Consultancy Objectives

Over the last 15 years, a lot of the focus of the financial services industry has been on education, technical knowledge and compliance which has often been at the expense of communication and engagement skills – commonly referred to these days as “soft skills”.

I started my consultancy at precisely the time that Financial Services Reform kicked in , and therefore when giving appropriate personal protection advice as part of a financial plan became a legal obligation as well as a professional obligation for financial planners. Yet despite this, we still find ourselves in this country in the grip of a massive underinsurance epidemic – why?

I believe that most financial planners have a genuine desire to do the right thing by their clients when it comes to personal protection, but I also believe that most of these same financial planners lack a user friendly process (or in some cases any process at all!) for covering their clients in this area.

Since I had been an active risk adviser on opposite sides of the globe for over 25 years at this point in time (and still am now some 7 years on), and had therefore been fine tuning my own client engagement process in the risk advice space for the same length of time, I felt I could make a difference to an awful lot of advisers who simply lacked a methodology or process when it came to risk advice for their clients.

Any advice process evolves over time as a result of trial and error with real clients. I have always believed that my primary role as an adviser is to facilitate as much as I possibly can the decision making process for my clients, and this starts with making it easy for my clients to identify what they want, and then to make it easy for them to understand what needs to be done to achieve these financial outcomes.

All of my material in the risk advice space is in some way shape or form to do with different aspects of the client engagement process, and my very clear objective in any session that I may deliver – be it a 1 hour session to 50 people, a full day one on one mentoring session or anything in between – is to ensure that everyone who attends the session walks away with a number of simple, practical, usable tools/concepts/ideas that they can take back to their office and start using straight away, which will result in them writing more business and generating more revenue.

Exactly the same objective applies to my material that is of a more generic sales skills nature for those involved in sales outside the financial services industry.

With regard to the cost of any sessions, whether it be as part of a group for a 1 hour session or on your own with me for a full day, I guarantee that the cost will not exceed what you will be able to recoup in revenue from the acquisition of one additional new client.

You should always therefore view any cost as an investment rather than an expense.