The New Advisor for Life: Become the Indispensable Financial Advisor to Affluent Families

PART I

THE STATE OF THE ADVICE INDUSTRY AND YOUR OPPORTUNITIES

Introduction

When I wrote the introduction to the first edition of this book, which was published in 2007, I highlighted several trends that were emerging at the time and asked financial advisors to consider the way those trends were impacting not only their practices, but also their lives. Those trends are still emerging—but boy, have they been affected by the events that followed about a year after the book hit store shelves. The questions I raised then seem even more important now.

The first trend I identified was the challenge to prove the value of advice, especially to the baby-boom generation (the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964). In the early years of what we now recognize as the financial services industry, most baby boomers were still very young; if they had any awareness of brokers or advisors at all, they most likely concluded that such people were employed only by the very wealthy. Over time, as these boomers began accumulating significant assets, they did not seek out the service of an advisor, even though their financial situation called for one. Such professionals are only interested in the very, very rich—or so the boomers believed.

You may remember those television commercials from the early 1980s, in which a couple of guys are sitting in a restaurant or at a sporting event talking, and one of them utters: My broker is E.F. Hutton, and E.F. Hutton says . . . Everyone else in the immediate vicinity stops speaking; there is dead silence as people hope to get some free advice from someone wealthy enough to employ his own broker.

That was undoubtedly a compelling image, and it helped establish the notion that personalized financial advice is a service available only to a chosen few. The far larger group of moderately affluent or even sort of wealthy had to look for guidance elsewhere, and in time there was no shortage of places for them to find it. When commissions were deregulated on May Day 1975, several new companies set up shop and reached out to smaller investors—those who believed they didn’t have enough money to garner the attention of a full-service financial advisor—and over time and with very aggressive, very imaginative, and very successful marketing, they became household names: Charles Schwab. Fidelity Investments. The Vanguard Group. These companies have shown themselves to be brilliant at delivering financial services to the broad marketplace, and each delivered value and innovation. Schwab pioneered the use of a single platform to hold securities and mutual funds from multiple companies. Fidelity became one of the largest providers of actively managed mutual funds and the world’s largest provider of retirement plans. Vanguard attracted a substantial following by offering low-cost index (passively managed) mutual funds.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious that these firms found precisely the right moment to deliver their message. Less than a year before the May Day deregulation, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which was the government’s response to the bear market of 1974. Among many other innovations, the ERISA regulations established the Individual Retirement Account (IRA), which was a way for employees not covered by traditional pension plans to invest money and defer taxes on gains until they began withdrawing funds in retirement.

That groundbreaking legislation would trigger a seismic shift in the way Americans began thinking about saving and investing—especially as it was followed just a few years later by the establishment of the 401(k) plan. For a number of reasons, workers stopped looking to their employer to fund their retirement and took that responsibility on themselves. Numbers tell the story: In 1980, 60 percent of Americans were covered by a traditional pension plan; by 2006, that figure had fallen to just 8 percent. Some 70 percent of workers were enrolled in a 401(k) plan, and 22 percent were covered by a combination of defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans. That’s a remarkable shift in just 30 years!

Perhaps because of their Depression-era childhoods, relatively few members of the so-called Silent Generation—that is, the baby boomers’ parents—had invested in the stock market, but an overwhelming majority of their children were regular investors and some managed to accumulate significant wealth, often through a company-sponsored 401(k). Yet most of them had never consulted a full-service financial advisor, because they still clung to the outdated image of personalized service as something accessible only to the very wealthy—an image that should have served as a warning sign to the wirehouses even before the economic catastrophe of 2008. And with the advent of discount brokers, many baby boomers became do-it-yourselfers, giving little or no thought to hiring a professional financial advisor.

This situation has also created a dilemma for individual advisors. Many of them have used technology in innovative ways to customize online offerings and leverage their knowledge and guidance. There are challenges to delivering personal service to a mass audience, but a number of firms have made great progress in delivering choice, service, guidance, and value.

On a smaller scale, many individual advisors opted to follow the path of constantly seeking out more and more clients. As their client base grew, the time they had to devote to each client shrunk and the quality of the relationship deteriorated—or they ended up working far more hours than they’d ever intended. Somewhere in that mix, someone was dissatisfied—and dissatisfaction inevitably results in change. It’s only a matter of time.

