The lessons learnt from a career in financial planning

After two decades as a financial planner, newly retired Ray Griffin explains what he has learned from a career in the industry.

Late one Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I quietly locked the office door and headed home, bringing an end to a financial planning career that spanned just over 20 years. It has been a wonderful period of my life, capped off with being able to realise the value in my business through a sale in 2009.

The 30-minute drive home gave me some time to think about closing that chapter of my life and on what I had really being doing for two decades or so.

For many years now I have been of the view that while financial planning is technically centred on legislation, money, financial markets and economies, when the fog of all those areas is cleared away, financial planning businesses are mostly about people.

The most technically brilliant financial planner will fail in business without the capacity to build client-centred professional relationships with people.

In recent years, people skills have been referred to as the ‘soft skills’ of financial planning and the nascent emphasis on soft skills development amplifies the need for a planner to be equipped with more than just hard edged technical knowledge.

The week before I retired, I took time to start ringing clients to update them on the latest aspect of my transition away from the frontline of client service.

The first call was to my very first client, who is now aged 82, and she and I warmly reminisced about the very first meeting we had in my then office in Inverell.

It was a huge office divided in two, with a very large area of floor space containing only a desk and filing cabinet being the interview room.

It looked embarrassingly bare and as a result I knew I looked brand new in the job and unsuccessful. I will always remember her arriving at my office and my hope that she would choose me to be her financial planner.

Several years later, I was much more comfortable and confident when Alison’s husband Michael also became my client.

As I now look to pass Alison and my other clients onto my replacement, it gives me time to reflect on what held such long-term professional relationships together.

While I am very comfortable that, together with the people who worked alongside me, I served my clients well from the technical perspectives, central to our service offering had always been a deep-seated belief that we needed to look after clients — to care for them as best we could.

There’s nothing new in that from a professional perspective. Indeed, the very essence of all professional relationships sees client interests placed ahead of the professional’s.

I was recently reminded of this when reading the latest edition of my wife’s professional journal.

On numerous occasions over the last 19 years, I have heard Leanne tell people that for as long as she could remember, she had always wanted to be a nurse.

The passion with which she speaks of caring for her patients and, in recent years, caring for the residents of the nursing homes she manages, is extremely comforting.

That there are people with a lifelong ambition to care for the health and wellbeing of others has to be one of the greatest successes of human evolution.

Nursing is in some respects analogous to the professional evolution of financial planning.

My wife’s nursing journal contained an interview with a neurological nurse in Spain in which she said: “In my nursing training I learnt that listening to our patients is at the heart of nursing care.”

The Spanish nurse added: “Call me old fashioned, but listening to patients and developing relationships with them so we can better care for them, I think, is still the most important aspect of the nurse’s role.”

She then spoke about the pain she felt from having watched many patients deteriorate over a lengthy career. In my own small way, I could relate to that and as I write I recall shedding tears for both Michael and Alison at his funeral several years ago.

No other profession provides the services and care that financial planning can. No other profession sees practitioners as deeply embedded in the lives of their clients.

Despite the complexity of superannuation law and unlike taxation law, which requires annual tax returns, there is no legislation that compels individuals to have a financial plan prepared and then managed over the years ahead.

The clients of financial planners choose to become, and remain, clients entirely of their own volition.

If you would indulge me for a brief moment while I include myself in the collective one final time, we are extremely important in the lives of our clients.

As financial planners, we can never really know how much more at peace, how much less stressful the lives of our clients are because of the role we fulfil in caring for their financial wellbeing.

This was brought home to me quite dramatically when an elderly client surprised me as he burst into tears when I told him of my then impending retirement from planning.

For 18 years he had relied on me to look after his money, and to learn that was changing was something he didn’t want to hear.

In my mind, being asked to manage one client’s life savings affords a financial planner one of the greatest honours that can be bestowed on a professional person. To be afforded the opportunity to do the same for many clients is indeed a great thing.

It is something of which we as planners should be extraordinarily proud. All of us should stand tall knowing that despite Storm Financial and a litany of investment collapses, the majority of financial planners are good, honest people.

If that were not the case, financial planning as a distinct professional service would have failed very many years ago.

It is a good thing that financial planners do. It is good for clients and their families, good for the economy and good for Australian society.

As I stand down from professional practice, I look fondly to the future for the profession of financial planning.

With nationwide fees-for-service almost a fait accompli and growing acceptance of the need for tertiary education prerequisites for financial planners, the future looks extremely bright, provided we never forget to put our clients’ interests ahead of our own in all aspects of professional practice.

If you are a financial planner, or the owner of a planning business, never forget that you have nothing in business — absolutely nothing — without the ultimate yet most intangible of business assets: the trust your clients have in you. Without trust you have no clients, no funds under management and no assets. It’s as simple as that.

After I parked the car and wandered inside, Leanne was quick to ask: “So how do you feel — now that it’s all over?”

I paused for a second or so, then said: “Actually, I feel great — really good. I’m going to miss my clients but it’s time for someone else to look after them now, and Justin will do a great job. It’s time to move on to the next chapter.”

Ray Griffin was the principal of ConsultGriffin and is a veteran financial planning industry observer.