Senior advisors may be walking away from money if they are unwilling to connect with their clients’ children, according to Townsend Financial’s co-founder, Heather Townsend, who recently shared her thoughts at Financial Advisor magazine’s 2018 Invest In Women conference.
“What I’ve noticed in the industry is that [the] sentiment is kind of like, ‘We don’t really want to get involved with the younger generation—they don’t have money.’”
Before launching her own practice in Washington state serving mostly millennials, Townsend worked for a firm that had many baby boomer clients.
Since many of the adult children of those clients were around the same age as Townsend was, she wanted to talk to them more and get them more involved in financial planning with their parents. But when she made attempts, she said she got the impression from the industry as a whole that those types of clients weren’t wanted.
That sentiment was confirmed when Townsend’s clients shared with her that their parents’ financial planners didn’t ask them about their goals and didn’t try to get to know them.
Townsend, however, believes advisors should want to on-board their clients’ children, especially if those children stand to inherit their parents’ wealth. That’s one of the reasons she decided to create her own firm for millennials and the youngest cohort of Generation X.
Winnie Sun is the co-founder and managing director of Sun Group Wealth Partners in Irvine, California, and she has a millennial-minded practice as well. While moderating the Invest In Women panel discussion, she also doled out her own expertise in attracting and working with millennials.
“They want you to paint that picture of what it would be like if they were working with you,” said Sun, who uses platforms such as YouTube to keep up with her millennial clients.
“They want to see who they are dealing with,” added panelist Helen Ngo, the chief executive officer of Capital Benchmark Partners and Made Modern Money in Atlanta. Millennials want to know if they can trust you, Ngo continued. She and Townsend are both members of XY Planning Network, a turnkey financial planning platform catering to investors from the X and Y generations.
To tell a trust-building story, the panelists said social media is their marketing tool of choice. Townsend doesn’t have official social media accounts, but she said she doesn’t mind clients following her personal Instagram account.