In three decades of financial advice, I can count on one hand the conversations that were really about money. They were about purpose, vision, legacy and fulfilment — money was just the language available.
People came to see me about portfolios, structures, tax and retirement dates. Those were the reasons on the calendar. But within about twenty minutes, almost every conversation moved somewhere else: what they wanted their life to look like, what they were afraid of, who they were responsible for, and what they hoped would still be standing after they had stepped away.
Money turned out to be the most socially acceptable way to raise those questions. It gave people a number to point at while they worked out what they actually meant.
People who could answer this made decisions quickly and slept well. People who could not kept accumulating, hoping a number would eventually tell them they were finished.
Very few had ever described it out loud. Ask the question directly and you often get a long silence, then something surprisingly specific.
Rarely about inheritance. More often about children who can stand on their own, a business that works without them, a reputation for how they treated people.
The hardest one, and the one no spreadsheet answers. Plenty of people hit their target and felt oddly flat. Others had far less and were entirely at peace.
Nobody ever sat down and said: I'd like to talk about purpose. They said: I'd like to talk about the money. It was the same conversation.
They were unhurried. They allowed for uncertainty — people were permitted to change their minds without it being treated as a problem. And they were confidential in a way that mattered: I had no stake in the answer beyond it being genuinely theirs.
That last point did most of the work. Almost everyone in a person's life has an interest in their decisions. A spouse, a business partner, a board, an adult child, a bank. Somewhere in there, people need one conversation where nobody is quietly barracking for a particular outcome.
Over time it became obvious that the advice was the smaller half of the job. The part that changed people's lives was the thinking we did before any recommendation existed — and that part had nothing to do with financial services.
One question kept getting more interesting: what allows some people, leaders and teams to genuinely thrive, when others with the same resources do not? ELEVEN26 grew out of that curiosity.
The subject matter has changed. The conversation, mostly, has not. It is still purpose, vision, legacy and fulfilment — just without the spreadsheet in the middle of the table.
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