Most behavioral finance assumes the person being studied is already a client. It looks at how clients behave once they are in the door. The prospect side is different work: how trust forms, why people pay attention, and how someone decides who to bet their future on, before any paperwork exists.

Most Behavioral Finance kicks in after the paperwork is signed. But the most fragile decisions happen before that moment.

Most of the financial industry is built around the machinery of money. That’s the technical side. Important, necessary, very “left-brain.”

My lane is the "human side of money," as Mitch Anthony coined it in the 90s. But even inside behavioral finance, or "BeFi," there’s a split nobody talks about.

Most BeFi assumes the person you’re analyzing is already a client.

What does most behavioral finance actually study?

The field is overwhelmingly focused on:

• How clients behave once they’re in the door
• How to improve client decision-making
• How to get clients to stay the course
• How to help clients avoid biases

Vanguard’s Advisor’s Alpha research puts the total value of good advice at roughly 300 basis points a year, with up to 150 to 200 of that coming from behavioral coaching alone, coaching that only happens once someone is already a client.

Even the BeFi work on “discovery meetings” starts late.

By then, the biggest behavioral bridge has already been crossed: the prospect chose who to talk to.

In an age where information is cheap, that attention decision is the real prospect-side moment.

That’s why most of what we call BeFi is really client-side work.

It’s valuable, but it’s incomplete.

What is prospect-side behavioral finance?

My work lives on the pre-client side of behavioral finance. The prospect side.

The messy, high-friction, very real world of:

• Positioning
• Attraction
• Attention
• Trust

The decision to give those first few “yeses” in the first place. The decision to give you a chance.

Why is it like this?

I can't say for sure, but most people talking about “behavioral” anything have never had their paycheck tied directly to whether they can sell at a high level, repeatedly, over time.

That’s not a flaw, it’s just the lane they’ve lived in, and the lane they have earned credibility in.

Of course their work orients around client behavior after the relationship exists; that’s the part of the journey they’ve seen up close.

That work is extremely valuable. It's what got me interested in BeFi to begin with!

Why does building from zero change what you notice?

But my background sits in a different part of the map.

I’ve lived in the pressure cooker where:

• If you can’t turn strangers into believers, your models and insights sit on a shelf.
• If you don’t convert, you don’t get to “advise” anybody.
• If you don’t create trust, you don’t eat.

When I started, I was an advisor with $0 AUM, no base salary, and no built-in book. Every relationship was from scratch.

I read behavioral finance pieces and thought, “Interesting—but anyway, I need to get back to trying to grow now.”

It felt like it was written for servicing advisors or advisors with established practices, not for the person still making calls, hearing no, and trying to keep the lights on.

You and I both know some advisors are rainmakers and some are relationship managers. Both lanes matter. But if you want to scale, trying to be both at a high level is a trap.

A lot of people who say, “I was an advisor once” — right before telling you how to grow — were effectively relationship managers: leads flowing to them, calendar set, responsible for planning and service, not creating demand.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different lane.

When I was in your seat, I wanted growth advice from people who had to hunt, and who did it successfully at a high level.

I was firmly in the rainmaker camp. My job was to create demand and turn strangers into clients. As the practice grew, I doubled down on that.

As soon as I could afford it, I hired a CFP and paid him more than I paid myself so I could stay focused on growth.

That focus worked: over time I moved from zero AUM advisor to CEO, and eventually exited.

What separates real strategy from tactics?

That’s also why I’m picky about “strategy.”

A lot of what gets sold as strategy is really just tactics in a nicer slide deck.

When you've built from zero, you quickly learn that real strategy is the through-line that makes your tactics matter; without that, it’s no wonder advisors stop believing strategy is worth paying for.

If you’ve never actually had to sell—not just “agree to do business with a warm referral,” but talk to people and sell as a job, over and over—then your take on the behavioral side of growth is, at best, theoretical.

It might be smart. It might be technically correct.

But it hasn’t been stress-tested in the same way.

So there are really two different conversations in the human side of finance:

1. Client-side (where most behavioral finance lives now):

• How existing clients behave.
• How to coach them, counsel them, calm them, “nudge” them, improve decisions.

2. Pre-client, or "Prospect" side (where I live):

• How trust is formed.
• Why and how humans pay attention.
• Why and how people decide who to bet their future on.
• How positioning, story, and emotional resonance pull someone across the line from “interested” to “I’m in.”

I’m not just interested in how people behave once they’re already in the book of business; I’m interested in how they behave before they ever show up in the CRM.

Living in that pre-client world forced me into the machinery underneath those early decisions—the neuroscience of attention, safety, threat, and memory that drives “Do I move toward this advisor or away?”

That eventually became Neuro-Behavioral Finance—NeuBeFi for short—where I now focus my work on the prospect side of BeFi, helping advisors and firms design their positioning, messaging, and experience around how the brain actually makes those first few yeses.

That’s the gap: most behavioral finance is built for service, not for sales.

My work is built for the ones who still have to go out and win them—and want to do that in a way that’s ethically clean, emotionally honest, and actually effective.

Frequently asked questions

Does behavioral finance work on prospects, or only on existing clients?

Most behavioral finance starts after someone becomes a client. It studies how existing clients decide, and stay the course. The decision that gets skipped is the one that happens first: why a stranger chose to trust this advisor over any other. That earlier decision, not the after-the-signature behavior, is where the fragile part of the relationship actually lives.

What is the difference between client-side and prospect-side behavioral finance?

Client-side behavioral finance coaches people who already signed: how to calm them, keep them from panic selling, improve the decisions they make once they are in the book. Prospect-side behavioral finance studies what happens before that: how trust forms, why people pay attention, and how positioning and story pull someone from interested to in.