Ep 3: 3. Rethink: Human vs The Robo-Advisor

Episode 3 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (36:40)

Episode 3 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Adam Holt and Derek Notman take on a question they say they have been asked for years: whether automated advice will displace human advisors. Their answer is that the framing is wrong, and they trace three waves to explain why. The first wave arrived as a direct-to-consumer threat, the second added human support after the model underperformed expectations, and the third saw advisory firms simply absorb the technology into their own operations for portals, trading, and reallocation. The hosts argue the real exposure sits with advisors whose value is concentrated in product distribution, because distribution is the part an algorithm does faster and cheaper at scale. They quote an early Asset-Map colleague, Steve Amfield, on the idea that advisors competing with technology alone will be replaced by it at a fraction of the cost, then spend the back half of the episode on digital reputation.

What this episode covers

• The three waves of automated advice, and how the industry response changed with each one
• Why product distribution is the exposed layer rather than advice itself
• Consumer expectations set by Amazon and Netflix, and what they imply for advisory service design
• Digital reputation as a business requirement, and the one practice model the hosts treat as an exception

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Adam, I have an interesting question to expand on our last episode. I think it’s a fascinating topic, but I’m curious what you think about this. Who is going to win the Robo versus human advisor battle? I don’t know. Do you know? I don’t.

But I think that we need to have a good chat about this because I know it’s been on people’s radars. We talked about in our last episode, but I think there’s more to this. And it’s almost not an advisor battle. I think something else. There’s. Yeah, I tend to agree with you. The number of times I’ve been asked this question is just amazing to me for the past, what? Five, six years. Do you remember when Robo advice first came out? Oh, totally. I was Googling betterment and all those things, and I was just freaking out and like, oh, my gosh. And then about four minutes later, like, wait a minute.

This isn’t that bad. You can’t replace human beings. They tried that in the Terminator and it didn’t work. I think we’re going to be OK almost, but it didn’t. And and I think we mentioned before, but it was a flash in the pan. It was new. It was sexy. It was mysterious and it was online. So we got to check it out. I think the luster wore off pretty quick, actually. It’s true. There was a lot of media, you know, hype about Robo is going to totally disintermediate the human. I’m going to call them the financial professional. We both know that they’re worth it. But advice is getting thrown around way too much now.

But as we talked about in our last podcast, I really think we all need to make a recognition shift. That identity of who we are as financial professionals really, really matters. We talked about last time by asking the question, are you an advisor that sells or a salesperson that advises the important part of that is how you actually get compensated or how your clients think they are compensating you really matters. And this is a question we need every advisor to really start to think about because it’s going to affect your business. Oh, no question. And if they don’t think about it, they will be forced to, but they’ll be forced to do it in the rearview mirror.

And that’s a bad place to have to try to figure this thing out. That’s true. One of the things that’s that’s interesting about the whole journey of Robo advice and also, of course, is you. Many of you were also in the fintech world. Both of us, we get to see a lot of tech. We see it actually sometimes before other people see it because we’re on the circuit. We’re running around. People call us and say, we need your feedback. Is this going to work in community? So we get a little bit of that insight, right? Or we’re building something like it ourselves because we see an opportunity.

But I think there’s a big nuance here that people need to recognize. And I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Michael Kitzis who you know well. And for those of you in the space, Michael is a fantastic thought leader in fintech and has been way before it was. If you get a chance to check out his nerds, I view it’s a fantastic resource for many of us. And this conversation came up and he used this great terminology, similar to what we had actually talked about last time, which was this idea of a financial advisor versus a financial advisor and the comments that he made.

If I’m paraphrasing it well, Michael effectively said that there are those that basically lead with advice in all cases, and there are those that use advice to facilitate sales. Now I’m, we’re not making a value judgment here. 90% of us in the marketplace have some component of implementation for which we get compensated because frankly, if we don’t implement nobody gets healthier, right? If you don’t actually do the therapy, right? We’re not going to get fitter just by sitting here and knowing we should work out, right? And that doesn’t, I don’t think that works. Does that work for you? I sit a lot too. Yeah. Look how healthy you are.

