Growing Your Practice By Putting Your Clients’ Interests Ahead of Yours

Mitch Anthony

Growing your practice is about more than increasing assets under management or the number of clients you have. It’s about showing your clients what’s right for them. After all, doing the right thing for your clients always pays off in dividends. As a financial planner, you are in a unique position to grow your practice while making a positive impact on your clients’ lives.

Growing Your Practice through Financial Life Planning

Financial planning starts where life planning leaves off. You don’t start with a financial plan and then work your client’s life plan into it. You start with a life plan and then build a financial plan to accommodate or accelerate that life plan. This changes the description of the business we are really in and also affects how advisors will be compensated in the minds of your clients. Compensation, as your client sees it, can no longer be tied strictly to transactions, because she clearly receives more value from the discussion than from the facilitation of a trade. Because your clients no longer need an advisor to simply facilitate a transaction, the service that will be paid for (either through commissions or fees) will be relevant and customized advice that helps her negotiate key life transitions. Our research has shown that clients are generally willing to pay more for this type of advice.

Opening the Dialogue of Financial Life Planning

How do you make the fundamental and philosophical shift with your clients from a transaction-oriented style to a transition-oriented approach? A veteran advisor told us it starts with the very first positioning statement you make with your client: “Money is a means, not an end. More important than building a pile of money is building a plan for that money. That plan will be as unique as you are. That’s the reason I’m going to ask a lot of questions about your life, your dreams, and your plans as well as about your money.” This is an effective positioning statement for the advisor who wishes to practice financial life planning as well as a way to introduce the questions that you will need to ask.

The issues that people deal with on a daily basis aren’t whether the markets are up, down, or sideways, or whether they own the right mutual funds. Rather, people are more concerned about their children, grandchildren, health, careers, and perhaps pending midlife crises. Equally as important as these concerns are the dreams your clients have, those abstract ideas of what we could and should be in our lives as well as the thoughts and visions of what we could do and who we could be if we could sit down with a map and figure out the route from here to there. These concerns and dreams can keep your clients up at night, cause indigestion, or stir every potential moment of tranquility; yet, most of your clients are not likely to confront these issues until you intervene. This is where you make the leap in your practice from financial planner to financial life planner.

Your clients are trying to run their lives, not their money. The two are inextricably bound in their minds—one affects the other. No matter how much money each of your clients has, chances are that during the course of a day they will think more about where their life is and where they want to be than they ever will about where their money is. Helping your clients discover what they really want out of life, and then helping them achieve it, will not only help your practice grow, it will make your own life more worthwhile and fulfilled.

Adapted from Your Clients for Life: The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Successful Financial Life Planner, Second Edition by Mitch Anthony. (©2006 by Mitch Anthony. Published by Kaplan Publishing.)

Mitch Anthony is the founder and president of Advisor Insights Inc. and The Financial Life Planning Institute, training companies serving advisors and the financial services industry. He is a contributing editor for Research magazine and his column “Financial Life Planning” appears in Financial Advisor magazine. Anthony has been named one of the financial service industry’s top “2006 Movers & Shakers” by Financial Planning magazine. His radio feature, The Daily Dose , is heard every day on 200 radio stations nationwide. Anthony is the author of several books for advisors, including StorySelling for Financial Advisors , The New Retirementality, Your Clients for Life , Selling with Emotional Intelligence , Making the Client Connection , The Financial Professional’s StoryBook, and Your Client’s Story. Contact him at mitch@mitchanthony.com

© 2007 Mitch Anthony