Episode 1.2 with Simon Chan

Kevin Press:

Welcome to the Canadian Advisor.cast, a podcast dedicated to financial advisors and the people that work with them. My name’s Kevin Press. I’m the Editorial Director of Advisor.ca. My guest today is Simon Chan, Founder and CEO of Adapt With Intent. Simon advises leadership teams on workforce and customer experience design. As he says it, “for a world shaped by 100-year lives.” He’s worked in financial services, technology, higher education, and in the non-profit sector. In the process, Simon has pulled together a network of longevity thought leaders and institutional partners. He sits on the Advisory Board of the Yale School of Management’s Experienced Leaders Initiative. He’s chair of the Board of Governors at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics. Simon joined Advisor.ca as our longevity columnist in February. “Many Canadians alive today will spend as much time in retirement as they did in their primary careers,” he wrote in that first column. “Some will reinvent themselves multiple times, blending work, learning, and leisure in ways their parents could never have imagined. Yet, despite this shift, a lot of retirement planning still revolves around outdated assumptions. Not all clients will live to be a hundred, but there’s good reason for planning to do so.” Well written. Simon, welcome to the podcast.

Simon Chan:

Thanks, Kevin. It’s a pleasure to be here and be with you, and thanks for the opportunity to write for Advisor.ca. So, yeah, I spent about 20 years in the financial services sector. I came by it quite honestly. My mom took me to a financial advisor when I was 16 years old and said, “You should start saving. You should start saving for retirement.” And that really hooked me. I thought to myself, “This is amazing, like, there’s a profession here that helps people reach the goal of retirement.” And that’s kind of the formative years of how I got into financial services. So I spent about 20 years at various financial services companies — Manulife, Sun Life, et cetera — and I kind of did the tour of duty. I worked in group retirement, working with workforce. I worked with advisors, in insurance, and I worked across a bunch of different functions as well. Everything from finance to, you know, running a call centre. And towards the later years of my financial services career — which I think set me up for a lot of what we’re going to talk about today — was I spent a lot of time in education, educating people on their retirement plans; product development, developing new products for retirement; as well as strategy and innovation, and how do we modernize the financial services planning process to meet people where they’re at as they’re planning for their lives.

Kevin Press:

Did your mom work in the industry? That’s pretty young to get you started with financial advice.

Simon Chan:

No, she’s a, you know, I’m a child of immigrant parents. And when they came over here, the two things that they really focused on and instilled in us was the importance of education, the importance of financial security. And, you know, they kind of gave a very traditional blueprint, which I think we can, you know, is a good place for us to talk about. They talked about — I don’t know if you remember The Game of Life that we used to play back in the ’80s — they gave me the very simple road map of, you know, you go to school, you get a good job, you get married, you save diligently, and then you retire at 65 or whatever the age is, and that is the goal of life. And so, I think that’s kind of the imprint they put in my mind, which I think is still the imprint for many Canadians. But they were very focused on financial security and making sure that you had a good education to live a good life so that you could reach that end goal of retirement.

Kevin Press:

And it sounds like talking about money, which it’s so huge with kids, isn’t it?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, you know, we talk a lot about financial literacy, improving financial literacy, and I think it’s really something that you need to talk about. But also, you know, a lot of the behaviours are observed, right? We watch how our parents navigate through life. We watch how our parents focus on money and how they think about savings and do they save. And these are all these kind of early imprints that we get around how to travel through life, what should work look like, what is the role of money and savings. And those things really root us early in our lives subconsciously. And that really takes us through how we view different stages of life and money. And I think that’s an important part of the discussion today because I think that — let’s call it the Game of Life — road map is somewhat dated.

Kevin Press:

You went on to Communitech after your time at Manulife, which was an exit from financial services, entrée into the tech world in Waterloo.

