Deep Dive: Journey Into Learning What Most Successful Financial Advisors Do

I’ve been on this journey for a some time now.  For the past 8 months I’ve been tirelessly interviewing and engaging Financial Planners to understand what is it that they are struggling with.  I’ve spoken with people in eight countries now, in Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Africa, India, U.K., Italy and Netherlands.  It’s been tremendous and I’ve been so grateful for the opportunity to connect with the most altruistic, deeply compassionate bunch of people I’ve ever met.  While it is a job, a business to be a Financial Planner, what I’ve found is that, it’s much much more than that.

What I’ve set out to learn was to understand challenges that FA’s face.  A sample of the questions I’ve asked are:

1. Like what are the headwinds in the industry?
2. What do you struggle with in your day-to-day activities?
3. How do you measure you successes (and failures)?
4. What kind of metrics do you track to know you’re running things smoothly and which direction your practice is going?

Unexpected and Delighted Findings – A lesson from the Most Successful Financial Advisors

The result is that I got lot of responses back.  Some of them the same, some of them the age old, highly technical issues that all Financial Planners face.  And to each their own, each planner has their own way of doing things that are unique to themselves and their practice.  But the one thing I heard the most and also the one that heard throughout all successful planners was somewhat unexpected to me.  It surprised me and at the same time it delighted me to think that this happens to be something that makes them as successful as they are.

Financial Planning as an Art and a Science

Before I think into the specifics, I want to just write about what the most successful Financial Advisors are obsessed with.  In the previous articles on Building Trust with Clients and #1 Tried and Tested Way to Drive Referrals From your Financial Advisory Clients I talked about how Trust is the foundation for the way clients feel engaged.  All successful financial advisors know that building trust, building a real long-lasting life-long client is a ART and a SCIENCE.  It’s this mix of skill, experience and knowledge.

Now, the art part is something that can never be replicated.  That’s why all this talk about Robo-advisors in the market taking share away from human financial advisors is misunderstands what Financial Planning fundamentally is all about.  (Michael Kitces is right on the money about this.)

Physical Fitness, Financial Fitness – An Analogy

Allow me give you an analogy of someone with the goal of wanting to become more fit, more athletic.  You can “google” all you can on this information, on how to lose weight, on how to train.  You may even take that up all you learned and be motivated to do it for a time, but we all know how easy it is to fall back into our previous status quo.  It’s not that we don’t have enough knowledge or information out there on how to do something, what we lack is often the motivation and the conviction to do something.  And that’s just human nature for you; when left to our own devices, we often fall back on our vices.  Not that it is good or bad per se, it is only “bad” insofar that we have set a goal that we couldn’t sustain, try as we might.

You don’t need me to tell you this because if you have any experience as an advisor you’ll realize that that’s where your true value lies.  As a financial coach, you provide not only the technical know-how in various financial matters, but most importantly that you ARE their external and much needed motivator that keeps them ON TRACK.  We stray, and you gently pull them back, course correcting all the way.

The Single Most Important Lesson from Successful Financial Planners

This brings me to what the most successful planners do.  It’s kind of obvious from the analogy that I just gave.  The most successful financial advisors is provide the motivation to their clients.   Specifically, it’s about providing recognition for the things that were done to achieve their goals and in a gentle way. This does a few key and most important things:

1. Build Trust that the advisor has their client’s interest at hand
2. Confirms to the client that the goals set out by the client is well-understood by the advisor
3. Doesn’t make the client feeling like a failure for not following through certain recommendations.

Recognition Changes Everything

Key Takeaway to be a Successful Financial Advisor

Recognition, encouragement are the secrets to how a financial advisor is sustainably successful.  If you recognize the constructive efforts that the Advisor-Client relationship has produced at the outset and throughout the relationship, you can achieve a strong engagement.  It’s a emotional state.