Myth: Busted. I’ll never think the same way again. What myth, you ask? The myth that all clients want their planning to be simpler and less complicated. Ah, if only life could be as simple as it once was.

We can all agree that without a flow of qualified prospects, an advisor isn’t able to do all that much advising. We need prospects and we need them to become clients in order to build a healthy business that serves people in their financial planning needs. But I think it’s worth considering whether all prospects are created equal. Because if they’re not all the same, then should we consider treating them differently from one another? I’m not just talking about A, B, and C clients either. There’s something else going on that we really should pay attention to.

How do we perfectly align what we do for our clients with what they say we do for them? If we’re really honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what we think about ourselves rarely matches what other people think about us. Knowing that, how do we ensure that our value proposition, the core thing that we think about ourselves, is heard by others in the same way we see it? 

In the pursuit of better understanding how money really works, and probably more importantly, how people interact with and handle money, an advisor eventually comes face-to-face with the study of behavioral finance. That is, the formal study of how we really make decisions and why we make them. It’s fascinating.

In an era when people are questioning whether they even need a financial advisor, when automated investing services threaten to undermine the advisory business, and easy gains have lulled people to sleep, you and I will have stress test moments to prove ourselves – and our value – to our clients. How will we do? More specifically, how will YOU do?

When we consider what the advisory business actually is, a lot of thoughts come to mind. You have yours and I have mine. And while it’s unlikely to get two people to come to a perfect agreement on just about anything, I’d like to suggest that our business is primarily focused on helping our clients achieve their objectives. Simple enough, right? So, if that’s fundamentally true, why does it often seem so complicated to run a successful advisory business?

Oh, the stories we tell ourselves. How quickly and easily we fall prey to our own blind spots when we consider our business and how we intend to manage it.

In Q2 Scott had simple but impactful messaging in his Advisor-to-Advisor webinars…Utilize and maximize the resources you have and make it more profitable for your practice. Scott quoted Tony Robbins: “It’s not about your resources, it’s about your ‘resourcefulness’”! Scott also tapped into one of his favorite books by Jay Abraham on this same topic: “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got”! Big take away – “mine” your data!

There are so many things to do, so many activities to perform, so many actions to take to build your business. But are you considering how you should think about your business? Are you putting in the required thinking time in order to hone your strategic vision? It’s the old cautionary tale of a person putting in superhuman effort to climb a great mountain only to discover that he’d climbed the wrong mountain. Are you climbing the right mountain right now?

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