#FASuccess Ep 091: Increasing The Value Of Advice By Focusing On Life-Centered Planning For Transitions Not Goals with Mitch Anthony

What You’ll Learn In This Podcast Episode

• The six key values of financial planning. [04:28]
• What Mitch does in the advisor world. [12:33]
• The unbalanced shift most people make into retirement. [19:50]
• A major motivator for saving and investing (other than retirement). [29:46]
• What makes a retirement successful. [31:52]
• His unusual pathway into the industry. [34:03]
• What he says every advisor needs to know about their clients. [52:09]
• The difference between data gathering and discovery. [54:05]
• What life-centered planning is, and how it improves client relationships. [58:28]
• The best way to demonstrate the ongoing value of financial planning. [1:04:47]
• How new advisors can set themselves on a better track to long-term success. [1:29:38]

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Mitch Anthony
• Mitch Anthony's Speaker Website
• ROL Advisor
• My FLP Tools
• 6 Key Value Propositions A Good Financial Planner Provides
• The New Retirementality
• Storyselling Revisited
• Episode 15 with George Kinder
• Life-Centered Planning course launching with Texas Tech
• Life Centered Planners

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 91st episode of the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Mitch Anthony. Mitch is the founder of an eponymous training and coaching firm for financial advisors on how to ask the right questions to have better conversations with clients. What's unique about Mitch, though, is his truly unique gift for finding the right words for effective client conversations. From describing the value of financial planning itself based on the six principles of helping clients with their organization, accountability, objectivity, proactivity, education, and partnership, to simply making the point that in the end, the role of a good financial planner is to help clients find the balance between vocation and vacation and ensure that clients prepare so they don't have to repair instead.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of language in financial planning. The difference between having good rapport with clients and really building a relationship with them, why asking clients the right questions is all about engaging them by making them feel like they're answering the questions they've always wanted to talk about anyway, and why the best way to demonstrate the ongoing value of financial planning is not about helping clients to reach their goals, but instead helping them to prepare for and then navigate the never-ending stream of transitions that life throws at them anyway, which are also great opportunities for advisors to demonstrate our value and grow our businesses because money goes in motion when life goes into transition.

We also talk about how the real value of a financial advisor should be measured by their ability to impact a client's return on life and whether they're living the best life they can with the money they have, rather than the traditional focus on benchmarking and advisor's return on investments, which as Mitch puts it, Standard and Poor's is a poor standard for measuring value, how the life-centered planning approach helps to address the common client question of, "What have you done for me lately," and the platform that Mitch is building aptly called ROL Advisor, to provide coaching and tracking tools that advisors can use with their clients to demonstrate these ongoing values.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Mitch shares his key insight for how new advisors, in particular, can set themselves on a better track to long-term success by doing whatever it takes to, as he puts it, surround themselves with greatness and find opportunities to learn from best advisors they can before starting out on their own.

And so with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast with Mitch Anthony.

Welcome, Mitch Anthony, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Mitch: Thanks, Michael. Good to be here with you.

Michael: I'm really excited about this episode frankly, for a couple of different reasons. One, Mitch, you are one of these people that just has an amazing gift with words. It's something I've long observed in your writing and hearing you speak over the years, that you aren't just a really good speaker and writer, which you are, but for most of us, when we're trying to get some concept out or some point out, there's always the right word on the tip of our tongue that you never actually think of until 30 minutes after the conversation you go, "Oh, that's what I should have said in that meeting." And you just seem to always have the right words to describe things. And it's so powerful to me.

You were out speaking for the AICPA Conference a couple of years ago about the value proposition of advice, and we as advisors like to talk about how we do asset allocation, rebalancing, and, "We help you with your spending and your Social Security decisions. And we'll give you behavioral coaching," and all these different things that are I think legitimately good value propositions, but pretty much goes over the head of every client.

The Six Key Values Of Financial Planning [04:28]

And then you boiled the entire financial planning value proposition down to these six key points that still stuck with me. And I'll admit I tried out and mentioned to people from time to time in client meetings, that the value of planning is organization, we help you bring order to your financial life. Accountability, we help you follow through on commitments. Objectivity, we bring insights from the outside world to help you avoid emotional decisions. Proactivity, we help you anticipate financial life transitions and be prepared for them. Education, we will give you the knowledge that you need to deal with your situation. And partnership, that we're here to work in concert with you.

And we all struggle with how to say what the value of planning is, and then you just trot out these six words: organization, accountability, objectivity, proactivity, education, and partnership, like, a sentence on each. And that's better than anything I've ever figured out in 20 years as an advisor. Those are the right words, stamp it, we're done.

Mitch: Well, I'm flattered that you like it. And I was really quite honored that you wrote about it, and I got a lot of people writing to me after that saying, "Hey, I'd like to use that little iconographic thing that you've put together." And it's funny, I even met a guy here in my own town who was working for a major firm, and he said, "I've been using that in every prospect meeting I've had for the last three years and it started a good conversation."

That's the importance of language, is that it opens people up, right? If you say things in a novel way if I can put it that way, in a way they haven't heard before, the eyebrows come up and they go, "Oh, well, that's different from what I've heard before." A little phrase like, "It's better to prepare than it is to repair." It sort of has a poetic quality to it, but there's some deep truth to that, right Michael? It is better to prepare than to repair, so what is it I should be looking forward to and preparing for? So what I find is that the phrase, if you can catch people by surprise with the language, it opens them up.

And then I'm really, really, particular about not sounding like somebody else. I remember listening to comedians talk about the fact that they wouldn't listen to other comedians because you can easily absorb what they're saying and forget where you got it and then you'll end up plagiarizing them and you look stupid. And I remember when I first became a professional speaker, this is a long time ago, people started asking me to come to the National Speakers Association meetings, right? And I went to a couple of these meetings, and they were all ripping off each other's material. They all sounded alike... and I came home and I said to my wife, "I'm never going to another one of those meetings again because I just don't want to be that guy," right? I just want to say things in my way or the way I think about it, and I don't want people hearing me and going, "Oh, that sounds just like so-and-so," right?

But more important than how you sound is I want to adduce something from people in a conversation. I want to get them thinking and I want to get them talking. And the beauty of language is if you're careful with language, so those six things you just walked through, I just spend an awful lot of time thinking about, "What are the intangible values?" And that's when you ask people, "How was that conversation with that planner," you don't want them saying, "Oh, that was pretty good." You want them saying, "Wow, that was incredible. I've never had a conversation like that." And so I just spend a lot of time thinking about the intangible delivery of value that the planner can bring by virtue of their process. And when it's intangible, you can't measure it. And when you can't measure it, you can't commoditize... it if that makes sense.

Michael: It's a good point, when it's intangible you can't measure it, and when you can't measure it, you can't commoditize it.

Mitch: Right. Yeah. So asset allocation and all these sort of things that people would put out there as value proposition is all measurable, and so it's just a matter time before they become commoditized and people say, "You can get that." And we're seeing, we're seeing that today, everybody, that that's not news to anybody, that all those sort of traditional planning values are being commoditized.

So at the end of the day, what are we really delivering to people? So for example, the thing about accountability, "I hold people's feet to the fire of their own best intentions." That's a powerful value. That's why people hire executive coaches and life coaches and all kinds of... physical trainers, right? It's not that they can't count to 12 while they're lifting weights, it's that they need that accountability where they have to show up. I think that's an incredible value to bring as a financial planner to your clientele. To look them right in the eye and say, "I'm going to hold your feet to the fire of your best intentions. When you tell me that you need to do something, I'm going to stay on you till you do it."

Michael: And for folks who are listening, if you're listening trying to scribble down these six words and remember the items here, we posted a whole piece on the Nerd's Eye View a few years ago about this, with Mitch's permission that... like, I just told him, "These are the best words I've ever heard, so we need to share this with more people." So this is episode 91 for the podcast, so if you go to kitces.com/91 and go down to the show notes, the Resources section, we'll have a link out to that if you want to go look up these words and think about how you might use them yourself in describing, as you said, the value of financial planning and the intangible part of financial planning.

That to me is what's so powerful about these words: organization, accountability, objectivity, proactivity, education, partnership. They're all just simple, straightforward ways to describe the intangible aspects of that planning relationship and what we're trying to get at when we do planning projections and tell you if you can retire and tax strategies and asset allocation and all the other technical stuff that we do with the whole bunch of our industry jargon. These are six words anybody can understand and apply.

Mitch: Yeah. And those six words, by the way, something just kind of jumps to my mind as I'm hearing you talk about this, I've long believed that there's the opportunity to bring inspiration in this process, if you know what I mean, right? That not everyone is an inspirational-type personality, but if you are, if you've got some of that in you, this is a great vehicle for bringing inspirational quality to your work, right? When you're challenging people to do their best. When you're helping them get it together. When you're helping them stay the course.

When I think of coaching, good coaching, what are great coaches? Well, they're people that they've mastered the X's and O's, right, strategically, they've got a great strategy, and they've got discipline around their strategy, but there's also a great inspirational quality to coaches, where they know how to read their players and they know what to say, they motivate somebody. I think financial planning is an area where you can have an outlet for that sort of inspirational quality in your work.

