Your Filter

Aug 9, 2019

Digital Noise Filter

Turning the noise into value.

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Are You Building On Purpose?

The first six micro-modules of Infinite Advisor Alpha allow you to set your unique foundation for trust so you can promise your behavior and expect reciprocal actions… which means you only work with trusted partners… which means you have started to design your digital noise filter. (Discover More About Micro-Value Development)

Based on the ideal clients you want to work with, the foundational categories of your relevant value (for which they will gladly pay) are at your fingertips.

Your Filter will build the foundation and set the standards for getting and keeping ideal clients…

  • Earning trust
  • Creating meaningful touch points
  • Promising behavior
  • Making your competency, character, and concern tangible.

Do You Have A Filter?

The first six modules create the foundation for the design of your unique digital noise filter.

Module seven empowers you to use the word NO as a strategy… your filter in action.

Modules 8-12 will empower you to add to your filter by…  defining your process, creating an omnipresent user experience – UX, (which is rapidly replacing the old fashioned client experience – CX) Defining topics of meaningful engagement, designing questions that matter, and gathering feedback required to remain relevant.

Are You Where You Want To Be?

  • Never be complacent.
  • Design a simple model that people can understand.
  • Learn how to ask distinctive questions.
  • Gather feedback that matters.

“Where you want to be” is the state of perpetual relevance…a never ending journey.

The only way to get there (where you want to be) is to design your unique filter.

This is the journey that will help you design your unique filter… to remain relevant in a robo-world.

The journey to perpetual relevance is never-ending.

The journey to your infinite relevance begins with a single step…

The journey to perpetual advisor relevance begins with Purpose… and it never ends,

Enjoy your journey.

 

 

Align Your Purpose With Your Fees

Aug 2, 2019

Justify Your Fees

 

 

 

 

Alignment of Fees with Purpose

 

For advisors to survive in a robo-world they must be granted the autonomy to build their own unique compensation structure that demonstrates tangibly, their alignment with the success of the investor-client.

It won’t happen from the top-down… the hierarchical model that separates shareholder-value from stakeholder well-being is deeply ingrained into the landscape of financial services… for a long time to come.

So advisors must become empowered to set their fees at a level commensurate to the quality of their services… to do that, they must define their unique value for digital delivery, consumption, and refinement… in other words, their advisor value must become tangible for the justification of their client-centered fee structure.

Introspection and self-value discovery are required to justify the fee structure of the advisor in the future of financial services.

The ability to design this self-aware model must become available for easy access 24/7. (That’s what we have done… FYI)

Advisors who were trained to sell, and have no experience with service driven incentives, will struggle with the concept of this new compensation ideology. Transparency will illuminate the path for the advisor in the future… so he or she can see exactly what must take place to structure his or her unique compensation package… to be in complete alignment with the good of the client.

The micro-learning modules of Infinite Advisor Alpha can help you shine a spotlight on your value… to justify your fee structure… so you can survive and thrive in a robo-world.

 

Good Stuff Curated

Jul 24, 2019

The Good Stuff

 

This article says so many things about the state of the  financial services industry… great read.

Curated Content Worth Reading

The Markings of a True Destination RIA
The decisions we make over the next five years will radically shape our ability to compete, and even survive.

The ball doesn’t lie, and neither does the math. As an industry, our client
acquisition rate has slowed from 7.1 percent in 2014 to 5.8 percent in 2016, asset
growth has dropped from 10.6 percent in 2014 to 8.9 percent in 2016, and revenue
growth has deteriorated from 14.4 percent to 6.6 percent over the same period,
according to the 2016 FA Insight Study of Advisory Firms by TD Ameritrade.
To add insult to injury, in a recent blog titled “The Unhappiest Successful Advisors:
Accidental Business Owners,” Michael Kitces called firms with $100 million to
$300 million of assets under management “accidental business owners.” He said,
“once you grow past about $100 million of AUM, you don’t make any more money
until you reach $1 billion.” This, he said, is because of the level of reinvestment in
people and technology required to account for your firm’s growing pains. All of this
reminds me of my high school basketball coach, who told us at the start of the
season, “Not only are you guys really un-athletic, but you have no sense of how to
play the game.”

