The ClientWise Blog

You spend your days counseling clients as to the critical importance of careful and proper planning. Yet a great many of you either don’t have a business plan, or haven’t revised and updated it since you first started practicing. So ask yourselves a few questions: Does your firm today look identical to how it looked on Day One? Do you have the exact same service offering, same team members and same assets under management? More importantly, do you expect and desire the firm to evolve over the next five years?

Commit to making a fresh start to 2016 by dusting off your old business plan, meaningfully revising it, and actually using it for its intended purpose – a roadmap for your business. If you never actually wrote a business plan for your practice, it’s not too late to start. And it can be a tremendous opportunity to actively engage your team members in helping to shape your future firm. 

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, you need to finish out 2015 with a flourish. Advisors who are still scrambling in January to make their previous year’s goals all too often find themselves like Sisyphus – doomed to spend the rest of their year endlessly rolling a huge boulder up a steep hill.

If you want to ensure that you hit the ground running after the holidays, now is the time to get a jumpstart on several essential year-end activities. 

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 necessitates a transfer of trust – something that can’t be measured using factors and formulas.

The days of calculating an advisory firm's value by simply multiplying its annual revenues by some magical multiplier (usually 2.1x or 2.3x) are an anachronism. As M&A in the financial advisory space has evolved, both buyers and sellers have become much more savvy about a host of ancillary considerations that can dramatically impact a firm’s tangible value.

“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 growth through the acquisition of another practice. There’s no question that managing cash flow is essential both to your team’s ability to weather short-term bumps in the road, as well as the long-term growth and sustainability of your practice. Yet far too many advisor CEOs focus on the “cash is king” part of that saying – treating their business revenues as personal income.

Great success doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It’s difficult to achieve and takes patience, time, and focus. While many advisers in varying situations can experience success, there are several traits commonly held by the best of the best. We’ve had the honor to witness many of these traits first-hand, through our work with the top financial professionals in the industry today. Here’s what we’ve observed:

The question of whether or not stories sell better than ads is long settled by now. We live in an information driven age in which consumers crave knowledge with purchase. The decision to buy goods or services is driven as much by a desire to gain insight as it is the eventual outcome that results from using that product or service. So what does this mean for you?

The social media space can be an overwhelming environment, especially in an industry in which it’s just becoming “acceptable” or commonly practiced. Even our marketing team and digital community managers at ClientWise are constantly commenting on how much they do to keep up with the latest and greatest in the world of social media.

After our last post on public speaking, we decided to seek out some of our favorite TED Talks. We were curious to see how the elements we advised were applied (or not) for these speakers. We were so inspired by what we saw here that we wanted to give you an opportunity to experience it for yourself. Here are some of the top TED Talks recommended for entrepreneurs and leaders today:

Summer provides an excellent opportunity for financial advisors to work ON their businesses in addition to working IN their businesses. While many of your private clients might be away for the summer months, and many of your corporate clients may be rolling into slower summer hours, you have the opportunity to prepare for an incredibly strong finish to the year.

Sometimes we have to break the rut of our networking to find any new successes. If you’ve run into the same people at the past three networking dinners or non-profit events with little to no success, it might be time to diversify your approach a bit. These basic techniques and perspectives will allow you to capitalize on your potential for client acquisition (and hopefully with less effort than previously necessary).

I recently heard an inspiring story about a former international tax lawyer. David (name changed for privacy) is currently working to build his own independent practice, after spending decades working with a large international accounting firm. I had the pleasure of learning about how he’s found success, which has everything to do with the power of listening. 

Last week we provided you with 5 items to cover, or at least consider, in your business plan for your financial advisory practice. These elements provide more of a template for you to reconsider through the lens of your ideal vision for you business, the future of that business, and the people or team with whom you work. Much like The ClientWise Professional Advisory Model (PAM)™, it creates a roadmap for your practice. But the task of fleshing out the details that make it uniquely yours are the most crucial piece of this process.

Sometimes a task that feels like back-tracking can actually give you the momentum to move forward. Our discussions surrounding succession planning have led many of you to ask some significant questions regarding your business: How are you running it today? How would you want it to run in the future? How do you imagine it will continue to run in the event that someone else takes it over?