How to Be More Human-Centered Advisor

And so I think moving here forward in the future, Matt, it's having that human first approach. It's something that the computer can't take over, is having a person deal with another person who has a shared human experience.

You're listening to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Each episode we have conversations with firm owners and marketing experts about how to attract your ideal clients, foster trust, and build a marketing eng that works for an accounting firm. I'm your host, Matt Banker. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. You can find more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now here's the show. Hello. Hello. I've got Rory Henry with me today. We've met through some, some accounting space groups and things like that.

Through Masterminds.

Yeah. And I'm excited to chat. Rory, give us what's, what is your, what's your background and why should people have, have, why should people care what you have to say about anything? I guess.

Right. I wonder that a lot, Matt. Well, thank you so much really for having me on the show. I always enjoy our conversations. A brief background on myself. I am a director at Arrowroot Family Office and we are a family office in the sense that we manage the finances of the people here at Arrowroot and then we work with high net worth families all the way down to the everyday client. We're a big believer in the transformative power of technology really, to provide our family office services to the ultra wealthy as well as, like I said, the everyday person. I also developed a program called AFO Wealth Management Forward where we partner and educate CPAs, accounting firms out there on how to adopt holistic wealth management services. I also have a podcast and a forthcoming book talking about integrating services. And then I'm big into behavioral finance, which we can talk about on the recording today. Really a human first approach in working with clients to uncover their values and help them really find out what they want most out of life.

Yeah, well, I think that's a great way to kind of segue into this conversation when, when I think about not just accounting firms, but this is true in the accounting space. A lot of folks, they, they approach the market by trying to sell solution to an external problem. Right. We're going to do your taxes, we're going to do your bookkeeping, we might even give you some business advice. But these are all kind of, you know, external things. But people are, are people and there's a lot going on inside. And so you mentioned kind of A holistic approach. I'd love to, I'd love to just kind of un, unpack that. Just with this context. I think I'm a business owner, but I think of the, the line between my business and my personal finances and my, you know, taxes and my financial planning. All of these things to me as a regular person are kind of fuzzy lines. They're all related. But in the accounting space we have very clear lines between, you know, well, we, we're a tax firm or we do bookkeeping and that's it. So tell me a little bit more.

We do cast, right?

Yeah, I, I think you have a little bit of a different approach. So unpack bit and tell me kind of your perspective here.

Yeah, so I actually trademarked the term advise roar, Matt. And the roar isn't short for Rory, it's actually short for, it's actually acronym for return on relationship. Because I believe here in the future we're really servicing a relationship. So we're not really a serv, a servant to a service. We're really servicing the many needs of that client. And that really came out of our program, ifol, bench forward and what I call a virtual family office. So in essence, we're handling the tax, the accounting, the business advisory, the financial planning, the investment management, the estate planning, the insurance, the lending needs. And that was for really the wealthy. So when you hear family office, you think of families with a hundred million dollars more in assets. The Rockefellers, the JP Morgans. But now with technology, we can now provide these services in an authentic way holistically, to not only serve the business needs of that client, but also the personal financial planning needs. These professions really shouldn't be working in silos. That's why we call it an integrated model. Because one decision affects the other. Taxes are affected by investments. There's an insurance component within, you know, investments and our taxes. So we're really moving into a world where we need to provide for those many business and personal needs of a client. You're just pulling different levers to handle those clients needs. A lot of times, Matt, it's really. Clients come to us with a situation. How do I, or what if, how do I save on taxes? Right? Or how do I increase my gross margins? Or what if my spouse passes away? What happens? And I think what our program teaches and what I'm, what I'm doing with our behavioral finance and human first approach is saying we can go beyond that situational answer to that situational question and start diving deeper, helping really find out the many needs of that client, getting into a client's values, looking at not just their financial aspects, but their emotional or spiritual, their social well being. So we can look at the whole client.