Meanwhile, Tim Buckley, the new CEO of Vanguard says our jobs as advisors are at
risk as the firm’s robo advice platform ticks above $100 billion in assets. At the
same time, Morgan Stanley’s wealth unit just hit record revenues for the fourth
quarter of 2017. The report of the wirehouses’ death has been greatly exaggerated.
It certainly feels like an us-against-them climate in financial services. On one side,
the upstart entrepreneurs who chart their own course and wear many hats, all
while building a business that provides for principals and team members. On the
other side are industry Goliaths with the resources to out-scale, out-advertise, and
out-tech most of us. According to Cerulli’s U.S. RIA Marketplace 2017 study, the
687 firms with more than $1 billion in AUM oversee 59 percent of all assets in the
registered investment advisor channel. The 3,605 RIAs in the $100 million to $500
million AUM range, on the other hand, have 19.8 percent of RIA assets. The larger
destination firms have figured out scale and repeatable growth, and it’s in the
numbers.

The battle lines have been drawn. The decisions we make over the next five years
will radically shape our ability to compete and, for many, survive.
The good news is many technology vendors, platform providers, strategic
acquirers, and other resources can help firms build a destination firm that will
attract clients, recruit next-generation talent, build scale, and develop resources to
facilitate regional acquisitions.

Technology: A destination firm needs a digitally integrated operating system for
its middle and back offices, one that lets advisors and staff focus on clients 80
percent of the time. The right tech is crucial to attract next generation clients and
advisors. While Gen Xers aren’t digital natives, we’re close. We expect a digital
experience with on-demand access to our financial lives untethered by geography
and time. With the proliferation of digital tools at our fingertips, this level of
services is table stakes today.

Differentiation: Draw a 20-mile radius around your office and review the
websites of your competition. You’ll find interchangeable marketing points like
“independent,” “fiduciary,” “CFP,” “life planning,” “open architecture,” “trust,”
“discipline,” or “100 years of experience.” You get the idea. We all look the same to
the outside world, and a potential client or recruit will see your firm the same way.
The client experience must go well beyond a math exercise and a retirement
number with a few goals. They can get this kind of low-touch service cheaper at any
given robo. In addition to the traditional financial planning, we need to present
experience at the confluence of a client’s personal values and their financial
resources influenced by behavior finance. This discipline, rightfully, is proving
critical to the success of clients living their best financial lives.

Growth: Our industry relies on referrals to grow. Joe Duran, CEO of United
Capital, reminds advisors that once we exhaust our sphere of influence, our growth
plateaus. Attracting next-generation talent or acquisitions requires a systematic
growth program. We’ll need a cohesive, digital marketing and branding strategy
that ties a stand-out client experience to the firm culture. For mature businesses,
the average age of the client skews to the age of the principals. Without a clear path
to attract next-generation advisors to backfill the aging client base, established
firms tend to follow the life cycle of their clients, with the unintended consequence
of sunsetting the firms’ value.

Training, Coaching and Business Management: I see firms doing really
smart things on the staff side of the equation. They cross-train to mitigate personal
dependencies in operational functions, build and maintain operating manuals, and
hire professional operators to manage the middle and back offices. They wisely
consult with custodians or other third-party firms on best practices. However, it’s
rare to find firms improving their client experience with the same rigor. To what
end is the benefit of a scalable operation when most advisors reach capacity at 150
households or so? The answer isn’t to find clones of ourselves, but to foster a
digitally driven client experience that wraps advisors in a system where there are
degrees of consistencies throughout the client journey. We all cannot be world class
at everything and the right resources can bolster blind spots.

Equity Value: Roll-ups and strategic acquirers offer sellers the option to take a
portion of the valuation in equity. Sellers who opt for equity in a strategic acquirer
or roll-up fundamentally believe the value of the buying firm will “perform” better
than the equity in their business over a period. If an internal succession plan or an
acquisition strategy is in the works, you must make the same case. If a nextgeneration
advisor, who probably will need to take a personal loan to fund the
transaction and sees flat growth with limited infrastructure or scale, he may not be
willing to take the risk as a buyer. It is reported that owners prefer an internal
succession plan to an outside buyer, but we’re asking a lot of employees to now
start acting like entrepreneurs. Creating a destination firm will ensure enterprise
value and make the underlying equity worth owning and betting on. The RIA
industry faces challenges from well-funded and well-known brands that are used to
serving our community. As a principal of a nationally branded, multi-office RIA
with more than $21 billion of AUM, we realize every day that we must disrupt
ourselves to remain relevant or someone else certainly will. Disruptive technologies
redefine the rules of what it means to be a consumer, and financial services is not
getting off the hook. The next decade will test the entrepreneurial grit of the RIA
industry, and I really like our chances.
Get your firm destination-ready.

