Narrative Before Numbers

In The Three Mega-Trends in Wealth Management, I made the case that three important things need to happen in the financial services industry:

• The Business Needs to Grow Up—the industry needs to move from a manipulative product sales model to a real professional services model based on financial advice.
  
  
• Narrative Before Numbers—clients' stories need to be heard and understood before the charts and graphs start flying.
  
  
• The Need for a New Culture—the industry culture is rife with conflicts of interest that need to be cleaned up.
  
  
  

Narrative Before Numbers

Wealth management is about understanding at a deeper level what an individual's predisposition is to money. For that reason, as financial consultants, we ask a lot of questions no the frontend of our relationships. One of our team’s favorite questions is: “What is one of your first memories about money from when you were growing up?”

Sometimes it takes awhile to process an answer to that question, but what gets said is always revealing.

The Power of Story

One answer I once heard was: “One of my first memories of money is a vivid slow-motion scene I’ll never forget.  I was about 10 years old and I was sitting on the couch with my eight-year-old brother.  That, by itself, wasn’t so unusual, of course.  What was unusual was that the couch was on our front lawn.  As we were sitting there, I remember seeing one of my classmates, in the back seat of his parents’ car, pointing and laughing at us.  You see, we had been kicked out of our third rental house for falling behind on the rent.  I will never put my children through that humiliation.”

Impact

All I could say when I heard that was “Wow”. Do you think that story might possibly influence how we plan for his families’ financial future?  Yeah, me too!

Our industry loves the “X’s and O’s” of planning and investments.  (At Archetype, we love it, too.)  However, we have a culture and platform that allows us to be on our clients’ agenda 100% of the time.

Mission

Our mission is to help families thrive across generations by connecting their money with their purpose.  We can’t do that unless we

first understand where they came from and

then try to help them unpack where they want to go.  We enjoy process capturing a family’s narrative so that we can do a better job of connecting their past with a plan for the future.

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