Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Carl Richards
Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Julie Littlechild: Carl Richards: Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and today, Steve and I are thrilled to be speaking with Carl Richards. Now this feels like one of those this man needs no introduction moments, but it only seems right to provide one.
Carl is a certified financial planner and the creator of the Sketch Guy column that has appeared weekly in the New York Times since 2010. I happen to believe that a big part of Carl’s success is his uncanny ability to make complex financial concepts easy to understand. You see that in his presentations and in his two books The One Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way To Be Smart About Your Money and The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways To Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money. You’ll hear that ability in our conversation today, which focuses on the concept of real financial planning and helps I think to redefine your role as a financial advisor.
We tackle how to have deeper conversations and when to exercise caution. We discuss the idea that certainty is a myth and that your primary role is to guide clients to the next best step in their journey. I really believe that you’ll walk away from this episode with not only new insights but a sense of relief and confidence. With that, let’s jump straight into our conversation with Carl.
So Carl, welcome to the show. So happy to have you here.
Yeah, welcome, Carl.
Thank you, Julie and Steve. It’s super fun to be here.
So people know you for all sorts of reasons. You’ve been out there talking in the industry for a long time, but I know I really wanted to understand more about the work you’ve been doing around real financial planning. This concept of real financial planning. There’s some interesting stuff there with you talking about what that even means and what you’re supposed to call it. So why don’t we just start there. How would you actually describe this idea of real financial planning? And then we can get into some of the detail.
Yeah, I’d love to. But first, I would love to know, Julie, how would you describe real financial planning?
I’ve had the benefit of listening to you talk about it previously. Well, here’s what I can tell you, and this is, in fairness, in the context of having heard you talk about it because I might have used some different terminology. But as you talked about it, what came to me is what is lacking in the way most people describe financial planning. In particular around the essence of planning needing to start with where people are trying to get and this idea of goal setting. I’ve always felt that that was incredibly difficult thing for some people to do. The whole idea of having goals was provocative or difficult or they grew up not setting goals and it felt wrong.
You actually address that. So I began to think more and more about the notion of financial planning as starting with what you call purpose, and I thought it was just a fascinating way to talk about this. It made sense.
Yeah. No, it’s been a fun journey. Thanks for that. I was curious how you would approach it because the reason I ask that question is because this started in a… It was at, what did we use to call that? FPA Retreat. FPA Retreat. I was on a panel with Michael Kitces and Tim Maurer, and I was bemoaning this juxtaposition that I was seeing at the time between the work that I hope I was doing but certainly I was seeing my colleagues do and what was being talked about in the press. This huge gulf between it was sort of mini-Madoff and all of that stuff going on. Then I was seeing my colleagues save people’s lives is what it felt like to me. I would describe that to journalist friends, and I remember a specific conversation with somebody at the time, the New York Times, where I was like, “No, no, no, no. There’s real…” They literally looked at me like the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Like it was a fairytale. That’s a cute story, Carl. I was like, “No, there’s real…”
So at that conference, at retreat, I said, “It’s like there’s a secret society of real financial planners.” That’s where I first said it, and then you know how at retreat they used to do these self-forming meetings. There was time under the tree-
Under the trees, yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
I looked at the agenda later in the day, and there as an agenda that said, “Real financial planning. What is it?” I went, and there were all these luminaries, like the grandfathers and grandmothers of financial planning were around this table. And we were all looking at each other saying, “What does that mean?” That was a fascinating thing to me to be like in the industry with the people saying what does it mean.
So I think if we have a hard time, the people… I’m pointing out the window. The people out there have no clue. It becomes a little bit like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. I couldn’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.
You know it when you see it.
Right, exactly. Exactly.
