Steve Davison was part of a panel session at No More Practice Live, a one-day event dedicated to helping practice owners improve their practice value and grow their business, held in Sydney on Thursday 9 August 2012. Following is an edited excerpt of his talk on how advisers can prove the value of advice in tough times.
It’s a tough market for many advisers at the moment. Providing advice in good times is easy when the focus is more on investments, but that’s not the game we’re in. The current more challenging environment is an opportunity for advisers to prove their point of difference in a number of ways.
Financial advisers need to build strong, trusted relationships with their clients, with a focus on strategy and coaching to help clients through tough times like this. Solutions need to be advice-orientated and not orientated towards product, and advisers also need to consider the unique position that each client is in.
Not all clients will want holistic financial advice; some of them may just want reassurance via a telephone call. Others may be members of a corporate superannuation fund which provides access to professional advice and other services.
Even in tough times, there is innovation taking place across the industry and we need to look how we can do that cost effectively to help advisers meet the needs of consumers. Licensees plays a significant role in this process, and there are many ways in which dealer groups can help advisers prepare for a variety of challenges
A client walking in the adviser’s door is let’s say 45-years-old, with a life expectancy probably in the 80s. So they’re making a decision that will potentially set them on the advice path for four decades. We need to develop advisers with more appropriate skill sets to not only engage clients but provide them with the technical skills to cater to clients at all levels.
Bigger groups with the capital structures can better afford to develop processes, systems and people to build better business models that have long-term sustainability. For example, we are spending significant money on advice processes, technology and speeding up the time it takes to engage a client and produce a piece of advice. This is a capital-intensive piece of work, and you need money to be able to do this so the backing of an institution plays an important role in achieving scale to invest.
