Your Standard Operating Procedures

• You handle all client correspondence by email.
• You store the information — the bulk of your role: scanned files, notes and fact finds go into the system (today, Pipedrive).
• You receive insurer correspondence from the providers and pass it to the adviser.
• You run annual reviews from bullet points, using the client’s preferred name, and send one email to both the adviser and the client.
• You’re the single source of information — any question about a client, you can answer it.
• You protect client information — sensitive details stay with the people who need them (see Privacy & permissions).

Claims are a major part of your work. Hank fields the incoming call, then hands the claim to you to run and follow up.

1. You send the claim documentation from Partners Life. (Partners Life is bringing in a portal so claims can be lodged online.)
2. You fill in the claim number, and tick the consent box on the insurer’s form — “would you like your adviser to know?” — so the adviser is kept in the loop and involved.
3. You complete the form for the client to reduce their friction, save it as a PDF, and scan it in at the back.
4. If there is a surgery or medical event coming up, you flag it to the insurer so the claim is prioritised.
5. You file every copy against the client record.
6. You keep the claims history. A past claim affects future cover — for example, an existing claim can affect a client’s ability to get income protection later. The record has to remember it.

• You handle claims and take the difficult calls yourself. When there’s pushback from the insurer, your client hears it from you rather than straight from the provider — direct pushback can leave a client assuming the claim won’t pay. You field those calls and pass what Jill needs to her.
• You watch the pipeline — you pull the data from Partners Life to see what’s in the pipeline and what to expect. Pipeline sales, not cashflow forecasts.
• You plan in January — you use the quiet ~6 weeks from mid-December to plan: you review each adviser’s performance and ask what they want to achieve for the year. Adviser-led, no pressure.
• You keep costs simple — few overheads, mostly fixed percentage payouts. You keep enough aside to cover fixed costs and any clawbacks.
• You work your referral relationships — accountants and a networking group, nurtured over time. Multiple sources of referrals matter — not cold outreach.

You’re phone-first, backed by text and a little email. Before a meeting you text the client to say you’re on your way.

Maintenance rather than growth — with a priority on moving off Pipedrive onto one central system.

Can be templated: the preferred name, the statement of financial position, and the breakdown — most of the document.

Stays with you: the advice itself is personalised — never fully automated.

Your car-check stays printed and delivered in person. A video or audio version of the plan adds little — being in the room, where you can see if the client is listening and talk with them, is the point.

Where it’s heading: send the application straight from your CRM to each provider using their own systems, so the details you already hold never have to be re-keyed onto an application form.

Your CRM can put each adviser (and support user) on “only assigned data” — they see only the clients assigned to them, and nothing of other advisers’ clients. You and Jill sit above that as administrators with full visibility.

Your CRM controls access at the record and section level, not field by field. So you cannot, today, hide just the medical field from a person who can otherwise open that client. Field-level permissions are a requested feature but aren’t built.

• Protect sensitive clients at the record level: the record is visible only to the assigned adviser plus you and Jill.
• For an especially sensitive case, keep the detail in a restricted note or document rather than an open field everyone on that record can read.
• Still to confirm: whether it’s worth pursuing field-level locks given the platform limit, or whether record-level control is enough from a compliance point of view.

Think of the police idea of contemporaneous notes — also called job sheets: a dated, timed record of what happened and what was discussed, that can be relied on later.

Your CRM’s conversations tab is exactly that: one chronological, time-stamped history for each of your clients — every call, text, email and note, in order. It’s your defensible “what happened, and when” for any client or claim, all in one place.

A future addition: tracking sales performance — conversion by adviser, drawn from Partners Life — which you don’t track today. It would be an early-warning signal for who’s converting and who isn’t.

Captured here as something to work on later — not part of this first piece of work.