Simon Chan:

Yeah, so, like I said, I spent 20 years in financial services with the back half really looking at kind of innovation. And it was at that time where I started to think to myself, you know, “It’s time for me to expand my horizons a little bit.” There was a lot of talk about technology and the advances of technology, much like it is today. And so I decided I wanted to work in a more broader field. So I worked at Communitech, which is an innovation hub in Kitchener-Waterloo that serves over 1,500 organizations — from start-up companies to scaling companies to multinationals. And I worked in their corporate innovation practice. So working with boards, leadership teams, innovators at different organizations — from Manulife, TD Bank, Rogers, General Motors — to help them think about how do they learn from the tech sector, and how do they continue to adapt and evolve in a rapidly changing environment. So I spent a lot of time on the innovation side as well as focusing on the future of work. And this is prior to the pandemic. So a lot of the things that we were talking about came to fruition during the pandemic, but that was probably the seedlings of where I started to think about this topic of longevity and demographics. I noticed in a lot of our conversations with leadership teams and executives and boards that longevity and demographics was always on the list of disruptors or mega trends. It was on every deck; it was in every white paper. But it was, again, I’m going to use another ’80s reference, it was a bit of the Rodney Dangerfield of strategic trends. While it was on the list, there really, typically, wasn’t anybody assigned to it, there wasn’t much of a strategy behind it, and there weren’t really any resources assigned to it, like you would, say, digital or the trend of AI today. And so that was kind of the inkling of starting to think about maybe this is an opportunity for me to spend some time working with leadership teams and boards around how do they rethink this idea of longevity and demographics. It’s oftentimes referenced as a major risk, and an aging society is all about risk, but there’s also an innovation and growth opportunity here. And I think that was at Communitech and at Manulife I started piecing those puzzle pieces together to see that there might be a bit of a niche or a lane here.

Kevin Press:

That’s what I love about your background is that you had that risk piece working in the insurance industry, also looking at innovation there. And then with Communitech comes altogether under Adapt With Intent. Tell us the mission of that consultancy and who you’re working with.

Simon Chan:

Yeah, so the mission of Adapt With Intent is really about getting, working with leadership teams and boards to rethink longevity and demographics. So the idea that we’re living longer and the idea that we are an aging society, but also an age-diverse society, which is often overlooked, is that we actually have equal number of people at ages from zero to 74. So, it means we got a very diverse set of people and we need to design in a very diverse way versus 100 years ago when it was very youth-oriented. We had a lot of young people, very few old people. So the mission of Adapt With Intent is to help people think about the fact that this is not just a risk, it is a risk that we need to manage, but it’s also an opportunity to redesign many of the systems that we have in place to modernize so that they are there for a 100-year life. Most of our societal systems, whether it be how we think about financial planning, how we think about learning through life, housing, health, they’re all oriented towards a much shorter life, like 65 or 70 years. And so the mission is really to help organizations see that there’s an opportunity to modernize and align better with the lives that we live, which are much longer, much more diverse, and not really that three-stage life that my parents gave me, which was that, you know, you learn in the first part of life, you work in the middle for 40 years, and then you retire at the end and you can go off to leisure and relaxation and golf.

Kevin Press:

You said a moment ago that this longevity demographics thing was just kind of hanging out there. It was in everybody’s deck, but there was a moment when it started to crystallize and really start to inform decision-making. Was there a particular tipping point that you saw happen?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, I think for me personally, I mean longevity and demographics, I think one of the reasons why it is somewhat overlooked is that it’s a long tail trend, right? Like, I mean, I think you and I are old enough to remember the book “The Pig and the Python,” right? So we’ve been talking about demographics for a long time. I think for me, when it crystallized was as I established Adapt With Intent, I really wanted to connect with the foremost thinkers and leaders in the space. And I was very fortunate to meet a few mentors who connected me with the Stanford Center on Longevity. And the Stanford Center on Longevity is really probably the foremost global think tank when it comes to longevity. And this isn’t really longevity in the terms of, like, life extension or biohacking. This is about the idea that we’ve already been gifted an additional 30 years of life in the last century, but for the most part, we kind of tacked it on to the end of our lives versus relooking at the arc and the shape of life. So, the Stanford Center on Longevity published a paper a couple of years ago called “The New Map of Life.” And it’s really when I came across “The New Map of Life” and started spending time with the Center, that it really crystallized for me that this is an actual strategic opportunity. This is missing from the strategic conversations at boardrooms, at leadership tables. But not just there, but it’s missing from how we live life day to day. And so that was kind of the inflection point for me. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a global ambassador, one of 25 global ambassadors for the Stanford Center on Longevity where I myself, as a practitioner, try to influence systems change along with the 24 other ones that are globally. We’re trying to take a lot of the research from the Center and actually put it into practice. And the areas that I’m really focused on, and Adapt With Intent is focused on, is really thinking about kind of a throwback to how do we modernize financial planning and financial services, how we modernize learning and higher education based on my work in the higher ed field, and then also in the workplace. Those three kind of areas tend to knit together. And so there’s a lot of crossover when you start making changes in one area, it tends to, kind of, have an impact or an interdependency on those other areas.

