Breakaway Brokers

Fiduciary duties are either unneeded or harmful, according to the opponents of the DOL rule. In their view, the finance and insurance industries have already achieved perfection.

A cash cushion is needed not just for initial startup costs but for peace of mind as you leave your firm, move clients over and reestablish revenue.

Here are tips for handling prospect objections and how every advisor can improve client meetings.

A recent study found significant differences in how our brains process in-person meetings and Zoom calls versus in-person meetings.

I’ll share some important insights gleaned from many decades of working in the advisory profession and being both an insider and an outsider.

Here are six key trends for HNW donors to consider during your giving season conversations.

User engagement is up on LinkedIn. How can you capitalize on it? Here are six steps to cultivate a LinkedIn network.

You have nothing to lose when you increase your fees to match the value you deliver. Advisors chronically undercharge for the value they provide.

Is there a graceful way to explain to clients I’m not the person making these decisions, and that I understand the impact, without betraying my firm and aligning fully with clients?

Harness the power of neuroscience and psychology to help your clients reach their long-term planning goals.

Forging connections with beneficiaries sends the message that you not only safeguard the individual's interests but genuinely care about the long-term prosperity of their family. Here’s how this benefits your client and your firm – and how to do it effectively.

A successful RIA hired a designer and spent $200,000 on a new logo as part of a project to create a new digital presence.

Being part of a football coaching staff fascinates me.

I don’t understand why it’s necessary to have an elaborate screening process to deal with prospects.

Here are my seven keys to emerging as a leader.

Once you gain someone's trust, they will accept almost anything you recommend. But trust is tough to earn and rarely given quickly.

Is the work you do to make a living a job, a career, or a calling? Recognizing the difference will pay great dividends in many ways.

The AICPA PFP section approaches its 40th anniversary. The engagement of CPAs in providing personal financial guidance has deep professional roots.

Dimensional’s new ETFs are good news for investors but raise issues for advisors.

From this research, advisors can discern ethical, non-manipulative ways to create more persuasive messages.

The pandemic changed many things about the economy — how we work, where we work and who we work with, for starters — but one of the most striking trends has been a big uptick in entrepreneurship.

The financial planning landscape is undergoing a great transformation, driven by emerging trends that have accelerated in recent years.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve met with more than a dozen vendors. Here’s what I learned.

Advisor Perspectives has announced its Venerated Voices™ awards for commentaries published in Q3 2023.

Last week, Bob attended the Insider’s Forum in San Antonio last week - a gathering of several hundred financial planners that focused on the latest research in practice management and other topics for the advisory profession.

When you see articles and posts about the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, ignore them.

In investing, you can have a safe present or future value, but not both!

The most challenging assignments I receive start with the advisor asking: “I had a great meeting with a prospect. Now I’m being ghosted. What should I do?”

Don’t dismiss a “hack” as a clever way to do something more efficiently. Here are four hacks that I know will deliver client referrals.

I always talk about how powerful social media is. Let me tell a story that proves it.

Many Americans believe that Gen Z is financially illiterate and uninformed. But the story is not that simple.

SECURE 2.0 contained a provision that gave favorable treatment to partial annuitization. The reason you haven’t heard about this is because those transactions cannot increase commissionable income.

As with so many other financial matters, the varying opinions around student loan debt forgiveness are more about emotions than dollars.

It doesn’t seem that difficult. Why don’t more of us follow this advice?

We have been given the mandate to show our capabilities by growing our books of business to “earn the right” to work with clients.

Here are the 10 best books I read from September 2022 through August 2023.

Deride the tactics of car salespeople all you wish, but their primary sales tool shows just how much brokers pay their employers.

Improve your own and your firm’s productivity by sidestepping these top five hybrid work mistakes.

To widen your audience, deepen client bonds, and carve out a strong market presence, a webinar strategy is your ticket to success.

I’m finding it hard to reconcile this.

For financial advisors, an appreciation of these changes fosters more profound empathy with older clients and fine-tunes their strategies.

Your prospects often don’t tell you everything you need to know to assess the depths of their problems, because they can’t articulate the context behind their surface-level description of their issues.

Have you ever wondered why your closing ratio on seminar attendees rarely exceeds 40%?

How do you stand out in the crowded inbox and get more email opens?

Incorporating debt planning into your services helps your clients achieve a more comprehensive and sustainable financial future.

Many advisors aren’t familiar with financial phobias. They are common and can be debilitating.

Why has there been a reluctance within the advisory profession to actively collect, much less leverage client experience feedback?

Understanding and managing your firm’s practice growth multiplier is your ticket to enduring success, higher profits, and a more rewarding practice.

New tests are making it easier for doctors to detect cancer and provide targeted treatments.

I lost my dad, Alfred Munro Flaxington, this past weekend.

Communications should be planned and thoughtful. Rarely – if ever – should a serious message be delivered without warning.

Top venture firms are betting that rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the public fascination with ChatGPT will help tech startups to transform healthcare after years of Silicon Valley struggling to move the needle in the industry.

Here are the six things you can do to create stellar content and increase your odds of going viral.

It’s time to focus on your happiness. Here are some tips, including some unconventional suggestions.

Financial advisors frequently attribute their marketing challenges to not finding that one magic solution. But the true culprits are deeper, foundational issues.

When your client conveys vast amounts of information – as is typically the case in a discovery meeting – it’s unrealistic to expect you to retain that information without writing it down. That’s about to change.

Let’s look at the keys to creating a successful podcast.

Here are five ways to take your COI relationships to the next level – and maximize your business along the way.

Equity traders reeling from the market’s worst stretch since February face some pivotal events in the days ahead, and a closely watched speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell may not even be the biggest test of all.

Halfway through the third quarter, the economy is looking surprisingly strong. A tracker from the Atlanta branch of the Federal Reserve has real gross domestic product growth, based on the limited data we've gotten so far, tracking at 5.8%, which would be the fastest for a non-pandemic quarter in 20 years.