Welcome back to the 381st episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Ashley Quamme. Ashley is the Founder of Beyond The Plan, a consulting firm based in Evans, Georgia, that offers a Fractional Financial Behavioral Officer service including consulting and training to advisory firms and even direct meeting support for new or existing clients.
What’s unique about Ashley, though, is how her background in psychology and couples therapy allows her not only to be able to help clients navigate their relationships with money but also to help advisors get their clients unblocked so they can actually move forward and implement the advisor’s financial planning recommendations to achieve their financial goals.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Ashley helps advisory firms figure out why their clients are getting stuck in their financial journey and, through an offering of advisor training and even supporting directly in client meetings, guides clients through the necessary changes in behavior to achieve their desired outcomes, how Ashley assists advisors with the “Self-Work” of better knowing and understanding their own behaviors, biases, and potential blind spots that could otherwise result in certain types of clients being more challenging to work with, and how Ashley developed an Office Hours format for advisors to talk through particularly challenging client situations and receive structured feedback on how they might improve their approach with their most difficult clients.
We also talk about how Ashley built on her experience as a couples therapist, after hearing 20-25 clients/week come in for couples therapy that often ended up tying into a discussion of financial issues, to pursue and learn how certain therapy tools and techniques could effectively translate to the world of financial advice, how Ashley uses the Klontz Money Script Inventory and Datapoints’ Building Wealth Assessment to help advisors’ planning clients gain a better understanding of themselves through an analysis of their relationship and mindset as it relates to money, and the way that Ashley introduces herself into advisors’ client meetings to reduce any perceived awkwardness when joining the meeting and ensure that clients themselves feel supported.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Ashley shares the surprises and challenges she went through when she decided to launch her own consulting practice as an independent business owner to serve financial advisors (which unfortunately came right in the midst of the COVID pandemic), how surprised Ashley was when she realized how much of a demand and support there is for financial behavioral services within the financial advisory industry, and the way Ashley’s focus and success shifted when she stopped trying to find her compass and figure out what was next after the first decade of her career, and instead simply looked internally to figure out what she enjoyed doing… and let that become her compass instead.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to get clients unstuck on their financial journey, how the principles of couples therapy can be applied in the financial planning context, or tools that can help clients better understand their relationship and mindsets with regard to money, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Ashley Quamme.
