While we were preparing for the move, two potential associates applied for jobs as financial planners. These were people who were perfectly suited for the practice we wanted to build, but not as insurance agents. Because of our vision, we hired these people and they helped us to build our practice. One went on to own her own successful financial planning business and the other, Jeff Weiand, had been with us since 1985 and is our chief operations officer and a major shareholder.
Shortly after opening our independent practice, I was out to lunch and walking in downtown Philadelphia. I ran into a person I had unsuccessfully attempted to recruit while I was a general agent. He was very talented but accepted another position because he wasn't interested in becoming an insurance agent. When I told him that I had left the insurance company and was building a financial planning practice, he became very interested. Shortly thereafter, he joined our firm and Rich Busillo is now our president and also a major shareholder. Was meeting him on the streets of Philadelphia karma, coincidence or luck? I have no way of knowing, but my vision of the future told me that Rich Busillo was going to be a part of it.
Eventually, the vision was no longer mine but was shared by our associates as our firm began to grow. In 2000, we wanted to incorporate an emerging discipline, life planning, into our practice. While we prided ourselves on the relationships we established with our clients over the years and how we had come to know them, we were looking for a process that enabled us to accelerate understanding our clients. Once again, we had the vision but not the tools.
At about that time, I read an article by Dick Wagner. He wrote about the Nazrudin Project, a think tank for life planners. I called him and he told me about their next meeting, which I registered to attend. I also discovered that George Kinder, the co-founder of the Nazrudin Project, was presenting his two-day workshop, "The Seven Stages of Money Maturity." I attended that and we were on our way to incorporating life planning into our practice.
What would've happened without the vision? I have no way of knowing, but I may or may not have read the article by Dick Wagner or I may have read it and done nothing about it. But to me it was the answer to what I needed to do to begin fulfilling our firm's vision of life planning.
We incorporated much of what we learned from George's two-day workshop, but we needed more specifics beyond his wonderful discovery process that we learned and incorporated with our clients. Again, while we were attempting to develop this on our own, I got another "cold call" from a publishing company asking me to read and provide feedback on a new book written by Mitch Anthony (the first time I heard his name) titled Your Clients for Life: A Definitive Guide to Becoming a Successful Financial Life Planner. It outlined a system that provided us with much of what was missing from our process.
I called Mitch and we collaborated on further improving the process. We became close associates and I am indebted to him for much of our accomplishments, including the use of the term "Financial Life Planning," which we believe more closely describes what we do. The fact is that it is highly likely that I would have ignored a cold call from a publishing company that sells to financial advisors. But I did not. Karma, coincidence, or luck? Who knows?
Visualization is an ongoing process, and our firm is now in the process of developing our vision of the future. A business plan may emerge from this process, but experience tells me that it will not be nearly as important as the shared vision and the passion for accomplishing that future. Gandhi wrote, "Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning." Visualization will give you that belief.
Roy Diliberto is chairman and founder of RTD Financial Advisors Inc. in Philadelphia.