Kevin Press:

You’ve written about this New Map of Life for us. Explain it to us.

Simon Chan:

Yeah, so The New Map of Life, the premise behind it is really that most of society has been built for a 70-year life, and today, 50% of children born in developed countries have a 50% chance of living to a hundred. So, as you said in the opening, not everybody’s going to live to a hundred, but the reality is we are living a lot longer than we did before. And so The New Map of Life looks at eight domains in society and says that we need to think about looking through kind of the lens of longevity, look at what it means to live longer, at things like how do we think about finances, right? How do we save, and how do we reimagine finances when we’re living to 100? How do we learn differently? It’s not about learning just in the front end of life. If we’re going to stay relevant through maybe a 50- or 60-year career, we need to continue to learn. How do we think about health? No one wants to live longer, right, if you don’t have health. So how do we ensure that we have kind of a tight window between health span and lifespan so that they’re narrowly connected, right? And so, and then how do we build communities where we can support each other? Because, as we live longer and travel through life, we tend to lose social connection. And so how do we create more community that actually brings people together? So The New Map of Life is really eight domains. And how do we think about reimagining our life course so and the support systems in society to accommodate that. And the one actually I like the most in The New Map of Life is a domain they call Transition Is a Feature, Not a Bug. And I think that’s something that we need to think about in the financial services space is that we’re no longer living this kind of very linear three-stage life; we’re going live a much more non-linear, multi-stage life. We’re moving in and out of different forms of work. We’re going to move in and out of different personal priorities. And so how do you now embrace life transitions as a real feature in life and not just something that comes along and is a bit of a bug that’s a nuisance. It’s something that we need to plan through, from a financial perspective, and it’s something that we need to get good at as people transitioning from one identity, or one profession, or one area of life to something else.

Kevin Press:

This is a massive transition and it really is happening in real time, right? This is playing out over the course of our lives. I tell my kids about my grandfather a lot, who, you know, very much a sort of 20th-century life. Born in 1910, he worked as a coal miner as a child. So he had that experience in Scotland that, you know, we read about in history books. They moved to Toronto, they settled, he became a TTC driver and mechanic, retired at 65 with a wonderful defined benefit pension. But he was gone by 72. And so that archetype, that is exactly the kind of model that you’re describing, is now two generations ago. And we’re in a completely different world now. The thing that strikes me, though, is that this is still a moving target. Retirement continues to evolve. We’re not really through this change yet, are we?

Simon Chan:

