Table of Contents

A client of InvestorKit needs a Portfolio Strategy Session to ensure their property investments align with their long-term financial goals and personal circumstances.

Here’s why these sessions are crucial:

In short, a Portfolio Strategy Session provides the clarity, direction, and confidence clients need to succeed in property investing, while leveraging InvestorKit’s expertise to fast-track their journey toward financial freedom.

The strategy session is your first interaction with clients after they sign their agreement—making this initial impression vital. A strong first meeting builds trust and confidence, showing clients they're in capable hands. By running a well-prepared, knowledgeable session, you establish yourself as their trusted guide who will support them throughout their investment journey.

If we take the lens of the client, this is where they will:

Must watch! In the below videos, Adrian will walk you through best practice when preparing for and running a portfolio strategy session

Gameplans is your primary tool for mapping out portfolio strategies and crunching the numbers. Below you'll find two essential resources: first, a training guide covering the individual Gameplans pages and our typical usage methods, and second, a comprehensive course by Jordan (Gameplans' founder) that explores each tool feature in detail.

We use this tool to talk to clients about their monthly savings as well as guide us on creating a passive income target.

The below scripts serve as guidance on how to run your strategy sessions and how we want to guide the conversation.

We don't want you to sound robotic by repeating identical phrases—instead, cover the key topics while letting your authentic personality come through during client calls.

Brief creation sessions are basically just shorter portfolio planning sessions, without the tools and as much strategy.

These will often only occur when a client has been referred by a partner who is doing their strategy and doesn’t believe ours is required.

Contact the Referring Financial Planner and add them to the portal workspace

Kickoff Message with Brief Summary

It’s important that you frame the call correctly, because this sets you up for success for the rest of the call. Putting ourself in the clients shoes, the client has invested a lot of time and money already learning about our company and process, and now we are the first person they meet to begin their journey. (No pressure!)

So how do you show up for the call? How do you build rapport and trust?

Framing the call is essential.

You need to ensure that the following is covered as begin your call

At InvestorKit, we focus on understanding clients’ long-term goals and showing how property investment can help achieve them. While we keep the excitement alive, we plan conservatively, presenting a “worst-case scenario” to account for life’s uncertainties. This approach ensures realistic expectations, and because our performance often exceeds these projections, clients frequently reach their goals faster than planned.

Even with conservative numbers, we highlight the potential to build substantial passive income, balancing realism with motivation. By setting achievable targets, we create moments of success during reviews, where clients feel encouraged by exceeding expectations rather than disheartened by falling short. Any results above projections become a welcome bonus!

We also value conversations about more ambitious goals, which help deepen relationships and set meaningful, longer-term objectives. It’s about finding the balance between cautious planning and inspired ambition.

More importantly, make sure to uncover their WHY in their goal. This is your golden star to always bring back the conversation to.

It’s important to ensure that you’re matching and mirroring with the client. Remember, people respond to people who they like, and that is often personalities that are ‘similar’ to themselves. So how do you match tonality? Here’s a few steps:

A key part of every session is bringing energy and excitement to the client’s journey. Building a portfolio is a path toward achieving their goals, and your enthusiasm about their vision and how we’ll get there makes them far more receptive to the plan.

Clients choose us because they know we genuinely care about their success. Showing up with energy reinforces this trust and connection. Too low energy, on the other hand, risks sending the wrong message. Be the person they want to work with—engaged, positive, and invested in their success.

It’s important to note that partners should always be included, even if they are less involved. When in conversation if you notice that one person is less involved, make sure to always direct to the other partner for confirmation. While they may be silent on call, they often are pulling the strings in the background! Make sure to directly address them on your calls to show them that their input is important as well.

If they aren’t on the call, we need to bring this upfront to the client who is. That even if they aren’t making the decisions, that we want them to be fully involved, if they’re a part of the journey at all. We can openly discuss with the client that if they have full authority to make a decision, then they can go at this alone. But if they have to justify ANY part of the decision with their partner, then we want to help them be in the best position to make a decision. As we’ve seen other clients miss many good opportunities because of this, and we want this to be easy for them. Otherwise, we go down this path, and that’s the risk they’re exposed to.

Often you will face this with bigger budget customers, they have more options, which leads to more analysis paralysis

The framework goes like this:

PROOF - ‘I can recall a client who was in a very similar spot to you, time poor, not sure what to do with their budget exactly like yourself. I was able to work closely with them and get them to X result’

PROMISE - ‘I am confident we can build a diverse multi property portfolio and deliver you on the growth as well’

PLAN - Deliver the direction

When you notice a client can’t decide, providing them options will create more uncertainty. In this moment it’s important to recognise that you are the advisor, and they came to us looking for guidance.

