Shortchanged by Numbers

Mitch Anthony

As a financial advisor, helping your clients achieve their financial objectives is an important goal. However, it shouldn’t be the only one. Successful advisors not only advise their clients, they educate them.

Educating clients begins by finding out more about them. The only way to successfully teach your clients is to recognize where they’ve come from so you can understand why they think the way they do. You wouldn’t begin a client interview by asking, “How are you, and how much do you have?” Neither should we attempt to teach our clients to be financially literate without finding out what they already know––and why. 

There is only so much numbers can tell us. Numbers speak only to the material side of the equation––not to why your clients make the decisions they do.

When physicist Brian Green was asked why he was such a good communicator (unlike his peers), he replied:

“I don’t feel like I understand what I’m doing unless I can form a mental picture of what’s going on. If I’m relying on mathematical symbols, I feel like I’ve got the true heart of the science. When it comes to communicating with the public, I take those mental pictures I’ve developed, strip away the math, and wrap them in a story.” 

In other words, Dr. Green knew that in order to be effective he needed to reach out to people on their terms, not his.

The true science of financial advice is found in your clients’ stories––revealing where they’ve been, where they are, and where they want to be. Their stories also help you understand what they know and what you need to do to teach them.

There is a story behind every move your client makes regarding his or her financial decisions. I once heard an accountant give a presentation about the fact that one day he realized there was an important story behind every fact and number on a 1040 tax form. Financial professionals who harvest those stories will be in better stead with their clients because the numbers are not nearly as important to their clients as the work and love and sacrifice that produced them. Those clients will be grateful for everything you teach them about financial responsibility.

Numbers and facts tell us what clients have––not how hard they worked, what they had to sacrifice, who inspired the dream, the hardships they overcame, the pain and joy they experienced in the journey, the partnerships formed and broken, and the amazing breaks and bad fortune navigated in gathering the assets those numbers represent.

Behind every success story is a genealogy of events and relationships––one leading into the other––that come together to form incredibly unique biographies. Your job, first and foremost, is to uncover as much of that biographical genealogy as possible.  Once you’ve uncovered that genealogy, you have a responsibility to your client to help them make better decisions.

Adapted from Your Client’s Story by Scott West and Mitch Anthony (©2005 Mitch Anthony and Scott West). Available at http://www.mitchanthony.com/BOOK_Your_Clients_Story.html.

Contact him at mitch@mitchanthony.com.

© 2008 Mitch Anthony