We are all familiar with Murphy's Law: A satirical proposition stating that if there is a possibility for something to go wrong, it will go wrong. But this does not always have to be a bad thing. If you are prepared to fix what goes wrong quickly...
VANGUARD HAS LONG BEEN A RIVAL to advisors and brokers with its no-load, low-cost, direct-to-investors business strategy. Three decades ago, the firm's straight-talking founder, John Bogle reckoned not only that professional money managers couldn...
It would seem like a nice problem to have too many clients. Unfortunately many reps have too many of the wrong type of clients. It doesn't have to be this way, of course. We are in the midst of arguably the best affluent client acquisition...
What advisor couldn't build a respectable practice just serving the needs of doctors, lawyers and MBAs? Six- (and even seven-) figure incomes, smart, well connected and, most importantly, too busy to handle their own investments. Research suggests...
Advisors trolling for small business clients are discovering what mate-seeking singles have known for years: cyberspace is the place. The old methods of small business prospecting, such as hanging around the Chambers of Commerce and Kiwanis clubs...
The industry's focus on high-net-worth clients has been a boon to many advisors, but the high energy focus required to succeed in the high-net-worth game is not always easy to sustain. An advisor I know named Marsha admitted: Sometimes I wonder if...
Dreams are an important part of any successful advisory business. Indeed, they represent perhaps the purest form of aspiration. But there's a reason that is a derisive term in the business world: Many people are unwilling to pay the price for...
The term 12-step process is all but synonymous with substance-abuse recovery, but it's also easily applied to other undesirable behavior: poor salesmanship. Our interviews with successful high-net-worth advisors has helped us to create a process...
Advisors of a certain age might remember an old Heineken beer ad campaign based around this phrase: Just being the best is enough. The idea, of course, being that the beer was so good it sold itself. A surprising number of advisors subscribe to a...
The corporate way of communicating has been so bad for so long, many of us have stopped caring altogether. It's a natural reaction: If something is annoying and unavoidable, ignore it. Trouble is that, in the brokerage industry, corporate are...
