The Power of A Good Story

Stories are powerful things. They are the most effective way to transfer ideas and information. In other words, stories are easy to remember, which makes them quite powerful. They burrow deep in our minds when we connect with them, and the best ones inspire us to change.

Client referrals are a main driver of new business for financial advisors. What if you could harness the power of stories to situate yourself, and your value as a financial advisor, in your client’s mind? Think of it like inception, but less sinister: If you can learn how to tell a damn good story that your clients will remember then it’ll be easier for them to refer you to their friends, because it won’t be as much work for them to remember what they like about you.

Furthermore, learning to tell a good story will help you write better blogs. There’s certainly a place for lists, how-to’s, reviews, and technology posts on a finance blog, but nothing will stick to your reader’s pixel-soaked brain like a good story. And, sometimes, you can weave your lists, reviews, and technology posts into a mega-story, creating an OMGIHAVETOSHARETHIS-style blog post, which is obviously ideal.

Story Structure Basics [Adapted]

For story structure theory, I turn to my man Dan Harmon, creator of NBC’s Community, which is a great example of storytelling because every 28-minute installment feels like it has a feature film’s worth of story in it. Harmon’s lessons in storytelling are great because he’s well read (he’s an avid analyst of Joseph Cambell, the foremost authority on comparative mythology and narrative patterns), he’s a master of brevity, and he’s hilarious, and his humor makes all this theory (yuck!) easier to digest.

Harmon distilled Cambell’s “monomyth,” the pattern that every great story ever–from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Die Hard– follows, into an 8-step master-storytelling circle that anyone can grasp in just a few minutes. Here’s the magic circle of story telling greatness, as borrowed from the Wiki on his old site, Channel 101:

I hope I’ve made it clear to you that the REAL structure of any good story is simply circular – a descent into the unknown and eventual return – and that any specific descriptions of that process are specific to you and your story.

Here is my detailed description of the steps on the circle. I’m going to get really specific, and I’m not going to bother saying, “there are some exceptions to this” over and over. There are some exceptions to everything, but that’s called style, not structure.

1. You (a character is in a zone of comfort)
2. Need (but they want something)
3. Go (they enter an unfamiliar situation)
4. Search (adapt to it)
5. Find (find what they wanted)
6. Take (pay its price)
7. Return (and go back to where they started)
8. Change (now capable of change)

To bring this lesson full-circle (terrible pun), I’ll paraphrase Harmon’s example of this structure at work through the story of a man who has to change a tire: A man is driving in the rain (1). He wants to get home (2). But he gets a flat tire and has to pull over (3). He goes to the trunk for the spare, but there’s a lot of junk in there, making it hard to find (4). Eventually, he finds it and changes the tire (5). But now he’s soaking wet and has a little grease on his hands (6). He gets back into his car and starts driving again (7). But now, he knows how to change a tire and he can tell his wife at home of his triumph (8).

That story is boring. But it’s a story. It’s complete. You could tell it to someone right now, having read it once. The thing that this model doesn’t make crystal-clear, however, is that the “You,” the guy driving the car, is your protagonist. Your audience will identify with him regardless. So he has to be relatable; his motives clear. While you might not remember the 8 steps (they aren’t in story-form), what you need to remember is the circle: you start at the top with a character in a normal state, and you have to provide a reason or motive for your character to get down into the dark side, the subconscious, the unknown; that life-altering place, only to come back up to the top, having changed.

Homework: Write Your Story

If you have a blog, or a website for your independent advisory practice, write your story and post it as a blog or your about section, or both. Use the 8-step structure. Tell the story of how you were inspired to become a financial advisor, or when you decided to go independent or something. Writing it will help you internalize it. Then, try giving it a go with one of your clients, face to face. If they seem underwhelmed, tweak the story. If they like it, do it again with your other clients.