So you're, you're not saying like you should just add more service lines to your business? I think that the, the idea is that it's more almost taking a step back and saying what is, what are the actual like needs of the person? Not just the needs of. Well, and it kind of goes along these lines of how can you think about your business as serving that individual? Not simply like who's the ideal client for us, but how, what, what is the real need that the person on the other side of the table has here?

Yeah. And I say that those in the accounting professional are uniquely positioned to start really diversifying services. But people love saving on taxes like that value add is, it's tremendous. Phenomenal. Right. So it's a lot easier to sell someone on the value of not paying Uncle Sam a penny more than you should saving them thousands, if not tens of thousands on their taxes as opposed to maybe saying 30 years down the road you're going to have X amount of dollars in retirement.

Right.

So, but when you can combine those two, Matt, that's where it's powerful. So you have that short term savings that, that, that provides value to that client in the here and now. But then when you also pair that with a vision for a better tomorrow and giving them the peace of mind, security that their life's going to be taken care of in their later years, that is a powerful combination.

It's, it's funny, I mean I, I talk a lot about marketing for accounting firms and I, I think most people think Matt helps them with lead generation. Right. We're just going to send you more leads. But what I found, the more I work with firms, it comes back to business model questions. It comes back to how do you actually deliver your services? Those are, those are often the more important questions from a marketing seat. Well, who are you? What makes you different? Why are you not, you know, the same as every other accounting firm down the block? And that has to do a little bit with, you know, how do you set up the services that you offer? It has a lot to do with how do you set up your team to interact with your, your people. Tell us a little bit about how, how do you, go ahead, jump in here.

You know, I was, yeah, I was going to make a comment on that because I'm actually wrapping up my book here and I talk about perception and, and Value for people on the audience there. You may hear wealth manager, and a certain thing pops in your head, right? You hear a family office, and something else pops in your head. You may think of. You hear arrowroot family office. You may think of, oh, Rory works for one really wealthy family named Arrowroot.

Right.

We are a multifamily office. Technically, we're a wealth management firm where we serve many families. Right. But certain things obviously pop in your head when you hear behavioral financial advisor or certified financial planner, which are the acronyms CFP and BFA after my name, certain things come to your mind, right. When you hear business advisory, certain things come to your mind. And so obviously those perceptions and what you handle, Matt, is that marketing piece. And how do we convey really, the many ways we can help a client? So if you're an accounting professional out there and you have CPA next to your name, you are that trusted advisor. They see CPA and see trusted advisor. I love the work of Ron Baker in his book Time's up, and he talks about the experience economy. And we're not just delivering services. We're really in the business of staging experiences, Matt, and then guiding those transformations. So if we can really move, for those in the audience from being that trusted advisor to that transformational advisor, we can then really provide so much more value, increase revenue, and really start growing our firm in a way that provides more value to our colleagues as well as our clients. This week's episode is sponsored by Benchmark Growth Marketing. Helping your accounting firm expand your niche with branding, positioning, websites, SEO and marketing strategy. If you're an accounting firm looking to fix your marketing, benchmark is your go to solution. Learn more at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now back to the program.

Yeah, well, tell. Tell me a little bit more about the book that you wrote. You. You came. What's. What's this all about? I know you've talked to a lot of folks in the accounting space about this, but, like, unpack that for me.

Yeah. So I was speaking with Seth Feinberg, accounting consultant. He was the former editor at Accounting Web, and he said, rory, the accounting profession really needs a how to or a guide on how to integrate these services. And through my podcast over the last three years, Matt, as you know, on this show, you get to speak to so many really interesting and smart people. And I've had titans of the profession, really well respected names in accounting, wealth management, technology, and behavioral finance that have been on the show talking about some ways that we can integrate solutions into A practice. So I was able to gather 24 + names Thought leaders that maybe some of those audience are familiar with. Randy Johnston, Blake Oliver, Seth Feinberg and then a number of wealth management as well as behavioral finance people to write either chapters or portions of chapters talking about these different service lines. So financial planning, investment management, estate planning, exit planning, communicating with clients. And so I took these authorities from there and they're writing chapters or like I said portions of chapters of the book to really talk about this service offering on how we can provide more value to clients by bringing together the accounting world as well as the wealth world and the estate planning or like call the triumvirate services service offerings there to provide for not only the personal needs of the client but the business needs as well.

