Musings – Devon Ryderwood Investments

One’s reputation can be compared to a tomato. As lovely as it looks otherwise, if it’s got a blemish of rot on it, nobody wants it anymore.

It’s not like a financial advisor has to have bodies buried in their backyard either. Online reputation is a particularly insidious thing that’s sensitive to even the slightest non-positive comment made about a financial advisor, or anyone else for that matter. If negative online commentary is not managed promptly, it has a tendency to spread and get out of control very fast because it’s so easy to copy, spread, distort and amplify negative comments that are left online (and negative comments and news tend to spread faster than positive ones).

If you think about it, sites like Facebook and Twitter are little more than bragging and gossip forums where the same people who used to spread rumours in high school tend to congregate (it’s no coincidence that the Dementoid in Chief, Donald Trump, loves to use Twitter). This is particularly bad news for investment and realty advisors because they stake their business on maintaining a good long-term professional reputation in a highly commoditized and competitive field and because they deal with something that people care about almost as much as they do their health, namely their investments and their wealth.

A financial advisor or realtor shocked by online content written about him

Imagine you are a retail investor who, for some reason, has decided to find a new investment advisor (perhaps you have moved to a new city or have decided that your current investment advisor is not as skilled and responsive as you’d like). You might ask someone you know and trust if they know a good advisor, but you probably would just start searching online to find two or three good candidates. You plunk the two advisors’ names into good ol’ Google and you discover that both have similar backgrounds, work for equally prestigious investment dealers, speak your native tongue, etc. But then you see a link to a website with comments about one of the advisors that is concerning. You read the investor’s opinion that the advisor was not so responsive or proactive, that they put them into risky investments that performed poorly and, most damning of all, that they exhibited some kind of eccentric behaviour. Like most people, you are not likely to become a client of such an advisor (and if you already are a client of theirs who was already having second thoughts, you might start looking for a new one soon).

If the president of the United States can be elected largely on the basis of fake news, it’s easy to imagine that even a fake negative comment about an investment advisor can have a massive detrimental impact on their career. What matters most is the nature of the opinion, though, not so much whether that opinion is necessarily correct. Jilted lovers, unreasonable former clients or even unscrupulous other advisors who would like to damage an advisor can all leave exaggerated or outright incorrect damaging comments about a financial or realty advisor online (remember, psychologists tell us that the incidence of sociopathy is around 3%, so there are a lot of bad investors and others in society who wouldn’t hesitate to ruin someone by posting lies about them online).

Investment advisors are generally well acquainted with the concept of risk management in the context of managing investments for their clients. But too often they are unaware of the major risk posed to their own finances by a stray bad comment left in any corner of the Internet that Google and others can serve up to any prospect, client, employer, or business partner.

The 3% incidence of sociopathy is perhaps a good proxy for the risk/probability that the average financial advisor or realtor will eventually become the victim of abusive and damaging online commentary made about them (This risk rises, of course, if the advisor is below average and actually not a good advisor).Using this figure, then, let’s roughly calculate the financial damage to a full-service investment advisor’s business of receiving bad reviews online.

Assumptions and reasoning:

Annual average client churn of 10% – source: McKinsey & Co / PriceMetrix report on advisor churn and retention). Note that clients who leave are mostly unhappy; these are the most likely people to leave bad online comments.
Average AUM per investment advisor of about $100 million across the 10 largest investment dealers in Canada (source: Advisor’s Edge 2016).
Average 1% annual fee revenue at a grid retention rate of 50% (advisor keeps 50 basis points).

The mathematical logic then becomes:

The probability of a bad review popping up in any given year of 3% x 10% churn x $100 million x 0.50% + alpha (where alpha, estimated at 5%, is the chance in any year that the advisor will do something wrong that will lead to negative comments online (e.g., lose temper with a client, break a compliance rule, unknowingly or not, forget to do something for a client)).

