What Makes a Good Financial Advisor Anyway?

Whether you’re trying to be the best financial advisor you can be or you want to find someone with the best expertise and skills to help you with your financial planning, there are certain traits that are consistently displayed by successful advisors.

Passion for Financial Planning and Wealth Management

Passion is the driving force behind many successful financial advisors. This job requires extensive knowledge, diverse skills from analytical to social, and attention to detail. Caring passionately about helping people live better lives through effective financial management may provide the focus and energy to keep getting better every day.

Intellectual Curiosity

In the financial world, standards, methodologies, products and conditions are constantly changing. Avid learners start the day by reading and learning. They find the programs, news sources and people in the industry with the best information and follow them actively. They earn multiple certifications. Successful advisors know their industry but they also believe they can never know enough. Curious advisors also want to know everything they can about their clients. They thrive on understanding how clients live and how they really want to live. And how any gap between the two can be closed.

Good Communication Skills

Curiosity isn’t enough, however. A good advisor must know how to listen and talk. They have to hear what their clients say and know what questions to ask. Then a good advisor must know how to clearly explain the challenges in a client’s situation and the possible solutions. Advisors need to be both personable and responsive.

Cooperative Approach

Successful financial advisors put the interests of their clients first and fully believe that this is in their own interest as well. This builds healthy, productive relationships that produce financial rewards for both parties.

Analytical Abilities

Advisors can help clients in many different ways. For example, they can help clients with cash flow planning, retirement planning, investment management, insurance planning, estate planning, and tax planning. Each of these areas requires analytical skills — asset allocation, calculation of risk and return, comparing the short- and long-term effects of multiple strategies, and analyzing the appropriate financial metrics and ratios to support all of these activities.

Control Over the Process

A successful advisor does not let the tasks of managing their business control them; they take control. They search for the best resources to help streamline routine tasks so they can spend more time on what they really love and get paid for—guiding their clients toward financial security and satisfaction.

United Capital Values Good Advisors

We know the values and work it takes to be a good financial advisor, and we’re here to support advisors’ efforts through our award-winning financial advisory training. Our program includes interactive, multi-day FinLife^®training sessions plus follow-up virtual executive coaching and feedback.

For Financial Professional Use only. This document and any attached materials are the sole property of United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (United Capital) and are not to be used by you other than to evaluate United Capital’s service and/or products. United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (“United Capital”), is an affiliate of Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and subsidiaries of the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., a worldwide, full-service investment banking, broker-dealer, asset management and financial services organization. This document and any attached materials are not to be disseminated, distributed, or otherwise conveyed throughout your organization to employees without a need for this information or to any third parties without the express written permission of United Capital.