It's all about YOU!

The premise of good financial planning is "know thy client", but what about "know thy planner?". We are amazed to see how many financial planning websites have little or nothing personal about the people offering this important personal service.

When was the last time you had a look at your "About Us" page? What did it say about the human beings behind your business? If it contains just a few feel good lines about how your practice is different but mentions no names or photographs, what type of message are you sending out to the world?

We weren't meaning to write an article about websites but we have just looked up the website of a financial planner we'd heard about. We wanted to learn more about this particular planner, not just his business, so we obviously clicked on the "About Us" tab on his website. And this is what we found out about "Us"...

1. A Mission Statement about helping clients realise their dreams (We hope so).

2. List of services - explaining all of the different services this business offers (which are not much different to any other financial planning practice).

3. Confirmation that all of the advisers (spelt two different ways) were all authorised and qualified (We really do hope so!).

After reading this, we knew nobody's name - not even the Principal's. We don't know what these wonderful advisers/ors look like, and more importantly we don't know how qualified each individual is.

Why on earth would we call anyone at this practice? We wouldn't know anything about them before we picked up the phone and we certainly wouldn't know who to ask for.

The sad part is that this website isn't the only one that hides the most important part of the business it's promoting - its people. There are a lot of shy business owners out there doing themselves a great disservice.

Your website is your window to the world - please make it transparent!

We are supported by a great team of talented writers and we love telling the world who they are. Not just because we know they're good at what they do; it's important that our clients and prospective clients know that too. What are our qualifications, our qualities, our quirks? What have we done that makes us empathise with our clients so we can write exactly what they want, usually hitting the mark in the first draft? What makes us different? Our Story page tells all.

Have you looked at your website lately? What message is it sending out?