Ep 52: Scaling Financial Advice 3.0 Featuring Michael Lecours

Episode 52 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (40:45)

Episode 52 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

Michael Lecours joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman with a question framed to provoke: are advisors unknowingly committing malpractice, not through bad intent but through forgetting? An advisor serving a couple of hundred households cannot reliably remember every question to ask and every planning item to raise, and rules such as the SECURE Act keep changing underneath them. Holt’s response is the sharpest line in the episode, that unlike medicine, financial advice has no genuine standard of care, only a best-interest obligation nobody can define precisely and a form to file. Lecours’s answer is systematic checklists rather than better memory. Late in the conversation the three of them work out a framework live, tracing the profession from selling products, to planning and then selling products, to ongoing preventative care organized around a client’s wellbeing.

What this episode covers

• Whether omission counts as harm when an advisor simply forgets to raise something
• Why financial advice has no standard of care comparable to the one medicine uses
• Checklists as an answer to the limits of memory across hundreds of households
• Keeping current with rules that change faster than any individual can track
• The three-stage framework the hosts build live, ending in preventative ongoing care

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. 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, are financial advisors unknowingly committing malpractice? I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell people that, but maybe, why? That’s a good question. Well, think about it. We’re human beings, human beings make mistakes, right? And I know, for example, a good friend of mine, his name is Adam, has a lot of to-do lists in his brain, okay?

Oh, you mean someone who looks and sounds like me? Yeah, it’s remarkable. Like you guys could be the same person. But think about it. So we, as advisors have, we serve what? 100, 200, hundreds of clients or households, depending on what type of advisor you are. Sure. And how do you remember to do everything you’re supposed to tell your clients to do? How do you remember to ask every question? How do you remember to tell them to do every single planning thing you’re supposed to do? Humans are naturally bad at remembering everything. So are we committing malpractice? Maybe not with intent. I sure as hell hope not.

Are we committing malpractice by simply forgetting to do things? Wow, I just had an epiphany. Okay. And the epiphany was rooted in your question. Which is there is no true standard of care for financial professionals. Ooh, that’s good. That’s good, there isn’t. And it’s not like Medicsyn that has a code. We have best interest advice. Nobody can figure out what that really means. And Department of Labor, fiduciary responsibility, everybody’s just doing business like they always have. Yeah, I’ve got an extra form. There’s a form, there’s an ADV. I’m still doing what I always do. I’m looking out for my clients. I believe that I’m acting in the best interest.

But malpractice is a completely different question. It’s asking, are we actually practicing in a way that is detrimental to our clients? And in the absence of actually doing certain things, are we actually hurting them? Yeah, even if we’re not intending to, we still could be hurting our clients. Almost from a negligent standpoint. Yeah, for sure. A mental bandwidth. Can you remember all the stuff from the Secure Act? I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of all the things, right? I look it up. You look it up, right? But then how do you know when to look it up for which client and when?

What a good question. I keep an enormous amount in my head. I actually do have lots of tools that I keep my to-do list, but they’re almost running to-dos, right? This has to get done, or this is a new project, that’s a high priority. And you’re constantly just managing projects. But I think we’re talking about something deeper. When you’re meeting with those hundred clients and you’re replicating and scaling the process and the experience that somebody’s gonna have, for which they’re paying you some money, right? Either POM or fee or whatever it is, are you delivering a consistent process to everybody that’s a great question, because I think most of us think we are, but it might actually be in our head.

I think so. Yeah, and unfortunately our clients probably don’t know that something is missing until a life event happens where it’s now too late to do something about it. Oh, you know where this happens a lot? This happens in long-term care planning. Where advisors don’t wanna talk about it, and then all of a sudden it’s the next generation that goes to the advisor and says, you’ve been managing my parents’ money for the last 20 years. How come you never brought up long-term care? Because we just spent all that money you manage, and now there’s no inheritance. So guess who I’m suing for malpractice. Wait, what malpractice?

I didn’t do anything wrong. I managed your money. Keywords, I didn’t do anything. That’s it. Right? Wow, that’s a great pickup. There you go. You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t do anything, you’re right. Great point. That’s an interesting line of thinking. So this came up actually partially in a conversation with Michael La Cour. I think his profile is going higher and higher because he’s co-founder of FP Pathfinder. And that’s a tool that I’ve had exposure to for the past bunch of years. And this kind of came up in our conversation, Derek, with him, and I think he brought some really great accolade to this.

