Entering a new year is often a time to reflect. For me this includes considering my most valued relationships, which got me thinking about the importance of the relationships I hold with my clients.
Your relationship with your financial planner is one where you may feel a sense of vulnerability. You lay bare your most intimate details, from all aspects of your financial positioning to your wishes and dreams for the future (which you may not even disclose to some of your nearest and dearest!), thus entrusting a professional with the financial futures of you and your family.
It’s essential that the planner understands and respects this, and provides the highest level of commitment to the relationship, as it deserves. Ultimately the planner needs to be able to undertake the weight of responsibility for meeting your needs, as they are looked upon to; provide the answers, create the financial roadmap and manage the journey in achieving your objectives.
When things are going well, markets are buoyant and personal circumstances are uninterrupted and on track, the planner can say all the things you want to hear. The relationship appears strong and healthy.
However, life is never straight forward, and there are challenges along the way which need to be explored and confronted. It’s important to have a planner who sits alongside you every step of the way, not only during the good times, but more importantly never shies away from being there with you during periods of difficulty, such as over recent years where we have endured Brexit, Covid, a cost-of-living crisis and now a recessionary environment! Such events truly test the strength of the relationship, and the credentials of the financial planner.
For me, the fundamentals of a strong and successful financial planner/client relationship come down to:
- Trust – there must be mutual and absolute trust, and respect, between both parties. Through trust comes the ability to have honest dialogues and for both parties to fully invest into the relationship to get the best out of it.
- Transparency – both parties must be transparent throughout the journey. Clients being fully transparent mean that the financial planner is able to create high quality, relevant and realistic financial plans. If the financial planner is fully transparent with the client, it will build and maintain trust, and ensure longevity of the relationship
- Time – we are living in a fast-paced world, often forming transactional relationships which are compromised in quality. Time needs to be invested by both parties to ensure needs and objectives are fully understood and met, and for a high quality long lasting relationship and service to be maintained.
These three principles sit at the core of my client relationships and I look to treat clients with the same empathy as I would if they were my family. One of my clients once said to me “…treat me like you would do your own dad” and this has always stuck with me.
Here’s to a 2023 of strong and long lasting relationships!