Yeah. You look healthy for podcast. Thank goodness. That’s right. You can always Google me when I look better. It’s a good thing about archive is that basically everything’s public forever. But I think what’s here’s the debate that we need to rethink. And that is the same thing is true for robo advice. 0 was about basically providing a way to maybe do some investing to get an app on your phone where you had some transparency, accessibility. It wasn’t actually addressing, Hey, are we doing the right things by our family? Do you really know me as a robo advisor? Can you really say, you know, me and have relationship with me, know what I care about.

But I think it’s changing. I think there’s a change about the cup. What do you think is going on? A huge one almost would say it’s a, wasn’t ever even robo advice. I don’t know why they really used that word. It was almost more robo investing what it did do. And I mean, this is a whole nother conversation almost, but it democratized access to investing. Cause at the end of the day, what is a robo advisor in the eyes of the S and C they’re registered investment advisor, they manage assets, they do portfolios, right. And before robo advisors access to that type of service was reserved for people with means.

You had to have some cash. You couldn’t open an account for 20 bucks. I think there’s some good, they came of it, but people, I think quickly realize that, wait a minute, we’re missing one major component here. This thing called human advice, right? Where, where did that go? Yeah, this is great. I can invest now on an easy basis for my phone, but I’m not getting the stuff like he just says, like, is this good for my family? How does this fit in with the rest of everything that I’m doing? So I think once that luster wore off, we’ve now come to this realization like, Hey, we really do need human advice, customized, personalized.

But what’s that distribution look like, right? What, what’s that medium? What’s that interaction look like moving forward? Now think about it. Like we used to go to a bookstore to buy a book number borders, right? I remember I actually went to one of their liquidation sales to get some stuff from my brick and mortar office way back in the day. I don’t get it. Yeah. Right. Way long time ago. Now I get my books from Amazon delivered to my house. I still want a physical book, right? I still buy it. I’m still purchasing that thing, but the distribution of it has changed. And I think that we’re on the cusp of something like that for this industry.

I don’t know. What do you think? No, I think you’re right on it, right? One of the things that we commented on the last time is that if your identity is the distribution of product for which you deliver advice, then you’re really competing as a marketplace or as a buyer representative of your client, right? I’m representing you in the marketplace of a consumption of financial services products, albeit investment, insurance, annuity, whatever it might be banking. Yeah. And that’s an interesting distinction. Cause as we both know, that’s where most of the margin is asking the client to pay for that advice has always been a challenging thing.

And I know a lot of us who wanted to go to fee-based planning is I think the compensation difference is significant, right? Getting a client to pay you $10,000 a year for advice to manage their money and their insurance portfolio and their kids and their financial planning. Seems almost like, wow, sticker shock. But when you roll in all of the product and implementations, that’s not unrealistic for a family with some means to be paying this in an aggregate. And I think what’s interesting about this relative to robo advisors, the following robo advice, as you just said, as it’s used in the terminology is really robo distribution.

And maybe Michael Kitsis would call it robo advisor. Okay. Right. Literally a product designed technology that makes the implementation of the product easier. And nothing wrong with that. No, no, no, that’s right. And we should just be honest about what it is. I think the question is, is the robo advisor going to compete with the typical financial advisor? I happen to think that the answer is, Oh yeah. Absolutely. And so the question is, if you don’t know your identity coming into this one in the next couple of years, it’s pretty clear to me that effectively we’re going to need to consider what our real identity is and can we compete or can we utilize some of these tools as advocates in our own practice?

Can we use a robo, let’s say asset allocator, just to drive margin down, right? Do I drop the least of costs? I shouldn’t say margin. Can we use a shopping application to go shop for insurances and place and implement literally within days, not months, can we go shop and compare all the different annuities in the marketplace for our clients and basically be a buyer representative if that’s an appropriate strategy. And, and I think that’s where we’re moving robo advisors will help that. Oh, no question. Yeah. I think you’re really, it’s a robo distribution model, a robo sales distribution model. I mean, we’ve been having fee compression for some time now, as we’ve all seen.

I think that was driven mainly by transparency, right? All of a sudden people are like, well, wait, I’m paying how much, right? This doesn’t make sense, right? Where it’s been kind of hidden from page 400 of the prospectus or whatever it’s impossible to find. So you’re having this compression, which I would argue is a good thing, but it’s going to disrupt the space. Those advisors that are reliant on just distribution of product are going to be competing now with an algorithm, an Amazon marketplace of financial products, if you will, that can distribute faster, more efficiently at scale and cheaper than a human being could ever do that.

