and kids (who are not allowed to enter the hallowed ring) will swear that all the sausages have gone off in sympathetic detonation and there’s more fat flying around than at a weight-watchers disco night.

From here, the conversation will move to who’s with what fund. The guy drinking mid-strength will tell everyone he earned seven per cent but be ignored altogether. Nonetheless, rest assured someone will be able to report that his fund added four per cent over the year.

Again the conversation will stop as this is digested (in addition to the “sample” sausage which has been carefully divided into five, with the host entitled to claim the bit accidentally cut for the mid-strength vegetarian) and then they’ll want to know which fund has earned four per cent.

This is dangerous ground for a planner as the punter will simply state “my bank’s”.

The end result of the barbecue will be the calls waiting for you when you return to work. All the guys from the barbecue will be wanting you to explain why you didn’t switch them across to the retirement savings account (RSA) run by the other bloke’s bank.

At this stage, it’s probably time to revisit and revise some of the tactics we’ve introduced you to in the past on how to deal with such requests.

It might also be worthwhile re-capping a few things not to say.

“Don’t you trust me?” NEVER ask this question, the answer will disappoint and keep you awake for two nights.

“It will go up.” Unfortunately, you told them the same thing in July, September and December 2001 as well as March, June, September and December 2002. There’s a reasonable chance that such a comment is not likely to be accepted and you will hear similar sounds to that of an exploding sausage.

To more positive ways of handling the situation:

“He’s not here.” This is pretty boring and only likely to get you off the hook for a day or so. You can embellish it a little. Why not get your PA to add “he’s giving a kidney to Kerry”. That should get you an extra week.

“Hmmmm. A bank,hey?” The delivery here is very important, the “Hmmmmm” needs to be done in a style like your Doctor has just discovered your pecker’s about to drop off. If you think the “Hmmmmm” is a bit soft (no relevance to previous sentence), you can follow it up with a little laugh. “Huh huh huh…well it’s your money.”

If no success, you can resort to more forceful methods.

“We have pictures ofyour family.” You don’t have to say any more, just repeat it every time there’s a comment. “Waddya mean” — “We have pictures of your family.” “Listen Nick, I just wanna know what’s happening with my money—” “We have pictures of yourfamily.” You get the idea?

“We have your family.” Be careful with this. Some may respond with “Keep ’em — waddabout my money?”

At the end of the day, you may just have to spend an hour going over the same boring old stuff about statistics and long term growth. It can sometimes help to demonstrate volatility in a physical sense.

Clitheroe did it on the telly last year in a roller coaster where the seven year old sitting behind him threw up. You could say that this demonstrates a redemption in a practical sense but in an office environment setting up a roller coaster can be difficult.

I’ve found the use of electricity can help. You need to have plenty of volts. If you reverse a nine volt transformer and stick the wires into a power point, holding the prongs that normally plug into the wall, you’ll have 6400 volts.

While the client is sitting in the chair, you connect the adaptor to their fingers, using a couple of bulldog clips to hold the prongs on the finger. You explain that in an economic sense, volatility is essentially caused by demand and supply side shocks. “Click, Click.” The client will look somewhat stunned (we hope) or at worse, the eyes will close and there may be a nasty smell.

You continue to explain that this is part of investing and we just hope that “Click, Click” the shocks will disappear.

Trust me, a two minute lecture like this and the client will think he’s just joined the sausage. Thoughts of a transfer to that RSA will be the last thing on his mind.