07/09/2026
The daughter of a long-term pensioner client set up a gym in Ballarat.
A couple of years later, she set up a second, then a third and they have been running by the seat of their pants ever since.
Nearly six years of strong cash flow with exciting highs and sleepless lows.
Asset poor.
Very little superannuation.
For most FUM advisers offering comprehensive advice, these guys don’t, on paper, appear to be a client for whom they can create and sustain a valuable advice relationship.
That's understandable, considering the first question of traditional comprehensive advisers is how much money prospects have.
Everything else - the proposition, the pricing, the positioning, the decision to engage - follows from that first question.
Advisers become advisers to help clients with their money.
They build their businesses with clients who have money to manage.
Which is understandable if they are purely money specialists, promising to pick the best structures, portfolios, and returns while managing risks and understanding the client’s objectives.
But most advisers are not offering a money specialist proposition.
They’re specialists in financial relationships.
The Ballarat couple needs a specialist in financial relationships as they have created a business with real financial complexity.
These prospects are ubiquitous.
One of my Sydney-based advice clients had another example last week.
She had a number of inherited SMSF clients.
She had not had a lot of success scheduling a proper discovery meeting with them. Most of them, in their late-forties, are too busy and can't see the point.
Busy clients prioritising everything other than their own priorities.
Another of my clients in Toowoomba was introduced to a lady going through a difficult divorce.
She also has a recently widowed elderly mother not in the best of health, who now wants to sell up and move to Toowoomba to be closer to her daughter and granddaughter.
Ballarat business owners, busy SMSF couples, and regular families facing forced life transitions do not fit the ideal client profile for today’s financial planning industry, which has been fed on pre- and post-retirees with retirement sums needing management.
All these cases are stuck in real, unresolved complexity that, left alone, will shape their financial lives for years.
That's the advice client worth having.
So here's a question worth asking your team:
Which clients have you quietly written off because they don’t look like your “ideal client” - when the real issue is that you haven’t yet built the capability to see what’s actually going on for them?
If you want the advice grid I use with teams to identify these opportunities, comment or message me READY and I’ll send it through.
