A psychiatrist and a lawyer are talking at a party. The psychiatrist complains that he is having a terrible evening. “I’m trying to relax and enjoy myself, but every time I talk to anyone and they find out I’m a psychiatrist, they start telling me all their personal issues.”
“Ah,” says the lawyer, “that used to happen to me. But if anyone came to me with any problem I decided to give them an answer but then invoice them the next day. They soon stopped.”
“That’s brilliant,” says the psychiatrist, “I’ll try it. Thanks.”
The next day the lawyer invoices the psychiatrist.
It’s an old joke, but it can be filed under ‘funny because it’s true’. We all love to hate lawyers and this resentment is largely driven by the way they charge fees that we perceive to be expensive.
But we still pay them. This is key. However deep-rooted the public’s general antipathy towards lawyers is, however many jokes there are about how awful they collectively are as human beings, any dislike is more than balanced by the value we place on the work they do.
While we see them as money-grubbing, we still pay them the fee they ask for. And really, shouldn’t we admire their apparent comfort in asking for money in return for the service they provide? It is something a lot of advisers could learn from.
It may be difficult to maintain any semblance of confidence in the face of the bashing that advisers collectively suffered over the past 20 years or so, but if we are ever going to get to a stage where the general public does not view paying for advice as an insane concept, advisers themselves probably need to start believing that people should be paying them a fee. And let people know that they are confident enough in the value they can bring to ask for some money in return.
The popular caricature of lawyers paints them as arrogant, but I only have a problem with arrogance in people who don’t back it up with results. If arrogance means being confident enough to expect payment for a service provided, we should all be as arrogant as lawyers.
In the interests of balance, I should point out that my own industry could also learn something here, but again, advisers could also learn from our mistakes.
Large areas of the publishing world seem to have lost all sense of their own value.
There was much hand wringing recently following the news that the Independent would be closing its print edition. But the decision was almost entirely caused by the publishing industry itself, which has spent the best part of the 21st century making an almighty mess, repeatedly undermining its own ability to make money.
The internet is a wonderful thing, but it has taken established news sources years to work out how best to use it. If they have worked it out by now it will take still more years to unravel the mess they have already made of their offerings.
If arrogance means being confident enough to expect payment for a service provided, we should all be as arrogant as lawyersIn the rush to give everything away free, a lot of mainstream media forgot what made it valuable in the first place.
People point to declining sales of print newspapers and blame it on the rise of the internet but that is an oversimplification; it seems to me that more people are reading print newspapers than ever before, but they are reading those that they get free, rather than the paid-for titles that we see plummeting sales figures for.
I doubt anyone reading the Metro believes it to be ‘better’ than the Independent, Times, Telegraph, Guardian, or even the Sun, but its one selling point is that they don’t have to pay for it.
For many, that is enough, and the same is true of advice.
All the banks currently returning to the advice market are doing so in the knowledge that they will find an audience which is happy simply not to be paying for a service, however basic it is.
But, and I concede that I may sound like a naïve old romantic, I would like to think that there will always be a market for quality. People will pay for something if they perceive value in it, whether it is legal representation, print media or financial advice.
You don’t need to just be better than the banks, you need to be sufficiently better to justify whatever you are charging for your service, otherwise all those currently populating the advice gap will end up settling for advice that is ‘good enough’, which won’t help them and certainly won’t help you.
You need to remind the paying public that you provide a service worth paying for. And then convince them to pay for it.
