How we can reshape the profession of advice

As published in Financial Planning Magazine, October 2013 issue:

I believe we can have an advice boom over the next decade, with an almost limitless inflow of new clients seeking and paying for high value financial advice.

How will we do this? Quite simply, we are going to reshape the entire public perception about the value of advice itself.

Let me just ask you to set aside that sense of scepticism you are feeling right now (as a financial planner of 15 years, I both know it and understand it).

However, I am not speaking out of rhetoric or vague hope, so let me break down for you how we are going to reshape the future of our profession. Not only that, but I am going to give you the chance to join in as we create a bold new future for advice (and trust me when I say there is a huge reward waiting at the end for each of us).

So here’s what we need to do…

We take responsibility

It’s time for you to take ownership of the future of the profession. Not just ownership, but responsibility. That means you are going to have to actually ‘do’ something and ‘be’ a part of shaping this future.

For too long, the course of our profession has been set by legislators, product providers, dealer groups and financial institutions, and it’s time for that to change. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a ‘beat up’. My point is that as a profession, I believe we have abdicated this responsibility and it is time for us to collectively step up.

We work collaboratively, not competitively

Very few people out there are actually getting real financial planning advice. Yet instead of working together to change that, we have worked competitively to carve out our own piece of an already small pie.

By working this way, as a profession we have isolated ourselves, stifled our ability to share ideas, to innovate, and most of all to have a collective voice. By working collaboratively instead of competitively, we can reach far more clients and achieve greater business results.

Become active in your Association

I want to explain one thing about your Association – it’s in existence to represent you. However, how much you get out is only determined by how much you put in.

Did you ever notice that the most successful professionals are always the ones that are the most active in their Associations and give back more to the industry than everyone else?

We share vicarious experiences

There is simply nothing better for spreading the value of real advice than sharing the stories about the impact that financial planners have on people’s lives. Nothing removes our fear or misconceptions of the unknown more than experiencing heartfelt stories about everyday people that are ‘just like us’.

I have dedicated my life to understanding what drives human decision-making, and the application of that learning, to raise up the profession of advice. I can tell you that sharing vicarious experiences is at the heart of creating any widespread change.

Once we take responsibility, work collaboratively, and become more active in our Association, then we use our collective voice and the immense leverage of digital and social media to share thousands of life changing advice stories with millions of Australians, consistently and into perpetuity.

So if this message resonates with you and you feel the urge to take action, then the first thing I would ask you to do is to share this article with your colleagues. Email it, share it on LinkedIn, Tweet it, or even better yet, pick up that ‘old school’ social tool…the phone.