Think about where your time actually goes. The real work, the part that changes a client’s life, isn’t picking funds. It’s the plan. The hours you spend working out whether they can retire, how to get the kid through school without wrecking the nest egg, what happens to the spouse if something happens to them. That’s the valuable thing. That’s what they lie awake worrying about, and it’s what you solve.
And you charge nothing for it.
Most Advisors fold all of that into the fee for managing money, or give it away outright to win the account. The planning is the bonus. The money management is the product. We’ve got it exactly backwards, and it’s quietly costing us real revenue.
Here’s the trouble with giving away your best work. It’s revenue you’re choosing not to collect, on the most valuable thing you do. Free also tells people it’s worth nothing, so the client credits you for the portfolio instead, which is the one part of your job a robo-advisor can do for a quarter of a point. And it means you can only make money from people who already have assets to manage. The forty-year-old doctor making four hundred thousand a year, big mortgage, not much saved yet, is a fantastic client who badly needs a plan, and under the assets-only model you can’t take him, because there’s nothing to bill against.
Charging for the plan fixes all three at once. It’s new revenue. It reframes you as the person who does the thinking, not the one who just holds the money. And it opens up a whole market of good clients you currently turn away.
And before you decide nobody will pay it, the data says they already are. Kitces Research found standalone planning fees, the flat fee for building a plan, rose by double digits over a two-year stretch. Retainer fees, the annual amount firms charge for ongoing advice, climbed about a quarter, to around four thousand dollars a year. People are paying more for advice every year, not less. The only Advisors not collecting it are the ones still giving it away.
So what do you actually do about it. Pick a simple model, either a flat fee for building the plan, a few thousand dollars depending on how complex their situation is, or an annual retainer for ongoing planning, billed separately from anything you charge on assets. Don’t overthink the structure. Pick one and start. The rest is just nerve and a bit of sequencing.
The Quiet Discount
A prospect signs on, and somewhere in that first month you do a few small, generous things without thinking twice. You waive the planning fee, because they're already paying you on the assets and it feels petty to charge twice. You round the quarterly number down to something clean. They ask if you can also take a look at the rental property and the wife's old 403(b), and you say sure, of course, happy to. A month later the brother-in-law calls with a "quick question" and you spend forty minutes on it, no charge, because that's how referrals happen.
The revenue most Advisors leave on the table is exactly what The Chairman’s Council is built to help you collect. Free readers get the idea. Paid members get the playbook, and every one after it.
Charging for the work you already do for free is the fastest revenue you’ll add all year. Upgrade and read how.
How to start charging
Price it to the work, not to a number you’re afraid of. You’re doing hours of genuine, high-skill work that materially changes someone’s financial life. Charge like it. The fee that makes you a little nervous to say out loud is usually about right.