So is this hard, is it hard to add wealth management, estate planning, this kind of stuff to an established tax firm? And are there. There's certain types of firms where it's a good fit and others where it's not going to be a good fit.

There's a great way to really get started and that's to start doing the work on yourself. So if you're a partner out there or you're a firm owner, go through a holistic financial plan, go there's a number of great software solutions out there that you can do demos with and go through that process yourself. You'll then see how easy it is because of technology and then you'll be able to see how you can apply it to your clients. And then the other offering. It's really why I believe so passionately about this service offering is three or four years ago there was a an estate planning technology called trust and will that is one of the most well known in the marketplace. And you can do a trust matt for as little as I believe $599, a will for as little as $180. So they've democratized the estate planning process. I say when you can do this for a family, give them an estate plan making sure that their families taken care of in case of any unforeseen circumstances. I call estate planning really a family office level of care because you give them that security and you can also connect generations from the boomers all the way down to Gen Z. So those are two ways that I would go about it if I was an owner. I do it on myself first and then see how I can apply it to my clientele. So technology only advancing these systems are getting better at, better at talking to each other. And I say like I said with the trademark advisor or it's really that relationship. So finding ways that you can integrate these services. I believe that everybody should have a holistic financial plan. I'm on a mission to help people do that. I think tax planning is great, but I think we need to have that vision for a better tomorrow through holistic financial planning.

Yeah, yeah. I think that there's, there's already, there's an accountant shortage and there's, there's a lot of work to be done. But as we think about the future, technology, AI, all these, these things are. I feel like I'm a broken record. I talk about this every time. The, what we do and the, the services that you deliver are going to change. Especially, especially more of the like technical production level stuff. Hopefully that gets better. What isn't going away though is the trusted advisor piece. You still need that person who validates the output of any AI model and people still want to work with people that they can trust. Right. I don't understand what's happening behind the scenes in ChatGPT. And so I'm not going to go to ChatGPT and say, hey, put together a financial plan for my business. I might ask my, my accountant to use CHAP GPT. But then they're going to look at it and say yeah, this is good, this is bad, but this relationship piece, right. This is the, this is the piece that as human beings we're not going to get away from. The downside to that I think is that a lot of accountants don't necessarily see themselves as. That's not their preferred way of interacting. They like the numbers, they like the books, they like that kind of work. Do you have any advice? I know you talk a lot about like behavioral psychology and other things. How do you, how do you get into like as a person? How, how do you help other people a little bit better, you know, beyond just like the spreadsheets and projection side of things.

Yeah, I, I say that as a behavioral financial advisor. I'm really in the belief in the behavior business and really helping people believe that they can do it and then creating the necessary behavior changes to, to optimize their business and optimize their well being. All the research shows that our values shape our goals, our goals shape our behaviors and in turn our behaviors will then reflect our values. I believe that people should go through a values based exercise. We use a number of different ones. But you can take a values exercise where you can then really map out your top five values and then from there you can, you can Map out your business decisions as well as your personal financial decisions. So that's grounded in, in what we call values based planning. And then, Matt, I'm a big believer in a concept of really envisioning a better tomorrow. And the research by my friend Hal Hirschfeld, he's got a book out there. If you don't sign up for my book, I would definitely read the book your Future Self by Hal Hirschfield. And he is a researcher, and he did some research that basically showed that we see our future selves as no different than a stranger. And the antidote to actually correcting that is to create a vivid visual picture of that future self. And then how you would feel. So where you would be, what would you be doing, who would you be with, and then how would that make you feel? And that'll allow you to create the necessary behavior changes in the here now to make that future a reality. So those are some tools that we really use in our planning with clients. I really frame it in a past, present, future. We won't go too much into the behavioral finance weeds here, Matt, but our relationship to money, many times is formed in our childhood.

Yeah.

