Managing
Planning Your 2010 Recovery
- Details Category: Practice Management
One year ago, America’s financial system teetered on the edge of ruin. Happily, we avoided the worst. However, in the year since the crisis erupted and securities prices collapsed, even the most successful advisory firms suffered decimated fees and are earning a lot less. Worse still, confidence in all things financial—including advisors—has been similarly debased. Are you planning your comeback yet? With Labor Day behind you and the final quarter of 2009 closing in, it’s time to start planning your firm’s recovery. It’s a good time to think strategically about how you’re goi
One Advisors Process Evolution
- Details Category: Practice Management
Financial planning is one area of a practice that often was developed as a process without technology. It is or was then later married to a technology solution that supports the process.
An advisor I have worked with in California, Neal Quon, successfully uses the goals-based approach to planning. At the outset of his practice, he found that Money Guide Pro facilitated his planning methods and provided meaningful output for his clients to work with.
However, much like the constant discussion in financial circles surrounding goals-based versus cash-based planning, Neal has those deeper
Starting to Think About Workflow
- Details Category: Practice Management
Business process and workflow are terms that generate fairly tepid responses. Something akin to - are you looking forward to your dentist appointment tomorrow? That said - a big portion of what we all do on a daily basis is boiled down to process and workflow.
As our business has shifted from paper largely to systems, we can now find value in examining our process and workflow to do several things (that most stuff respond very well to):
Get things done quicker
Get them done with fewer errors
Free up time to focus on clients
Save money, which in aggregate translates
A Worksheet for Technology Evaluation
- Details Category: Practice Management
One of the more challenging areas of process is documentation, requirements and due diligence. For the latter, it can be difficult to get a solid baseline of information when evaluating service providers and vendors.
The process can be systemized in a straightforward way.
You and your team determine the need for an outside provider to solve a business problem
As a group you collaborate and write out the requirements you seek
Your business begins looking for vendors who service the target requirements you have
The long, slow dance begins of demos, phone calls, brochures, e
Lessons for Advisors in Government Inefficiencies
- Details Category: Practice Management
It's pretty much a given that when government agencies are mentioned, we think of bureaucracy, red tape, and waste. So when President Barack Obama recently challenged his cabinet secretaries to save $100 million by streamlining government operations, lo and behold, they did it.
With an underlying theme of "Duh! It took how long to figure this out?!?" details of the cost savings are in this Wall Street Journal article by Jonathan Weisman, In a Savings Shocker, the Government Discovers That Paper Has Two Sides. The savings shockers: double-sided printing and deleting old email
