What if there was a way to make every client meeting feel more personal, engaging, and trust-building?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the top advisor marketing podcast brought
to you by Proudmouth.
I'm your host, Matt Halloran.
Being your own loud is not new to
marketing, but the mindset, strategies, and resources to
help you get there are evolving faster than
this industry is keeping up. It is time
to find a new perspective on what works,
why,
(00:21):
and how to move your business forward.
Listen as I interview guests to help you
learn from them how to be your own
Loud. Let's
get to the show.
Hello, and welcome to another top advisor marketing
podcast. I am your host, Matt Halloran.
Behavioral finance seems to be something that a
lot of people talk about, but I've actually
(00:43):
really seen it a lot more in theory
than I've seen it in practice. And our
guest today, Brian Portnoy, is somebody who I
got to see about 2 months ago speak
at the Excel Conference, the Carson Wealth Conference,
and I got to see him on stage
talking about applied
behavioral finance. And after I saw that, I
was like, oh my god, dude. You gotta
come on the show because there's so many
(01:03):
things that you talked about in that presentation,
Brian, that
are so applicable to the world of marketing,
client service, client communication, client retention,
and really understanding and getting to the crux
of what your clients want. So welcome to
the show, man. Hey. Good to see you.
Great to be here. Yeah. Alright. Here's the
thing.
Applied.
Right? I wanna start there. Let's define the
(01:24):
difference between what you're bringing to the marketplace
and maybe what other people are reading in
books and seeing it from other presenters.
Yes. There's a few different ways we could
start. Let's just start through the lens of
the financial adviser
and be a little bit empathetic to their
plight.
In the world of financial planning, everything's now
comprehensive.
It's holistic,
(01:44):
and those are fancy words that signal virtue.
You're doing more good for more people. It
also means that you are ridiculously busy and
that your hair is on fire.
Behavioral finance,
as we think about that, and that's maybe
a fancy term for the psychology of money.
It's been a fascinating topic for decades. It
was invented by Kahneman and Tversky in the
(02:06):
seventies eighties.
And fast forward to now, who's not interested
in the human condition, but, specifically, who's not
interested in themselves? We're all egomaniacs.
And so advisers are like, yeah. Behavioral finance,
really interesting topic.
How do I use it in my practice?
I'm very busy.
And so the idea I wrote a book
a number of years ago called the geometry
(02:27):
of wealth, which sort of was a larger
meditation on where money fits into a meaningful
life. And there were some concepts in there
that clearly landed in the advice community and
landed with
the end client, our friends, our neighbors, our
partners.
And the name of the game is, how
do you take those core ideas, some of
which are conceptual,
some of which are theoretical,
(02:48):
and package them in a way where they
are bite sized skills
or ideas
that you can immediately download
and use in your day to day. So
that's the applied piece,
and advisers like it. You can meet them
where they are and give them something useful.
So it's easy for them to implement, and
it's easy for them to understand.
(03:09):
But I wanna know why. I I and
it's maybe
just a stupid question, but why is this
so important, and how does this change
the adviser's practice?
Because there's been a pretty significant evolution in
the industry. So the first CFP was issued
in 1972,
1973. It's only been 50 years. This is
a relatively new profession,
(03:30):
and it's evolved
significantly.
This was a brokerage business selling investment products.
That still happens, but it's not where your
edge is. And your edge is actually no
longer in
the investment side of things, picking better stocks
or better funds.
The edge or maybe even we can talk
about it as the moat that you want
to keep wide in order to preserve and
(03:51):
then scale your business
is on
relationships.
How do you more deeply engage
in your conversations with other people so you
understand where they're coming from, and you could
help them along the way? Oh, and by
the way, that's just not an outward facing
perspective in terms of engaging the client where
you are earning revenue. It's also an inward
(04:13):
looking perspective in terms of who am I
hiring, how am I training and motivating them
across their career. So behavioral finance
is a shorthand for
human facing skills that we all need, and
there's a lot of them. And they're very
distinct
from the elements of the technical expertise
(04:33):
in investments, assurance, state planning, taxes, and so
forth. When
everybody was freaking out about robo advisors, and
you and I have been in the industry
remembering when that happened. That didn't seem that
long ago. By the way, I just wanna
take a step back. It makes me so
happy that you said something that was started
in 1972 is still new. Just personally, because
that's when I was born, and that makes
me feel young again, and I owe you
a big one for that one. So, anyways,
(04:54):
I appreciate that. The idea here, though, is
that some of the things that advisers have
been hanging their hats on, especially a lot
of the things that they communicate to their
existing clients and prospects about are things that
they have no control over and are really
table stakes.
What are some of the things? Let's choose
maybe 3 because I know you have so
many different opportunities here. Let's choose maybe 3
things that our audience could just do. They
(05:15):
get done listening to this podcast. They've got
a client meeting, and they can go ahead
and implement. And I'd like, if you don't
mind, 2 that are
advisor centric, but I love that other thing.
Actually, I hadn't heard you say that previously,
that some of the things that you teach
also help with management training, motivation,
stuff like that. So if we can save
the third one that's a practice focused one,
(05:36):
that'd be great. So where would we begin
with advisor focused behavioral finance techniques
that they can take to their next client
meeting?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Boy, my mind's going in a few different
directions.
A lot of what we're talking about here
is I'm a give you I'm a give
you one straightforward one and one curve ball,
and then we'll go
(05:56):
to so the straightforward one is
about
expectations
and
the importance of expectations in our lives.
I'll skip the neuroscience lecture, but the brain
in its essence is a predictive vehicle. Modern
neuroscience is really consumed with this powerful idea
that really all the brain does, all humans
(06:18):
do, is anticipate the next millisecond, second hour
day,
year, and decade. There is an equation, the
happiness equation, that we work with our clients
on, our clients being financial advisers. Happiness equals
reality minus expectations.