(3% x 10% x $100,000,000 x 0.50%) + (5% x 10% x $100,000,000 x 0.50%)

= $1,500 + $2,500

= $4,000

This dollar figure represents the average amount per year that the average financial advisor should be spending on online reputation management, even if no negative content about them has appeared yet online. The amount that should be spent to manage an already bad online reputation is likely substantially higher.

The future cost of losing clients due to bad reputation online

There is an opportunity cost of future clients not won plus the opportunity cost of lost revenue from clients who leave (on a net basis). Let’s conservatively peg that as double the average annual churn rate of 10%, multiplied by the starting size of the average book (Assets Under Management) of $100 million, as stated previously.

The simplified math for this is:

2 x 10% x $100 million x 0.50% = $100,000 income lost per year, for every year that the bad online reputation is not corrected (more difficult as time goes by without it being managed properly).

A poor reputation online can cut your investment advisory business by more than half! At Devon Ryderwood, we’ve seen it happen and it’s not pretty. Clients see those festering online comments and they leave. New ones don’t sign up. Advisors have lost their homes and cars over a few bad comments left about them online.

So pay an expert to monitor, improve and manage your online reputation or pay a much bigger price when someone starts slagging you on the Internet.

Manage your online reputation to prevent the dominoes from falling

1. Invest in your education

Now is the time to earn your stripes by learning new skills and training for a better tomorrow

There are credible things that you can do to improve your career prospects even if you have no money to spare on training right now. For example Coursera and EdX are examples of online platforms that offer many courses for free. If you do want to have a certificate that you can later display on your LinkedIn profile, then most are relatively inexpensive.

There will be a ton of competition for jobs over the next few years, and the people who get them are likely to be the ones who have taken the extra time they had during the pandemic to improve their qualifications. Take a quick look at the course offerings at Coursera to get started planning the upgraded version of you.

2. Invest in your relationship with your family and loved ones

Be kind and helpful to those you love. You need their support more now.

It may be outdated now from a gender inclusion standpoint, but there is a lot to the old adage that behind every successful man there is a woman (today’s version might be either: “behind every successful man there is a woman rolling her eyes” or “behind every successful woman there is a man”).

The point is that your family support system is crucially important to your financial success. They are important sounding boards, financial contributors, child helpers, and primary mental and physical healthcare givers.

Without people around you who are willing to support you, it’s much more difficult to succeed in any area of life. So treat your family well. Tell them you love them. Do your part around the home. And help them out. This is especially important during the anxious time that we are living in now amid Covid19.

There are numerous reports that show women are particularly grateful when their spouse voluntarily takes the time to clean and tidy up around the house. (Study: Women Find Men Who Do Housework Sexy – ABC News)

So, by not being a loving husband, think of all the time you might otherwise have to waste in arguments or simply dealing with an unhappy wife and kids. That takes away from your time and energy that could be better directed toward building your education, career or business. So, men, start thinking about cleaning up around the house as an investment, not just a wasteful chore.

And, for both men and women, take enough time to play with your children every day. They will be happier and less likely to bother you later when you need to get your work done.

Think of 1 hour out in the backyard with your kids running through the sprinkler as an investment (and, of course, as a time to unwind and destress).

3. Invest in your physical and mental health

Establish a better exercise, diet and emotion management plan.

First, ask yourself: do you really need to eat 3 meals and 3 snacks a day? The habit of eating breakfast is apparently one that only gained currency in the 1800s after the cereal company

Kellogg’s started telling people that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s simply not true, but it certainly was a good marketing ploy by Kellogg’s. And, unless you are a body builder, there is no need to snack between meals. Burning off all those calories is hard to achieve, even with the most intense exercise programs and keeping your blood sugar high in between meals essentially leads to corrosion of the cells in your body: not a recipe for maintaining or regaining healthfulness.

If you want to melt away belly fat, it’s remarkably powerful to simply stop eating sugar, bread, pasta and other starchy foods. Give all this a try and you’ll be amazing by the results of these simple change to your diet.

