June 09, 2025

YOUR BIGGEST COMPETITOR AS A FINANCIAL ADVISOR IS........

YOUR BIGGEST COMPETITOR AS A FINANCIAL ADVISOR IS……
As a financial advisor, your role is to provide advice and empower your clients to make clear, simple, and compelling financial decisions. You’re not competing with other advisors, you’re…

YOUR BIGGEST COMPETITOR
As a financial advisor, your role is to provide advice and empower your clients to make clear, simple, and compelling financial decisions. You’re not competing with other advisors, but against your clients’ doubts, procrastination, and everyday distractions. Clients hesitate not because they lack options, but because they feel overwhelmed. By simplifying complex financial concepts, you can help them feel more confident and empowered to take action.

Consider this: Your clients' most significant barriers aren’t external but internal. Doubt keeps them second-guessing, procrastination delays crucial steps, and distractions dilute their focus.
If your explanations, in any way, feel complex or confusing, you're fueling the flame of mental clutter, making it easier for them to postpone or disengage entirely.

However, simplifying complex financial concepts can reduce their mental clutter and make them feel more confident, empowered, and less overwhelmed.

Try translating complex financial concepts into language a thirteen-year-old could quickly grasp. I once read that The New York Times writes for an average 10th-grade student.

Imagine distilling risk management into a story about carrying an umbrella in case it rains, or retirement planning into saving jellybeans for enjoyment. Using simple, relatable metaphors removes intimidation and makes clients feel more engaged and less intimidated.
Make simplicity your superpower. Master clear, conversational explanations that remove clients’ mental friction, replacing it with curiosity and confidence. To shift from merely explaining to truly empowering action, do this:

1. Identify Your Client’s Main Roadblock: Clearly and compassionately pinpoint precisely what's holding them back, whether fear, confusion, or inertia. Be curious about what is going on for them in this context. Clarity is the number one thing your clients want. You can do this through goals based planning conversations. If you want to learn a better goals based planning approach contact us for a sample script and process to help you and your clients get deeper clarity. 
2. Simplify with Vivid Examples: Turn complicated financial jargon into memorable, everyday analogies anyone can easily visualize and grasp. There are tremendous software and tools and AI that can help you simplify your messages. Words are powerful, and we have tons of examples to share with you.
3. Focus on Immediate, Manageable Steps: Clarify precisely what clients should do right now, ensuring each step feels easy, achievable, and free of overwhelm. Create an implementation schedule or step by step or checklist approach.
4. Seek acknowledgement that they are with you in this conversation. This requires multiple “check-ins” to determine if this strategy or change “makes sense”. Use intermittent “check-ins” to ensure they understand what you’re explaining and why it makes sense for them to execute.
5. Confidently Prompt Action: End every conversation with an enthusiastic and encouraging invitation to take the next step immediately, reinforcing their newfound clarity and momentum, and making decisive action irresistible. Now, it's your turn to implement these strategies and see their positive impact on your client engagement and decision-making support.

Thank you for reading! This is what we help advisors do every day!

To book an obligation appointment with Jeff to discuss practice management or coaching, click https://calendly.com/jeffthorsteinson/30-minute-q-a-explore-apm

Jeff Thorsteinson is a partner in Advisor Practice Management, an organisation that helps financial advisors build world-class practices through innovative concepts, tools, and systems. Jeff works with individual advisors, investment dealers, insurance firms, and fund companies. For more information about Advisor Practice Management, contact jeff@jeffthorsteinson.com or 1-800-223-9332, or visit the website at www.apm.coach

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Contact us to help get clarity around your goals on paper, and have the goals conversation by contacting Jeff at jeff@jeffthorsteinson.com  

Regardless if we work together, let’s have a chat and listen to your biggest practice management concerns to help you get clarity around your future business.

To book a NO obligation conversation with me to discuss practice management or coaching click the following link https://calendly.com/jeffthorsteinson/30-minute-q-a-explore-apm  and let’s talk.

Jeff Thorsteinson, Grant Hicks and  Advisor Practice Management's combined financial advisor clients manage over 8 billion AUM, and earn over $80 million dollars combined!

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