And where does an expectation come from? Part
of it is just subconscious, and part of
(06:38):
it is something that you set and manage
very explicitly,
and the equation works in a pretty straightforward
way. When the world ends up being a
little bit better than you expected, you're happy,
at least for a moment. And when reality
is less than you wanted it to be
or thought it would be, you are sad
if only for a moment. So the idea
here, happiness equals reality minus expectations,
(07:01):
take that equation into any client conversation
and try to see
be very explicit about the types of expectations
that you are setting,
because it's one thing for a client to
say, I wanna turn $1,000,000 into $2,000,000
or that standard math. It's another where they
are gonna be very satisfied
(07:23):
with the service and the experience that you
deliver so much so that you get those
so called referral worthy moments. And it's not
about sandbagging. It's not about setting expectations so
low that you beat them. That actually is
not a great long term solution.
But when happiness equals reality minus expectations,
what are the elements of your practice that
(07:43):
you have control over that which is not
the market, it's not the weather,
It's not the economy.
It's not the inflation rate. It's not any
of those things.
It's different elements of the plan, different decisions
a client can make in terms of savings
behavior or spending or asset allocation or things
like that, things that the adviser has control
(08:04):
over as well.
Tip number 1, happiness equals reality minus expectations.
Lean into the way the brain is wired
and
set and manage expectations
much more explicitly
than you have in the past.
The second thing, and this is the curveball
one, is that we want to be more
(08:24):
empathetic.
I don't think that's particularly controversial. So that
doesn't necessarily mean walking in somebody else's shoes,
but it does mean being able to take
on the perspective of others and understand what
it is they're feeling and, also, to a
large extent, trusting them when they tell us
something about who they are and what they
want. So that's empathy. Here's what a lot
(08:45):
of people don't realize.
The fuel in the tank for empathy is
self awareness,
and there's 4 dimensions to emotional intelligence, self
awareness, self regulation, empathy, and social skills.
When you want to connect better with others,
we'll go back to Aristotle and just say,
know thyself. Actually, that was Socrates. Get my
(09:06):
Greeks mixed up sometimes. What can you do
in terms of your own money story,
your own personality, the own the your the
elements of your identity and who you are.
And this isn't the forum to walk through
detailed exercises, but there's different ways to get
to know where you are coming from. And
as you build up that self awareness
(09:27):
and as you build out a new kind
of emotional vocabulary to understand where you're coming
from, I guarantee it that you're gonna listen
a little bit differently to the clients,
and you're going to hear them better. And,
most importantly, they are going to feel heard
in a way that they haven't before. So
if what we're trying to do here is
deepen engagement,
it actually starts with you, not with them.
(09:50):
Let's take the last one, though, which is
the social skills in order to execute this
in a social situation.
You and I go to conferences all the
time, and there are a lot of advisors
who think they have these amazing social skills,
but they're actually just planned selling skills that
have been functional for them in the past.
One of the things that I thought was
really fascinating when you took me behind the
(10:12):
scenes of what you guys are offering
is the exercises
and the scripting
and the way that you help people practice.
Can we just back both of those up
and take the first one and the second
one and deconstruct that just a little bit
on how can advisor
learn how to do that more and better.
(10:33):
Because I remember when you and I were
sitting down, one of the things that we
both agreed on is this takes practice. I
was actually talking about listening, and you were
talking about what you had just presented on.
It is practice.
How do you help implement practice? Because that's
a huge component of behavioral psychology, which I
had studied
substantially in graduate school as a therapist because
(10:55):
I know that if I can get somebody
to do something over and over again,
the probability of them doing it better as
they do it over and over again increases
exponentially. What do you think? I think that
most people think they have a growth mindset,
but they don't because growth is uncomfortable,
and no one wants to be uncomfortable. You
need to break muscle to build muscle. I'm
really glad you used the word practice because
(11:18):
substantive expertise
of behavioral finance
is
maybe necessary, but not even close to being
sufficient
to really upskilling to becoming a behavioral adviser
or a human first adviser.
Instead so where behavioral finance has been and
why it's been actually just a dead end
for decades
(11:38):
is that we memorize a list of bias,
endowment effect, loss aversion, availability, recency bias, all
these kind of things. And so you walk
around with basically the ability to win a
trivial pursuit, but not the ability
to have a better conversation.
Where does the better conversation come from? It
comes from learning design.
And so one thing I'm really proud of
(12:00):
about Shaping Wealth is that, yeah, we have
we're very knowledgeable about behavioral finance, neuroscience, emotional
intelligence, positive psychology, a a number of different
disciplines
that do translate into learnable skills. But then
the other piece,
the other circle that creates the Venn diagram
here is expertise in learning design and learning
(12:22):
experiences. And as you just alluded to,
there's better or worse ways of doing that.
The worse the less good way, I don't
wanna say it's bad, but it's not as
good, is to just tell someone something and
have them memorize it and say, go forth,
and I hope that's useful.
The better way to do it is to
thin slice knowledge so that you can learn
(12:43):
it bit by bit. You give someone an
idea. Let them learn the idea and then
play around with the idea. Hey. Happiness equals
reality minus expectations.
That's a super low it sounds simple.
It's super loaded. All three of those words
are like heavy duty.
And alright. You learned what it was. Now
we're gonna play around with the different pieces
(13:04):
to it. Now
step 3,
you're gonna go out into the world, and
you're gonna practice.
You're gonna think, okay. I've got 9 client
calls this week. Let's see if there's 4
of them that I can if not explicitly
use that model, I can have it in
the back of my mind as I think
about what it is that we're going to
talk about, and then
(13:24):
take your wins and losses seriously.
Was that helpful? How was that useful?
And then the step after that, step 4,
is share it with others. We really don't
know something until we can teach something.
This is experiential learning design, capital e, capital
l, capital d. It's the way that adults
learn. It's the way that busy adults learn.
(13:46):
And
to the full circle growth,
this requires us to be uncomfortable.
It requires us to be a little bit
confused at times. It requires us to maybe
have a conversation on something
where it doesn't go as well as we
would hope. But until you cobble together a
stack of experiences with each of the different
(14:07):
skills that you might learn,
you're not going to get better. You could
think of that in any growth context. If
you go to the gym and you work
bicep curls just once,
you're gonna break a little bit of muscle
and maybe it grows back slightly bigger, but
then you don't do it again.
