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Happy Wednesday, everybody.
So I often talk about the importance of understanding consumer psychographics, in addition to demographics. So understanding how your ideal clients make decisions, where they’re getting their information from, who’s influencing them, how they formulate opinions and buying decisions.
And I was inspired to talk about this topic, again, in light of what’s going on this past week with GameStop, and AMC and Blackberry, and certainly over the last few months with Bitcoin, and if anyone’s on Robinhood, trading was halted, and the site was down again this morning, although you folks are probably not on RobinHood. But many of your clients may be or their kids may be.
And this is going to be one of the most important practice management themes yet again, for advisors, maybe even more so this year. And I want to give my thoughts on on what you should be doing to stay in the know and always appear forward thinking, I talk to advisors all the time about, you know, I always ask like, Are your clients asking you about, you know, blockchain? Are they asking you about Apple or Tesla or whatever. And most of the time advisors will say to me, you know, what, they get it, they they’re not they ask maybe once or twice, but they’re not really thinking about it. They’re invested for the long term with us. And, you know, we’ve trained them while and while that answer is accurate and good, it scares me a little bit, because change is happening so quickly. And as I think Justin Trudeau said, it will never happen this low again. And the firms and advisors and service providers who really are teed up for what I’ll call sustainable success, over the long haul, meaning over the next couple decades, are those who are thinking several steps ahead of the consumer. In other words, the consumer may not be worried about it now.
But it’s only a matter of time before they do start caring about it. And they do start making, you know, gut decisions based on information information they’re reading, I don’t want advisors to underestimate the power of community, the power of FOMO, the fear of missing out the power of seeing 1000s of people on a Twitter thread, or a Facebook group talk about how you know, they just made enough money to, you know, pay off their, their, their mother’s mortgage. And this is the reality of the conversations that are going on unregulated outside of your office. And so what I want financial advisors to do, regardless of whether or not and by the way, if you’re really building a sustainable business and enterprise, then you have to believe that the enterprise and business is going to be continued to be around and serve clients long after you’re gone. Meaning somebody is going to be taking over your business at some point in serving, you know, the next gen of your current clients hopefully. And, and that’s where the real you know, the change in how we talk to and market to clients, is really going to be critically important.
So start having a voice and providing thought leadership in areas of wealth management that maybe you haven’t otherwise had to talk about. I’ve really seen advisors get really paralyzed, sometimes by the idea of how do I start, I can’t do videos. simply start by communicating directly to your clients and prospects and centers of influence once a month, organize your thoughts, your reflections on the month, your roundup of resources and critical information. And put those comments out to your clients once a month. It could be in a standard email, it could be in a text message thread, it could be in a you know, and again, you’ve compliance isn’t listening. So if you’re on, you know, Slack or a project management system with your clients, whatever it is, if you can record videos, great if you have a blog or a podcast fine. It could be as simple as an email and every month say things are happening so quickly.
The way investors think about investing has changed so radically because of social media and AI and tech providers. I want to make sure that I’m translating to you. Any headlines that are coming out that may be confusing, or that may make you feel, you know, it may make you have questions about about our plan or what we’re doing or what’s happening elsewhere. It’s so so important that you start positioning yourself as a thought leader before the needs and the fears and the FOMO starts to kick in. By the way, I also want to say if we’ve learned one thing in the last year, it’s just how much power uninformed people on educated people, not meaning traditional education, but an educated in certain subjects, how much power they have, how much they have the ability to influence.
Financial Advisors actually do have the credentials and education to be able to talk about anything Wealth Management related. So even starting to translate what’s happening, so GameStop, and what’s going on, most women don’t actually understand what is happening. Being able to serve as the one voice of reason, in a, in what feels just like chaos from every angle right now is a tremendous value to the consumer. Even for me, somebody who’s in the business, I have my go to people who I say, you know, what does this really mean? And what’s going on and explain to me what’s happening and how does this all end. Wanting to be in the know is, is is a natural, is natural right now and so you can serve as the voice of reason, you have to do it in an organized and systematic way.
In other words, it’s not a one off conversation with a client, but it’s a systematic way in which you now communicate with this ideal client and stay ahead of things in in the news and in the media. Okay, that’s my recommendation. This was a quick one. I hope that was helpful. Feel free to reach out to us if you need advice on how to get started and what you should be talking about. I think this is the advisors biggest, biggest opportunity this year. Alright folks, have a good week. See you next week, same place, same time. Take care.