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The ClientWise Blog
Posts by
Ray Sclafani
Keeping Your Wealth Management Team Fully-Engaged
At the beginning of the year, you and your team were fired up and ready to rock-and-roll, committed to 2016 being your firm’s best year ever. Like straight-A students on...
Will the Fiduciary Rule Open the M&A Floodgates?
Over the last two weeks alone, I’ve had no fewer than eight clients say to me that they’re throwing in the towel as a result of the DOL’s new Fiduciary Rule. “You know...
How to Avoid Benchmarking Your Way to Mediocrity
Ours is an industry seemingly obsessed with benchmarking – whether it’s the performance of our investment portfolios or the performance of our businesses; we want to...
Short-Term Comp = Long-Term Headaches
In just the past few weeks alone, I’ve come across no fewer than a half-dozen situations where highly successful advisors suddenly find themselves hamstrung by...
Wealth Advisors: What is Your Business Really Worth?
Every advisor – whether thinking about selling their firm or not – wants to know the value of their business. It’s simply human nature to be curious about how much your...
The Biggest Inhibitor to Your Firm's Growth? It May Be You.
Frequently when I speak at advisor events, I’ll ask attendees what they believe to be the greatest impediment to their firm’s future growth. More often than not, the...
8 Accelerators for Transformational Change
I recently came across a terrific older article in the Harvard Business Review that articulated in very specific detail an optimal organizational structure to empower...
Creating a Positive Wealth Management Team Culture
We focus so much on acquisition, portfolio management, client issues and day-to-day operations that we rarely have time to sit back and take stock of the state of our...
Don’t Fear the DOL Rule, Embrace It!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Open any financial advisor trade publication these days, and that pretty much sums up the prevailing sentiment. Yet despite all...
Why Your Networking is “not-working!”
Whenever I have a conversation with an advisor client about his or her professional advocate network, invariably they begin to discuss the number of client referrals...
How to Justify Your Value So Price Doesn't Matter
As the advisor industry continues to churn with speculation regarding the scope and extent of new forthcoming DOL guidance around the transparency of client fees, all...
Financial Advisor Client Events: Making a Lasting Impression
Intimacy and engagement: those are the qualities that separate truly memorable client events from the merely enjoyable; they’re the qualities that resonate at a deeply...
How to Master Your Business Financials
“Revenue is vanity, cash flow is sanity, but cash is king.” It’s an age-old business maxim that too few independent advisors ever fully embrace. As firm owners, many of...
Team Building Activities for Wealth Management Advisors
Successful wealth management is a team concept and not an independent function. In order for the client’s work to get done, you need a team that willingly engages in the...