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Tweets and Blogs from T3 (Tech Tools for Today Conference)

Posted on February 26, 2009 by in Practice Management

The Technology Tools for Today Conference (T3) kicks off today at the Dallas InterContinental Hotel in Addison, TX.  Due to scheduling conflicts, I’m not able to attend, but I will be able to stay on top of the action at the conference through blogs and people I follow on Twitter.

Here are some useful links to keep up to date on T3 events.

Blogs

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Kristen Luke’s $3,000 Marketing Plan for Advisers

Posted on February 9, 2009 by in Practice Management

Attention! There’s still time to register for the FPA of Oregon & SW Washington’s 2009 Mid Winter Conference in Vancouver, WA.  Sessions begin Tuesday morning, February 10, at 8:00AM.

Coming to the conference? You won’t be able to miss me: I’ll be making many of the speaker introductions and other announcements.  Catch me during breaks and say hello! 

On with today’s post.

I’m a technology guy and not really a marketing guy, so allow me to refer an excellent blogger on marketing strategies for independent financial planners and investment advisers that frequent FPPad.com

Go visit Kristen Luke’s blog and add her RSS feed to your reader.  Don’t have a reader?  Use Google Reader, or you can always subscribe to email updates for most content, including Kristen’s.

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Cost-Effective Alternatives to Layoffs

Posted on January 23, 2009 by in Practice Management

For those firms who derive revenue from assets under management (AUM), revenues are down anywhere from 20 to 40 percent year over year.  In response, financial advisers are evaluating all available options to trim operating costs.  Undoubtedly, salary cost is the biggest line item expense for independent advisory firms. 

That said, layoffs are often the method of choice to reduce this significant expense.  However, there are other, more cost-effective ways to reduce labor costs.

I want to highlight an article by Wharton’s Dr. Peter Cappelli on Flexible Downsizing on FastCompany.com.

Here are the major takeaways from the article:

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Streamline Your Practice in a Recession

Posted on January 4, 2009 by in Efficiency, Practice Management

Readers of FPPad.com know that we’re in a recession.  Not very many needed the National Bureau of Economic Research to tell them that we’ve been in one since December 2007.  While little can be done to cure the ills of the global economy, advisers can evaluate how their business is positioned in order to thrive in the face of economic pressures.

I want to comment about positioning a practice in a recession after reading David Drucker’s article on Morningstar Advisor, Practice Management in a Recession.

Drucker interviewed two broker-dealer firms to discover what their reps are doing to respond to the recession.  What are they doing?  First, reps are committed to continued spending on marketing to new clients, and second, they are looking to reduce operational inefficiencies in their practice.

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Explore the Independent Advisor Technology Forum

Posted on December 14, 2008 by in Efficiency, Practice Management, Technology

04/18/2012 UPDATE: The Independent Advisor Tech Forum is no more, as the domain registration has expired. Still, you can get great information on advisor technology right here! Subscribe today.

In Friday’s Tech Bits column on InvestmentNews, Davis Janowski highlighted a new technology-oriented website targeted “for financial advisors affiliated with a broker dealer and/or wirehouse who are interested in becoming independent.”

Click here to visit Independent Advisor Tech Forum. (link removed)

Independent Advisor Tech Forum is a collaborative effort spearheaded by several technology vendors in the independent adviser space.  The list of participants is a genuine who’s who of big players in the technology space for CRM, paperless office, and performance reporting.  Here’s a short list of who’s involved:

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Free AdvisorMax Access for Advisers

Posted on December 2, 2008 by in Practice Management

AdvisorMax is now FREE for financial advisers!

Previously available through an annual subscription, AdvisorMax is an emerging online source for quality practice management articles as well as moderated discussion boards featuring a variety of subjects.

I’ve posted content several times to the Discussion Forums, but traffic to the forums fell off considerably since the summer (likely when the initial free 1-year subscriptions expired).  Hopefully traffic will return to the site now that there is no subscription fee for access to content.

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Advisers: You Will Soon Abandon AUM Fees

Posted on November 11, 2008 by in Practice Management

Here’s my not-so-bold prediction for challenging times:

In less than 5 years, AUM fees will no longer be the main compensation mechanism for independent registered investment advisory firms.

I’m not alone in my prediction (I wish I had published this post months ago when I intended!), as Andrew Gluck of Advisor Products, Inc. wrote the following in a recent October article in Financial Advisor magazine titled Fixing AUM Fees:

The mode of compensation that most advisors use is broken. The system of charging clients based on the amount of assets they place under your management is fatally flawed. The AUM compensation often forces clients with simple financial lives to pay you more, while those clients with highly complex financial arrangements can demand more and get away with paying you less.

The AUM Dilemma

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Replace Performance Reviews with “Previews”

Posted on October 20, 2008 by in Practice Management

clockIf you haven’t done so already, read the Business Insight section of today’s Wall Street Journal.  Look for the article titled Get Rid of the Performance Review! by Samuel A. Culbert.

Click here to read the article on the WSJ.com website -OR- click here to view it on the MITSloan Management Review.

Dr. Culbert, a professor of management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, writes about putting an end to formal performance reviews because they “destroy morale, kill teamwork, and [hurt] the bottom line.”

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My Results Using Succession Registry

Posted on August 6, 2008 by in Practice Management

ShakeBack in May I wrote an initial review of David Drucker and Kristopher Behn’s Succession Registry website here on FPPad. My firm signed in as a Rainmaker and posted an offering for a new position. What were the results of using Succession Registry?

Unfortunately, Succession Registry added nothing to our firm’s search for its next employee. We filled the position through other channels. In addition, I have no idea where we went wrong with our offer. Did our offer ever show up in search results or consolidated listings? How many views did our offer have? Did anyone revisit our offer multiple times?

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Is ByAllAccounts Reading My Blog?

Posted on July 31, 2008 by in Practice Management

At the end of the first quarter, I posted an entry to my blog titled Done With Quarterly Reports; How About You?  I discussed how I inherited a laborious quarterly report process that involved a lot of manual entry of captive account data and ended with reports generated one-by-one.

We’re now using ByAllAccounts to streamline data reconciliation and are generating batch reports from dbCAMS.  So I bragged about it in April on FPPad.

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