Real life examples and stories resonate with clients most, if you don’t remember actual names just use a common name.

The key framework for this is the following

Remember to always go deeper, have a curiousity mindset to uncover where the root cause is.

When building a portfolio, we focus on “portfolio construct”—a strategy designed to create a well-rounded, diverse portfolio rather than simply chasing the latest hot market or making isolated purchases. For long-term buy-and-hold investors, this means avoiding overexposure in any single area by diversifying across price points, states (for legislative protection), and economic drivers. This approach reduces risk and leverages counter-cyclical markets, ensuring steady growth even when some areas slow down.

We prioritise diversification to safeguard against inevitable market dips, knowing that no single market performs strongly all the time. By investing across different market cycles, we maintain balance and consistent growth, aligning with our scaling framework. For example, while foundation markets may not always deliver the highest growth, they provide crucial stability as regional markets deliver higher returns during expansion. This strategy suits long-term portfolios but may require adjustments for active investors using a core-satellite approach, where short-term trading is part of their plan.

Building on the Portfolio Strategy video from the previous section (link), we consistently use our portfolio scaling framework as a foundation. While each client needs a unique strategy based on their income, existing portfolio, and goals, your role is to create a plan that achieves their objectives while applying InvestorKit's proven portfolio scaling framework.

Our portfolio scaling framework typically looks like this:

If clients prefer to skip the foundation stage, that's perfectly fine! While we can explain the benefits of including foundation properties in their portfolio, some confident clients may choose a different path.

The more you customise a strategy for each client, the more valued and understood they feel, moving away from one-size-fits-all advice. Building strong relationships requires making clients feel that our recommendations are truly personalised to their situation.

Since every client's situation is unique, they often seek guidance on what works best for them. While we cannot provide formal financial advice, we can adapt our approach to each client's circumstances using these frameworks:

You can use the below framework to guide clients to a particular direction, if you feel they are one that needs a more subtle nudge compared to a strong ‘advice’ direction like in the Proof, Promise, Plan framework

Our portfolio scaling framework encourages clients to make purchases within a condensed timeframe early in their journey. This approach allows more time for compound growth, maximising their long-term results.

A tight acquisition period benefits both the client and our business. Clients can build larger portfolios faster, setting the foundation for greater wealth creation, while we secure repeat business as they progress quickly to their next property. The initial strategy session is key to introducing this concept and setting expectations for multiple purchases in quick succession. By explaining this clearly, clients will understand and anticipate the progression when it’s time to discuss their next purchase post-settlement or within the year.

At times our clients will turn up to a strategy session with clear goals in mind, it could be they are after the mythical 10 properties and $100k in passive income (in 10 years of course!), or that they want to buy their PPOR in 2 years as part of their strategy, but still want to buy and hold investments.

When you crunch the numbers and begin mapping out the strategy to get there and you take our traditionally conservative approach to the plan, you may find cases where it will be difficult to hit even the worst-case scenario for clients.

In these scenarios, we have multiple levers that we can pull to make the results better.

Check out the below updates for lending!

SMSF provides a huge opportunity for clients to grow their portfolio faster and further than they possibly could in their personal name. When a client has a sufficient balance, the strategy session offers a perfect chance to introduce SMSF investing, even if clients haven't considered it before.

Following up and nurturing on SMSF:

Following up is key to guiding clients, so they don’t sit in a position five years from now wondering why they didn’t pull the trigger earlier. See below for some ideas on how to nurture your clients to explore the path of investing within SMSF.

Commercial property can be a powerful addition to a portfolio, especially for clients who are aiming to boost cashflow or transition into a more passive income-focused phase. It’s particularly useful for clients with significant equity or cash reserves, or those who are approaching retirement and looking to replace income.

Often, clients don’t realise how close they are to being able to leverage into commercial. A strategy session is a great opportunity to plant the seed — even if they don’t act immediately, it becomes part of their longer-term thinking, like what we’ve done for many clients who are 5+ years into their residential journey and transitioned.

Don’t pitch commercial as a replacement for residential — position it as a next phase of the portfolio that kicks in once the foundation is built. This makes clients feel like they’re progressing and unlocking new parts of the journey.

Look for the following trigger points for clients:

Following up and nurturing on commercial:

Similar to SMSF, clients may not move straight away, especially given commercial is a big ticket item — but continued exposure to education, real and relevant examples, and numbers keeps it top of mind.