And so what was, you know, a first money memory? We don't ask ourselves these questions, like, what was the first money memory that comes to mind that shaped your beliefs around money? I mean, do you have one, Matt?

Okay, so I. I do have a first money memory. I. My brother and I were saving up, literally saving up pennies, nickels and dimes to buy an original Nintendo System, the original NES 8bit system. We had a jar and we filled it with coins, sometimes a dollar bill here or there, and we knew it was a hundred dollars. Well, like 99.99. So we knew we finally had $100. We brought our jar to KB Toys in Minnesota, and we got our Nintendo. We brought it up to the, to the front, and he rang it up. And this was the first time I ever learned about sales tax because I had a. I knew I had a hundred dollars in my jar. And then when he rang it up, it was like 106 something. And my, my heart sank. Now, luckily, my dad is not a cruel person. He. He paid the $6, whatever it was, but that was, that was my first mo. Money memory.

Yeah. Hey, you never forgot about sales tax since.

Never forgot.

Yep. Well, that's awesome. So, like, we just went through that small question, right? There's one question I asked you, and I learned so much more about Matt. Right. Like, that memory holds weight now, and we can always Go back to it in our future conversations. And then, you know, other questions like, you know, who influenced your beliefs around money? I mean, did you have parents or anybody, any relatives? You know, like that question can be asked. Then we can ask something like, you know, is there any events in your childhood that shaped your beliefs around money? So we can really start telling a story, not only about our past, how that shaped our decisions on who we are as a business owner or how we operate in the world today, but also doing that, that future storytelling of where we want to go in life. So I really frame it as the past, you know, where we, where our beliefs around money come from. The present is really looking at the values. So doing a values based exercise, looking at our top five values. And then the other aspect of the present is looking at the many dimensions of our well being. Dr. Peggy Swarbuck, she was an addiction counselor. She talks about the eight dimensions of wellbeing. So not just looking at our financial, but our spiritual, our emotional, our intellectual, our occupational, and using something that therapists use in their process. What we do is scaling questions. So scale from 1 to 10. You know, how. How are you feeling about your emotional wellbeing? Right, Rory? I feel like a six. So what would make that an eight or nine? So we didn't start quantifying those measurements, and we can start putting smart goals to those other dimensions besides just the financial. So it's moving past the pie charts, the plans and the numbers, and really getting into that person and the purpose.

That's. It's a pretty big paradigm shift, to be honest. I think that a couple things come to mind. One is obviously, I think when you have more of that holistic and personal approach you're developing, relationships are stickier than just the math or, you know, especially a commodity type service. And so when you're doing that, you are developing a relationship with your client. But the thing that comes to mind is when I talk to accountants, especially ones who are in, you know, smaller firms, working with business owners. Yeah, that's why they got into this business. In most cases, they actually want to help people. But sometimes there's this big disconnect between, you know, the, the technical side of, of doing accounting and tax planning and all that, and then the actual person. And I think what you're, what you're offering or kind of revealing here is how, how could you take a more human centered approach to, to money and things like that? Right?

Yeah, it's. We call it human first financial guidance. And I always say it's like being around a camp. We're around a campfire right now, Matt, and we're just talking about life and so we can get on that more personal level and like I said, go beyond the numbers of the transactions. Then we can start having those transformations. We're just a client, we can be a client advisor relationship. We're talking about life. Right. And those are the most rewarding types of conversations I have with clients is talking about everything but a retirement plan or but their financials. We talk about their family and really what matters most to them. And there's great solutions out there in the software space that are starting to embed this human first approach or these behavioral tools to allow you to guide the conversation to the more life planning aspect of that client experience. So like I said, it's really getting into that relationship aspect of it. We're just using a number of different service offerings to accomplish that. Whether it's through the estate planning piece and involving the whole family, the personal financial planning or the FPA software, it really helped that business owner find out what they want out of their business. Do they want to IPO or they want a lifestyle business? So I believe that this foundational approach, this life planning approach can be had by anybody, whether you're a wealth manager or an accounting professional.

Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with the. Alex Hormozi, he has a book called A Hundred Million dollar leads and 100 million offer. I think it's in the first one, the offer book, he talks about, you know, the shrinking the time from, you know, the purchase to that first emotional win. And I just think about with, with accounting firms a lot of times the, the way that a relationship begins is, and then you've got this kind of long onboarding phase before you get your first, you know, P and L and everything set up and, and that, that can be a big gap between I paid the money and when I first see the results. But I think that when you start to think more, you know, what, what would be an emotional win for your clients? Well, having, having these conversations about how do you, how do you feel about money or how do you like understanding them at that level could really do a lot to make people like feel the value that they're getting from you much earlier. Because they have this connection.

Yes. And you can advise them, especially for those who are advising small medium sized business owners, you can help them advise on their businesses more effectively. Right. Because you really understand what they want out of that business. There is a Vanguard study That I quote in the book. And they talk about trust and they have three. This is on the wealth side, but I think it applies, you know, to a lot of professional services. There's three aspects of trust that they really examined. One was ethical trusts. Right. You are ethical, you just say we're doing. The other was functional. So, you know, you're, you're going to actually be able to do what you.

Say you're going to do.

Right. Functional is you're going to do what you say you're do. Ethicals, you have their best interest at heart. And the other one was emotional. The ethical was 30%, the functional was 17% and the emotional was 53%. And so I think moving here forward in the future, Matt, it's having that human first approach. It's something that the computer can't take over, is having a person deal with another person who has a shared human experience. And people are, who do business with someone that they like are less likely to leave them. Right. They're more understanding when it comes to mistakes. So it's really using a human first approach to deepen that client engagement and that relationship by really uncovering, helping people uncover what they want out of life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, for most, most accounting firms, if you have, if you have a pricing page on your website, that's the second most common, like commonly visited page. But if you don't or, or in, if it's, if you have an about page that's in most cases we look at a lot of analytics, people go to the about page. That, that's the second most popular page except for maybe the pricing, if you've got it. The reasoning though, at least our, our interpretation of it, is that people need to understand what services you offer.

Right.

They, you have to be able to do the job. That's kind of that functional trust that you were talking about. They also need to know. Yes. That you're an ethical person. That, that's, that's important when you're working. Because accounting is a trust business. But I think that third, that third piece is really fascinating. People want to know who they're working with and they want to like the person that they're working with because accounting is such a trust based business and people go to the about page because they want to know what are the humans behind this. And I think a lot of, a lot of accounting firms tend to actually hide some of the best things about them, which are their people. And they don't do a good job of helping their prospects and their clients Understand? Yes. We're real humans. We like you and we're like you.

Right.

Those are the key things that you're trying to communicate.

Yeah. And I think this goes back to the business model Matt and I know you probably talk about, I talk about on my podcast is the traditional accounting model is broken. Having, you know, that's why I love Ron Baker and what he talks about more, that concierge model of really having those high touch points and providing for a number of different services to handle those clients needs as opposed to trying to do thousands of tax returns. I think as we're seeing, technology is going to take over a lot of that business. It's those that can quarterback that relationship that not only can survive, but then thrive here in the future.

Yeah. I don't know if you have a great answer for this or not, but I think one of the big challenges that mid size and firms that want to, that are large or want to get larger is it seems like a lot of firm owners feel pretty comfortable in that advisory role. But it's hard to scale that because it's not necessarily something that every staff accountant or tax manager, they don't necessarily have that same level of ability to kind of advise people. What's, what's your advice to firms who want to develop these skills in their people?

That is a good question, Matt. I think, I mean there's a number of different resources out there on the wealth side that, that teach this methodology more of that human first approach. But as you and I both said and you alluded to it, it's tough to take these firms that have been doing or operating one way for a long period of time. That's why you see a lot of these firms out there that are successful break off. Right. And just start anew. And so I think it's difficult to really change the culture within a lot of firms. There are some great firms that are doing it well out there that we're seeing those financial flywheel of services. And I think it goes back to when you have more services that are higher margin, you have more leeway. Right. To pay people more money. Right. To train those people. So I think it goes back to that business model. Once they can start going beyond maybe those financial statements and beyond those tax returns and into the, whether it's cybersecurity, IT consulting, financial planning, wealth management, they're able to then have those higher margins to hire the staff they needed to train the staff they want. So, you know, success begets success.

