As an Advisor Thinketh adapts Allen’s classic for advisors

Pete Bush, CEO of Baton Rouge-based Horizon Financial Group, published As an Advisor Thinketh, a 64-page adaptation of James Allen’s 1903 As a Man Thinketh, last month. The book applies Allen’s central idea-that inner thought shapes outward results-to the mindset of financial advisors.

Bush leads a Cetera-affiliated network of 79 advisors across 14 states with $6.5 billion in client assets under administration. He has worked in the industry for more than 35 years and this is his fourth book.

Bush said he has read Allen’s original dozens of times and kept notes about how its ideas might apply to advisors. He revisited those notes during the pandemic and committed to the project earlier this year.

The text emphasizes nontechnical aspects of advisory work rather than investment strategy. Bush frames investing as one tool within the profession and highlights advisors’ roles in providing confidence, perspective, accountability and guidance during life events such as retirement, selling a business, a spouse’s death or caregiving.

Bush distinguishes between what he calls entrepreneurial and nonentrepreneurial advisors. An entrepreneurial advisor, he wrote, thinks like a builder and focuses on creating systems, teams, culture and intellectual property so a business can outlast its founder. A nonentrepreneurial advisor, he added, tends to treat the work as a job centered on servicing accounts and relies more on employer structures.

The book underscores mindset, discipline and the internal narrative advisors hold about themselves and their clients as factors that produce different outcomes among professionals with similar skills and resources. “The quality of an advisor’s business rarely exceeds the quality of their thinking,” Bush wrote.

Bush framed the book as a complement to practice-management guides. He wrote that his aim was to apply Allen’s principles to financial advisors and to prompt reflection on who advisors are becoming as they build practices. The title and some language in the book reference a biblical proverb that also appears in Allen’s original.

As an Advisor Thinketh is intended as a compact manual focused on emotional clarity and conviction for advisors who are building firms, teams and client-oriented enterprises.