BachrachBlog

How do you become a Trusted Advisor? You start by earning people’s trust, which you can easily do by following these three steps: Communicate with conviction, ask better questions, and tell the hard truth.

1. Communicate with Conviction

Have you earned the right to expect people to follow your advice and respond to your authority? No one will give you that authority unless you first believe you deserve it. If you show up in the marketplace assuming that you’re not going to be trusted and people aren’t going to respond to your authority or advice, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The result is a collaborative environment where the client directs you instead of following your advice.

I often see clients or prospects who strongly believe that they know what they’re doing. Others think, “It’s my money, so I should be in charge.” There’s certainly some truth in that, but unless they’ve dedicated themselves to becoming financial experts, they should find somebody smarter than themselves and defer to that person’s expertise. Unfortunately, many financial advisors don’t convey the impression that they really are more competent or knowledgeable than their potential clients and prospects. Therefore, people don’t defer to them.

To become a Trusted Advisor and have people defer their financial decisions to you, your clients need to think, “I trust you and I believe you have my best interests at heart. I also trust that you’re competent enough and, between the two of us, you know better.” There’s nothing wrong with a client questioning your authority, but at some point all clients want to find an advisor they can trust. Deep down inside, they want you to tell them what to do. If they can trust you, they’ll do it. If they can’t trust you, they’ll find someone else. That’s why so many people have more than one advisor—they don’t completely trust any of them. Communicate with conviction, and you’ll earn your clients’ trust as well as all of their business.

The smartest and most successful people aren’t the ones who question authority and try to do everything themselves. The smartest, most successful people outsource. They defer to someone with greater expertise—someone like you!

When people trust you, they not only give you their business, they also listen to your advice and defer to your knowledge. Isn’t that the kind of relationship you want to have with your clients? The great industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie understood this philosophy extremely well. The epitaph on his tombstone sums it up perfectly.  It says, “Here lies a man who knew how to enlist the service of better men than himself.”

What should you tell the client who wants to be educated or wants to dictate how the relationship should work instead of trusting you to do your job?

Just tell the truth.

Tell the client, “That’s not the basis of our relationship. There are a dozen people who are going to contribute to your financial plan and I can’t possibly be expected to know everything they know. The basis of our relationship is for me to understand YOU. It’s my job to understand your current financial situation, your goals, and what is truly important to you (your core values). Then I orchestrate the creation of a comprehensive financial plan that involves the collective wisdom and expertise of an entire team of professionals. This brings to bear virtually hundreds of years of experience to develop the best advice for you. Then it’s my job to hold you accountable to implement this advice over time, which will give you the highest probability to achieve your goals for the reasons that are important to you. We’ll meet once per quarter to provide you with progress updates, make appropriate adjustments so you achieve your goals, and ensure that you are doing your part to get where you want to be.  Is this the kind of relationship you’d like to have with a financial advisor and his or her team?”

Commitment.
Consolidation.
Coordination.
Simplification.
Confidence.

Here’s how you can put these powerful words into action to communicate with your clients and prospective clients the value of having a Trusted Advisor leading a team of Best-in-Class Subject-Matter-Experts for their benefit.

True commitment is the key to any successful program, process, and relationship. When you make a commitment to truly comprehensive financial services and commit to implementing the advice of your team of your Best-in-Class Subject-Matter-Experts led by your Trusted Advisor you will get your entire house in perfect financial order and keep it that way forever.

Regardless of their success or wealth, we estimate that less than 1% of people in the world actually have their entire financial house in perfect order. You can be one of them. This will not happen by accident. It happens by commitment.

Consolidation means that everything is organized together. You no longer have multiple relationships with different institutions that you have to manage and keep track of. Everything is in the hands of one team of experts, led by your Trusted Advisor, so all decisions are made with complete visibility to everything you have with your goals and values in mind.

Coordination means that there is synergy between all areas of your financial life and the expertise necessary to make smart choices about your money in alignment with your goals and values. Your Trusted Advisor is involved in every element of your financial life coordinating with you and the appropriate experts. Every member of your team: financial planner, tax experts, legal experts, insurance experts, money managers, etc. are always aware of your complete picture so you get the best advice possible.

Simplification. Your commitment to all of your financial affairs being consolidated and coordinated makes life for you and your family much simpler. Therefore, you can relax, enjoy your life, and do the things that are much more important in life than worrying about your money.

By making a commitment to consolidation, coordination, and simplification you also gain confidence.  Confidence about your future. Confidence that your team of experts will make certain that nothing falls through the cracks, ever. Confidence that no matter what happens in the market, the economy, or the world that you have the highest probability of achieving your goals because your Trusted Advisor and your team of Best-in-Class Subject-Matter-Experts are giving you the best advice possible under all circumstances. You are confident that you will achieve your goals and fulfill your values.

Continue your journey of implementing the Values-Based Financial Planning® Turn-Key Business Model. If you do not already have the systems and processes to earn commitment from your prospects and clients to hire you to consolidate, coordinate, simplify, and be more confident about their future, contact one of our coaches at (858)558.3200 or email SRMinterview@baivbfp.com for a complimentary consultation.

Have you ever wondered why some financial advisors have the kind of businesses they want, while others don’t? It’s really no big mystery. They simply took three steps back and made the important choices that led them to their current success.

To create the business you want, start by taking the first step back: Decide what kind of life you want. Do you know exactly how you want to spend the next 10, 20, or 30 years? When you decide how you want your life to look and why, you’re ready to take the second step and create a financial game plan.

It almost goes without saying that there’s a financial component involved in creating the life you want. Therefore, step two is to figure out how much money you need to live the life you want. You also need to consider the time component: How much time are you willing to invest today in order to earn for your future? Most people are willing to sacrifice some quality of life today so they can achieve a better quality of life in the future, but if that sacrifice gets too big, then their willingness to continue eventually diminishes.

By figuring out how much money you need and how much time you’re willing to work, you’re ready for step three: figuring out how to invest that time. When you know what you want your life to look like and how you’re willing to invest your time, you’ll quickly realize that you don’t have any time to waste.

The good news is that what produces a simpler and better life for you also creates better results and value for your clients. Our experience shows that clients are much better served when you organize a “deliverables team” that is dedicated to making sure your clients achieve their goals regardless of what happens in the market, the economy, or the world. Whether you’re 22 years old and a brand-new advisor, or 65 years old with decades of experience, your personal time in the business will never match the collective wisdom and experience you can put to bear toward your client’s best interest when you assemble a team of competent, professional, trustworthy money managers, financial plan writers, insurance experts, tax professionals, attorneys, etc., to work for you and your clients.

Don’t delude yourself into thinking, “Once I get my arms around all this stuff, my business will really take off.” All that stuff is impossible to “get your arms around.” It’s simply too much stuff, coming from too many sources, and there’s simply not enough time. You have too many clients and too many variables to ever be able to manage in the finite amount of time that you can dedicate to your business without letting the rest of your life falling apart. Do you know why you feel like there’s never enough time? Because there isn’t enough time to run the business you have or are trying to build.