A little more than a month ago, the SEI organization asked me to deliver a speech about the future of the profession to a home audience. Through the miracle of cameras and broadband Internet connections, it was also viewed on the computer screens of 600 or so advisors. (You can still view it here: http://tinyurl.com/mjvcfq.)

I talked about the impact of last year's meltdown on financial planning practices, and traced ways the near-collapse of the global banking system was accelerating our professional evolution in interesting directions. I presented new ideas that emerged around the areas of practice management, investing and client services. I passionately advocated for flexibility and openness to change as the new normal unfolds in the planning world. And I sketched a positive view of the profession's future, which I think came as a surprise to the gloomier members of my audience.

I expected a lot of feedback on all these interesting subjects, and maybe some praise for my visionary articulation of what the profession will look like just around the next bend in the road. But as soon as I turned on my computer, and the responses came in from advisory firms from Bangor to San Diego, nearly all of them focused on three or four sentences of my 60-minute presentation.

"I think you might have said something about getting a coach," read the typical response. "Where do I find one?" Others asked if I had developed a list of coaches who serve the planning profession. Did I happen to know somebody who did coaching in Moline, Ill.? Or Hot Springs, Ark.? A few wondered if I myself would consider coaching them. (I made it clear that I'm not remotely qualified.)

THE VALUE OF ADVICE

Why the sudden interest in coaching? Most of the trends that I talked about in that videoconference and other trends that are swirling around your practice, have raised the value of outside advice by whole new orders of magnitude.

Coaching services were already immensely valuable. One of the things you inevitably discover about many highly successful advisors is their long-standing habit of working with a coach. Most of them, in fact, have rotated among different outside professionals at different stages of their careers, and will tell you that the coach is there to keep them moving forward, holding them accountable for making progress in an age when most of us consider it a victory if we can get through most of the work landing on our desk each day.

A coach will give you an outside perspective on your business, help you see what you were missing (because we all have our blind spots), and encourage and motivate you when it would be easy to slip into complacency (if you're successful) or despair (if you've been hovering on the edge of success but can't seem to get over the hump).

These are immensely valuable things in any environment. But in the current one, where so much change is coming at us so rapidly, coaching services take on an added importance. When it's both harder and more important to manage your business, a business coach can help you better understand all the procedural stuff about financial metrics, and annual reviews and incentive compensation that they forgot to teach you in the CFP curriculum.

At a time when resources are at a premium and we're all searching for efficiency on the cheap, some coaches will come into your office and do things nobody has time to do, like install those internal processes that unlock the value of your CRM system and make the most of your staff hours. When client-service innovations threaten to put you unexpectedly behind the curve, the coach can ask you hard questions about your value proposition and, as an outsider and potential consumer of your services, help you understand how best to position yourself and communicate with potential clients.

When the regulatory environment is changing and the portfolio management side of your business is becoming more dangerous and complicated, the coach can explore things you don't have time to think about, like outsourcing some of your back-office chores, sharing employees with a compatible firm down the street or (as I suggested in a recent e-column to my Inside Information readers) focusing on the real value of managing clients while having a strong outside vendor manage the portfolios. When you have piles of papers all over the floor of your office and feel overwhelmed every morning, a coach can help you find ways to reorganize and get on top of it all-and still manage growth and evolution as it comes at you.