The Hard Truth Most Financial Advisors Avoid—And Why It’s Costing Them Growth

Written by: Justin Goodbread, CFP, CEPA, CVGA

The vast majority of financial advisors who want to work with business owners don't have the credentials to do it.

Read that again.

Not the licenses. Not the designations. Not the scripts your home office handed you in a three-ring binder.

The credentials that cannot be bought, earned in a weekend, or downloaded from a corporate portal.

I have been in this industry for over two decades, and I have watched the same pattern repeat itself so many times that I have genuinely lost count. An advisor hits a ceiling, the retiree pipeline dries up, and somewhere along the way a conference speaker or a corporate training program points them toward business owners. The pitch is always the same. Today we call it the $10 trillion opportunity. Tens of millions of business owners will exit their companies over the next decade, massive liquidity events will follow, and every advisor in the room wants to be the one who captures those assets.

I understand why advisors chase it. The logic sounds solid on the surface. There is, however, a fundamental problem underneath it that almost nobody in this industry wants to say out loud.

The Hunting Trip

I have been hunting my whole life.

I grew up in the swamps of South Georgia, spent years in the hills of East Tennessee and the mountains of West Virginia, and have hunted all across the Eastern Seaboard. There is not much game on the east side of the country I have not pursued at some point in my life.

This August I am doing something completely new. I am heading to the northern Alaska tundra to hunt caribou.

Going into it I know one thing with certainty. The tundra is nothing like anything I have hunted before, and in fact, I have never even seen it. I understand through research that the terrain is different, the animal behavior is different, and the weather, the gear requirements, and the decisions you have to make when things go sideways are all completely different from anything my forty-plus years of Eastern hunting have prepared me for.

So here is a simple question. What logical sense would it make for me to find somebody in downtown New York City who has only ever read about caribou hunting, who has never set foot on that terrain, and ask that person to guide me on this trip?

None whatsoever.

That person may have read the books. He may have even studied the maps. But he has never felt the wind shift across open tundra and understood what it means for the hunt. He has never felt the weight of a pack on his back for days on end, sleeping on the ground in a tent with temperatures dropping hard overnight. He has never dealt with the mosquitoes that come out in force in the Alaskan evening, so thick they can drive a man to madness. He has never experienced what it actually takes to haul two-hundred pounds of caribou meat through miles of open tundra on foot. He has lived in New York City his whole life. The gap between what he knows and what he needs to know is not small. It is everything, and in that terrain, that gap has real consequences.

That is you, financial advisor, every time you walk into a room with a business owner and position yourself as their comprehensive guide.

The Hypocrisy Nobody Is Talking About

Let me describe exactly what is happening inside this industry right now, and I want you to really sit with this example.

Imagine you are a financial advisor earning a W-2 at a regional or national firm. You have never started a business, never signed the front of a paycheck, never put your own capital at risk, never lost sleep wondering if the whole thing was going to come apart by morning. You have spent your entire career inside the safety of a corporate structure.

Furthermore, you were trained by that corporation. A corporation staffed, top to bottom, by other people who have also never owned a business. Risk-averse organizations built on compliance, predictability, and protection from downside, sitting down to write the scripts and playbooks and training programs they handed you, all of it designed to teach you how to walk into a room and connect with entrepreneurs who bet everything on themselves and did it anyway.

Read that one more time.

Employees training employees on how to communicate with business owners.

Employees with the title of manager, VP, and so on, who have never taken a business risk, attempting to guide employees with the title of advisor, who have also never taken a risk, on how to speak the language of business owners whose entire identity is built on taking risks nobody else would take.

It is laughable.

And I say that with full awareness that it is going to trigger some financial advisors reading this. That is fine. Send the emails. I am not moving off this position.

It gets worse.

Many financial advisors today are not walking into these rooms simply to offer investment management. Increasingly, financial advisors are walking in claiming they can guide business owners on how to grow their companies. How to scale. How to increase the value of what those owners have spent years, sometimes decades, bleeding to build.

Notably, the vast majority of those advisors have never done any of it.

Go back to the hunting trip. That New York City guide may have read the books and studied the maps, but he has never felt what it actually means to be out there. He does not know how the elements are going to affect every decision. He has never felt the weight of the pack, the ground under a tent, the mosquitoes at dusk, or what it takes to haul two hundred pounds through miles of open tundra. A bad hunting guide costs you a trip. Sadly, the vast majority of advisors, specifically employee advisors, advising a business owner on growth, exit strategy, operations, and value growth without ever having built anything themselves, can cost that owner everything they spent a lifetime building.

Let's Just Say What This Actually Is

Let me say something the industry refuses to say out loud.

You cannot guide someone to a destination you have never reached yourself. Yet here is the playbook being run on business owners across this country every single day.

Advisors are using every technique available just to get in the room. Statements like:

"We can help you exit your company."

"We can help you increase the value of your business."

