Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: The Only Context Clients Care About With life-centered financial planning, “life” is the point, the objective, the logical conclusion, and the only context that clients care about. It’s about getting your eyes off the numbers and your ears on their stories. Progress is measured by the impact their money has on [...]
Life-Centered Financial Planning Essentials: Is Your Value Proposition Sustainable? How can you tell if your value proposition is unsustainable? You cannot control the outcome. The value of your offering continues to erode, and the price being paid continues to fall. Your business model asks more and more of you but pays less and less. If [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on July 1, 2020. On a recent trip to Alaska to see my son, a park ranger, I asked him about how officers like him are trained to respond in the most stressful and chaotic situations. In triage training, for example, when a gunshot victim is bleeding out, officers [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on September 1, 2020. With everything going on around the world—a global pandemic, economic uncertainty and social unrest—being able to have meaningful and impactful conversations is more important than ever. Let’s face it: We lack dialogue as a society. We’ve replaced it with a perpetual and driving need to [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on May 1, 2020 Over the last two years I’ve had the privilege of speaking at a gathering for employees of the American Transmission Company (ATC) based in the Milwaukee area. The first time I spoke to one of the groups, the employees that had gathered ranged from age [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on March 1, 2020 I recently was invited to a think tank hosted by Eventide Asset Management, a company in the values investing space. CIO Finny Kuruvilla gave a talk and I was confronted with the question, “Do you want to own companies that you are proud of?” Well, [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on January 2, 2020 This past fall, I had the privilege of speaking once again at my favorite conference in the world—Back2Y—hosted by Paul Armson in Birmingham, England. This conference draws life-focused advisors from around the world seeking to deliver the highest order of value and the highest level [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on November 1, 2019 The self-centered self-delusion. Your clients live in their own world. You live in yours. Is it possible to tune into clients well enough in conversation to break out of the gravitational pull of your planet and make a permanent landing on theirs? Only if you [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on Sepember 1, 2019 As we approached the tee for the eighth hole, a buddy of mine said to me, “Last year I stood on this tee box with Advisor Joe Schmo, and you were up in the fairway ahead of us. He turned to me and asked, ‘You’re [...]
Originally posted in Financial Advisor (fa-mag.com) on July 1, 2019 In my last column, I described how messy a financial advisor’s value proposition is when it’s based on a return on investment and how unsustainable that value offering really is. Trying to guess the future and constantly outperform the market is an activity done out [...]