5. Commit To Your Personal Objective
Smart fintech leader, Tom Moysak said recently that the decisions we make in the next five years are the most important we will even make. Wow. Given the average age of financial advisors is 55, what’s your plan? Be brutally candid with yourself about your immediate course of action. If you truly want growth, you won’t find a better time to compete against advisors who will ignore the forces listed above. If you want out, you won’t likely find a better time to sell. No matter what, don’t get caught with one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. Commit. The key is to embrace a new third dimension of success available to advisors with the energy to get onboard that boat—full adoption. Think of this phenomenon in the context of your mobile phone: first, brilliant inventive innovation created the phone itself, you then invested personally in the idea enough to buy one. But you miss out on the incredible benefits of entertainment and productivity if you use your phone only to make calls or read emails and texts. The entire fintech world wonders aloud every day why advisors work harder than they need to. And something like 75-80% of advice industry clients wonder why no one seems interested in the worries they have about health care and outliving their money. So much of the reward ahead is based on more thorough execution—fully capturing the potential. Not on some digital silver bullet. Don’t leave wins on the field—adoption is the new innovation.
Steve Gresham is a consultant to the wealth management industry through his firm, The Execution Project and managing partner of industry initiative, Next Chapter. Formerly executive vice president and head of the Private Client Group at Fidelity Investments, he is also senior education advisor to the Alliance for Lifetime Income and author of The New Advisor for Life (Wiley). See more at https://www.theexecutionproject.com/