Scott Stewart, a senior advisor with ScotiaMcLeod Inc. in Winnipeg, remembers a day about five years ago when he was on holiday with his wife and another couple, one of whom is also a broker. They decided to go out for an ice cream.

“CNN was playing on a television in the lobby, and the Dow and the Nasdaq were both down 250 points on the day,” Stewart recalls. “We both sort of slumped back to our hotel rooms.”

Stewart gives a nod to the lingering sense of responsibility he feels for clients who depend on his advice — even when he’s not at work. That turbulent market day in the spring of 2001 was not an unusual one for equities, but he knows his clients would have been watching those same reports. When you’re on a ski holiday crunching down on sugar cones, it leaves a particularly heavy feeling.

Stewart wasn’t able to take any calls from clients that day, but his two licensed assistants did. They are the focal points of his client contact when he’s away on holiday.

“They speak regularly with my clients throughout the year,” he says, “so I’m lucky that way.”

In fact, Stewart would be happy to take calls from clients anytime — even on holiday — but he has never taken a call. That’s because he tries to book holidays when he knows clients don’t want to hear from him. He books off Fridays throughout the summer, for example, when everybody treks north to Lake Winnipeg or east to Lake of the Woods in Ontario.

Another convenient time to disappear is between Christmas and New Year’s Day, a period when markets are closed most days anyway. “Plus, clients are with their families and they don’t want to hear from me then,” he says.

Stewart’s vacation strategy is just one of many communication strategies that, judging by a short, informal survey, seem to be as varied as the advisors themselves. What do you tell clients when you’re due for time off? Which clients? How available should you be? It’s one thing when you work in an office with two licensed assistants — but it’s another when you run your own shop.

John Osborne, an Edward Jones advisor in central Toronto, lets all of his clients know when he will be away. He runs investment workshops at a local bookstore about once a month, speaking with clients often enough that they will know when he’s on holiday. Between himself and his assistant, who generally takes vacations on a separate schedule, they have relationships with almost all of their clients. They also send out bimonthly newsletters on economic and market trends to keep clients in touch.

Remote access

It helps that, as a firm, Edward Jones is technologically advanced. Any clients who need to speak to an advisor will be routed to head office. Plus, if Osborne is out of the office for any reason, he has remote access to his front office and all messages can be forwarded to his BlackBerry. The system also daily automatically prints lists of clients in active stocks.

Osborne often visits his sister in Whistler, B.C., to ski, booking a week-long trip for the first week of March, starting “10 seconds after the RRSP deadline.”

Gary Reamey, principal and head of Edward Jones’ Canadian division, based in Mississauga, Ont., says the firm’s centralized services group fulfills an important need for clients when brokers are out of the office.

“If something happens in the markets in the short term, and the client is adequately diversified, in many conditions, he or she doesn’t need to do anything,” Reamey says. “But clients still want to talk to somebody.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Bruce Cumming, an independent advisor in Oakville, Ont., who works under the umbrella of Markham, Ont.-based FundEx Investments Inc. , takes his holidays without letting a single client know. His voice mail advises clients that he is out of the office until his return date, that he won’t be listening to messages, and that callers should contact his assistants for help.

That said, Cumming always takes his laptop with him on vacation and he does an e-mail check daily, simply to avoid the deluge of e-mails upon his return.

@page_break@A recipient of the Financial Planners Standards Council’s Ontario Advisor of the Year award in 2004, Cumming admits there is a risk that needy clients will be left in the lurch when he’s away. In the event of a tumbling market, he says, he might consider cutting short his vacation to rush home.

“But I really believe my staff can hold the fort while I am gone by reiterating: ‘We have the right asset mix with your investments, and we were expecting something like this —but not quite as severe and quick’,” says Cumming of the rest of his staff at Cumming and Cumming Wealth Management Inc. IE