Michael: So Mitch, aside from coming up with the six words that describe financial planning better than any of us kind of figured out how to describe around financial planning, how do you describe what you do? Can you give us a picture of Mitch Anthony in a nutshell? what is your business and what do you do in the advisor world?

What Mitch Does In The Advisor World [12:33]

Mitch: Well, I feel like my mission is to help connect the financial conversation to the purpose it's intended for, which is to improve one's life. I've long maintained that nobody gathers money for the sake of gathering money, that there's a reason for that. And that that's the living, breathing context. An analogy would be, “You know what? There are 210 bones in the body. A financial plan is like a corpse.” But it doesn't come alive for people until we get the stories, the stories of, "What's this money really for? What are you going to do with this money when you get it? What are you doing with it now?" And that always comes back to life itself. And so if you want a financial plan that lives and breathes and is animated then we've got to get the stories of, "What do you want to do someday? Who are you taking care of? What matters to you?" There's financial tethers to all these questions.

So, a phrase I like to throw out there is it's one thing to gather a story of numbers, it's another thing to gather a number of stories. And it's the number of stories that I found lacking in the advisory process, the ability to get the right stories, to ask the right questions to help understand what this client wants to do with this money. Why is this money important to them? And so my mission is to help advisors, help planners make that connection with their clients. Ask the right questions, figure out what really matters in their life, figure out what they need to change and what they're doing now and what they need to prepare for ahead in life. Get ahead, be proactive, anticipate, what's coming, be prepared for it. So I just want to see life at the center, if that makes sense, Michael. I want to see life at the center of the planning process.

Michael: So I've seen you doing this through... kind of speaking was my, at least, primary action first awareness of you. I think I first saw you probably 15-plus years ago or so at I think it was an FPA chapter meeting, and you had just done your new book at the time called "The New Retirementality," which was... like, the story that stuck with me was, you talked about the story of a client who had just retired and was all happy that he could finally retire after years of working towards it and working with his advisor to make it happen. And he finally got there and retired and was playing lots of golf with all of his buddies and doing that regularly.

And then six months later, the advisor met with him again and he's unhappy and he's miserable. He's played the same round of golf, same 4 buddies for 4 days a week for 6 months and can't believe he has to do it with them for another 25 years-plus of retirement. And is now becoming miserable in his life of retirement that was supposed to be this great pinnacle of, "Now I don't have to work and I can play more golf."

And I was just a few years into my career at the time and spending most of my time just trying to figure out how to do the number-crunching for that plan to help that doctor be able to retire so that he could play all the golf, and it was one of those record scratch moments for me of like, "We're doing all this work to help clients save and prepare for retirement, oh, I never thought about the fact that once they got there they might be bored and miserable! Well, now I don't know what the heck I'm doing here as an advisor."

And, as you said, it opened my eyes for the first time to a whole other side of the dynamic of planning and the whole purpose of this advice we're doing, that yeah, if what they want to do is get to the point where they can stop working at 65 and be able to play more golf, there's some number-crunching and some analysis to do and some recommendations we give that can help them get to that path, and that's all well and good, but pointing out to them, "If you do this plan you just said, you're probably going to be miserable six months into retirement and here's why," is a much more powerful conversation and something that I had just never thought of, never conceived of until I heard you talking about it for the first time.

Mitch: Yeah. Well, first of all, I just remember when I was young thinking, "I don't get this, these people working for 40 years at something they hated so they someday could have enough money to buy an RV."

Michael: That is kind of the quintessential, isn't it?

Mitch: Yeah. And then get behind the wheel and watch their navel expand for the next decade, right? Well, this is not a dress rehearsal, people. And I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea and yet so many people did it. So I got curious about retirement and I started studying it, the history. I think most people listening to this probably know a little bit about Otto von Bismarck and the history retirement. And really, that is a relatively new phenomenon in our world in terms of social construct. And when I realized how new the idea was and when I finally understood the context within which it was created, which was the Industrial Age, where you were trading physical capacity for a paycheck, right?

And so, okay, that made sense I guess, right? If you're 60 years old and you're tired and you're not as motivated and you're not as strong and you're not as… you just don't have that vigor you once had, maybe you do get out of there and they replace you with a 20-year-old and the machine just continues to hum along. But what if you're making a living with your gray matter? What if you're making a living with your relationships? What if you're making a living with your experience and the insights that come from that? At what age do those things expire, right? Where's the born on date on Michael Kitces' gray matter, right? Or not the born on date, the use by date, the use by date, right?

And so, when I started thinking about that way and then I started sitting down and talking to people and finding out, "You know what? The stuff you saw on the retirement brochure wasn't really true for everybody. And for a lot of people, retirement is a horrible idea." And then what if you're one of those people...? Here's the thing that I always... this kind of blew my mind, Michael, people were having these retirement conversations and failing to talk about the one thing that we should be talking about and that is work. That's the thing you're retiring from. Did it ever dawn on anybody that we ought to be having a conversation about work? And what do you like about your work? And what do you not like about your work? And if you could describe the perfect situation what would it look like? That's a much better conversation than just assuming that when you turn 62 or 65, you're going to stop working.

The Unbalanced Shift Most People Make Into Retirement [19:50]

So that's a vocation conversation. And I've sort of long maintained that what people are really looking for is a balance between vacation and vocation. And that's another one of those wordplays that sort of gets people to stop and go, "Run that by me again."

Michael: People are looking for a balance between vacation and vocation.

Mitch: And vocation. And so, in America, most people don't have a balanced situation, what they do is they burn out at vocation and then they completely quit and then they think they're going to go full time into vacation and that that's going to work. That's not balance, that's shifting your binge, right? And so, when you find this balance between vocation and vacation, and by the way, "vocare," the root word, means... it's about a calling. There are people that don't have a JOB. And God help me if I had a JOB. I couldn't handle it. I feel a sense of calling in what I do. And I'm sure many of the people listening to this do as well, right? And so if you feel a sense of calling in what you do, at what age does that expire? I know it's philosophical, but in my formative years philosophically, I read an awful lot of Viktor Frankl, right? And that it's about meaning. Life is about meaning. And so a lot of people's job, if you will, or career has meaning in it.

And I live in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, and I talk to doctors all the time. And let me tell you, there's a set of people right there that has a really hard time with retirement, right? Because it's such meaningful work, and so many of them have a sense of calling about what they do, and suddenly they're just supposed to walk away from that and be happy. And be happy with what? Playing golf with the same guys every day and hearing the same jokes and the same complaints, it's Groundhog Day. It's got everything but Bill Murray, right? Anyway, I know, I think I'm just kind of rambling here.

Michael: Frankly, it's something that I think resonates in the advisor world, not only because a lot of us see this in practice with clients, that they build up for retirement and they're trying to get there and we're helping them to get there, and then they suddenly get there and then we're meeting them the first year or two or three thereafter and either they're unhappy or miserable, or they are already going off and finding some other work, another thing to do. Which A, at best gets ironic. Spend a whole bunch of time working with you to get to retirement so that you cannot work, and then within a year later, you went back to work. And even worse, if I'd known you were going to go back to work, we actually could have done this five years ago because you didn't need to save as much if you were going to go and work in retirement as it turns out you're going to do.

And I think there's a piece of this in the advisor world, in particular, that as a lot of industry studies that keep pointing out, the average age of an advisor is 50-something. Close to 40% of advisors are 55 or older, therefore 30% or 40% of advisors are going to retire in the next 10 years as they approach 65. And I've been one of those people pounding the table for years now, and in part I think being very influenced by some of what you've written around this “Retirementality” mentality in general to say, why would there be a wave of retiring advisors in the next 10 years because they're getting in their early 60s? You can do this in your 70s. I know a few advisors that are still doing in their 80s. Maybe not quite as actively as they did before and they've dialed down their clients a little, but the sad reality is a few of the clients are probably going to start passing by then anyways so the client flow kind of naturally adjusts itself.

That, “what if the wave of advisors that are anticipated to retire aren't going anywhere for 15 to 30 years from now, not in the next 10?” And the fact that every year we talk about this looming wave of retiring advisors, and then every year the advisor count doesn't actually go down, and it's happened for four or five straight years that they've been predicting the wave of retirements, I think sort of emphasizes the point that we experience this ourselves in our business. It's like, it's a great business. Particularly if you've been doing it that long and you're that far in your practice, you make good money, you have good relationships with your clients, it's mostly enjoyable work, you've usually, at least, grown to the point that if there's some not enjoyable work you can hire someone else to do that part, why would you walk away from that?

Mitch: That's right. That's right. I've had that same conversation. I remember having a conference call with a bunch of 65-year-old advisors who were on the cusp retirement, and one of the gentlemen basically iterated what you just said, and that was, "This is easy now. All my clients know they can trust me, we sit and talk about life, we're friends with a lot of them, and I make more money I've ever made in my life, why do I walk away now?" That's a valid question. It's a valid question. And experience matters. Experience really matters in financial planning. And you've got all this experience. When they asked Warren Buffett why he didn't retire at 65, his answer was, "I'll retire 2 years after I die." He knew that if you're not using that gray matter, it's going to begin to atrophy.

