1. Help customers to become financially well-organised
To help customers become financially well-organised is Trusted Advisor's first objective in our relationship. Unless the customer is well-organised, we cannot hope to effectively deliver our services.
2. Consolidate their financial arrangements and simplify their lives
Simplifiying a customer's financial life is a crucial element in what we do. As well as time and cost reductions, every customer derives significant pleasure from consolidating their accounts to one administrator. Provided it can be done without significant tax implications or financial penalties being applied by existing managers, almost always there are major advantages for the customer in this part of the process. 3. Create a written Investment Plan to help customers get from A to B
While each investor’s situation is unique, investment plans always address certain factors, including the reasons for the investment, the investing horizon and the degree of risk that the investor can comfortably tolerate. This investment plan will serve to guide us as we work to achieve the customer's long-term financial success. Our process centres around five steps:
4. Create a successful investment experience
It is Trusted Advisor's main objective to deliver a successful investment experience for every customer. The vast majority of people think investment advice as some kind of forecast that will tell them when the market is going up or down, or which shares to buy or sell. They spend all of their time looking for an advisor or financial guru who can give them the important investment forecast that will make them a successful investor. The reality is nobody can predict the future.
5. Act as a financial coach to maintain discipline
One of the things which Trusted Advisor gets paid for is to act as a financial coach to maintain discipline between our customer and their investment portfolio to ensure they receive a successful investment experience. On a daily basis our customers are bombarded with a plethora of television interviews and announcements, newspaper articles and advertisements, and magazines telling them about the latest investment forecast. It is easy to feel tempted by such promises of easy money and such financial pornography can appeal to the greed factor in all of us. However, because of Trusted Advisor's investment process, our customers feel very comfortable in the knowledge that their Investment Plan is engineered to capture the capital market rate of return. Because at each meeting we carefully measure progress of the portfolio and refocus our customer on the long-term nature of investing, our customers are much less likely to deviate from their chosen path.
Each of these items has been broken down into a process which moves the customer from the point of our first introduction, through to implementing their Action Plan, and finally into the Annual Consulting Service phase. To best explain the process involved we have a flowchart which summarises the customer's transition into the firm, and how we deliver our sevices to meet the customer's needs.
