Imagine you’re a widget-maker.
You pride yourself on making the finest widgets in the land. Your widgets are making a positive impact on people’s lives and they know it.
So people come from all over to buy your widgets and over the years you’ve built one helluva reputation.
Then one day your neighbor decides that widget-making isn’t so tough, so he gives it a go.
His widgets are awful. They’re made with the cheapest materials he can find and they don’t work properly and often break.
But your loyal customers can tell the difference in quality, so they continue to buy YOUR widgets instead of your neighbors.
After a year or two though, you see more and more of the unknowing public buying widgets from your neighbor.
THEY don’t know enough about widgets to understand the difference in quality.
So they buy your neighbor’s low quality widgets instead, thinking one widget is the same as the next.
After several bad experiences buying your neighbor’s widgets, they finally write off widgets altogether.
They think “Argh, widgets are for the birds. They don’t work and they always break. I’m never buying a widget ever again.”
That’s my industry in a nutshell and it all boils down to AUM fees.
The “shark in the water” perspective that the public (correctly) has about most financial advisors is derived from their fee structure.
If you only make money by “gathering assets” and charging a fee, that’s all you’ll be truly incentivized to do.
Everything else is just window dressing.
And that’s why we charge flat monthly membership fees.
You should pay us because we deliver amazing service, coaching and accountability, NOT because we convinced you to handover your money.
The 0.25% fee we DO charge for investment management is so small and inconsequential to our top line that’s it’s NEVER a consideration in who we work with or how we work with them.
So if you’ve written off widgets, take another look. They’re not all the same and the good ones are well worth investing your time and money in.
