Ep 35: “Does your advice suck?” Featuring Carl Richards

Episode 35 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (39:19)

Episode 35 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

Carl Richards joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman with a claim most planners will resist: that advice can be technically excellent and still be bad. His formulation is that a plan can be the best plan ever built and simultaneously wrong, because it answers a problem the client does not actually have. The failure is not in the analysis, it is in the discovery that preceded it, and Richards’s prescription is short enough to remember, which is to stay curious a little longer before advising. The hosts connect this to what Holt calls the righteous trick of planning, where mathematical rigor produces client confidence in a process without anyone confirming the underlying goal was ever understood. Richards also describes his frustration, in the years after Madoff, that the public had no idea real financial planners existed at all.

What this episode covers

• How advice can be technically correct and still fail the person receiving it
• Holding two competing truths: a plan that is excellent and also wrong
• Staying curious longer as a discipline rather than a personality trait
• Why mathematical rigor can produce confidence without producing fit
• The reputation gap between what planners do and what the public believes they do

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. Derek, does your advice suck? That’s kind of a blunt statement, man. I would say no, but tell me more. What do you actually mean? How do you know? What do you mean? Does my advice suck? I mean, you’re a financial planner. Yeah, I’m a CFP, so.

How do you know your financial planning is good? Well, I guess it’s like the ultimate litmus test. So what do my clients think about it? Do you ask them? Yeah, of course I ask them. Yeah. You know, so this is funny, Derek, because this came up in a conversation with Carl Richards, who you know well. Yeah. And I think a lot of you know well. And he brought this up and this theme is that financial planning has been overused and has been misvalued to the technical and the mathematical value of projecting your life with some form of precision errantly, of course. We know none of it’s precise.

It’s a joke. It’s a nice guess. And it begs the question that I’m wondering, which is how do we know that any of this advice is really good advice? That’s a huge question. I mean, it’s almost like good advisors or just it’s a series of best guesses, right? Because as you said, it’s not precise, is it? So are you saying that we’re putting too much stake on financial planning or set advice with planning? Is that like the thing here? And because we do, it sucks because we’re too focused on the math? I think that he touches on some interesting aspects, which we’re gonna hear in a second, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about and actually talking about.

I know you have too for a long time, but he says it in his classic Carl Richards way and he doesn’t just draw it. He actually explains it, which is kind of fun. But I think there’s really something to think about for all of you listening. We have for a long time put a lot of preeminence on the technical mathematical value of planning, usually around this idea of retirement planning, mostly because that is most of our biggest fears. No one’s got a safety blanket for us in retirement. And of course we can’t generally earn income. So retirement tends to be the number one financial planning module run, just to the point where almost all financial planning has somehow become ubiquitous with retirement planning.

And yet, as we all know, it’s really about the journey, not the destination. And as financial advisors, we have to make constant decisions again and again and again. And sometimes the long-term plan is not relevant. We have episodic things that happen in our lives. Kids go to school, something changes course, I lost my job, I have no savings, there’s something blows up. There’s lots of decisions that we need to make that kind of predict our outcome. And so the question is, is financial planning being unfortunately rooted in the technology idea of projections on Excel or the best planning tool out there, or is it more about making ongoing wellness decisions that serve the long-term goal?

Well, I’m biased. I think it’s the latter. You’ve got a great question that you have put out there many times that clients may not always articulate, but they’re thinking it, am I okay? And the am I okay question is extremely important, but it’s also not a precise question in that it does change every single day. So how can a financial plan be precise about something that’s a moving target? And I don’t know where I heard this. I don’t know if this was with you. I talk to you a lot. I know, I’m sorry. I don’t know where this was, but just recently I heard someone say like, if you ask a client what they’re gonna do tomorrow or next weekend or next week, they can tell you with a lot of certainty what they’re gonna be doing.

But if you ask them what they’re gonna be doing in 10 years or 20 years, like, oh, I don’t know, golf maybe, travel, hanging out with the grandkids, I don’t know. So there’s no precision left at that point. It’s too far out. So how can a financial plan, like I would say that your advice sucks if your financial plan tells them exactly what they should be doing in 20 years. Oh, see, that’s interesting because I know that many advisors think it’s about the money and all of the financial planning discussions that we’ve had recently that are really about the technology supporting financial planning has been about the math, right?

