Create Magic with Clients, the Disney Way

Kim Potgieter

Director, Chartered Wealth Solutions and Managing Director, The Financial Life Planning Institute, South Africa

The name Disney conjures up images of fairytale castles, animated animals, and pure fantasy. Walt Disney was a creative visionary who built his company using strategies which are now taught in business schools throughout the world.

Walt Disney was consistently guided in his work by four concepts:

1. Dream
2. Believe
3. Dare
4. Do

These concepts have become the foundation of the organization’s management principles and remain at the heart of every Disney strategy, more than 40 years after the founder’s death.

Using ‘Mouse Magic’ To Unlock Your Clients’ Life Goals

You’re probably asking yourself, “I am a financial planner; how is this relevant to me?” Disney’s management techniques can help you work some financial planning magic of your own by helping you unlock your clients’ deepest dreams and desires. This, in turn, enables you to create a truly meaningful financial plan that not only resonates with your clients, but also inspires them to live the lives they’ve only dreamed of living.

How often have you sat in front of clients and, when you asked them what they wanted to achieve in life and use their money for—you got a blank look? Too many clients are so busy trying to just survive their day-to-day lives that they have no idea of what they are actually working towards; they’re just working.

Good financial planners know that it is essential that their clients ”own” their financial plan. The very worst thing to do is to make assumptions for a client and devise a financial plan according to those assumptions. But how do you get clients to identify and verbalize their dreams and desires? Here’s where that Disney magic comes in.

When working with clients, I explain that we will be going through four steps as part of the planning process: (1) Vision; (2) Planning; (3) Criticism; and (4) Action. What is sacred in this process is that the steps 1 and 3 never meet until their dreams have become clear. Let’s look at an example of how the process works:

Step 1: Vision

Encourage your clients to think of a big dream or plan they’ve been mulling over—the kind of dream that, if there was absolutely nothing standing in the way, could be achieved and seen as the fulfillment of their life’s vision. Have them acknowledge their inner critic’s voice and reassure them that it will be heard in time. However, now is the time to let their imagination run wild and to visualize their dream becoming reality.

Step 2: Planning

It is still not time to let your clients let their inner critic loose. This is the time for planning the steps that could help their dreams come to fruition. The goal of this stage is to give your clients what they need to achieve their goals. Identify several future milestones that need to be reached on the road to make this dream a reality. You can also work backwards by asking clients to imagine that they have already achieved their dreams. Ask them what needed to happen to make that dream a reality. 

Step 3: Criticism

Now is the time for your clients to listen to that critical voice. Help them name all the obstacles to their dreams, and ask how they can overcome them. Keep at it until all the criticisms have been addressed.

Step 4: Action

Devise a workable plan that details the first step toward achieving their goals. Once you have that nailed down, go on to list all subsequent steps. Be sure to include milestones and time frames. 

A Real Life Example

A couple came to see me with the intention of investing money they had inherited when their 30-year old daughter was killed in a plane crash. Although this tragedy happened three years before their visit, they had struggled to invest this money because the money represented their daughter’s death and their subsequent grief.

Before discussing specific investment options, we spent some time discussing how we could look at this money and make it represent something positive. We shared experiences and had an emotionally-charged conversation about the past. We decided it was important that we do something meaningful with the money so that it would become a positive and lasting memory of their daughter.

Here’s when I used the Disney strategy. We needed to find a way that my clients could see things more clearly without being distracted by their inner critics. I started the process by asking, “If this money was to fulfill a life dream for your daughter, what might that be?”

I encouraged my clients to vision freely. As a result, they shared how their daughter had a passion for educating women and how she had worked so hard to become a Chartered Accountant. It became apparent that they wanted to set up a trust so others could follow that same path. This approach would help them to see the money as something positive, and keep the memory of their daughter alive.

We then planned how this transition could happen. We looked at how much money they had inherited. We also needed to take into account that they were both over 60, and looked at what allocations they had made for retirement. Both had longevity in their families and, even though emotionally they felt quite numb, they could still live for 30-40 years. Would their daughter, who had been a vibrant, vivacious woman, want them just to exist, but not live? When we looked at their financial assets, it became apparent that they needed some of the money from their daughter’s inheritance to be able to retire with enough assets to be able to travel and visit their other daughter who had relocated from South Africa to the United States.

Only then did we move to the Criticism stage and discussed what could go wrong. We discussed how their critical voices—the ones that advised them to keep all the money for retirement—were in conflict with their vision of using the inheritance to give back and honor their daughter’s memory. They realized that their vision had to be fulfilled in order for them to accept inheriting the money.

My clients were excited because through visioning, they finally felt that they could see some light coming into their lives. Their inner critic felt that they might run out of money; I tackled this by proposing that they not retire from their jobs, but continue working. This appealed to them. We then decided to take half of the inheritance and invest it towards their retirement. The other half of the inheritance would be placed in a trust. The trust would pay for someone to attend college as long as the funds permitted.

The visualization process enabled my clients to start dealing with their pain, while at the same time securing their financial future and honoring their daughter’s memory. In follow-up meetings, they reported a new lease on life because they could now focus their energy on finding scholarship recipients for the trust they had established, without having to worry about their eventual retirement.

As financial planners, we play a critical role in people’s lives––and should never take that role for granted. We owe it to our clients to use some Disney magic of our own and devise financial plans that help our clients achieve and support their dreams and desires. 

Kim Potgieter

Kim is a qualified financial planner, as well as a registered life planner. Armed with a Clinical and Industrial Psychology degree, Kim has a keen interest in the relationship between psychology and money. She is fascinated in the relationship people have with money, and is passionate about inspiring retirees to live with purpose. Kim believes that to have the most fulfilling retirement possible, you have to see it as an exciting journey filled with opportunities. Her favorite question to ask is, “Are you getting the most life out of your money?”

Contact Kim at www.charteredwealth.co.za.