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A lot of financial planning software today is built to solve math problems, but what advisors really need to do is solve human problems. I’d like to propose a shift: empowering advisors to put client values at the center of their practice. Imagine a dashboard showcasing what truly matters to clients, not just algorithms and spreadsheets. By fostering an abundance mindset — both in advisors and clients — we can unlock remarkable new possibilities in wealth management.
But before I dive into the hows and whys of this transformation, let’s step back and consider a broader question: What do successful entrepreneurs, both inside and outside of wealth management, have in common? The answer might surprise you. It’s not just their financial acumen, but their ability to cultivate a positive, growth-oriented mindset. This very mindset, often overlooked in our industry, holds the key to unlocking a paradigm shift in wealth management, where clients’ values take center stage.
The power of abundance
When my team at Summit embarks on a new journey — whether it’s solving a small problem at work or envisioning a whole new way for advisors to connect with their clients — we take time to imagine a future version of ourselves in an environment where our obstacles have been overcome. It’s not necessarily a time-consuming exercise, or an overly procedural one, but we make sure to establish a mental framework centered around abundance:
- We express gratitude and appreciation for what we have;
- We acknowledge that we have the wherewithal to develop the skills we’ll need to arrive at a solution; and
- We reassure ourselves that mistakes and missteps along the way are acceptable, so long as we’re learning from them. Failing forward is a positive learning experience, not negative.
Most advisors are familiar with these concepts. After all, behavioral psychology, applied to wealth management and financial planning, isn’t new. We’re aware that an abundance mindset, and its skill-supercharging cousin, a growth mindset, help us conceive of a world full of opportunities rather than devoid of them. It’s also a world in which skills are developed, rather than doled out at birth.
With this combination, we can unlock a remarkable new paradigm in wealth management. Too often, we’re overly hesitant to share them with our clients.
Enough with the calculators
The biggest obstacle to providing abundance and growth coaching to clients isn’t a disinclination for sharing information or digging into what were once thought of as “soft skills.” Today’s technology is holding advisors back. Too many advisors are forced to build their practices around the technology they’re using, rather than advising first and using software that adapts and wraps to their style and preferences.
Client values fade into the background, while advisors try to impress clients with a dashboard of calculators and a confusion of spreadsheets, Monte Carlo simulations and mathematical gobbledegook. In short, the industry expects clients to sit back and watch their advisors at work, like a scene out of A Beautiful Mind, where John Nash, played by Russell Crowe, pulls numbers into the air in front of him, somehow solving calculus problems in the black box of his mind.
What happens is so much different from what advisors imagine happens. My co-founder Anthony Sperling and I know, because we’ve spent over a decade as wealth management clients, watching advisors at work, while the actual, real values that we wanted at the center of our wealth management experiences were placed in the background. We felt what it was like to be clients whose own abundance and growth mindsets were largely ignored, in favor of letting calculators and spreadsheets “do the work.”
Instead of letting this obstacle define our futures, we were inspired to ask how we could transform this challenge into an opportunity. We diagrammed on whiteboards our ideas for a platform where financial advisors are empowered to put their clients’ values at the center of their dashboard. We imagined a transformative tool for building a practice and plan around what was important to the people turning to them for help.
Elevate client values
Science supports our approach at Summit. Adapting an abundance mindset not only raises intelligence, it actually leads to greater success in classrooms, healthier lives and more rewarding careers.
In a study that looked at the intellectual implications of scarcity, researchers discovered that preoccupation with money problems produced cognitive impairment similar to the loss of an entire night’s sleep. This disadvantage can actually compound, leaving a person trapped in a scarcity mindset with “fewer ‘mental resources’ to focus on complicated, indirectly related matters such as education, job training and even managing their time.”
Advisors who help their clients focus on what they have, surround themselves with others who are exercising their abundance mindset (including their own advisor), create win-win conditions and incorporate gratitude into their day-to-day lives are building a practice centered around values. Wealth, in this scenario, takes the role it should always take. It becomes a tool to help clients achieve their goals in life; it’s a means to an end.
This is the environment where advisors and clients start forming incredible relationships, enabling far more than what could ever be provided by a calculator or Monte Carlo simulation. When clients and advisors are aligned around client values, the imaginative work of financial planning isn’t just a future possibility. It’s an empathetic journey powered by a client’s self-motivation and guided by an advisor’s expertise. Technology should allow advisors to connect with their clients at a level that allows for a greater efficiency of service, while affirming the values held by every individual client.
Modern financial advisors are so much more than the face of a calculator or the voice of an investment model. By embracing an abundance mindset and allowing clients to express and celebrate their values – with technology that’s built to frame those values and hold them at the center of all it does – advisors can form deep, meaningful and lasting relationships with their clients, helping them achieve their goals and transforming their wealth into the foundations and buttresses that elevate their values above all else. It’s humanization at its finest.
As the CEO and co-founder of Summit, Reed Colley is dedicated to revolutionizing wealth operating systems through innovative technology solutions. He is a seasoned advisor, investor, and director of startup and growth companies, known for his expertise in leveraging technology to enhance advisor-client relationship
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.