No, in some ways I actually think we’re a bit stuck between the model that you just talked about and the model that’s emerging. So, if we take a step back, I think it’s important for everybody to note that retirement is a man-made construct. We just fabricated this idea of retirement. So I think about retirement in kind of four phases, right? So, for most of human history, we didn’t retire, right? You worked until you couldn’t work anymore and your family and your community took care of you. The second phase, or when retirement became a thing in the early, you know, 1920s, was when we had a very large group of young workers and very few older workers and we wanted to get them out of the workforce, right? We had high youth unemployment rates. So, retirement was brought in really to move older people out of the workforce and then give them some financial security. But to your point, life expectancy back then was probably about 50 years old and you might have collected your pension at 65. So a lot of people never even collected their pensions. And if they did, it was for a year or two because we all worked in fairly labourous roles. The third version of retirement, which is the golden years, emerged in the ’60s. We, you know, created OAS, CPP, defined benefit plans. And that is, for the most part, marketing people took this and said, “Look, like, you’re going to retire at 65 and then you’re going to have this beautiful life. Everything’s going to be magical. You’re going to be able to travel. You’re going to be able to rest and play golf. You’re going to be able to hang with your grandkids.” Which are all very, very good things, but again, life expectancy at that time might’ve been in your 70s, right? And so, that is, you know, we all remember Freedom 55. That is the marketing and that’s the narrative that we’ve been given. And I go back to my parents, my mom taking me to the financial advisor. That’s the model I had in my head. But today, as you know, we’ve got declining defined benefit plans. It’s much more of a do-it-yourself adventure. You have to do it on your own with a financial advisor to do some of that planning. But you could live another, you know, 20, 25 years, right? We generally don’t, we underestimate how long we’re going to live. If you ask somebody how long are you going to live, most people will use their parents as the proxy, right? But if you make it to 65, the median number of years after 65 is 22, which is 87. So you now have an extremely long period of time after your primary career. And for the most part, that’s a complete void. We don’t have role models for that. We don’t have a narrative for it, other than rest and relaxation. And most people, quite frankly, when they plan, they don’t think about that at all, right? As an industry, we’ve typically responded to two questions that our customers ask us, which is, when can I retire, and how much do I need? That’s it, right? And when you think about planning for another 20, 25 years, that’s a lot of time to plan for. And there are a lot of questions that go beyond just when can I retire and how much do I need? And I think that is the shift that we’re having. We’re also living in a much healthier way, and we’re much more vibrant than we were, say, 25 years ago. And so, again, you have an opportunity in your post-primary career to actually do a bunch of different things. You can, quote, “continue to grow, reinvent yourself.” And I think the sentiment is already out there. There’s an Edward Jones study that came out a couple of years ago saying that 54% of pre-retirees now view retirement as a new chapter in life, not necessarily this period of rest and relaxation, but I think our planning practices, our narratives haven’t really caught up because it didn’t need to. We never lived this long before. So why would you have a lot of structures and support for this phase of life when most people lived only until their mid-60s or 70s.

Kevin Press:

One of the things that strikes me is how adaptable Canadians have been on this front. As you say, they’ve come to realize the importance of exercise and nutrition. They’ve more recently come to understand the importance of emotional health. And I think we owe a great debt to the millennials for helping usher that in to sort of the way we talk about health now in much more holistic terms. Do you think that the advisors are keeping up with their clients in this sense, or are the clients kind of pulling the advisors along saying, you know, that’s not what I want, I don’t actually want to stop working at 65 or for that matter, maybe even 70?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, I think this is still a very early conversation. I actually think that while the sentiment is that people view it as a new chapter in life, for the most part, the narrative is still the point of retirement is to not work, right? And I think we need to come up with a newer narrative that there’s a difference. I always say there’s a difference between work and a job, right? A job is something where you’ve got a boss. You maybe have limited flexibility. You don’t have a lot of autonomy. Work is something that can be quite joyful, right? It could be unpaid work. It could be part-time work. It could be fractional work. It could be things that you’re interested in doing that maybe not even in your existing profession, right? And there’s some good data out there talking about people are willing to work longer, but they want to reduce stress. They want more flexibility. So I think there is an increasing number of individuals pushing for it. And I think the really advanced advisors, the ones who are really thinking about holistic planning, are having these conversations. But I think for the vast majority, at least of the advisors that I’ve spoken to, they’re still very focused on, you know, the investment asset allocation, the investment mix, you know, rate of return, et cetera, which are all very important things. But I think, again, we need to help shift the conversation a little bit so that advisors actually are the ones who are prompting their clients to think about the fact that they might live longer and what might they do, right? And I think advisors have an opportunity to really influence the future of how this conversation goes, or one of the people that most Canadians will talk to about what retirement looks like. But I think the conversation still centres around these two questions of when can I retire and how much do I need? And not enough around the topics you talked about, which is what’s going to be a source of purpose for you when you are retired? What’s going to get you up in the morning? It doesn’t need to be big purpose in the sense that you’re going to solve the world’s problems, but most of us need to have some reason to get out of bed in the morning. We lose a lot of connections, social connections, when we leave the workplace. How are you going to maintain social connection? You know, obviously health is an important topic, right? And the other one is just what is your view of aging, right? We, as a society, tend to be still a very ageist society, and we really focus on the negatives of aging, which is predominantly the physical aspects of aging. And we know that we’re all going to age and our bodies will decline to a degree, and we can do some things to mitigate them, but we need to talk a lot more about the benefits of aging. You know, you tend to have better social-emotional regulation as you age. You have better perspective as you age. You’re able to handle stress better. You have perspective. And so, these are all actually assets that I think are valuable in society and valuable in the workplace. And I think that’s what we really need to be doing is shifting that narrative to show people who are approaching this phase of retirement or their next chapter, that they actually have a lot of things to bring to the table and there’s a lot of possibilities. But that comes with intentional design; that comes with a conversation about what is it that you want to do and your financial plan will back that up. I’ve always found it kind of interesting that we have all these rules of thumb of what you need in retirement, but it’s not really connected to what people are actually going to do because we rarely have a conversation in any level of detail beyond golfing, travel, and grandkids about what you are going to do in this phase of life, which again, could span 20 to 30 years.