If you think about it, what I’m asking you to do is exactly what Carl Richards did with his controversial piece, How A Financial Pro Lost His House, which went viral, helped him sell books and–I’m sure–earned him more than a few referrals. Carl’s story has all 8 steps; his journey into the unknown was scary and dark, but he came out capable of change and better because of it.

The Power of Dialect

A dialect is a specific form of language. American English has hundreds of dialects and sub-dialects, and you are probably fluent in several of them. Whichever dialect you choose to speak says a lot about you: where you’re from, what you do; who you associate with. Slang words, for example, belong to a specific sub-dialect.Terms like “rad” or “gnarly,”, you’re probably fluent in what I’ll call Extreme Sports English.

Result of my Google Image Search for "rad dude gnarly"

In school, we were all taught what David Foster Wallace calls SWE (Standard White English) in his essay that inspired this piece. SWE is the vernacular of grammar-nerds. Your english teacher’s English. It was invented and popularized by rich white men, and these are the same, powerful people who employ it today–the very people who might call you an ignoramus for employing “ain’t” in casual conversation or saying “me and my friend” instead of “my friend and I.”

The truth is, however, that not a lot of Americans are fluent in SWE. While it’s an extremely useful dialect for writing and communicating with people of power, in everyday speech it can be clunky, overly formal, snobbish, and confusing for non-SWE speakers (of which there are plenty). As financial advisors, your job requires fluency in SWE, as this is the language of people with money. But I’m not concerned with your SWE skills. I’m more concerned with your ability to leverage the sub-dialects that you’re already fluent in to earn new business.

Can You Talk the Talk?

Just as most regions have their own dialect, as do most professions. Legalese, for example, is the language of lawyers. The laguage of finance doesn’t have a funny name, but it’s its own dialect nonetheless. What other interests, hobbies, or groups have their own dialects, and how can you leverage your fluency to earn new business? Finance marketing is all about trust, and sharing an interest-based vernacular builds trust faster than you can imagine. Consider the following excerpt from Financial Planning Magazine:

Chris Storace, CMFC, owner and principal of Storace Wealth in Danville, Calif., is a part of Rick Kagawa’s OSJ. Storace is a younger advisor, an up-and-comer, who just made the Transamerica’s Top Producer’s list for the first time.

Storace courts and works with some of the biggest names in the Mixed Martial Arts community. To earn their trust, Storace attends the fights, the press conferences, and visits athletes at their gyms just to say hello. Of course it doesn’t hurt that he’s ex-military – a Navy man for eleven years. That gives him a lot of credibility and an instant sense of respect. They not only share common interests, values and passions, but a common vernacular.

The hobbies, interests, and activities where you already spend time might be your way in to a new niche of people who could use professional advice.

Leveraging Language To Find New Business

We all have hobbies. What I’m suggesting is that you stop thinking about all those hours spent reading/watching/working, the hours spent at conferences/events/games/meetups/clubs, and all of the dialects that, over time, you’ve become fluent in as a waste of time. Think of it as business development.

Some interests will have a greater chance of earning you your next client, and those are the ones that you ought to focus on. Golf, boats, and cigars, for example, are hobbies that, by nature, are suited to wealthier people, which consequently might be more worth your time and effort, than say, model trains, rock climbing, and comic books. But who knows, there are people in need of financial advice all over the place. It’s up to you to find them, and if you can talk the talk then that’ll put your foot in the door.

Maurice Sendak, author of Where The Wild Things Are, passed away last Tuesday. He was 83 years old.. Maurice frequently delivered dead-honest, thoughtful remarks in interviews, appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air, The Atlantic, and The Colbert Report, and was equally famous for his curmudgeonly profanity as his essential profundity. Here are a few things that he left behind, accompanied by some of my own thoughts on what advisors might learn from his unique brand of wisdom:

Sometimes Sendak responded to fan mail with pictures.

“I don’t believe in children. I don’t believe in childhood. I don’t believe that there’s a demarcation. ‘Oh you mustn’t tell them that. You mustn’t tell them that.’ You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true you tell them.”

