What is Your Safe Harbor?

In 1995, during his years in exile from Apple, Steve Jobs gave an interview that could have been advice to most successful professional service firms.

Jobs said companies often stop innovating when they become successful. The product people—the innovators who know what make offerings useful, elegant, and different—slowly lose influence. The power shifts to sales, marketing, distribution, and operations. The company still looks successful, but something essential has been lost.

It forgets how to make something great.

That warning feels uncomfortably close to wealth management.

Our industry talks constantly about size, process, scale, fiduciary duty, comprehensive planning, model portfolios, and client experience. Of course, comprehensive planning is good, and fiduciary duty is (or should be) foundational.

But too often, those words become the wrapper around advice that is not very different from what everyone else is offering and doesn’t matter very much.

A branded mutual fund lineup is not innovation. A 60/40 stock and bond portfolio ─ a common product of investment firm questionnaires and software ─ fell victim in 2022 to the worst bond market in almost 40 years. It was not resilient and it wasn’t a financial plan, just a portfolio.

A quarterly review of performance numbers doesn’t restore order in a family’s financial life. And “comprehensive planning” can become one more polished phrase that sounds important but does not answer the client’s real question.

What we really want to know runs deeper:

Will my spouse be okay if something happens to me? Can I retire without becoming a burden? How do I protect what I built? How do I reduce taxes without making my life more complicated? Will my wealth planning support family harmony and relationships?

Will I be okay? 

The process? One challenge solved, then keep building. That is where financial planning adds value and remains innovative.

Jobs was a product genius. He found emotional connections between products and the people who use them. Our product is knowing which decisions move the needle and which ones merely fill the service calendar or meeting agenda.

What is your safe harbor? Define it today. Then read next week when Steve Jobs helps shine some light on U.S. health care.