Books by Jim Stackpool

Rewriting the laws of pricing advice

Tailored, strategic consulting and planning to help you and your business find the quickest path to growth and returns.

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What Price Value by Jim Stackpool

“The cure of a part should not be attempted without the treatment of the whole” – PLATO (circa 380BC)

It is generally considered that Plato was one of the three acclaimed Greek pioneers of Western philosophy. Along with his teacher Socrates and his pupil Aristotle, the three devised some of the most significant foundations for generations of philosophers and thinkers that followed them.

The above quote highlighted his concern that his fellow practitioners were reducing the study and science of medicine to an intricate understanding of its parts, rather than being seen as a study of a total system, a total being.

Plato could be speaking of the study and practice of advice in the 2020s. It is being ruined by treating people’s financial lives as simply the sum of its technical parts. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The beliefs of Plato and acclaimed behavioural scientists such as Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler provide an intuitive ‘law’ for when advisers consider the price of value for a client. If we believe that for every significant choice that is made in life, there are varying degrees of uncertainty attached, it follows that there are varying degrees of value also for the individual considering the choices.

Seeking Certainty explains that the current financial planning industry is badly broken and driven by people intent on just selling financial products rather than helping solve people’s financial problems.

Many so-called financial ‘advisers’ today are just financial product salespeople more intent on product sales than the provision of quality advice to their clients. This has created a massive and growing ‘trust gap’ between the informed purchaser seeking financial advice and many of today’s financial ‘advisers’.

This book aims to provide the informed seeker of financial advice with an approach to seeking greater financial certainty in their lives. It argues that clients who engage firms that offer ongoing management of their financial behaviours, habits, mindsets, life experiences, situational complexities, and personal influences will obtain far greater benefits in terms of achieving their financial dreams that the ‘old style’, product-pushing firms that do not.

Seeking Certainty by Jim Stackpool

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Stackpool founded Strategic Consulting & Training (SCAT) in 1993 after three years of lecturing and consulting with the Financial Management Research Centre at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW Australia.

In the 1990’s he was the first to establish industry business performance benchmarks with over 1600 Australian firms contributing.  At the same time, the Securities Institute invited him to act as Chair of the Securities Institute’s Practice Management training modules.

Since November 2004 his successful Certainty Advice Workshops have attracted over 1500 professionals seeking to implement a version of his comprehensive advice approach – Certainty Advice.

In 2019, after a thorough review of the Certainty Advice methodology, ACCC and IP Australia approved his submission and agreed that Certainty Advice is Australia’s first certification standard of professional financial advice which guarantees Australians a similar standard of comprehensive, non-conflicted, flat fee advice regardless of licensee and location.

Due to Australia’s competitive marketplace, compulsory superannuation industry, egalitarian consumer mindset, and national legislative environment comparatively our advice industry is world-class and Jim Stackpool has been one of Australia’s prominent thought-leaders for the evolving advice profession.

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