Doyle Brown, RLP • Reno, NV
Windrose Retirement Income Planners • SagePoint Financial
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I have learned that the most productive and satisfying relationship for both parties does not involve the selling of products. While we are in the primary business of helping clients with their financial planning, for me it goes much deeper. It is not just about accumulating wealth—and that perception of wealth obviously varies by client—but more about how a secure financial future can help someone in the pursuit of what is going to be meaningful in their lives. I tell clients all of the time that understanding their life goals really comes before trying to formulate their financial goals.

In terms of the financial planning side, I am interested in having clients understand their financial structure and bring to bear the appropriate resources for each foundation element of that structure. I am licensed for securities and insurance, but have to be able to guide clients to find the right solutions in areas such as legacy planning that will involve an attorney or a CPA for tax matters. There’s always a team approach: first, fully understanding the need; then,  selecting who is appropriate in each area of specialization.

I conducted a lot of due diligence—attending webinars, going to symposiums, and digging deeper into managers that looked like they had the approach I was interested in. While there are many alternatives, I found a few active money managers that closely fit my criteria and have been using them ever since. Third-party management is not a universal solution for all clients, but for most it can address the goal of trying to achieve a better balance of risk and return. These managers have an investment process that is repeatable over market cycles and not powerless in the face of the volatile markets. It is a vast improvement over an investment approach that does not incorporate strong risk management.

You also have to take the bigger view and see the risks inherent from a macro perspective: the shocks we have had to the financial system, the changed dynamics of the markets, and the huge asset flows rapidly moving in and out, more or less in unison. The strategies that may have worked well in the past may not necessarily work well going forward. The market may move up dramatically or we may have further dramatic bear markets. I want my clients to be prudently positioned in either case. I am convinced that history tells us there will be surprises and shocks in both directions.

Let me give you two ends of that spectrum. I work with a fair number of clients with engineering backgrounds and they like to understand how everything works—they really appreciate the discipline of a quantitatively based investment approach that utilizes objective and systematic models.

On the other end of the spectrum are clients who might be classified almost as

investment-phobes. They find the markets to be intimidating or just lack interest in trying to understand the nuts and bolts. They can be very indecisive and driven by emotions. Having professional money management applied to their portfolios removes that emotion from the decision-making process. That is very reassuring for them and also just makes good investment sense, freeing them up from the fear-and-greed cycle that sabotages so many investors.

For all of my clients, I want people to understand what the possibilities are for themselves, their families, their assets, and their futures. I want them to make informed decisions and to have access to the solutions that will work to enhance their progress toward the goals that are truly important.