Many characteristics contribute to being exceptionally successful at serving the ultra-wealthy. First and foremost is the ability to find suitable prospects who are inclined to do business with you. After all, no matter how technically skilled you are, your expertise will go to waste without clients.
Successful prospecting hinges on two questions:
1. How expert are you in your field?
2. How powerful is your professional brand?
But there's a lot of confusion about the relationship between expertise and brand that acts as a stumbling block for many professionals.
The Importance Of Expertise
Professionals tend to equate their potential business success with their mastery of specialized material. Trusts and estate lawyers, for example, often base their level of expertise on their knowledge of tax law and their ability to apply this knowledge. Investment advisors regularly define their expertise based on their skill at managing assets. This is all well and good. The problem comes when these professionals equate their technical proficiencies with business success.
Admittedly, being a true expert in one's field is, or at least should be, a very important criterion for business success. But being an expert does not inherently translate into being able to source the very wealthy.
The ultra-affluent-and most likely everyone else-wants to work with exceptional experts. Who, for instance, would want to have their life-deciding surgery performed by some second stringer? It's no different when it comes to investment management or estate planning or any other professional service. Going back to those two critical questions, let us pose a third:
3. What is more important to cultivating the ultra-affluent, your expertise or your professional brand?
We've just pointed out that the ultra-affluent want to work with experts. So you might conclude that expertise trumps brand. In a perfect, rational world, that would be correct. However, the world we inhabit is far from perfect and rational. In sourcing the ultra-affluent, it turns out, brand outshines expertise all the time.
Let's examine the logic by creating an Expertise/Brand Matrix (Figure 1). In this matrix, a high level of expertise coupled with a strong professional brand makes you a Talented Leading Authority. You're as adept as any of your competitors, and the right people among the very wealthy and other types of professionals know who you are. The former attribute means you'll do an exceptional job for your ultra-affluent clients. The latter means you'll have the opportunity to do so. This is the best place to be.
If you have a high level of expertise, but lack a professional brand, you're a Hidden Talent. Given an opportunity to work for a very wealthy client, you'll do an exceptional job. The only complication is that if you can't find very wealthy clients, there's no way for you to apply your expertise.