With Football and Financial Advisors: Loyalty is Everything
February 18, 2011A few weeks ago I had a conversation with my girlfriend about the concept of loyalty. To products and services. And football teams. I guess I should add some background information here. I have been a lifelong football fan and she is just learning about the game over the last few years and frequently asks awfully insightful questions. One of her recent questions was about what happens when a player from another team that you don’t like comes to play for the team you do like. For full disclosure, I grew up in the Baltimore area and I’m a Baltimore Ravens fan (and I really don’t like the Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts). My answer was that most fans root for their team regardless of the players on it. We essentially root for laundry.
[YouTube video: Seinfeld]
For me, loyalty to the Ravens took a number of years. I was a huge Baltimore Colts fan but the Colts moved to Indianapolis in the middle of the night when I was a kid, and my uncle who worked for the team lost his job on that horrible snowy night when the Mayflower moving vans left Baltimore. My heart was broken that night and I stopped watching football for a long time. 13 years later, when the Browns left Cleveland and became the Baltimore Ravens, I felt for the city of Cleveland and the incredible fans there. I knew what they were feeling. It took a few years for me to come to like, then root for, and then eventually become a loyal fan of the Ravens.
This conversation about football led us to talk about loyalty to people who provide important services to us (doctor, dentist, financial planner, attorney, etc.). One of our friends is a financial planner and owns a small practice. One night, while we were sharing a bottle of wine with him he got a phone call from one of his clients. It was 8 o’clock on a Friday night, but his client had a question (they had met earlier that morning) about a financial issue that had been causing her stress. (A family member approached her about a significant investment in a struggling family business.) He knew she would lose sleep if she couldn’t resolve her situation, so he spent the next hour listening to her, providing meaningful advice to her, and assuring her that he would help her get through her decision and pointed out the pros and cons of each side of the decision. By the time the conversation was finished, she had pretty well decided on her course of action and was simply going to “sleep on it.” He provided an amazing level of service during a stressful time to a client. She has since maintained her relationship with him, invested in the family member’s business, and encouraged her friends and family to use my friend as their financial planner because of his level of care for his clients. She is no longer “a client” to him; she is more like family now. He has moved from financial planner to most trusted advisor / life planner.
Many people go their whole lives without developing a loyal, mutually beneficial relationship with a financial professional. In my experience, when you find the person who looks out for your interests above their own (a true fiduciary relationship) and does so in a way that shows they care about you as a person, you need to look no further. Sadly, the Bernie Madoff example shows us that not all advisors are trustworthy. For those of you looking to find this kind of relationship with a financial planner, here is a quick article to aid your search, How to Choose a Financial Planner.
I wish you the best of luck in your search, and for anyone with a success story already, please share it in the comments area.