In this section we present key findings and insights from our survey questions on practice management and operations, including services offered, the most time-consuming activities, professional designations, custody relationships and documentation trends.
Tom, a financial planner for Schwab Institutional's unit, had a client named Walter. He had worked with Walter for almost 10 years, knew his family and, now and again, played golf with him. Tom had watched as Walter, a small business owner...
Brokers often take a shortsighted view of their careers, and this usually turns an effort to convince them to think about their own retirements into an uphill battle. Indeed, given the average advisor's zeal to earn as much as possible as quickly...
For advisors looking to expand a practice quickly, purchasing a book of clients was once the most expedient solution. Robert Enright learned the hard way that it isn't necessarily so anymore. Enright, of the Burton/Enright Group in Walnut Creek...
Rick Peterson, a Houston recruiter, places about 75 clients a year. But when firms come to him to scout out branch office managers (BOMs), those who'd make the best prospects are increasingly loath to step up. I'm asked by many firms to come up...
The process of deciding to change firms often hinges on concrete comparisons of compensation, of working conditions, of relations with management. But other, less tangible factors come into play as well. Here are four questions that get to the...
A New York judge's recent decision in Estate of Dumont1 should give trustees reason to pause and re-evaluate the investment policies and procedures of any trust for which they act, that is governed by or may come to be governed by New York law...
When Jim King sits down with clients for the first time, he hands them the usual forms and risk-assessment questionnaires and a Myers-Briggs personality test, the same one used by top corporations to size up potential hires. I've found it useful...
Once upon a time some 20 years ago securities and insurance firms were dens of incest, with product manufacturing married closely to sales. Securities firms developed proprietary research ideas, launched new issues of stocks (including IPOs) and...
Warren Bischoff was the new guy twice over when he took the branch manager job at RBC Dain Rauscher's Washington, D.C., complex in 2002. But he wasn't just new to the office; he was, in a sense, new to retail branch management, having spent the...
A persistent myth of the brokerage industry is that prospecting is the best way to expand a practice, however, advisors are far more likely to profit from expanding relationships with existing customers.
