Best Advice Ever – Just Listen

At Jefferies, our “life blood” is our clients. Without their trust, support and loyalty, we would have no reason for Jefferies to exist and no personal opportunity for all of us. If there is one point we would like to get across to each of you, it is that every one of us must take the time to fully listen to and understand the challenges, fears, goals and aspirations of each of our clients and only then give them our best advice.

It doesn’t matter what product we think we should sell, what piece of information we may possess that we think is vital, what we did great for our last client, or how well we are doing either at Jefferies or individually. Put simply, our clients “just don’t care” about this noise, nor should they. All that matters is what our client or prospective client believes is important, and the most remarkable and straightforward part of our job is that almost all of them will tell us what we need to know to best serve them, as long as they trust and respect us and our firm. The key is that we LISTEN. All we need to do is to ask warm, open-ended, non-judgmental questions and let our clients share with us what’s on their minds. We shouldn’t interrupt them, start thinking about our response or otherwise detract from simply listening and understanding what’s on their minds.

Once we have a complete grasp of the problem or opportunity our client believes needs to be addressed or the goal that needs to be attained, then it is up to us to take full advantage of the incredibly complete range of people/products/solutions/services we possess within the global walls of Jefferies, and creatively and diligently marshal all of our resources to flawlessly execute on behalf of our client.

That is it — our job in a nutshell. Then if every one of us can just do like the bottle says, “rinse and repeat,” we will be unstoppable as a leading investment banking and trading firm because our clients will be the winners and they will take us with them to ever higher heights.

We are going to stop here, and ask that you think carefully about what we are saying and do all you can to internalize our message — every one of us must take the time to fully listen to and understand the challenges, fears, goals and aspirations of each of our clients and then give them our best advice. In our next several notes, we will talk about how to assure we indeed give our best advice and will share with you our top 25 list of observations on how to best work with clients.

Listening alongside each of you,

Rich and Brian