Four photographs are arranged in a vertical column on the wall of Naguib Kerba’s office in Mississauga, Ont. The Investment Planning Counsel branch manager asks visitors to stand back a few steps and look at the pictures — landscapes showing shorelines and reflective bodies of water.
What do they have in common?

The answer he is seeking invariably eludes the visitor: the photos are upside-down. The apparently dominant image in each photograph is actually a mirror-image of “reality” reflected in the water. “I use this with every client that comes in here,” Kerba says. “I use it to talk about perception, and to show them that things are not always as they
appear.”

The quartet of photographs and dozens of others that adorn the walls — misty landscapes, bustling cityscapes, sharp-eyed birds of prey — all share another characteristic. They are all the work of Kerba.

Once a professional photographer, Kerba has found many ways to incorporate his art into his financial planning practice, both as a learning tool for clients and as a way of networking. It fits his financial planning approach. As one who strives to bring the whole of his experience into his work as a planner, he is a strong believer in developing financial strategies based on all aspects of a client’s life.

“We tend to do full, comprehensive financial plans, with a bent toward the ‘softer’ side of financial planning,” he says.

At the heart of Kerba’s practice is a planning program he developed, revised and fine-tuned over the past 10 years and compiled in a binder. The program includes a series of questionnaires and information covering such areas as goal-setting, risk profile, financial planning, real estate planning, insurance and benefits, as well as a letter of engagement, how Kerba is compensated and information about his team.

The planning program is an amalgam of tools from various sources that Kerba has encountered in his 12 years in the industry. It includes parts of the program supplied by IPC, with other materials and questionnaires — from industry experts
such as Dan Richards of Strategic Imperatives Ltd. and Julie Littlechild of Advisor Impact Inc. , both of Toronto — thrown in. (Materials from outside sources are used with permission and credited on the documents.)

“We do life planning,” Kerba says. “We find
out if they have balance in their life or not — if they will let me.” He believes it is essential to learn as much as he can about each client’s background and goals to serve their financial planning needs best. That takes time, he acknowledges, and not all clients are willing to open up to an advisor.

“I find we’re all like onions,” he says. “We have certain layers that we allow certain people into. It may take two or three years to get into someone’s psyche, but I’m in no hurry. My approach is: ‘We get clients for life’.”

One of those layers in Kerba’s life is a fascination with photography. He began taking pictures as a teenager and majored in photography at Sheridan College in nearby Oakville, Ont. Since then, he says, he “hasn’t stopped taking pictures,” both professionally — as a wedding, portrait and commercial photographer — and as a hobby. After college, he had a 25-year career in retail, working in department-store sales and management, a career that provided a solid foundation for his planning practice.
He is fascinated by the way the sexes arrive at purchasing decisions.

“When a man decides to buy something,” he says, “he will put the blinders on and buy the thing, no matter what the rest of the world says. A woman will look at the object from several angles, then ask a friend for an opinion. Ultimately, they might both buy the same thing, but [there] seems to be different mechanisms at work.”

Understanding how women make decisions is important for Kerba’s practice. Of the 400 client households in his book of business (AUM: slightly less than $30 million), 70% are headed by single women — either divorced, widowed or unmarried. He has found that his binder program works extremely well with women clients.

In fact, he can adapt the program to suit a variety of learning styles. He took a course called Insights through a local business association, which taught him that people receive information in different ways. When presenting a plan to a business person, for example, he will give a synopsis. For an engineer, he will go page by page.

@page_break@“If it’s all numbers, I think you lose clients,” he adds. “I’m from a visual background and I like pictures in my presentations.”
Sometimes he uses his photographs as visual metaphors for financial and life-planning concepts.

He points to a picture behind his desk — a massive enlargement of a street scene in Paris by night — that serves as a retirement planning tool. “I tell clients how that’s $100,000 out of my retirement nest egg,” he says. He took the picture nine years ago, when he and his wife, Donna, travelled to Paris to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. If he had saved the $15,000 the couple spent on the trip, it might be worth $100,000 by the time he turns 65.

But that money was not wasted, he insists, and the picture is proof. “What I’m all about is getting people to figure out what’s really important to them. We’re so busy trying to get to retirement that the journey, in a lot of cases, is forgotten.”

Photography has also brought him many networking opportunities. Some pictures he shot for a community garden group caught the eye of a publisher about to launch a local magazine, Mississauga Quarterly . Kerba is now a regular contributor. His pay is free advertising in the magazine. A client who is in the printing business told Kerba he was interested in getting the job to print the magazine at his plant. The client submitted a bid and landed the contract.

A self-described “conference junkie,” Kerba is a member of the Canadian Institute of Financial Planners , which supports the certified financial planner designation, and its U.S.-based equivalent, the Financial Planners Association . He is also a member of the Nazrudin Project , a U.S. financial planning think-tank that explores life-planning issues related to finances. It was co-founded by George Kinder, who originated the life-planning movement.
Kerba is on the host committee that will bring the first Nazrudin conference to Toronto next spring.

The theme of Kerba’s career seems to be to learn from whomever he encounters. During a recent trip to Italy, partly organized through the FPA, he exchanged ideas with top financial advisors from that country and Britain and gained new material for his planning program — not to mention lifelong friends.

Kerba can travel frequently because he has organized his office to operate in his absence. The team consists of administrative assistant Karen Sakala;
assistant Carol Beagle, who has a CFP and a mutual fund licence; and Vinh Ta, a junior planner who is working on his CFP. Ta, 35, whom Kerba describes as his “exit strategy,” will gradually take over the business in 10 years.

Married for 29 years, with a son and a daughter in their 20s, Kerba is not about to slow down. “I’ve been speeding up while a lot of friends have been winding down,” he says. “I think I’m just hitting my best stage of my life. They’ve all been special in their own way, and I’m just having an absolute blast right now.” IE