Right? So that’s kind of where I’m coming from this is we got to get better language around it. First, we got to pull… I mean, probably most of the people who are listening to this engage in the practice that I think of real planning. But the people who are listening to this are a very, very small percentage of the whole industry. So we first we got to pull a bunch of the industry this direction, and then second we have to figure out how to talk about it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that’s such a great point, Carl, because I want to just really highlight something that you said. That if we can’t explain it, then how is the public ever going to hope to understand it? Julie and I see that all across the whole spectrum. We talk a lot about it in terms of value proposition. If you can’t explain what your value is, how will you attract people who are interested in it? But I think you’re totally right. And unfortunately what a lot of it ends up coming down to is investments because that’s the one thing that everybody talks about that everybody can understand. So I think there’s a huge need for talking about what’s the value here? Because it’s not investment management. So how do we talk about what this thing is? So what were some of the conclusions from that under the tree conversation?
Well, I don’t know. I was listening, and then somebody said, “Well, Carl, you’re the one that said it.” I was like, “I don’t know.” But my early definition was be somebody I would send my mom to. That was my early definition. And I want to get back to what you said, but let me just finish that thought real quick. Ron Lieber and I talked about writing a column. Maybe once a year we had this conversation where we’re like, “Let’s write a column about how to hire a planner.” Ron actually did it, and he used the column to hire his planner. So he said, “I’m going to go hire and I’m going to use the column to hire it.” Then I can’t remember how long later it was. I think it was like 18 months later, he got a letter from the regulatory body saying his planner was stealing money from little old ladies or something.
So every time we went to write that column, we had a similar experience. It was like okay, let’s use this checklist and go check the reality. We go out there and we find somebody who was a whatever member, a whatever, a fiduciary, an affiliate, like all the things, and they were on the front page of their local paper for stealing money. So we’re like, “That’s really hard to write a checklist that out of the bottom falls trust.” So I started talking about a different approach. I was like, “No, what if you had these… Go ask the person you’re thinking about hiring, ask them these questions.” See what the response… The answer’s going to matter, but how it’s answered is also going to matter.
Sure, charlatans know that too. They know how to trick people with their answers, but at least we start to get a sense of it. I think too this idea of investments… I just want to talk about that real quickly because I’m clear that almost no one walks into a financial plan… And see, it’s really funny. Even when I say planner, I’m like, “Should I be saying advisor? Should I be saying planner?” We don’t even know. So I’m trying to reclaim the word planner just for fun, but nobody walks into a financial planner’s office and says, “I want to cry on your couch,” or, “Would you help me clarify my goals?” No one says that. They come in and say, generally, “I got an acute problem.” The acute problem typically is investments.
So I think that we just have to get better at, and I’m going to use this word very carefully. I’m going to define it. But I think we have to get better at playing righteous tricks. I don’t mean bait and switch. Very, very careful distinction here. A righteous trick is in service of the client. So a righteous trick would be something like greeting them where they are. “Oh, investments. You know what, those are really important to me too. In fact, performance is really important part of a plan.” Then subtly shifting, greeting them with what they want, and slowly teaching them what they need. That can be a punch in the nose or it can be an empathetic hug. That’s knowing the difference between those is where the art of planning comes in. Every client you win based on performance. I can promise you, you will lose based on performance.
So you’re not going to be helping yourself or them by doing that. So we have to figure out, and then we’re also not helping by saying, “No, no. Sorry. We don’t talk about investments here. You’re supposed to cry on the couch.” They don’t even know what to call that. They’ve never experienced it. It’s like the Supreme Court’s definition acted out. They don’t even know it exists to have somebody ask them meaningful questions to uncover a sense of purpose, get a little bit more clarity about these things called goals that they didn’t even know they had, and they walk out to the car thinking, “Oh my gosh, I feel diagnosed for the first time in my life.” They don’t know what to ask for when they walk in. So instead they say, “Here’s this portfolio.”
Yeah.
Is that… Go ahead.
Go ahead. I’m thinking we should probably come up with a different term for that that doesn’t have the word trick in it, but I get totally what you’re saying.
I love that term though. That’s part of the problem. I consider myself a righteous trickster. But I hear what you’re saying.