Michael: To me, there's just this dynamic of how retirement has evolved over the better part of the past 100 years or so. You go back to the early Otto von Bismarck, German structure, the original purpose of setting up a retirement fund was basically because it was the Industrial Age, and you worked with your hands and physical labor, and people got so old they couldn't do the physical labor anymore, so they were literally becoming obsolete in their ability to earn and do business, and as a society, we had to do something with all these old, obsolete people. So we said, "Well, we've got to provide for them somewhere, somehow, so we'll make this social security thing," or their equivalent, and then we applied it as social security, as this safety net for the literally physically obsolescent work.

Then at some point along the way we tried to morph it from a bad thing, "You have to retire because you can't do the work anymore," to, "Let's make it sound good. You'll retire into retirement and there'll be beaches and Adirondack chairs," and all the imagery that we created to say, "No, this doesn't have to be a bad time in your life, this could be a good time in your life. You're finally done with work." And now we've spent a couple of decades trying to turn it from the bad obsolescence thing into the good you're working towards it, now we seem to be getting to the next stage, which is, "Maybe it's not actually that good and natural in the first place."

Mitch: Yeah. Well, Del Webb got a hold of the idea and sold the whole leisure life entitlement, right? And actually, before Del Webb came along, it was the financial services world that glommed onto the idea and said, "Hey, we could make this an incentive for saving money and investing money." And that's where it started. I can't remember the fella's name but some executive from an insurance company gave a speech in 1952 or 1953 to that effect and it caught on. And so suddenly it became this great incentive.

Michael: That's a little depressing. I hadn't quite thought about it that close to home. To what extent did we in the financial services industry invent this retirement thing so that there was a good excuse to get our clients to save giant piles of money with us?

Mitch: Well, that's exactly what it was.

Michael: It's a little depressing.

Mitch: And I often taunt my audiences and say, "Wow, this is great, you've built an entire industry around a really bad idea, what are you going to do now," right?

Michael: Well, there has been some discussion that's starting to crop up of what would it look like if people planned for a more steady rotation, as you put it, between vacations and vocations, right? I do a career for 15 years then I take a 3-year sabbatical, then I do another career for 15 years, then I take another sabbatical, and I just do that back and forth until I'm 80 and then have a relatively short retirement. And if that's your plan, what you discover is... well, disability insurance becomes way more important because if that gets interrupted, it's really bad, but as long as it continues to work, you never need to save that much for retirement. You need a little, but retirement doesn't last that long, and you're not very active by the time you get there, so you don't actually need that much, which really messes with the business model for most financial advisors. It's kind of predicated around building up pools of assets.

It's not that those people may not need advice, in fact, arguably, they may need more advice to navigate those transitions effectively, but you would build up shorter-term savings and then use it in the next transition, and then build up shorter-term savings and use in the next transition. You wouldn't build up one giant pot that gets absolutely enormous and then spend it all at the end.

A Major Motivator For Saving And Investing (Other Than Retirement) [29:46]

Mitch: I've had people get upset with me when I talk about this and say, "Well, how in the world am I going to incentivize my clients to save money?" And I said, "Well, why don't you just talk to them about emancipation money?" Right? To me, that's a greater motivator than retirement, is to have enough money to do what I want, when I want, with whom I choose, at the pace I'm comfortable with, right? It's freedom money. That's a great motivation for saving and investing, so you can call your own shots in life. Who doesn't want that, right?

Michael: I've become a huge fan of framing this, not in terms of retirement but simply financial independence. That your time is now financially independent of what you do with it. So do whatever you want with your time. If it makes money, that's cool, if it doesn't, that's okay as well, your time is financially independent. Now do whatever it is that's rewarding.

Mitch: Right, right. And also, you heard me talking about this in Las Vegas at a convention we were both at recently. And sort of the health implications of all this is that the jury is in, the verdict is in on the idea of full-time life of leisure, that it actually is not a positive thing. And there are gerontological studies demonstrating this. And one male gerontological researcher put it to me this way, he said, "Life of total ease is two steps removed from a life of total disease." And he described for me how when people get bored, they then get pessimistic. And once they get pessimistic, it becomes this downward spiral, both psychologically and physically.

And I did an interview here, I wrote about this in "Financial Advisor Magazine" last year with the head of psychiatry or psychology at the Cleveland Clinic. And this guy told me that he spends his entire week counseling depressed retired executives. These are people with a lot of money and they're depressed. Because this life....

Michael: They lost their purpose. They lost what they wake up for every morning.

What Makes A Retirement Successful [31:52]

Mitch: Yeah. And that's another phrase I throw out for advisors is, successful retirement is when you have enough purpose to get up in the morning, and enough money to sleep at night, right? So you've got to book in those two things. Money is really important, but it's not more important than purpose. And there's only so much money can do. It's like our dearly departed friend Dick Wagner used to say, "The only people that really understand what money can't do for them are the people that have it." Everybody else still believes it, right? So the people that have the money realized the money is great but... like one retired executive said to me, "What am I supposed to do now? Hug my checkbook?"

Michael: That's a powerful same statement. Sadly, the only people who really understand what money can't do for them are the ones who have it.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah, right? And everybody else believes it can do all these things that it can't do. And Michael, I can remember, so 20-something years ago, before I even got involved in financial services, I used to speak in schools, right? And I was the guy that came into the gymnasium, and they put all the kids in there and I talked to them for an hour about life and choices and all that sort of thing. And so every summer, I basically had the summer off, right? Kind of like a school teacher can if they want.

And I remember vividly standing on the number 7 fairway, I'm an avid golfer, I love golf as much as anybody, and that's the great retirement dream, right? So you can wake up every day and do nothing but golf. And I remember standing in the middle of the fairway on number 7s with my wife, and I looked at her and I said, "I'm wasting all my energy, competitive energy, creative energy on this game." I realized right then and there, I could never retire and have only that to do.

Michael: So how did you get started into these discussions and visioning and focus around financial planning and thinking about retirement differently and figuring out how to explain what we do? What was your pathway to the industry?

Mitch’s Unusual Pathway Into The Industry [34:03]

Mitch: Well, I don't know if I've ever... I don't know if you and I have ever talked about this, but I am truly an accidental tourist in financial services. I still shake my head and go, "How did this happen?" Right? Because I was literally… I spoke in schools. I spoke to 3.5 million kids and teacher conventions and all this stuff for years. And one day, my little girl and I are out in the backyard and I'm teaching her about planting a flower. It's on a May Day, right? And we're out there digging up some dirt and we're going to put this seed in the ground. And my wife walks out with a telephone, and she says to me, "It's a broker." And I'm thinking, "Why are you giving me a telephone with a broker when I'm having this special life moment with my little girl?"

And I take the phone and the guy says, "Hi, my name is Jim," and I said, "No, thanks, Jim, not interested." And I hang up. And my wife looks at me mortified and she goes, "They've got a banquet tonight at the Country Club with 400 people and their speaker from Atlanta is sick and somebody told them to call you."

Michael: And you hang up on him because you thought it was a sales call.

Mitch: Well, I said, "Honey, did it ever dawn on you to give me that as a turnover place as opposed to, 'It's a broker?'" And so, this is so funny, that was the first week we had caller ID on her phone. It was the great technological advance in 1998, right? And so, I looked at the phone and I pushed the caller ID button and it showed me the guy's number, and I called him back and I'm apologizing and humbling myself. And I'm like, "I'm so sorry. Tell me what's going on." He said, "Well, I've got all these people coming and somebody told me that you're a good speaker and maybe you could fill in for us."

Michael: Apparently, not great on phone skills, but a good speaker.

Mitch: Little lacking up on introduction. And so the irony was, the person that told him this was a guy out at the golf club who had been stuck on the tarmac with me during an ice storm for two hours and had asked me what I did and I told him and he asked me to send him a CD. And he listened to it, and he just happened upon this situation, okay?

Michael: So just the purest of three steps removed of random serendipity.

Mitch: Oh, unbelievable, right? So it gets better from here. So he says, "Well, what could you talk about?" Well, this was at a point in my life in 1998 where I was beginning to think about this whole idea of what a weird idea retirement was. I hadn't written anything on it. And I had actually developed a talk called Don't Ever Grow Old, right, about the whole attitude thing and lifestyle thing. And he said, "Oh that sounds perfect. We've got a free chicken dinner and half of these people are retired and the other half are getting close."

Michael: So, this was the broker's prospect event? Because this was the era of seminar marketing.

Mitch: Yes. Free chicken dinner, man.

Michael: Okay. So, you were the fill-in speaker for his free chicken dinner marketing seminar.

Mitch: Well, I think he called it a client appreciation event.