Now, if you don’t know, FP Pathfinder, they’re a tool that’s used by over 4,000 advisors who recognize that checklists, flow charts, and advice engagement tools really help them deliver a scalable practice experience with value as we’ve all been trying to struggle with in this commoditized world, how are we adding more value? So I think we’ll appreciate, Derek, how he started in the practice. He’s obviously a professional, but he also started this project with Michael Kitzis and it’s really kind of taken off. It’s a great story, great origin story. Let’s hear what he has to say. I’m a financial advisor and co-founder of FP Pathfinder. And the FP Pathfinder really got born based out of my own personal frustrations.

They’re just like you, Adam. And Derek. Well, yeah, Derek too. The problem I had was that clients would call me up and they’d ask a question, can I make a deductible IRA contribution? Like real basic question. And I kept screwing it up. The rules kept changing. There were like five questions you had to ask. I always seemed to mix up one and then I’d have to call the client back, apologize, clarify and then provide the accurate advice. And it got so frustrating that I actually just sketched out a little flow chart for myself just to keep it straight. Other advisors saw it. I turned it around.

I sent it out to others. They liked it. I didn’t send it to bloggers and it led to Kitzis. So Kitzis emailed me and goes, I’ve been thinking about another business along the lines of checklists. Similar to the flow chart aspect, we were helping to guide conversations, uncover planning issues. You wanna talk about this? You wanna see if there’s like a way we could partner together? And I’m like, it’s Kitzis, like of course, like sign me up. And so we started FP Pathfinder. It was really just an experiment to see what happened. And it actually did really well. We’ve got over 4,000 advisors now using FP Pathfinder and it’s morphed in like three different ways.

So some use us internally and some are putting us in front of their clients directly. Like they’re putting the checklist in front of the clients. And then others are using some more interactive features where they’re trying to create sort of like a repeatable system of working with their clients. Michael, what is your unique perspective of the financial advice market today? Yeah, I’m an advisor and I’ve got FP Pathfinder that I helped to start several years ago. And really the genesis of all of this comes to something and I didn’t know it at the time but it’s providing advice at scale. And five years ago, that would have been silly to be thinking about and talking about it because we were actively saying as an industry wasn’t really a thing.

But I struggled with certain things about how to have conversations with clients in a way that was repeatable. Because a lot of the conversations all had similar themes but I would go over and I’d have to like reinvent the wheel every time or I’d have to go like double check all the rules and I needed something to help me save some time. And so you marry that up with a book that was written by Atul Gawande of Checklist Manifesto and like those two concepts come together to where we are now. Where there are these simple frameworks, checklists and flow charts that can help provide that outline to help advisors have those kinds of conversations with clients in a systematized way.

It’s really cool in that you’re bringing outside influences in and then applying them to the financial advice space, which is great. We see that actually quite a bit. Now, given your experience, you’re still an advisor, you got your finger on the pulse. What is the missing opportunity that advisors don’t see coming or maybe not addressing? So as I look out like across the industries, different industries, because we try to get different perspectives. We do come back to healthcare numerous times. There that profession, the doctor profession is just several decades ahead of where we are in many aspects. And one of the things that really inspired us, especially with that, the book Atul Gawande wrote was his experience of seeing what was going on in the medical field.

And so basically the World Health Organization called him up and said, we’ve got this problem. There are all these people dying and all these complications happening that are creating a lot of really big problems. And it’s just forgetting to do something. That’s it. Doctors across the world were forgetting to do simple things. Like check the patient’s name, this surgery for this patient, left leg, right leg. Make sure we clean this. They’re like, we laugh because it’s kind of silly, but that’s literally the problem that doctors are running into. They go, I do this surgery all day long. I don’t need a check because I can do this thing in my sleep.

That’s the problem. They get in a routine and then all of a sudden they forget. And the research came back like 1% of the time there would be a mistake that would be made in somebody’s level of care. Yeah, and okay, 1%, not a big deal, but there’s so many people and there’s so many steps and so many things happen that that compounded to create a problem that the World Health Organization had to step in and fix. So you can take that and extrapolate that out and take that to what we’re doing. We have a similar issue. There’s all these planning issues out there. As advisors, we can’t keep track of it all.

