Once upon a time, before you learned to be more objective, you thought you were important and that people around you were important. Chances are you asked questions that made people uncomfortable. To protect you from a life of narcisstic, emotional waywardness, you were sent to school to learn how to be useful.
You learned you aren’t important.
Few financial planners enjoy the services of a full team of social scientists to create a great value proposition for their services. So what do you have to do to create one by yourself?
Most financial planners sell advice. Because people are willing to pay for it. It’s as simple as that.
This system worked in the old world. Because there was no alternative.
Fortunately, we now live in the age of DIY.
Do It Yourself.
Fortunately, because now, people have the (free) online tools to create their own, new financial planning experience. Which ignites innovation in our profession.
Is this a threat for your financial planning business? Yes, it can be.
Yet, there is an alternative.
When you enter a poker room usually there are many different choices of tables that you can sit down at. Each table has different stakes, different players and different dynamics that change as the players come and go, and as players get excited, upset or tired.
In poker, people spend a lot of time learning the best strategy to play once you’re sitting down at a table. It’s like the financial planning business. Financial plannners spend a lot of time to get better when they’re in the business.
They think the game starts when they are at the job.
They think the game starts when sitting at the poker-table.
But does it?
What if financial planning could be done fully digital? No planner needed.
Is this the scenario we are heading towards?
What is professionalism?
Professionalism is fitting in.
Fitting in the corporate culture of targets, AUM and commissions. Fitting in the accepted belief that more is better. Fitting in to not challenge the status quo in the financial services industry.
Imagine that Steve Jobs was a professional. Would there be an iPhone?
There are three types of financial planning businesses.
All three have its own style, it’s own structures and measurements and it’s own strategies.
The question is: are you in the type of financial planning business you really want to be in?
Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay
Do you believe that your clients act on your financial plan?
Then imagine Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, explaining how he was able to accomplish that feat.
Suppose he had explained he was just walking around one day when he happened to find himself at the top of the tallest mountain in the world.
Ridiculous of course. But no more ridiculous than your thinking that your client will stick to your financial plan while you are not working to make it happen.
Why consider to serve another niche?
There are a million and one financial planners, advisors, wealth managers or online solutions on the market. The market is so saturated, so why bother launching yet another one?
Before answering this question, let’s go back in time. Where we lived in a world with limited choices and big companies could afford to cast the net wide across the masses. No depth required.
Do you think this tactic works now that the masses have the power to choose? Where people have the choice to visit your competitor with two swipes? The market of everyone has disappeared and that’s scary for big companies.
Some things are so common, that you think it’s true without even thinking it might not be. The Beatles sang “Money Can’t Buy Me Love”. And that’s true, probably.
Everybody says “Money Can’t Buy Happiness”. And that’s true, probably.
But what if there is scientifical evidence that money CAN buy you happiness?