What's the point? The thing about these human
facing skills,
(14:28):
whether it be decision making or emotional intelligence
or habit formation
or well-being
protocols,
is that they need to be learned and
practiced over time in different contexts.
And we always like to say at Shaping
Wealth that we share with you a lot
of words, but it's on you to find
your own voice.
We give you the words. You find your
(14:50):
voice. I also I'm gonna
take that in just a little different direction
because you said something that I hadn't heard
you say before,
which is when you're going into these client
meetings that you're gonna be practicing,
you're going to keep this topic, whatever technique
you're gonna use, in the back of your
mind.
And I think that's part of this applied
(15:11):
component of what you're talking about, but I
also think it has a lot to do
with intention.
When you go into a meeting, a client
meeting,
most advisors don't go to a client meeting
with any real intention.
They're going in to just go through the
motions, and Wayne Gretzky didn't get on the
ice thinking he was going to lose. And
so I love that, just breaking that apart
just a little bit. But the other thing
(15:31):
that you said there, which I love, one
of my favorite videos, I share this with
friends, share it all the time, probably more
than I should.
There's this great video of this rabbi talking
about growth and how uncomfortable growth is, and
he says it's like a lobster.
In order for the lobster to grow to
the next size, has to get unbelievably
uncomfortable
(15:52):
in the current shell that it's in
until it breaks and he has or she
has the release
of that growth. And it has to go
through that
all the time. And we think that growth
is gonna be easy. People are selling placebos
left and right, cleansing products, and I'm your
life coach, that's gonna change your life in
(16:12):
10 days. Right? That sort of stuff. But
we know as professionals, everybody who's listening to
the show is a professional.
They know they have to put in the
time and work. And I really loved the
system that you've built, not trying to sound
like I'm selling your stuff even though it's
freaking amazing, that you have
made these into bite sized exercises with practice
(16:33):
and feedback
and the ability to talk to people on
your team in order to implement. Now let's
go to the practice because one of the
things that I've always said
is some of the things that make you
a really great adviser don't make you the
greatest business person.
And so and that includes hiring, firing, training,
accountability,
motivation. How can you use some of the
(16:53):
stuff you guys have built at Shaping Wealth
to work inward in the adviser's practice to
make that experience for the team and everybody
even better?
Yeah. Step 1 is just recognizing
that
great cultures have an inside out point of
view, meaning
until everybody gets on the same page, it's
really hard to serve your external clients properly.
(17:15):
So we actually run full blown half day,
full day workshops on what it means to
build a human centric
wealth culture,
and what does it mean to treat a
colleague as a human first
and a colleague second? What does it mean
to treat a client as a human first
and a client second? It requires
(17:36):
a fair amount of insight into what makes
us human. We have a guide we call
it the guidebook for human advice, and it
slices the human experience into 6 dimensions. I'm
not gonna walk through all of those pieces,
but there's a certain
workflow that we can all slipstream into where
we appreciate
(17:57):
the value of identity and beliefs and values,
the importance of the information that we take
in at and that we project, the emotions
that we feel, the decisions we make, the
habits that we form or don't, and, ultimately,
the forms of contentment or well-being that we
experience,
all of those are different dimensions
(18:18):
of so called
human first advice or human first wealth culture.
Each of those six dimensions are practice areas.
And so when you think about, okay. I
wanna hire a young person into my practice
or someone's at the cusp of the next
stage of their career. They've been here for
5 years, and it's going great. Or they've
been here for 23 years, and what's the
(18:39):
next challenge for them to keep them motivated?
It sound I don't know if it sounds
obvious or easy or weird,
but forcing yourself to think of someone as
a human being before they are a colleague
or a coworker
and leaning empathetically
into
the types of perspectives that are going to
benefit
(18:59):
them the most.
This framework allows you to embrace the whole
person and recognize that we're all trying to
flourish
in one way or another, and we're each
on our own path even though we have
a shared legacy in what makes us who
we are. And so being able to recognize
the timelessness of the human condition
(19:19):
and its connection to the timeliness
of the roles that we're playing
and how we need to get trained over
time, making that connection is unbelievably powerful if
you can do that. Well and your clients
and prospects can feel it when they walk
into your office. If you're if you don't
have a cohesive culture and you don't have
happy team members, it's gonna come through. And
(19:40):
making sure that you're starting at home in
the office in order to
build that sort of relationship that you want.
We talk a lot about influence here and
how important it is to be able to
be more influential to your clients, prospects, and
setters of influence.
What you're talking about is the essence, in
my opinion, of influence.
It is other focused.
(20:02):
It is trying to do your best to
make real authentic
connections.
And, again, that's not just in the marketplace,
but that's also in your own workplace.
Yeah. That's right. I've never thought about the
word influence in this context. I think of
it oftentimes in terms of leadership
and servant leadership.
I know a lot of we both know
(20:22):
thousands of advisers, good people trying to do
good work,
and the concept
of servant leadership lands
very well in the advisory community because you
can make a great living
helping people lead better lives, and that's a
that that's a heck of a calling. One
other separate data point, but I wanna throw
(20:44):
it into the mix, and you probably have
better data on this than I do. I've
just heard anecdotes.
But I recently heard that when it comes
to your client engagements and the touch points,
that
some really big number I wish I remembered
exactly what it was but, like, 80 or
85 percent of your firm's engagement with an
(21:04):
external client is not through the adviser
herself,
but through the team. So think about the
culture that you're building such that
everyone from the c suite to the support
staff is on the same page,
knowing where the firm is going,
and it's nonnegotiable,
having incentives
(21:25):
built into the culture. Culture without incentives is
platitudes.
So having the right incentives
in place to really pursue what it is
collectively we think the culture is, because if
80%
of your conversations
or emails
or other types of interactions with your clients
is done not through that lead adviser, but
(21:46):
through a CSA, a paraplanner,
an assistant,
someone from sales or marketing, who
whoever it might be.
