Editor’s Note: This article is based on Steve Sanduski’s podcast interview with Ross Levin. To access more than 100 interviews with industry leaders, subscribe for free to Steve’s podcast, Between Now and Success by clicking here.

Imagine you’re sitting down with a potential new client for the initial discovery meeting. What do you see sitting across from you?

Unfortunately, many advisors see a “prospect,” “dollar signs,” or perhaps “a million-dollar account.” The philosopher Martin Buber called this an “I-It relationship,” in which one person objectifies the other.

Ross Levin, the CEO and founder of Accredited Investors, an RIA with approximately $2 billion in AUM, said, “I think one of the things that we unconsciously do in our industry is we make people into objects in the form of prospects or clients. As a result, what ends up happening is the conversation is tilted from an authentic conversation into one that is hoping to lead to an end.” And in most cases, that end is a second meeting.

As an aside, how often have you heard an old school sales trainer say, “The objective of the first meeting is to get a second meeting?” That’s a sales culture that should have died along with “always be closing.”

Yet, this I-It thinking is ingrained in the very language of our business. Almost all advisors segment their clients and the assets they manage into some variation of: As, Bs, and Cs. It’s how many advisors track their business’ health, and segment their level of service to each.

Robo-advisors are perhaps the best example of I-It relationships. And when it comes to treating clients like numbers to be crunched and optimized, the robos are smarter, faster, and cheaper than you are. I-It thinking isn’t just a disservice to clients—it’s a long-term loser for human advisors.

Levin and his team focus on establishing “I-you relationships”: one-on-one, person-to-person conversations that help advisors understand their clients and their motivations. They have a conversation about life. They try to understand the client’s story, and through this conversation, they discern whether or not the person is open to those kinds of discussions. And if not, Levin’s team will happily refer them to another advisor that might be a better fit.

“We want to have discussions with our clients about life, so they have to be open to those kind of discussions, in order for them to have an effective relationship with our firm,” Levin said.

Here are a few questions Levin’s team typically ask early in the first meeting.

1. What was it that brought you here?

2. What are you thinking about?

3. What are the things that you have experienced around money that you feel aren't productive?

4. What are the things where money has gotten in the way for you?

Levin’s team is trying to get to the “why.” They want to understand all the different whys that brought a person to their office. “It's not just saying, ‘I want to have two million dollars when I retire.’ It's, ‘What does two million dollars represent to you? What will that do for you? What do you think that's going to provide for you?’”

Through this dialogue, Levin begins to understand more about prospects and clients, but importantly, he’s also listening to what they’re not saying, and trying to engage them in that dialogue too. This life-centered discovery process is something that apps and robos can’t replicate, and so advisors who use this discovery process to create life-centered financial plans are providing a service that robos can’t provide either.

“But that’s not scalable,” you may be thinking. Too labor-intensive, too reliant on the human element, too slow.

In business, we often think that speed and scaling go hand-in-hand. But Levin makes a distinction between things that advisors have to be really fast at, and things that we have to be really slow at. Both are important.

“We're now in a situation where people can look at their phone and get an update on their investment performance every day, so it shows what their returns are, what each category's done, all those kind of things,” Levin said. “Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant. It's something that a certain subset of clients definitely want to be able to see, so you have to be fast at that.”

But as technology gets faster, the numbers component is going to be less and less valued as it trends toward commodity value.

Ultimately, it’s the slow things that will determine the future of the traditional RIA. “Those are the conversations and the life changes, and being on the front end of dealing with people through their day-to-day existence and through all the major things that go on in their life,” Levin said. “That, to me, is something that is really important, because that's the part that technology, I don't believe, can overcome.”

After all, there's no technology that is going to enable two humans to increase the speed at which they're having an in-depth conversation.

Levin does acknowledge that speed of growth might be a tradeoff advisors have to make in order to future-proof their practices against scale players like Vanguard and other technology-focused platforms.

The big question for financial advisors right now is: “What is your future going to look like?” Do you want to build a highly-scalable business, focus on the “fast things,” drive up your AUM, and spend the rest of your career hoping technology doesn’t sprint past you? Or, do you want to enter into relationships with people and differentiate by focusing on the slow things?

“We have never focused on assets under management as the metric for success,” Levin said. “What we have focused on is doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, with the belief that we are going to get rewarded for it.”

Of course, going slow and growing big aren’t mutually exclusive—Levin’s firm does manage about $2 billion in assets after all.

The future of the traditional RIA is to automate what makes sense, but then really focus on the slow things, really focus on the relationship you have with your clients and how, through that deep, trusting relationship, you can help them get to a place they never thought possible.

That’s your advantage over the scale players, and over the advisors who cling to automation to compete with them. It’s your humanness, and your ability connect with your clients’ humanness as well.

So instead of asking how to scale your practice, it might be time for you to start asking, “Do my clients want to be scaled?” The answer…NO! Mountains and fish are for scaling, not people.

Rather, we should slow down, and have meaningful conversations about life, money, and financial planning that your clients can only have with you—a real human being.

Steve Sanduski, CFP, is the co-creator of ROL Advisor, a discovery process technology system, a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, international speaker and blogger at BelayAdvisor.com.