Building a Financial Planning Practice Around Better Decisions with Gareth Collier

and maybe maybe a little bit of a of a sneaky question in a way because it wasn't on the on the list of things i wanted to talk about but now something that dawns on me is the You know, back in the day, like even maybe before your time, like back in my day, many years ago, kind of in the 90s, you know, it was usually a one meeting, maybe two meetings.

It's one meeting to see the client, two meeting to call it, close the deal and move on to the next one, right? But I mean, we obviously have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people and businesses and practices and so forth.

And that is no longer the case for many.

They take three, four, five meetings before they get to the point where anything is maybe implemented.

So my question to you is this, is that due to all the regulation? Or are we being intentional to take the client on a journey? And I guess this answer is obviously going to be different for different businesses, right? But I mean, if we just zoom out and just look at it in general, do you think or what's your view? You know, is it something that we are intentionally said, look, we can't do the one meeting too many because I can't get to know you well enough in one or two meetings if I don't know you from a bar of soap.

um to really give you the right advice so we need to make this a longer process or is it because of all of the paperwork and the regulation and all of the the difficulties that has that has come our way and hurdles that we've got to overcome which is all meant to help us by the way it's not not meant as a bad thing but but do you think it's because we are evolving as a profession or is it because we are forced to to do so and is there a way to still keep it as few meetings as possible

I think maybe, maybe not, not so much evolving, maybe, maybe maturing as a profession.

I think, you know, I've obviously heard the stories from, from that initial environment, some of the older guys there and it was exactly that, you know, you kind of, You went in and it was very much a sales technique, right? And there you almost coached to plant seeds in the clients when you're having the conversation around, well, you've got a problem here and you've got a problem here.

So you kind of manufacture a need and then the clients maybe think they didn't realize that they had.

And then you go back the next time and you sort of present yourself as the savior and say, well, I've got this product.

This can solve all the problems that you had the last time.

And maybe it's more sort of a product-led process where now I think the planning has come more to the forefront.

And that's where the maturity aspect is possibly starting to shine through.

We've had a journey and experience before and said, right, that was one way of doing it.

And it solves certain needs.

But really...

I think also that approach is also sort of resulted in a lot of the need for a lot of the regulation that's in place, because unfortunately, you know, you're always going to get people that see the ways to possibly abuse those situations.

And then also I think people's access to information has really changed.

I think historically you were kind of like the walking catalogue of all the products.

There was an information gap between what was available and what people were aware of and what they knew about.

So the planners kind of had to fill that gap on the product facing things.

Whereas now that that gap is closed quite a bit.

And now it's really, I think, understanding that the planning is about the people and not the product.

So I'm quite excited.

I think where it's moving in terms of the professionalization and the chosen approach in terms of how we engage with clients is something that's really great.