Michael: Okay, we have better labels for it, but yes.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. Right, right. And I don't know how many prospects were there or what it was. But anyway, I was the guy who took the mic that night and I gave my talk. And there's a lot of humor in it, but it was a lot of challenge philosophically for people about the whole idea of age and old and retirement and all these things. So I talked about it. The next day, I get a FedEx envelope from a mutual fund company called Van Kampen Funds out of Chicago, okay? And in the FedEx envelope is a sort of a value-add program they're trying to put together about communicating with people that are mature, communicating with the mature client. Kind of like the Dychtwald kind of Age Wave thing, right? You know what I'm talking about?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, Ken Dychtwald's Age Wave stuff was… yeah, yeah.

Mitch: And so here's this sort of half-baked program in this envelope, and then the note says, "Who are you, and where did you get these ideas? Call this number, our senior vice president of marketing wants to meet you." I'm like, "What?"

Michael: Because the Van Kampen wholesaler was at the dinner event?

Mitch: That's exactly right. And he was one of the people that the guy had tapped to help pay for the event.

Michael: Yep. That's a lot of Van Kampen wholesalers there.

Mitch: You know how it works.

Michael: Absolutely. I know how it works. Yeah.

Mitch: I don't think the wholesalers go to these things because they want more chicken. So I go to Chicago and I meet the senior vice president of marketing, and he hadn't even listened to my talk, right? This is a month later I come in and visit. So I was like, "Wow, did I just waste my time or what happened here?" And he seemed to have no clue about why this wholesaler wanted me to come meet him. So I point to my CD sitting on his desk and I said, "Well, that's me. I gave that talk and your wholesaler heard and he thought it'd be a good idea for us to talk." He goes, "Oh, oh, well, I didn't have time to listen to it. What else do you do?" I'm like, "Are you kidding me?"

Michael: "I do what's on the CD man."

Mitch: "What else do I do?" And he said, "No, I'm serious." And I said, "Well, what do you need done?" He said, "No, seriously, what else do you do?" I said, "Well..." So I told him another idea I'd been working on, and that was using the analogy and the metaphor to help people understand complex ideas, right? And I'd long been a believer in that, and I've thought in the financial world that people use too much jargon and clients were confused and didn't really get what they were talking about. And so I told him that. I said, "I don't think people really understand what advisors are talking about. And I think if they'd learn to use the analogy and the metaphor better and say, 'This is kind of like' then it would help people understand what in the world they were talking about." Now, I'm sure you recognize right here that this is basically the thesis that became the book "Storyselling," okay?

And so he says to me... he turns around, this executive turns around, gets on his phone and he said, "Brett, how's that presentation day at a 1998 year in review presentation that we're working on, a PowerPoint deck?" Right? He said, "Bring it in here right now. I want this guy to see it." And so the guy comes in, and he puts this PowerPoint thing up, and it was the 1998 report to shareholders or year in review, right? And the guy who put it together said, "This is really bad. I've got to warn you ahead of time, it's really bad." And he puts it up and he runs slide by slide, and it's exactly what I was saying in my criticism. It's just so full of jargon and it made no sense at all.

And I'm like, "Tell me this," I said... and the whole gist of the presentation was about investing in international stocks, right? They were trying to convince people that's a good thing. And so I said, "How old is your average shareholder?" He said, "66 years old." I said, "Well, why don't you... and you want them to feel comfortable with international investing?" And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, that's the idea." I said, "Well, then they're grandparents, why don't you talk to them about when the kids come over and drop the grandkids off and they come driving up in a Subaru or a Volvo, and when the kids get out and they take their console, their game out of their bag." And what's the name of...? You know what I mean.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, like, Game Boys of the time?

Mitch: Yeah, whatever. It was a Japanese company that made it, right? That we're talking about at the time. And then the kids asked for some Nestle's Quik so that they could drink. And, "Oh, by the way, Grandpa and Grandma, all these things were made in other countries. Why don't you just tell a story like that?" That was the beginning. And this senior vice president said, "Oh, I want to know more about this idea." And so he became my co-author on the book "Storyselling."

Michael: Oh, that was Scott West.

Mitch: That was Scott west. And I still to this day, now, Invesco bought Van Kampen, to this day, Scott West is a good friend of mine, Gary DeMoss is a good friend of mine. I still work with them on developing ideas. They have a really good value consulting group, tremendous consulting group.

Michael: For advisors who aren't familiar, this is a whole book. This is a whole phenomenon now called "Storyselling," as a way to position your value proposition about what you do as an advisor. So when did "Storyselling" first come out Mitch?

Mitch: It came out in 2000 or 2001. We just came out this year... the book has been a perennial bestseller for our publisher, so they would never redo the book. So I finally negotiated with our publisher to let us redo the book and distribute it internationally. So we just came out with "Storyselling Revisited" 18 years later, and boy, have the author's pictures changed, I've got to tell you, right? But that book has been... it instantly became a bestseller, and it opened the door for me to go out and speak all over the industry and start talking to people about, "How do you use the analogy and the metaphor?" I define a metaphor as using the language of the known to explain the unknown. Use the thing they get to describe the thing they don't get, right?

So, the master, this was Jesus with his parables, right? It's kind of like the kingdom of heaven was kind of like. Aesop and his fables, Ben Franklin and his Poor Richard allegories, great, wise teachers always used the analogy and the metaphor, not the literal. And you know why? Because people will argue with the literal but they won't argue with an analogy. They'll absorb it. They'll absorb it.

Anyway, that opened the door. So Van Kampen at the time said to me, "We will pay you to use this idea, and we want you if you get other ideas to tell us because we want to develop value-added programs that help advisors get better at communicating with their clients." And so all of a sudden, I'm being paid to think up ideas. I don't have to think them up, they just come to me, right? And I love looking at how things work and asking, "Why do we do it that way? Why do we do it that way? And who made this up?" And I like tracing it back to its origins, right, and finding out, "Who invented this? Why they invented it, the context within which they did." And then when you do that enough, you realize there are a lot of things going on that nobody's thought about for years, and we could do better.

Ad so that... I went from the "Storyselling" thing, which was all about how to communicate with your client in a way that they'll understand and make it easier for them to make the decisions they need to make, to I started thinking about the retirement thing that we've already talked about. Then I started looking at the financial planning process, and I saw a lot of holes in that. And I saw too much emphasis on numbers and not enough on the story in the context, which is the life of the client. And so that's what got me going down that path, and that's a path that has just continued to move on and on and on and it's taken on a life of its own.

Michael: So "Storyselling" was kind of the first and "New Retirementality" was the second, and then you kind of shifted all in on financial planning in the process. And I guess that's the one that keeps on giving. As our space evolves and grows and changes, so too has what you've been working on around it.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Michael: So what was the first transition in? Because I'm trying to think back… I had seen your "New Retirementality" work, and I know you were doing some things around life planning as well, but I don't know when that transition happened or how that happened.

Mitch: Well, I started a company. I had a partner and we started a company in 2001 to start promoting the idea of financial life planning, is what I chose to call it, and create tools that people could use in their discovery process, that advisors could use in their discovery process to get better at understanding who their client was and what mattered and where their life was headed and what they needed to prepare for. So I started developing this suite of tools.

Michael: I'm just wondering, how did you come to the point of creating this? I'm trying to remember sort of the timeline of this coming out. George Kinder started talking about a life planning movement in I think the early to mid-1990s. George had been out there for a while. He has his Three Questions and his EVOKE process. So, you were coming in saying, "No, no, like, this is my take," or, "Here's a different structured way to do it?" You can come at this in a lot of different ways.

Mitch: I think George kind of came out with his thing in the late '90s, and around 2000/2001, I started getting invitations to come to the FPA National Convention and different chapters, and everyone was talking about this life planning stuff. And it was sort of a... it was kind of a firebrand issue. People had strong opinions on both sides of it. And I just sort of had a little different take on it, and I just felt like calling....

Michael: So what was the issue at the time? Just some people saying, "This is the future" and others are saying, "No, no, no, we're here about the numbers and the dollars and the investments?" Just that tension?

Mitch: Yeah, basically that. And also, the big complaint was advisors shouldn't be trying to play psychologist. That was sort of a popular phrase, right? And I was sort of agreeing with those people. And I was saying, "Life is important, but I don't know if calling an advisor a life planner is a good idea because it feels like a bait-and-switch. And why are you talking to me about this stuff," right?

Michael: Because I'm going to talk to you about all this life planning stuff, but I'm still expecting you're going to pay me by buying my insurance product or my mutual fund or giving me your assets to manage, or something else that isn't directly pertaining to the life planning conversations that we were having.

Mitch: Yeah, it felt, and I'm just coming at this from a communicator's point of view, it felt awkward to me. And it felt awkward to me if I was a client when I'm going to go to my financial advisor and they're going to start asking me these deep questions about life. And so I just proposed that we call it financial life planning and that the questions be that we have the ability to demonstrate with all the questions we ask how it's tied to your money, right? And we tell people before we ask a question why we're going to ask the question we're going to ask. And I call that getting permission to ask, right? So that the client can relax and go, "Oh, okay, now I see why you're asking me this." And then we're able to demonstrate very quickly how the answer to that question is tied to their financial well-being.