Do you have Monte Carlo? Do you take into consideration tax? And I don’t know. I’ve always had a trouble with this because in the real world, the client’s not thinking about that. I know they’re relevant. They think that we are supposed to be paying attention and we are, but it’s not the real meaning, right? Many advisors think it’s about the money. It’s not about the money. It’s about what the money gives you, certainty, security, and what it provides you. And those things, unfortunately, very often can’t be quantified because they’re so far out in the future. And we have no clue what we’re gonna spend in the future really.

So what about your projection model of I’m gonna die at a hundred and I’m gonna pay this much in taxes? Like, I don’t know. It seems, as Carl says, a righteous trick. It basically is a necessity that we have to do it, but it’s kind of also a silliness, right? And I think that’s an important aspect. So let’s get to know Carl because I think you’re gonna all appreciate what he has to say here. How do, tell me about Carl. Well, he is a certified financial planner. He did work client facing for a while, but he’s really well known as the sketch guy. He did a column in the New York Times, I think starting back in 2010.

And you’ve probably seen some of his pictures on, well, maybe the New York Times or LinkedIn, just really simple scribbles to explain sometimes rather complex ideas or strategies in a very simple manner. So he’s known as that. He’s been featured in places like Marketplace Money, Oprah, Forbes. He’s been a keynote speaker in a number of places. Just recently, he was at the Riskalyze event. He does the Carl and Kit’s podcast. He’s got a couple of books out there, the One Page Financial Plan, and then also the Behavior Gap. He’s been in the space for a while. As we come at it from more of a behavioral finance, psychological aspect, but enough of his stuff there.

I think we just gotta hear what the guy asked to say and let people make up their own minds. I agree. How do we get to know Carl really fast? Oh man, that’s the hardest question of all. Really fast. I got into the business by accident. I applied to be a security guard. I thought it said security. It said securities. I didn’t know the difference. Got into the business by accident. Stayed because I quickly, with my first interaction with the public, I figured out that this was not a math job. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, whoa, this is not about spreadsheets and calculators.

People are upset. People are sad. People are mad. And that kept me in the business because humans and their interaction with money is endlessly fascinating. So now really the last 20 years have been about exploring the secret is I don’t care about money. What I care about is that it’s, as far as I can tell, other than health and I think maybe even more than health actually, it’s the fastest way into the stuff that matters. Like we can just use money as a righteous trick to get to the stuff I really care about, which is like, what are you doing here? Like what’s the purpose of your life?

What’s the thing you care about? What’s the difference you wanna make? And so that might shed some light on why I wrote a personal finance columns at the New York Times about imposter syndrome or taking cold showers in the morning, or I have a much broader definition of personal finance than most. So maybe that helps. I like that. I’d love to see the job that you applied for. I’ve been asked so many times about it that I went back and tried to find it. It was a, I just recall it being like security guard and I thought this is be amazing because I’m with school full time.

I was like, I’ll work the graveyard shift. I’ll be like a mall cop or something. Like I can study in the booth or whatever. They never asked me at the job interview about Kung Fu or Jiu Jitsu and mutual funds and stocks and bonds and whatever. But I still got the job, which tells you about the applicant pool of course, but I’m glad it worked. Given that entry into this profession and industry. Triumphant entry. Triumphant, triumphant. True, I heard the horns. I heard them. I love it. I’m curious as your perspective now on what the financial advice market profession industry is given this really cool path you took to get there and what you’re doing.

Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting, right? That that question is even up for discussion. And the reason it’s so interesting is that we don’t even know what to call ourselves. I remember when this first really struck me, it was at FPA retreat and it was someplace in the sort of the South, Southeast. I can’t remember exactly where it was. And at FPA retreat, it’s like deep thinker retreat. And they have Tim Maurer and Michael Kitsis and I were on a panel and this was a long time ago. And I was writing the column at the time for the New York Times. And I was really frustrated by the difference between what I was seeing in the financial pornography network, like the stuff I was seeing written about financial advisors, because this was like Bernie Madoff and Minnie Madoff and all of that stuff.

