How to hit it off with clients right from the get-go? Ask about their personal history.
"Arrange the conversation to connect with people instead of connecting with their money. It starts with the idea that your client is a human being, not an account," Mitch Anthony, president of Advisor Insights, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.
With his life-centered financial planning approach, the popular keynote speaker trains advisors to hold a wide-ranging conversation with clients about retirement that, he says, "starts with lifestyle and then moves to money."
Financial advisors need to focus on the client's "end objective" for saving and investing that money, Anthony points out.
Kicking off the conversation by asking, "What are your goals?" often triggers a "deer-in-the-headlights look" from clients, the industry veteran notes in the interview.
"Start the conversation with something concrete, like their personal history," he highly recommends.
Anthony co-founded, with Steve Sanduski, ROL (Return on Life) Advisor, an online platform designed to help advisors become life-centered planning firms.
Anthony is also founder of the Retirement Coaching Program, and in conjunction with Texas Tech University, developed a certificate program in life-centered financial planning.
As the author of "Life-Centered Financial Planning" (2017) and the classic "The New Retirementality," among several other books, Anthony teaches advisors to help clients "map out all their life events they anticipate for the next 10 to 15 years," so they'll be financially prepared for them, he emphasizes.
In the interview, he reveals the six categories of life events that advisors should cover with clients. According to his research, there are more than 60 separate life events that occur over a lifetime.
It's essential to stay in touch with clients regularly to keep abreast of changes and transitions in their lives, argues Anthony, whose clients include Charles Schwab, Citigroup, Edward Jones, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, UBS and XY Planning Network.
Prior to building a career training financial advisors, Anthony developed life skills education programs — on, for example, conflict management — for secondary schools.
ThinkAdvisor recently held a phone interview with Anthony. The host of the long-running syndicated radio show "The Daily Dose" was speaking from his base in Rochester, Minnesota.
"The way to approach this business," he maintains, "is to become more human-centered, a better biographer of your clients and to provide value that will never be undervalued."
Here are excerpts from our interview:
THINKADVISOR: What should advisors ask clients at their first meeting?
MITCH ANTHONY: Learn about the client and find out who they're dealing with, where they stand and where they'd like to go.
You should start the conversation with something that's concrete, like their personal history.
Should the financial advisor ask about goals?
I think the industry at large has it backwards: They want to sit down with clients and talk about their goals. But why do you want to start the conversation with the ethereal and with blue sky [dreams]?
A lot of the time, clients give you a deer-in-the-headlines look when you ask them what their goals are.
What's a better way, then?
Arrange the conversation to actually connect with people instead of connecting with their money.
It starts from the idea that your client is a human being, not an account.
What's the concept of your book, "The New Retirementality: Planning Your Life and Living Your Dreams … at Any Age You Want"?
I'm [addressing] financial advisors whose entire business revolves around the proposition of retirement, but I'm telling them that that's an outdated idea!
Why do you believe that?
Retirement is a social construct that has outlived its use. It was invented in the industrial age for industrial age purposes. And it no longer applies.
We're now trading intellectual capital and experiential capital. Those things appreciate with maturity, not decrease.
So the whole idea that when you reach 65, you're supposed to take the exit is an artificial finish line that's been superimposed on our lives.
People I know who retired fairly young fell ill not many years later, and some have died. I wonder if that's because they had nothing much to do. Thoughts?
When many people retire, they miss certain aspects of the work they did; they feel this void, this aimlessness and lack of purpose in their life.
A gerontological researcher at the Mayo Clinic told me that people [often] go from boredom to pessimism.
Once they get to pessimism, it's a downward spiral both physiologically and psychologically.
The industry at large has sold people on the idea that if you have enough money, everything is going to be great. No, it's not. You've got to have something to do that matters, or you'll feel useless.
In working with advisors, what's your specific approach concerning retirement?