Yeah. I love working it around toward purpose and those things because even the whole idea of goals I think is misapplied by a lot of advisors. I’ve been working on a project where I just rail against advisors who have a 35 year old come into the office and get a question like, “What do you envision for your retirement?” What’s the purpose in that question?
Yeah, even crazier is intake form in the lobby that says, “What are your goals?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
So can you talk us through that, Carl? Knowing that’s not the path, how do you define this alternative process?
Yeah, yeah. To me, I think we have to show them what it means to have a goal. So it’s like show, don’t ask. The way that works for me, and we just did this interestingly with one of the people in the industry cross-armed. Like, “My clients don’t engage in this soft-touchy-feely stuff.” I was like, “Okay. Then let’s have a conversation.” He was telling me that he had an electrician that couldn’t raise his arms over his hand. By the way, if this advisor recognizes the story, I think the world of this advisor. It was just that we don’t even have common language to discuss what we’re talking about. We don’t even know what it means to set goals.
So had an electrician, can’t raise his arms over his head anymore because he’s that worn out. He’s like, “His only goal is security.” I’m like, “Well, that’s really fascinating. Did he ever say that to you?” “No.” “How do you know that?” “Well, because I can tell.” I’m like, “Wouldn’t it have been fascinating if he had said that? Wouldn’t it have been fascinating if you had whatever that meant.” Like, “I don’t want to be a burden to the kids,” is what he may have said written down.
So what I think the way you do that in my mind, and look, I’m often wrong but never in doubt. So I’m totally okay if… I reserve the right to be completely wrong about everything I’m saying.
That just makes you a guy.
But this is a very strong opinion that I have that I’m trying to forcibly insert in the industry that we greet them where they are. Investments, investments, performance, insurance. I sold my business. Whatever. Then we slowly say, “That’s very important. Before we get into that, would you mind if we back up a little bit and get a sense of why this might be important to you?” Then you can insert any one of the great questions that we have from people like George Kinder, if you can go that far, which I’m a huge fan of. But it’s hard work for some people to go that far. Bill Backer’s work and John Bowen who used it later. Then even all the way to Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach who has that great question that’s just can we back up a minute? If we were meeting three years from today on May 17th, 2024 and let’s pretend like you’re happy with this relationship, what would’ve happened in your life financially for you to be happy? That’s the Dan Sullivan question. He’s written a book called The Dan Sullivan Question. Super simple.
So somebody would say something like, “Dude, I’m just really tired. I can’t work anymore. I can’t lift my arms above my head.” “Okay, really tired. I can’t work anymore.” And I could give you mine. Mine if I got asked that question, I would say, “I really want to spend more time with my family. Mainly outside. And I’d really like to serve in my community and my church.” Okay, that we can now say, “Oh, I understand you’re really tired and you don’t want to work anymore. John, what if we put some framework around that. What would have to happen financially in order for you to make that happen? If we put a little framework around that, could we then call it a goal?”
So I think teaching them what it means. You just clarify the goal. They had no clue. They’re just like, “I don’t want to work.” I say more time with my family. But my planner has said, “Let’s put a little framework around that. What would have to happen financially for you to spend more time with your family?” Now we have very specific things, and then I can say, “And then we’ll call that a goal.” That would’ve never, ever happened on the intake form in your lobby.
Knowing that that goes on. That you’re literally seeing people who get the… I talked to an advisor recently who was sharing that they book a meeting and then they send 12 pages of stuff you need to bring to that first meeting. So how do you help advisors step away from that and ask different questions to bring them into the relationship.
Well, that’s a really good… Maybe you don’t need to step away from it. If it’s working for you, that’s amazing.
It wasn’t in this case.
Well, I used to always be so surprised. We’d send this list, like, “Bring your tax returns, bring your things.” People would bring it, and I was always surprised they’d bring it. But I noticed after a couple of rounds of that, that it was like in a locked briefcase with a handcuffed… You’re not getting this from me in the first meeting. So I was like, “Why am I…” So I started thinking, especially after reading some of Kay State’s work on what your office should look like. I mean, the feedback on the office was like anything you can do to basically lower the stress. I started thinking of that briefcase with the financials in it as a giant bag of stress. I was like, “We don’t really…” For the first meeting, that doesn’t really matter if you can remember that your 401K has 500,000 or it has 550. We’re going to be okay. We can guess.