It keeps changing. I can’t keep track of how the rules change from Secure Act three years ago, let alone the ones that are in effect now and the ones that are gonna happen next year. So we need these guides. This is really important for us just to keep our clients from making a big mistake. See, that’s really amazing because I can relate to that on so many levels, not the least of which is the healthcare side. That 1% might’ve been that they left the tweezers inside of you. That’s a big outcome. I can make a life-changing difference. But also as a financial professional like the two of you, there’s no way that if I were to be really honest and get the hubris out of the room that I can remember every single thing that could affect this client.

So I’m really curious, what action steps do you recommend that advisors need to take now? Or what do they need to rethink about in their own practice? Okay, so here’s what we’re like, we study a lot of our advisors. We’re asking them, our advisor members all the time, how do you see this shifting? And the theme that I’m really picking up on right now is that advisors are breaking apart the annual client review meeting. It’s like you meet with the patient, you’re a doctor, a patient comes in, you do the physical and then I’ll see you next year unless there’s a problem, right? You can’t cover everything then.

Now take it to being, you’re a financial advisor, you have a client come in, you try to cover all there is to do with them, can’t do it. So what we’re seeing is they’re breaking it up into more bite-sized nuggets and they’re spreading it out throughout the year. So order one, let’s just look at your taxes. Order two, let’s look at investments. Order three, now we’ll do insurance one year, we’ll do a state plan another year, and then order four, let’s just look at end of year planning opportunities. And so one aspect is that, it’s just let’s break that annual client review meeting up. Another one is saying, we do a lot of work behind the scenes for our clients all the time, we don’t get credit for it.

That’s our shadow work. Let’s bring them into the fold a bit more. Let’s not just go through and double check that, hey, this client, they satisfied their RMD, let’s move on. Oh, let’s stop. There’s a planning opportunity that happens right there. Do they actually have to take this RMD and put it in their bank account or should it go somewhere else? Or should it be tied up to doing like a qualified charitable distribution? All right, let’s fold them in on some of that shadow work that we’ve done or at least show them that we’ve done it because it might raise and elevate the conversation about something like an RMD.

And then I think it’s just about creating these processes. Don’t try to keep everything up in your head. Actually have it like listed out and being able to say like, this is what we do to our clients. We do this in quarter one, we do this in quarter four, breaking it out in that way. I really like how you break down those action steps. They’re tactical and if I put my advisor hat on, those are things I could easily incorporate into my annual review process. They’re not overwhelming. If you’ve got those checklists or flow charts to be able to do those things, it becomes pretty systematized.

And I think you’re spot on. There’s a lot of shadow work as you put it that is there’s no credit given due. And if we’re trying to show the value that they’re paying for, what a great way to do that without actually creating a whole bunch of extra work in the process. So Mike, what controversy, what debate do you think our community should be talking about or hearing that isn’t being talked about? Well, I think that this is really part of it. It’s this idea of uncovering these planning issues. How do we keep doing this? And how do we make this like a systematized or repeatable process across the board for all advisors?

We’re fortunate. We’ve grown more than we really expected we ever could. 4,000 advisors or so. But there’s still a ton of advisors out there that aren’t doing that. They’re not thinking like that. And they’re doing a disservice to their clients in a lot of aspects. We need to be waking up as an industry and just realizing that there is so much going on in our clients’ lives. How can we help them? And how can we do that in a way that’s scalable? Yeah. Adam has mentioned this before in many conversations is that the cost or price of doing something wrong with our clients when it’s a very big potential problem, we don’t want to make a mistake there.

That’s why they come work with us in the first place. But as an advisor, we’re already super busy and we’ve only got the mental checklist. So we’re, I mean, it’s human to forget things, right? Right. There’s a huge opportunity here, but they have to actually systematize through what you’re talking about. And it’s just, it makes total sense. And especially for a fiduciary, you don’t want to have the malpractice situation like a doctor does. Right. And malpractice is one aspect of it. But the other aspect is that you have a client where you know everything is fine with them, but how do you keep showing that value to them?

Client, they’re retired. Everything is on track for great retirement for them. How do you keep showing value and providing value to that client? It’s like, okay, now we have to go look for some issues to go work on. Like there’s other things out there that maybe we weren’t thinking about. It’s not going to blow up your financial plan. It’s not a malpractice thing, but it’s providing a bit more value. And that’s the other aspect that these checklists can help. We’re going to keep improving your situation above and beyond just protecting you in case, so you don’t make a mistake. You know, there’s an interesting aspect to this that I’m thinking about listening to you, Michael, which is someone told me many years ago that medical malpractice was statistically lawsuits were higher when the patient claimed that they did not build a relationship with the physician before the surgery, for example.

