For an independent advisory, is there an issue more fraught than succession planning? Success and Succession examines the leadership transition process from the successor’s point of view and outlines the considerations and strategies that lead to the best outcome for the transition. The book provides a road map for transition general enough to give readers the big picture but also detailed to let readers build the concepts directly into specific succession plans. 

Author Cred: 

Eric Hehman is CEO of Austin Asset. The book recounts the seven-year transition plan providing for the retirement of the firm’s founder. 

Jay Hummel is a senior vice president in the Corporate Strategy group at Envestnet. 

Tim Kochis is a 40-plus-year veteran of the wealth management industry and a founder, former CEO and chairman of Aspiriant. He successfully transitioned equity ownership and management responsibility and now consults with firms around the world facing similar issues.

This book collects essays from 50 experts on the 50 most common questions to help high-net-worth families successfully manage significant wealth. The advantage of this approach is diversification of insights and experience across disciplines. The 50 questions are divided into nine categories, including: Thinking Through What Matters, Planning Thoughtfully, Investing Wisely, Seeking Sound Advice and Making Shared Decisions. This is a book that profits from sampling. The editing is first-rate. The chapters are short, well-researched and highly readable.  

Author Cred: 

Tom McCullough is chairman and CEO of Northwood Family Office. With over 30 years of experience in family wealth management, McCullough is also an adjunct professor of private wealth management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Dr. Keith Whitaker is president of Wise Counsel Research, a think tank and consultancy focused on families with significant wealth. He served as managing director at Wells Fargo Family Wealth.

All clients benefit from having a financial plan. This book is a powerful tool when advisors need to recommend a planning book to clients. The One-Page Financial Plan offers an actionable framework to help clients create a financial plan they can live with. Successful relationships ensue when clients see the financial advisor is a critical component of the financial plan. Most clients are, rightly, fearful of complexity. But the pay-off of this book is a one-page values-based financial plan that clients can refer to and build a future on.

Author Cred: 

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner, the director of investor education at BAM Advisor Services, a columnist for The New York Times and Morningstar Magazine, and publishes a newsletter.   

The retainer-based movement is a growing alternative to the assets under management-based model. One advantage of this structure is that it allows advisors to attract clients younger than the 50- and 60-year-olds that are the sweet spot for many fee-based advisors. Currently, only 7% of advisors embrace a retainer-based compensation model, but those numbers are increasing. The book offers a road map to help advisors transition from an existing fee structure to the retainer model. Case studies describe how advisors can communicate their value to prospects and current clients and how they can leverage technology to deliver an expanding range of services efficiently and profitably.  

Author Cred: 

Alan Moore is the co-founder of the XY Planning Network, a support network for advisors looking to serve next-generation clients. He is also the CEO of AdvicePay, a compliant payment processor for financial advisors. He hosts XYPN Radio, a podcast for independent financial advisors.  

Michael E. Kitces is a partner and the director of research for Pinnacle Advisory Group, co-founder of XYPN, and one of the most widely followed advisors working today. He is the publisher of the Kitces Report practitioner editor of the Journal of Financial Planning. Kitces is a prolific writer and long-term observer of the financial services industry.

How does an advisor measure performance? That’s the thrust of this book, which features a benchmark system that, through a series of questions and evaluations, enables advisors to score their performance for individual clients. Templates allow advisors to quickly put metrics around such issues as investment and estate planning, asset protection, disability and income protection, debt management and more. Levin, a financial planner, shows how an advisory profitably applies the index and tools for measuring client financial progress and advisor performance.  

Author Cred: 

Ross Levin is the founding principal and president of Accredited Investors Inc. and a nationally recognized expert in financial planning. Levin was the first recipient of the Financial Planning Association’s Heart of Financial Planning Award. 

This volume really reads as a textbook or reference, accumulating the wisdom and experience of three highly successful advisors. As such, it’s suited for readers who want a thorough, step-by-step grounding in the practice and wealth management. Chapters are short and consistently high quality. Advisors can do worse than committing to reading a chapter per week. First published in 1997, and updated in 2011, the book dissects both practical and theoretical issues such as optimal asset allocation, investment and portfolio theory, and performance appraisal and evaluation. The book, part of the CFA Institute Investment Series, is designed to benefit a broad spectrum, ranging from active advisors seeking to improve their wealth management credibility to students interested in a career in financial planning. While still highly relevant, the book is dated in places, so an update for 2020 is definitely in order.

Author Cred: 

Harold Evensky, CFP, is president of Evensky & Katz. He served as chair of the TIAA-CREF Institute Advisory Board. Achievement. 

