You learn things running a bowling alley that you don’t learn anywhere else.
I bought a venue called Spinners two and a half years ago thinking I was buying a bowling/bar/pool hall business. Lanes, tables, balls, beers, scoreboards, and karaoke, the works. About six months in I realised I’d bought something completely different.
People don’t drive to Maroochydore on a Saturday because they suddenly need to roll a ball at some pins. They come because they need a Saturday that works. The birthday they don’t have to organise. The teenage daughter who actually wants to be seen with them in public. The first date that isn’t a quiet table with too much pressure on the conversation. The Friday night that rescues a week that did them in.
The lanes, the pool tables, the karaoke and bar are how we deliver it. But they aren’t the product.
This is the thing I wish someone had told me earlier in my financial planning career instead of me having to work it out myself.
And here’s what I keep coming back to, because it’s the same problem from the other end of my career.
Most financial advisers think they sell what’s on the menu. The Statement of Advice. The portfolio. The strategy. The platform. The plan. The process. Walk into the average advice practice’s website and that’s what’s being marketed — the menu. We do retirement plans. We build portfolios. We have a five-step process. We use the latest technology.
Nobody’s buying any of that.
Clients are buying the same thing my Spinners customers are buying. To be understood and be looked after through something that matters to them. To not have to be in charge of working out the bit they don’t understand. To trust that the person across the desk actually understands what’s important to them, and won’t let them do something stupid in the moment when stupid feels right. To wake up after a market correction and not feel sick because someone they trust has already messaged them about it.
The plan is how we deliver it. The plan isn’t the product.
This is the bit that takes most advisers years to actually feel, and some of them never feel at all. It’s why advice practices with technically excellent plans still lose clients, while practices with average plans and exceptional relationships keep them for thirty years. The technical work matters — but only as the chassis underneath the thing the client actually paid for, which is being known and looked after by someone they trust.
I had a version of this in my head for over twenty years in advice. Built an award winning practice on it, managed the top tier advisers at BT/Westpac (RIP) and watched the good ones live it and the average ones miss it. After a few years on the other side of the counter, I’m feeling it again. Selling something simpler, watching every transaction up close. When you’re handing over the EFTPOS machine, you see exactly what people are paying for. And it’s never the thing printed on the receipt.
Which brings me back to advice — and to what I think the next few years are going to expose pretty brutally.
AI is going to make the menu cheap. Plans, modelling, comparisons, projections, research — all of it commodified, fast, often very good. If your value proposition is on that menu, you’re in serious trouble. Not because AI is smarter than you. Because the client never wanted what was on the menu in the first place. They wanted to be looked after. They tolerated the menu because it came with the relationship.
Take the relationship away — leave just the menu — and clients will choose whatever menu is cheapest and easiest.
Which is no longer you.
The advisers who’ll do well in the next decade are the ones who already understood that what they were really selling was understanding, relief, judgement, trust, and someone in their corner. The lanes were how they delivered it. The lanes were never the product.
If you can’t articulate, in one sentence, what your clients actually pay you for — and “we provide quality financial advice” doesn’t count — that’s the work to do this year.
Before the menu does it for you.