Success doesn’t happen accidentally. And sustained success can be even more difficult in a profession where you often start from zero every January.
Randy L. Scritchfield, CFP, LUTCF
For 33-year MDRT member Randy L. Scritchfield, CFP, LUTCF, his career turned a corner after hearing an Annual Meeting presentation and putting several strategies in place. This took him to Court of the Table for three years and then to continuously qualifying for Top of the Table the next 16 years.
One of the strategies that worked was specializing in retirement planning and combining it with a relationship-based business, said Scritchfield, of Damascus, Maryland.
Personal responsibility
Understanding the power of personal responsibility had a profound and positive effect on Scritchfield’s production. That came for him several years ago after hearing the late MDRT legend Sidney A. Friedman, CLU, ChFC, repeated a famous saying from William H. Johnsen during his MDRT Main Platform presentation, “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
“Those 10 words empowered me to go out and do what I want and need to do to help myself and my clients. I came home with a renewed sense of passion and commitment for what I was doing, and I cranked it up another notch,” Scritchfield said. Shortly after that, he qualified for Court of the Table for the first time.
Creativity, relationship and leadership
Another set of ideas that consistently boost his production is that, “As an MDRT member, we get paid best for doing what we do best. And what we do best involves the activities around creativity, relationships and leadership.”
For him, this means
- Creativity in designing solutions for clients
- Relationships in spending time with clients
- Leadership in getting clients to do the right thing
“If you focus on those three things on a daily basis, you will not only be successful but you’ll be happy because you’re doing what you should be doing,” Scritchfield said.
“For example, if you’re filling out an application or doing an address change, that requires no creativity or leadership and you’re not building relationships. Delegate it to someone else.”
Staff is critical in accomplishing this. If you don’t have staff, start hiring. If you have staff, hire more, Scritchfield said. For those advisors who haven’t hired anyone before, he recommends either hiring someone part-time or sharing a staff person with another advisor.
Relationship building with clients
The amount of time Scritchfield spends with his clients is another aspect that’s important to him. He spends as much time as needed to build a strong relationship, which includes having dinner or playing golf with clients when no business is discussed. It’s not something every advisor does, he acknowledged, but it works well for him.
“My goal is to make clients comfortable about their future financial security, be it with their retirement or other aspects of their financial planning. For me, it’s process-driven not time-limited. It has paid off by building very deep relationships with clients over decades which, of course, resulted in multiple referrals in many different areas of my community.”
When trust is there, client interactions are seamless. For example, Scritchfield was once explaining a proposal to a client when the client stopped him to say, “Randy, you’re my doctor. Just tell me what to do.”
“That trust by a client is sacred and must be honored over time,” Scritchfield said. “And client’s trust like that is what makes my business so rewarding and what we must honor every day in our client interactions.
“At times over the years, particularly when the stock markets have been in disarray and have gone down, clients have come to me concerned about what’s going to happen to their income. Through the many products I’ve used with them, their account values might change but their income will last their lifetime. They understand that and they are very grateful for it,” Scritchfield said.
Trust feels like it’s something intangible, but it leads to the tangible result of clients confident of a comfortable retirement, Scritchfield said. He takes pride in knowing his clients feel secure that they’ll have enough money to last them for the rest of their lives.
Hear more from Scritchfield in his video,”How do you create sustained success?”
By Antoinette Tuscano, MDRT content specialist
I have known and worked with Randy from almost his first year of MDRT qualification. There has been no doubt in my mind that some day he would be tapped to lead our great organization.
Congratulations, Randy. You’ve earned this!
Gene Mahn