Brian Cochran is a Christian financial advisor, a Certified Financial Planner, and a Kingdom Advisor with John Moore Associates in New Mexico. He’s been named the top advisor in New Mexico by both Forbes and Barron’s, and he serves on the board for the National Christian Foundation’s Southwest team. We met with Brian to talk about how and why he considers generosity such an important part of his practice.
When did you decide to bring generosity into your practice?
Our founder, John Moore, decided that in 2012. And that’s when we started tracking how much our clients give away from the assets we manage. We just broke $45 million in client giving!
If something’s important, you measure it. Right? So, we celebrate that. We have a page on our website that tracks the number, and we celebrate it with clients, because it’s their number more than ours. John saw that calling for biblical generosity and wanted to make sure we were encouraging our clients to take that leap.
A lot of people have [generosity] in their heart, but they don’t feel like they have the capacity to give because of other obligations. Giving is always in competition with other financial priorities, but we can often tell them, “Hey, you have enough to provide for your family’s needs. Maybe not everything you want, but certainly everything you need.” So, that opens the door. That’s where the financial plan process can be helpful.
Can you recount a time when you helped somebody to be generous and what that was like?
A retired couple came to us after their advisor retired. He had done a wonderful job helping them accumulate a generous net worth. And our first recommendation was that they should give away about 15 percent of their investable assets. This was possible because of the CARES Act, and it kind of rocked their world. Generosity hadn’t been a regular part of their conversations with their advisor. So, we were able to identify in the planning process that they had more than they required to meet their lifestyle goals. They made a seven-figure gift, and we set up their plan so they could give about four times as much as they’d planned – each year for the rest of their lives, while still supporting their family and maintaining their lifestyle. And NCF was integral in the details, in terms of a tax-efficient strategy and giving strategy.
What have been the results of making generosity part of your business?
It’s led to deeper client relationships. When I look at the families we serve, those who are generous and allow us to be part of their generosity conversations as a family are often our deepest relationships. I don’t question for a minute that they’ll stay with us. It’s such a personal thing that they’ve opened up and they’ve allowed us to be an influence.
Have you ever brought up giving with a client and it went poorly?
In one of our introductory meetings, a gentleman who was not a big giver said, “I don’t get how it makes me financially successful to give my money away.” That challenged me a little. I thought about it for a second, and I think God helped me. I said, “Well, it depends on how you define success. If the only definition of success is more money for you, then giving is not a key to success. But if success involves feeling a joyful spirit about your money, having a good relationship with your family about money, having a good relationship with your community – for those who have the spiritual calling to honor God with what they’re doing with their money …. If those things are part of your definition of success, then generosity is maybe the most important.”
You’ve never lost a female client after their spouse died. In light of the statistic (70% of widows leave their financial advisor within a year of their spouse passing away) that’s remarkable. To what do you attribute that?
The values alignment. When you have shared values, usually they’re not just shared with one of the spouses. Usually, it’s the values of that whole family. It’s a big part of what we invest in. We’re not just trying to get more assets from every client. We’re trying to build a deep relationship, and often that goes multigenerational.
We had a widowed client who was very fearful, always wanting to keep everything because her husband died of cancer, and she was worried she would get cancer and not have anyone to take care of her. She was accumulating millions of dollars. I said, “Well, you have much more than you require.” Now, she’s given away almost $2 million. So, we went from, “Hold it tight, I need everything I can possibly accumulate” to generosity. And a lot of that is because of the strategies we’ve learned through Kingdom Advisors and NCF.
We have to remove the fear to allow the generosity to creep in. We slowly instilled confidence in her and exposed her to giving opportunities, never prescribing, but saying, “Just in case ….” She really wanted to support the cancer center that treated her husband. And we showed her strategies.
We knew she could, and we knew she would receive emotional and spiritual benefits from doing it, but it had to be proven to her. If it wasn’t a point of emphasis for us, there’s no way that would have happened. And now there’s someone doing research at the local university cancer center who’s paid fully by her donations and is making cancer breakthroughs that wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for those conversations and her willingness to allow us in.
What would you like to share with other Christian advisors?
I think it would be our principle of tracking the total our clients give. It’s on our home page. It’s one of the first things people see when they look at us. And it’s become one of our key business metrics for whether we’re successful. It also shows us we don’t really have as much control as we might think, because generosity conversations are kind of like evangelism. You can have a lot of conversations, but it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to change hearts. In the end, the generosity choices are up to the client. It’s a very personal decision.
We always say, “This is YOUR number,” and “Thank you for allowing us to be part of your generosity.” It’s creating this whole-firm culture around giving. And people don’t want to be left out. Even if they give $1,000, when they see the number go up by $5,400,000 like it did last year, they know they’re part of that.
What’s your favorite Bible verse about giving?
To me, the keyword comes from 2 Corinthians 9:6-7. Some clients want the formula. They want the prescription, but there isn’t one. You give as you decide in your heart and try to give cheerfully. If I start giving you a formula, then that’s compulsion. That’s the law. This is a response, and it’s more about joy.