"We can help you build a succession plan."

The language sounds sophisticated. It sounds like you understand the world of a business owner. But underneath all of it, what you actually want is to sell a financial plan or capture assets under management so you can charge a percentage and build your book. That is the real product you are selling. Everything else is the bait. The pitch about helping them grow their company, increase their value, and exit on their terms, that is the switch.

The reality is you are deploying this bait and switch built on borrowed language and a credential earned in a week-long course, in a room full of people who can see through it before you finish your first sentence.

This is why so many financial advisors fail repeatedly in the business owner market, yet stand back contemplating why they can't make headway. They keep refining the pitch when the problem was never the pitch. The problem is that you have never actually been where the business owner is standing.

Business Owners Already Know This

Over the last decade, through my seven companies, I have spoken to tens of thousands of business owners from stages, in private rooms, at roundtables, and face to face across the table.

Last week I sat in a room with fourteen of them. I asked them a direct question. If you could send one message to the financial advisors who have their sights set on working with you, what would it be?

Their answers were consistent, and I wrote each one down carefully.

"Quit trying to impress us with credentials you earned in a certificate course."

"Quit learning our language from training manuals written by employee-minded people who have never walked a mile in our shoes."

"Quit trying to guide us somewhere you have never personally been yourself."

Those are their actual words.

Business owners are a tenacious group. Most have gone against the odds, fallen on their faces, gotten back up, and kept building anyway. There is a constant drive in the business owner community to find the right people who can genuinely help them reach the outcome they are after. But here is what most advisors on the outside do not fully understand about business owners. They are constantly under attack.

When they struggle, they are under attack. When they succeed, they are under attack. Employees push for more. Family members appear with their hands out. Friends grow distant or resentful. The media takes its shots. Someone is always angling for position, always working an agenda, always showing up with what I call commission breath, trying to get close because there is now cash flow to go after.

Because of that, a business owner's guard is never fully down. A friend of mine says it best. Business owners are like junkyard dogs. Always alert. Always watching. And they can smell a fake from a mile away. The fake never even sees it coming.

That fake is you, if you have never built a business yourself.

The Hippocratic Problem

Doctors take an oath. Do no harm.

If financial advisors were held to that same standard, a significant number of them would be guilty of malpractice. Not because they are bad people, but because they were handed a credential after a few hours of coursework and sent out to guide people through decisions they have never personally navigated. The cost of that gap is not abstract. It shows up in failed exits, in business owners who took the wrong path at the wrong time because someone who had never been there told them it was the right one, in liquidity events that should have been transformational and were not because the advisor lacked the judgment that only comes from real experience.

Many of these advisors are completely sincere. They believe the training they received actually equips them to help. Sincerity does not close an experience gap.

Someone reading this will inevitably point out that surgeons perform heart surgery without ever having had heart surgery themselves. That is worth addressing directly. A cardiac surgeon spent a decade in medical school, then served a residency working alongside a master of the craft, then handled progressively more complex cases over years before ever operating independently. A fifteen-hour online course followed by a new designation on a business card is not a residency. It is not even close.

What You Should Actually Do If You Are a Financial Advisor Who Wants to Work With Business Owners

You cannot lead someone through a door you have never walked through yourself.

So here is my challenge to you directly as a financial advisor who desires to work with business owners.

Before you walk into another room with a business owner and tell them how to grow their company, go grow your own. Before you put that shoe on someone else's foot, put it on yours first. Do the work on yourself that you are asking business owners to trust you to do for them. Until you have felt the weight of that, you are not ready for the room.

Walk away from the W-2. Set up your own business. Take the risk and figure out how to make it work. Not theoretically. Not as a side project you can retreat from if it gets hard. Take the path that over 30 million owners have already taken. Burn the ships. There is no safety net on the other side of that decision, and that is exactly the point. Put it all on the line and make a genuine run at building something where the outcome depends entirely on you. Feel what payroll means when it is your money on the line. Feel what it costs to make a hard call with no one above you to absorb the consequences. Feel what it is like to lie awake wondering if the decision you made today is going to unravel everything you built. Feel what it means to keep moving anyway.

And when, and only when, you have done that, go sit across from a business owner. The conversation will be completely different. Not because you earned a new credential, but because you finally carry something that cannot be downloaded, cannot be scripted, and cannot be handed to you in a binder.

I started my first business in 1994. I have built, scaled, and exited seven companies. I have sat at that kitchen table at midnight, wondering if everything was going to hold together or if I would lose it all. That experience is the reason my coaching business exists, where I help financial advisors who are themselves business owners scale their practices rapidly and command fees that match the value they actually deliver.

If you are a financial advisor who is serious about serving business owners at the highest level, here is what I want you to do. Reach out to me directly. Let's have an owner-to-owner conversation about what it actually takes, what it costs, and whether you are truly ready to make that run.

Everything else is just reading about the tundra from a desk in New York City.