And that was evidenced by a couple of things. Number one, the physician didn’t take time to educate. The physician treated me like a commodity or like not a person, but a surgery. Check it off their list. And the reason why that was important is because when they had a bad outcome or an unexpected outcome that didn’t feel like I got the right kind of treatment, when they had a relationship with the physician, they didn’t sue. They’re like, ah, I can’t sue Dr. John. But if they didn’t have a relationship, they were 10 times more likely to sue. And so that malpractice actually relates to bedside manner.

Now the important aspect of that is that a physician or a financial professional, whether they’re guided by best interest, DOL or other regulatory suitability, or just being at best advocate that they can be, really is well served by educating their client, being thorough and not treating the client like a commodity. And I think that that’s really one of the things that you’re actually empowering advisors to do and get that bench without having to build it themselves. Yeah. Wow. Right. Bedside manner and malpractice. It makes sense, right? Scalable bedside manner. Well, on the reverse, isn’t it true that the financial advisors are really getting commoditized too?

So effectively what Michael you’re saying is that we need to continue to prove, what’d you do for me lately, right? So when we fixed 80 to 90% of the maladies of their financial wellbeing, now we have the time to work on that last 10%. And that might take twice as much time as getting to the first 80 or 90% because of the details. It’s like, how can I make a tax nuance or a legal protective shell around you? Or how could I deal with the state planning and think about legacy and charitable impact after I’ve covered the core needs through let’s say, typical financial planning.

And I think it’s those ancillary areas, those less focused on areas that the highest net worth always expected us to deliver for them. And you’ve actually scaled that. Yeah, that’s really well said, right? We got your blood pressure in check. You’re all, you’re healthy, you’re stable. Now what? Yep. Did any of you listen to Peter Atiyah? I was with Peter Atiyah. Oh man, this guy. So he wrote a book all about longevity planning. So he’s a doctor. 0. We fix you when you’re sick. No, that’s where malpractice comes in for our industry. Like, let’s just make sure we don’t make a mistake for you here.

0. It’s like, before you’re even pre-diabetic, is the doctor helping to coach you on aspects to avoid you even getting to pre-diabetic? Right now, they won’t even talk to you until you’re pre-diabetic. Oh, this is good. 0. 0? I don’t know. 0, because it sounds good. 0 was selling you insurance. Yeah. 0 was selling you investments, but doing financial plan. 0 is you do the plan first, you don’t sell any product unless it’s certain. I don’t know, what is it? But it’s proactive, right? It’s just like he’s saying. Just like Mike is saying, it’s proactive. Like, hey, to not become diabetic, here are the things you should do.

0 is we’re going to get you retired and you wanted those big goals, we’ll get that covered for you. 0 is what you’re talking about. You’ve got more value each year and we’re going to keep doing that and that’s going to have these huge compounding benefits over time. That’s on top of you already being able to retire. Now all of a sudden you’ve got a much better estate planning. You can be more charitable than you ever imagined. It almost feels like your financial health is better. Yeah, right. You feel better about who you are and the choices you’re making and in tune with everything. You just, you feel good.

Do you know what you guys just did? Just literally created a framework for the history of our industry. 0 was you buy the product regardless of your wellness. Yep. You need a whole life. You bought it, you purchased, you purchased or you’re sold. Right. 0 was you got financial planning and then you bought the products. 0 was all about wellness. It’s all about mindset and being preventative. Care, ongoing care, holistic care. Preventatives. 0. Right. Like I like goosebumps. That’s everything. Dude, that’s money. That’s awesome. That’s going to get some attention. Wow, Adam, that was really cool, man. Just seeing the, almost it happening in real time.

0 and we’re going to claim that title for ourselves by the way. That’s ours now. That’s it, we’re going to have to write it. We’re good, yeah. Trademarked it. As my daughter said, she said, I just copyrighted that dad. That’s now. Anything I say. Love it. I can’t use it again without asking her permission. Like go to bed, trademark. I could see her kid doing that, dude. She does. She does that to me. Just a really interesting conversation and he’s right. This, there is this malpractice and I think the thing that he references that stood out to me initially was, what about the 1% of things that the doctors are doing wrong, right?

