Financial Advisers’ Empathy Gap

“We all must work together for the client, connecting and collaborating to help solve their problems.” – Jeff Motske

Robert Reiss: Let's roll back to 1999. Talk about your vision for Trilogy.

Jeff Motske: I created the model that we use at Trilogy Financial, which is the combination of tax, financial and estate planning. In my previous life I was in the retirement planning space, but I knew there was more out there. I was working with my clients, and I recognized they had needs that we didn't service. So, I built a little network to better serve those needs, specifically tax and estate planning. Then I realized that a more comprehensive solution needed to be created, and the only way to realize this vision was to start my own firm…and that was the very beginning of Trilogy Financial. The way I look at it, tax, estate and financial planning may be in different lanes, but they're all on the same highway heading toward our clients' final destination. We all must work together for the client, connecting and collaborating to help solve their problems.

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We are at our best as educators and space-makers for a deeper engagement with the financial world, and all our work with our clients should spur on hope.

Many people in my profession would not make an immediate leap from the late physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking to our work of capital markets, mutual funds and financial planning. This is understandable. Our work in financial advising is overtly pragmatic. It’s either mathematical or fervently personal, with little room for theory or imagining the “why” behind what we do. It is—I suggest—so much like the world of science Hawking was awakened to 50 or more years ago. He watched as the imaginations of his peers went deeply to the practical, to the technological, while he dreamed of deeper questions about how and why.

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