In the earlier edition, I questioned whether the financial services industry would follow the same road as the American automobile industry (a comparison that seems a bit eerie, given the events of the past few years). When the latter industry was in its infancy, quality was of the utmost importance because, at that time, cars were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Affluent customers aren’t going to accept second-rate products or services, especially if they don’t believe they truly need what is being marketed to them.

There was a time when the great U.S. automakers controlled every aspect of production; the Ford Motor Company, for instance, was a substantial miner and smelter of iron ore. However, once the idea of owning a vehicle caught the public’s imagination, the quality of many American automobiles began to slip. Automakers began using inferior materials to widen their profit margin, and by the 1960s had even embarked upon a strategy of planned obsolescence—building cars that weren’t meant to last! Detroit somehow convinced itself that people would buy whatever it was selling—good, bad, or otherwise—and for a time, they were right. In the industry’s golden era, demand so outstripped supply that people would wait months for a car. General Motors became the largest private-sector employer in the world and was the first public company to pay more than $1 billion a year in taxes. Many other automakers were almost as big, and the market was theirs . . . to lose. And lose it they did.

In the early 1970s, the Arab oil embargo highlighted the risks associated with America’s dependence on foreign oil. Service stations ran out of gas, customers had to wait in long lines for the ones that were operational, and Americans were crying out for more fuel-efficient vehicles. The automobile industry initially turned a deaf ear to the outcry and continued to produce large, expensive gas-guzzling cars loved by a declining percentage of the American auto-buying public. Meanwhile, a group of German and Japanese carmakers entered the fray, with different models with a value bent. Despite innovations and improvements in later years, Detroit never returned to the industrial prominence it enjoyed in the 1940s and 1950s. By 2009 GM was no longer the world’s number one automaker—Toyota took the crown and GM was struggling to survive.

What are the lessons to be learned by full-service financial advice firms from the experiences of the automotive industry, as humbled by the boomers? And is it too late? Those were questions I asked in 2007. If most Americans had answered the latter question in the final months of 2008 or the early months of 2009, many would have said, Stay alert! Financial services firms, like automobile manufacturers, have to focus on the end experience—choice, value, service—and never stop working to maintain trust.

Many people of all income and asset levels saw their portfolios hit hard by the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed (the effects of which are still being felt as I write this). Venerable institutions, from internationally recognized Wall Street firms to local and regional banks in cities and towns across the country, have closed their doors or merged with former rivals as a way to stay in business. The phrase ‘too big to fail’ which has entered the national lexicon, was coined to describe financial institutions (and, eventually, two of the remaining Big Three automakers) that were rescued by the federal government because, it was believed, their collapse would be even more costly than the billions of dollars in taxpayer money required to keep them in operation.

The dire circumstances of what has come to be called the Great Recession have engendered a lot of understandable pessimism, but it has also underscored a trend that has been evident in every economic downturn in recent decades: Demand for financial advice goes up when the market (and the economy) goes down. In the 1990s, the longest bull market in American history, the financial planning profession enjoyed tremendous growth; even so, many of the people who made a lot of money during that decade did not engage the services of an advisor for the simple reason that they didn’t think they needed one: Their portfolio was doing just fine on its own. After the Tech Wreck of 2000 and 2001 caused the market to plummet, many people finally sought out professional assistance in managing their money. It was a hard lesson, but one that proved the value of professional financial guidance.

In the pages that follow, I will attempt to help you consider the issues facing our industry and to evaluate choices as they apply to you and your practice, by helping you clarify the value you bring to clients and differentiate yourself within the crowded financial-services marketplace. Along the way, I will also suggest ways in which you can help your clients understand what exactly you can (and can’t) do for them, and how you can make sure that you consistently deliver high-quality performance to each of your clients—without losing yourself or ignoring your own needs and goals in the process.