So I just started telling people… The email that went out a couple days before the first meeting just said, “Look, to make the most of your time, Mr. And Mrs. Client. I know how busy you are to make the most of your time, it may be helpful.” All this language is intentional. Just lower the… “It maybe helpful if you review your financial situation before you come in in case it comes up.” So then I let go of all that 12 pages of…
So then when they come in, what I’m trying to… I’m begging people to believe me. I just got an email again last… I get one of these a couple times a week for sure. Last week it was around the weekly letter we send out and the weekly letter was around enough. How do you know if you have enough? I get this reply from a lady who I’ll call Sally, and Sally’s like, “ENOUGH.” It was all caps, explanation marks, and a bunch of question marks. She’s like, “We thought we had it figured out until our daughter got this crazy developmental disease that’s going to require surgery after surgery for who knows, and we don’t think she’ll ever be able to live on her own. So now what is enough?” I replied. I’m only using this story to point this out.
I replied with a video and just said, “Hey, that’s…” I was human. “I can’t imagine. That must be really hard. In that context, enough is even harder. How do you do it?” I gave her just a couple of suggestions on like, “Think about all that stuff and then get quiet and figure out what the next step is. Focus on what you can control.” We had a little moment together. She sent back a note saying, “I can’t even watch this all because I never felt like anybody’s ever heard me like that.”
I can just tell you everyone is walking around like that. They don’t need to have a daughter with a developmental thing. Everyone. Nobody has a place. You don’t have to be a soft California woo-woo advisor, whatever to give the electrician a spot to say, “Bro, I’m just really tired.”
So all I’m suggesting is can we please before we start chucking prescriptions or self-diagnosis tools at people, can we give them a chance to be heard? Can we just diagnose? If we diagnose correctly, all the other stuff takes care of itself. The prescription could be simple. You don’t even read prescriptions. You never Google the medicine if you felt thoroughly diagnosed. Overcoming objections. I think overcoming objections should simply… If there’s an objection, it should literally be a warning light in your head that you just didn’t hear something. It’s not their fault. You should just, “Oh, I must’ve missed something. Can we back up?”
So all I’m saying is the quality of the questions you ask, being thoughtful, listening, giving people time to answer, letting go of your agenda, all those things will create a remarkable experience, even if no one cries that’ll change the way you do the business. I’ve seen this thousands of times at this point.
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Sorry, go ahead, Steve.
Go ahead, Julie.
No, go ahead.
We do this a lot, Carl.
Welcome to our world. Yeah. So a couple of things just on how advisors can have those conversations, and this jumped out at me in some of the things you’ve been talking about. One is just this idea I think you said of entering with caution. That you’re going deep into some conversations. Can you give us some examples of how advisors can think about that?
Yeah, and I really believe all this takes is just take the hat off and put on your human hat. If you can just pause and think about what you’re doing, we’ll get a lot of this right. I only think really two things. Curiosity and humanity. That’s like almost all you really have to think about. But let me give you an example. My favorite example of this is the… Well, there’s two. Let’s see if we get to the second one. The first one is the balance sheet discussion. You’ve had a discussion about maybe you’ve gotten good and you had a discussion about why somebody wants to go somewhere.
So go read Simon Sinek’s work, check out Bill Backer’s work, Dan Solin’s, The Greatest Sales Book You’ll Ever Read is great on this. Dan Sullivan’s book, Kinder’s the master, of course. You’ve got that part. You’ve rolled in the goals now. It’s the second part of the first meeting. You’ve defined a few goals, and then you’re like, “Okay, great. So we know where you want to go, and we know a little bit about why you want to go there. So we have to back up now to where are you today.” That’s a classic consulting job. Where are you today? Where do you want to go? I’ll build a map to get you there.
When we get to where are you today, we always sort of flip the switch where we’re like, “Oh, it’s factual. It’s called a balance sheet.” You’re 37 minutes into meeting this person, and you’re going to ask them, which I think you can earn the right to do this by asking good questions. But you’re going to ask them about their balance sheet. You just kind of pause real quick and remember what you’re doing. It doesn’t need to change your tone of voice. It doesn’t need to change anything about the questions even, but just realizing, “Hey, I’m about to ask a couple things on the balance sheet.” We all think that’s just a statement of fact. It should be. It’s a set of numbers. It’s quantifiable. But you all know that everything on that balance sheet has a story. Often, especially if you’re dealing with a couple, there will be shame and blame around these things, and particularly maybe between the couple.
I remember one client or it’s actually a really close friend of mine my parents’ age. She and her husband, anytime money would come up, I would watch her get so upset about this mistake they made. It was a costly mistake but it was 20 years ago. It served no point, and there was all this shame and blame around it. So just remember that when you enter the balance sheet discussion, it’s another place where we just have to be like, “Hey…” Adam Schallau last week told me last week he loves to just say, “We’re going to leave the past in the past. We’re going to try and extract any valuable lesson we can, but we’re going to leave… We’re just moving forward.” So that’s one example of this idea of entering with caution, giving people permission to relax a bit, understanding the humanity of what you’re doing.
Yeah.
So I’ll mention this to you, Carl, because I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I just finished it. I think you would love it. I loved it. It’s called Time To Think. Have you seen that?
No.
Nancy Kline. It’s all about how to help facilitate other people working through their thought processes. Anyway, it’s right up this alley. You’d love it. So we come back now to the challenge of… I think this is great. I think it’s spot on. I think it delivers. It’s way more valuable a thing we can do for people by doing this stuff. So we come back to the problem of so how do we describe what we do?
Yeah. That’s so hard. I remember one of the best days of my life professionally was when I was at a barbecue, and somebody asked the guy I was talking to… I was talking to a doctor, and somebody else came up and joined the conversation and asked the doctor what he did for a living. The doctor said, “I’m a doctor.” I was like, “What? What? He didn’t say I fix people’s knees so they can live their best life while [crosstalk 00:25:41]. He just said I’m a doctor.”
I was like, “You’re allowed to do that. I can say I’m a…” Because I was just hammered early on for the first decade of like elevator pitch at the barbecue and the cocktail party. Everything. I was like, “Oh, so I can just say…” So then I was like, “Well, so what would I say?” I typically would just say, “I’m a…” I also learned on flights if I wanted the person next to me to leave me alone for the whole flight when they asked me what I did, all I had to do was say I was a financial planner. That was like, “Oh, okay. Good,” and out came the book.
So I learned in those settings, what do you do? The only way I just had fun with it. I’ve said, “I’m a financial advisor.” Then I wait for the look. Then I’ll say, “But no, not like that.” Before I’ll say, “You know what,” before I even answer, I’ll just say, “You know what, it’s too hard to talk about.”
So I think having some fun with the elevator pitch of what do we do, but if I were really describing it to a friend, I would say… It sounds like an elevator pitch, but I was like, “Look, we engage in real financial planning,” which really is this hard work of aligning… This is what I think internally. Aligning people’s use of capital, and that’s asterisked time, money, energy, and attention. So aligning people’s use of capital with what’s truly important to them. That to me is what we do.
Yeah. Well, and I’m often reminded that sometimes the best way to describe what you do is to give people an experience of it to some extent. By a good set of questions to get people thinking, they stop asking what you do. They’re just so drawn into the fact that I’ve never thought about it that way.
One other thing I did want to ask you because I can see, and I’m sure everybody can see the benefit to the client of this kind of approach. That it’s deeper and it’s much, well, what you just explained. But I can also see that this kind of approach would be so beneficial for advisors in terms of their own level of confidence. You talk about the difference between being a guide, and it felt so free to me. All of a sudden you have to let go of having to have every answer and having to be certain and having all of that. Do you see that kind of impact for advisors as you talk about this?
