Dear Greg Richguy,
I had an appointment today to meet with one of your recently-minted financial advisors. We knew him before he worked for you. He was a pretty nice guy. We met in our home, told him what we wanted, and he said he’d get to work finding an appropriate product. We thought that we were going to his office today to meet with him, discuss two or three different product options, and then choose one that suits a hole in our financial planning.
Dear Greg Richguy,
I had an appointment today to meet with one of your recently-minted financial advisors. We knew him before he worked for you. He was a pretty nice guy. We met in our home, told him what we wanted, and he said he’d get to work finding an appropriate product. We thought that we were going to his office today to meet with him, discuss two or three different product options, and then choose one that suits a hole in our financial planning.
What we got instead was you relentlessly attempting us to engage us in some other conversation for an hour.
Now, I’m sure that your bombastic, egotistical presentation and flagrant salesmanship impress people. Heck, it impressed me. I was really impressed with your ability to wield a tool of influence like Reciprocity with panache. I was even more impressed with your smooth deflection of my hostility toward an attempt to influence me by your explanation that you weren’t trying to influence me, and what I was actually hostile to was the truth of what you were saying.
Wow, how profound. I even told you, “that’s a question that causes me to be hostile because you’re setting me up to give the answer you want” and you deflected that into “I’m sorry you are hostile at having the lies you’ve been told about your finances debunked.”
Well, Greg, let me count the ways in which you set up influence opportunities, followed through, fell short, and were frustrated. Rather than the straight-up deal we came in there expecting, you wanted us to buy into some financial planning services. You described that I was the “owner” and the “quarterback” of my financial team, with all kinds of people with their own interests acting as the linemen keeping me from getting sacked. You, you told me, would be my “head coach” to ensure all those financial people are blocking effectively.
Listen, jackass, this ain’t a football game, and the people I hire to provide specific services on my behalf will do what I have asked them to do or they get fired and I find someone else.
You set up reciprocity nicely. I have a nervous habit: I tend to keep my hands busy when talking. Otherwise, I talk with my hands or tend to do embarrassing things like pick my nose or scratch in unacceptable places. I’ve learned that if I can quietly keep my hands busy, I avoid those embarrassments. I fiddled with the mints, bottled water, and the shiny coasters on your table.
You pointed out to me that the only intrinsic value those coasters had for you was the fact that I was entertained by one in that moment. That people mattered.
You lectured me for fifteen minutes on that topic. You stroked my ego by suggesting that I was smart. You also tried to flatter me by talking about the “two types of people in the world — consumers and producers”, suggesting that I was one of the few, the lucky, the producers.
Don’t you see this is a trick? It’s a sham? It’s purely a technique to try to exploit my reflex toward consistency and going along with what you suggest as the most personally-consistent response? It was transparent to me. That’s why I refused to answer your questions, asking you to answer them instead. You realized this tack was not working as you tried to force me to answer by saying “I can’t answer these for you”… yet the questions were manipulative, and intended only to force a false consistency on me in order to agree to have your firm be my financial advisor.
Another example. You asked me straight up: “Are you LDS?” I answered in the negative. My wife answered in the affirmative. You were taken aback by this, it seemed, and quickly mentioned that you were not religious and your wife was. You tried another tack: “Do you believe in God?” “No.” “Yes.” You then decided to address the next part of your influence campaign by asking my wife “don’t you want your children to be brought up with your values if you pass away?”
The appeal to consistency here is that you tried to position your services as the only way that my wife could appear self-consistent. If she didn’t agree, how could she possibly consider herself consistent with her desire to have her children brought up LDS? Manipulative.
Another mistake: You asked Dean if he had any cash. He produced $6.00. You took the $5 — probably his lunch money — and asked us what intrinsic value it had. I responded “Lunch” because it was lunch time, and Dean looked hungry. My wife responded something else. You showed us it had no intrinsic value by ripping it in half. We responded practically: it still had value, it could be taped up or taken to a bank which would replace it. Your point was lost for two reasons:
- It wasn’t your money. You took Dean’s money, told him you owed him five bucks, and then destroyed his money. That makes you a bully, exploiting a subordinate.
- Even if it was your money, I don’t want a financial advisor who values $5.00 so little as to ruin it in a demonstration. That tells me you expect to make a lot more money off of me than the paltry sum you tore in half in front of me. I want a somber financial advisor with depression-era values who prides himself on earning as much as possible for me while keeping expenses down.
Next mistake, Greg: You told me you never intend to pay off your mortgage, citing the bank’s inability to foreclose if you are meeting the terms of your agreement. My wife and I are very conservative financial thinkers, and owning an asset outright is valuable because it means that we won’t have the expense of debt in our retirement. I know you believe that this cost is irrelevant because you intend to be wealthy. I intend to be wealthy as well, but I like to have lots of safeguards and fall-back plans.
One of those is to keep my debt as low as possible. I intend to leverage it while I have it so that I can increase my assets and my cash flow, but there will come a day that I will encounter unexpected cash flow problems, and a paid-off home is one more item that will help me ride out the storm.
Unfortunately, you also proved yourself a bit of a hypocrite. You handed me a thin book and challenged me to read it. I agreed, and said it looked as if it would take about two hours. You responded by telling me that you don’t read, you just listen to audiobooks. Say what? You want me to do something you are not willing to do?
Greg, you are a loathsome person who has financial values completely different from ours. I do not care how much money you have — thought you sure liked to talk about it — nor do I care how much you are insured for, though you sure like to share that information too. Dean is a good guy, with mouths to feed at home, who is trying to make ends meet. Your attempted conversion of our conservative financial plans to meet your goals may have just cost him a customer.
It’s really OK if I never see or speak with you again.
Regards, Matthew P. Barnson Dissatisfied customer
