What are the positives for business development from this period?
I was stopped at the lights in Brookvale yesterday waiting for them to turn green when I noticed quite a crowd across the road.
Nothing out of the usual – normally – but of course these aren’t normal times. And they were all keeping their 2 metre distances so quite a crowd was probably 20 people.
The surprising thing to me was what they were crowded around. A bike shop.
It made me realise that apart from Amazon and Uber Eats a few businesses must have found that this turn of events has operated in their favour and I presume that in this case – the weather having been pretty good the past few weeks in Sydney – a few middle age blokes have decided that they should get out of the house more.
Which set me thinking about the opportunities for business development for advice to which the past month has given rise. Many advisers tell us that a key role they fulfill for their clients is that of comfort and confidence building. They believe that their clients feel reassured that their affairs are under the guidance of an expert. And they should feel reassured. These are worrying times. Reading an article in the Economist this week from Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, he made the point that the turmoil in the market is more than a simple loss in financial value, it reflects concerns over previously unquestioned organisations and assumptions about how economies will work. Specifically, he asked.
“How many once-viable companies will be permanently impaired? How many people will lose their jobs and their attachment to the labour force?...The searing experience of the simultaneous health and economic crises will change how companies balance risk and resilience.”
If people with the experience and insight of Mr Carney ask these questions, what must it be like for people who haven’t had to think much about these matters and how the microcosm of their lives might be affected in a very real sense by the macro factors of the global economy.
Which brings us back to the role that advisers perform. Not of somehow having greater insight about how this will all work out than the Mark Carney’s or the CIOs and portfolio managers at fund managers. But of being able to help clients prepare for the inevitable downturns in their life – personal or economic.
And if advisers can do this for their existing clients, isn’t there an opportunity to do it for others who are not yet clients.
Watching people queue in a crisis to buy a bike, I took to wondering:
How many of these people had idly been to a bike shop in the past, looked at a couple but never had the final compulsion to go ahead with the purchase?
How many were there because a family member had said “Well if you can’t take any exercise at the gym, why not get a bike?”
And for advisers I thought:
Is this a good time to go back to the people you’ve spoken to in the past 24 months and ask them if there’s something they’d like help with now?
And for your existing clients, is this the time to ask them if there’s anyone they know who they think might be interested in talking to you and would they mind if you mentioned their name?
Then the light turned green.
Have a good week.
Toby Potter