Success in the independent financial services industry is all about building and sustaining relationships with your clients. Done right, they'll give you all of their business and happily refer their friends. However sustaining a good level of value added communications can be challenging - especially for planners who are short on time. As your practice grows, you need to be able to communicate more frequently on a one-to-many basis, as opposed to exclusively a one-to-one basis. This is where the Internet and your client statements come in.

Think about all those clients that you told not to look in the paper for the mutual fund prices, but who you know do anyways? These are the same clients that will check their statements online given the chance. It makes sense to be able to use the opportunity as a relationship management opportunity. That's exactly what the best advisors in the country are doing. They update their own commentary either on the client statement or on a page just before their clients get to their statements, to be able to manage their client's expectations and talk about the same things they do in person with their clients.

Now, let's do the math. Today 80% of Canadians are on the web. Of those, typically, you'll find that roughly half of your clients that are on the Internet (the wealthier half) will log on to see their statements - on average about 6 times a month. If you've got 500 clients, you'll find that roughly 200 will be there regularly. So that should give you about 1200 reasons to take a few minutes each week to update a very brief commentary that they'll see when they're checking things.

Here are just a couple of things you'll want to remember when writing:

	Change your comments frequently. Some clients log in several times a week. Leaving the same commentary up for months at a time might give them the impression that you are just 'not paying attention.'
	Vary your commentary. You don't just talk about money in person with your clients, so vary the types of things you write about.

The bottom-line reason that clients deal with you is that they both trust you and value your opinion - more than the other financial services professionals they may deal with. So use the opportunity wisely and you'll find you have more time and better client relationships because of it.