The other emerging trend I highlighted in the earlier edition centers on the baby boomer market. In 2007, the oldest members of this generation—those born in the years immediately following World War II—began to reach the age at which they could take early retirement. The wealth-accumulation phase of their financial lives was drawing to a close, and the wealth-distribution phase was about to begin in earnest. The assets these people had amassed during their working years would have to see them through another 15 or 20 years, according to current life expectancy guidelines. Therein lay a challenge: These boomers had spent on average 40 years accumulating assets, and now those assets had to last on average another 20 years—and many of their portfolios have recently sustained heavy losses.

The advisor-client relationship will change as the client’s life circumstances change. Is he or she prepared for that transformation? Are you? Later chapters in this book detail the issues that both of you will face and ways in which you can discuss and address them.

However, in this edition of Advisor for Life I am moving beyond the scope of the original book, which focused primarily on the baby boomers, and am including information that I hope will prove helpful as you consider the affluent within the next generation of Americans, those known as Generations X and Y. Taken together, these two groups represent some 125 million Americans, and the oldest among them will turn 45 this year—a pivotal age at which many people finally start getting serious about saving for retirement. This market has not been a central focus of the financial services industry.

Just as the baby boomers differ dramatically from their Silent Generation parents with regard to attitudes about saving and investing, Generations X and Y are very different from baby boomers. Despite their relative youth, they tend to be much more conservative investors than the generation that precedes them and many even tend to identify themselves as savers rather than investors.

Financial security in retirement is a key concern of these younger Americans, particularly Generation X, even if retirement still seems distant for many of them. A 2008 study by the American Education Savings Council and the American Association of Retired Persons found that 70 percent of Generation X and 51 percent of Generation Y have given some thought to retirement. The figures are even higher for those who are covered by a retirement plan at work, suggesting that participation in a plan fosters long-term thinking about retirement goals. Although the study found that 21 percent of the Generation X respondents expect to retire in their 70s, compared to just 13 percent of Generation Y, most participants said they expect to retire in their 60s, just like the Baby Boomers.

However, the generations diverge when it comes to funding that retirement. Unlike the Boomers, who expected Social Security to be a primary source of retirement income, most Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers expect to pay for their golden years with the proceeds of their investments—defined-contribution plans, non-work-related investment accounts, and savings accounts. Only 7 percent said they expect to rely on Social Security as a primary source of income in retirement.

The financial-planning relationship with Generations X and Y tends to be much more collaborative than with Baby Boomers. But in order to work effectively with this market, you must first understand them. Many young Americans hold contradictory beliefs about the world and their place in it. On the one hand, their expectations are very high with regard to jobs, money, material possessions, and more. On the other hand, they are often skeptical about the role of government, corporate America, and the news media. In short, they expect a lot from institutions in which they are not fully confident. That attitude can affect their relationship with a financial advisor—but it doesn’t have to. I will explain more about building trust in later chapters.

Much has been written in the past couple of years about how the economic crisis triggered by the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market has forever altered the financial landscape. And yet individuals must press on. They still need to manage their finances, save money, and plan for retirement. Even as they acknowledge that they need help with these tasks, they may be skeptical—even suspicious—of your ability to assist them. Why should I trust you? they may ask. What sets you apart from other advisors? This book will help you answer those questions and show you how to build the advisory practice of your—and your clients’—dreams.

CHAPTER 1

The Value of Advice

WHICH ADVICE IS MOST VALUED BY AFFLUENT HOUSEHOLDS—AND WHAT SHOULD IT COST?

What services are today’s clients willing to pay you to provide?

What can you offer—and what do you want to offer?

What five words can help guide you to provide a consistent offering of services valued by affluent clients?

If other service professions can be a guide to financial advisors, they reveal that the most reliable long-term profits can be earned from those services that cannot be easily delivered via non-human means, such as over the telephone or via the Web.

There is an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for those advisors willing to engage those who need long-term financial help. The most lucrative segment of the industry will remain for those advisors who can deliver what clients will pay for—real advice for real issues. That advice will require you to determine for each client household its greatest:

Needs—the requirements of daily living, including household income.

Concerns—issues that worry a household based on current conditions, such as the care of an aging parent.

Fears—potential problems, such as the chances of contracting a major illness or being confined to a nursing home.

Risks—vulnerabilities—financial, emotional, or otherwise.

Goals—what people hope to accomplish.

Dreams—the things people hope to do, but typically do not as circumstances catch up to them and realities or lack of motivation outweigh the potential.