So now that puts you in a position like, can I compete with an Amazon distribution model? I don’t think any human being could, but you could leverage it. Right. This goes back to the identity piece. Now, if I know, okay, I am an advisor that’s going to focus on advice, human customization here, and then we’re going to leverage a marketplace, this robo solution. Now this, I think is a sweet spot, but you have to identify like that if you’re going to be able to take advantage of it, it’s going to be an interesting dichotomy moving forward. I don’t, it’s, it’s exciting, but also a little, I think probably a little scary for some.

It’s very true. I think that’s a really great point, Derek. One of the things that one of my friends that used to work for me, many of the earlier partners in asset map, he indicated, he used to say this phrase all the time, those advisors that are trying to compete with technology alone will be replaced by robo’s at a fraction of the cost. Steve Amfield said that, and I thought that was really interesting because it kind of stuck with me, right? There was so many advisors saying, I’m just going to add this technology and I’m going to have this cool client portal and I’m going to have aggregation and evolved and I’ll have all this great.

And we’re like, but where’s the human part? Where’s the part where you actually spend time with them every year? You’re trying to basically robotize charge them a high price to basically have a portal. Okay, cool. You’re replaceable buddy. And I think that’s interesting. What do you think about this? Right? Cause we all talk about how much we need to invest in technology, but that can’t be our differentiator. No, it can’t. It actually is the benchmark. Now it’s the bare minimum. Do you have to have tech people expect that? So if your value add is technology, then you just commoditized yourself. That doesn’t work. Now you’re replaceable.

So it’s that human interaction. It’s empathy. It’s trust. An algorithm can not empathize. Point and simple human being who can empathize can leverage an algorithm can leverage tech. And if you combine those two things with the human understanding and empathy, and now you’re leveraging tech to make that better. Like that’s the magic. That’s the sweet spot where beautiful things can happen. I think maybe 10 years ago, if you were the guy girl who was like, Hey, I’ve got all this tech. You could probably use that as part of your value add, right? Cause you were ahead of the curve and not a lot of people were doing this, people will flock to you just like robo advisors were that flashing in the pan, but that’s all gone now.

Now that is an expectation at a minimum. Actually that leads us into our next, this fundamental shift here, which I think you should talk a little more about this consumer driven shift that we’re having now. Well, yeah. I just didn’t tag on to what you’re saying a second ago in my office. If you went to my office 10 years ago, it was one conference room. That was my office. I was a big fan of the idea of a non-office office and it was what I was supposed to do revenue producing wise. I was just supposed to spend the entire day in meetings, not doing anything else that would normally require an office conference room.

You’re in a meeting all day, dude. On my wall, I had a six foot touch screen and it was awesome and everybody came in to play with it all the time that we’re talking. I’ve seen pictures. I’ve seen pictures. Oh, you have, but there’s a video out there about this. It was like literally doing the weather show where John Madden approached the financial planning on the wall and it was just so entertaining, I think people were just blown away by their technology at the time. We also moved to remote 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, because it was just easier to facilitate. So people just thought we were just so far ahead tech wise.

And I think that probably gave us some panache, some value. I think in the early days, we were just way ahead. Everybody was using paper based. We were like, yeah, that’s cute. Um, now everybody has a touch screen, maybe five of them in their house. Uh, right. Their kids are walking around with a touch screen. The technology, as you can see, advances and you have to stay on top of it. If you’re going to say that, no, we’re innovators, we’re tech, we’re basically facilitating delivery of advice in a different way. This is really what this is the kind of hope of what robo advice will do in the marketplace.

But we all know they’re going to grab margin from advisors. We’re not creating accessibility environments. They’re not creating transparency for what you’re managing. And what does it mean to me? I think it’s a really interesting thing because for the past couple of years, we’ve seen an argument being made, my financial advisor. Well, robo doesn’t do financial planning per se. Derek, what is financial planning is financial planning to a lot of people is literally running a retirement analysis. Yeah. They’ve almost tried to commoditize that. And that here’s a public service announcement. That’s not financial planning. Wait a minute. I don’t understand. I have a financial planning tool and that’s what the financial planning tool does.

Aren’t I a financial planner if I’ve run your retirement analysis of when you run out of money? No, sorry. No, that’s a hard stop hard. No, on that one. No, there’s a lot more to it than that. Sorry. I just can’t agree with that. Do you know how true this is for live? I have now trained and you have to work with thousands of advisors who claim to be financial planners. Now I’m not saying this to be disparaging, right? This is awesome that you’re doing casual analysis, but it is the next commodity to go. If you’re trying to different, this is a table stake. You have to do it.

