Thinking for the modern advisor.
Where the ideas behind Dream Architect Life get argued out at length, rather than compressed onto a slide.
In the archive 20 pieces
Where the ideas behind Dream Architect Life get argued out at length, rather than compressed onto a slide.
In September I am spending an hour answering advisor questions, no slides. Most of it goes to one question I got wrong the first time I tried it: what transfers first.
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The part of a client relationship most likely to live in one advisor's head is what the money is for. Here is where that answer gets captured, and who comes in when.
A full walkthrough of the Vision meeting: the six questions in the order I ask them, what tends to come back after each one, and how those answers become a Blueprint.
Four drawers of gray steel held every number I had ever gathered about my clients and almost nothing about their lives. Here is what I file now, and in what order.
The thing that keeps a firm doing what it has always done is usually the size of the first step, not any doubt about whether the change is worth making.
An hour, live, with the person who built the thing, and room for the questions a recorded webinar has no way to answer.
Simple goals can be handled by one competent advisor. Somewhere above that, a client’s ambition crosses a threshold no individual covers alone.
Most advisors put off booking one because they expect a polished pitch and a hard close. This is the actual agenda.
The advisor who thrives in 2030 will look almost nothing like the average advisor today. Here is what we are building for that world.
There is one question that would tell you the most about your client, and it is the one most advisors were trained to leave to someone else.
We spend most of our time talking about how to grow wealth and almost none on what it is for. That second conversation is where the depth lives.
You run reviews for your clients every quarter. Almost no advisor runs one for their own practice. Mid-year is the moment.
Modern client lives are too complex for any one advisor to cover well. The future belongs to the orchestrator, not the generalist.
A perfect estate plan can still produce a fractured family. The document is the easy part. The conversation is the work.
Most successful clients are brilliant at saving and terrible at spending. That is an advisor problem, not a client problem.
Most advisors think being irreplaceable means being loved. The firms that survive a departure built something sturdier than affection.
What an acquirer is really buying is whether your client experience survives you walking out of the building.
Wealth is the dimension every advisor already covers well. The other four are where the relationship is actually held.
Held-away assets rarely say anything about your performance. They usually say the relationship hasn't yet been given a reason to go deeper.
Five conversations that turn up in every long client relationship, and the structure that keeps you steady when one of them arrives without warning.