Yeah. All of these things are, are Connected. I, I have a friend who uses. He, he has a, a model he calls the law of the levers. I'll have to have him on my show at some point. But it's, it's a triangle. And each point you've got your positioning, your process and your people. And in the middle is the, the thing that you offer the product or the service. And whenever you adjust, one of ones have to adjust as well. You can't, you can't update your positioning to say we're a human first firm if you haven't trained your people or built in the processes that give them the facetime that they need. To have a human first approach, you have to, you have to address all these things at once. But it's often, I feel like the people who are really thinking about this space are all coming to similar conclusions. I think More advisory, more specific or niche using automation to support your business but having more of this face to face kind of guide. Focused advisory, focused firm seems to be the way of the future. And there's, there's different ways to get there, but all these things need to be addressed, you know, in order to like get your fill your firm there. Eventually. Yeah.

I mean for the larger firms out there, obviously they're bringing all this in house. But for those smaller firms out there, you know, you can connect with someone like Arrowroot Family Office or another wealth manager who can handle the personal financial planning, the estate planning, the wealth management needs of that client. And you can handle the business advisory, the cast work, the tax work. So that's a great powerful combination that you can leverage to start, maybe start integrating these services in an authentic way. So for those smaller firms out there, it's possible for those larger firms you're just seeing happening, the top 100 firms, they're all having this financial flywheel of services to really provide for the many business and in personal needs of the clients.

Yeah, well, I think that's a great segue, Rory. If folks who are listening want to learn more about what you do or find ways to work with you, like where do you, where do you point them to, how they find you?

Well, you can always reach me on LinkedIn, so just message me direct message me on LinkedIn. And then I have a number of different sites. The book which is coming out here shortly is advisoror.com that's a D V I S R O R dot com. We also have our educational program called Wealth Management Forward. That's wealthmanagement forward. Com and then also our family Office website is arrowrootfamilyoffice.com well, we'll make sure.

To get all of those links in the show notes here and I look forward to the book coming out, Rory. And I hope that our listeners check that out as well. We'll make sure that that will promote that when that comes out along with this, this podcast. Rory, it's been great having you here. Super fascinating conversation. I love this, you know, human first approach. I think that it, when you have a human first approach to business, it filters through all those other things. Yeah, I as a marketer would say, you know, I love it when firms have sort of that distinctive and, and really are focused on not just being kind of that commodity accounting firm. So, you know, there's different ways to get there. I think that this is, this is a really fascinating thing. I think that if you're a firm owner, you should really be thinking, you know, how does wealth management have a place in our business model as well? And if you're thinking that you should be talking with Rory, you should connect with him on LinkedIn. Any, any last nuggets of wisdom that you would, you would leave us all with today.

Oh my goodness.

No. Open ended question.

One thing because I'm passionate about it, Matt, is improv. I started doing improv eight years ago and I had a huge fear of public speaking. I never in a million years thought I can go on stage and take a suggestion and I don't necessarily think I'm funny, but some people have laughed a few times. That was a great way for me to step out of my shell, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It led me to raise money for a technology it allowed me to get. I have a podcast and start to write a book. So if anybody wants to challenge themselves, I highly recommend getting to improv and just taking a couple classes. It's super fun. You get to become a kid again and you should make make believe and play around with some great folks.

Wow. Well, that is, that is a piece of information or advice that I was not expecting. But I love that. I think that be. Become un. Become comfortable with being uncomfortable as a way to stretch yourselves. That's great advice, Rory. Thanks for being on the show.

Thank you, buddy.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you liked this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting Firms newsletter at marketing for accounting firms.com and you can connect with me, Matt Banker on LinkedIn or Twitter. We hope you tune in next time for another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firms.