The Cheap Quote and the Financial Adviser’s Empty Profile

“My compliance guy says we’re not allowed to ask for reviews.”

She’s a financial adviser, she’d been carrying that sentence around for eleven years, and she had never once gone and checked it.

I didn’t push. It was the third call that month where the same line turned up almost word for word, from three people who have never met each other.

So read the rest of this as a letter, addressed to whoever is about to reply yes to the cheapest of three quotes.

I read a lot of those quotes, because clients forward them to me for a second opinion, which is an awkward favor to be asked when my own bid is sometimes sitting in the same inbox.

They’re more alike than any of us would care to admit. Same pages, same promises, and the same silence in the same place.

Take it

Sign the cheap one. I mean that.

Not because cheap is good, and not because the expensive quote is a swindle. Because in your trade the website is not the thing standing between you and a ringing phone, and no amount of extra money moves the thing that is.

Look at what your industry already owns. 91.1% of the financial businesses I counted put a website on their listing, against the 83% I get across every trade.

The ones I opened were put together with more care than most trades manage, too. 76.1% of them carry schema markup, against 70.5% of everything I audit. Schema markup is a block of labeled code, and I put one into every site I build so the hours and the phone number are stated outright rather than buried in a sentence.

Careful and locked down is how your trade turns up everywhere I look, right down to the emptiest Google listings I count.

83.1% pass the checks Google runs on how a page holds up on a phone, against 78% of the sites I test.

Whichever of the three you sign, you get all of that, because all of it arrives with the software. The cheap builder and the expensive one are installing the same parts.

So what exactly is the extra money buying you?

Now the one check nobody quoted you for.

The check your trade finishes last on

51.5% of your trade holds at least one, against 88% of the small businesses on my list.

I lined every trade up on reviews one evening and read the list from the bottom. Financial services on the last line, with nothing at all underneath it.

Everything else about these websites is built with care, which is how the grade still lands near the bottom of my report card on the strength of two checks nobody at the firm has a report for.

Above it the psychologists, then the software companies, then the accountants, and then a long climb through every other trade I count to the restaurants near the top, who ask each customer on the way out and think nothing of it.

Google isn’t waiting for your permission to have an opinion about you, either. It builds a profile out of your listing and then invites you to come and claim it, and the panel a stranger meets beside your name is assembled almost entirely out of things other people typed.

Yours is already up there. So is mine, and so is the firm’s across the street.

The only variable between the three of us is whether anybody has written a word on it.

Have you looked at yours this year?

”We’re not allowed to ask”

Some of you are right about that, and I’m not going to pretend I know your rulebook better than the person you pay to know it.

But the SEC amended its marketing rule in December 2020 so that advisers can use client testimonials and endorsements, with conditions and disclosures attached to each one, and advisers had to be complying by November 2022.

Conditions are not a ban. Conditions are paperwork, and your profession is better at paperwork than any other one on my list.

How many forms did your firm file last quarter without anybody breaking a sweat over it?

So the honest question isn’t whether you’re permitted. It’s whether anyone in your office has read the rule since the day it changed, or whether the whole firm is repeating something a partner said out loud in 2013 that nobody has gone back and confirmed.

If you’re regulated somewhere other than the States, it’s still the same question. Has anyone actually looked?

What the ones who ask get back

The firms in your trade that do collect reviews come out of it very well. 4.4 stars on the average financial listing I checked, which is about what I’d expect from a profession full of careful people who return their calls.

That’s the part I find hard to watch. You aren’t badly reviewed.

You’re unreviewed, which costs the same money and feels like nothing at all, because there’s no complaint sitting in your inbox and no angry star to argue with.

Your competitor down the road isn’t beating you on the internet. She’s simply the only one of the two of you that a nervous stranger can check.

Funeral homes have the same shape of problem, counting everything inside the building and turning up nowhere outside it.

And what did you check, the last time you handed a professional a serious amount of your own money?

The asking part takes under a minute, which is the detail that makes the whole thing so annoying. You write a short note to the client whose mess you sorted out last month, put her own name at the top of it, and send it while the relief is still warm.

Do that once a week between now and Christmas and the empty panel stops being empty. There’s no clever version, no software that does it for you, and no afternoon of work that gets it done in one go.

Money, since we’re being blunt about it

Financial firms are a good chunk of what I build now, and I lose bids like yours most months of the year.

I’m not the cheap quote and I’ve never claimed to be. My prices are published, which saves the two of us an awkward email.

Even so, the gap between the cheap quote and the expensive one couldn’t buy you the one check you’re losing, because I’d be the wrong person doing the asking. Your clients hired you. The request only carries weight coming from the name printed on their statements.

That makes it the one job on this entire list with no invoice, no delivery date and no supplier, which is a strange way for the most valuable thing in a profession to end up.

One question, and I don’t want the answer

Take the cheap quote. Really.

Then work out what you’d have paid the expensive one, and ask yourself what that money was ever going to buy that a stranger could see from the outside.

Tonight, someone will hear your firm’s name over dinner and type it into her phone in the car on the way home.

What comes back?

And knowing exactly what’s sitting on your own listing this evening, would you hand her your savings?