You see, there’s an important reason why every corporation has a chief financial officer on staff. The president and key executives, and the board of directors, need to be able to rely on somebody who understands the financials at a deep level, somebody who can keep them fully informed of the financial situation, and the trends, what the company can afford and when it’s able to take risks. Without the chief financial officer, it would be impossible for the executive team to steer the company toward success, and make course corrections as necessary. It would be like sailing a ship on the open ocean without a navigator; the difference between success and disaster.
You see, there’s a reason why every ship has a navigator. The captain selects the destination, and the navigator makes a plan, which we call plotting a course, before they set sail. The navigator knows how to monitor the weather and steer around obstacles without compromising the progress toward the destination. Without the navigator, and the course that the navigator plots at the direction of the captain and the ship’s officers, the ship would be running circles in the ocean.
You certainly understand why the chief financial officer and the navigator are key staff members, not people brought in at first to make a plan and then leave. No corporation ever succeeds without overcoming unexpected obstacles that often show up first in the numbers. A ship may face storms or other emergencies. The plan, or the course, may have to be adjusted over time; the plan requires ongoing planning to keep it relevant.
In our working relationship, you’re the company president, and we’re the chief financial officer. You’re the captain, and we’re the navigator. You set the course, we monitor the plan and help guide you to inevitable adjustments so that the goals can be achieved and the destinations reached.
Of course, that’s only a part of what we do. We also take over a lot of menial, complicated tasks so that you can give your time to more important, more interesting things in your life. And we ensure that your financial situation is well-organized, well-understood, and resilient against life events and outside shocks that happen to all of us.
Because we do these things for a fairly broad spectrum of clients, and because we have advanced tools, expertise and experience, we can offer these services at a reasonable fee. And I can tell you that we get a lot of satisfaction out of the success stories that we help our clients achieve—that pays us as much or more than anything we earn monetarily.
This was how many advisors described their financial planning services in some of the early days of the profession. Looking back, I’m not sure we’ve greatly improved on it in all the years since.