A really, really, really early client meeting

Earlier in my career, and to some extent still today, we did a lot of target marketing in different industries. One of those groups we courted was in the waste hauling business. They start their days pretty early and end relatively early in the afternoon. When they end in the afternoon, those guys don’t hang around. They’re gone. This client had a super-early start date for his guys. They’d run out and start their routes. When we took over a lot of the group benefits, the 401(k) and the health insurance, I said, “When do you do your employee meetings?” He said, “At 3 in the morning.” I said, “Great, I’ll be there.”

If a client, particularly a business, has those kinds of restraints, or if you need to schedule a conference call because it’s a different time zone, I’m happy to oblige. If you have a client who might be based in Chicago but they’ve got staff in California or out on the east coast and you need to make that phone call a little earlier, then you would start your day with that or do it a little bit later depending on the situation.

At 3 a.m., it was neat — everything was empty. Normally it would take like an hour to get there, but it took a half hour. No traffic. Nothing’s lit up. Nothing’s going on. You do see things differently when you’re doing that. I think the staff there was genuinely surprised that somebody would show up to do the enrollment. They were used to the HR person kind of sporadically going through the benefits and just trying to kind of check the boxes and get the meeting over with. I was able to tell them exactly what they had, how the plan worked and how to best use the plan. I think they appreciated that.

The flipside of that is I do see a lot now, particularly with retirement planning and 401(k) clients in particular, employees’ level of expectation is to have the meeting on the clock versus meeting after work or at a lunch break or whatever. It’s almost as if it’s an obligation of the employer to provide that service to them. So I think the employees’ mentality has changed over the 20 years or so since that last happened.

Russell L. Clousing, CLU, ChFC, is a 26-year MDRT member from Chicago, Illinois. Hear more in the October episode of the MDRT Podcast: