David Finley on Creating Experiences to Connect With Your Clients in a Digital World

Show Timeline:
03:22 Drivers for deeper engagement between advisors and your clients
09:18 Connecting your clients with ‘experiences’ to broaden conversation
19:07 Creating a framework for designing your content and experience offerings
24:50 The value of advice, redefining the value proposition
29:29 Creative ways to create connections
32:54 ‘Referral Privilege’ a less intrusive way for referrals

Links:
Website:              https://livingwealth.ca/
Twitter:               https://twitter.com/davidmfinley
LinkedIn:            https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-finley

Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

Julie Littlechild:
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 speaking with David Finley. David is the founder and CEO of Living Wealth Media, and someone I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for many years. We were really excited to chat with David because he’s doing something incredibly unique. And providing what he calls a co-branded, digital engagement platform. David has a history of innovation in the wealth management space, with a particular focus on truly effective marketing.

Now, I think we can all agree that one of the big challenges for advisors, certainly the ones that we talk to, is how to engage with clients when they can’t be face to face. And that’s the issue that we tackle with David. We focus in particular on how advisors can deliver truly unique and meaningful content, and some very cool experiences, but in particular, how all of that can be done digitally, in the current environment. And with that, let’s get straight to the conversation with David.

Well David, welcome to Becoming Referable, so thrilled to have you here.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, welcome, David.

Dave Finley:
Well, thanks, Julie.

Julie Littlechild:
Well look, I have had the pleasure of knowing David for some time actually, so I know a lot about the various roles you’ve played and the great work that you’ve done, but do you mind if we just start with a quick introduction to yourself, and to the work that you do?

Dave Finley:
Yeah, no problem, Julie. Thanks for having me too, right off the bat. So I’ve been in the business for … the wealth management business for 28 plus years now, and really in the advisor client relationship side of things. So not so much the portfolio management, or the planning, or compliance, but really either building a practice through some really interesting marketing, and/or helping for the most part advisors doing that. So I’ve had corporate experience, a couple entrepreneurial stops along the way, but my passion has always been the relationship between the advisor and client, and I just underline relationship.

So for the past 24 months, I’ve been working on a new project, which we’re going to I’m sure talk a little bit about, but it’s really a relationship builder for wealth advisors. And that’s another way of saying it more technically, is it’s a digital engagement and loyalty platform and tool. And the idea here is to give advisors a way and a means to broaden the wealth experience that they’re providing their clients. And we take kind of a content approach, and we embrace the theme of living with wealth, so the topics are about live enrichment and lifestyle, and it really is, at the end of the day, giving advisors a way to distinguish and differentiate themselves.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, maybe I can just sort of pick up on that, there’s a few streams there that I’d like to talk about. But you refer to this as a digital engagement platform I think were the words you used. So just at the highest level, what do you actually believe drives deeper engagement between advisors and their clients?

Dave Finley:
Yeah, it’s a million dollar question. I think-

Julie Littlechild:
If I had the answer to that we’d all be-

Steve Wershing:
That’s right-

Dave Finley:
Yeah.

Steve Wershing:
Is that what the cost of it is? There you go.

Dave Finley:
It’s funny, you go back and I look when I started in the business 28 years ago and I think that question was being asked then too.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Dave Finley:
But I take a little bit of a step back thinking to this, and I think that the first premise is, is it’s first really to me and to us about broadening, broadening or the breadth of engagement. I think engagement for the most part, and certainly in all my time in the business, has been quite narrowly focused. And I won’t go into the details, but we all know portfolio, portfolio, portfolio. And in terms of driving deeper engagement, I think the first step is to think about broadening it. So how do you broaden the conversations with clients that go beyond what maybe the traditional discussion has always been about. And that’s where you kind of enable yourself to go down pathways of developing deeper engagement or a deeper relationship.

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