Ray Sclafani's ClientWise is a coaching business, so what's the difference between coaching and consulting? Sclafani calls that his "favorite question."
Sclafani told Investment Advisor's Jamie Green that when he founded his firm 10 years ago, "the only people who hired coaches were the underperformers or executives who needed help in interpersonal skills. But if you looked outside the financial services business, it was all the high performers who were working with coaches—all kind of coaches."
The consultant is the expert who tells the client "here's what you ought to do; here's the answer, here's the best practices," Sclafani said. In other words, the consultant has "an agenda and tells the client what to do."
The coach's agenda, he said, is to "focus on each client's genius," to help advisors solve their own issues, first by prioritizing and then by "developing a structure that helps them solve their current issue" so that "when the next issue comes up, they can do it on their own."
