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.
The field is overwhelmingly focused on:
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.
My work lives on the pre-client side of behavioral finance. The prospect side.
The messy, high-friction, very real world of:
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!
But my background sits in a different part of the map.
I’ve lived in the pressure cooker where:
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.
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.
1. Client-side (where most behavioral finance lives now):
2. Pre-client, or "Prospect" side (where I live):
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.