1 In 5 Clients Plan To Fire Their Financial Advisors

Dec 15, 2025

A startling study reveals that 1 in 5 clients are ready to fire their financial advisors! Wealthy clients surprisingly value services like personal trainers over financial advice. Advisors often lose out because their messaging lacks the tangible results that clients crave. To avoid becoming expendable, it's crucial to make your value visible. From understanding the shift in client perceptions to leveraging value packaging, this discussion offers strategies for advisors to ensure they remain indispensable amidst rising competition.

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INSIGHT

Wealthy Clients Shop Services Ruthlessly

Wealthy clients often value services like trainers and nannies more than financial advisors.
James Pollard highlights that high-net-worth clients are professional buyers who readily replace services they perceive as low value.

INSIGHT

Tangible Outcomes Win Perceived Value

Other service providers communicate tangible results far better than many advisors.
James Pollard points out advisors hide behind jargon instead of giving concrete outcomes clients can point to.

ADVICE

Make Value Obvious And Emotional

Make your value obvious, concrete, and emotionally compelling so clients won't cut you.
James Pollard advises turning invisible advisory work into visible outcomes to avoid being on the chopping block.

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The bar to stand out as a financial advisor is incredibly low.

Why?

Because most advisors think, for some reason, that their profession is immune from market forces.

This explains the results from a recent study that reported that 1 in 5 clients plan to fire their financial advisor.

And it gets way worse…

The study also found that people value their financial advisors less than they value the services provided by almost any other kind of professional: from personal trainers to pool cleaners to nannies and almost every other service you can think of.

Read that again: Your clients value their pool cleaner more than you.

The good news is that the bar to stand out is incredibly low. And after you listen to this episode, you'll understand why so many clients plan to fire their financial advisor… and how you can be one of the few advisors whose clients would never even think of firing you.

Listen now.

Show highlights include:

Why wealthy clients value almost every other service they pay for more than they value financial advisors (0:38)
Think you won't be fired because you serve high-net-worth clients? Here's why wealthy clients are more likely to fire you than a low net worth client (1:40)
The "point to" secret for making your clients value your services more than their weekly pool cleaner (this might sound silly, but it silently sabotages so many advisors' bottom line) (3:44)
How to be the advisor that doesn't get fired when your clients go through their expense reports (7:09)
Why thinking and approaching your marketing like Zillow does with real estate can prevent AI from stealing all your clients (10:13)
3 things that every client who hires a financial advisor wants from them (13:11)
The "Value Packaging" method that turns all the invisible things you do for clients into real, tangible, perceived value (17:00)

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