And so I was frustrated by the reputation of what a financial advisor was compared to what I thought I was doing myself, but certainly I was seeing my colleagues do. Like these people were saving people’s lives. I mean, maybe not literally, but like as close as you could get. And yet everybody was like, yeah, nobody, nobody. And I remember saying at that panel, I was expressing that frustration. I was like the difference between what people think and what we, this group, real financial planners do. It’s really frustrating. I remember saying, it’s like there’s a secret society of real financial advisors. Right, and I remember whispering it even.

Like nobody believes that we exist. I’m trying to answer this question that at retreat, you can sign up for your own session. Like you can create like under the trees, I think they call it. And somebody wrote down real financial planners. I went out and there was like a hundred people there and the president of the FPA and the CFP board and people I looked up to and admired. And we were all there to debate what it meant to be a real financial planner. And I was like, this is so crazy that we don’t even know. And so my definition of the advice market, of what real financial advice means is the sort of never-ending alignment of somebody’s use of capital.

Use of capital and capital has an asterisk by it. It’s time, money, energy and attention, sources of capital. So the alignment of somebody’s use of capital with what’s really important to them. That’s what I view as financial advice. Now, how we deliver that, like does anybody sign up for that? I know nobody shows up. Hey, can I sit on your couch and cry for a minute? But that’s why asset allocation and performance and those are all just righteous tricks. Greet with empathy or if performance is important to you, I can say, Adam, thanks, that’s a great question. Performance is important to me too. Could we back up a minute?

And get to the why questions underneath. And that to me, I just define real financial planning as the alignment, the never-ending alignment because it will never finish. The never-ending alignment of your use of capital with what’s really important to you. We’ve heard that so many times in similar interviews, of course, in our own journeys, right? Don’t tell me what you care about, show me your budget, I’ll tell you what you care about. And the use of capital is also sometimes very obscure because people don’t wanna share because they feel like they’re gonna be judged too. So it is a very intimate and authentic space that we need to move our profession too.

So we clearly appreciate what you’re saying and I think our listenership will as well. What do you think, Carl, is the missing opportunity that advisors just don’t see or can’t see coming? Super interesting, the missing opportunity. To me, there’s been so much for the last, let’s just call it decade, fear around robo-advice, fee compression, online TikTok advisors, whatever it is. And that fear to me is actually a really helpful tool to point us to what is actually really the value, right? I think the opportunity is to understand real financial planning is under no threat of fee compression. It’s all those other things that you used to think was your job.

Like you used to, and there was a time, like I grew up in a time where security selection and timing were something we sold as our value proposition as a stockbroker, right? Like I’ll pick a stock for you. Then we moved to asset allocation and portfolio design. Answer these 17 questions and out pops portfolio, right? And now we’ve realized like all of that is under pressure and the missing opportunity, I think the opportunity that advisors are often missing is the solution to that threat is to be more human, not to be more like the calculator, but be more human. So really I think of it as a tech-enabled human, but that’s good news.

The opportunity is like, robot, awesome. Like you can take care of all the crap I didn’t wanna do anyway. And now I can be really clear about, I think the huge opportunity and value is probably summed up in Covey’s old thing that he used to say, the last thing we wanna do is spend our entire lives climbing the ladder only to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. An algorithm’s not gonna help you figure out if it’s leaning against the wrong wall. A human will. And I think the opportunity is to lean into that, to be more human, to go there further and use all the tools to help us do that at scale.

I love it. I know I’ve said that a couple of times now, but I really do love what you’re saying. It’s profound and I think it should resonate with our audience. Further along that vein then Carl, what action steps would you be giving to advisors? Now our audience is primary advisors, but we do have folks that are in the product marketplace, if you will, we have consumers listening. So I guess if you had some advice for all of us or any of us, what are some action steps we can take? Yeah, I mean, I think I like this word rethink. And I think the opportunity, what I love, and I think my work has been valuable to anybody, it’s mainly because I’m looking at opportunities outside of our industry, right?

I don’t get it right very often, but when I do, it’s because there’s no ground beneath my feet, right? It’s truly a new and novel thing. And I think if we could rethink the way we approach advice, we could rethink business models we use, like you look around at other business models, I mean, subscription for, here’s one way to rethink. What if you rethought of yourself, like I love this, like just sort of just take yourself out of your business and put yourself in a different one. What if a financial advisor stopped thinking of themselves as financial advisors and they started thinking of themselves as the owners of intellectual property businesses, right?