Financial advisors are like parents, and clients their children.

“Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.”

Were you always as good with money, savings, and finance, or were you brought into your current state of enlightenment through school, testing, and lots of practice? In this way, good financial sense, much like adulthood in Maurice’s eye, is the forbidden fruit; once it is known, it cannot be unknown. Thus, financial advisors are like adults; their clients something like children. Children/clients are still allowed to not know, they can still “play dumb” and make poor  decisions, but those poor decisions are how they learn. That’s because they have you, the advisor/adult, around, assuring them what the “smart” thing to do would be. Maurice Sendak was beloved by children, he brought the best out in them; I think advisors might benefit from thinking of their clients as Maurice thinks of children–not as children at all.

Look back at that last quote from Sendak. The last few lines just ring so true, “You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true you tell them.” That’s the kind of mutual respect that advisors should have for their clients. Your clients will make mistakes, not heed your advice, and they might even throw away your plan, but that’s because they’re human, they are faulty. The children-client/adult-advisor metaphor is about the relationship: one side has the weight of experience and knowledge but that doesn’t mean that they’re any smarter, and it certainly doesn’t warrant dumbing things down, lying, or sugar-coating. Mutual respect, honesty, and straightforwardness are just a few things that advisors can learn from Maurice Sendak’s legacy.

If you liked this post, please enter your email at the top right hand side of the page to subscribe!

I’ve written blogging guides just like this one, and I have to admit, the folks at Divvy did a nice job with this infographic. I really enjoy how they’ve designed the infographic as an actual checklist, something you might print out and use–nice call to action. Divvy HQ, by the way, is a spreadsheet-free editorial calendar application, and it sounds like a pretty cool tool if you’re really crushing content.

Some steps I would emphasize: 

1, You can never put too much emphasis on quality SEO work.

4, We’ve talked about how different networks beg for different types of content, and how, for example, a headline that might work well on Twitter or LinkedIn might not work so well on Facebook. One strategy I’ve noticed that works well for Facebook is leading with a picture, not a link. This technique works especially well when you have a custom image, one that you’ve edited, taken, or had taken just for your blog. What you do is add the new picture to your timeline, and then comment on the photo with a link to the blog. People love pictures.

7, The key to commenting on blogs is to comment where it counts, which means that you’ve got to be selective. Comment on blogs that are relevant or related to your own, have steady traffic, and have a sense of community (e.g. other commenters), this is how you will direct more traffic to your own blog. It also helps to comment on blogs that use the same platform as your own blog, just because the trackbacks and commenter profiles tend to work better.

11, If you have a newsletter, obviously you should push blog content through it. If your newsletter is well-read, consider writing some content exclusively for the newsletter; it’ll make your subscribers feel special. If you don’t have a dedicated newsletter, then set up an RSS feed so that people can subscribe and get email updates when you write a new post.

The Psychology of Money

We know that emotions are, often subconsciously, heavily weighed in financial decision-making. The fact that behavioral economics is an actual course of study proves this fact, although I doubt it needs vetting. I think it also becomes quite apparent to professionals who are steeped in money-talk–like financial advisors–how money is situated in the American psyche. I’m not sure if it’s a solely American custom, but there is definitely not a whole lot of transparency, between family, friends, and professionals, in regards to money. When you were a kid, did you know how much money your parents made? Do you know how much money your friends make, without having to guess? In your opinion, is this lack of money-talk, which I think we can all agree is important, changing?

An interesting post by Fast Company sparked my interest in this area. The post brought up a study that proves people spend more at restaurants when there was no dollar sign in front of the price, as opposed to including the dollar sign or the word “dollars.” It’s a similar principle to the 99-cent rule, where our faulty brains associate the price $4.99 closer with 4 than 5, when mathematically, rationally we know this isn’t the case. I’m wondering how you, financial advisors, weigh these psychological effects into your practice. How much stock do you put into this money-psychology stuff when you are talking with your clients? How are you pricing your services, not compensation-model-wise, but in a dollars-and-cents way?

