What do advisers do?
Maximise returns, protect risks, anticipate complexities, minimise costs, reduce stress, remove distractions, test assumptions, and change client’s long-term habits.
Advisers are in the confidence business.
They convert a client’s doubts into confidence.
Unfortunately, Australians don’t appreciate that.
Australians believe financial planning involves investments, superannuation, insurance, taxation, structures, savings, shares, property, estates and cash flows.
Most Australians are about as interested in the traditional elements of financial advice as they are in paying their taxes. It isn’t of interest until it becomes a significant issue, and then they must be interested.
A shift is required before most Australians are interested and value financial advice.
The shift will be driven by the same thing that motivates everyone to pursue the things significant to them – value.
RECOGNISING THE SHIFT
Reviewing our client’s work last week, I saw two examples of advisory teams shifting perceptions that left clues on how the shift will occur.
The first was with a couple in their late 40’s.
The wife was a reluctant meeting attendee.
Driven by a recent small inheritance, her husband arranged a meeting with a planner – one of our Certainty Advisers – who asked them both to attend the appointment.
Money was always tight for her.
She came from a strong family that never afforded much but was happy.
For her, advisers were an unnecessary luxury for serious investors.
She prided herself on living as cheaply as possible, saving money with good controls to avoid regretful purchases.
She was annoyed being asked to attend the meeting, which she thought would be a waste of time.
Until she got there.
The second example was a sad meeting.
An existing client, who had been inherited by another Certainty Advice team during a recent merger, had been diagnosed with an aggressive terminal illness.
Again, despite their trauma, the meeting proved to be a liberating experience for all attendees.
Why?
Because both meetings were not about financials; they were about individuals.
DISCOVERIES
What happened in both of last week’s meetings?
Clients discovered something of significant value to them.
In the first example, the wife discovered how she managed her day-to-day financial life was not serving her best interests.
She discovered that she had been mimicking her mother’s deep footsteps, unnecessarily suppressing her significant personal hopes for the good of the family.
She discovered she had new options, which meant no suppressing.
She discovered a different path she could pursue with money, advice, and planning if she was up for it.
In the second example, by combining the harsh reality of tragic circumstances with financial expertise, care, and impartial advice, both partners discovered that their legacies, loves, and loved ones would be sad but OK.
Value is the confidence created when clients make valuable discoveries as they unpack and resolve their locked-up hopes and worries.
This is achieved when advisory teams consistently, specifically, skilfully and impartially facilitate individual and collective conversations with their clients that enable them to discover and regularly re-discover what is essentially of value to them.
This is far more than scripted conversations about goals.
Good accountants, financial planners, tax agents, brokers, investment advisers, superannuation specialists, insurance agents, solicitors and other professionals have been doing this for years.
Unfortunately, over the last thirty years, the advice from these roles has become commoditised, bent out of shape by well-intentioned but failing regulatory reform, and now being reinvented by synthesised AI apps available on everyone’s handheld.
The more financial advice moves away from impartial client discoveries of significant value, the less clients will value advice.
Advice is needed more than ever.
What do you reckon?
Photo credit: Shutterstock_1622702722
ABOUT JIM STACKPOOL
Since 1989, Jim has influenced, coached, and consulted financial advice and accounting firms across Australia. His training firm, Certainty Advice Group, skills comprehensive advisory teams to price and deliver valuable, methodical, non-person-dependent advice relationships with their clients. He has built a collaborative community of firms aligned to his firm’s comprehensive advice model – Certainty Advice – Australia’s only Certification Mark accredited by ACCC and IP Australia for impartial financial advice. He presents at conferences, has judged professional advice awards, written industry white papers, chaired practice management curriculum for tertiary institutions, and authored four books on financial advice – his latest being What Price Value.