Kevin Press:

And there’s a productivity gain that comes with an older workforce, isn’t there? People get better at what they do, and the studies show this, that an older worker is typically more productive than a younger worker.

Simon Chan:

Absolutely. And I think this is what we talk to employers about at the Center of Longevity is really to raise the awareness that there’s immense value in the wisdom that your experienced workers have, right? And just look at the demographics. I mean, we’re going to have about, you know, right now or by 2030, we’re going to have one in five Canadians over the age of 65, right? And, by 2050, that’s going to be a quarter of Canadians, which is about, I think, 10 million people. So we, we need them from a talent perspective, first and foremost. You’re going to have a whole bunch of people retire out of your workforce without much knowledge retention strategy. So there’s a talent management piece of it. The second is that I don’t think I can go to a conference or a conversation where we don’t talk about AI. And when you think about what AI is good at and what it isn’t as developed at, many of the gaps in AI come down to things that you find in older adults: perspective, wisdom, the more softer skills of things of that nature. And so, one of the things we talk a lot about in the Center is how do we actually enable older and younger workers together to work with AI to solve business problems or to solve workplace problems or society’s problems? Because we need to leverage that age diversity as a net benefit. And, I think, as employers start looking at that, they’ll naturally get to the question of, okay, so if I do want to retain the wisdom that I have within my organization, how do I do that? How do I convince someone who’s 62 years old that, you know, it would be an opportunity for them to stay engaged. And a lot of the conversations will come down to what people want later in life is they want flexibility. It’s not that they don’t want to work necessarily, it’s that they don’t want to work in the same ways. And so I think the workplace is an opportunity to look at how do we become a lot more flexible and enable people at all ages, not just people who are older adults, but how do we allow them to provide value and productivity, but in a way that is a win-win on their own terms, right, with flexibility, but also in a way that works for the organization. And I think those are some of the system-wide changes that we’re looking at. My plan is probably never to retire, right? I think it’s really about, I see the value, if you look at what people struggle with, and I have talked to tons of retirees, right? And when you get them, you know, to be in a vulnerable spot and honest with you, and you ask them what they miss, and there’s studies that back this up. There’s generally three things that they overlook, right, when it comes to what their assumptions were, their pre-retirement assumptions were, versus what they now feel as retirees. And those three are they underestimate the value of social connection. They underestimated the value of mental stimulation, and they underestimated how difficult it was to shift from an identity standpoint, right? And so when you look at those three things, well, that’s what work gives you, right, to a degree, right? It gives you social connection because you’re interacting with individuals. It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning, a reason to get up in the morning. And it also gives you an identity; it doesn’t necessarily need to be that big title anymore, but it gives you an identity to go to a cocktail party, and what’s one of the first questions we get asked, Kevin, right? “What do you do?” right? And that’s a very, and I’ve talked to many retirees about it and, you know, not to make it gendered, but many men struggle with this idea of like, they’ll introduce themselves as like the former, you know, but they do not like to introduce themselves as retired. Or they’ll make fun of it or they’ll poke fun of it, right? So I think for me, personally, I don’t think I’ll ever retire in the traditional sense. I think I will probably ramp up and ramp down based on my life stage. But I will always want to find a way to stay engaged. I will always want to find a way to add some level of value to my, you know, for my own personal purposes or for society. I think my priorities will change, but I don’t think I’ll ever retire in the same way. And, you know, if we talk about, we talk a lot about longevity and we associate it with boomers and, you know, older adults, you know, say 55-plus. But what I think is really interesting about this whole longevity conversation is what does this mean for my son who’s 20, right? What does it mean now if he has a 90- to a 100-year life? Like, how is retirement going to change? And, you know, HSBC just put out a very interesting study talking about the phenomenon of mini retirements, right? And the idea that for my son’s generation, there may never be this hard stop, full retirement that you and I are accustomed to or have in our minds, that they’re actually going to take mini breaks along the way, right? And if you think about that, what does that mean from a financial planning standpoint as an advisor? Are you having those conversations about how do you plan for those things? Do we have vehicles, savings vehicles designated towards that, right? And how do our tools accommodate for those things when we do retirement calculators or cash-flow analysis? And so I think this is where I get excited about the fundamental shift that we’re seeing and how do we modernize how we do financial planning and retirement planning to align with how people are likely, well, they’re likely going to live in the future and how they’re living today.

