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Knowing Your Professional Purpose Is Your Game Changer
by Tony Vidler        All the regulatory change has many advisers seriously thinking about how to position for the future, and how to lift performance in a time of squeezed practice margins.  Many are stuck in their existing paradigm of doing business though, and struggle to accept things like remuneration models changing rapidly, long term shifts […]
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Becoming Elite Comes From Being Just 1% Better
by Tony Vidler        Becoming an elite adviser, or building an elite practice doesn’t come about by chance.  It takes graft and grit…and help. Building a great business is rarely the result of a single champion taking on the world.  The champion business owner is usually the captain of a team that has taken on the […]
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Could Advisers Be DRIVING Revenue To Online Providers?
by Tony Vidler        I do keep wondering if advisers realise how much revenue is waiting to be unlocked by them inside their existing business?   A little while ago I was talking with a business that provides outsourced client servicing solutions and they provided me with some of their data from working with financial […]
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Value is not Black and White, it is Shades of Grey
by Tony Vidler        At the most basic level “Value” can easily be defined: Value is Benefits less Costs. That simple definition doesn’t highlight the enormous range of definitions for “Benefits” though, which is why trying to understand what value is results in everyone seeing a different shade of grey. The range of possible benefits […]
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5 ways to make smarter use of your CRM system
by Tony Vidler        In days gone by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems were used as little more than simple marketing machines. They contained enough information to know who your clients were and how to contact them, and perhaps even had some prospects in there, and be able to produce a mail merge to run […]
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What is the point of an expensive CRM system?
by Tony Vidler        An adviser who plans on being in the business for another couple of decades asked what the point is in paying for an expensive and fancy CRM system. Honest.  He did ask that. He has a list of clients in Outlook and has the clients home addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes […]
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goldmine-in-practice
How Big Is The Goldmine WITHIN An Advisers’ Practice?
by Tony Vidler        Just how much opportunity is sitting inside the typical adviser practice?  How much new business is waiting inside that existing database?   It Is Usually A Goldmine.   A report from a couple of  years ago highlights the point: A lot of clients do not give advisers all their investable funds. […]
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three-dimensional-marketing
3D Marketing: There IS more than one dimension
by Tony Vidler         There is a tendency for those in professional services to see marketing in a single dimension whereas it really is multi-dimensional. Typically marketing is seen as being one of two quite different things – and neither are entirely right in themselves. It is either something “strategic” and broad and slightly fuzzy, […]
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fee-for-advice
Most Advisers Are Frogs Being Boiled Alive When It Comes To Fees
by Tony Vidler        Most financial advisers acknowledge that things are likely to change when it comes to fees, initial commissions, renewals or AUM fees and so forth in coming years.   Yet they behave like the frog being boiled.  The boiling frog story is a common metaphor used to describe the inability or unwillingness of […]
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listen-to-clients
Listen to the market or get out while you can
by Tony Vidler        “Two Ears but only one mouth”…blah blah blah…sales training 101, right?   We know how important it is to “listen” to clients, and we know the danger of losing touch with what they want and what they are thinking.  Every single professional has lost good clients at some point simply because […]
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