How an Advisor Keeps His 'Worker Next Door' Clients on Track

Financial advisors are well aware that their work isn’t only about the numbers. For Mark Delp, focusing on addressing clients’ emotions helps avoid investing blunders.

“It’s making people feel listened to,” Delp, branch manager of Impact Wealth Management, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.

Delp, who is based in Irvine, California, emails clients monthly and dispatches physical letters that address their fears and uncertainty about economic and market issues. He says his communiques “get at the pulse of what clients are concerned about.”

That makes Impact’s website stand out, he maintains: “Many of the communication pieces investment firms produce … are either pure propaganda or painfully dull.”

Delp, the winner of a 2023 ThinkAdvisor Luminaries award for community impact, defines his clientele as “the average worker next door.”

People need help, he notes, to ensure that, for one, they save enough and “not get caught in credit card purgatory.”

In the interview, Delp, who manages $180 million in assets and describes himself as “a franchisee of Wells Fargo Advisors,” says he aims to communicate by telling it like it is and with meaningful handholding.

Here are excerpts from our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: You’ve been an advisor since 2001. Is there a current wealth management trend you consider unhelpful?

MARK DELP: The cycle of calm, panic and greed is very fast. If something happens overseas and it’s already in the news and making stock prices fall, clients get crazy because they’re getting alerts about it on their phone.

What are the implications to you as an advisor?

It means a lot more handholding because the storms come faster now.

How do you address clients’ emotions of fear, nervousness, uncertainty?

It’s making people feel listened to. 

Right now there’s more fear; other times, when everything is going up, there’s more greed.

I send out emails on different topics and then physical letters to make people feel like they’re not alone — that they’re not the only person who’s afraid or who maybe wishes they’d picked a different type of investment. 

I tell them that emotion [in investing] is normal and why we need to go back to their goal of saving for retirement or whatever their goals are.

What do they say when they receive the emails and letters?

It’s not so much what they say; it’s what they do. A perfect time is when they’re not doing anything: They’re not panic-selling, running to cash the first time there’s a down day in the stock market or not selling all their broad-based funds and going only to a hot sector.