Welcome back to the 230th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Dan Moisand. Dan is a Principal of Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo, a fee-only RIA headquartered in Melbourne, Florida that manages over $800 million in assets for 650 households.
What’s unique about Dan, though, is his ability to communicate the value and power of financial planning to clients in a straightforward and compelling manner, illustrating in the process that if an advisor really focuses their communication on the planning issues, at every meeting, then their clients will view them as a planner… regardless of how their advisory fees are structured.
In this episode, we talk in depth about why Dan feels that there’s nothing wrong with offering the “average” advisory firm services for the average advisory fee and why their firm doesn’t discount, why Dan sees the concerns about fee compression as overblown and that the AUM fee model remains a perfectly viable method of charging clients, and why the trajectory of financial planning itself shouldn’t be gauged on the outlook of technology forces trying to simplify the advisor’s value proposition, but rather on the direction of complexity of the typical consumer’s financial life… which isn’t getting any simpler these days, and is just driving even more of them to seek financial advice.
We also talk about Dan’s views on why it’s the relationships the advisors forge with their clients that ultimately matter the most (and why technology may be an invaluable tool but it’s not a competitor for advisors because it just doesn’t care about the client the way another human being does), why it’s more important to simply be of service to clients than to try to always be the smartest person in the room (especially when Dan’s clientele literally include rocket scientists from the central Florida space programs), and the way Dan structures his initial conversations with clients around assessing their confidence levels in all the different aspects of their financial lives because, as Dan puts it, the real value of financial planning at its core is helping people to become or remain confident in all those areas for the rest of their lives.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Dan discusses his firm’s recent addition of a team member who’s exclusively in charge of building out workflows, automations, and software integrations so that their financial planners can spend more time serving their clients, how, despite all the changes in the industry and the ways in which advisors spend their time, the one thing that hasn’t changed in 30 years is that financial planning is about relationships and helping people, and why, being a good financial planner is less about the compensation or business model that we choose, and more about being skilled enough at communication to be able to explain to someone why they’d be better off going through the financial planning process.
So whether you are interested in learning how Dan communicates the value of financial planning to his clients, how he assesses a client's confidence level in the various aspects of their financial lives, or why he continues to view financial planning as a terrific career path, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Dan Moisand.
