We’ve all heard the phrase… “a picture paints a thousand words”… but do we use it in our business?
I’ve talked to two different advisors that have a different take on the same concept. Both are “safe money experts” and want to convey risk in a way people can actually feel it. They both effectively turned risk from an intangible, abstract idea into a concrete easy to understand idea.
One advisor has an actual crystal ball on his table that he hands to people when speaking about risk. He asks them to look into the future and tell him what they see… they get the idea. No one knows what is going to happen in the future.
The other advisor uses an idea that takes a little more work. He always has a house of cards built on a side table in his office. When speaking about risk he talks about always having a strong foundation of safety… because without that safety… if the ground your house is standing on shifts even a little bit (and he’ll shake the table), what happens to what it took you years to build.
Both these are fun ways to make a point about risk without going into all the gobbley-gook, financial lingo that too many advisors throw around. Simple stories and pictures beat out “standard deviation”, “alpha”, “beta” and all the other jargon we throw around… every time.