The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes... and the Financial Advisor Has No Business Plan

Written by Marc du Plooy, 19 June 2026

There is a joke that does not get told in polite company. A financial advisor walks into a peer session and is asked: "When did you last sit down and think seriously about your own business... your goals, your capacity, your actual plan?" He pauses. He thinks. He pauses again. Then he says: "That is a great question." And somehow, that is where it ends.

We launched Peer Council Chapter I in May 2026. Eight FSP principals. Two meetings in. First round of one-on-ones completed and here is the slightly uncomfortable thing we have learned: the people in the room who are best at giving structured, rigorous, forward-looking advice to their clients are often the last people on earth applying any of that to themselves.

This is not a criticism. It is practically a law of professional life. The cobbler's children have no shoes. The therapist does not go to therapy. The personal trainer, disciplined in everything, finds a way to skip the sessions that are purely for himself. And the financial advisor - who has spent twenty years sitting across from clients talking about long-term vision, accountability, compounding decisions, and the danger of short-term thinking - is running his own business on gut feel, institutional memory, and whatever he can squeeze into the fifteen minutes between his last meeting and his next. .

What actually happens in the room

We did not set out to prove a thesis. We set out to run a rigorous peer process and see what emerged. What emerged was this: within two sessions, principals who have spent decades being the most confident person in any room were openly acknowledging things to each other that they had never said out loud before. Not to their business partners. Not to their staff. Certainly not to their clients.

One principal, reflecting after his one-on-one, put it like this: "You get caught up in the daily grind too quickly, and eventually it dominates everything. It sort of overshadows life and living."

That is not a man who lacks self-awareness but rather a man who simply has never had an hour in his professional life where someone sat across from him and said, "Your turn, what do you need?"

The part worth arguing about

The financial services industry has spent thirty years building an infrastructure of compliance, competence, and client-centricity. It has done almost nothing to build an equivalent infrastructure for the people running the practices.

Advisor qualifications are regulated but dvisor burnout is not. Client reviews are mandated but principal reviews are not. There are frameworks for managing client risk, and essentially nothing for managing the risk that the principal - the human being at the centre of the whole enterprise - suddenly runs out of runway.

The FSP model is extraordinarily person-dependent. Most practices are, in reality, one person deep at the decision-making level. When that person is well, everything functions. When that person is fraying, or stuck, or running on obligation rather than intention, the whole thing holds together right up until the moment it does not.

Peer Council is not a therapy session and it is not a coaching programme. It is structured peer accountability for principals who are serious enough about their businesses, and their lives, to sit in a room where someone might ask them a question they do not immediately know how to answer.

Two meetings in

Chapter I is full. We have eight principals, the hot seat is working, trust is holding and one-on-ones are running. We are seeing what we expected... isolation, capacity pressure, succession anxiety, the particular complexity of people who built something they are proud of and are no longer entirely sure what they are building toward. We are also seeing something that

surprised us: how quickly the room formed, how willing people are to be honest when the structure gives them permission, and how much of the value lands not from the facilitator but from the person in the next chair - the one who has lived the same problem and handled it differently.

Chapter II applications are open. If you read the cobbler line and felt something (even slightly), that is probably the signal worth paying attention to.

FI Consult runs the FSP Peer Council for FSP principals and directors. Chapter II applications are open. Enquiries: marc@ficonsult.co.za