Words to the wise from our elite team of experts and executives with knowledge and experience from all corners of the financial services industry.
Practice Management Tip: James Carney, CEO
“Good practice management requires consistent measurement and review of key business metrics. Many advisors create a ‘dashboard’ in Excel or their CRM that provides them with weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual information on information such as deposits, disbursements, transfers, inbound calls, AUM change and other pertinent information by client. This type of consistent monitoring of key metrics may give the advisor visibility to potential issues as well as opportunities, and is extremely useful in assisting the advisor in communicating to the client the right information at the right time.”
Business Development Tip: Joe Murphy, Executive VP
“Business development requires a strategy with a measurement technique that your efforts can be gauged against. For example, if your goal is to increase AUM, then the business development efforts should all support that common vision/goal. The Strategy can be further leveraged by multiple business development activities (i.e. recruit new advisors to the firm, increase HNW clients by 2 per month, or looking at potentially partnering with another firm to consolidate with, etc.). The obvious part of business development is that it needs to be focused and targeted to a specific strategy—the hard part is defining a measurement technique to know you are on track.”
Marketing Tip: Cynthia Stephens, VP of Marketing
“Don’t forget the children. The first wave of retiring Baby Boomers brings with it the possibility of increasing assets under management as these clients roll over their retirement assets for you to manage. Don’t forget the children of these HNW clients – they are your potential future clients. Ask to meet with them at least once a year so you develop a personal relationship with them. Help them plan for the future and outline their retirement strategy. Having an approach to engaging the next generation of clients could pay big dividends and offset any decline in AUM from an aging, and de-cumulating, customer base.”
Marketing Tip: Barbara Kotlyar, Senior Marketing Manager
“For advisory firms and other small businesses simply finding the time for lead nurturing can be challenging. The solution is to set up a calendar with a specific time every day, or at least once per week, to nurture. Try to make this time either during non-business hours or during non-revenue generating time. The most efficient and effective way to nurture your clients and prospects is to leverage electronic communication such as email, e-newsletters, twitter or blogging to share content.”
Compliance Tip: Karla Paxton, Technical Relationship Manager
“Know whether you have custody when you log into your client’s accounts online. The difference between discretion and custody is discretion allows you to trade—custody allows you to move assets to an unlike registration. Just because you can trade on your client’s account by logging into the website does not necessarily mean you move assets. Ask your client or the custodian.”
Client Services Tip: Leslie Sutton, Manager of Client Services
“Don’t allow minor reconciliation issues to develop into larger problems. You may think fixing a small reconciliation issue is not a big deal, but as you add new accounts and attempt to reconcile historical data, the small items become larger ones and can be very time consuming to fix. One piece of advice I can give is to reconcile daily.”
