Client experience
Most fee conversations fail before they start, because the advisor is braced for an objection and the client can hear it.
Most fee conversations fail before they start, because the advisor is braced for an objection and the client can hear it. Defensiveness reads as something to be defensive about.
The underlying problem is that most advisors have never assembled the full number themselves. It is hard to be relaxed about a figure you are not certain of.
What a client pays is not your advisory fee. It is your fee, plus the weighted average expense ratio of everything they hold, plus any platform or program charge, plus anything else. Each part is disclosed somewhere. The sum usually is not, and the sum is what they pay.
Work it out for your ten largest relationships before you ever discuss it. If the total surprises you, it will certainly surprise them, and better it surprises you first.
The full argument for showing the all-in figure →
A client hears one and a half percent and files it under small. The same client hears fifteen thousand dollars a year and reacts entirely differently, because one is a ratio and the other is money they earned.
Say both. The advisor who only ever says the percentage is relying on the client not doing the multiplication, and that is not a strategy — it is a delay.
"What am I paying you for?" is rarely a challenge about price. It is a request for a list. Most clients genuinely do not know what happens between meetings, because nobody has told them.
So tell them, specifically and in their terms: the rebalances, the tax-loss harvesting and what it saved, the beneficiary error caught, the rollover analysis, the call with their accountant, the meeting with their daughter about the trust. Clients undervalue advice because it is invisible, and it is invisible because we have not shown it.
If you cost more than an alternative, the winning move is to name it before they do. There is a version of this that costs a third of what we charge. Here is what it does not include, and here is why I think that matters for you specifically.
That sentence does three things: it demonstrates you know the market, it treats them as capable of judging, and it moves the conversation from price to value while you are still the one framing it.
It also happens to be the substance of what a fiduciary standard expects you to have considered. You are not making a concession — you are describing work you were obliged to do anyway.
Do it in writing, in advance, with the reason and the date, and never in the same conversation as bad performance. Explain what has changed in what you deliver, not what has changed in your costs — the client is not buying your cost base.
Expect to lose a small number and price accordingly. A firm that has never lost anyone to a fee increase has probably left the increase too late and too small.
Say your all-in number out loud, in dollars, at a client's actual account size. If you flinch, the problem is not the conversation. It is that you have not decided what you are worth, and clients hear that decision before they hear the number.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Book 20 minutes with Kyle