Matt Brinker is the head of national partner development at United Capital.
Follow him at @mkbrinker. 

Designations Should Mean Something…

Jul 15, 2019

Define Your Value

...or the industry will do it for you

What do the letters that follow your name really mean to your clients?

You can NOT rely on industry generated campaigns to differentiate your value. You must become empowered to do this yourself. If you are lacking the confidence to define exactly what makes you so special, we have something to help you boost your confidence… enough to help you define your authentic relevant value…make it tangible for digital consumption… and maximize your relevance for years to come. If you have a minute, you have time to get started right now.

You won’t survive if you let this industry define your differentiation.

It’s nobody’s business but yours.

Curated Article

CFP Board’s new ad campaign to target client emotional well-being
By Kenneth Corbin
Published June 29 2018

The CFP Board is gearing up to launch a new phase of its marketing campaign, this time focusing on the emotional well-being of clients.

In the fall, the board plans to release a new wave of advertisements across multiple media platforms to tout the CFP designation as the gold standard of financial advice. The campaign builds on market research conducted on consumer sentiment of the planning profession.

In focus groups, consumers who worked with a planner reported feeling more “confident, optimistic, secure and at ease,” according to Kevin Keller, the CFP Board’s CEO.

“That is the opposite of the worry and stress that were cited by people who did not have a financial plan,” Keller said in an online presentation outlining the board’s business objectives.

“We’re finding that people realize they need help with financial planning, and they envision specific emotional benefits from doing so. That is quite powerful,” Keller said.

The CFP Board credits its advertising and public relations campaign with boosting awareness of the financial planning profession and the CFP credential.

The new campaign is scheduled to go into production this summer. It will hit airwaves, print media and online publications after Labor Day.

The Let’s Make a Plan campaign, launched in April 2011, has not been without controversy. Some CFPs have grumbled about funding the effort through a hike in their certificant fees.

To date, the board has spent $73 million on the campaign, which now carries a nearly $12 million annual budget.

That “might seem like a lot to most people, but in the world of advertising it’s just a drop in the bucket,” said Susan John, the chairwoman-elect of the CFP Board’s board of directors, during the online presentation.

The CFP Board credits its advertising and public relations campaign with boosting awareness of the financial planning profession and the CFP credential.

The board is also expanding its diversity initiative beyond the gender imbalance in the planning field to focus on racial and ethnic minorities.

Building on its Women’s Initiative, the CFP Board is now looking to promote the profession to other underrepresented groups, with a diversity summit scheduled in October in New York, according to John.

The board is also touting its new code of ethics and standards of conduct. The new code will take effect October 2019.It will require advisors to act as fiduciaries at all times, a stipulation that has met with some resistance among CFPs, many of whom are brokers.

“I would respectfully disagree that it’s going to be that hard for advisors to comply with the standard of putting your client’s best interest first any time you’re delivering financial advice,” said Richard Salmen, the chairman of the CFP Board’s board of directors, during the presentation.

Salmen rejects the notion that some CFPs will let their certification lapse as a result of the always-on fiduciary requirement. Instead, he argues there is emerging awareness about fiduciary responsibilities among investors spurred on by the highly publicized debate over the Department of Labor’s now-defunct fiduciary rule. He says he is frequently asked whether he is a fiduciary or CFP by prospective clients.

Clients ask whether their advisors are obligated to act as fiduciaries all the time, both Salmen and John say. They are also looking for holistic planning services more frequently, rather than just periodic investment advice.

“There are consumers that are now aware enough and educated enough to know what to ask for,” Salmen said. “And that, to me, is going to drive the future marketplace for financial planning advice.”

1 Comment

  • Posted by Cholly
    Tuesday, July 03 2018 at 11:21 AM
    The CFP Board is completely out of touch with it’s certificate holders. The CFP rakes in nearly $30M annually and in return the certificate holders get a tattoo artist inking a bullseye on our foreheads. I counsel young advisors not to pursue the CFP designation. I may soon surrender my credentials.

 

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