Think about, though, both the risk and opportunity
in that fact pattern. And, boy, what does
it mean to invest in the broader culture
so that no matter who is engaging with
the client,
it's gonna be a great experience?
(22:08):
And that's one of the reasons why we
believe, and you and I had a conversation
about this too, that the content creation is
so vitally important that your communication, your outward
communication, whether that is email, whether that's social
media posts, whether that's video, audio, or whatever,
also has to be sprinkled with this flavor,
this experience, this intention
of what you guys teach at Shaping Wealth.
(22:29):
If you have that behavioral finance undertone, that
human centered, human first,
human
connection desire
when you're creating content,
people feel heard and they feel seen.
Is that something that you've noticed, or am
I way off? No. The big pivot you're
exactly on point. The big pivot that we've
seen, but also we're trying to drive it,
(22:50):
is getting away from behavioral finance as a
distinct discipline
where advisors say, oh, I'm really good at
the portfolio stuff, and I know what insurance
policies to put my clients in. Oh, now
I wanna bring in behavioral finance.
Our view is that is old and incorrect,
respectfully.
Instead, we wanna be asking a different we
want a different starting point, which is to
(23:11):
think of behavior as gravity.
We want to think you don't walk into
a room and say, how's the gravity in
here? Physical gravity is everywhere and always. It
surrounds us, and we just adapt to the
forces at play.
Behavior is social gravity.
Behavior is everywhere and always. So the question
isn't how do we fold behavior or behavioral
finance into our practice. It's how do we
(23:32):
accommodate the always on elements of human behavior
at every stage of the planning process from
prospecting to discovery to onboarding to ongoing over
years
decades. That's where the guidebook comes in. That's
where we need to lean into the vocabulary
and the mindsets and the skills
that allow us to understand. This is actually
(23:52):
a conversation about values and identity. This is
a conversation about habits.
This is a conversation about emotions. Those are
3 very different conversations
requiring different knowledge bases and different skill sets
in terms of what am I talking about,
what is the mental model I have in
mind that is gonna drive this forward.
But until you appreciate the different elements of
(24:13):
behavior,
you might end up taking too narrow of
a point of view
and cut off opportunity, not only to help
the client better, but to grow your business
in terms of wallet share, in terms of
referrals, in terms of other growth opportunities. If
you didn't hook everybody right there, then I
think I'm missing my outro. So listen. I'm
sure that there are gonna be more people
who wanna know more about shaping wealth and
(24:34):
who wanna know more about how they can
engage with what you offer. Where should they
go, who should go, and what do you
want?
Yeah. So I point to 2 things. 1
is our website, shapingwealth.com.
It's pretty straightforward in terms of articulating that
we
want to establish ourselves as the premier learning
and development platform for all things human first
guidance. And increasingly over time, we've become the
(24:55):
outside learning partner for RIAs all over the
world
who want to have ongoing training and acculturation
in this sort of stuff. So shapingwealth.com,
and there's an experiences page that kinda walks
through immersive coaching programs,
lighter touch introductions,
workshops, speeches, all the kind of things that
we do. The second thing I'd point out
(25:17):
is that we have an always on content
and insights and tools platform called Compass.
Advisors, you are the guide. We are your
compass.
And we have
a 1,000 plus original pieces of content,
I think, organized beautifully
on compass.shapingwealth.com.
And you have a lot of content for
(25:39):
free. There is a CE tier for a
very low price. It's all you can eat
continuing education credits, so we're really proud of
that. And it's fun CE. It's interesting CE.
It's not the CE that you put on
mute and then just take the quiz at
the end. You're gonna actually wanna engage
this. And then we've got a pro tier
to Compass Pro
where
(25:59):
we're gonna give
you really good client facing content that you
can drag and drop into your client emails.
We're going to give you adviser well-being resources.
Adviser well-being is a major theme and initiative
across everything that we do,
and, also, live access to the team, live
coaching workshops, things like that. So shapingwealth.com
(26:21):
for general introduction to who we are, and
I'd love people to check out compass.shapingwealth.com
for kind of a free content platform and
just have fun with it. And, everybody, you
need the content. And especially when you're having
this
client
human first centered
experiential stuff that really make people think differently
(26:42):
about their relationship with you as an advisor,
that you're not just a product pusher, stock
jockey, a person who's gonna just do pie
charts and bar graphs.
That has changed. We talk about the change
that you need to be doing in your
content marketing all the time here at ProudMouth
and so does Brian at Shaping Wealth. This
is the future.
You need to do this. If not, you're
(27:04):
gonna have other people eating your lunch because
other people are gonna be going, why isn't
my adviser having these real meaningful
conversations with me about the stuff that, one,
we both can control and that really matter
to me? I don't wanna know about the
the gamma I'm making things up now, of
course, gamma of the s and p. I
don't care. That's not what I need. I
(27:24):
need to know how I can achieve what
I want to achieve.
And, of course, so go to the Compass.
We'll have make sure that we have all
of that stuff in the show notes, but
please take advantage of that. And the CE
thing is flipping amazing, everybody. Goodness gracious. You
guys are all taking horrible CEs. They're just
terrible.
Have some fun, man. So have some fun.
And last but not least, listen. If you
(27:45):
need help creating content outside of what Brian
and his team can do for you, please
go ahead and reach out to me directly.
You can direct message me on any social
media profile, or you can email me at
matt at proudmouth.com.
We would love to be able to help
you on your influence journey because we know
when you change the conversation,
you change the way that people are gonna
interact with you. They're gonna like, know, and
trust you faster,
(28:06):
and they're gonna become
fans, which we talk about as people come
in, and they're presold. So for Brian and
everybody at Shaping Wealth, this is Matt Halloran.
We'll see you on the other side of
the mic very soon.
Thanks for listening to the Top Advisor Marketing
Podcast brought to you by Proudmouth.
If you wanna know more about how you
can be your own loud, visit us at
proudmouth.com
(28:26):
and sign up for the PodRocket Academy.
Through courses and office hours led by professional
podcast producers and digital marketers, you will learn
everything you need to know to become the
trusted subject matter expert you were meant to
be.
