In my profession, it’s often hard to have the elevator chat with people when they ask: “What do you do?”
That difficulty in answering that question burned bright in my mind as I listened to a Morningstar Investment Management webinar.
“What do you do?” rolls off the tongue, is on everyone’s lips. It’s seemingly simple, yet I have to follow it up with another question—a personal one.
To answer your question, I first have to ask you what your financial goals are?
This sure is not something we can discuss in a lift. But I don’t want to let it go. It’s a good question to think about.
You might not know it, but we are in the business of stress relief. We often see ourselves as bringing our clients happiness, one step at a time. We help them get control of their finances, their investing, all those pesky things that relate to money. Suddenly they sleep better at night. The results are mutually beneficial.
At P3 Financial Planning, we get genuinely excited about clients goals. We love what we do. We care about everyone reaching their goals, gaining peace and financial satisfaction. I wanted to share the little wisdom I got from James Louw and Peter Burns’s webinar and tell you how P3FP works.
A noble professions’ steps to financial harmony
Step One : Write down some of your financial hopes or even wishes.
This is the beginning of your journey. It’s important because once you write it down, it moves from being just a dream to being something that you can visualise. Suddenly your wish becomes quantifiable, measurable and real.
Step Two : Monitor yourself.
Perhaps that is the biggest challenge. Some can do it with no help, and that’s great. Others, for various reasons, “fail to launch”.
You might be too busy, keep procrastinating, have too many distractions. Don’t worry, we can help you. At P3, we uncover your goals and develop a timeframe and plan for you. We get genuinely excited about the possibilities because there are so many paths to take, journeys to make and dreams to realise.
That’s the moment our clients lean forward in their seats. Suddenly they see themselves as the leading athlete on the field. They’re mounting a comeback, we’re commentating the match of their lives, and they’re on the edge of their seat, tense and ready to leap into action.
With the right strategy, structure, and a disciplined approach, financial wishes can be granted.
As Peter Burns discussed this morning, clients have no desire to beat an index benchmark. Their goals have nothing to do with the stats we handle. And they are not trying to define their exact risk profile. All that is the boring stuff. We advisers focus on that for their sake. The real core of our business lies in the personal engagement we forge with our clients and their financial goals.
Risk Profiles are necessary but don’t contain our clients’ best interests. It is just one piece of data that we have to keep in our minds. Our focus as advisers is to look out for and look after our clients’ best interest.
Walking hand in hand to the finish line
When we meet a client, we take them through our 7-step-process of advice. We meet them on their field to engage with their aspiration. We collaborate with them to plan and achieve short, medium and long-term goals.
Once you become a client, our best interest duty kicks in each and every day. We are ready for obvious transactional needs. But more than that, we engage with our clients meaningfully. We have gained wonderful connections and friendships over the years. Our clients, just like our staff, are friends to us, a second family. We make ourselves available for chats. We get excited about deciphering recent financial news together. And we love exploring ideas that our clients read or hear about.
The relations we forge are based on trust and sometimes that means we are brutally honest too. We are here to watch out for you, it is a safe space to dissect possibilities and analyse their reach. If we think an idea, a strategy or a theory on your personal finance is unrealistic, we will tell you and explain why.
We believe in the journey of advice, as opposed to it being a series of transactions.
A financial advisor is first and foremost about building trusted relations
All relationships are progressive. Maybe because we believe in nurturing this organic bond that forges with time, trusted exchanges, shared stories, mutual respect, perhaps this is why we have achieved such a multitude of satisfied, happy, financially successful clients.
For many of us, financial planner advisory is a noble profession. We have toiled to assist our clients to achieve outcomes that surpass their dreams and goals. I and my colleagues at P3 Financial Planning take great pride in this. We know it is all due to building trust and meeting clients expectations.
We do our utmost in this area to be clear, reachable and always reliable. We don’t always get our first contacts right, every person is different, but as I say, “if we don’t get it right, we will make it right.”
So how should I answer, as a financial advisor, a seemingly innocuous question like “What do you do?”
Perhaps there is a shorthand response after all.
I help people understand and define investing aimed at realistic goals while building lifelong connections.
Chat to us about how we approach goal-setting, financial advice, advice on data-collection, financial products and advice provision. Invest in yourself with a long-term financial goal focus. We offer an initial non-obligatory, free consultation.
