You've Been Framed

CHAPTER 3 Death of a Salesman/Saleswoman and Rise of the Wealth Advisor

One of the most significant problems financial advisors face is that the public does not know what they actually do. A person gets handed a business card from an advisor affiliated with a broker-dealer and assumes the advisor sells investments. A person receives a phone call from an advisor affiliated with an insurance agency and believes it precedes an insurance sale. But often, these frames and perceptions are outdated or inaccurate.

The current perceptual frame of the vast majority of the public is that most financial advisors are simply salespeople or that they only handle financial transactions. The thinking tends to be that the type of product, sale, or other financial transaction is limited to the business that the parent organization has historically done. The public doesn’t realize that the wirehouse advisor might offer financial planning, providing a goals-based approach to designing a wealth strategy, or that the agent affiliated with an insurance company offers other services beyond insurance that include a financial planning approach. They don’t distinguish between wealth management and investment management, or know that their current advisor can probably do far more for them than he or she is already doing. To be frank, when it comes to understanding what advisors do, the public is fairly uninformed.

The blame for this lack of understanding lies squarely with those of us in the financial ...