Q: What would you like to say about how life planning has changed your personal and professional life?
A: I was first exposed to life planning in 2003 and it has made a profound impact on my life, especially after completing the 5-day and the mentorship.  On the professional side, I now have a crystal clear vision of what I want my business to look like and have made quantum leaps forward in both focus and income.  My income has increased nearly 400% since 2003 and I am rapidly moving my business to the next level.  Personally, I have developed a bold life plan that includes significant foreign travel with my family (including 3 weeks in Italy next summer), 8-10 weeks of vacation and personal development time each year and creating my ideal life style within the next 2-3 years. 

Q: What helped you to decide to enroll In your first Kinder Life Planning workshop?
A: As a charter member of the “Type A” personality club, West Point graduate and former military officer, I found the offer of deep exploration, emotional connection and mindset shifting offered by George Kinder at a short 2-hour presentation both intriguing and a bit scary.  This led me to enroll in the 2-Day training, which was transformational on a personal level.  After applying the knowledge from that to client relationships, it became clear that this is how I wanted to practice financial planning.

Q: How does your Life Planning Practice differ from the other Financial Planning Practices in the area?
 A: I believe I provide a much deeper and complete client experience than the “standard” financial planning practice.  Further, I truly feel that the client is the client – not their money.  Having worked in traditional financial planning for a number of years prior to striking back out on my own in 2002, I feel that many traditional financial planning practices spend much of their time focusing on the money…how to gather it, grow it and protect it – instead of focusing on the client’s innermost dreams and letting the money support the client’s life plan instead of the other way around.

Q: What are the top 2 actions you have taken to spread the word about your Life Planning practice?
A: I have spoken at several regional financial planning conferences on the “How and Why” of adding financial life planning to a traditional financial planning practice.  That has stirred a lot of interest from traditional planners and a number have actually become clients.  I have also started networking with psychologists and other “helping” professionals, such as consultants, acupuncturists and others to provide an outlet for financial challenges they inevitably encounter.  As an adjunct, I am also very close to completing a professional life coaching certification, which provides additional soft skills in dealing with sticky client situations.

Q: Describe a client situation where Life Planning made a profound difference
(for the client and/or for you).
A: I have an engineer client in his mid-30s who has accumulated a low 7-figure portfolio, primarily through parental gifting over the years.  He has two young kids at home and was really stuck on the “engineer path” of working 35-40 years for a big firm, gradually working his way through the ranks, but at the cost of many late nights and missed milestones in his children’s lives.  I had been working with him for a number of years, but the LP skills enabled us to make a huge breakthrough around what was possible for him.  As a result, he dropped out of the rat race, joined a much smaller firm with far more flexibility and is now on track for an equity stake within several years.  He now spends much more time at home, never misses an event with his kids and reports much great satisfaction with his work environment.  Merely introducing the LP skill set to the discussion made an incredible difference and allowed us to craft a life plan that allows him to live a rich, conscious life now (not in 20 more years).

Q: What were the most significant challenges you have overcome in your practice and
how did you overcome them?
A: My biggest challenges over the last 2 years have revolved around how to build a true business – and not just a lifestyle practice – while maintaining my own freedom to practice from anywhere in the world with a laptop and a phone without sacrificing client service and satisfaction.  Fortunately, the explosion of ASP software, outsourcing solutions and virtual assistants have made it possible to create a virtual team that not only supports my vision of a completely portable business, it also does it less expensively than a traditional “brick, mortar and employee” solution.

Q: In what ways is your practice more successful since you have added Life Planning?
A: As noted above, I have seen a large increase in income since I began integrating LP into my business.  In addition, my profitability ratio has increased to about 70% as I focused on lean, mean and flexible.  I am now exploring strategic alliances with other financial planners that will allow them to focus on the traditional pieces of planning and allow me to work on the life planning/life coaching aspects.