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Financial planning is innately future-focused. It’s in the name—planning—which means to make arrangements in advance.
It’s not lost on us that this is, in many ways, in direct contention with life's inherent unpredictability.
And life is unpredictable—there’s evidence of this everywhere you look.
Almost every day, we’ll receive a call from a client saying: “Look, I know we had a plan, but something has just happened that’s going to blow that plan up.”
And we’ll say: “That’s okay. We’ll just need to make some adjustments to get you back on track.”
These exchanges say a lot about the role of financial planning. Perhaps it’s why financial planning is named as such, and not called “financial plan”. Planning is ongoing. It’s a living service that adapts and evolves in response to life’s unpredictability and the events that can never be planned for.
As advisors, our role is to build and provide that underlying pathway, the “track” we get our clients back on when life’s surprises come rocketing in.
While every client’s journey is unique, our business clients will follow a similar path over the course of their lives. The Ulton Client Lifecycle is a framework to represent this journey.
The Ulton Client Lifecycle© is a representation of how we see wealth evolve for our clients. Each stage highlights a key step in our clients’ journeys through business and life.
In this stage, our clients have either started a new business or taken ownership of an existing one. This phase is typically focused on setting structures up and growing the business to a point where there is surplus income available, which is generally used to start building up assets.
For most of our clients at this stage, business is booming. However, this is also the time where most families still have school-aged children and very high personal expenses. In this phase, it’s important that our clients are striking the balance between enjoying their success and living a lifestyle they enjoy, while also building off-business assets to set themselves up for the future.
In this stage, we begin focusing more intently on retirement planning, wealth accumulation and preservation, and succession planning. Our clients in this stage are usually some years away from retirement, but we begin having these discussions and shaping these plans with our clients well in advance. By doing so, we are mitigating the risks of any unwanted surprises, making the transition as smooth as possible.
The fourth and final stage, this is where our clients are navigating life events such as retiring from business, devising intergenerational wealth transfer strategies, and planning their estate. This is also a time for our clients to enjoy the retirement they have worked hard for.
This stage is also where we go beyond just estate planning, which aims to answer “what happens when I pass away?”, and look at capacity planning, which aims to answer a different question: “what happens if I’m alive, but not capable of acting for myself?”. This is an important part of the retiree phase and a topic we invest a lot of time in discussing with our clients.
We developed this framework because we reached the point where our advisors were drawing it for our clients in just about every meeting. It’s a simple graphic, but it serves many functions.
Most clients who are in their early business years will have moments of frustration. They are working harder than ever before, but are yet to see their efforts materialise in the way they envisioned. They wonder, “Am I getting anywhere at all?” and “How does my progress compare to others like me?”.
The lifecycle helps them understand their position in the big-picture, where they should be playing, and the importance of maintaining their focus on building their business so they can create that surplus income and get to that next phase.
The lifecycle shows what’s coming down the pike, so we can start having important conversations well in advance.
For example, I caught up with a client yesterday who is going through the process of selling their business. This is not something that has come out of the blue, the sale of their business and transition into retirement has been something that we have been having serious conversations about and working towards for five years. It’s a continual building process and it should be. This is how we make sure there’s no surprises waiting for us at the end—life has enough surprises in store for our clients already.
A big part of our job along the entire lifecycle is making sure that we have the to-do list ticked off at every step of the journey—making sure that our clients have insurance, wills, binding death benefit nominations, powers of attorney and so on.
For new clients who may not have checked off every item from their financial to-do list along the way, it’s never a case of missing the boat—the to-do list is there to identify exactly what needs to happen to get them caught up.
As advisors, our job is to take our experience with a wide number of clients over a long period of time and turn that into information we can use to guide our clients forward in the best possible way.
When we say we are with our clients at every step of the way, we mean it. We’ve seen all the ways life can be turned upside down through illness, divorce, death, and shifted family dynamics. We’re here to help our clients plan for the worst, hope for the best, and deliver clarity through life’s storms.
Financial planning isn’t something that is rendered useless when life drops bombs. In fact, it’s in life’s challenging times that financial planning, and your trusted advisor relationship, really shines.
Like we often hear ourselves saying to our clients—the plan’s blown up? That’s okay. Let’s get you back on track.
Reach out to our Ulton Wealth team to help you plan for each stage of your life's journey.
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