About The Course

A little warning has to be injected at the outset, converting a business from top to bottom is not easy and requires commitment and effort.

 

However Simon has worked this course with others in the past and knows what it takes to get an individual or business through the change program and he has designed this course to work in just 12 months, but you need to start now and you need to commit. The full details of how the course will work are at the footer.

 

Here are a few taster ideas from Simon’s course:

 

How to get paid at every stage of your interaction with clients

 

The traditional remuneration cycle looks like this:

 

IFA meets client, IFA and client discuss matters, IFA completes Fact Find, IFA does research and puts thoughts together, IFA writes report, IFA takes report back to client, client considers the IFA suggestions, client takes up IFA suggestions, IFA provides follow up and “service”, IFA provides reviews…………..

 

It is normally only the bit in bold which creates any revenue for the IFA and this is a problem. But it is also an opportunity, because in reality this old way doesn’t suit the client as much as it doesn’t suit the IFA and surely if this is the case then the new method must be better. So what does the new method look like?

 

(The bits in bold are where the IFA gains revenue from their client – can you spot the difference!)

 

IFA meets client, IFA and client discuss matters, IFA completes Fact Find, IFA does research and puts thoughts together, IFA writes report, IFA takes report back to client, client considers the IFA suggestions, client takes up IFA suggestions, IFA provides follow up and “service”, IFA provides reviews…………..

 

The amazing part of all this is the following: when presented properly and you get your client’s to this position – they prefer this to any other method of remuneration! And look at this – this is the most RDR compliant remuneration you can have.

 

 

Why everyone is looking in the wrong direction

 

A recent round table discussion about adviser charging and how this will work in the future created a surprising conundrum, three experts on the subject all gave entirely different answers as to how this would work. Sound familiar?

 

However it really doesn’t matter what the experts think or who is right, because it is a classic case of looking in the wrong direction.

 

It is not the edict from the FSA that matters, it is what the client wants and will do and will pay for. And this is the bit where most advisers have a problem – they think clients will not want to pay fees, will still want remuneration to be paid via the product and will only pay for the advice at the moment of advice.

 

They are entirely wrong! How do I know this – because I have built a business over the past 5 years which proves that clients want to pay for the whole process, from start to finish and want to pay me, their adviser and are happy to do so via a fee, a fee that repeats and is regular year after year. These clients are not unique they are ‘normal’ clients, no different to clients who suffer commissions and pay for the advice through products.

 

Therefore the thing is it doesn’t matter what the FSA are saying or the 3 experts are saying, whether this is clear or confusing, we know roughly what RDR entails, we know that our new basis will fit in with whatever the RDR dictates on this front, what does matter is we are creating something that clients want and that works beautifully for us as advisers (because we level our income year after year and don’t rely on selling anything).

 

The focus should therefore be on re-engineering our Businesses, to get this recurring fee model in place, not because we have to (although my view is that this is what RDR will force on us anyway) but because we will have a better, more profitable business that is easier to manage and run.

 

 

How to create something of value

 

There is a paradigm at the centre of the traditional industry we call the “IFA Industry”, this being: the things that clients really value are rarely the things that they pay for.

 

I believe that this paradigm is about to become transparent. Now I am no historian or palaeontologist but I have a fair idea that dinosaurs didn’t know they were going to become extinct. They became extinct probably because a huge rock hit the Earth and changed the conditions.

 

Once the potent combination of the RDR and the economic changes we are seeing clash together a huge rock is going to land on the IFA Industry and suddenly clients are going to be asking: what am I paying for?

 

As stated earlier the future position in effect is already here. I am utterly convinced that it is general IFAs that are largely responsible for getting Hargreaves Lansdown into the FTSE 100 Index. As an industry, IFAs are not producing the value that stops clients from deciding that they will be better off doing everything for themselves and using a Clearing House to do it.

 

To avoid this occurring at an individual level we must as IFAs create value for our clients and there is one way that this can be done that works every time. We need to specialise.

And this is where things start to get exciting, because as IFAs we have some very powerful specialities. But we have to learn to demonstrate these specialities and package them up and then sell them.

 

It is when this is done that the IFA business can start to work at a modern level, because the one thing that is clear is that the IFA then has a clear differentiator.

 

Specialisation comes from being able to offer a financial plan, from helping with trust provision, from offering At Retirement advice and so on. And in each case there are fees that will be payable and the clients will happily pay the fees, because they are now getting something of value.

 

The key to this is constructing your specialist model, then packaging and explaining it, then providing it. This not only wins business from new clients, it gets more business from existing clients, lots of referrals and attracts professional introducers and all of this with recurring fees attached.