It took me twenty years before I finally realized what truly sets successful businesses apart from their competition. While I thought I knew what attracted clients to our wealth management firm, it took an online retailer to show me the root of our success – transparency.
My epiphany came when I stumbled across Everlane, an online store that sells high-quality clothing for men and women at reasonable prices. What distinguishes them and why I’ll be a loyal customer is how they live up to their company mantra, “Radical Transparency: Know Your Factories. Know Your Costs. Always Ask Why?” You see, transparency is something I’ve always valued, and it’s driven everything we do from how we communicate with clients to how we run our firm. I may have been looking right through the reason for a long time, but here’s why I think transparency makes winners:
Give your clients the information they need to make better decisions:
At Everlane, when you click on an item that’s for sale, say, a silk blouse, you see all the standard stuff we’re used to seeing like its measurements, what colors it’s available in, and its price. But what you might not expect to see is information about the model – how tall she is, the measurement of her waist, and what size she is wearing. They include information that’s really useful to help their customers make more informed decisions
The kinds of information we share with clients and the media has also evolved. We are done with white papers and commentary prepared to make us sound smart. We are also done offering up the same information clients can find everywhere else.
We want our clients to understand what’s going on in the world, but we put it in the context of how it applies to them and their families, and what we are doing about it. Our website has resources for the relevant financial issues that most of us face, like what you need to know about social security before your file in our Social Security Survival Guide, or the 7 Critical Retirement Deadlines you can’t ignore, or the 3 Things You Need Besides a Will and Why You Need a Will Too. Important, relevant stuff!
Show your clients how it’s made:
Everlane is challenging the cashmere market by showing us what goes into making a great cashmere product and why we don’t have to pay those huge retail prices to get a high-quality sweater. They literally open the factory doors so you can see where and how the item is made and where the material is sourced. You’ll find pictures of the factory, a bit of history on the owner, and some facts about the kinds of working conditions there on their website.
At Glassman Wealth Services, we want our clients to understand how we put together our investment portfolios and the thinking behind why we chose one investment over another. We open our doors and invite our clients to sit down with the investment managers who are in charge of the millions and billions of investor dollars that they manage in their funds. Some of our most enlightening discussions have come from questions our clients asked during these “Meet the Manager” meetings. By giving them ‘under-the-hood’ access and the ability to talk directly with the people who are investing their money, they have greater confidence in how and why they are invested. We also put together informative and entertaining videos, like Are Stocks Expensive? to explain our thinking and investment strategies.
Lead with transparency:
Too often, when you see those large brokerage firm ads, especially during the Super Bowl, you’ll hear them repeat the same tired terms – trust and objectivity. Do we really trust them more because they tell us to? If they can make money by recommending a specific investment, how objective are they? Trust and objectivity are foundational to any relationship. They can’t be gleaned from a website or brochure. It may be cliché, but they’re built and earned over time.
It’s time for businesses to offer something more refreshing and meaningful – like radical transparency. (In full disclosure, I wish I would have come up with that phrase.) It’s one of the reasons we are a fee-only advisory firm.
The big takeaway here is that I believe we are on the cusp of a new era, one where success in business will be driven by how open and connected companies are with their customers. Customers expect to receive great service these days; it’s a minimum standard. The question then becomes: what’s next? When we look ahead to the future, it seems all too clear to me that, to be succinct, transparency wins.
By : Barry Glassman
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