Putting Money-Psych To Work

Another case that the article brought up was the trend towards $5 as a new benchmark price-point. The trend was set by two comedians, Aziz Ansari and Louis CK, who released their stand-up specials online for $5 flat, with much success. They likened this to Steve Jobs’ “saving” the music industry with his 99-cents-per-song price point. The underlying theme here, is that there is, for one reason or another, a certain benchmark price that does not trigger the “pain of paying” response, and right now, the Lincoln might be that price. The study found this true with the dollar-sign example at the restaurant I mentioned earlier.

Before I get off-topic, here’s a poignant quote from the Fast Company piece:

This idea relates to buying trends: The more us consumers see products–whether comedy or couscous–on sale for $5, the more comfortable we become parting with that amount.

As an advisor, do you make your clients aware of this kind of cognitive bias? Are you, yourself, affected by it? And, now that you’re aware of it, how might you use it to better your business?

Here’s an idea: Gather a small batch of potential clients, say 20. Mail them a note with your information on it and a simple tip, like: “Here’s a few bucks, buy a couple coffees and talk with your wife about your finances. Then talk to me if you have any questions.” Interesting idea, right?

What’s in a certification, really?

Credentials are important, and not just in finance. This is no surprise. But we also know that there are a lot of bad, if not downright crooked finance people out there masquerading behind their three-letter designations. Whether they’re selling a financial product to a client when it’s clearly not in his/her/it’s best interest, or if they’re being downright deceitful and stealing from their clients, it’s bad stuff. On the other hand, we know that there are plenty of smart, ethical people out there operating without credentials. All I’m sayin’ is that credentials don’t come with a “guaranteed moral compass,” and unless polygraph machines go mainstream, a man’s morals are always going to have to be judged by people, based on the person’s actions.

Another thing a certification won’t tell you about a candidate is what they’re like. Within any organization there is a mysterious thing we call culture: it comes in many flavors and is described in many ways (sometimes not at all), but it has a profound impact on the way that organization operates both internally and externally. Corporate culture, as it is sometimes called, stems from the beliefs that an organization (or maybe just the boss) holds, and those beliefs certainly affect whatever it is the organization produces or provides. Finding employees that fit the “culture” is tough, and I found a tool that might help firms find better advisors to add to the team. This tool might be useful for advisors in other regards as well:

A Tool For Employers, A Challenge For Advisors

Independent advisors who are looking to start a firm, hire a freelancer, or just go the extra step to further qualify and specialize financial certifications really ought to get familiar with Smarterer, the Boston-based education startup. Here’s what they have in their About section:

We created Smarterer to provide people a simple, fun, and authentic way to show what they know. Smarterer is a platform designed to score individuals on any and every digital, social, and technical skill under the sun. Using crowdsourced test design and a scoring mechanism similar to the one developed to rank chess masters, in just 10 questions and 60 seconds we can give you a valid score.

The Interplay Between Audience and Channel

You’ve got to get outside of yourself, your business, and your industry, and into the minds of your audience in order to be as effective as possible on social media. Understanding the types of content that your audience relates to is going to take some trial and error, but your content strategy–what you’re sharing, why, where and when–is a bit more scientific. A refreshingly readable Mashable article on Facebook, a platform I’ve always found difficult for brands, made it clear to me that repetitive is boring. Twitter is a great place for information sharing, so, naturally, blog posts spread nicely there. But not on Facebook. Your audience knows they can get your blog posts from Twitter, your website, or their email, and they don’t want to see the same shit on Facebook. People are there for different reasons, and they get annoyed when you use the channel as just another RSS feed. Your audience on Facebook requires a different type of engagement; completely original content and a complementing strategy. As the author writes, “Facebook is an entirely different animal, you can’t just repopulate your entire website onto it.”

