If you buy the $5 trillion baby boomer market opportunity, are you optimising the transfer of your clients’ assets or the transfer of your clients’ resilience?
There is a huge difference.
Most expert commentary focuses on the “assets” as if it will occur in a linear fashion when all the evidence today suggests that it will occur at a time that the heirs to the baby boomer wealth, are highly vulnerable to shocks and disruption (aggressive IHT changes, wealth taxation, currency instability and geopolitical changes).
In a world where social media has promulgated millions of so-called “experts”, it is time now as the smartest linguist I know, Alan Weiss, stated this week, to raise the bar. If you are in professional services, financials services, business services and are not seeking to be known as, quoted and cited as, and seen as, “The Authority” in your field, you are not trying hard enough. You need a new Personal Strategy.
With due attribution:
Who do you want to be in a year? Known as the Authority to……
What do you want to be doing in support of you want to be? (referrals, networking, speaking, publishing, hosting private events, Board or Charitable leadership roles etc)
What do you need to move from where you are to what you’ve described? (what must you maintain/contine to support, what must you improve, what must you jettison, what must you acquire. Pick a small list, schedule in calendars, and start immediately).
The entrepreneurial risk-taking journey is not for everyone but one critical reason is often overlooked. The propensity of owner-managers to overestimate their ability to manage risks they are taking today and underestimate what can go wrong at the point of realising wealth.
When the risk-taker uses the business as a personal “cash machine” to fund their lifestyle (salary, dividends, drawings tec) a form of co-dependency arises until there is a weird screeching halt at the point of, and post, a sale of the business.
That familiar replenishing cash machine is no longer, you are now exclusively in the investment management business.
Yet a great many small and mid-sized business owners are not good managers of their own personal capital (cash, credit and investment), and many are poorly advised. They leave it too late to change their own mindset, and behaviour and preparation for their new life.
They act like gamblers rather investing to win.
It is like the guy who wins on the first race at the horse racing track but who freely gives it all back and more to the bookies while entertaining his friends, and walks out a loser after the last race.
If you are serious about building, nurturing and realising business wealth for a long and improved life, you need the discipline and skills of a professional investor not a punter.