Another investment in your good health is by taking care of your emotions. Whenever you can, listen to good music (what’s important is that it is music that you like). You can also watch funny animal clips and look at beautiful photographs to improve your mood quickly. If you live in an uncrowded neighborhood, you can also take a 20+ minute walk out in nature. A recent study in Japan found that walking in nature daily hugely increases immunity and one’s sense of well being, both of which are super important during the Covid19 pandemic.

Lastly, one of the most effective ways to boost your mood is to go to Google.com/images and then search for smiling babies. This is because humans are hard wired to like and be calm around infants. Here’s one that is particularly sweet.

As for exercise, you don’t need gym equipment. Running up and down the stairs 10-20 times will get your heart beating faster than any elliptical or running machine ever will, and bodyweight exercises are good for building or maintaining muscle.

High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT for short, boosts both the number and size of mitochondria in cells (these are the powerhouses of our cells), so doing HIIT actually will boost your energy. For a fun workout, turn on some music from the disco/funk era of the 70s and simply dance around your living room for 20 or 30 minutes. If you have kids, get them involved, too; they’ll probably giggle along and make it even funner for you.

And if you think you might need professional advice to boost your physical fitness, then an excellent person to contact is George Pintilie, who is a certified online fitness coach. Here’s his LinkedIn profile and Facebook page.

4. Invest in gratitude

Take stock of the good things you have in your life and consciously practice an attitude of gratitude.

This is very important for developing a contented mentality that will get you through many tough times as it will make you resilient. Humans, particularly during Covid19, are surrounded by bad news and pessimistic people, so it’s super easy to fall into the habit of focusing on negative things in life. To overcome such negativity, you must develop the conscious habit of looking for positive things in the world for which you then express gratitude.

You don’t have to be Bill Gates or Adrian Lima to be grateful (and who knows if those people even are happily grateful for all that they have). You can be grateful for so many small things and for things that people tend to take for granted. For example, the next time you see a beautiful flower, say to yourself that you are grateful for the fact that you could see it. Start to regularly think about things that you can be grateful for. Think how great it is, for instance, to have electric light, the Internet, clean water, your best friend, your skateboard, your car, whatever. The point is to look for and then to focus on the positive in what you have and in whatever happens. Look for the good in people, things and events and you will be happier for it. Developing an attitude of gratitude is an investment in your happiness and, resultantly, in your productivity, too. Remember that negative thinking has never made anyone happy or wealthy.

5. Invest in better financial advice

If you also have money to invest, then reconsider your investment plan and the advice you have been receiving. Maybe it’s time for a change in your portfolio and your advisor.

If your advisor is a garden variety advisor, then they are probably not familiar with or skilled in all the strategies that really should be part of your wealth building and protection strategy. Ask yourself, for example, does my advisor likely know about the Analyst Coverage Differential Strategy, Collared Option Strategies and Long/Short strategies, which can help alleviate or otherwise take advantage of the current volatility in markets due to Covid19? There’s a good chance that your advisor actually isn’t that knowledgeable and skilled in these strategies. So, it’s probably time for a change and Devon Ryderwood can help you find the right advisor for you.

The reality is that, like professional sports, only a small percentage of professional investment advisors are excellent and highly worth seeking wealth management advice from. Too many lack the breadth of investment knowledge, skill and duty of care to make it into the top ranks of advisors. Realizing this, you might be tempted to do your own investing online at one of the many trading platforms or you might use a robo-investor. But this is often not the optimal solution, for a few important reasons.

First, you may say to yourself that no one will ever care about your money and your investments more than you. And you’d be right. But that would be missing the forest for the trees, because caring so much about your money and investments means that you leave yourself more vulnerable to trading in and out as you become emotionally involved. It’s better to have another person, a competent and caring professional advisor, who can more objectively manage your money. That advisor will prevent you from making emotionally charged trading decisions that can be devastating to your long term financial performance and retirement.

The good news is that top investment advisors do exist. The problem is that most people are ill equipped to know how to identify them, so you should seek help in this regard and Devon Ryderwood can do that for you.