Brevity is not a term widely used in financial services. Many people think of it as terse speech or rude behavior. The truth is that it’s an underutilized and rare skill. The ability to be brief without minimizing value is a cornerstone principle of modern technology. RightCapital’s Snapshot feature is an example of brevity in action.
Carl Richards, CFP, wrote a book about one-page financial plans in 2015. In a recent interview with Michael Kitces, he described the concept as “the deliverable that clients will be looking at for the next thirty years.” He went on to say that financial planning is “not a product and event, but a relationship and a process.” We couldn’t agree more.
Preserving value with the deliverable clients want
The one-page financial plan introduced by Carl Richards faced questions from industry insiders. The most common reaction was, “How do we justify our fees if we’re not producing lengthy financial plans for our clients?” We see value differently. If clients can't understand the deliverable, the value of the effort is minimized.
Your computer has value because of what it can do. You don’t need a 300-page manual explaining how it does it. The deliverable on the screen is sufficient. Clients feel the same way about their financial plans. They don’t need a complicated PDF report when a snapshot can answer most of their questions.
The benefits of a one-page Snapshot
RightCapital has introduced brevity into financial planning. Our new-in-2022 Snapshot feature is a customizable, one-page view of a financial plan for advisors and clients. It provides in one glance what financial planners have historically communicated with multi-page reports that clients likely aren't reading completely and might not be able to understand.
Every practice is different, so we made Snapshot customizable. Advisors can choose which widgets they want to display. These could include net worth, a tax allocation summary, asset simulation over time, a balance sheet, and more. There’s even an option to add personalized messaging from the advisor.
Ben Henry-Moreland, an advisor on our platform, sums this up best. “Snapshot is a great example of why RightCapital is the best financial planning software right now,” he said on Twitter. “Most software outputs I would never put in front of a client. This is just so much better and will make it way easier to present the info that matters.”
How to scale your practice with Snapshot
Let’s return to brevity. Think in terms of more concise explanations, shorter meetings, and fewer client inquiries. With Snapshot, the client has a daily report at their fingertips. It’s dynamic, so they can see changes as they happen. You can too. There’s no need to go back in and recalculate all the numbers as RightCapital does that for you.
Dunbar’s number says that 150 is the maximum number of quality connections we can have. That was in the 1990s, without the technology we have now. Modern studies suggest humans can handle as many as 500 relationships. Saving time with each client means you can use that time to scale your practice with new clients. Imagine the possibilities. Snapshot is the tool that can help you do it.