Last week, I had a conversation that revolved around the loss of a multi-million dollar account.The case in point was a successful tech entrepreneur in his thirties, who started his company in the mid nineties on a shoestring with little except vision and determination - for the purposes of this commentary, let's call this entrepreneur Jeff.

With limited capital, Jeff went through the typical struggles of most start-ups before developing momentum; last year he fulfilled every entrepreneur's dream and successfully sold his company to a large multinational.

About five years ago Jeff began working with a financial advisor from a mid-sized independent; this advisor was referred to him by a fellow CEO after Jeff decided to establish a Group RRSP for his firm. By the time of his company's sale, assets in the Group RRSP approached $1 million and this advisor was also handling the personal accounts for Jeff and his senior team.

Throughout their relationship, Jeff was frustrated by his advisor's lack of attention to detail and failure to be on top of things. On one occasion, they agreed to transfer a $1500 RRSP account at a bank - but somehow this never happened. Another time, when meeting to conduct a portfolio review, this advisor forgot to include a significant non-registered account.

This sloppiness and lack of follow through became a growing problem and understandably undermined Jeff's confidence in the advisor - it also became an issue with the other senior members of his team working with this advisor.

Nevertheless, Jeff wanted to give his advisor every opportunity to shape up. A few months before the sale of his company, he made a point of taking him aside and informing him of the upcoming transaction - and told him that now was the time to step up his service level and demonstrate that the advisor really wanted to work with him.

In spite of this heads up, there was no response. As a result, shortly after the successful sale of this company, Jeff and a number of his colleagues were introduced by their financial advisor on the transaction to a contact at a bank-owned firm and ultimately moved their multi-million dollar accounts over.

Note that at no time had performance entered into this decision - it was purely and simply driven by the loss of confidence in this advisor's follow-up and attention to detail.

There are three important lessons for advisors from this episode.

First, attention to detail and follow-through are at the core of the confidence that clients have in you. It's essential to put systems in place to ensure that you execute on both the big and the little things.

Second, some clients will put up with a remarkable amount of frustration before they make the decision to pull the plug.

Sometimes it's because they are very patient and forgiving. Other times they are time-pressed entrepreneurs whose focus is on their business and who want to avoid the hassle of changing advisors.

Most often, however, clients hang in out of inertia - sometimes, they stay where they are because they fundamentally don't believe they'd be better served elsewhere. This captures the sentiment of many clients today who are staying with their existing advisors out of default - they aren't thrilled where they are, but aren't sure it's much better anywhere else.

Ultimately, though, if clients remain unhappy and only stay with you out of inertia, one of two things happens. In some cases they will be approached by an advisor who taps into their discontent and gets them to move. In other instances, even the busiest and most forgiving clients will lose patience and start looking for alternatives.

The final lesson from this episode is the need, painful at times as it might be, to systematically solicit feedback on how clients really feel, so that you can address issues before they cost you the account.

You can't rely on your clients to be as forthright in giving you the opportunity to rectify problems as Jeff was; he truly went the extra mile to try to make the relationship work and to give his advisor every chance to remedy the problems.

Jeff was atypical in his candour. Rather than telling you they're unhappy, most discontented clients speak with their feet ... and advisors only discover that a serious problem exists after the account is lost.

Particularly in light of the performance of portfolios over the past while, it's imperative that you talk to clients about where they stand. You might lose them even if you candidly discuss how they feel about the job you're doing - but chances are those clients would leave no matter what you did. Failing to have that conversation only increases the odds of seeing clients defect.