It’s what my past product manager used to say, he says, this is a hygiene item. You don’t leave the house without brushing your teeth, right? You don’t have, you don’t do an analysis without doing a retirement analysis. And by the way, we used to do this in Excel, right? Remember this, we would build these awesome models in Excel. And now there’s cool technology, which can generate all that work for you. This is a commodity. It’s not a differentiator. It’s the bare minimum and it’s what the consumer is demanding and expecting now. So you better get on board with that and figure it out. Does that mean you have to learn more?

Yeah. But I think because of how consumers are purchasing products, like we’ve got this marketplace phenomenon happening in this reality, so becoming the subject matter expert has become so much more important now that includes financial planning, by the way, that this is extremely important. And that’s where people will pay. People will pay for expert advice because you can’t commoditize that. You can’t commoditize empathy and trust and understanding. So this is where I think human advisors can actually win over global advisors or the two can have a symbiotic relationship at a minimum. Yeah, that’s true. Well, I tend to teach it. And there’s a model we teach called the four frames, which means that a professional has to look at somebody’s life from the perspectives of a legal advisor, a tax advisor, an insurance advisor, and an investment advisor.

These frames or points of view are how you compete. And of course, one might argue even a psychologist too, because we know there’s behavioral finance in here. How many times, right? Yeah, exactly. We probably know way too much, right? I was asking how many dollars, not how many hearts. Okay. But that really, that motivates, right? Why, what people do and why they do it. But I think the point of that is just to consider that. And that’s a great takeaway. When you look at somebody’s financial life and their decisions are making, that doesn’t mean you have to be a practicing attorney or a tax professional or the other professionals that the key is, can you start bringing ideas to the table?

I think we’re about to see this idea of the rebirth of a proactive advisor. I’ve been talking about it a lot recently. It’s time for us as humans to reach out to our human clients and point out the areas they need help in without being asked. I mean, Netflix didn’t ask me if I wanted to watch a show, but they have absolute intention of telling me, Hey, listen, other people, like you watch this show. Thank you Netflix. They know enough about me to do that. We should be doing that to the humans. Oh, of course. Any quote unquote advisor that has more than, you know, 10 clients can say, well, I’m learning some things here.

This is what’s going on. I should probably call Johnny up and sit, tell them like, Hey, we, and we should probably consider it. This isn’t plug and play advice where everyone gets the same widget, but there are a lot of similarities when it comes to planning. So I think you’re spot on with that. Well, isn’t it? That’s how human advisors win over robo advisors all day long. Cause a robo advisor can’t do that. We have seen tech and I know, honestly, we’re building some amazing tech that we’re going to release this summer that will, from an algorithm, we’ll be able to tell a client where their hazards are and what they should focus on.

If we can do that today and tell the advisor, it’s not far away before that technology is going to be able to tell the client directly. And then they’re going to be able to solve the problem now by hitting a button says buy it now. So I think that the conclusion of this is the consumer has basically, and we all know this because we are consumers of technology and products in lots of other ways. You mentioned your Amazon experience. So we’re in the same boat, but we get more boxes delivered than, you know, I don’t know what I feel like our recycle bin is actually bigger than our trash bin, which maybe that’s good.

I’m not exactly sure right now, but I feel sort of good about that environmentally, but maybe not. Our kids will yell at us later. I think the interesting thing about this is that the consumers don’t have attention span. They want convenience. They want it to deliver. They want it mass customized. They want it in front of them. Think about as an advisor, how you’re delivering on the consumer expectation, where your competition is Amazon, Netflix, Fang, uh, stocks and so forth. I mean, these guys are setting the standard and we’re all following and chasing that standard in the delivery of technology services. How are you going to basically make sure that you create a financial advisory experience that’s that basically exceeds this can go beyond with the capacity of a technology, at least for now.

Right. Who knows what the future will hold by. I think the short-term future is just that like, look how many people use Amazon and everything else online that we order, they want that convenience and they’re doing it from a place that has a strong digital reputation that does have transparency. So we know that model works. We know robo advice in the way that it first came out. Doesn’t work, actually work that well, but this new human element that we’re talking about, which actually isn’t new at all. It’s just being facilitated differently. This is a different medium. Now you have to get in front of this as an advisor while you don’t have to do anything, but I would argue that if you don’t, you’re going to be playing catch-up and eventually you’ve just kicked out of the game.