What if I got paid for my wisdom? Well, how could I package that wisdom? What souvenir or artifact could it take? Like in the old days, we would have just set a book, right? But now we got all these other, how could I package the experience? How could I productize? And not just to make more money, but to do me at scale. We joked a little bit before we started talking about how efficient my team may be, right? Like, well, one of the reasons for all of that is to try and do impact at scale. I don’t have a ghostwriter, but I got a whole bunch of ways that people on my team capture what I say so they can be done at scale.

Well, how could we rethink, how could we make impact at scale if we started thinking of ourselves as the owners of intellectual property businesses? It doesn’t just have to be an AUM fee anymore. Oh, it could be that I have a course. It could be that I have a workshop. It could be that I have a paid podcast. I have a paid podcast. It’s 10 bucks a month. It’s a great, great business, right? So I love thinking, well, let me give you one more example. And this is just to like jolt people out. What if, as a financial advisor, you started a podcast where you recorded something two or three times a week with no guest, you could actually just take the CFP modules, there’s like 87 topics in there, can’t even remember what the number, and talk about each one.

What if at the end of that, you repackaged them up a little bit and you wrote a book, but you never published the book. The book was only released in audible form in your podcast. Here’s chapter one of my new book, and it’s a mini book, and it was 10 bucks a month. All I’m saying is you start thinking about all these other delivery mechanisms, you get a chance to completely rethink the business, not just because it will generate more revenue, but also because it will allow you to do you at scale. These are all these interesting, Carlos is fun, because this is the space that Derek and I choose to live in a lot, which is to completely rethink why we’re doing.

It’s why we love innovation, I really express that, we appreciate your attitude towards this. And it’s a great opportunity in today’s age, we’ll call it, where advisors have the luxury to do this, if they choose to rethink themselves versus waiting for calamity to force them to change. And so that’s really exciting. I’m curious, is there anything that you think advisors need to hear, or that the community needs to hear, that is a topic we should be talking more about? Yeah, and I love this format of this. We think a lot internally about the work we do as like balancing a punch in the face and an empathetic hug, then sometimes it’s an empathetic punch, but maybe in the punch in the face vein, your advice is not as good as you think it is.

Your plan is not worth anything. And here’s the reason, let me like back up a bit. The advice is not as good as you think it is, is because you didn’t listen long enough. com. He has a great book called The Advice Monster, or The Advice Trap. And he talks about this idea like, the reason our advice, he uses the word it sucks, right? Your advice sucks is what he’ll tell coaches. Your advice sucks. Well, it’s not because it actually sucks, it’s because it’s not solving the right problem. Your advice could be perfect, except it doesn’t match the problem I have. Well, then it sucks, right?

So the way to solve that is could we just stay curious a little longer, like curious a little longer, advice later, like just curious a little longer. So we’re not as good as we think we are in terms of the advice we’re giving, not because our solutions aren’t awesome. It’s because they’re not matched to the problem. And the reason it’s not matched to the problem is because we didn’t listen long enough. We didn’t do the discovery. The thing that I think we need to hear is like, look, you’re as an adult, you adults are required to sometimes hold two competing truths in their mind at the same time.

It can be true that your plan is the best plan ever created ever in the history of the world. And it’s wrong. And I would submit that good planners, that is actually true of every plan they ever do. It’s the best plan they ever created, and it’s wrong. And so one way to state that is like, the financial plan is worthless without the ongoing process of planning. And if we could just please let go of this false sense of precision, this need to be precisely correct today and realize that when you look at other domains, like I’m heavily involved in sort of the VC world right now and a bunch of pitches and in entrepreneurship, there’s a thing called the lean startup, we all know.

We build MVPs, we try little experiments, we see what information we get. In programming, nobody does waterfall development anymore where you lock yourself in a room for two years and build a program and then come out and announce it to the world and realize it was all wrong. The world’s moved on. You do agile development. In complexity theory, we know that in a complex adaptive environment, the only way to navigate a complex adaptive environment, which is the definition of humans and their money, is to solve for the next local optimum and then reset. So your projections actually don’t do us that much good. What matters, financial planning is not about being precisely correct today.

