TD Wealth advisor explains how she built a practice and a team on repeatable processes
Christie Bartram has always had an eye for detail. The senior investment advisor and associate portfolio manager at TD Wealth started at the Richard Ivey School of Business with the goal of studying accounting. She loved doing tax prep, auditing, and planning. When she began working in accounting, though, she found a cultural mismatch. Reconsidering her career path, Bartram pivoted over to the investment side, finding a niche where her tax planning knowledge and accounting expertise could be applied to her clients’ financial plans. Her success in marrying detail-oriented and tax-focused planning with investment management has earned her a place among the WP excellence awardees nominated for the Equiton Award for Canadian Advisor of the Year.
Ahead of the WP awards gala on Thursday, Bartram spoke with WP about how she built a successful practice. The recurring theme throughout her career has been process. By creating and operating a clearly defined and repeatable process, Bartram has been able to serve her clients with diligence, grow her practice, and build a team that can support her in these goals.
“My team and I pride ourselves on being absolutely meticulous when it comes to attention to detail. Our team is incredibly process driven so that things don't fall between the cracks,” Bartram explains. “We take a very proactive approach as well. So as regulations are always changing, we're pivoting, creating new processes and putting those into place to track absolutely everything, almost obsessively, so that it's a smooth process where clients are able to have that trust and confidence that we're taking care of everything for them, and that mistakes are not happening.”
That diligence and attention to detail is necessary in any practice, but perhaps more necessary for Bartram given her focus on tax. She reviews each of her clients’ tax returns every year to inform their financial plans. She offers tax planning services to improve overall portfolio efficiency. She manages certain tax issues, too, like this year’s struggles with CRA auto download. She can show clients where fees weren’t deducted and corrections need to be made. She can talk clients through ways to prevent any OAS clawback. She knows the details of her clients’ financial lives and can provide better advice as a result.
Bartram built her processes from the ground up. Using trackers and colour coded systems she ensures that she and her two associates are able to quickly grasp the status of any client or case. She builds in automatic prompts for future conversations. She’s created a process to create and manage annual strategic planning meetings with clients. She ensures that her own behaviour reflects those processes, too. At every client meeting, she talks about their next point of contact. Clients are never left in doubt about the next time they’ll hear from her, thereby reducing their anxiety.
Communication in Bartram’s practice follows the old rhetorical rule of ‘tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.’ She begins each meeting with a clear agenda, giving clients an opportunity to add their points to that agenda. The meeting itself functions as the ‘tell them’ section. Immediately afterwards, clients receive a follow-up email that summarizes the meeting and outlines action items for Bartram and her client. That structure, she says, helps create clarity for the client and helps her demonstrate her value.
That level of proactive planning also allows Bartram to manage her own workload. When RRSP season and tax season grab her attention, she can apply that necessary focus to those subjects knowing that her regular cadence of client communications has been maintained. She is never left scrambling.
As regimented as her processes are, Bartram explains that she built them organically. Coming into the industry 18 years ago, paper files and analogue communication tools dominated. Scheduling follow-ups and prompting actions was more a product of serendipity. Bartram would look through her files, notice a name she’d not seen recently, and schedule a follow up. As the industry moved into online platforms, she started building more structure into her work, learning from mistakes and doubling down on commitments to ensure her clients feel safe in her hands.
“If it was easy, everyone would do it. But it is something that I think is so necessary,” Bartram says of her process. “It's what I need to do to feel good about what I am doing when I'm looking after people's life savings.”
That level of personal discipline is reflected in Bartram’s two client service associates. In the years they’ve worked together the whole team has developed a shared mindset and commitment to process and detail. When she has looked to add on new associates or grow the team, Bartram has always sought that shared mindset first and foremost, noting that knowledge about markets and financial products can be taught.
As other advisors look to build their practices out and deliver more structured processes to meet modern client needs, Bartram cites her own example to espouse the advantages of a process built from the ground up based on lived experience.
“For me, creating some of our own systems has been more beneficial to have a full picture of our practice," Bartram says. “It is more legwork in the beginning, but you can customize and tailor it to the way that you want your practice to be, and the way that you and your team work. The way that I work may not work for every other person. So come up with your own systems and processes.”