And then we apply that to financial services and we actually ended up having quite a scalable issue. Even if just 1% of the time we’re all forgetting to do something. So I really liked how we can try to overcome that and really having better bedside manner, if you will. How are we going to be helping our clients and not leaving the clamp in the body, so to speak, cleaning the wound, being a little better about that. Washing your hands, right? Wearing a mask. Yeah, that’s an interesting aspect to financial advice. I think because we opened up, there’s not the same institutionalized rigor on inspecting your process.

Of course, we all have audits, right? So there’ll be an audit function in pretty much most broker dealers historically and insurance companies and even RIA space has to do it at some level, but they’re inspecting one out of every 10. They’re not necessarily inspecting process and that’s the difference is that when you have a situation where there’s mass attacks like malpractice attorneys coming after you, you have to build a process that’s so scalable that it’s bulletproof, right? 001% error like as opposed to a 1%. And that means that everybody has to follow the same exact process. The challenge I found is that most financial practices I’ve talked to, their process is very unintentional across the board.

It’s really, they provide a robust process for their top 10, 20 clients, really deep, really personal, overbearing, really involved because you can’t lose them and everybody else doesn’t get anything but a statement and maybe a call once a blue moon from the junior. And I think it’s interesting because if there is a kind of change in the regulatory environment towards show me your process that’s defensible every single time, that’s going to require a lot of workflows and a lot of tensionality on checklists. Did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? Even if it’s boring and like rolling your eyes. Yeah, but you know what?

I mean, using the medical analogy, if it saves lives, there’s a cost. And one of the things that Mike also mentioned is that we’ve had some fee compression although it does feel like that’s starting to level off actually a little bit, but there’s more transparency. I think the customer has more expectations. So the challenge is how do we show our value? How are we scaling the value that we have and it’s not by selling them more accounts. That’s not how we show the value that we have to go further than that. 0. Yeah. You know, it’s an interesting idea too. I think that his comments on ego tends to drive advisors from, let’s say accepting the fact that they need to create process.

Right, Alfred, I’ll remember all the things. I know what the stitches come next and then the… Yeah, right. And then next thing you know, they’re talking about what their kid is doing after school and they forgot the clamp, like you said, inside this. It wasn’t intentional, right? But how much familiarity with doing the job, like driving on the phone, somehow you get home. We don’t know how you got home, but that process is really required at scale and it has to supersede ego and familiarity with the job. And it’s interesting that he mentioned this scaling that very often in order to scale, you need to delegate.

And that means I need to delegate to people that may not have the same familiarity or experience that I have with executing, let’s say a financial planning review or an estate planning analysis. So that means you have to have processes that people can follow so they get the opportunity to learn the job and deliver at a level of preeminence that you’ll be proud of and that represents the practice. That’s exactly right, because if you’re the lead advisor at that firm or group, whatever, what if the clamp got lost in you? Yeah, right. You know, and you’re out for a while. You need everything else to be replicated where anybody, any doctor, quote unquote, can walk in and do the same thing and provide that client experience.

Boy, that is true. I guess that begs the question though, if we all take on the same exact process that we just commoditize ourselves or is there really then gonna be a differentiation of those who have process and those who don’t? I think that for sure. I agree, yeah. There’s definitely a differentiation between those who have process and I don’t think we will ever outsource ourselves as advisors entirely. Money is a very personal thing. And when it’s something as personal as it is, trust is an extremely important factor and human beings tend to trust other human beings for a variety of reasons, human reasons, right?

That you just can’t outsource. That’s what we’re doing at Coupler, right? Oh, great idea. It’s that whole foundational aspect where we’re starting with that. So no, I don’t think I would ever be worried about that. I would be worried about process versus non-process. Don’t have it. You can’t show it. You’re not showing that value to your clients. You know, that’s a curious thing. I mean, I haven’t hired a financial advisor in many years, although I do have a financial professional who works for me because I know I can’t manage my own money. I’m too emotionally connected, like you said. So I have an island manager.

I know some people in the business. You know, but I think if a financial professional came to me and said, if I asked them what’s their process and they can’t really explain it or diagram it, or one might argue they don’t actually have a process. And one of the things I think that Michael’s talking about with that P Pathfinder is he’s actually able to show you a brandable, because it’s white label, process for all these different events that you’re gonna have in your life. And here’s a checklist when you lose somebody, when you gotta make your filers, when you got an annual review. So that process becomes instantly plug and playable into your practice that you can actually show you have a process.