Let’s just talk about the guide, defender thing for a second because I think we’ve largely built, and I’m speaking broadly, probably not to this audience, but broadly as an industry, large industry, a profession within the industry. Don’t send me emails about how it’s a profession. I know. But I think largely we’ve built our value proposition on stuff we can’t deliver. So I remember I got asked to do a big consulting job for a bank, and it was the largest bank in the country that it was in. They had just done a… I’m trying not to say the current seat. But equivalent to $5 million marketing budget to get this new slogan, and I didn’t know what it was. I was coming to work with their financial planning offering. I walked in, they said, “Let’s show you…” And there was this poster up on the wall. All over the place there were these posters, and the tagline was, “Delivering certainty.” I was like, “I got to change everything I’m about to say.”
But I think largely when we build our value proposition on delivering performance, and then there’s this tricky slide more towards what we do as planners, professionals at this. We don’t know we’re doing it, but we’re kind of trying to deliver certainty. It’s where this false sense of precision comes in, and we hear Monte Carlo’s with three decimal places or whatever. What we’re doing is trying to draw the perfect line. A 30 year line, as you mentioned earlier, Steve, so a 30 year line. The only thing we know for sure about that line is that it’s wrong.
So back to the benefit of what you’re asking, Julie, is what happens if you have placed your professional value and the relationships on that line being right, and the only we know for sure is that it’s going to be wrong. Then you’re in this weird spot where you have to feel like you’re a defender of incorrect line. I like to call it a defender of an outdated map.
So the client walks in and they say, “When the plan blows up,” which it does to the positive and the negative side, but back in March and April of last year, the plan blows up. The client shows up, and you feel not only defensive, and that’s where the 10 best days stock chart comes from. Having seen the 10 best days is that’s just spraying people with facts and figures. Not only are we defensive but we often can feel like the ones that are listening to this I’m sure this resonates with. You can even feel a little guilty or a little bit responsible that you did something wrong.
Then you got to realize like wait, if we change our mindset from defender of that map to a guide in a changing landscape, a guide still, no matter how good you are as a guide, you still draw a route and you still take a map. You make it the best one you can. Then you realize when you get out there… What did Mike Tyson say? Plans are great until somebody punches you in the face. Once you get out there, and I can’t remember the famous general that said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
So when you get out there, you can realize, “Hey, I didn’t realize this storm was going to blow in.” If the client comes and gets mad at you for the storm blowing in, that would be silly. They probably will because they’re scared. But you can take the approach instead of saying, “I checked the forecast. On Thursdays in June it never rains.” Instead of saying that, you can say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I didn’t think this was going to come either. I mean, you get weather in the mountains, but we didn’t know today was going to be the day. Guess what,” and you can reach across the table and grab them by the collar, look them in the eyes and say, “I’ve got you. These tools in my backpack don’t have anything to do with maps. They have to do with how to deal with changing landscapes.”
So then your value becomes the course corrections. Your value becomes the ability to navigate uncertainty. In other words, your value becomes reality, not some myth that we’ve all been portraying. So I think it changes everything. It maybe the same tools. It maybe the same software, but it changes everything about how you feel and how you communicate about your job. Right?
I’m sorry, Carl.
No, no. It’s fine.
You quoted, I think it was Patton who said, “No plans survives contact with the enemy.” It gets more towards Eisenhower’s quote of, “Plans are useless. Planning is invaluable.”
For sure. For sure. Look, we can make all sorts of comparisons like pilots. I’ve been asking commercial airline pilots, everyone I’ve ever met, do you write up a detailed flight plan for every flight? And they say yes. I always ask them how often does the flight go according to plan? They always say never. So we got to get that tension.