It’s about being a little less wrong tomorrow. And that’s a debate Michael and I have all the time, which is fun and we’ll probably do it at Advice Tech, is that the idea that nobody cares about your solutions. They care about their problems. And so if we can just get better at, everybody else in the world is doing it. Why are we still building 30 year projections carved in stone, right? They should be written in pencil so that we can adjust them tomorrow and realize that a fact, and last they did on this, because this is a little ranty on my part, I know, but I get so fired up about it, is if we treat our plans like a strong opinion, loosely held, we should actively be looking for disconfirming evidence.

And when it shows up, we shouldn’t feel like that makes us bad. It’s actually a sign of our value. When we show up and disconcerting evidence shows up and we say, oh, great, that means we can course correct. Instead of feeling like disconfirming evidence shows up, I’m gonna dig in and be a defender of this outdated method, right? So maybe that’s helpful. I don’t know. It felt good to get it off my chest at least. We felt good to watch you get it off your chest. Yeah, it was kind of fun. You’re welcome. That’s good, thank you. Send me a bill. It’s a therapy session.

Actually, we’re gonna package it and send it back to your team. I will bill you. Perfect. So that was fun. Awesome. And I’m gonna jump back to the beginning of this episode. You asked me, does my advice suck? And I think by accident, I’ve kind of been doing what Carl talks about is listening longer over the years. Now I’m by no means like a perfect advisor and there’s a lot more successful advisors out there than myself. But I think part of the reasons that clients have stayed with me since the very beginning is that I listen. And so I think to that point, I wanna get your thoughts on here, but that struck me right away is I think that there is something to this here.

If you’re not listening long enough, you’re just like, give me your social security number, give me your net worth, give me your income and give me your debts. Okay, you need this much insurance. See, that’s not enough. And if you do that, then yes, your advice sucks, in my opinion. How did that hit you? I thought it was a great conversation, but how did it hit you? It’s funny because Carl’s demeanor is very intellectually thoughtful in his word choices and clearly I like that. And listening back to it, now probably the third or fourth time, you can hear this very therapeutic delivery of no nonsense, but I wonder from the standpoint of being in the business for as many years as both of us have too.

There’s a maturity level that comes out of recognizing what really matters after you’ve been in the business for 15, 20 years. And you’re saying it’s no longer the recipe that I followed of executing financial planning as a business, right? Do this, do that. It becomes an art and not such a science. And I think the interesting thing that a lot of advisors that we’ve been talking about is this idea of humanity and how do we deliver more humanity? And yes, so let’s talk about takeaways because I think there’s really a couple of things everyone needs to pay attention to here that they can write down, they can think about or rethink about.

Where do you start? Well, his comment about we don’t even know what to call ourselves, that resonated. And I think the term financial advisor is terrible. I think you mean so many different things to so many different people and if our clients don’t know what it means, like that’s a problem. And it leads to a bad reputation for a lot of us that are trying to do a really good job. And it’s like, what is a real financial planner? And I liked his definition of someone who is helping with this never-ending alignment of their capital, their time, their money, their energy attention with their client in using that to deliver real financial advice.

As you put it, everything else is a righteous trick and it’s an unending thing, like this journey that keeps going on. Put it in pencil, don’t put it in pen. Like don’t carve it in stone. I think that resonated with me. You just said something that totally, I realized something, I had a little bit of an epiphany. I wonder if what you just said and what Carl also supported is if we don’t know what to call ourselves. And remember we brought this up with Michael Kitzis. He brought up a whole new terminology around advisor in our podcast way back when. And I wonder whether financial planner as a naming convention is actually doing us a disservice.

I’m not sure if we’re ready for it, but financial coach still might be more appropriate long-term. And here’s why I say that. If planner by definition is thinking about the future and they’re trying to architect actions to plan for the future. But we just said the planning for the future is kind of silly in a sense. We have to take actions today. And I think a coach helps us take actions today that serves our long-term agenda. And maybe we should stop thinking about this is all about the projections of the future. I’m planning your road trip. Maybe we should be talking about I’m planning what you’re gonna do today so that we’re ready for tomorrow.

And that’s what this kind of episodic concept or what he mentioned was, what did he call it? He called it the complex adaptive environment and the need to reset at different points of inflection. I don’t know. Maybe that’s something to think about. I’m almost having an epiphany on your epiphany. Is that possible? You’re layering epiphanies. Use like a sports analogy. Does a coach try to like put in stone what you should do 20 years from now? No, your coach is helping you today and then a little bit more tomorrow. And then the next day and assessing where you are and okay, now we can make this pivot and that pivot.

