Using the Web for Fun and Profit

Back before the twin towers fell, it was considered de rigeur for up-and-coming financial planners to create a commercial site on the worldwide web. Andrew Gluck and others would help us in its design. With earnest hearts, the “new millennium” planner strove to divert some of the huge online population into a well-designed web spot where they might easily contact him by email for an appointment. The average 2001 web site, if it was like mine, had been installed by a young local nerd of our acquaintance. It was really just an electronic brochure. But it caused us to create our own domain on the web. Yikes. If all those people just knew where to find us, we’d have something. They didn’t find us easily, unless you sent them a link. So, we used print to alert them of our presence. I remember deciding that the best place to post my new URL would be on a billboard with the text: “Stock Options got you worried?” or “Will you have enough money in retirement?” Despite our best efforts, web surfers stayed away in droves.

By the end of the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, nearly all of us were less enamored of the web. Getting eyeballs to our website had proved to be both elusive and expensive. Email worked, but netting anyone with the web seemed impossible. FPA and NAPFA websites and those of others were getting some results, but they were just dating sites. Our web sites were expensive to construct, routinely out of date, and very ineffective at prospect generation. We all sensed that this technology had promise for doing something, but we were damned if we knew what it was

Today our software is web-enabled. Most of us have overcome diversions, learned to throw back phish and fry SPAM. We publish financial e-zines with personality. We use email with our clients very effectively. It is still a struggle to grow a practice. Kiwanis breakfasts are early. Golf is humiliating. But at least these traditional strategies can create relationships with those who may become clients.

Web effectiveness is difficult; maybe we are using the web inappropriately? Maybe the web has more to offer. Maybe, in time, it will change financial planning practices like it has changed journalism and publishing and music and everything else. Hmmm.

The web is a tool which everyone can use, and most people are using it. If financial planning is going to use the web effectively, we need to change ourselves to fit into it, not the other way around. The web is the largest technological and cultural change in our generation. It is literally shredding everything it touches, re-forming whole industries. What it brings to financial planning is incredible target marketing and a new communication medium with which to deliver us to those who need us. New technologies of scale exist that will allow us to serve more people. However, obstacles to full and efficient use of the web exist in relic practice-management models that our industry has used for two decades. The web may bring an industry transformation, but in doing so, I’m pretty sure it is going to require us to side-step the present and leap into the future.

We need to sell what people want to buy. At this point, it’s clear that people want advice. They want the benefit of our technical knowledge, our wisdom and our experience. They may tolerate the purchase of a product in order to get our advice right now, but not if they have an option not to do so. People shy away from advisors who want to sell them something when they want advice. So before they come see us, they prefer to buy Money magazine or go to a web site that discusses retirement and investments without requiring them to purchase anything. They’d rather talk to friends and people at work. However, if they are assured, somehow, that an advisor is wise and successful in giving advice, and they think they can afford the fee, they may make seek advice face to face. People trust people that they know, or those their friends know. This is the reason referral is so powerful. This is also the reason web “dating service” sites are so weak. People who need advice will seek it from strangers only when their “pain” is great enough to require action. Otherwise, they’ll stay away.

More people will call you when you offer something they want to buy at a price they can afford. In private practice, just pay attention to what most people ask you in the middle income community. At a Kiwanis breakfast, for example, they may ask you about what you think of a mutual fund they read about in Money Magazine. They may ask you how much the average person should have put away in their 401k at their age. They may ask you about home equity loans for school tuition and Health Savings Accounts. What they are indicating is the sort of advice they and their neighbors need. Since they approach you face-to-face, they are testing your mettle as a source of advice. In informal conversation, you may respond to them with rules of thumb in hopes of appearing to be more trustworthy and less scary. You may suggest they call for an appointment. Some actually will call you. Most don’t.

However, if we develop “advice products” that actually solve the urgent needs that they expressed at Kiwanis, middle income folks who have now identified you as a trusted source will come to you at the right time and at a place convenient to them, and they’ll hire you.

The web has the potential to deliver considerable numbers of people who need our services, but can we find them aggregated for our convenience? Yes, they exist in groups in the workplace. And, when do these groups need us most? At Open Enrollment and when quarterly statements are available with balances and investment performance that cause them to wonder again what they should do or how they are doing relative to their co-workers. If we could get the employers’ cooperation, we’d be in business. But maybe the most we can get is an introduction to them where they work; in a framework they trust, at a time that they need targeted advice.

The gigantic domains of wealth and health are colliding and will merge before the end of this decade. Fortunately, the collision is in the workplace, where consumers aggregate. As employers get less fearful of advice being given (with PPA 2006 and 2006 HSA liberalization), there will be a growing role for advisors in the workplace to meet the needs of workers. Advice on healthcare and wealthcare will most easily be given by the same person, and in the not too distant future that could be a CFP® practitioner who may learn to manage several hundred employees in one or more employers through employer’s intranets or through collaboration with HR staff, insurance carriers, third party administrators (TPAs) and investment companies. How will they do that? Through the Internet, of course.

Meeting the needs of the working public through the internet is new territory for most; it’s going to require both advisor and consumer to change in ways that deliver what you both need. These people need our help.

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