Think about what a cool experience that is if you’re a client’s interviewing you and other advisors and they ask you, what do you do if this happens? You know, or they ask you to show the process and you can say, well, look, check this stuff out. I can help you. If this happens, here’s what we do. If this happens, here’s what we do. And all of a sudden you prove your worth, you know, very quickly and visually too, which is really important. Well, he talks about that actually in his annual review, the change up in terms of going from a once a year annual review to a four times as an example.

And I know on FP Pathfinder, he has actually this outline, I’ve seen it. You can create your own format of what you’re gonna talk about in the three or four times you meet, brand it, put your logo on it, and then share with your clients, say, okay, here’s what we need to do and here’s all the process we need to do. And really shows that you’ve got an intention behind this thing that they are paying for. And I think in this kind of new transparent world, Derek, I think these are gonna be table stakes. And if you haven’t thought about that, your client’s gotta be wondering, why am I paying $10,000 a year?

Oh, for sure. What, for money management? Yeah, no. What did he say? He called it shadow work. Shadow work. Didn’t he say something like that where there’s so much work that advisors do behind the scenes that never gets shown, but even something as simple as chunking up your review meetings into three or four a year, and you simply give them a one pager. Here are the things we’re covering and why we’re covering them. This is the checklist, Gary. And then now all of a sudden, they’re like, oh, wow, my advisor’s thinking about social security, Medicare, Roth conversions, require minimum distributions, my kid’s going to college, taxes.

Now all of a sudden, whoa, there’s a lot of value here. My advisor has the answer to each one of these things if they happen to me. Huge, huge. Very smart. That’s, I mean, these are things that take us forever to create in our practice. A lot of- Oh, forget it. It’s very cool. 0, our new trademark. Oh, I love this. Yeah, and don’t let your daughter buy the URL, man. What’s the best of what you gotta have? I purchased it. It’s done. I copyrighted it. When you speak it and it’s recorded, you got it. It’s done. Oh, man, it’s done. So we’re good. We’re good.

No one else can use it ever. Ever. That’s right. Well, they can pay us a license and fee. That’s right. I mean, I thought about this and we obviously started riffing and you could hear the excitement behind it. This is very aspirational, but I had to contextualize it. 0? 0 as agents and reps that were solution-based salespeople that used needs analysis in that advisory capacity to conclude an action, right? Solve a problem, typically under insurance, asset management, education, retirement. So we had the idea that we had to sell the problem, but our interest was really to sell the solution. Yeah, that’s how we got comped.

And that was the way most of the markets still to this day is actually organized. 0 came out strong when financial planning became big. Both of us became CFPs and we used financial planning because it was a better alignment of our ethos. I think we were more advisors than salespeople. We liked helping people. We liked being knowledgeable in the room and being the smartest guy there and helping people and being a resource. 0, right? That’s really the major theme of where a lot of RIAs, fee-based planners are, investment advisors, but it’s truly still a sales enablement process to earn the right to manage money or earn the right to place the insurance or charge a fee.

And I think there’s a new thing coming. 0 is gonna be. I agree with you. 0 to me is all about preventative, proactive, how do we help clients get ready for things that are going to happen to them or might happen to them? How do we educate them and be proactive versus, oh, you just got divorced? Shoot, sorry, didn’t know about that. Let’s take care of it now. Oh, you just had a kid? Oh, okay, I didn’t know about that, but let’s get you some life insurance. Totally. Not that that’s bad because at the end of the day, if the client’s getting the thing they need, right?

The advisor is still providing some value, but the consumer has more transparency into what we do than they ever have. They have higher expectations. They want more value. 0 type of advisor, that’s how you drive it. We’re helping do all of those things. It’s more collaborative. It’s more coaching. We’re talking about your feelings and your behavior a bit, which can feel a little weird, but let’s face it, money’s personal. That’s tied to emotions. So I do think it’s going that way, but you mentioned something earlier where it’s aspirational. 0. 0 hasn’t happened at mass scale. No. 0. I think they’re starting to understand as they hit the retirement scene, mostly the baby boomers and kind of pre-retirement, they’re like, oh, I better do some holistic planning.

I need a financial planner. It’s getting too complicated. They argue that they need a specialist. They need a concierge doctor, not just a attending or a primary care. So they want a concierge. They believe they’re gonna get more services from that. They’re gonna get more diagnostics, things they didn’t know to ask about, like whether your jugular has some kind of blockage in there. They’re doing an EKG every year, whether you need it or not. So I think that preventative attitude is really gonna force a lot of advisors to rethink how they charge because you’re looking for ongoing diagnosis to help be preventative, to see whether you’re on track, kind of like the financial Fitbit, if you will.

