What They Want You to Believe You are Receiving
They would love to have you believe that you are the very fortunate recipient of a carefully-crafted, personalized Investment Strategy.  One designed from start to finish with you, and only you, in mind.  What are your hopes?  Your fears? Your dreams?  We’ll spend dozens of hours mulling these questions at great depth and breadth, ponderously crafting and re-crafting a custom solution for you and your family.  Best protecting you from your particular “nightmare scenarios” whilst maximizing your chances of realizing your investment dreams.

What They Actually Do (An Inside Look)
IF you’re lucky, your “Investment Professional” will spend an hour or two with you, purportedly to “fully understand your particular wants, hopes and dreams”, taking great care to “fully analyze your unique and particular situation” and [fill in all the clips shown during televised golf tournaments here].  Then, he will spend a few days “crafting” that “Personalized Investment Solution, Prepared Especially for [Your Name Here].
Of course, this is all a show.  A good show, usually well-presented, but Vaudeville well-done is still farce.

What he (or she) will REALLY do is play the part of concerned, thoughtful advisor (this usually occurs in your living room), carefully noting all relevant information for the account he presumes you will open, then dump the whole thing on the desk of his Client Service Assistant, who will enter your information into the firm’s system, press a few keys to select your Money Management Platform, then press, “PRINT”.
Voila!  A “Personalized Investment Proposal, Prepared Especially for YOU”.  Sixty pages, full color charts, graphs, it very effectively achieves its intent to impress you.

Oh, it looks ever so professional; it appears the result of hours of careful consideration and analysis.  It looks so GOOD. 
But what is it really worth?  Forget for a moment any labor theory of value as to how much you “should” pay for this “service”.  How well does it work?  Does it out-perform the market BEFORE fees?  How about AFTER fees?  I’ll bet you a round of golf at my Club that, over the long term, it does not.   What Not To Expect From Us