Welcome to the top advisor marketing podcast brought
to you by Proudmouth.
I'm your host, Matt Halloran.
Being your own loud is not new to
marketing, but the mindset, strategies, and resources to
help you get there are evolving faster than
this industry is keeping up. It is time
to find a new perspective on what works,
why,
(00:21):
and how to move your business forward.
Listen as I interview guests to help you
learn from them how to be your own
Loud. Let's
get to the show.
Hello, and welcome to another top advisor marketing
podcast. I am your host, Matt Halloran.
Behavioral finance seems to be something that a
lot of people talk about, but I've actually
(00:43):
really seen it a lot more in theory
than I've seen it in practice. And our
guest today, Brian Portnoy, is somebody who I
got to see about 2 months ago speak
at the Excel Conference, the Carson Wealth Conference,
and I got to see him on stage
talking about applied
behavioral finance. And after I saw that, I
was like, oh my god, dude. You gotta
come on the show because there's so many
(01:03):
things that you talked about in that presentation,
Brian, that
are so applicable to the world of marketing,
client service, client communication, client retention,
and really understanding and getting to the crux
of what your clients want. So welcome to
the show, man. Hey. Good to see you.
Great to be here. Yeah. Alright. Here's the
thing.
Applied.
Right? I wanna start there. Let's define the
(01:24):
difference between what you're bringing to the marketplace
and maybe what other people are reading in
books and seeing it from other presenters.
Yes. There's a few different ways we could
start. Let's just start through the lens of
the financial adviser
and be a little bit empathetic to their
plight.
In the world of financial planning, everything's now
comprehensive.
It's holistic,
(01:44):
and those are fancy words that signal virtue.
You're doing more good for more people. It
also means that you are ridiculously busy and
that your hair is on fire.
Behavioral finance,
as we think about that, and that's maybe
a fancy term for the psychology of money.
It's been a fascinating topic for decades. It
was invented by Kahneman and Tversky in the
(02:06):
seventies eighties.
And fast forward to now, who's not interested
in the human condition, but, specifically, who's not
interested in themselves? We're all egomaniacs.
And so advisers are like, yeah. Behavioral finance,
really interesting topic.
How do I use it in my practice?
I'm very busy.
And so the idea I wrote a book
a number of years ago called the geometry
(02:27):
of wealth, which sort of was a larger
meditation on where money fits into a meaningful
life. And there were some concepts in there
that clearly landed in the advice community and
landed with
the end client, our friends, our neighbors, our
partners.
And the name of the game is, how
do you take those core ideas, some of
which are conceptual,
some of which are theoretical,
(02:48):
and package them in a way where they
are bite sized skills
or ideas
that you can immediately download
and use in your day to day. So
that's the applied piece,
and advisers like it. You can meet them
where they are and give them something useful.
So it's easy for them to implement, and
it's easy for them to understand.
(03:09):
But I wanna know why. I I and
it's maybe
just a stupid question, but why is this
so important, and how does this change
the adviser's practice?
Because there's been a pretty significant evolution in
the industry. So the first CFP was issued
in 1972,
1973. It's only been 50 years. This is
a relatively new profession,
(03:30):
and it's evolved
significantly.
This was a brokerage business selling investment products.
That still happens, but it's not where your
edge is. And your edge is actually no
longer in
the investment side of things, picking better stocks
or better funds.
The edge or maybe even we can talk
about it as the moat that you want
to keep wide in order to preserve and
(03:51):
then scale your business
is on
relationships.
How do you more deeply engage
in your conversations with other people so you
understand where they're coming from, and you could
help them along the way? Oh, and by
the way, that's just not an outward facing
perspective in terms of engaging the client where
you are earning revenue. It's also an inward
(04:13):
looking perspective in terms of who am I
hiring, how am I training and motivating them
across their career. So behavioral finance
is a shorthand for
human facing skills that we all need, and
there's a lot of them. And they're very
distinct
from the elements of the technical expertise
(04:33):
in investments, assurance, state planning, taxes, and so
forth. When
everybody was freaking out about robo advisors, and
you and I have been in the industry
remembering when that happened. That didn't seem that
long ago. By the way, I just wanna
take a step back. It makes me so
happy that you said something that was started
in 1972 is still new. Just personally, because
that's when I was born, and that makes
me feel young again, and I owe you
a big one for that one. So, anyways,
(04:54):
I appreciate that. The idea here, though, is
that some of the things that advisers have
been hanging their hats on, especially a lot
of the things that they communicate to their
existing clients and prospects about are things that
they have no control over and are really
table stakes.
What are some of the things? Let's choose
maybe 3 because I know you have so
many different opportunities here. Let's choose maybe 3
things that our audience could just do. They
(05:15):
get done listening to this podcast. They've got
a client meeting, and they can go ahead
and implement. And I'd like, if you don't
mind, 2 that are
advisor centric, but I love that other thing.
Actually, I hadn't heard you say that previously,
that some of the things that you teach
also help with management training, motivation,
stuff like that. So if we can save
the third one that's a practice focused one,
(05:36):
that'd be great. So where would we begin
with advisor focused behavioral finance techniques
that they can take to their next client
meeting?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Boy, my mind's going in a few different
directions.
A lot of what we're talking about here
is I'm a give you I'm a give
you one straightforward one and one curve ball,
and then we'll go
(05:56):
to so the straightforward one is
about
expectations
and
the importance of expectations in our lives.
I'll skip the neuroscience lecture, but the brain
in its essence is a predictive vehicle. Modern
neuroscience is really consumed with this powerful idea
that really all the brain does, all humans
(06:18):
do, is anticipate the next millisecond, second hour
day,
year, and decade. There is an equation, the
happiness equation, that we work with our clients
on, our clients being financial advisers. Happiness equals
reality minus expectations.