Stephen M. Horan, CFA, manages professional education and private wealth management content for CFA Institute members. For many years, he was a professor of finance at St. Bonaventure University. 

Thomas R. Robinson, CFP and CFA, is managing director in the Education Division of the CFA Institute.

The family is always at the heart of wealth management. That’s the key axiom driving this thoughtful and readable book co-authored by the chairman of two of the world’s largest family trusts and a CEO of a leading global family office and professor of finance. The book benefits from the complementary experiences of two experts who have navigated all the challenges of assisting families preserve and grow their wealth across generations. The book introduces seven imperatives, e.g., Establish Family Vision, Values and Goals. Another imperative is how to successfully engage and educate the family to preserve and enhance the financial wealth and human capital over the generations. The book offers a model of wealth management that produces the desired return outcomes while staying aligned with the family’s overarching values and goals. 

Author Cred: 

Mark Haynes Daniell is the founder and chairman of the Raffles Family Wealth Trust, based in Singapore. He is a former director of Bain & Company. He was the founder and chairman of Singapore’s national Private Wealth Management Initiative.  

Tom McCullough is chairman and CEO of Northwood Family Office in Toronto. He is also an adjunct professor of finance at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Most advisors hate selling. Selling is hard work and few financial planners are naturally good at it. Besides, what, really, do advisors have to sell besides themselves? The temptation of most advisors is to demonstrate how skilled they are in navigating the complexity of the markets. But that takes facts and, as this book illustrates, facts put prospects to sleep. What sells is simplicity. Stories make complexity simple. This short book is a guide to better storytelling by learning to speak the language of the right (artistic/creative) brain. The best stories appeal to the right as well as the left (analytical) parts of the client’s brain. This is a process that the authors dub “storyselling.” The book reveals the recipe for how to fashion stories to sell your value proposition and deliver them with integrity. That includes the advisor’s body language, setting the context, crafting metaphors, asking the right questions to elicit emotional affirmation and encouraging prospects to tell their own stories. When an advisor and prospect are exchanging stories, there is no need to sell.

Author Cred: 

Scott West is senior vice president of marketing for Van Kampen Funds. A nationally renowned speaker to the retail brokerage community, he is best known for creative marketing strategies
geared to financial services professionals. 

Mitch Anthony, the author of more than a dozen books, advises financial services organizations. 

This is a great book for advisors to recommend to clients who want a primer on technical analysis. Weiss served as chief technical analyst for Lehman Brothers, PaineWebber Inc., UBS/PaineWebber and UBS. He is an enthusiastic educator with an unending fascination for the fundamentals of the markets using the common experiences of life and relationships to make sense of the market’s movements and mannerisms. Named the “Best Investment Book of the Year” by the Stock Trader’s Almanac 2018, Relationship Investing is a romp through the traps and thickets of investing, all without statistics. Readers can’t help but come away from the book without being impressed by the discipline of the best financial planners as they apply these tools on behalf of clients. Relationship Investing succeeds in covering most of the critical lessons of technical analysis without actually being technical. The grand takeaway from the book is the benefit that comes from treating each investment like a personal relationship. Doing so reduces much of the complexity and anxiety of buying and selling decisions while also addressing the all-important but often neglected risk management side of the investment equation.

Author Cred: 

Jeffrey S. Weiss, CMT, has more than 30 years of experience as a stock market analyst and is a leading media expert and motivational speaker on the subject. He has been the chief technical analyst at several nationally recognized investment firms and has been featured in Barron’s and on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, Fox Business Network and Bloomberg Radio. 

Sometimes the path to success lies in forgetting and jettisoning discredited habits. This book is based on a popular consulting program that Steve Moore has led for financial advisors. Gary Brooks, a practicing advisor, has distilled the lessons to help advisors transform their businesses into elite practices based on unlearning many of the assumptions and ineffective habits that hold advisors back. Some of these ineffective habits include: focusing on quantity rather than on quality of clients, hoarding unprofitable clients instead of disengaging from them and selling to prospects instead of through clients. The lessons and replacement best practices are delivered through the eyes of Jack, a fictional financial advisor. Some readers may appreciate this narrative device and others will find it clunky, but the underlying information and advice are rock-solid. There is much wisdom here for established advisors as well as those just starting their careers.  

Author Cred: 

Steve Moore is a leading management consultant, mentor and coach specializing in performance improvement. 

Gary Brooks, CFP, is president of Brooks, Hughes & Jones, a registered investment advisor, and a financial columnist for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.