If you and your clients are still pinching yourselves after 153 months of rising stock prices, save room for more good times. The ride has been epic, but this bull run looks as if it could be ending in a china shop.

However, there’s another bull market out there just getting started. And this one is easier to control.

The OBM (Old Bull Market) was a historic opportunity to grow assets. The New Bull Market (NBM) is about protecting those gains. The winners in the OBM ignored market volatility and rode on. Many of the top OBM advisors kept clients invested to max out the market’s advance.

In the New Bull Market, many of the winners will have to ignore the anxiety of retirement and live on. The best advisors will now keep clients on track to max out their accumulated assets. In the Old Bull Market, you could get away with leveraging bullishness with options and margin. In the New Bull Market, you need to explore protecting client assets with insurance, annuities and credit.

The Old and New Bulls require a different perspective. In the Old Bull, you focused on the future. In the New Bull, you focus on today—and maybe tomorrow. In the Old Bull, you were a guide and a coach, leading the team. In the New Bull, you are still leading, but now you are more of a problem solver and a therapist. And the clients are mostly the same clients, though the typical one is now surrounded by three generations of family members you need to include.

The opportunities of the New Bull Market were created by the changing priorities, objectives and concerns of today’s investors. You know about the age wave of retiring baby boomers departing the workforce at 12,000 per day. They tell researchers they worry about five things:

• Paying for healthcare
• Outliving their money
• Falling markets
• Unexpected big bills
• Remaining independent (with a healthy brain and body).

These concerns form the basis of a New Bull Market advisory practice. In the old market, you were helping clients grow assets for unknown future costs. In the new market, the costs are increasingly known and you may have to stretch clients’ assets to meet those costs. In the OBM, you made investments and hoped they worked out. In the NBM, you create solutions that have to work out.

The winning advisors in the new market will earn their success. There are new tools they need to use to help clients through those five worries. New Bull Market winners will know the answers. They will be able to rattle off their most common solutions quickly and with confidence. That confidence will be a welcome contrast to advisors stuck in the Old Bull Market mindset. The leaders are now sharing their perspective with clients—on retaining assets, consolidating assets and earning referrals. The things you’ll be talking about in the future include:

• Long-term care strategies
• Longevity protection
• Protected income sources
• Liquidity through security-based lines of credit
• Financial wellness

Advisors who solve for the five needs will then face a second dimension of opportunity created in part by the bull market—scale. The Pareto principle is alive and well in financial advice: Fewer than 20% of clients will receive “full service” and even fewer will get complete financial plans. Clients are typically scattered across four to six providers—another outcome of the Old Bull Market.

That underserved 80% now represents the biggest potential gain for advisors and companies able to connect with them. If the incumbent players can’t figure out how to engage, the 80% will be the scale play for robos and other disruptors to the human-dominated advisor world. Digital tools can help the human world, but their adoption by clients remains low. How did this happen? Blame the Old Bull Market. Who needs client relationship management when the market is compounding at 14% per year?

For those advisors who pivot to the new reality, the changes will be worth it. The New Bull Market is more than 10 times the size of the old one in its infancy. Consider that $2.5 trillion is now held by retirement plan participants age 55 and over, who had nothing before the Old Bull Market. Retail managed accounts have swollen to more than $7 trillion from a cold start in the 1980s. Residential real estate equity is now worth more than stocks and bonds, and nearly $70 trillion will be rolling downhill to next gens from older clients who were pups when the Old Bull Market was forming. Sure, there are more advisors now—but they are retiring as fast as the clients. If the Old Bull Market stalls, those retirements will speed up.

Next Time
I believe this is the best time ever to be a financial advisor and that any advisor can double their business in 2022. Here’s how I do the math:

• The definition of “client” is expanding—it’s a relationship that will now include nine to 15 people across three generations.
• Advisors could increase their assets under advisement by 25% to 50% when they take into account the assets they don’t currently hold and their clients’ use of multiple providers.
• Advisors will be able to capture profits from managed assets and convert a portion to retirement income and protected income sources like annuities.
• Advisors will be able to turn to life insurance sales to fund estate plans and provide for heirs.
• Security-based lines of credit will help clients achieve liquidity but also help advisors retain and attract additional managed assets.
• Advisors will be able to use digital means to better engage unengaged clients—the other 80%.

Steve Gresham is CEO of the Execution Project, a firm focused on reimagining “retirement,” and is also managing partner of Next Chapter. Formerly the head of Fidelity’s Private Client Group, he is also a senior educational advisor to the Alliance for Lifetime Income. See more at theexecutionproject.com.