And where does an expectation come from? Part
of it is just subconscious, and part of
(06:38):
it is something that you set and manage
very explicitly,
and the equation works in a pretty straightforward
way. When the world ends up being a
little bit better than you expected, you're happy,
at least for a moment. And when reality
is less than you wanted it to be
or thought it would be, you are sad
if only for a moment. So the idea
here, happiness equals reality minus expectations,
(07:01):
take that equation into any client conversation
and try to see
be very explicit about the types of expectations
that you are setting,
because it's one thing for a client to
say, I wanna turn $1,000,000 into $2,000,000
or that standard math. It's another where they
are gonna be very satisfied
(07:23):
with the service and the experience that you
deliver so much so that you get those
so called referral worthy moments. And it's not
about sandbagging. It's not about setting expectations so
low that you beat them. That actually is
not a great long term solution.
But when happiness equals reality minus expectations,
what are the elements of your practice that
(07:43):
you have control over that which is not
the market, it's not the weather,
It's not the economy.
It's not the inflation rate. It's not any
of those things.
It's different elements of the plan, different decisions
a client can make in terms of savings
behavior or spending or asset allocation or things
like that, things that the adviser has control
(08:04):
over as well.
Tip number 1, happiness equals reality minus expectations.
Lean into the way the brain is wired
and
set and manage expectations
much more explicitly
than you have in the past.
The second thing, and this is the curveball
one, is that we want to be more
(08:24):
empathetic.
I don't think that's particularly controversial. So that
doesn't necessarily mean walking in somebody else's shoes,
but it does mean being able to take
on the perspective of others and understand what
it is they're feeling and, also, to a
large extent, trusting them when they tell us
something about who they are and what they
want. So that's empathy. Here's what a lot
(08:45):
of people don't realize.
The fuel in the tank for empathy is
self awareness,
and there's 4 dimensions to emotional intelligence, self
awareness, self regulation, empathy, and social skills.
When you want to connect better with others,
we'll go back to Aristotle and just say,
know thyself. Actually, that was Socrates. Get my
(09:06):
Greeks mixed up sometimes. What can you do
in terms of your own money story,
your own personality, the own the your the
elements of your identity and who you are.
And this isn't the forum to walk through
detailed exercises, but there's different ways to get
to know where you are coming from. And
as you build up that self awareness
(09:27):
and as you build out a new kind
of emotional vocabulary to understand where you're coming
from, I guarantee it that you're gonna listen
a little bit differently to the clients,
and you're going to hear them better. And,
most importantly, they are going to feel heard
in a way that they haven't before. So
if what we're trying to do here is
deepen engagement,
it actually starts with you, not with them.
(09:50):
Let's take the last one, though, which is
the social skills in order to execute this
in a social situation.
You and I go to conferences all the
time, and there are a lot of advisors
who think they have these amazing social skills,
but they're actually just planned selling skills that
have been functional for them in the past.
One of the things that I thought was
really fascinating when you took me behind the
(10:12):
scenes of what you guys are offering
is the exercises
and the scripting
and the way that you help people practice.
Can we just back both of those up
and take the first one and the second
one and deconstruct that just a little bit
on how can advisor
learn how to do that more and better.
(10:33):
Because I remember when you and I were
sitting down, one of the things that we
both agreed on is this takes practice. I
was actually talking about listening, and you were
talking about what you had just presented on.
It is practice.
How do you help implement practice? Because that's
a huge component of behavioral psychology, which I
had studied
substantially in graduate school as a therapist because
(10:55):
I know that if I can get somebody
to do something over and over again,
the probability of them doing it better as
they do it over and over again increases
exponentially. What do you think? I think that
most people think they have a growth mindset,
but they don't because growth is uncomfortable,
and no one wants to be uncomfortable. You
need to break muscle to build muscle. I'm
really glad you used the word practice because
(11:18):
substantive expertise
of behavioral finance
is
maybe necessary, but not even close to being
sufficient
to really upskilling to becoming a behavioral adviser
or a human first adviser.
Instead so where behavioral finance has been and
why it's been actually just a dead end
for decades
(11:38):
is that we memorize a list of bias,
endowment effect, loss aversion, availability, recency bias, all
these kind of things. And so you walk
around with basically the ability to win a
trivial pursuit, but not the ability
to have a better conversation.
Where does the better conversation come from? It
comes from learning design.
And so one thing I'm really proud of
(12:00):
about Shaping Wealth is that, yeah, we have
we're very knowledgeable about behavioral finance, neuroscience, emotional
intelligence, positive psychology, a a number of different
disciplines
that do translate into learnable skills. But then
the other piece,
the other circle that creates the Venn diagram
here is expertise in learning design and learning
(12:22):
experiences. And as you just alluded to,
there's better or worse ways of doing that.
The worse the less good way, I don't
wanna say it's bad, but it's not as
good, is to just tell someone something and
have them memorize it and say, go forth,
and I hope that's useful.
The better way to do it is to
thin slice knowledge so that you can learn
(12:43):
it bit by bit. You give someone an
idea. Let them learn the idea and then
play around with the idea. Hey. Happiness equals
reality minus expectations.
That's a super low it sounds simple.
It's super loaded. All three of those words
are like heavy duty.
And alright. You learned what it was. Now
we're gonna play around with the different pieces
(13:04):
to it. Now
step 3,
you're gonna go out into the world, and
you're gonna practice.
You're gonna think, okay. I've got 9 client
calls this week. Let's see if there's 4
of them that I can if not explicitly
use that model, I can have it in
the back of my mind as I think
about what it is that we're going to
talk about, and then
(13:24):
take your wins and losses seriously.
Was that helpful? How was that useful?
And then the step after that, step 4,
is share it with others. We really don't
know something until we can teach something.
This is experiential learning design, capital e, capital
l, capital d. It's the way that adults
learn. It's the way that busy adults learn.
(13:46):
And
to the full circle growth,
this requires us to be uncomfortable.
It requires us to be a little bit
confused at times. It requires us to maybe
have a conversation on something
where it doesn't go as well as we
would hope. But until you cobble together a
stack of experiences with each of the different
(14:07):
skills that you might learn,
you're not going to get better. You could
think of that in any growth context. If
you go to the gym and you work
bicep curls just once,
you're gonna break a little bit of muscle
and maybe it grows back slightly bigger, but
then you don't do it again.
