This month, we’ll be hosting, once again, our conference, the Insider’s Forum (September 16-18 in Denver, CO), and I’m working on all the various chores involving my presentation and moderating four panel discussions. I’ve attended many conferences over the years, and this exercise has me thinking about the various options that advisors can choose from as we move into the heavy part of the year’s conference schedule.
There is no shortage of them. In my mind, I tend to characterize the various meetings by the way that they attract their audience. The lines around the categories are somewhat blurred, but here’s what I’ve experienced after attending many meetings over the years.
One category is the conference whose attractiveness centers around a party atmosphere—I used to call them ‘carnivals.’ There might be substantive sessions, but the attendees are mostly looking for a good time in between CE opportunities. The most obvious recent example is the FutureProof conference, held outdoors on the beach in southern California, with food trucks and generous adult libations. The organizers pay (or comp) advisors to meet with exhibitors, charge exhibitors for those meetings, and the feedback I get from attendees is that they had a great time walking along the edge of the beach with a cup of beer in their hand.
The annual Schwab conference also seems to fit into this category; it features rock concerts in a local baseball stadium and extravagant food and beverage in the (enormous) exhibit hall. (I once found myself being served lobster pizza by the roving ladies with trays.) Often the keynoters have no idea who financial planners are—they’re championship boxers, basketball players, sometimes former Presidents or Prime Ministers, famous people, basically, and every third session is a breathless look at about how to use this or that wonderful feature of the Schwab platform.
Less extravaganza-ish are some of the other custodial meetings—the Altruist conference (formerly Shareholders Service Group) and TradePMR—which put more of a focus on trends and issues, less on flashy keynotes and breaking the food and beverage budget. Both tend to lean on their advisor community to give presentations.
I’ve been to a few broker-dealer conferences over the years, and they share many of the same aspects; the conference is a reward for the top offices and a celebration of another successful year—with a few serious sessions thrown into the mix to give credibility to the enterprise. I always have fun at these meetings, and never have much to write about afterwards. Credit the CFP Board with cleaning up the CE at these meetings; in the past (before things were tightened down), you could get an hour of CE from a session whose presenter started off by thanking all the producers in the audience for selling his product so productively over the past year, and now he’s going to tell you the best tips and techniques for selling a lot more.
The venn diagram of professional meetings would include some overlap between the carnivals and the software platform conferences—which, like the Schwab and BD meetings, focus much of the session content on their software features and how to better use them. These range from the extravaganza of the Riskalyze (now Nitrogen) meeting overlapping in the carnival space, through Orion (perhaps a small overlap), to the more serious practice management lineup at the Advyzon meetings.
The T3 conference strongly overlaps with the software meetings, but of course it includes virtually all of the platforms and programs—in the exhibit hall and in the session lineup itself. The interesting thing about T3 is that you can get a glimpse of the emerging practice management and client service trends most clearly through the eyes of the tech vendors and their presentations, which are telling the audience about the new innovations and features that their customers have been recently asking for.
There is very little overlap on this venn diagram between carnivals, tech and BD/custodial meetings and what I call the community conferences. The two NAPFA national annual meetings are the best example of the community category; they bring the NAPFA membership together once a year to compare notes, attend a serious session lineup, and one of the most powerful attractants is getting to see old friends in the profession once or twice a year. The NAPFA South conference offers the same dynamic.
Also firmly in this category is the XYPN conference, which has put an extraordinary amount of thought into breaking the traditional conference mold. The exhibit hall is a one-day (rather intense) affair of meetings and demos, and then the rest of the conference is devoted to serious sessions about how to build the firm of the future and explore new revenue models to serve nontraditional (aka non-AUM) clients. It’s a community gathering, future visioning exercise and celebration all in one.
Most similar—and dissimilar at the same time—to XYPN is the Nazrudin meeting, which breaks the mold to the point where it’s mainly dust on the floor. Naz focuses on what some would call the ‘soft’ side of planning, how to help clients overcome their own obstacles to achieving their goals, and even helping them discover goals they didn’t realize they had. There is no published agenda because the attendees make up the agenda from scratch in the first hours of the meeting—and I get the impression that everybody at the meeting knows everybody else and looks forward to the community aspect as much as the extended conversations that make up the sessions.
The FPA Retreat seems to be almost exclusively about the community that has evolved over the years around the meeting; I haven’t attended in a few years, but I am told that something like 70% of the audience are serial attendees—and that may be a low estimate. Very serious sessions during the day, festivities and networking during the evening.
I would put the AICPA Summit firmly in this category as well: it’s the upper-echelon of the CPA financial planners and a handful of technically-oriented non-CPA advisors who all know each other, and want to explore the (sometimes more complicated) non-technical aspects of the planning business. Retreat and Summit: two very different audiences, but almost total overlap on the venn diagram.
There as a time when the FPA National meeting fit into this general category, but the FPA community has grown a bit more amorphous (less cohesive?) in the last decade or so, to the point where, at the last conference I attended, people put in their time from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM to get their CEs, and then retreated to the conference hotel for drinks and dinner. Maybe it would be best to create a new category, in a separate part of the venn diagram, for an entry-level conference that caters to advisors who are still in the early stages of learning about the profession or whose primary motivation is to get a shot of CE credits and a general sense of what the advisory world looks like outside the walls of your office.
I see the annual AICPA ENGAGE conference in a different corner of this big venn circle. The meeting is overwhelmingly big, with a polyglot of attendees and a confusing exhibit hall. But if you can manage to navigate past the audit sessions and weave between the financial, tax and estate planning tracks, you can come away with by far the best technical planning education in the advisor space. Alas, the conference organizers seem to think that having a big name celebrity (with no awareness of the planning community) is an important keynote component of the meeting, but you can spend those couple of hours calling your office or getting work done.
The annual FPA NorCal conference is similar in content—with more practice management and client service sessions than ENGAGE, but also plenty of technical presentations. NorCal actually came in first in a conference survey we conducted several years ago for content and overall quality of the meeting. But I put it last here because most of the attendees come from the Bay Area, and in fact it’s hard for outsiders to register because space is limited to a conference hotel that the meeting outgrew sometime in the late 1990s.
Where does our Insider’s Forum fit into all of this? We’re probably in our own space on the diagram. Unlike the other meetings, we have a niche: unusually successful advisors who have ‘outgrown’ the traditional conference experience, who often know more than the esteemed presenter at a Schwab or FPA National conference. It’s a community still in the construction stage, but very serious, very demanding, and you would be hard-pressed to create material that goes over their heads.
The sessions tend to be focused on questions that I have about the future of the profession, and about newly-emergent best practices that I hear about from interacting with a thousand or so advisors a year. We try to define the frontiers of the profession in all its aspects: practice management, client service, marketing, fee models and the occasional technical content, and those frontiers are constantly advancing. It’s not easy to keep up.
There’s something for everybody in this rather large venn circle—and if anybody were to ask for my advice, I would say that your best option is to choose one or two of these meetings every year. Sample them and see what you like, what meets your needs, and find your community if you haven’t already.