Financial Advice and Sliced Bread – Added value on your plate
The guy who said “Hey, why don’t we slice the bread, before we sell it” has long been hailed as the undisputed father of value-added, the founding father of product innovation.
That fateful day in 1928, at the Chillicothe Baking Co., Missouri, launched a product that gave the phrase ‘the greatest thing since sliced bread’ to every English-speaking country around the globe. It refers to any innovation that takes a basic product, and adds value, processing it into something more practical and user-friendly, more accessible. An innovation that delivers a better bottom-line benefit to the customer.
In ways, the financial planning business is the sliced bread innovation of the financial services industry. The financial planner takes the burgeoning number of increasingly complex mortgage, insurance, investment and pension products now available, and adds value by imposing order upon them, evaluating them, and selecting the best in a way that makes them accessible and usable for the ordinary customer.
Given the free availability of financial advice these days, though, often at zero cost, it is remarkable how many fail to take advantage of it. Rather than sitting down with a good financial adviser who can cut straight to the chase and give us a tailored solution to our own particular financial issues, so many of us prefer to labour on alone – still cutting our bread by ourselves.
A growing number of people have discovered the bottom line benefits of financial advice, however, and they always come back for more.
Those are the ones who know which side their bread is buttered on.