What's the point? The thing about these human
facing skills,
(14:28):
whether it be decision making or emotional intelligence
or habit formation
or well-being
protocols,
is that they need to be learned and
practiced over time in different contexts.
And we always like to say at Shaping
Wealth that we share with you a lot
of words, but it's on you to find
your own voice.
We give you the words. You find your
(14:50):
voice. I also I'm gonna
take that in just a little different direction
because you said something that I hadn't heard
you say before,
which is when you're going into these client
meetings that you're gonna be practicing,
you're going to keep this topic, whatever technique
you're gonna use, in the back of your
mind.
And I think that's part of this applied
(15:11):
component of what you're talking about, but I
also think it has a lot to do
with intention.
When you go into a meeting, a client
meeting,
most advisors don't go to a client meeting
with any real intention.
They're going in to just go through the
motions, and Wayne Gretzky didn't get on the
ice thinking he was going to lose. And
so I love that, just breaking that apart
just a little bit. But the other thing
(15:31):
that you said there, which I love, one
of my favorite videos, I share this with
friends, share it all the time, probably more
than I should.
There's this great video of this rabbi talking
about growth and how uncomfortable growth is, and
he says it's like a lobster.
In order for the lobster to grow to
the next size, has to get unbelievably
uncomfortable
(15:52):
in the current shell that it's in
until it breaks and he has or she
has the release
of that growth. And it has to go
through that
all the time. And we think that growth
is gonna be easy. People are selling placebos
left and right, cleansing products, and I'm your
life coach, that's gonna change your life in
(16:12):
10 days. Right? That sort of stuff. But
we know as professionals, everybody who's listening to
the show is a professional.
They know they have to put in the
time and work. And I really loved the
system that you've built, not trying to sound
like I'm selling your stuff even though it's
freaking amazing, that you have
made these into bite sized exercises with practice
(16:33):
and feedback
and the ability to talk to people on
your team in order to implement. Now let's
go to the practice because one of the
things that I've always said
is some of the things that make you
a really great adviser don't make you the
greatest business person.
And so and that includes hiring, firing, training,
accountability,
motivation. How can you use some of the
(16:53):
stuff you guys have built at Shaping Wealth
to work inward in the adviser's practice to
make that experience for the team and everybody
even better?
Yeah. Step 1 is just recognizing
that
great cultures have an inside out point of
view, meaning
until everybody gets on the same page, it's
really hard to serve your external clients properly.
(17:15):
So we actually run full blown half day,
full day workshops on what it means to
build a human centric
wealth culture,
and what does it mean to treat a
colleague as a human first
and a colleague second? What does it mean
to treat a client as a human first
and a client second? It requires
(17:36):
a fair amount of insight into what makes
us human. We have a guide we call
it the guidebook for human advice, and it
slices the human experience into 6 dimensions. I'm
not gonna walk through all of those pieces,
but there's a certain
workflow that we can all slipstream into where
we appreciate
(17:57):
the value of identity and beliefs and values,
the importance of the information that we take
in at and that we project, the emotions
that we feel, the decisions we make, the
habits that we form or don't, and, ultimately,
the forms of contentment or well-being that we
experience,
all of those are different dimensions
(18:18):
of so called
human first advice or human first wealth culture.
Each of those six dimensions are practice areas.
And so when you think about, okay. I
wanna hire a young person into my practice
or someone's at the cusp of the next
stage of their career. They've been here for
5 years, and it's going great. Or they've
been here for 23 years, and what's the
(18:39):
next challenge for them to keep them motivated?
It sound I don't know if it sounds
obvious or easy or weird,
but forcing yourself to think of someone as
a human being before they are a colleague
or a coworker
and leaning empathetically
into
the types of perspectives that are going to
benefit
(18:59):
them the most.
This framework allows you to embrace the whole
person and recognize that we're all trying to
flourish
in one way or another, and we're each
on our own path even though we have
a shared legacy in what makes us who
we are. And so being able to recognize
the timelessness of the human condition
(19:19):
and its connection to the timeliness
of the roles that we're playing
and how we need to get trained over
time, making that connection is unbelievably powerful if
you can do that. Well and your clients
and prospects can feel it when they walk
into your office. If you're if you don't
have a cohesive culture and you don't have
happy team members, it's gonna come through. And
(19:40):
making sure that you're starting at home in
the office in order to
build that sort of relationship that you want.
We talk a lot about influence here and
how important it is to be able to
be more influential to your clients, prospects, and
setters of influence.
What you're talking about is the essence, in
my opinion, of influence.
It is other focused.
(20:02):
It is trying to do your best to
make real authentic
connections.
And, again, that's not just in the marketplace,
but that's also in your own workplace.
Yeah. That's right. I've never thought about the
word influence in this context. I think of
it oftentimes in terms of leadership
and servant leadership.
I know a lot of we both know
(20:22):
thousands of advisers, good people trying to do
good work,
and the concept
of servant leadership lands
very well in the advisory community because you
can make a great living
helping people lead better lives, and that's a
that that's a heck of a calling. One
other separate data point, but I wanna throw
(20:44):
it into the mix, and you probably have
better data on this than I do. I've
just heard anecdotes.
But I recently heard that when it comes
to your client engagements and the touch points,
that
some really big number I wish I remembered
exactly what it was but, like, 80 or
85 percent of your firm's engagement with an
(21:04):
external client is not through the adviser
herself,
but through the team. So think about the
culture that you're building such that
everyone from the c suite to the support
staff is on the same page,
knowing where the firm is going,
and it's nonnegotiable,
having incentives
(21:25):
built into the culture. Culture without incentives is
platitudes.
So having the right incentives
in place to really pursue what it is
collectively we think the culture is, because if
80%
of your conversations
or emails
or other types of interactions with your clients
is done not through that lead adviser, but
(21:46):
through a CSA, a paraplanner,
an assistant,
someone from sales or marketing, who
whoever it might be.
