Best Practice Advice Archives

There are 2 big questions before you fire a client.

by Tony Vidler I encourage you to try this: fire a client. It is liberating, and it moves your thinking and sense of self worth onto a different professional plane. Pretty much everyone who has been in professional practice for more than a year has at least one or two clients who are just a […]

Client Complaints: Fight it, or just Fix It?

by Tony Vidler Client complaints are a fact of life. It is virtually impossible to run a service business where everyone is happy 100% of the time, as human beings are involved and they are unpredictable creatures with ever-shifting expectations. The art of good client complaint handling is knowing when to fight and when to […]

How can you be sure that your advice will pass the test?

by Tony Vidler The nagging worry for financial advisers in today’s environment is “how can I be sure that my advice will pass the test?” The concern is understandable given that policymakers typically do not understand the difficulty of applying any sort of objective assessment of suitability to professional opinions – which is fundamentally what […]

Is Insurance Churn Really The Issue We Think It is?

by Tony Vidler Any time an insurance product is replaced by an adviser with an alternative one someone complains about “insurance churn” or the “twisting of policies” and the immediate inference is that something unethical just occurred. Sometimes that is true of course, and there are undoubtedly bottom feeders in the industry who survive by […]

The Top Challenge In Shifting From Product Sales To Advice Delivery

by Tony Vidler Lots of financial advisers are still figuring out how to get paid for advice delivery, not just implementation of product solutions. Now, the simplistic answer is of course: “easy…just position for it and tell clients that’s how you work now.” That answer really is glib though and doesn’t touch upon the […]

Top Of Mind Awareness: Being Present Without Being A Nuisance

by Tony Vidler Promoting our personal professional brand is essentially all about creating top-of-mind-awareness. Being the person that our target market thinks of, and then calls, when they recognise a need or desire is our goal. We want to be “top of mind”. To achieve that we must master the art of being present, but without […]

Give yourself a better chance of having prospects engage you

by Tony Vidler There is one simple thing that advisers should do to improve the probability that prospects will engage you: Talk about the outcomes you create for clients rather than talking jargon. In engagement letters and scope of service documents, as well as in advertising brochures or online, too many advisers list their expertise […]

One tactic to make people remember your message…in just another moment…

by Tony Vidler Ever wondered why infomercials or news broadcasts come up with lines like this: “XYZ Corporation closed its doors on customers today leaving 10,000 without the products they had paid for already…more on that shortly.” The “more on that shortly” part creates intrigue of course….but the reason why TV stations do this is […]

Practice Growth Requires Leadership More Than Management

by Tony Vidler The most frequent thing I see that prevents great practice growth and holds advisers back from developing their dream business is a lack of vision. I don’t mean “vision” in the namby-pamby buzz-word sense of having a beautiful set of words on a plaque on a wall that nobody really cares about. […]

How to take the “R” out of FREE Advice

by Tony Vidler Traditionally the financial services sector has been almost entirely remunerated via commission, and many advisers are still grappling with the basic question of how to make the transition – even if only in their minds – from working solely on commissions to charging clients directly for advice and/or service. Consumers perceived […]

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