Our Audience, And Yours

Our audience is–hopefully!–you: finance professionals. We’re fortunate to have such a specific audience. You, however, are not so lucky. Your audience varies greatly demographically, psychographically, and otherwise. Here on The Scalable Advisor, we typically write to and for advisors, but this time I’m going to try something a bit different. I’m going to try to give you something to share to your audience. Without further ado, here it is, a lovely infographic breaking down how to plan for retirement:

If I told you that you can train your brain to be quicker, sharper, more insightful would you be interested? We’ve talked about how good listening skills can make you a better advisor, but strengthening your brain is a skill that is a bit harder to pinpoint. By learning about working memory, being conscious of it, and doing your part to improve your working memory (which DOES decrease with age!), then you can sharpen your brain, and become a better financial advisor, as well.

Step 1: Get familiar with working memory

If you’re going to improve your working memory, you ought to know what, exactly, working memory is… To Wikipedia!

Working memory has been defined as the system which actively holds information in the mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing. Working memory tasks are those that require the goal-oriented active monitoring or manipulation of information or behaviors in the face of interfering processes and distractions.

This analogy from the New York Times Magazine’s feature, Can You Make Yourself Smarter?, might help, too:

What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it’s the capacity to manipulate the information you’re holding in your head—to add or subtract those numbers, place them in reverse order or sort them from high to low.

Step 2: Be conscious of your working memory

The first step in strengthening your brain–which isn’t ripped from a major news source, Lifehacker article, or science magazine, but from my own experience–is to be conscious of whatever it is that you’re trying to do. For a long time, I struggled to remember names. I would meet a person and forget their name the moment the letters left their lips. It was a problem that made me look like a jerk, so I tried to fix it. What worked for me is simply recognizing that you want to remember this person’s name, no matter who the person is. I find that repeating the person’s name after they give it to me, using it aloud in our first few interactions, and actively trying to keep the name in my working memory works.

But working memory is also useful for rearranging and manipulating information in your head, which could prove to be very useful for a financial advisor. Imagine you’re having a conversation with a potential client, or even catching up with a current one: our brains spew information in strange orders and patterns. You’ll often recognize important bits, but they’re often buried in nonsense and sometimes it’s tough for us to connect the dots and keep everything straight in our heads. An advisor with Jedi-working-memory-mind-tricks would have the capacity to log these details and organize them in real-time, while being active current in the conversation.

Step 3: Gaming your way to better memory?

The New York Magazine piece highlights dual N-back games, which require you “to remember the location of a symbol or the sound of a particular letter presented just before (1-back), the time before last (2-back), the time before that (3-back) and so on.” You can play a version of this game for free at Soak Your Head. But there are also more practical activities and games that help strengthen your working memory, fresh from–you guessed it–Lifehacker! Some of these are:

Sudoku puzzles–they’re right in the paper!

Practicing simple math every day–remember time-tables? Do some of those!

Writing instead of typing–we’ve talked about the benefits of this, in slightly different context, before.

Act like you’re teaching–you could teach a young person about finance!

Exercise and eat well–we already know that sitting is killing you!

Images give your blog interest and personality. And let’s be honest, finance blogs don’t score very well on the Interesting Blog Scale. We humble finance bloggers need to step up our photo-game.

Can we all agree to never use stock photography?

Seriously. It’s awful. No road signs pointing to ambiguous destinations. No close-ups of handshakes. No large, arrow-laden graphics that look like they were ripped from a 1990′s flowchart. I’m warning you, even ironic use of these images can render your blog unreadable by the snap-judger.

This is a sucky photo.

Plus, there’s this: 60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos. It’s pretty funny, have a look.

If there’s an obvious choice, take it.

Sometimes posts or post-title’s, specifically, have really obvious photo-choices. And most of the time you should probably just go with that photo. Like when you write a post about a famous Star Wars character, you should probably pull just that character’s photo for the post. Like this:

3 Tips To Help Liz Lemon Retire From 30 Rock

Funny and relevant? That’s a no-brainer.