And then after we hear the answer or the opinion or the perspective or the story the client has to tell, we then go into the final phase of the dialogue, which I like to call it anchoring, and saying, "Well, now that you've explained your view or now that you've told me your story, maybe we should look at doing the following financially." So it's all about money and life and the connection between the two. And so it's not this esoteric conversation. Some people would view those sort of questions that don't have to do with money as being esoteric conversations. And there are other conversations floating around financial services too that were a little bit awkward as well, that felt very Freudian and not just... you know, there's a number of dialogue paths out there that were being promoted.

Michael: Right, Kinder's Three Questions are very powerful for people. And for those who are wondering, we had George Kinder on the podcast in the past as well. So if you're interested, we have it in the show notes here. You can just go dial back. It was episode 15.

But, I've known a number of advisors that struggled with this as well, that just Kinder's Three Questions, which are all built around, “You have 10 years to live, what's important to you? You have, one year to live, what's important to you? You've just found out you have a terminal illness, what do you regret not doing?” They're really weighty life questions about, "Have you spent your life well and are there things you want to do differently?" And sometimes you realize, "Oh my gosh, if I always diagnosed with a terminal illness, here's my one primary regret." Then you say to clients, "Well, great news, you're not terminally ill, so when are you going to go do that thing?" And, it's a powerful conversation. But you have a good point, like, not exactly what people thought they were going to get when they went into a financial planner wealth manager's office.

Mitch: And I love the questions. I love a deep dialogue. And I also have found that the people that go through George's training seem to increase or broaden their capacity for better dialogue. You know what I mean? They just get better at it. But at the end of the day, there was that surprise factor that you just articulated very well that I just felt a little awkward with. And so I set about designing questions and discovery processes that weren't awkward at all, right? That I could quickly demonstrate to you that, "I'm going to ask you some questions you may not have been asked before, but I'm going to also demonstrate to you why it's important to your financial future to think through these things."

Michael: Powerful right there just saying, "I'm going to ask you some questions that you may not have been asked before. I'm going to show you how they connect to your financial future."

What Every Advisor Needs To Know About Their Clients [52:09]

Mitch: And you probably know this, but I've always been a big proponent of getting your clients' history. Knowing their past is more important than talking to them about goals. And so, before we even get into the money, we can say to the client, "We're going to talk about your money, but as a planner, it's more important to me to know who you are than it is to know where your money is," right? "So if you don't mind, I'd like to take a little bit of time and just get an idea of your personal story." Well, who's going to say, "No, I don't want to talk to you about that?"

Michael: Right. Yeah, the good news of this approach is virtually everybody likes talking about themselves, so this tends to go well.

Mitch: Well, it tends to go well. And you know what? Here's the other thing, most people... I know so many people, they've never had the opportunity to tell their story because nobody is interested, right? And all of a sudden here you are this financial planner and you are interested, and you're genuinely curious about their story. And then as you hear their story, you find things that you can relate to in their story.

I've always believed that relationships… you hear so much talk, Michael, about building relationships in this business, relationships are the result of the exchange of stories. That's how relationships get built. And so we need to be good at educing people's story, and there's got to be a reason for asking. "I want to know your history. I want to know how you got into this business. I want to know how you got to where you are today. It helps me understand you." And to me, I have had companies calling me for 20 years to look at their discovery processes and I'm amazed at what passes for discovery in this industry. It just blows my mind. It's just a collection of numbers and facts. There's no discovery in it at all.

The Difference Between Data Gathering And Discovery [54:05]

Michael: Well, and this may have been yet another legacy thing that rubbed off from reading you in my early years. I don't really remember where I heard it first. But someone made to me what is a really powerful distinction between data gathering and discovery. And as the name kind of implies very literally data gathering is about the data, discovery is about the client. And ultimately, we need both. I do need me some data so I can do some number-crunching because I'm pretty good at that and think I can add some value there, but there's also a discovery process about the client themselves and that you have to be focused on both to the point now that I try to even talk about them separately, like, "Look, that first meeting with the client is not a data gathering meeting, it's a discovery meeting." We might gather the data before or after, or maybe we'll fill out a little bit during, but separate those out conceptually about, "When are you doing the data gathering and how?" because that's numbers and facts and software can help with that. And then there's a discovery process, that's all about conversations and stories.

Mitch: Yes. Yeah. So, for example, we need the numbers, we need the facts, but people are not revealed through those numbers and facts really, it's the stories they tell that reveal them, who they are. And that's what discovery is really about. And so, I've encouraged advisors for years to first just get to know their general history, and then to sort of segue way from the general history and say, "If you don't mind, I'd like to take a little bit of time and get a better understanding of your financial history as well and some of the experiences you've had." And a good starting point for that is, "Where are you from originally and what was money like growing up?" It's amazing how much people like to answer that question. They love to talk about what money was like growing up. And then they'll tell stories about mom or dad, or good habits or bad habits and experiences.

And then from there, I like to encourage advisors to ask, "Tell me about what you would describe as your best and worst financial experience so far in life," right? Not just an investment experience, but financial experience. It could have something to do with the mortgage or whatever. But at the end of the day, we want to hear about people's experiences with money, and we want to understand how it's impacted their behavior and their thinking. That's what discovery is really about.

And by the way, I mentioned this, that I live next to the Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic, you know that name, everybody knows that name, right? Year after year, they are the top medical clinic in all the world. Let me tell you something about Mayo Clinic doctors, you may go there for a visit, you might have a condition, you might see five different doctors in your visit, every single one of those doctors will start the conversation exactly the same. You know where they start? Your history. They want to hear your history. So that, to me, is the blueprint right there. They want to know your history because they know that's had a major bearing on where you are right now.

Michael: So the distinction for what you were developing in this direction was trying to tie it back to the money more directly in what we do as advisors, which I guess that's why you called it financial life planning when George was calling it life planning.

Mitch: Right. But he then adopted the term financial life planning a couple years after that because it just makes more sense. And a lot of people have adopted the terminology, which I think is great. And I've sort of shifted since then. I've talked about this offline, and that is I'm beginning to use the framing of life-centered planning, life-centered financial planning as a way of describing it. Because I think there's just so much stuff out there claiming to be financial life planning that in my opinion really isn't. And so I'm just trying to sort of differentiate with a different form of language now what we're talking about.

What Life-Centered Planning Is, And How It Improves Client Relationships [58:28]

Michael: So how would you draw the distinction between life-centered planning and financial life planning?

Mitch: I don't know that I could. I'm just saying I'm choosing to use a different form of language to describe it now. Because it's financial planning that we're talking about and it's financial planners that are best at this when they get it, but it's putting life at the center of the planning process. So, that's the reason I'm calling it life-centered financial planning. And I'm actually about to introduce, with a leading university in this space, a course, nine-credit course called Life-Centered Financial Planning. It's going to be a certificate program, and it's going to be a master's level program as well. And that's what we're going to call the course is Life-Centered Financial Planning.

And the curriculum for that is going to involve planning with emotional intelligence, the whole idea of life-centered financial planning and how it works, how these discovery processes work. And then another part of it is going to be communication and counseling skills. Of course, Deena Katz had developed... the university I'm working with is Texas Tech, and so in the winter semester, January of 2019, we're going to be launching this course. So I'm just... yeah, it's just sort of a language saying that I've chosen to distinguish it with a different sort of framing.

Michael: So you were creating these tools to help facilitate this discovery process, so are you still building those tools? Can advisors access those tools? Because I know we're still a couple of years in the past now.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, so present-day, I've got a couple three different firms that I've got partnerships here in the United States and in England on this. Here in the United States, I partnered with Steve Sanduski, and we've got a company called ROL Advisor, which stands for, “Return on Life Advisor.” And we just launched that in December of last year, so what are we, we're September now, right? Okay. So I guess we're two months away, two, three months away from our first year anniversary.

And what we're trying to do there is give discovery tools to advisors, basically a turnkey solution so that they have marketing tools, discovery tools, training, everything they need to be a return on life advisor. To have these kind of conversations and to engage... to give a client experience that really resonates with clients and helps them to see the powerful value of having their life at the center of the financial conversation. So to date, we have about 245 firms that have signed on with the program from 9 different countries. So that's going pretty well.

Michael: So, what is it? I mean, what do you get if you sign up for this? Is this software?

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. So there's software. There are three unique tools. One is called the Fiscalosophy Profile, understanding how people's views and perspectives were shaped on eight key financial issues.

Michael: The Fiscalosophy, like philosophy but it's Fiscalosophy.

Mitch: Yeah, that's another one of my neologisms. It doesn't flow off the tongue as nice as I'd like it to, but it's the Fiscalosophy Profile. So, it's, "How did you arrive at your thinking on these key financial issues?" That's the first one. The second one is called the Return on Life Index, and it measures how well you're using your money to improve your life situation in 10 key aspects of life. So that's a way of measuring success that's highly personal and is not comparative.

Michael: And what kinds of areas? You say, "How are you using your money to improve your situation in 10 different areas?"