Why the Affluent Want You

Now save yourself a lot of time. Here’s a simple exercise to determine if you have the right stuff to be an Advisor for Life:

Think about your own life and family. What do you need to live on right now? What level of income is required by your current lifestyle? If you are a successful advisor, you earn a six figure annual paycheck—or more. So what is that annual number? Now ask yourself: What would you do if your income fell by 50 percent this year? Where would you turn? Who would you ask for advice?

Consider that the loss of a high percentage of current income is the precise concern of many affluent households. According to Cultivating the Middle-Class Millionaire by Russ Alan Prince and David A. Geracioti (Wealth Management Press, 2005), 88.6 percent of millionaires surveyed are very concerned about losing their wealth. A significant financial reversal is uppermost in the minds of those who have achieved financial success—the fear of losing is what drives so much of what we in the advice industry call risk tolerance. Translate that into your life.

What would you do? Initially you might want some sympathy but sooner or later you’d want someone to give you advice about what to do—lay out your options, help you decide how to adjust to the situation.

The Acid Test—Can You Show True Concern?

The point of exploring this scenario is to see the client’s side of financial advice and financial advisors. The emotions that I trust ran through you as you contemplated the income loss are the same as those surging through your clients and prospects. Here’s the true test—can you summon empathy for others? Can you be truly concerned for your clients as they confront life’s real challenges? This is the primary test of the Advisor for Life.

The reason I earlier urged you to save yourself a lot of time is that if you do not feel concern for your clients, you will not be happy (or successful) as an Advisor for Life.

You can’t fake concern. (Warning—you haven’t heard the last from me on this topic.) As this book progresses, I will continue to challenge your ability to accept your clients, probe for their concerns and fears, and deliver a consistently superior and surprising level of service. This will maintain your value no matter the markets and is the essence of the Advisor for Life.

The Four Commandments

My longtime colleague, Don Berryman, has a marvelous way of phrasing important principles so that they become impossible to forget. An old branch-manager friend of Don’s summarized the role of the financial advisor in four words that are appropriate for us to use now to frame the role of the Advisor for Life:

1. Be available

2. Be concerned

3. Be informed

4. Have an opinion

These four simple but powerful commands capture the meaning of Advisor for Life. While you may intuitively appreciate their importance, here is my perspective.

Be Available

To be truly available to your clients you must be ready to give your time—your most valuable resource. The same is true of how you choose to spend your time away from your role as a financial advisor. To be available to your family—spouse, parents, growing children—is to give the most precious gift you can provide. Busy and successful people constantly lament the shortage of time, yet most don’t take the time to determine where their time is best and most valuably spent. A consistent complaint of many millionaire households is that their advisors are not proactive and are difficult to get ahold of. They don’t freely offer their time. They do not make contact on the client’s terms instead of their own.

In the current economic climate, making yourself available is more important than ever. According to the 2010 Phoenix Wealth Management survey, the number of high-net-worth consumers saying they regularly seek professional finacial advice increased from 73 percent in 2009 to 79 percent in 2010—close to the annual survey’s all-time high of 82 percent, which was recorded in 2003 (at the end of the post-9/11 and tech-wreck bear markets). The survey also found a notable rise in the use of written financial plans—44 percent in 2010, up from 39 percent one year earlier. The 2010 figure was the highest recorded in the survey’s history.

Most advisors to millionaire households get pretty good reviews from their clients—successful people don’t tend to suffer poor service from anyone for very long. But surveys indicate a consistent 20 percent of clients working with a primary advisor are actively looking for a new one or thinking about doing so. Given the rich supply of millionaire households in the United States today—roughly eight million—that is a hefty list of prospects for advisors willing to provide better service!

The opportunity for prospecting millionaire clients by being available—better proactive service—is even greater than indicated by the numbers above. The percentage of millionaire households using a primary advisor is only about 70 percent—a number that has been consistently falling as the bull market helped buoy the confidence of investors. Digging farther into the data reveals that many of these self-directed households are interested in finding a primary advisor. Data from a recent survey found that of the respondents who reported keeping the bulk of their assets with a well-known discount commission firm, 38 percent of those households are interested in finding a primary financial advisor. What gives?

