Cognitive biases can be as detrimental as they are universal, and the curse of knowledge is no different.

There is one incredibly potent tool that keeps employees engaged and productive.

Broad appeal is a thing of the past. It’s time to find your niche.

You can’t carry other people’s emotional weight for long without your legs giving out.

You can’t add more hours to a day or decrease the amount of work on your plate. Your only option is to save time by increasing your efficiency. The question is how.

It is challenging to deal with clients who are so clearly stuck in their financial pasts. Strong emotions don’t lead to calculated financial decisions, after all, which makes doing your job much harder.

What can we, as advisors, do to promote healthy finances?

People say that the best defense is a good offense. They are wrong, at least when it comes to protecting wealth.

Millennials want to be valued team members. They value productive working relationships with their supervisors. Here my leadership lessons for millennial team members.

A would-be client’s journey to choosing a brand is complex. There are ample opportunities for them to be distracted.

An old saying reminds us, “There’s no lesson in the second kick of a mule.” Once you have learned something the hard way, nothing can be gained by repeating the experience.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Def Leppard sang in its hit song Rock of Ages. Maybe that’s good advice for a hair band, but for financial planners, not so much.

We encounter plenty of obstacles as financial planners. And the biggest of all are the barriers thrown up by our clients.

Tough times are not an excuse to stop marketing. When you do that, your career will suffer from neglect and inaction.

Surge meetings will maintain important ongoing contact with your clients while better managing your time.

The one speed bump advisors keep tripping over is that, well, people are funny about their money.

What do you tell clients who suddenly find themselves receiving a large financial windfall?

You will wear a therapist hat on top of your wealth manager cap.

We are a service industry. Before we try to sell clients anything, we need to stop and consider what they want.

As a financial planner, it’s your job to help the client understand why certain investment steps are in their best interest when their intuition may be telling them otherwise.

Given that someone else’s money is on the line, the potential for emotions to get supercharged, super-fast is very real.

The four emotions that I encounter in client interactions are fear, guilt, shame and envy. By anticipating and learning how to address them, we can tailor solutions to each client.

Financial advisors have spent the last decade threatened at every turn - being told that technology is going to replace them and that their fees are going to make their careers obsolete. However, even the most innovative and intuitive technology cannot replace what the financial advisor actually manages for clients – human emotion. In this session, Matt Reiner – managing partner of 2 successful RIAs and Co-Founder of fintech firm Benjamin - will offer a top-down look at how financial leaders can better value and empower advisors to face the future.

Matt Reiner speaks to the the technology gap in the advisory profession. Financial firms are not growing and not adapting as quickly as businesses in other industries. Slow to employ new technologies, look at client segmentation, and consider new outlets for client growth, the financial industry seems stuck in a bygone era.

The past 12 months allowed us an opportunity to innovate our ability to establish, cement and build trust with our clients.

You cannot assume the Gen Xers and Millennials who’re receiving that wealth will automatically turn to you for help managing it.

Duke basketball fans have a widespread – and sometimes deserved – reputation for being arrogant, smug and generally annoying. But I have to give the “Dukies” credit for helping to prove that computers and algorithms will never replace human financial advisors.

Yes, I still send emails. But in the interest of building connections and enhancing the client experience, I prefer to make quick phone calls when possible.

The pandemic is financially stressful, but it also demonstrates the value of technology that lets me communicate quickly to my client base.