Last week our friends over at Locavesting.com published an article I had written earlier this year after attending the ComCap Conference in Portland, Oregon. In the article I reflected on how it seems the financial advising industry was still as reluctant as ever to get on board with investing locally, even though 35 states have enacted rules to streamline local investment. I gave some advice to our industry colleagues about how they could support their clients interested in shifting capital to their own community, either through arms-length counsel or through direct leadership.
I closed the article with a word of warning that while baby boomers are just now coming around to this movement, millennials were practically born with the impetus to make the world a better place with everything they do and if advisors don’t adapt they may find themselves without the next generation’s business as a consequence.
We’re entering a new phase of societal stewardship where no longer are our activities as consumers, investors, and producers separated. The lines are blurring. Evidence is everywhere – from today’s workers looking for meaning in their work, not just money, to consumers voting with their dollars.
Imagine a world where you take your ‘Big 3 Ts’ (time, talent, and treasure) with a 360 degree view of your own consciousness as a consumer, investor, and producer and you make decisions from that perspective. Now think about the last conversation you may have had with your financial advisor. How much of your 360 degree Big 3 T view was discussed at that meeting? If you’re with the 90% of advisors who aren’t even SRI or impact focused, let alone ‘whole conscious person’ focused, you may be feeling a bit deflated at this point.
So what if the financial services industry, and the regulators who police them, don’t evolve fast enough to meet the needs of this growing conscious marketplace? What might the world look like then?
Maybe people will start creating neighborhood investment clubs.
Maybe advisors will leave the industry and become private sector non-regulated investors themselves.
Maybe charitable institutions will start recruiting those in their donor base who are also active dollar voters to join their board to diversify the financial perspective beyond the one financial advising firm they’ve contracted for years (and who regularly tells them investing for local impact is an outrageously ridiculous idea).
Or maybe the robo-advisors will take over the world. (Let’s hope not… we’ve all seen Terminator by now..).
I don’t know what the world will look like in 10 or 30 years. I only know that those of us at Revalue have adopted this 360 degree whole person conscious view, and that’s led each of us to do the work we do here with clients who are also on this path. If you’re disillusioned with your advisor, call us. And if you’re a disillusioned advisor looking for a better way, you can call us too.
Onward and upward friends.