Change Brings Opportunity

The self-directed household population draws heavily from two groups—both of which represent opportunity for the Advisor for Life. First, the baby boomer demographic is rife with self-directeds because the generation has grown up with more information and confidence managing its own financial affairs, which to this point have consisted largely of investments. But now boomers are confronting more complex needs. Estate planning, disability, parental care—each require knowledge of legal structures, trusts, taxation, insurance, and other issues that are beyond the realm of simple investing. When these issues unveil themselves even the most confident investors are suddenly in uncharted waters—and they generally don’t like it. Figure 1.1 is a chart I’ll refer to several times in this book that can help provide perspective (and life preservers) for these investors.

Figure 1.1 The Advisor for Lifecycle

Source: The Gresham Company, LLC. www.greshamcompany.com.

The Lifecycle shows both the phase of client-household financial development and the advisor’s role in each phase. Note that the early stages of investing create little or no opportunity for the advisor to add value—indicating where the financial advice marketplace has evolved to support the self-directed client. As discussed in the Introduction, within the relative safe haven of a 401(k) plan, a client can select investments and build a diversified portfolio—a Phase II strategy. In the late 1980s, the innovation of managed-account programs was to help investors who owned a grab bag of individual stocks, bonds, and funds to build a managed solution with structure and purpose. Now that advantage has been taken away and provided to the average defined-contribution-plan investor. The opportunity for the Advisor for Life to make an impact has been moved to Phases III and IV.

The others who are ready to accept the value of the Advisor for Life are those households unable to navigate the financial markets since the bull market lost its steam. For them, the thrill of making their own decisions has worn off through the unexpected shock of the Tech Wreck in 2000 and 2001, or even more likely, the flat market of 2005—the second flattest in modern-market history. Down markets followed by flat markets are especially frustrating because nothing good seems to be happening while investors are hoping to make up for earlier losses.

The final aspect of availability is the numeric reality of time. A survey of top advisors examined their allocation of time among a number of activities. And while administration and business processing garnered much of the advisors’ attention, the largest segment was devoted to client service. I believe client service to be the most important and therefore the most lucrative activity for top advisors, so the ranking is appropriate. But consider the numbers—39 percent of top advisors’ time is allocated to client service. Is it enough? (See Figure 1.2)

Figure 1.2 Where Advisors Spend Their Time

Source: Advisor Impact.

Let’s now test the time commitment to affluent clients and see if advisors are allowing enough of it to provide the needed service(s). A 50-hour work week over 48 weeks a year would give 2,400 working hours per year.

Now consider the amount of time required to provide effective service to a millionaire household. From industry surveys, we know that a large percentage of millionaire households think monthly contact with their primary advisor provides the right balance for service.

Take it a step further. What does the total year of service comprise? Is each contact an hour? What about the more complex work? What about reviews? Preparation? If the time commitment to your affluent clients is one hour a month, that’s 12 hours. If you devote two hours per month, that’s 24 hours each year. For the sake of this discussion, call it 20 hours. Based on a 39 percent slice of your 2,400 hour year, you can provide adequate service to just 47 households—more only if you reduce the service time.

You probably have more than 47 clients (the average Series 7 registered rep has more than 500 accounts, according to SIFMA), and you don’t want to limit yourself to that number. What’s the result? Some clients get more of your time than others. That’s what’s happening across the industry. Millionaire clients aren’t going to tolerate shoddy service, but neither do most advisors intend to provide less-than-expected results. The problem is mathematical—there is only so much time in the day and only so many days in the year. The amount of time we have is finite, yet client concerns are infinite. The major complaints about service are based on the pure reality that few advisors have adequate time to spend with clients. Based on other commitments and the structure of their responsibilities, most advisors don’t spend the time they should with clients.

There are two observations here—first, that much of this book is dedicated to helping you determine and deliver the most-valued services in limited time. Second, we will examine ways to recapture time—primarily by eliminating from your routine those services that can be provided by others or even eliminated. A great motivator and coach, UCLA’s John Wooden, was fond of saying, Don’t let something you do well get in the way of something you do great. Your time is precious—use it for what no one else can do and for which you will reap the greatest reward.