So I really like your financial coach term. Now, honestly, one of the things that hits me with that though is this financial coach. Is it a strong enough term? You hear the word doctor, you hear CPA, you hear attorney or lawyer. Those have these strong credible like auras around them almost. Does financial coach have that? I don’t know. No, it doesn’t, but that’s only because historically it’s had a hundred years to ferment in your brain. I mean, we have association with those terms just like we have an association with this financial advisor. We all know, as was said, the evolution of the stock broker to the financial advisor or the insurance agent to the financial advisor or the bank broker dealer to the financial advisor, everybody’s a financial advisor.

And that’s the challenge is that the tasks that we executed were typically product or solution-based. Now we’re all trying to say like, no, we lead with advice because it helps us sell more product. And that’s the righteous trick that I’ve been banging the drum about forever. I appreciate the fact that financial planning as a technique has been a loss leader for AUM gathering. Okay, I get it. And we all know that those advisors who lead with advice and do more planning, financial planning, CFPs supposedly earn more revenue than those that don’t have a CFP. Why is that? Because the righteous trick of planning gets people convinced that they’re confident and they can trust your process because it’s baked in what?

It’s baked in a process that’s mathematically pure. And I’m already lost in terms of meeting the obligations that Carl has pointed out, right? Have I really listened to the underlying why of what you’re really trying to achieve and I’m helping you get there? Now my very will be the same thing mathematically, right? You still gotta save. You gotta invest. You gotta be smart on taxes. You gotta buy some insurances. But maybe there’s a more human way to connect in a way that’s gonna literally change behavior, which will drive wellness, which will lift the entire population, not just our clients, the entire population if all of us were more financially fit.

And I think that’s the interesting implication of this change. It’s not just about how do I sell more, but how do I actually lift the population? So. Ha ha ha ha. Bam. I know, like boom. Too big. If I’m a CFP, listen to this right now and I’m leading with advice. You are a CFP. Yeah, but I’m not listening to it. Oh, thank you. Recording it. You’re supposed to listen more, he said. Uh, what? Very well. You know, are you telling me that I should, that my leading with advice to sell products is bad or is the message, should I listen more to lead with better advice and that it’s okay that products and services have to get placed eventually?

Or do I need to get out of the product manufacturing side and delivery side entirely and just provide advice and figure out a way to like come up with an Amazon to deliver these products for implementation? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. This is an ongoing debate. I know lots of people are having, but if, since you’re asking, I might as well answer and put myself on the line and say what I really think. We can edit it out later. That’s true. We could. Is that a cue? Please edit Adam’s comments. I don’t want to do it. I want to share because I don’t think that product placement is some form of anti-financial planning.

It’s only about the sales. I think the money does need to land somewhere. I think we do need to make decisions. There’s too many people driving around right now without their seat belts. In other words, they don’t have the right insurances. Someone needs to just sell them something. They need to just put a seat belt on. It doesn’t need to be perfect. There’s a lot of gaps that we constantly see in asset map where massive, hundreds of thousands of families do not have the right stuff that are basic. And gosh darn it, if it takes someone selling them something to protect their family, that’s good.

What I am saying though, is that we do need to help people start getting healthier financially. And in some cases, they need advocates. They need an advocate that’s gonna help them. We all know top professional athletes. They get a coach, even if they’re an individual sport or a team sport. And likely they probably have a fitness coach, an attitude coach, a strength training coach. They have coaches and mentors that help them make better decisions. And the same thing is true on the financial side. What we need to do as financial planners is not necessarily use planning to get the outcome we want, but use planning to get the client what they need.

And ultimately because we’ll earn the business because they’ll need to place it someplace. And if we’re the right place for that to land, then fantastic. If we’re not, we should be big enough to tell them so. Yes. You know, I think that you just nailed it. I’m glad that you elaborated so we won’t edit this out. Okay. We’ll keep it in. Okay. But actually what I’m hearing is that financial planners, I guess we can include advisors in this definition here, actually have a really amazing, huge opportunity. And I think this is what you’re driving at to impact society at a pretty interesting level by helping with these things you just talked about.