That’s true. Actually, there reminds me of something that I, that Joe Durant had written, if you follow Joe from the United capital and now Coleman sacks private wealth management, I believe it is, he said something once I really just hit home for me. And he said it actually, I think back in 2016, if I recall this article, right, he said that there’s, there are two distinctions, two variables when you think about making very difficult decisions. And I hope to paraphrase this correctly. He said, when there is a high cost of being wrong and there’s high complexity, people tend to want another human to help them make a decision.

And I think we are really saying, and this is kind of the culmination of all this, that financial services are all about helping people make financial decisions. If it’s easy and there’s a little complexity, it’s simple, and there’s not a high cost of being wrong. You can bet that the robot technology is going to take this business, right? What is that? It’s going to be term life insurance, banking, investing, direct investing, asset allocation, models, target investing, easy, low cost of being wrong. Totally very simple. I can execute that. I think it’s going to push the financial advisors to move into the higher end wealth management space, estate planning, the complex business succession, retirement distribution planning.

We all know it’s easy to get to retirement as opposed to actually had to make sure the distribution lasts forever. That’s actually a harder job. I don’t know if you’ve dealt with retirees, especially low interest rate environments. So I think we’re going to really say, if you’re going to try to focus on an area, make sure you’re getting skilled in this area, because it’s going to be harder for technology to compete directly in this stuff. When there’s so many working variables, family members, kids, different legal situations, separate marriages, there’s like, that’s going to be interesting. And algorithm can’t understand or plan around those because they’re infinite, right?

Every situation is different. Although maybe sometimes just slightly, it’s still different. Algorithms can’t figure that out, at least that I’m aware of. So that’s where being that subject matter expert, that doesn’t just have to be high net worth. I think obviously more complexity comes in that space, but even for just some middle America, there’s still a lot of complexities there. And although some of it might be done for you, that family still was probably going to say, you know what I’d like to talk to an advisor once a year, just to make sure I’m on track. Let’s do a benchmark, almost like going to your general practitioner.

Like I think I’m doing okay. I’m exercising. I’m taking my vitamins. I’m doing it all myself, but I’m going to get a checkup just to make sure nothing’s there that I don’t know about. Boy, that is so true. You know, that kind of inspired me to rethink something that we’ve been hearing a lot about. It is true. There have been some major studies done. I know McKinsey did one in last year that was really valuable, but they did promote the idea that financial advice will be really relegated again to, or we’ll say human advice and, or teams might only be for the higher net worth.

I think you’re right that it will be more accessible. There it’s not, we’re not going to lose this profession. Okay. We’re going to evolve like all things. It’s going to evolve. The record industry clearly evolved and thought that CDs was going to be the next thing. And they all wears an MP3. Now it’s like, what, why do you need an MP3 player? You just get the cloud. I mean, that, that industry has changed drastically. If you’re following what I’m talking about the financial advice industry or the financial distribution or product industry, whichever you’re calling it has been around for a hundred years, pretty much in the same way.

It’s one of the reasons why we were inspired to do this. The reason I mentioned that is because when you think about the consumer, the consumer has literally like a third grade education in finance. The ocean is incredibly blue, right? There’s an enormous amount of space. People do need basic help. They need complex help and they need ultra complex just because there are technology solutions in here that can help them, let’s say, get a little bit more comfortable about their financial aware with all, maybe do some banking or do some trading online. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be as humans, give them the confidence that they want bringing our competence associated with our experience and our credentialing, of course, our own research and skills.

So I think that’s really the key. So when the, in the question that we started with was, do we think the two of us, at least so far, do we think that robo versus human is really a battle? It’s a depends statement. We do think that human advisors will win over robo advisors, but pay clear attention to this concept of advice versus distribution, robo distribution of products and solutions will win over human distribution simply because the margins will be compressed to the point where it doesn’t make sense. Like other technologies, this, this, this intermediated industries for a human to do that work. Technology will be faster, cheaper for basically shopping.

