Why, how, who?

Maybe you are wondering what the future is for financial advice. Perhaps you are worried that you’ll be replaced by a robot. Or could it be that you are questioning how you can improve the advice and quality of clients whom you deal with?

Instead of that, imagine a time where you are delivering way more value to your clients than ever before, a time when, as a result of the brilliant work you do for them, you have a constant stream of your ideal clients knocking down your door to seek your help. A time where your clients are raving about what you do and why you are different.

I believe that, if you want to have a bright future in our industry, you need to change your focus. You need to stop focusing on financial advice and change your approach to financial planning.

You may be asking yourself what the difference is. Financial advice is about the products, the tax and the legislation, the stuff the clients aren’t really interested in. Financial planning is all about their future, their passions and their goals, the sort of stuff they are really interested in.

There has never been a more important time to do this either. You may think you are immune to artificial intelligence taking your job. A recent PwC study predicted that a whopping 38 percent of jobs in the United States will be replaced by AI in the coming two decades. Some studies take this as high as 46 percent. Why should we be any different?

If you don’t think that a computer will be better than you are at finding the best financial advice, the best tax solution, the best investment strategy or the best life insurance assessment, you are mistaken. It will, and sooner than you think.

What will keep your job safe from AI? Two key elements: empathy and creativity. If you build your business and processes around this, you will be here to stay. For example, when you go to see the doctor, if a computer can better diagnose your cancer than a person, you want the computer. If it can give you a more accurate life expectancy, again, you want the computer. But do you want a computer screen to be delivering you the message or answering your questions? Probably not.

So, you need to bring creativity and empathy to your business, and financial planning is how you do that. It is about getting to the heart of what’s really important to the client. No one wants a pension; they want retirement and the freedom it brings. Financial planning is about having deeper conversations and then building a specific plan for that.

The cornerstone to financial planning is lifetime cash flow forecasting. If you aren’t using it, you aren’t financial planning. You can’t. If you want to take your business from advice to planning, you need to embrace technology, and lifetime cash flow forecasting is one very important example of that.

With anything new I do in life, I find the experts, and I learn from them. The reason I went to see Tony Robbins when I wanted to improve my approach to life was because he is the best in the world. If you want to embrace financial planning, you need to find those people, those courses and those books that can help you in your specific industry. For me, those were things like Strategic Coach, and people like George Kinder and Tony Robbins. But for you, that will be different.

Identify the people who can help you make this transition and you will have a business that flourishes in the future. Carry on focusing on the product and not the person, and you will get replaced by a robot.

Charlie David Reading, APFS, is a two-year MDRT member with two Top of the Table qualifications and the founder of Efficient Portfolio, one of the top financial planning practices in the U.K. Through their innovative marketing strategies, the firm has achieved 50 percent growth in five of the last six years. Reading is the author of “The Dream Retirement,” which he published in 2015.