practice management Archives - Page 2 of 25

If you still need more clients then you probably need different skills

by Tony Vidler Financial advisers who need more clients need to be better marketers than salespeople in todays environment. For most that means they probably need new, or more, skills. Not more technical skills; more commercial skills. While financial advisers have been figuring out how to get ever-more-compliant and deliver yet-more-paper over the […]

You need to get selling

by Tony Vidler Advisers: Good advice process is not enough. Being technically competent is not enough. You have to get selling. I know that “Sell” is seen as a bit of a dirty word these days, but we cannot back away from the need for it. You have to sell if you are going to […]

How do you create an “Act Now” mindset with clients?

by Tony Vidler One of the ongoing challenge in marketing professional services is simply getting people to “act now”. We have to overcome their lack of urgency. Because our service will still be there tomorrow, right? And usually the need to be addressed by us is a future need, and maybe well into the future….so […]

Why Advisers Need To Invest In Their Businesses. Now.

by Tony Vidler Financial advisers really need to invest more into their practices. Now. More money, more thinking, more strategy….more leverage. Even those who have been investing probably need to invest more. For decades financial advisers have been able to to operate “lifestyle” businesses. It has enabled them to largely choose when they will […]

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 […]

How to balance client time with practice development

by Tony Vidler An ongoing challenge for advice firms is balancing client time with all the practice development work necessary to have a better business. There are after all only so many hours in a day, but then there are deadlines for when new standards and rules have to be met if one is to […]

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 […]

Professional Practice Evolution: What Separates Modern Professionals From The Past?

by Tony Vidler There are lessons to be learned from the evolution of the modern professional practice for those who are not quite there yet. When you compare the two – the modern professional financial advisory practice, and the historic product-focussed financial services brokerage business – it seems there are 5 distinct points of difference […]

practice management

SEARCH BY SUBJECT AREA

Get financial adviser coach blog updates via email.

Other useful resources

Fresh ideas delivered to your inbox