A psychiatrist and a lawyer are talking at a party. The psychiatrist complains that he is having a terrible evening. “I’m trying to relax and enjoy myself, but every time I talk to anyone and they find out I’m a psychiatrist, they start telling me all their personal issues.”
“Ah,” says the lawyer, “that used to happen to me. But if anyone came to me with any problem I decided to give them an answer but then invoice them the next day. They soon stopped.”
“That’s brilliant,” says the psychiatrist, “I’ll try it. Thanks.”
The next day the lawyer invoices the psychiatrist.
It’s an old joke, but it can be filed under ‘funny because it’s true’. We all love to hate lawyers and this resentment is largely driven by the way they charge fees that we perceive to be expensive.
But we still pay them. This is key. However deep-rooted the public’s general antipathy towards lawyers is, however many jokes there are about how awful they collectively are as human beings, any dislike is more than balanced by the value we place on the work they do.
While we see them as money-grubbing, we still pay them the fee they ask for. And really, shouldn’t we admire their apparent comfort in asking for money in return for the service they provide? It is something a lot of advisers could learn from.
It may be difficult to maintain any semblance of confidence in the face of the bashing that advisers collectively suffered over the past 20 years or so, but if we are ever going to get to a stage where the general public does not view paying for advice as an insane concept, advisers themselves probably need to start believing that people should be paying them a fee. And let people know that they are confident enough in the value they can bring to ask for some money in return.
The popular caricature of lawyers paints them as arrogant, but I only have a problem with arrogance in people who don’t back it up with results. If arrogance means being confident enough to expect payment for a service provided, we should all be as arrogant as lawyers.
In the interests of balance, I should point out that my own industry could also learn something here, but again, advisers could also learn from our mistakes.
Large areas of the publishing world seem to have lost all sense of their own value.
There was much hand wringing recently following the news that the Independent would be closing its print edition. But the decision was almost entirely caused by the publishing industry itself, which has spent the best part of the 21st century making an almighty mess, repeatedly undermining its own ability to make money.
The internet is a wonderful thing, but it has taken established news sources years to work out how best to use it. If they have worked it out by now it will take still more years to unravel the mess they have already made of their offerings.
