July 1st marked ten years since Scott earned his CFP designation. Rather than let the milestone pass quietly, we turned it into a conversation —what the job actually meant back in 2016 versus now, what’s changed in the industry, and what hasn’t budged at all in a decade.
Early on, the products felt like the plan itself — the right insurance policy, the right investment, maybe a projection showing how a given product might grow over 30 years. That wasn’t an unreasonable read of the industry at the time: for a long stretch, advisors functioned as gatekeepers. If you wanted access to markets or insurance, you generally needed someone to get you there, much like the old stockbroker era where placing a trade required a broker, full stop.
That gatekeeping has largely disappeared. Self-directed investing and direct-to-consumer insurance applications mean anyone can get access on their own now, if they want it. Which means the products themselves were never really the plan — they’re what a plan is built on, once the actual planning work has identified what’s needed. And it reframes what a credential is worth. A CFP designation once felt like a finish line; a decade in, it’s clearly closer to a starting point. The technical expertise is table stakes — genuinely necessary, but not the differentiator. What actually matters, especially as AI and DIY tools put more raw information within everyone’s reach, is the part that’s much harder to automate: communicating clearly, translating complexity into something usable, and genuinely caring about a person’s outcome.
Across a decade of client conversations, one topic outranks everything else: cashflow. Both personal and business cash flow management underpin every other piece of a financial plan — investments, tax strategy, insurance, all of it. Interestingly, cash flow management barely showed up in the CFP curriculum itself, despite being the single most consistent thread across real client conversations. For an incorporated business owner, the practice is the engine funding everything else; without a clear system for managing what comes in and where it goes, even a great investment strategy sits on a shaky foundation.
Generally, yes — easier access to information and AI tools means more people arrive having already done some homework. But being informed and being organized aren’t the same thing. The more common pattern is a handful of individually reasonable-sounding decisions that don’t actually fit together: research suggesting a TFSA is the best place to invest, for instance, made without factoring in a corporate compensation strategy — salary versus dividends —which affects CPP contributions and RSP room, which in turn can flip which account actually makes more sense. Optimizing one piece in isolation can quietly work against the bigger picture.
Thehonest answer is AI, applied practically. Meeting note-takers keepconversations on track and searchable. A CRM with a full meeting history meansa quick, accurate answer to “what have we actually discussed with this clientover the past year” instead of relying on memory or scattered notes. Andincreasingly, complex data can be turned into something genuinely simple, fast— a recent example was condensing two full years of a client’s personal taxreturns into a single-page visual comparison, no line-item jargon required,just the handful of numbers that actually mattered. Sometimes the value isexactly that simple: confirming there were no surprises, in a format a clientcan actually absorb in a few minutes.
This part hasn’t changed in a decade and probably won’t change in the next one: money is tangled up with feelings — fear, stress, pride, vulnerability. Sitting down with a third party, even a spouse, and being honest about where things actually stand takes a real decision to move past that discomfort. If anything, it may be getting harder rather than easier: general resistance to feedback seems to be rising, and social media adds a distorting layer of comparison — a curated glimpse of someone else’s practice, car, or lifestyle that often isn’t backed by the financial stability it appears to represent. Chasing that appearance, rather than a clear picture of your own goals, tends to work against people rather than for them.
The shift is visible, not just financial. Clients describe genuine relief and peace of mind simply from knowing someone capable is now in their corner. The difference in energy between an early onboarding conversation — often a little overwhelming, sorting through a lot at once — and a check-in two or three years later is stark. People aren’t just further ahead financially; they’re living with noticeably less weight around money day to day.
Byfar, it’s investing. The honest position here is that investing, as a category,is close to a solved problem: stay globally diversified, keep costs low, andthe bulk of the heavy lifting is done. The real leverage lives elsewhere — intax planning and cash flow management, the levers actually within your controlday to day. Raising a savings rate from 5% to 20% moves the needle far moreover time than chasing an extra few points of investment return ever will. It’salso a sharp departure from how the industry used to pitch itself, oftenleading with past returns — numbers that say nothing reliable about what comesnext.
The moment someone genuinely opens up to a real conversation about their finances is still the spark, every time. Within the first hour of hearing someone’s full story, the blind spots and opportunities usually become clear — and picturing where that person could realistically be in two to five years, both financially and in how they feel about money, is what keeps the work interesting after a decade. Just as much, it’s watching what that improvement actually gets translated into: a trip that had been on hold for years, a practice grown enough to serve more of the community, room to give back. The numbers are the mechanism. What people actually do with the outcome is the point.
Listen to episode 039 of The Chiro Money Show →
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