The one thing I got wrong is I was so hyper-focused on the changing landscape because I love that navigation that often I was belittling or devaluing the plan. What I realized just in the last six weeks really was that actually what I’m asking you to do, what we really need to do is hold the tension that a plan is incredibly valuable, and it’s going to be wrong. That we got to write goals and they’re guesses. That we have to have strong opinions, and then we have to look for dis-confirming evidence. We’ve got to be able to hold both those tension performances, the last thing you want to talk about. It’s a major driver of your plan. We’ve got to be able to hold that tension at the same time, and that’s kind of I think why this job’s so hard and so fun.
And we made that. I mean, nobody wants to think, “I have no plan.” Maybe I just need a plan for today and then we’ll think about it tomorrow. For advisors who feel too… Their value is tied up in certainty. The one thing I can say that reinforces what you’re talking about is in the research we do with investors, we saw this really tight correlation between the most engaged clients and them describing their advisor as a leader. Then when we ask them to define leadership, guidance was the number one word that they used without you being prompted for any word.
Amazing.
So they see that power, and they understand that power. I know we’ve got to wrap up, but I have to ask you about the fellowship. And I know you won’t describe it in detail. I know. I know that now, but-
It’s part of the code.
It doesn’t mean I’m not going to ask you to tell us a little bit about what it is or isn’t or could be.
Yeah. No, it’s been really fun. A couple years ago I was so frustrated by the experience of being… This is more like a decade ago. Frustrated being at parent night or career night, and the woman before me would be a Secret Service agent and the guy after me would be a firefighter. Then my son would introduce me as the financial planner. I was like, “Look, I got to get something, a T-shirt, a sticker, a something.” The society and the fellowship have a dragon as its logo because we’re like, “Can we just have fun again?” And by the way, dragons protect the valuable stuff. They can also kill you with fire. So it’s really sort of a fun metaphor.
But the fellowship was just my attempt to write a manifesto. It’s 21 declarations of a real financial planner. I was writing it and I was recording videos for my editing team, and somebody on the team was like, “Hey, these videos are way better than the written. Like the written’ s great, but why don’t we build something that has the videos?” So we took the 21 declarations and we wrote them. We worked really hard to make them as short as possible. We work really hard around here to send people less. So I would much rather read a 20 page book that has everything I need than a 200 page book to get the 20 pages.
So the fellowship is 21 declarations of a real financial advisor. It’s an online experience. It’s an anti-course. It’s not a course. It’s not about tactics. It’s about principles because we built all these tactical… Sorry, this is maybe more than I was supposed to tell you. But we built all these tactical workshops, and at the end, we would find people not doing them. I was like, “Look, I discovered that the tactics are easy. It’s the doing that’s hard.”
So the fellowship was built to help you do, and largely I think it was a confidence forward. So the only way to learn more, and I can’t say much more about it because we found that the more I say, the less it helps. So you can go to the SocietyofAdvice.com, and there’s this whole thing. I’m going to give your listeners a trick. Go to SocietyofAdvice.com. It says wait list. There’s nothing on the page. You’re like, “What? This isn’t how things are supposed to work.” SocietyofAdvice.com. It just says wait list. If you put your name, your email address in there, you’ll get a confirmation email, and we only run six sessions a year. But nobody likes being on a wait list. So for your listeners, when the confirmation email comes, it says, “If someone sent you here, click here.” If they click there, it’ll ask who sent you. You can just put my name in, and it will work. What will happen is you’ll get more information.
So it’s the equivalent of a secret knock or a secret handshake, having your name-
The back door. Secret. If you sent me this email and said, “Tell me about the fellowship,” I would’ve just replied with the JPEG file of the dragon.
It’s kind of like the financial planning version of the Masons.
It is a little bit.
We like to think more-
The Knights Templar.
We like to think more like the Fight Club or something like that.
That’s a bit more dramatic.
Exactly. Yeah. There is no fellowship.
Yeah, for sure.
Oh dear. Well, Carl, thank you so much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. Let me just mention to both of you, thanks for the work you do because I can tell the difference between… We do a lot of these, and you don’t need to do the research you did before this call. But it’s clear that you did. Much more valuable for all of us. So thank you.
I appreciate it. Take care.
Yeah.
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths that Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. So until next time, so long.