Yeah. Well, we even mentioned it around financial wellness and health, and we’re healthier. We feel better if we are more preventative and know these things and can preempt things that are coming. Yeah. I sure as heck know I’d rather feel good going to my doctor and having a game plan of things I should do to stay healthy and stay feeling great versus, oh man, you gotta lose 50 pounds, dude. That doesn’t feel so good. You know what’s really funny? I tended to talk to clients about this. Retirement as a dominant factor of financial planning was broken down into the go-go, the slow-go and the no-go years.

And how long your go-go years are, basically when you tend to be spending more, traveling, seeing the grandkids, running around the country, doing your world tours, doing the things you didn’t do during your working years, making up for lost time, the go-go years. The reality is that we’re actually advising people on how to manage your money through those years. How are we helping them expand how long those years can be? And that’s why I think that you’re starting to see mindset and wellness and coaching on longevity and how you can extend the useful quality time that you have, not just deal with the money and distributing it.

I think that we’re starting to see this idea of true North mindset of why does it matter? Why are you working? What’s that behavior that supports it? And I think you’re gonna see more advising. Now, this was has been available to the high net worth community for years. We used to call this family office. And that has been inaccessible because you needed to have either $100 million or the ability to spend $100,000 a year on having a team of experts really be there for you. But technology is allowing us to scale this. 0, a proactive, holistic, comprehensive, collaborative advocate who’s acting in your best interest even when you’re not thinking about it.

And that’s what I think about being on retainer. Can I have someone like this who’s literally on my family staff who’s looking out for my best interest and all the things that touch money? And I don’t know if that’s gonna be the dominant player in the space. 0 sales just get something done. It has its place. 0. I think it could take a lot of market share. And I think you’re gonna see advisors who are financial planners starting to move into this space or enabling that capacity. So it’s important for us all to rethink how this plays into our own practices. I can’t even add anything to that.

Boom, done, well said. All right, well, let’s take that. Thank you, Michael Lacour on being part of this program. And hopefully everyone goes out and checks that out and sees and asks themselves, what’s your process and how can you scale it? Let’s talk about our LinkedIn community question, Derek. So this is from Genevieve. It’s actually Jean-Vive. Jean-Vive. Sounds much better, Jean-Vive. She’s from Paris. I thought she’s from Ohio. Southern Ohio. Okay, Southern. That’s the difference. Where they make wine. That sounds how ignorant we are. She brings up an interesting question. So there’s been a lot of chatter about AI and chat GPT specifically within wealth management.

So she’s asked, what do we think about it? Can you guys riff on that a little bit so we can hear for a minute now? But I think we need to bring an expert in to really talk about it. Now I know you more so than myself really dove into the AI pool. The deep end. I’m a gadget guy, Derek. I know you’re a gadget guy, but for creating content, for example. I just got my 3D printed laptop holder so that it’ll hold it up on an angle on me because I don’t like it taking a picture up my schnoz when I’m on a video.

So I got this elevator thing and I had it 3D printed. So I’m a gadget guy. So yes, you’re right. The chat GPT thing is really interesting to me. I use it actually more than most people would realize to summarize a whole bunch of stuff. But there’s a real big challenge here. And I have a bunch of fear around how the regulatory agencies are going to look at chat GPT. Not too far in this future because it really begs the question, what kind of data is in there? What were you putting client data in there? How am I using that? Is that violating InfoSec rules for your broker?

Oh man, yeah. Is it considered advice now if I produce this and distribute it even if it’s just a blog post? Yeah, that’s a great point. Is that defensible in court? What is arbitration going to say? So I think there’s an enormous amount of problems that are going to come out of this awesome innovation and nobody knows what it is, but we can’t ignore it. So we did bring in somebody. So I’m excited for our next guest. You know who it is. I’ll let everybody stew on that one because he’s a total industry leader. I’m looking forward to that one. Cool, brother. Well, Genevieve, thanks for the note.

We appreciate it. Enjoy South Ohio. Jean-Viv. Jean-Viv. And anyone else listening out there, you can send us a note, a question, kudos. And how to pronounce your name as well. And how to pronounce, yeah, we need the phonetics. That’s right. That’s very important these days. Very important. All right. Thanks, my friend. This was a blast as always. Cheers, brother. Good seeing you. All right, you too. 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.

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