What D’You Think of It So Far?
“What d’you think of it so far?”
“Rubbish!”
A brutal exchange. Delivered deadpan.
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll hear the echo of Morecambe & Wise.
A memory from 1970s Britain.
Funny?
No. Not really.
Because beneath the humour sits a question most professionals spend an entire career avoiding.
Last November, I stood in front of another room full of bright, capable financial advisers and planners. And I asked them something deceptively simple.
“How many of us have ever appointed an independent consultant to ask a meaningful selection of our clients this question…
“What D’You Think of Us… So Far?”
The room went quiet. Nothing. Not a single hand.
It’s an obvious question. Commercially fundamental.
Almost embarrassingly so.
Yet it’s rarely asked in this profession.
Why? I used to wonder.
I don’t any more.
Because I’ve asked that question of clients myself.
More than once.
And the answer always came at a cost. Emotionally.
Because the truth is dangerous to a fragile ego.
I asked it early in 2023, at the end of a long, expensive, deeply personal season.
Thirty months of work.
£Tens of thousands invested.
Building a 24‑month business and leadership programme for financial planners.
Thirty months!
And then I asked the question.
But I didn’t like the answer.
“Well, Dave… mate. The content is amazing. Truly.
But the volume? It’s killing us!
We’re overwhelmed with what we’re expected to digest… just to progress.”
Oh. Right. Thank you for that.
What followed wasn’t a tweak. It was a reckoning.
A professional educator – an exceptional teacher – spent 12 solid months red‑penning everything: videos, scripts, workbooks, templates, checklists.
Twelve long, hard months.
She cut 60% of the content.
Yes. Sixty.
Not a typo.
And then something quietly astonishing happened. Member retention rose from 45% to 95%.
Not because we added more.
But because we finally listened.
We’ve brought consultants in to do the same research for our clients.
There’s a four-question pattern that such a consultant tends to use… subtly.
- What would you like us to do more of?
- What would you like us to do less of?
- What would you like us to start doing?
- what would you like us to stop doing?
One example is so fresh because the firm’s transformation was so profound.
What their clients said… changed everything about the thinking and behaviour in that firm.
Everything.
The exercise literally changed the lives of every person in that team.
Every person.
They’re now a role model for every other client in our Soul Millionaire Tribe.
You know… it’s possible to sail through the whole of our career…
buoyed up by beautiful, blissful delusion…
about what our clients really, REALLY think about us.
We can earn a good wedge.
We can generate a self-congratulatory narrative in our head.
We can even grasp one or two nice client comments… and feed that to our marketing consultant.
We can live our assumptions as if they’re genuine… true.
Even though they’re just assumptions.
Or…
We can dare to ask the question.
To discover the truth about our behaviour. Our impact.
“What D’You Think About Us So Far?”
It’s a courageous way of doing business.
A gutsy way of developing our leadership skills.
A way of showing that how we impact our clients really is front-and-centre of our intentions.
Indeed…
It’s the Soul Millionaire way.
