Last month, I wrote about patience, about volunteering to assist with free financial planning, about being ghosted and being impatient. The opportunities would come, I hoped, just not overnight.
As an update, the patience paid off, and the pro bono program is starting to take real shape. By the end of this month, I'll have run a financial literacy webinar (with another one next month) and started working with two pro bono planning/coaching clients that were referred to me through nonprofit partners. More relationships are in the works that I hope will pay off over time. And I'll write about each of those individual experiences separately, because each one is teaching me something different.
Before we go any further, a confession from the first webinar: I've given hundreds and hundreds of presentations and webinars over the years. I'm, what I would say, polished yet authentic, I always know the material cold, I can read a room for pacing, questions or impact. This time I somehow ripped through 37 slides in about 10 minutes flat, like a rookie who forgot to breathe. Old habits and new audiences don't automatically line up. Lesson noted.
Building the Framework
Going into this, I already knew I wasn't just going to be serving individual clients. When I decided to focus on pro bono planning, Diversified wanted me to stay and build it out properly, and that meant building a repeatable pro bono program framework other advisors could use instead of starting from scratch every time. That part of it was the plan from day one.
As I said before, what I didn't fully appreciate was how much of this would be outside my comfort zone. I've spent my career building programs, standing up advisor communities, turning ideas into something usable, so the “building” part felt familiar. What's new is the content and the stakeholders. I'm not working with advisors anymore. I'm working with nonprofits, community partners, and now individuals who may never have had access to a financial advisor in their life. That's been one of the best parts of this whole thing, at my age, genuinely having to learn again.
Diversified has given me the room to test things, get some wrong, adjust, and keep going, without any expectation that this would be polished on day one. The goal has just been to learn fast enough to make the path smoother for the next advisor(s) who wants to do this work. This fall, we'll bring an early version of the framework in-house as the first step toward a firm-wide pro bono program.
Measure the Outcome, Not the Input
One lesson from the pilot has already stuck with me. As we started talking about how we'd measure success, we kept landing on the same question: what should we actually measure? The easy answer is volunteer hours, number of advisors, number of meetings, number of families served. We'll track all of that, but it's not really the point. Measure the outcome, not the input.
To me, that idea has become the foundation of the whole pro bono program. Hours and participation matter, but they don't tell the story. Did someone actually gain confidence in their finances? Did they finally understand their own cash flow, or build an emergency fund for the first time? Did they get advice they otherwise couldn't have accessed, and leave with more clarity than they walked in with?
That's the outcome we're actually trying to build toward. We're putting together an Impact Tracker to capture that, not just the activity, but the change behind it. My personal goal is to create an annual report to eventually say less about how many hours advisors gave, and more about what changed because they gave them.
Built to End
There's a second lesson that's turned out to matter just as much: these engagements are supposed to end. Unlike a traditional advisory relationship, success here isn't about how long the relationship lasts. It's defined the moment the relationship ends. Did we give them the advice they needed? Did they walk away with a clear next step and more confidence than they came in with? If yes, we did our job. Again, it isn’t about the hours we put in, it’s “did we solve the problem that brought them to us?”
If what we're learning now makes it easier for the next Diversified advisor to do this work with confidence, the impact is going to be a lot bigger than any one client or one planner, and that's the part I'm most excited about.
Next?
The pilot's still running. More client stories, more literacy sessions, more lessons I haven't hit yet. I'll keep sharing them as they come. Hopefully I will slow down during my next financial literacy workshop in early August.
For now, the goal is just to keep learning, keep improving, and build something that lasts, measured not in hours given, but in confidence created. If you're thinking about building something similar inside your own firm, figure out the impact reporting or just want to connect with your experiences, I'd love to hear about it. Reply and tell me your story.