Kevin Press:

It seems to me that advisors do a lot of this already. So anyone who’s been through a corporate downsizing, been packaged out of a position and spent a year or perhaps even longer looking for a next role are experiencing exactly what you’re describing. And they’ll tell you how much their advisor meant to them during that period, right? I mean, the work done by financial advisors for folks in that situation, it’s terribly under-recognized because it makes a huge, huge difference. I experienced it myself. So do you think that it’s more just about how we frame this, like, how do we help advisors have these conversations differently with their clients?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things. So I do, I agree with you. I think financial advisors play such an important role, right? I think when you have a life transition or when you think about living longer, the automatic reaction I get from any audience that I talk to is how are we going to fund this, right? Like, if you think about, you know, the traditional path of a 30-year retirement, how can we possibly fund a 30-year retirement on a 30-year career? The math just generally doesn’t work out. And so I think it is a couple of things for the advisor. I think one is, I think, the framing for the advisor is to help their clients think about what their life might look like over a much longer life course. And for them to have conversations to educate them on how much longer they may live, right? I think I saw a recent study, it was saying that 40% of people underestimate their life expectancy by 10 years, right? So they don’t realize they’re going to live as long as they, they are. And then for the advisor to start educating them and talking to them about what does that mean from your career standpoint? What does it mean for you to continue to learn and stay engaged? So I think a bit of it is framing. So education, if you will, I think that an advisor is very well suited for that because I don’t think a lot of people are talking about it in this way. So as a client, I think I would really value an advisor talking to me about that. I think the second is I would really push advisors to move beyond just the finance conversation around how do I fund this, I think, to the discussion we had earlier. There are questions that they can start prompting to help them realize that they need to think about the emotional well-being side, the purpose and connection and meaning side of things, right? Because those are important as we navigate in addition to, obviously, health. So I think those are some of the things that advisors can do from the client side. From an advocacy side, I’d really love for advisors to really start thinking about how do they look at their own practice through the lens of longer lives and multiple transitions. And how do they advocate, where are the gaps so they can advocate, you know, the sector or the industry, right? How do we need, there’s already products that are coming out from insurance companies and banks that are more oriented towards a decumulation side of things, but we need the sector to shift the conversation partly about aging, right? Like, we look at the commercials that are being put out there and marketing, it’s still very traditional. It’s still very, you know, husband and wife staring at each other on a beach and golfing. We need the sector to really highlight different role models for us in terms of how we potentially retire and demystify this idea that retirement is the end. So I think they can advocate there. I think there’s shifts in how we have estate planning conversations. If you’re going to live to 90 or a hundred, that conversation might be very different now. You may decide to gift, you know, while you’re still alive versus at the end of life. If you’re giving your child a gift at when they’re 60 and you’re 90, it may not serve the same purpose. So, I think there’s product advocacy. I think there’s advocacy around narrative and advocacy around best practices that advisors can do. So I think there’s a role for them to play both with their clients as well as with the sector.

