About six weeks ago, my running coach fired me.

I hired him. I paid him. I was the client. And after about three months, he concluded that the arrangement was no longer particularly useful for either of us. His message was essentially: “Matt, I think you may be better suited to self-training.”

Why I Hired a Coach

Let’s take a step back and start from the beginning. I hired Paul because I am training for Disney’s Dopey Challenge in January, a four-day event consisting of a 5K, 10K, half marathon, and marathon on consecutive days. I am also dealing with Graves disease and its potential impact on blood pressure and heart rate expectations, plus an Achilles and calf issue, which made the questions of how much to run, how quickly to progress, and what kinds of workouts to do more important than simply accumulating miles.

Hiring specialists is normal for me. On the health side, I work with a longevity physician, a health and fitness coach, and more recently, a physical therapist. On the professional side, I have a business attorney, a tax attorney, a business CPA, an estate planner, and insurance specialist, etc. I am perfectly comfortable acknowledging that other people know considerably more than I do about subjects in which I have no particular expertise.

Running should have been no different.

The Client Who Wouldn’t Behave

Paul’s job seemed straightforward. I would tell him what I was trying to accomplish, what my current fitness looked like, where I was having problems, and how much time I had available. He would design the training. I would do it, report what happened, and he would adjust the program as the evidence accumulated.

Except that I didn’t behave myself – I didn’t play my role!

If Paul scheduled an outdoor run, I might prefer the treadmill. If he prescribed a certain distance, I might think I was ready for more. If he wanted me to slow down, I’d mention a podcast about why speeding up made sense. Intervals were modified, days of the week moved, distances changed. There always seemed to be some small improvement available, from ME, the guy who had hired the running coach because he was not, himself, a running coach.

I genuinely wanted to understand the reasoning. I am Gen X. “Why?” is my middle name. Paul was willing to explain plenty of it. The problem was that understanding gradually became participation, and participation became intervention. I was no longer asking him to explain the program. I was telling him how to redesign it.

There was also a mismatch in expectations. His coaching arrangement cost less than $200 per month. I was approaching it like a consulting engagement costing 10X that, expecting extensive customization, discussion, modification, and debate. Some customization was obviously part of the arrangement. If I progressed faster, he could accelerate the program. If I struggled, he could slow it down. If the injury interfered, he could adapt.

But first he needed me to follow the program. Eventually, he had enough, and I got fired.

I Spend My Career on the Other Side of This

What made the experience particularly instructive is that I spend much of my professional life sitting on the other side of almost exactly this relationship.

The ideal financial planning relationship begins with the client. My responsibility is to understand, in explicit detail, what matters to them, what their financial circumstances are, what limitations exist, where they want to go, and when they hope to get there. I then translate those values, resources, goals, limitations, timelines, and life transitions into a financial plan. The plan produces advice.

If I understand the client properly and know my trade as well as I am supposed to, that advice should be highly specific to that person. Then I have another responsibility: explain it well enough that the client understands what I am recommending, why I am recommending it, and how all the pieces fit together.

Then comes the client’s part: Do it. Save what the plan calls for. Use the appropriate accounts. Invest according to the allocation. Maintain the reserves. Complete the tax and estate work. Follow the withdrawal strategy. Give the plan enough time to work. And report back.

Financial plans have the same feedback loop as training plans. Taxes change. Inflation changes. Investment results differ from assumptions. Social Security and Medicare change. Jobs, health, families, and goals change. My ongoing responsibility is to absorb that new information and adjust the plan accordingly. Sometimes the answer is, “Everything still works.” Sometimes it is, “The big picture still works, but we need to modify one or two things.”

That is remarkably similar to what Paul was supposed to be doing for me. The relationship works best when everybody understands his role. The client owns the destination. The planner/advisor is responsible for designing the most effective and workable financial route toward it.

When the Roles Get Muddied

Yet sometimes those roles get muddied. A client might call and say, “I want to own a technology fund.” That may be a perfectly reasonable subject to discuss, but the client has already moved from identifying an issue to prescribing the solution. A better question is: “Technology seems increasingly important. Are we getting enough exposure to it? How have you accounted for that?”

Now I can do my job.

The same thing happens when a client calls and says, “Send me $150,000. We’re renovating the basement.” It is their money, and I will send it. But we have skipped one of the primary reasons they hired me. The better conversation is: “We have a new $150,000 goal. Can we afford it? What does it change? Does it affect retirement, travel, taxes, reserves, or another priority? Can you build it into the plan?”

The client decides that the basement is important. My job is to figure out how, whether, and when it fits alongside everything else the client has told me is important.

None of this makes the client passive. Good clients ask questions. They challenge assumptions. They tell us when something does not make sense. They change their goals and tell us when the advice does not fit their lives. Collaboration is helpful. But collaboration works best when the parties contribute different expertise and stay in their lanes.

Reaching for the Wheel

That was the lesson I missed with Paul. I hired him because I believed he knew more about training for long-distance running than I did. I gave him the goal, the injury history, the schedule, and the data. Then, rather than allowing him to design the route and adjust it as we went, I kept climbing into the passenger seat and reaching for the wheel.

Eventually, he decided I could drive myself. Fair enough.

There is considerable irony in spending a career asking clients to tell me where they want to go, allow me to design the route, ask questions along the way, provide feedback, and then give the plan enough time to work, only to hire my own advisor and immediately begin redesigning his plan. Apparently, understanding how the advisor-client relationship works and knowing how to be the client are two different skills.

Coach Paul taught me the second one. For that I’m grateful.