We’ll revisit availability later on, including service strategies that reflect client needs and concerns—especially in the context of the all-important communication opportunity, the client review.

Be Concerned

Concern is what top professionals show their best clients and it pays dividends for them. They do not provide a superficial worry. Instead they offer real empathy for their clients’ situations. Some may call this the human factor or the personal touch. At the end of the day it’s about simple honest caring.

Consider this scenario. How successful would any physician be without having at some level a genuine interest in taking care of people? The same could be said for a teacher who didn’t honestly love children. The difference between accomplished professionals and those who spend a lifetime doing ordinary work for ordinary pay is that the very best care about their profession and their clients, patients, or students. The difference between an average restaurant and a fabulous one is the chef’s passion to put art on a plate and an unmatched service commitment from the maitre d’. If you aspire to these levels your concern for clients will be noticeable, appreciated, and best of all reflected in your work.

How to Get There

The question then becomes: How can you best exhibit concern?

Start with the order in which most people make financial decisions. The list provided earlier is a good framework. Most people focus on satisfying whatever current, perceived need they face. They then consider their goals and, finally, dreams. The financial advisor’s role is to follow the emotional path as indicated by the client. Help ensure that needs are met, and that goals and dreams won’t be compromised by risks along the way. At the same time, the Advisor for Life will probe for concerns and fears to make sure they do not spoil your clients’ quality of life.

Concern’s Two Dimensions

There are two dimensions of concern. The first is what—or what could happen to a household that would derail its ability to achieve its goals? This calls for my favorite financial planning tool, The Wealth Planning Overview (see Figure 1.3). This one-page chart summarizes the big issues for affluent households.

Figure 1.3 The Wealth Planning Overview

Source: The Gresham Company, LLC. www.greshamcompany.com.

Which risks may threaten your clients’ current and future existence? Knowing that most people want a comfortable retirement, which issues revealed by the overview could prevent this? One advisor uses this chart to find for each client where their blind spot is for risks. Another longtime practitioner is more dramatic. He likes to say he’s looking for the bullet that could take out the household’s financial plan.

We’ll return to the Wealth Planning Overview in Chapter Five. Consider it for now a tool to help show your genuine concern for clients—an inventory of potential risks.

The second dimension of concern is timing. Timing is the difference between an issue being a concern, risk, or fear—and how we act upon it. The more time you have to deal with a problem or objective, the more likely you are to resolve or achieve it.

Consider the basic issue of retirement. Retirement is easier to fund for the person with more time to save and invest. If you suddenly had to retire tomorrow, would you have the same flexibility? Of course not. Similarly, many concerns can become fears if the timeline to their appearance is shortened. Being concerned about a potential health risk can quickly become a fear once that risk surfaces. The person who acts early to address that risk usually has the best chance of managing it.

Although the Baby Boomers are much closer to retirement, the topic is one of great concern to many members of Generations X and Y—even if you may have to assist these clients to define what retirement means to them. Let me explain. Many people take the journey toward older age with many different definitions of what it means to be retired. Consider the multiple dimensions of retirement—when, where, how, even why. The paths are as unique as individuals. In your role as advisor, you are a guide to the future. Help clients define the objective and the path. When is the appropriate time to retire? Ask your clients and prospects to identify the retirement age and most won’t hesitate to say 65. But there is nothing magical about that number; it was chosen by the architects of the Social Security program in a very different era for a very different purpose.

In 1935, when the Social Security Act was passed as one of many New Deal programs meant to comfort Americans ravaged by the Great Depression, the average life expectancy of Americans was 61.7 years. Males, at the time the primary breadwinners, lived on average 59.9 years; women, 63.9 years. Workers could retire early, at age 62, and receive partial benefits, or wait until age 65 and receive full benefits.

Take a look at those life expectancy figures again. In the 1930s, the odds were against a man living long enough to receive even partial Social Security benefits, let alone full benefits. Medical advancements, better living conditions, and improved knowledge of healthier lifestyles have all contributed to a powerful trend—people are living longer, more productive lives. Life expectancies have risen—to 68.2 years by 1950, to 73.7 years by 1980, and to about 80 years today. But the age at which Americans could begin receiving full Social Security benefits didn’t change until 1983, and the changes only affect those born after 1959.

People have the