Okay. Shopping for the solution. The key is, can we help people get to the right place? So do I even need a solution? And if I do, okay, now let’s go shop on your behalf. Maybe that’s not our monetization model anymore. I think that’s the big debate, right? It is the big debate, but I think it’s probably going to happen the way that you’ve just explained it is that distribution will change. Hey, I meet with my advisor. We have comprehensive conversations and advice and a game plan. XYZ recommendations and implementations are now at hand. I’m going to go to my robo marketplace and go implement the things that I need.

And I’m going to completely cut out the eight middlemen that exist currently. So I can get what I need at a much lower cost. That’s what tech does, right? That’s what tech does. And it has to be coupled with that human advisor. That’s true. And for, for most of you thinking, well, okay, my entire business is structured around the delivery of solutions and I do lead with advice and I act in my client’s best interest. And we know that you’re out there because that’s us in many ways, right? That we’ve been part of roles and lots of friends in this role. And that’s a majority of the marketplace, by the way.

But if service is where the humans win, Derek, then digital reputation is going to be super important, right? Because if you think about it, if we take out the commoditization of actually implementation of product, my performance and my investments is no different than yours. I can’t argue that my fees are different. The solutions I have access to as an insurance person to implement are the same as everybody else. It’s just, why am I a better realtor than you? Okay. It’s the same housing market, same commission structure. I mean, everything will come down to digital reputation because when you think about it, when humans want to go validate that they’re making a decision, they’re putting that weight on another human advisor to help them make a good decision, they’re going to go look for validation and guess where they’re going to look, they’re going to go on Google.

We’re going to go where it’s easy. You’re going to want LinkedIn. They’re going to try to read reviews on you. So we do know that we think it’s going to happen here is that the humans are going to have to be more human than ever in order to differentiate from the robo component here. I love it. Doesn’t that right? So we have to do the things that humans do, not the things that technology does. Oh, let me send you an automated email. Let me send you an automated. No, I’m going to actually send you a real letter. Okay. I’m going to actually pick up the phone and call you.

I’m going to actually pay attention to your family. I’m going to become this and I’m going to get a reputation that’s digital and lives forever. Right. Well, what’s funny about it is that we are using tech to enhance that human element. And that’s what’s so brilliant and amazing. It’s just like an advisor using the marketplace for distribution. It’s the same thing. So we’re going to, we’re going to push forward here folks, but I think what you need to walk away with is that you need to leverage the tech and your digital reputation to really find that sweet spot as an advisor, moving forward. If you don’t have that digital reputation, that is a major red flag.

And the consumer has more than enough choices. They will move on to the next one. That’s true. I guess there’s probably only one exception to that. And that’s if you really want to be an exclusive elite mystery, because you think that’s what your customers want a very unique, non-accessible publicly super expert that’s available to a hyper niche, that might be the one exception that I can think of to not having an outward reputation. In other words, you’re not looking for business. You take referral only and you don’t, and you want to kind of protect that almost like the secret society. If you’re not in the secret society, you better have a digital reputation because people are going to be looking for it.

Exactly. Even your existing clients, by the way, when they’re not exactly happy because remember all of the entire business, we think that our clients are just, oh, they’re happy with me as a financial advisor. They’re not getting bombarded by every single marketing tool from Facebook to for a better advisor who could do it better, cheaper, faster. You’re wrong. In fact, they have buddies that they’re making on the golf course that also are in the space that are hitting them up. People look around and that’s what tends to happen. I think we can’t get stuck on our, on our laurels that people are always just happy because they’ve been with me for 10 years.

The deliver value. Okay. That’s the point. Find a way to deliver value and make it human value. And if it’s going to be technology, make sure that it’s not the technology that is differentiating you. It is an added value service because you’re empathetic to their needs and it saves them time and or energy and our money. I wanted to jump to this question because this question came in for you. And I think it’s so, if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you this question, Derek, because this came to Derek, it was a question from Jennifer in the States, the United States, and she writes on this.

Dear Derek, I’ve been recently questioning whether I’m going back to a corporate office after my success and working from home. While it was a challenge making a space, working with my family. We all can relate to that one. I have saved a bunch on overhead and commute. What tips can you share for advisors who want to grow, but wants to stay virtual? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer, for submitting that via LinkedIn. What do you think? There’s so much to unpack here. I hear this a lot. What tips can I share? Well, there’s so many things that have to be thought about. And heck, maybe that’s just a whole nother episode where we unpack that a bit more.