Think about, though, both the risk and opportunity
in that fact pattern. And, boy, what does
it mean to invest in the broader culture
so that no matter who is engaging with
the client,
it's gonna be a great experience?
(22:08):
And that's one of the reasons why we
believe, and you and I had a conversation
about this too, that the content creation is
so vitally important that your communication, your outward
communication, whether that is email, whether that's social
media posts, whether that's video, audio, or whatever,
also has to be sprinkled with this flavor,
this experience, this intention
of what you guys teach at Shaping Wealth.
(22:29):
If you have that behavioral finance undertone, that
human centered, human first,
human
connection desire
when you're creating content,
people feel heard and they feel seen.
Is that something that you've noticed, or am
I way off? No. The big pivot you're
exactly on point. The big pivot that we've
seen, but also we're trying to drive it,
(22:50):
is getting away from behavioral finance as a
distinct discipline
where advisors say, oh, I'm really good at
the portfolio stuff, and I know what insurance
policies to put my clients in. Oh, now
I wanna bring in behavioral finance.
Our view is that is old and incorrect,
respectfully.
Instead, we wanna be asking a different we
want a different starting point, which is to
(23:11):
think of behavior as gravity.
We want to think you don't walk into
a room and say, how's the gravity in
here? Physical gravity is everywhere and always. It
surrounds us, and we just adapt to the
forces at play.
Behavior is social gravity.
Behavior is everywhere and always. So the question
isn't how do we fold behavior or behavioral
finance into our practice. It's how do we
(23:32):
accommodate the always on elements of human behavior
at every stage of the planning process from
prospecting to discovery to onboarding to ongoing over
years
decades. That's where the guidebook comes in. That's
where we need to lean into the vocabulary
and the mindsets and the skills
that allow us to understand. This is actually
(23:52):
a conversation about values and identity. This is
a conversation about habits.
This is a conversation about emotions. Those are
3 very different conversations
requiring different knowledge bases and different skill sets
in terms of what am I talking about,
what is the mental model I have in
mind that is gonna drive this forward.
But until you appreciate the different elements of
(24:13):
behavior,
you might end up taking too narrow of
a point of view
and cut off opportunity, not only to help
the client better, but to grow your business
in terms of wallet share, in terms of
referrals, in terms of other growth opportunities. If
you didn't hook everybody right there, then I
think I'm missing my outro. So listen. I'm
sure that there are gonna be more people
who wanna know more about shaping wealth and
(24:34):
who wanna know more about how they can
engage with what you offer. Where should they
go, who should go, and what do you
want?
Yeah. So I point to 2 things. 1
is our website, shapingwealth.com.
It's pretty straightforward in terms of articulating that
we
want to establish ourselves as the premier learning
and development platform for all things human first
guidance. And increasingly over time, we've become the
(24:55):
outside learning partner for RIAs all over the
world
who want to have ongoing training and acculturation
in this sort of stuff. So shapingwealth.com,
and there's an experiences page that kinda walks
through immersive coaching programs,
lighter touch introductions,
workshops, speeches, all the kind of things that
we do. The second thing I'd point out
(25:17):
is that we have an always on content
and insights and tools platform called Compass.
Advisors, you are the guide. We are your
compass.
And we have
a 1,000 plus original pieces of content,
I think, organized beautifully
on compass.shapingwealth.com.
And you have a lot of content for
(25:39):
free. There is a CE tier for a
very low price. It's all you can eat
continuing education credits, so we're really proud of
that. And it's fun CE. It's interesting CE.
It's not the CE that you put on
mute and then just take the quiz at
the end. You're gonna actually wanna engage
this. And then we've got a pro tier
to Compass Pro
where
(25:59):
we're gonna give
you really good client facing content that you
can drag and drop into your client emails.
We're going to give you adviser well-being resources.
Adviser well-being is a major theme and initiative
across everything that we do,
and, also, live access to the team, live
coaching workshops, things like that. So shapingwealth.com
(26:21):
for general introduction to who we are, and
I'd love people to check out compass.shapingwealth.com
for kind of a free content platform and
just have fun with it. And, everybody, you
need the content. And especially when you're having
this
client
human first centered
experiential stuff that really make people think differently
(26:42):
about their relationship with you as an advisor,
that you're not just a product pusher, stock
jockey, a person who's gonna just do pie
charts and bar graphs.
That has changed. We talk about the change
that you need to be doing in your
content marketing all the time here at ProudMouth
and so does Brian at Shaping Wealth. This
is the future.
You need to do this. If not, you're
(27:04):
gonna have other people eating your lunch because
other people are gonna be going, why isn't
my adviser having these real meaningful
conversations with me about the stuff that, one,
we both can control and that really matter
to me? I don't wanna know about the
the gamma I'm making things up now, of
course, gamma of the s and p. I
don't care. That's not what I need. I
(27:24):
need to know how I can achieve what
I want to achieve.
And, of course, so go to the Compass.
We'll have make sure that we have all
of that stuff in the show notes, but
please take advantage of that. And the CE
thing is flipping amazing, everybody. Goodness gracious. You
guys are all taking horrible CEs. They're just
terrible.
Have some fun, man. So have some fun.
And last but not least, listen. If you
(27:45):
need help creating content outside of what Brian
and his team can do for you, please
go ahead and reach out to me directly.
You can direct message me on any social
media profile, or you can email me at
matt at proudmouth.com.
We would love to be able to help
you on your influence journey because we know
when you change the conversation,
you change the way that people are gonna
interact with you. They're gonna like, know, and
trust you faster,
(28:06):
and they're gonna become
fans, which we talk about as people come
in, and they're presold. So for Brian and
everybody at Shaping Wealth, this is Matt Halloran.
We'll see you on the other side of
the mic very soon.
Thanks for listening to the Top Advisor Marketing
Podcast brought to you by Proudmouth.
If you wanna know more about how you
can be your own loud, visit us at
proudmouth.com
(28:26):
and sign up for the PodRocket Academy.
Through courses and office hours led by professional
podcast producers and digital marketers, you will learn
everything you need to know to become the
trusted subject matter expert you were meant to
be.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.