“Are You A Fiduciary?”
“Are You A Fiduciary?” – Links
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“Are You A Fiduciary?” – Transcript
As a fiduciary, we focus on the client.
We want to always do what’s right for the client. That’s what it means to be a fiduciary in this business, in this industry of financial planning and offering investment advice.
Now we have marketing agencies in our industry, they work with registered investment advisory firms, they work with financial planning firms. They deal with putting together marketing plans and building websites for investment advisors like Mullooly Asset Management.
And they’ve been telling us – for many years, more than 10 years… “don’t waste space on your homepage, or on your website, telling people that you are a fiduciary.”
(They say) it’s because fiduciary is a tired phrase… it’s an overused word…in our industry.
I completely disagree with that reasoning!
It makes no sense, and here’s why:
More than 50% of the people who come into our office for their first meeting, for their initial appointment to meet with us …what we call a FIT meeting… will tell us without any prompting, unsolicited, “well…I’m looking for a fiduciary to handle my investments.”
More than 50% of the people that come in, tell us that. I think the number is actually closer to two-thirds of the people who come in, tell us that they’re looking for a fiduciary.
Why won’t you just tell them on your website what you do?
You always have to focus on the client and doing what’s right for the client. That’s what it means to be a fiduciary in this business.
I’m going to give you another example of that.
Every day… every single day… we get requests for meetings from product sales reps. In our industry, we call them wholesalers.
These folks are from big firms like Goldman Sachs and other well-known investment companies.
But they’re also from other companies that, quite frankly, we’ve never heard of.
They have no track record. And they’re usually pitching a couple of different things. They’re pitching a new line of mutual funds or exchange traded funds. They’re pitching SMAs, which are called, which stands for separately managed accounts.
They may be offering a structured product like some exotic debt instrument.
Or they could be pitching an annuity.
They want us to put their products …and almost always, their products have higher fees, they have poor performance, or they have no track record – or all three. They want us to put these (products) into our client’s account.
Maybe these products will work.
But maybe they won’t.
We’re just not going to be experimenting with our client’s dollars.
We’re just not going to do that.
We want to keep things, especially on the investment side, we wanna keep things simple. Very simple, because simple works well.
There’s an old saying among U.S. Navy Seals “slow is smooth, and smooth as fast.”
And we will stick to what we know works well.
We operate in a universe, in the investment business, where stock pickers might beat their index every once in a while.
We’re going to act as a fiduciary for our clients.
We’re going to be focused on the client.
We’re going to focus on what works well, and do what’s right, for the client.