But I think it comes down to a couple of key elements. And I wouldn’t say two of those are your physical infrastructure and your digital infrastructure. Without those, without infrastructure, it’s impossible to really run a successful practice, regardless of location, actually. I mean, you were talking about your old brick and mortar office. You had that conference room infrastructure, right? That’s what was allowed you to facilitate the meetings that you had. So I think that’s extremely important. I think it’s the mindset. Our industry has been doing things a certain way forever. Although the pandemic was quite the whirlwind for everybody around the world. It did show us that we can do things different and better.

It’s interesting. So I ran a poll on LinkedIn about a month ago. This was May of 2021. It was viewed around 20,000 times, which is not, that’s not, not too bad for a LinkedIn post. It had 759 votes. So, I mean, obviously this is a small sampling, but of all of those, and this whole post was about, or poll was asking, Hey, am I going to go back to the office or not? Like, what’s my preference? And we hit a couple of different options. One was I want to go back full time to my office setting. And keep in mind, the majority of my audience is financial advisors.

Only 14% want to go back to the office full time. The rest wanted to either be completely remote or hybrid of some sort like that, where they had some preferences and flexibility. So it’s very interesting that this question just like it’s near and dear to my heart, because I’ve been virtual for a long time. Like you have Adam and it’s something I love to talk about, but yeah, there were some growing pains, but obviously now we’re seeing the benefits of going through that evolution. And it’s clear that the industry doesn’t want to go back to that office the way that they used to. I think though, as far as tips, I mean, you and I could talk all day long about different tips that you could use to really do this.

But I think the ones I said earlier, probably a good start, but even those take some unpacking. I can talk all day about this. I know you can. Great question. I, yeah, we, we love this topic mostly because it’s hilarious how many people have discovered remote and we’ve been just doing it for so long, but I know, Hey, did you hear you can buy stocks online? Really? Wow. That’s cool. No, that listen, I don’t say that with disrespect. I say that because it’s amazing how life puts a fire to get you to open your eyes, right? Part of the reason why we’re doing rethink is because what a great opportunity to rethink why we’re doing what we’re doing.

It’s intentionality is really driver to I think specific purpose. This is another great question. I I’m actually surprised how many people, because we’re right in this kind of cusp of is everybody going back is that the masks are coming off and at this time of the world, it’s a middle to any 21. I, it’ll be really curious to go back to this episode a year from now and see what people chose to do. There are a good number of people that said they must go back. I don’t, I think the key to this and we’re going to, I think we are going to do our next episode on this specifically, so tune in for that.

The real question I would throw out here is what really serves your identity of who you want to be and where you want to spend your time. The probably the most amazing thing I’ve seen watching you, Derek, is the quality of life you’ve created as a result of disconnecting from a physical office, right? You live where you want to live. You move your family around. Everybody’s indoctrinated with this lifestyle of dad works and dad plays, and you’ve taken the freedom that this business affords you and used it from a time perspective to build a lifestyle that you want. And I think that this is financial advice.

We all know has the capacity of creating a lifestyle of accessibility and compensation that is really unlike many other professions, especially one without inventory management. So you don’t physically need a space. If you can figure this out, it is incredibly freeing. And I would argue is probably a necessity going forward because your clients are going to want to be remote too. They’re not coming into your office. So if you don’t need a physical space, fundamentally, you don’t need one or don’t need the same size one. I think it’s a real good question. Let’s make sure that we do a session right on this, which I think will be very popular.

Oh, it’s going to be, it’ll be fun. We can really rethink a lot of the preconceived notions of what it means to have a brick and mortar versus virtual office. We don’t need to dive into that. Here’s a teaser for next though, next episode folks would make sure not to miss it. Well, thank you, Jennifer. We’ll be sure to send you a shirt, a rethink shirt, t-shirt, hopefully aware with pride send us a photograph. Again, for those of you that want us to touch on certain topics, please take the opportunity to follow us on LinkedIn and send us a message in some manner with carrier pigeon or the technology, whatever you’ve got in your access today.

I make sure that we make this a community conversation. Derek, fantastic. Spend some time with you again. Yeah. Awesome. My friend, good, good chat today and everyone. Thank you for listening. We’re sending out positive vibes your way and stay tuned for our next episode. Cheers, buddy. All right. All the best, my man. Thank you for listening to rethink the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of asset map or connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.