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Ray Sclafani
Laying to Rest the Ghost that Haunts your Team
Many people mistakenly look at the world and think that what they see is reality. In fact, what they see is merely their perception of reality. Unfortunately, these...
Setting the Stage for a Strong 2016
While the final quarter of the year tends to be a hectic time, it’s a critically important time for your business. If you want to have a strong first quarter of 2016,...
Building Enterprise Value in Your Financial Advisory Firm
If you were actually able to stay awake through your 8:00am college economics class, you might recall a definition of Enterprise Value as a firm’s market capitalization...
Valuing Your Business Goes Far Beyond Revenue Multiples
There’s a big difference between buying a book of business and buying a business. Acquiring a business doesn’t just require an assumption of client relationships; it...
Capital to Grow: Acquiring Other Financial Advisory Firms
“Revenue is vanity. Cash flow is sanity. But cash is king.” It’s an age-old business saying that has increasing relevance for today’s advisor who’s looking to jump-start...
Improve Your Hiring Process -- Think Strategically!
With every hire, at a minimum you should be thinking about your future company rather than merely filling a current need. Ask yourself where you envision the individual...
Onboarding Starts with the Very First Interview
How do you go about quickly and effectively integrating new hires into the culture of your team? The trick is to not wait until the individual is hired, but rather to...
I’ve Got Your Back – Nurturing Mutual Accountability
Mutual accountability is a quality that neither develops on its own, nor can be coerced. Instead, mutual accountability must be co-created between you, as team leader,...
Are Your Marketing Efforts Stuck in the '80s?
Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel! For many of us, the image of Bud Fox’s tenacious efforts to bag the elephant and secure a new client relationship with Gordon Gekko...
5 Tips for Building an Effective Team and Future Company
There’s a fundamental and often monumental difference between a “team” and a “work group.” Yet what most advisors refer to as a team, is more often than not, the latter...
Financial Advisory Teams: Rules and Structures for Partnering Together
What are your financial advisory team’s rules and structures for successfully partnering together? When you’re just starting out and your financial advisory team...
What’s Your Strategic Employee Onboarding Plan?
For the vast majority of financial advisors, building a business begins with anything but a strategic growth and onboarding plan. They start out as a jack-of-all-trades;...
How to Better Leverage Millennial Financial Advisors
You’re most likely familiar with the oft-discussed Japanese business concept of Kaizen. Derived from the words“kai” which means change and “zen” which means good, the...
10 Guidelines for More Productive Employee Development Conversations
If you’re like most advisors, you probably meet with individual team members on an annual or quarterly basis to provide performance feedback. These evaluations are...