About the Book
Scott Farnsworth, the author of Closing the Gap, describes the day a suspicious client jolted him out of his Flatland view of his professional world.
“About fifteen years ago, I had a highly successful practice as an estate planning attorney and private trustee in a small town in the South. I was a sole practitioner with an excellent staff of four full-time personal assistants. I owned my own office building and enjoyed a reputation as an excellent lawyer and a thoughtful, considerate, and honest person. My CPA told me he believed I was the highest-paid attorney in town, and perhaps best of all, I took off 165 days a year from the practice.
“One day, I was reviewing with some clients a set of estate planning documents I had prepared for them. They studied them carefully as we worked our way through them, and then on about page 27, the husband stopped me. ‘Mr. Farnsworth,’ he said, ‘when we first sat down with you a few days ago, we had a wonderful conversation about us, about our children and grandchildren, about our faith and the values that make our family what it is today and what we hope it will become in the future. It seemed to us that you understood all of that at the time.
"‘But now that we’re looking at these documents, we don’t see any of that in here. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Farnsworth, it looks as though you’ve just plugged our names into one of your forms.’
“He was right. I had. With the truth out in plain sight, I felt the need to do a little tap-dancing to reassure him; but the truth is the truth, and no amount of tap-dancing, however skillful, changes it. The client accepted my rationale for the moment, but his comment had struck a nerve. In my heart, I knew that this was really all I was doing for my clients, and for the first time, thanks to my client’s honesty, I began to realize that this was no longer enough.
“I’d been doing what is typical in my profession, and more than adequate by accepted standards, but I came to see that there’s a huge gap between what client and donor service typically provides and what they could provide¬—a gap that neither advisor nor client may realize exists, but one that leaves them both deeply unfulfilled.”
The Client Service Gap—and Why We Can’t See It
In SunBridge, we call this chasm between what is routinely offered to clients and what could be offered, the “Client Service Gap.” This book explains how we can begin to recognize that gap in our own professional lives and what we can do to close it.
To begin with, the trouble is we don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t see what can’t see. Anais Nïn wrote, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” This holds true in our professional dealings just as much as in our social and personal life.
One aim of this book is to expand your vision of what constitutes professional advisory services. This in turn will naturally expand the world of your work, its value to your clients and donors, and your sense of significance and purpose both professionally and personally.
All of this may seem like a grand promise, and it is—but it is a promise we see fulfilled every day. The approach and tools offered in Closing the Gap will not just change your practice; they’ll change you.
Many of your colleagues around the world who have been trained in the SunBridge method have come to feel that their work life has taken on a new dimension and depth. We believe you’ll feel the same. By contrast, the traditional way of doing business may seem flat, linear; a presentation in black-and-white instead of living color.
A Simple, Powerful Idea
The foundation of this approach is an ancient idea, and the essence of simplicity: By bringing an experience of value, significance, meaning, purpose, and fulfillment to your clients and donors, you‘ll create an environment in which you receive the same.
The main reasons we financial advisors, estate planners, and philanthropic professionals have been unable to put this principle into practice are that, first, we haven’t had the standard that would allow us to see that we were falling far short of it, and second, we haven’t had the tools that would give us a way to translate such a standard into practice. Closing the Gap provides both.
There is an old Hindu parable about six blind men who are asked by a person with sight to describe an elephant standing beside them. One blind man feels the elephant’s trunk, and says, “It is like a great snake.” The second puts his hand against the creature’s side, and says, “No, it is like a wall.” The third man feels the elephant’s leg, and reports, “Not at all; this animal is like a mighty tree.” The fourth blind man, feeling the elephant’s tusk, says, “You’re all wrong. This animal is like a spear.” The fifth and sixth men feel the elephant’s ear and tail, respectively, and begin arguing: “This beast is like a fan!” “No, it is like a rope.” And this goes on.
Though each man is partly right, all are in the wrong—not because of what they have envisioned, but because of what they have failed to take into account from the reports of the others. In much the same way, traditional financial advising addresses only a small part of the reality of client and donor service, ignoring the rest, and “missing the elephant” standing right before it.
Wealth is More Than Money
This deficiency of traditional professional advising which keeps it from seeing the big picture is based on reducing client and donor service to a transaction-based activity centered around money. Such activity, while undeniably part of the “elephant,” is just one part.
Money actually is not the most important form of a client’s wealth, but we professionals have trained clients and donors to believe it is, to the point that they don’t think of their wealth as something beyond money and property, and don’t even realize that they can and should be asking us questions of value and meaning that go beyond this.
At SunBridge, we firmly believe that professional advisors who do not rise to the challenge of meeting the needs of their clients and donors as human beings, who do not shift beyond the old transaction-based approach to client and donor service, will have increasing difficulty succeeding and even surviving professionally in the years just ahead.
Are You Ready to be a Pioneer?
We invite you to join us in blazing a new trail to a truly client- or donor-centered model of practice, where the advisor meets the client or donor at whatever level the client or donor may be, and then invites the client or donor to move—at the client’s or donor’s pace—to increasingly more profound levels of advisor/client relationship.
Ultimately, at Level Three, the professional advisor serves clients or donors as an architect of sorts, helping them define and design a future of greater abundance, purpose, and significance; as the drafter of the blueprints of that envisioned future; and then as a general contractor in turning their blueprint into reality.
The astounding result of this pioneering effort is the blessing of working with your clients or donors as real people, addressing the issues of all their wealth, not just their money, and in turn, enjoying greater abundance, purpose, and significance in your own life. This book is the map and compass you need to make that challenging but completely worthwhile journey.
