Show Your Working Out

FINANCIAL PLANNERS – There’s a good chance you didn’t marry the first person you ever kissed. 

Kudos to you if you did, but you probably didn’t. 

There’s also a good chance you didn’t buy the first house you looked at. 

And yet, before you viewed it, it probably met all the criteria on your list. So, what changed after you saw it? 

Your idea of the ideal house shifted, even if only slightly, once you saw it in person – and with each subsequent house you viewed (or person that you kissed!), you learned something new about yourself. 

You realised that some things you once thought were important no longer mattered, while others—things you hadn’t even considered before—became your top priorities. 

It’s an organic, evolving process. 

So, if you didn’t marry the first person you kissed or buy the first house you saw, why would you implement the first version of a Financial Plan that appears to meet the criteria? 

You see, Financial Planners and Paraplanners are solverers (I know that’s not a real word; I just invented it.) 

They love a good problem to sink their teeth into, and they get a lovely hit of dopamine when a client gushes with happiness after being presented with a solution to their financial life problems. 

But that’s the trouble. 

We’re so eager to get to the solution that we forget the real value lies in seeing the process. 

If you look back at all the houses you’ve lived in (or the people you’ve kissed), there’s probably a clear pattern leading you to where you are now.  

Each mistake—or experience, depending on how you view it—helped refine your criteria for the next choice, probably by teaching you something about yourself along the way. 

And Financial Planning is no different. If we jump straight to a solution and present it to the client as a fait accompli, they miss out on seeing all the potential solutions that didn’t work—and more importantly, why they didn’t work. 

Without that context, they don’t truly understand the solution or why it’s the right one. 

Remember in school when you took a maths test and got one mark for the correct answer—but five marks for showing your work? 

Financial Planning is the same—the value is in the working. 

But if you do all of that behind closed doors and only reveal the final version, you’re robbing your client of 80% of the value. 

So, the trick is this: when developing a Financial Plan to help your clients achieve their life goals, show them the plans that don’t work first. Help them understand why they don’t work so they’ll recognise what does work when they see it. They may even realise that something they thought wouldn’t work for them, actually does. 

After all, if you hadn’t viewed other houses or kissed other people, you probably wouldn’t be with the person you’re with, living in the house you’re in. 

And just for funnies, take a moment and imagine a scenario where you’re currently living in the first house you ever saw with the first person you ever kissed. 

Now you get me.