Mitch: Yeah, with your career, with your residence, with your relationships, with your sense of personal security. 10 aspects, outcomes, education, right? Ten areas of life that we're all trying to improve. Basically, it comes down to, "Are you making progress, are you improving your well-being, and are you feeling your personal freedom?" Those are the three major categories, right? Well-being, progress, and freedom. Well, are you doing the things you need to do with your money to achieve those three things in your life is the question that's getting answered with the Return on Life Index. And a lot of investment advisors and financial planners are using that as sort of a lead gen tool, a way to get people engaged in the conversation because they're built as widgets for the websites on their website.

Michael: Oh. Okay. So this isn't just a like, "Hey, I've got my clients on board, here are 3 or 5 or 10 interesting questions I can ask at my first client meeting or a questionnaire I can give them before they come to the first client meaning," this is stuff you might use with a prospect.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah, you can use it with a prospect and you can use it with a client as well. But the reason I created that tool is because I'm tired of advisors reporting progress based on a comparative basis. I think it's an idiotic idea, right?

Michael: You mean benchmarking investment results, in other words?

Mitch: Yeah, benchmarking with an index. They that measure their progress by the Standard and Poor's have a very poor standard, in my opinion, okay? So it just makes no sense. It makes no sense. And it doesn't impact my life at all that I did such-and-such against such-and-such. Progress to be meaningful must be highly personalized. It's kind of like the track coach who says to the kid, "What event do you want to run? You want to run the 400? Okay run, we're going to clock you, and that's going to be your personal best. And then from here on out, we're going to try to improve incrementally on your personal best." That's an effective way of measuring progress. So that's why I created the Return on Life index is I want people to be able to measure how well they're using their money to improve their life. Because I define return on life as getting the best life possible with the money I have. That's why we gather money, to improve our lives. So we created a tool to help people measure that.

The Best Way To Demonstrate The Ongoing Value Of Financial Planning [1:04:47]

And then the third tool, and this is... I've been developing tools for 20 years and I'm really super excited about this tool. It's called the Financial Lifeline. And it's a collaborative conversation between the advisor and the client, where we sit down and we literally map out all the transitions that are coming in your life in the next 10, 15 years, and we're able to demonstrate to the client how their money is implicated in those transitions and how it impacts their financial well-being. And there's over 60-some transitions that people can go through between the cradle and the grave, and so what happens is literally, a portrait of that client's life appears on this lifeline and they see that they need financial advice around all these transitions in their life. And it just underscores the tremendous value that wise financial advisors bring to their situation, right? That they're speaking into the financial aspects of all these key life transitions they're going to be going through.

Michael: I think particularly for the advisor that works with clients on an ongoing basis where there's always either the pressure of, "What have you done for me lately," or just the pressure to explain and articulate like, "We did a plan, my stuff got sorted out, why are we working together and why do I have to keep paying you on an ongoing basis," to say, "Well, let's map out what your transitions are over the next 10 to 15 years. All right, here's a whole bunch. You're going to have to deal with all these. Some of these take a long time to prepare for, looks like we have our work cut out for ourselves."

Mitch: Yeah. And we've also got a retro view on that. So let's say you've had a client for 15 years, you can go in and backload all the transitions you've already helped them through and show them, "Since we met, here's all the things that we've worked through, now we've got to talk about what's ahead."

And a little economic law of life that I teach to the advisory community is that money goes in motion when life goes in transition. It's actually a cause-and-effect issue at play here. The life transition is the cause, the money in motion is the effect. All advisors are concerned about money in motion. They want it moving toward them, not away from them, correct? And so it tends to be good for business to have the money moving toward you and not away from you. Well, then strategically, it just makes sense then that you would pay attention to the thing that causes money to move. And that's life transitions. And so I challenge my audiences all the time, I say, "Name any transition in life, and we can demonstrate how that transition causes money to move."

So I remember years ago, a bank did a study on, "How soon should you be talking about the retirement transition with your clients in order to ensure that the assets will stay under your administration, not moved somewhere else?" And the answer that guy came up with in that research was four and a half years before the actual transition. Well, if it's true of that transition, it's true of all transitions that we need to be talking to people about the transitions before they happen and help them to see that we need to be proactive. It's better to prepare than it is to repair. We need to anticipate this transition, and we need to prepare for it financially. We need to have a plan in place before it happens.

And you sort of were alluding to this in your preface here to this conversation. The conversations that planners are having get redundant. They get rote. They get boring. I know a lot of planners are just bored with the same old revisiting of the same, old same old. When you start having this financial lifeline conversation, it's fresh, it's animated, it's real, it's real life. These are great dialogues that you're having with your clients and your clients are seeing a value in what you do that they've never been exposed to before.

So the program is it's got these three tools in it, but it also has coaching and it has marketing ideas, and we give them... we give all of our ROL advisors content that they can put out to their clients for blogs and whatnot. So we're helping those practices that really want to position themselves as a life-centered planner. We're giving them the tools and the instruction. We have education hours every month. We just want to equip, educate and equip those that want to practice that way.

Michael: And so it's kind of combination of content I can take back for my website or use with clients, some online tools I can give them directly. Have them fill out their Fiscalosophy Profile or their ROL Index and I can use them how I wish in my practice?

Mitch: Yeah, that's right. And then another partnership that I have that's really.... you're going to be hearing a lot more of in the next year or two is with Paul Armson in the United Kingdom. Paul has been a voice. He's called it lifestyle financial planning, but he's now calling it life-centered planning as well. But Paul has been sort of... he's been playing the kind of role that I've been playing and George has been playing and different players in this space over in the UK. And he's done a tremendous job, and he's got a great story. And he's got one of the greatest conferences I've ever been to. It's called BACK2Y, B-A-C-K2Y. And it's the only conference I've ever been to, Michael, where there are no sponsors allowed, okay? Nobody can pay to get the microphone. And it's a powerful conference, and I'm going back there to speak next week.

And Paul and I have started a company called lifecenteredplanners.com. And what we're going to do in that company is there's going to be a content-type site where you can learn the skills, the discovery skills, learn questions, learn ways of thinking, learn dialogues. We're not going to give tools away but we're going to educate people on that site and we're going to challenge the industry with the question, "Are you going to be a money-centered planner or are you going to be a life-centered planner?" Because there's a great difference between the two. And if you want to be a life-centered planner, we want to start educating you on what that's all about and the kind of questions you need to be having and the kind of things you need to be learning. So that site is going to launch this fall.

Michael: Okay. And so that's not meant to be... you said, not meant to be tools, just literally show up and see some good conversations?

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. It's a learning track, right? So basically, people will subscribe to it, they'll go at their own pace, and they'll learn all the skills necessary and the dialogues and the questions. And it's all video content-driven.

Michael: And what's the pricing for these different tools for people that are curious and want to check out? ROL Advisor and now what you're building with Paul with Life Centered Planners.

Mitch: I don't want to speak out of school on the Life Centered Planning, but I believe it's going to be in the £40, so however that translate, $50, $60 a month on that site. The ROL Advisor is in the neighborhood of $200 a month for licensing.

Michael: Okay. So just helps advisors to kind of get a framing around this.

Mitch: Yeah. And they can go to either one of those sites: lifecenteredplanners.com or roladvisor.com and read about the different things that are available. So, I just want to promote the idea of life-centered planning and putting life at the center of the process, and I want to help equip the people that want to do it well, and I want to challenge those that aren't doing it to think about doing it because it brings more value to the client.

Michael: So we'll have links out to these in the show notes as well. Again, this is episode 91, so if you go to kitces.com/91, we'll have links out to ROL Advisor and Life Centered Planners and the rest for those who are interested in looking at them more and thinking about if it's a fit for their practice.

The thing that always strikes me about these is it's just kind of the nature of the advisory business. Even most firms generate several thousand dollars of revenue per client whether you're AUM-based and you have a couple hundred thousand dollars as an average client or if you're charging planning fees for a couple thousand dollars or you're getting paid for implementation and make a couple thousand dollars, most advisors generate a couple thousand dollars of revenue per client and some go up from there. So, it's this world that we live in where you only need tools or solutions like this to literally help you with one client ever, and the client's annual revenue to stick with you as a client generates a full ROI on an investment, or at least gets you your money back. And if you ever get a second client, you've now made 100% ROI.

Mitch: Well, the tremendous value of this life-centered approach is it completely takes the "What have you done for me lately" off the table. It no longer exists because they see it.

Michael: So, aren't clients still at some point going to say, "Oh, but I haven't had a transition lately," or, "But my portfolio still isn't performing as well as I hoped?"

Mitch: Yeah. It's not like we're taking the money off the table, right, but it's the secondary value. The primary value is, "What's happening in your situation and are you financially prepared?" That's value number one. So it's your wisdom that you're selling in that situation. And then your second value is how we're investing your money and how you're doing. But that only exists to support the first value, which is helping you get through in the best possible way, right? So what I mean by taking, "What have you done for me lately" off the table is that literally, that has been the, "How is your money doing" has been the lead value. And let's just say you did a financial plan, a lot of times the client says, "Well, you haven't really done anything lately. You did that three years ago, why am I still paying you the same amount?" We're naive if we believe people aren't thinking that.

