1. Why Financial Advisors Matter
It may not have occurred to you, but more than any other type of professional advisor, people rely on their financial advisor as the one who can help guide them through life’s challenges. You know more about your clients—their hopes, ambitions, concerns, and problems. Your client relationships can span decades, during which you are the primary source of knowledge and expertise for a vital part of their lives. — Don Connelly
2. How Wealthy Clients Hire Advisors
Let’s face it, if you want to take your business and life to the next level, it is critical that you serve more affluent clients. The best way to make this a reality is to understand how wealthy clients hire advisors, how they think, and what skills and values they want their advisors to have. — Annette Bau
3. Dependability: Is It a Differentiator?
In professional services there has always been an ongoing issue with variable service levels, or to use the technical term: heterogeneity. That is, the service experience of customers is diverse – even from the same practitioner. When multiple practitioners operate in the same firm then the customer experience will potentially become even more variable. The word “service” in this context is the entire client experience that they have with any given professional, rather than the more narrow operational definition of ongoing communication and keeping existing clients satisfied or giving them excellent experiences to some degree or other. — Tony Vidler
4. A Primer on Bitcoin Conversations
Bitcoin is back! Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's safe to say the past several days of price action in the king of cryptocurrencies has been interesting. After spending much of the past several months mired in a slump that roughly cut its value in half, bitcoin rallied last week with the help of “The B Word Conference.” Long story short, ARK Investment Management founder, CEO, and CIO Cathie Wood, “Technoking” of Tesla and chief engineer of SpaceX Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square headlined that confab. It's almost impossible to get a smarter pro-bitcoin trio together at the same time. — Todd Shriber
5. The Shortest Recession In History Sets Up Next Recession
While the interventions certainly salvaged the economy from a more prolonged recessionary event, they also made the economy more fragile. Furthermore, by dragging forward future consumption, the interventions only gave the appearance of economic activity. As excess stimulus fades and assuming interventions don’t repeat, the economy will return its pre-covid growth trend of 2% or less. Such should not be a surprise given that economic growth is roughly 70% consumption. With wage growth well below inflationary pressures, consumption will get impacted by higher prices. — Lance Roberts
6. Avoiding Blind Spots in Your D&I Initiatives With Bob Skea
Discovery Data recently released a new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) dataset and 2021 Closing the Diversity Gap research report which captures the current state of diversity and inclusion initiatives within the financial services industry and what can be done to improve them. In this episode of The Data Possible Podcast, Bob Skea, CEO of Discovery Data, joins the show to talk about the firm’s new research study, the data behind it, and why it is so important that we all focus on diversity like a blind spot. — Discovery Data
7. Expectations Investors and Advisors Have Differ
The differences between expectations and reality are evident everywhere in life. Individuals generally have an expectation of what they want from a relationship, a business interaction, a services provider, and many other interactions throughout life, including regarding their finances. The expectations investors have of their advisor and wealth management services are not always what advisors would think they might be. Spectrem Group conducted research with wealthy investors regarding what services they receive as part of their wealth management services, as well as what services they would expect to receive as part of their wealth management services. This topic will be revisited again later this summer through our upcoming research “Wealth Management Redefined”. This research will gain new insights into how investors have redefined what wealth management means to them in today’s world. — Catherine McBreen
8. How Can Financial Advisors Scale Their Business Using Social Media
Short answer: have a plan and measure results. Better answer: Understand the formula for performance improvement and implement specific steps on and offline to make sure you are antifragile. First we have to have some agreement about what being antifragile means. How about we use this from the author that introduced the concept? — Mike Garrison
9. Creating an Actively Managed Portfolio That Outperforms
Making sure your clients see value for the fees you charge is a crucial element of managing an advisory practice. Senior Managing Director Lou Day joins us in this episode to share NS Capital’s philosophy and approach to building an actively managed portfolio that delivers outperformance over time. — NS Capital
10. The Power of Creating Community Among Clients
Mining for Hidden Gems The idea is this. Conduct a brief poll across a defined segment of your client base and ask them for their one-best idea on a very specific topic. The goal is to keep it light, so I’m not talking about their one-best idea for living a more fulfilled life, but rather their one-best restaurant, book, resource, app, blog or class. You’re looking for the hidden gems. By asking the question and sharing the results, you’ve found a fun and helpful way to add value for your clients while creating or reinforcing community. Oh, and there's a good chance your clients will share those results with others in a similar situation. — Julie Littlechild
11. Expecting Success Has a Cost
We’re right in the midst of the Olympic Games, and we are seeing athletes who have trained for years and years to get into a final to then pursue an Olympic medal. They have deliberately practiced in such a way that they have pursued excellence at every opportunity. They have earned the right to expect success. Now, whether or not it happens is not guaranteed. That is up for grabs; there’s nothing they can do to impact—to literally reach across the lane line in my sport—and influence their fellow competitors. However, they want to know when they go into that final, they have done everything within their power to earn the right to expect success. That feeling alone brings an added degree of confidence, where they know they are ready to perform, and there’s nothing they could have done better. — Paul Kingsman