If you can make a joke or reference pop culture in a way that’s both smart, funny, and somehow, even tangentially relevant, you best take that opportunity. Or if the image can be the punch line of a joke, or a joke in and of itself, then do that.

Permission To Experiment Fearlessly: Granted

A Word on Finding Kick-Ass Photos

Use Google image search, and get creative with your Googling. That’s really all you need to know. You don’t want to use that same stock photo that everyone else is using. If you’re writing a generic post about technology in financial services, experiment with some weird, slightly specific searches like, “woman frustrated by finance,” or “tech problems suck,” or “my iphone saved my life.” You never know what you might find…

Query: “my iphone saved my life”

Result:

This is a not-so-sucky photo.

We’re always preaching the efficiency of digital, but what have we lost in our abandonment of analog? What can we learn from the advisors who carried briefcases, not iPads–back when Starbucks was just a coffee shop in Seattle? This post was inspired by The Atlantic’s excellent feature this week, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?, that raises some important questions about the ubiquity of social media, and it’s affects on our general health.

What Digital Does To Us

In The Atlantic piece, Stephen Marche cites several studies proving that Americans are becoming increasingly lonely. But if you looked at our Facebook pages, you wouldn’t think so. One hundred friends, five hundred, a couple thousand… The old-school advisor might recite the old adage, “quantity over quality.” He might be right. But what does Facebook have to do with finance?

Facebook is as good an analogy as any for quality financial advice. After all, advisors are in the business of building relationships, and the core action on Facebook is “friending…” Do you think of your closer clients as friends? And regardless of your answer, does being friends with a client on Facebook count for much, if anything, when it comes to the financial advice you give them?

Being “connected” with your clients isn’t the same as sharing a bond with them. The answer’s right in the rhetoric: Connections are made, while bonds are shared, even forged. They take time, effort, and a certain sharing of space and time that can’t happen over the internet. My question is this: Are advisors spending their time in the right places? It’s no secret that keeping up appearances on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn takes a considerable amount of time. Might that time be better spent over coffee with a client, or on the phone just to check-in, or even writing them a note, Jeff Rose style?

These are just questions, but ones that I suggest you think about. We know that trust is built face-to-face, and we know that word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing. Is your client going to drop your name to his buddy because of that great link you shared on Twitter, or because you friended him on Facebook, or even because you wrote that killer blog post? Or is he going to talk about the guy who took him out to coffee just to see if he was still happy with his 401k?

The Benefits of Face-to-Face Conversation

I leave you with a Forbes piece that asserts the benefits of meeting in-person. Founder and President of High Tech Connect, René Shimada Siegel writes (paraphrased):

What can you learn from an in-person meeting that you can’t from a virtual one?

1. You’re off the record.  When I talk to clients on the phone, I might not get to hear the most important information they can share: that’s because they don’t feel comfortable sharing certain information from their cubicle where their colleagues can easily hear them speak.

2. Make use of not-so-small talk.  Business relationships are built when people take the time to share and learn more about each other. That happens more naturally in person than over the phone or in an email, no doubt.

3. Make an impression. Here, she talks about her handbag that served as a conversation starter and impressed one of her clients. She asks, how would you do that over Skype? Good point. For an advisor, it might be your sharp suit or firm handshake that make a lasting impression.

4. Read the body language. Facial expressions often communicate so much more than words. In their eyes and in their body language, we can see confidence, empathy, fear, friendliness or sincerity. That ability to “read” a person is crucial.

5. Learn where the action is. I find out so much when I visit one of my clients in their office. The environment speaks volumes and may factor into your business proposal or plan. The lesson here: go to your clients. Meet them on their home turf: what does it say about them?

Just a reminder to be conscious about how you interact with your clients. Facebook may be efficient, but it looks cheap. There’s definitely a right time for a quick message, Skype, text, or email. From a time-management perspective, these tools can be essential. But there’s definitely a need for face-to-face, honest-to-goodness, regular conversation, whether there’s something important to discuss, or just because it’s been a while.