And so what happens is when you have these conversations about their life and what's happening and what they need to do to be financially prepared, it builds that relationship to the point where the client understands the value in that and they just don't care as much about the fee because they just sense the value.

Michael: So you've mentioned a few times this dynamic of advisors we tend to get measured relative to the performance and the assets and the classic ROI conversation, and it's really about or should be about return on life, not return on investment. So, I don't know, can you just talk about that shift more? I feel like it's the thing that we all would love to say we do, right? "Well, yeah, of course, I'm helping the client achieve their goals," right? That's why I do financial planning, helping my clients get to their goals, and then we're investing the dollars and getting their insurance and all the other things in place so that they can get there and we'll give them tax advice so they do it tax efficiently. But, sure, we're all working towards client goals, that's the point of financial planning. How do you distinguish that from what you're talking about? Because I think it's different, but I don't know how to think about the difference when we all say... we all start with, "What's the client's goals," like that's financial planning.

Mitch: I think the goals conversation is an important conversation, but it's not the central conversation. And everyone tries to approach client's goals, but I distinguish the difference between transitions and goals. You need to talk about transitions before you talk about goals because goals are what we want to happen, transitions are what's happening anyway. That's the real life. And so many advisors out there are focused on, "What are your goals" and then there's some assumptions in all that. They just assume they want to retire at 65, that sort of thing, right? But life transitions are what is happening anyway. This is real life. So my kid is finishing up his senior year at college. I've got a daughter who's getting married. My mother just had... just found out my mother has Parkinson's. These are real-life transitions. And to me, every advisor needs to know about those transitions in their client's life because each of the things I just mentioned probably has a financial implication to it that needs to be talked about.

And so to me, we have to get better at this transition dialogue, and that's the spinal column of life-centered financial planning is understanding where the client's life is now and what changes are on the horizon, what changes are coming. Goals is a completely separate conversation. Nobody has a goal that mom falls down and breaks her hip. Nobody has a goal that their daughter's child is a special needs child, right? But it's real life, isn't it? And it's the real life stuff that we need to know about our clients.

Michael: It's a powerful framing just to say, "Everyone talks about goals but planning for the transitions is what matters." I don't even know if you would say planning for the transition or just dealing with the transitions.

Mitch: Yeah, dealing with. Well, and transitions come in two forms, there are those we can predict and those we can't, right? And it's like Roy Diliberto used to tell me. He said once he started talking about transitions and started using the transition tool I created, he said, "Suddenly, I was getting phone calls from people saying, 'I thought I should call you and tell you something just happened in my personal situation.'" And he was one of the first two people they started calling when something happened in their life because he was so good at showing them how that transition was going to impact them financially.

Michael: It's an interesting point, right? I guess very literally when you position your advice around transitions, now you're really the first person people call.

Mitch: Yeah, you're the first financial responder.

Michael: I like it, you're the first financial responder.

Mitch: Yeah. And so, I think the industry at large, the profession at large with this monomaniacal focus on goals has missed the larger issue, which is life happening right now. And guess what keeps people from their goals, Michael? Trying to get through the transitions.

Michael: Yeah, life happens all the time and it tends to throw me off from the goal that was in my head about where we were going.

Mitch: Yeah. And you know what? Knowing your client's story, shame on the advisor that doesn't know these things about their client, right? I used to sit and challenge advisors and I say, "Write down the names of your top 5 clients or your top 10 clients," and then I started asking them questions about their career, transitions, their health transitions, their retirement plans, all these different transitions, and they couldn't fill in the blanks. And they say, "Oh, I've got a great relationship with these people." Based on what, right? That you talk about how the Cowboys did last week? And you don't understand all these intimate situations in their life that are impacting them financially. You don't know about any of that because you don't have a conversation that deals with that.

Michael: What comes to me is the problem is we don't necessarily have a great relationship with our clients, we have great rapport with our clients, right? I feel like I have a great relationship because we're instantly connected and really chatty and always able to talk easily with each other whenever I sit down in these client meetings with my best clients. But, as you've kind of made the point, relationships are built around the stories. That doesn't necessarily mean I know their stories and I know their life well, it just means we have great rapport, which matters but is not actually the same thing as having a great relationship.

Mitch: I've never heard it put that way, but I like it. I like it a lot. There's a difference between rapport and relationship.

Michael: I'm so excited I might have created Mitch Anthony neologism out of atoms.

Mitch: I love it. It's a great conversation starter, right? Because we can all think of people in our lives where it's like, "Hey, how are you doing? Hey, great to see you. Love talking to you," they don't know the first thing about us and our situation. And we wouldn't even tell them if they asked. But I think that a real relationship like I said earlier, is based on knowing their story and them knowing your story. And that's another topic that I talk to advisors about it all the time is, "How well do you communicate with your clients why you're doing what you're doing and why you're doing it the way you're doing it?" That's an important story to tell.

Michael: So I feel like one of the eternal objections or at least pushbacks around this is,  “Hey, yeah, if I had unlimited amounts of time, sure, I'd love to have these extended conversations with all of my clients, but I have a lot of clients and I run a business and there's only so much time,” right? Just time becomes the constraint to go deep on all these conversations.

Mitch: And that's actually a myth, and I explode the myth constantly when I do workshops. I have an exercise called the Eight Minute Epiphany, and I have them pair up, financial planners pair up, and I give them two or three questions that they're going to ask each other, and they each get two minutes, three minutes, and then two minutes to answer those questions. Excuse me, it adds up to eight. I just gave you the wrong math there. I think it's three, two, three. Yeah, they get three, two, three to answer these questions, and then I have them process, "Tell me what you learned about this person that you didn't know and that was instructive to you." And, you can just see the light bulbs going off around the room. It's like, "Wow, I can't believe what I just learned in three minutes."

One of those questions quite frankly is, "What was money like growing up?" And I give them three minutes to answer the question. And it's amazing what comes forth in that time. And another question is based on transitions, "Is there anything happening in your life right now or that you see coming that could have a major impact on your financial future?" They get three minutes to answer that question. And so I created that exercise to explode the time myth because people are always saying, "Oh, I don't have time for that."

Michael: Right. I've got a lot of one-hour meetings with clients, yeah, probably could get eight minutes' worth of questions in.

Mitch: Yeah, you think you could? And by the way, would you allow me an audit of what you are talking about in those meetings and how important and impactful that is?

Michael: No. Probably would not be comfortable with you watching one of my client meetings.

Mitch: How much time do we spend talking about the weather and the football game and this, that the niceties if you will, and yet we don't have time to ask a meaningful question. So that's part of why I spend so much of my time and energy and focus on designing questions well so that... To me, the very first thing that a question should... the first impact it should have is that when you hear it, you're like, "Whoa, I've always wanted to answer that but no one's ever asked me," right? And it gives people a place on the stage of life to reveal who they are and in a meaningful way. And so that's why I love the whole process of working on questions and massaging questions. I literally feel like I run a question laboratory, right? And part of the reason that I've been doing that is because I ran across questions I hated and I thought they were so awkward and weird and it's like, "Don't ask questions that make people squirm. Don't blindside people with questions. Give them questions they've been waiting their whole life to answer."

Michael: And so again, this is the stuff that… these are the kinds of questions or question library that you get with ROL Advisor and those kinds of tools? That's what you're offering?

Mitch: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it is we just provide training around how to ask those questions and how to process the answers you get and how to... the scripting if you will, right, of how you introduce a new question, a new conversation, and then how you anchor the answer you hear to what you're doing for them financially.

So this is not esoterica, right? This is important stuff. So I like to pull back from the whole money conversation, the people that say, "No, I'm just too busy talking about the money," and I like to have those people answer this question, "What is the money for?" And everyone will give you the same answer. It ultimately boils down to, "It's for life." Okay, so you're telling me you want to have financial conversations without addressing the context of the money. You want to have the conversation without context is what you're telling me when you say, "I don't want to talk about that other stuff."

Michael: Are we just off-base about the value of financial planning?

Mitch: What do you mean by that?

Michael: No, no, no, you're making this point that, yeah, at the end of the day, people get the money because it's about their life and funding their life and funding the things they want to do and have to deal with in their lives. We often tend to talk more about the money than the life. Are we just somehow off-base about our own value? Is this just,  a giant training gap, we're too good at teaching about the money stuff and not good enough about teaching about the life stuff, so we all go to what's comfortable that we were trained in and have trouble getting to these other conversations?

Mitch: No, I think those conversations are important, but I think knowledge and wisdom are two different things. And ultimately, I want a wise financial advisor, not just a knowledgeable one. And wisdom means they understand my situation and they speak into it based on their experience and insights. That's the true value of financial planning.

Michael: Wait, say that again. That was another really good one. I want a wise financial planner and not just a knowledgeable one because the wise planner....

Mitch: Understands my situation and speaks into it based on their experience and insights, right? They've been through this before. They've seen this before. They can give me some insights that might be helpful. That's wisdom. And ultimately, that's the value that people are willing to pay for is wisdom, right? You've been down this track, you've got the insights.