Kevin Press:

We hear a lot about retirement coaches these days. Is that a model that you see in positive terms? This idea that it’s not just preparing your client financially, but more holistically?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, I do think that retirement coaches are, again, at a very early stage in its development. But I do actually think you and I could be sitting here 10 years from now and I actually think a retirement coach might be as common as a life coach, might be as common as a personal trainer. And the reason I say that is because financial advisors, many of them are very focused on their craft and their expertise and not everybody’s going to be able to have some of these more in-depth emotional conversations that we’re talking about, and that’s completely fine. But much like advisors think about centres of influence, whether it be a lawyer for estate planning, whether it be a tax planner for the tax side of things, if they want to stick to their kind of expertise, I think a retirement coach could be a valuable asset or a valuable part of that centre of influence of their practice. And just for people who are not familiar with life coaches, sorry, retirement coaches, retirement coaches really are like a life coach, but they focus specifically on the retirement transition. So they talk about the non-financial aspects of the retirement planning process. So they will sit down with a client and talk to them about maybe what their goals are, what their passions are, what strengths they have. They help them envision what they might want to do in the first six months, first year, in the first two or three years. And they help them develop a plan and coach them through the transition of primary career into those, you know, the first few months of retirement and potentially further down the line. And the really good retirement coaches are ones who actually work with their financial advisor, right, as a partner. They’ll help the client develop the non-financial conversation and goals. And that is used as the plan, so to speak, to create a financial plan that actually aligns with how the individual wants to live. So I think there is a really interesting relationship that can form, and it’s still a new profession. Bob Laura, I wrote an article about him. He created what they call the Retirement Coaches Association in the U.S., and there’s Canadian and American retirement coaches who go through an education process and a certification process to become a retirement coach. And so, again, very early days, but again, you can start seeing how the profession is starting to form. And in my experience, just dealing with organizations who are thinking about this idea of longevity, the non-financial aspect of planning, taking a much more holistic approach, I can absolutely see how a retirement coach could be a really integral part of an advisor’s team.

Kevin Press:

But there is also an opportunity, I think you’d say, for the advisor to absorb some of that thinking, that new perspective on longevity and how retirement and work is evolving, absorb that into the kinds of conversations that you’re having with clients and how to plan a career.

Simon Chan:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, again, much like some of the other parts of your centres of influence, right? When you’re having a joint conversation with your tax planner, you’ve developed a financial plan and there’s tax implications, you’re going to hear about some of the conversations that’ll happen with that accountant, right? And much like a retirement coach, when you sit down with your client, with the retirement coach, and you hear about what their hopes and dreams are, you hear about where they want to take, you know, experiment in the first couple of months of their retirement, or what they might want to do in a completely different avenue. It could be starting a business, a small business, which is, you know, entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing, parts of entrepreneurship is people who are over 50-plus, right? And so, people are taking multiple different paths and for you to be able to sit there with the retirement coach and your client to hear about some of those conversations really helps you personalize the plan that you’re building for your client. And I would argue it really strengthens the client relationship because, what do the clients get emotional about? They get emotional about their own life and their own plans. And it’s a great way to show both the emotional side and connect to that, but also give them the peace of mind of what a financial plan would look like to be able to back that lifestyle that they’re hoping to live in their next chapter.

