A forum to define and promote the ideals of “professional” financial planning has been set up by a cohort of industry consultants.
The consultants include Tony McDonald of T&C Consulting, Colin Williams of HFS Marketing, Rachel Staggs of SRS Coaching & Consulting, Bob Neill and David Fotheringham of Seaview consulting, and Cholena Orr of Profusion Group.
The Advice Leaders Forum is open to all financial planners interested in engaging with their peers to help define what professional advice is, and to participate in benchmarking surveys to help forum members pinpoint areas their businesses can be improved to live up to the definition.
The aim is to percolate up and across smart ideas and insights into ‘professional’ advice,” McDonald says.
“This aims to find that out as well,” he says.
“The very first thing we did was to create a survey, so it’s a bit of an introductory survey designed to find out what is interesting people, and what is challenging people, and give people confidence with the forum and that level of intimacy.
“Then we will start to dig into things like what does ‘professional advice’ mean?
“We’re trying not to be prescriptive; we’re trying to be a forum whereby like-minded people come in and participate – you have got to participate – and enables us to disseminate, probe and pick and get the debate going and the idea swapping going.
“So it’s slightly experimental, in the sense that we’ll see where it goes.”
McDonald says that if the forum gains sufficient momentum and can define appropriately what “professional advice” is, “then it becomes aspirational”.
“It becomes peer-group reviewed: how do we get to understand what each other is doing, and benchmark against that and see what the best-of-the-best is doing,” he says.
“It’s entirely dependent on whether people embrace it. If not, then nothing lost. But if they do, then it enables us to get information out there not only in a benchmarking sense, but what is challenging people.”