I joke around about this a little bit. One of my golf buddies is the world's top-rated liver surgeon, right? And I'll ask him once in a while when we go out to golf, "What's the number up to?" Because he operates on kidneys, livers. He's done something like 4,200 surgeries, okay? That's a lot. And I always say to my audiences, I say, "Now, if you find out you had a liver issue, do you want to go to him or the guy who's on his 23rd?" Right? It's a no...  And what if he charges more, do you even care? Of course, you don't. Because experience and insight means something, wisdom means something. Having been down that road before and having seen this before and knowing what's going to work better, that means something. That's wisdom. And we're willing to pay for wisdom, sources of wisdom in our life. And I think financial planners need to, first of all, understand that is their greatest value. It's not their knowledge, it's their wisdom, and they need to do a better job of positioning themselves as wisdom merchants.

Michael: Wisdom merchants. I like that. We are wisdom merchants. We are financial wisdom merchants?

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. It's like as a speaker, I get calls, I speak at conventions all the time,  and people will call and they want to know about the knowledge you're going to bring or, "What are you going to teach them?" And I flat out tell the people that call, I say, "Number one, I'm selling wisdom, number two, I'm selling inspiration. If you're looking for your people to do things better and do them the right way and to leave with a spark of purpose in their life, I might be your guy," right? Don't be afraid to bring those things to the table. People want those things.

How New Advisors Can Set Themselves On A Better Track To Long-Term Success [1:29:38]

Michael: So if it's all about wisdom and experience and the wisdom you gain from experience, so what's your advice to a younger and newer advisor who has not necessarily had the opportunity to actually accumulate that stuff yet since they're still in the early stages?

Mitch: Surround yourself with greatness, right? I did a speaking tour for a major company in the United States, a name everyone would recognize, and I spoke in 12 different cities, and in every city, there would be, 2,000, 3,000 people in these audiences. In every city, they would have the number one person in that region introduced me, right? And so, it was always, like, somebody 55 years old, been in the business for 30 years.

And when I came to Chicago, this kid who was 30 years old introduced me. So I had to talk to him backstage and like, "How could you be the top person in this region at 30 years old?" He says, "As soon as I graduated from high school and this company hired me, I said, 'The only way I'll come to work for your company is if you'll allow me to spend one year in the top five people in this entire company, one year each in their offices to learn how they do it.'" So they allowed him to do that, and he spent a year in the top five offices in the country, one year each, and learned how they did business and how they did their planning and how they did what they did. And that's how he got there. So if you're a young person, you want to just get around people that are wise, people that have high integrity, people that are setting a pattern and a model for you that you want to aspire to, and you want to just expose yourself to them. Be there. Absorb.

Michael: Powerful point. It's sort of a... I don't know, there's kind of got to pay your dues aspect, but this is the good version of what pay your dues looks like, right? The bad version is just, do crappy work for a while because everybody else had to do crappy work, and I walked uphill in the snow both ways kind of mentality. But this is sort of a different angle of it, of just, yeah, you know... I mean, I'd imagine for this young advisor,  he may not have had the greatest job in each of those five offices for a year each, but he was there and he showed up and he paid his dues, as it were, to get immeasurable insight and wisdom and experience and now has 40 or 50 years to build his career with a massively superior foundation for having spent a couple of years just doing whatever it took to be in the places where success was happening to be able to see it and experience it.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think, you know, of course, you've got the XY Planning, and I had the pleasure of being with you guys at your convention last year. That makes me... I feel a great sense of optimism when I see the 20s and 30-year-olds that are getting into this business and the way they're wired. And I think we're going to see some major changes here in the next decade or two around how this whole process works. And I've for a long time just, you know, I'm so tired of the masquerade of financial advice, if you will, that's out there still. And it's just not true advice, it's just sales tactics and it's self-serving. And it drives me nuts. And I think financial planning has not yet reached the potential for purity that it has. It just hasn't reached it yet. And I think it's going to have to be life-centered and high integrity and transparent. And there are a lot of people practicing that way, and they're wonderful people, and their clients love them, and they bring great value, and you know what? They make a great living doing it. And that's good.

Michael: So what else are you working on next? You mentioned Life Centered Planners initiative with Paul Armson, what you're doing with ROL Advisor, are there other things kind of out there on the horizon for you? Since it seems like you're in a world of continuously creating new things, there's got to be something else bouncing around your head of what you're working on too

Mitch: Well, yeah, there's a lot of things I'm working on, but they're within that context because, how does the old saying go? "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." And, for example, my schedule in the next couple months is I'm going to BACK2Y in London to talk to over 500 people there about life-centered planning. Then from I'm going to South Africa. And there's a firm over there that wants to bring life-centered planning to the marketplace there. And then from there, I'm going to Australia to speak at their FPA National Convention about life-centered planning. So I think the world of financial advice is finally beginning to pay attention, and I think a lot of it has to do, Michael, with just seeing the erosion of the traditional value propositions and they're realizing, "We've got to do something different." So I kind of feel like I've been working on this stuff for years and years and years, and now the world is really ready to hear it. So I just need to show up.

Michael: It's a good position to be in. Spend 20 years developing it then just show up. Success in a nutshell.

Mitch: Yeah. And, developing ideas is a frustrating business. I finally had an editor tell me, he's like, "You've just got to understand that by the time they get excited about something, you're bored with it," right? And you're a creative guy Michael, you understand what I'm talking about. That sometimes you're… and I think you do this too, you look out into the future and you say, "Where is this going to go." And you make your best guess, right? And you start preparing for it, and you work really hard. In my situation, I've got more ideas gathering dust than you can imagine. And then suddenly, someone comes along and goes, "What about that idea?" And I tell them, they're like, "Wow, I love that." And I'm like, "Well, where were you when I was excited about it?"

Michael: You're like, "Five years ago when I was beating the drum for that."

Mitch: So I've learned to just get patience with the process of creating ideas, and also, you just sort of have to tolerate the fact that maybe it's not as good of an idea as you thought it was, or maybe it's not the right time.

Michael: I think there's something... I think there's a parallel there in just the day-to-day reality of being an advisor as well. That whole framing of by the time they get excited about something, you're already bored with it. I know a lot of advisors that kind of struggle when the business gets to a certain stage where you're mostly in maintenance mode and it's a lot of the same conversations with the same clients over and over again, one client after another. And they may all be novel conversations for each client and impactful for them, but it's hard sometimes to bring yourself back to remember that because you're already bored with it because it's the same conversations being introduced to the same clients over and over again.

Mitch: Yeah. And that makes me think about the fact that there are so many good advisors out there, so many good financial planners, and I just want them... I want to help fuel their sense of purpose about what they do because it is really important work.

And I come from almost a spiritual point of view on all this, that managing people's money is sacred territory, in my estimation, because of the price people pay to get what they get, right? There are negotiations with life, there are compromises, there are hardships, there's a price to pay. We all pay it to get what we get. Now, to turn over the administration and the handling and the investment of those resources to another human being, in my estimation, that's sacred territory, and that's a sacred trust. And that's why I so loathe people playing sales games in that territory. It's just not right. So, I just want the people that do this well to know they do it well and to feel that sense of purpose and feel that sense of mission and calling when they're sitting in front of clients because it is really that important.

Michael: So, as we wrap up here, this is a podcast about success, and one of the themes that always comes up is just that even the word success means very different things to different people. So you've built successful businesses, you've put forth successful ideas that have reshaped I think a lot of areas in the industry, but when you look at this just personally for yourself, how do you define success?

Mitch: To me, and I hope this doesn't sound too out there, living up to my calling. Money is great, but who cares really, right? It's, "What am I designed to do? What am I designed to be?" You know, it becomes clearer as you mature in life that, "These are the things I'm designed to do, these are the things that just come naturally to me," or, "These are the things that really arouse my interest in curiosity. They fascinate me." And when I add up my personal DNA and the things that I'm interested in and the things that get my attention and the things I care deeply about, that all adds up into a recipe for me called a calling. And success is just living up to your potential to do what you're designed to do and to impact as many people in this world as you possibly can.

One of my favorite phrases in life was by the theologian Dallas Willard who said, "Everything in this universe that is of value is a person." So at the end of the day, for me, success is knowing I can impact personal relationships somehow for people around money. That's what I'm hoping for, occupationally if you will, right? There's other aspects of life in success, but they all have to do with relationships in my book.

Michael: I think you will impact a few people for the conversation we've had today around how they think about the relationship with money, how they think about their relationship with clients, how they think about the clients' relationships with money. And I think in particular for me, a little bit less focus on high-minded, long-term goals and a little bit more about just helping clients through the never-ending stream of transitions they have because they don't stop. Life is always throwing curveballs at us and there's a tremendous amount of value to be created for clients just helping them navigate transitions and using your wisdom.

Mitch: Well, I'm indebted to you for wanting to have the conversation. I appreciate this. And I know a lot of people listen to you and follow you, as I do. We're both working in our fields, aren't we Michael? And we're hoping to see a harvest someday in terms of change in the industry and the industry being what it can be.

Michael: Amen. Amen. Well, thank you, Mitch, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Mitch: All right. Thanks, Michael.

Michael: Thank you.