Kevin Press:

You work with a lot of employers. Generally speaking, do you find them understanding this evolution, and are they responding to it positively?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, I think it’s early days still with employers. I think they are starting to understand that they need to engage this experienced or older workforce because they are losing institutional knowledge. I think that what I’ve seen is that for employers, it tends to be one-off, right? It tends to be a manager who has an employee who’s retiring and the person who’s retiring says that they’d be willing to work 10, 20 hours or 10 to 15 hours a week on a fractional basis, and the manager decides to work with HR and essentially gerry-rig a one-off relationship because they can see the value of having that person stay engaged. What I’d like to see employers do is think about how you can take that and make it more systematic and programmatic, and more into policy. So I think that there are small experiments that are happening. If you look in Europe, you’re finding more models in Europe where they’re looking at fractional workforce and more phased retirement over in Europe for a retiring workforce, which they’ve actually started to use for different parts of the workforce, like millennials who want more flexibility because they’re a parent and they have caregiving needs that they, they need to take into consideration. And so I think employers are going to start getting there, but I think it’s still pretty early days for them. And a lot of it comes down to realizing that designing for the more experienced and older worker actually becomes something that you can roll down to other parts of your workforce. Because, at the end of the day, for employers and for employees, it comes down to flexibility. That’s what employees are looking for is flexibility. So, there are programs in place that I think are innovative. Sun Life offers a sabbatical program, right, where it allows you to take, add several weeks on top of your vacation to create a mini sabbatical of, say, six weeks. These are, again, are indicators of flexibility that employers are bringing to the table. And I think we’re going to need to see more of that to accommodate this, again, much longer life course and much more fluid career.

Kevin Press:

We like to ask our guests if they have advice for financial advisors, and, Simon, you have endless advice for advisors. But I’d wondered if we could turn this a little bit because a lot of what you’ve described can be applied to the advisors themselves. They are such driven people; they’re hardworking people. They identify, a lot of them, as financial advisors, and I think run the risk of falling into exactly the trap you described a little bit ago, which is that it’s tough to stop. And, if you don’t have other interests, if you don’t have a hobby, if you don’t have a balanced life — and, let’s face it, a lot of financial advisors are just too busy for that — making that transition can be tough. So, your advice to financial advisors on their own retirement?

Simon Chan:

Yeah, I think my advice to financial advisors and people who are in very driven professions that consume a lot of their time and a lot of their identity is to recognize that you need support through this transition and you need to be thinking about it before you get to retirement. This isn’t something you want to figure out on retirement day plus one. This is something you want to be thinking about several years prior to when you decide that you might want to retire. And what I mean by support is, as you mentioned, Kevin, one of the areas I spend time in is in higher education. And one of the things I’m seeing at a number of universities now is the rise of what they’re calling midlife or encore programs. And these are programs that are actually targeted at accomplished professionals and individuals because they realize that they have a hard time making a shift from what they were to what they want to be. And so what they do is they offer in a cohorted basis of, say, 25 or 50 people an experience over a period of time where they spend some time reflecting on their own strengths and what their accomplishments might be. They spend some time opening up the aperture of what other areas of interest are they potentially interested in spending some time on, right? It could be looking at things, everything from looking at climate to food insecurity, or it could be their own entrepreneurial, another entrepreneurial venture, and then designing a plan. But what’s magical about these programs, and what I mean by support is it actually is a structured way for you to, you know, travel through this transition. But also they provide you with a network of other people who are driven like you, at the same stage as you, but come from very different backgrounds. And that mixture of people and new community and new connection and new perspectives is often what I see people who are very driven and identify with their own profession as their primary identity, they need to make that transition. So I’m not saying that all advisors should go to a midlife program, but think about the idea of taking time to go through this process of exploration and who can you connect with that are maybe at the same stage as you, but are not from your sector or your profession, to really open up the possibilities of who you could become in this next act of life.

Kevin Press:

Amazing stuff, Simon. Thank you. It’s terrific to have you on.

Simon Chan:

Thank you, Kevin, for the opportunity, and I look forward to future conversations about longevity in the financial services space.

Kevin Press: My guest has been Simon Chan, Founder and CEO of Adapt With Intent. Visit AdaptWithIntent.com for more. Canadian Advisor.cast is a production of Newcom Media. It is produced by Alisha Hiyate. Noushin Ziafati is our associate producer. My name’s Kevin Press. Thanks for being with us.