I deal with lots of different participants in the financial advice industry. One of the features that marks owner-operator financial advisers out as particularly different is their sense of ownership or even stewardship of the industry. While running the smaller adviser businesses they know that collectively these advisory businesses account for a substantial majority of the insurance advice given nationally: that's what gives the sense of ownership, or stewardship, of the wider industry of advice-giving on insurance.
Each business has its own unique approach to giving advice - often quite different from the next just down the road - yet each has a common sense of pride in their service approach to clients, and that personalised advice is the right approach.
Where this leads to engagement, a dedication to high standards, and the kind of attention to detail that leads to great advice its good to see. Sometimes, however, it leads to being over-sensitive about a perceived criticism. Take underinsurance for example, when we talk about this we often have to get past a period of distrust. Sometimes when people talk about underinsurance they are implying a criticism of the adviser market. Advisers do dominate the market, but that doesn't mean that it's their fault there is underinsurance.
The advisers that do best, in my view, are the ones who take their stewardship of the needs of the customer to the point that they develop a sense of mission and build businesses that are about achieving that mission.