And as Carl said, listen more, make the advice more valuable. Know it’s a moving target. That’s what I’m hearing now, more than anything as we hash this out, which is great. What an amazing opportunity to help people. And there’s more than enough business out there for everyone. So yes, if you listen and you truly care and you try to help point your clients in the right direction, you’re gonna get most of the business anyways. Yeah. It’s gonna happen. Authenticity works in many ways. Oh my gosh. To everyone’s benefit. Yeah. That’s true. So any other follow-up check-outs before we close up? Anything that you think, remind anybody to go back and listen for it or listen for something?

Be curious longer and be honest with yourself as your advice actually suck. Take a look. Yeah. Take a look. And don’t be afraid to ask people, obviously. There’s an important aspect to this. Try out some new techniques. We really want everybody to rethink how they’re delivering advice and confirm that they’re doing the best or find ways to elevate it just a bit. I’ve thought about that climbing the wrong ladder. I thought about our DIY clients that do it themselves. They’re saving, they’re doing these things. And then you find out that the ladder’s on the wrong wall. And I think that’s an opportunity for most of us and advice to help out.

And I think it’s true that let’s be careful about the plan carved in stone. It’s worthless without an ongoing process that’s called planning. I think we need to do more of that. So with that, Derek, I actually really encourage everybody to go back and listen to that again, because it was really fun. And I know you’ll pick up more from Carl. Thank you, Carl, for taking the time to spend time with us. Derek, what’s next? Well, let’s end it on a slightly lighter note. Okay. Okay. So we’re both dads. We are. I’m guessing it’s a couple of dads listening. I think we should end today with a couple of dad jokes.

Dad jokes? All right. All right. Give me your best dad joke. Well, I don’t know if this is my best dad joke. All right. This is a dad joke. All right. It’s probably gonna make people listening cringe a little bit, but here you go. Okay. Adam. Yes. What did the man say while he was reversing his car? What? What? Ah, this takes me back. Oh my goodness. It’s so stupid. Did you try it? All right. That’s okay. I’m sorry. It’s all right. Maybe that’s poor execution. Maybe it’s just a bad joke, but it’s a dad joke. It’s a dad joke. It’s supposed to be bad, right?

Hopefully people will remember this one. I never remember the joke. So, but I have one for you. I want to hear yours. What do you got? Okay. So my kid has been going through these, these tests to get into a new school. So we were doing a lot of math. So here’s the question for you. Derek, if you have 10 apples in one hand and 13 oranges in the other hand, what do you have? I don’t know. You got a lot of something. Do you remember this? You got big hands. That’s what you got. You know, you’re from Florida. They have oranges down there. Big, big hands.

I know. I can’t wait to tell that to my daughter. She’s gonna roll her eyes like all the time. You should have her write that in as a question on one of her entrance exams, just to show how thoughtful she is. It’s true. She’ll fail, right? This is how good of math I am. It’s true. See, she’s rethinking the problem. Get credit for that. That’s right. Oh my God. That’s right. The train is going how fast? I don’t know. There you go. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for making me laugh. And of course, Karl, thanks for making us think. We do appreciate it.

For those of us that, that have been, had enough opportunity to meet you in person, certainly check out Karl and all the stuff that he’s doing online, as well as his fun societies and his podcasts online. You’ll just get some great stuff. I know Michael and him have been doing a great job. You also thank you for your 100th episode that was recorded at Device Tech Live that just came out. So make sure you check that out. And we were excited to have you there. Seeing this community is really so tied to each other. Derek, anything that everybody needs to do? Yeah. Everyone listening, tell a friend of yours that’s an advisor and one that isn’t to subscribe and listen to our podcast.

We’re growing and growing and growing. We’re having a ton of fun. We’re getting a lot of great feedback. So thank you for all of the listens. Connect with us on LinkedIn, man. Send us a DM. Adam and I will actually respond to you. Yeah. We will. And if maybe if you’re lucky, we’ll even put one of your questions on our podcast. So. Perfect. We got some cool stuff coming, but thank you for listening. And Adam, it was a pleasure as always talking to you multiple times a day. I’m very sorry. It depends. Thanks everybody. Derek, good to hear your voice and we’ll see you at the next podcast.

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 AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.