More on Wealth Management

I am in the process of revamping how we present information to owners of private businesses. I think that many of us who work in this field have done a good job of helping our Clients achieve particular goals. I also think that we can move past the tactical work we do to [...]

New Kid on the Block

I’ve just finished my first full-time week at Stage 2 Planning Partners, and I am delighted to be here.  For the last four months, I have been straddling part-time roles here and in my old life, and it is a great relief to cut back to just one job.   
Coming from a one-professional office, it [...]

Do systems set you free?

We have been working on systematizing our business for the past several months.  Up till now there has been a general way that we’ve dealt with working with Clients, but the level of service and what we would do changed with every person we worked with
I know one of the things that builds trust is [...]

Everyone needs to sell

I went to my Dentist yesterday for my quarterly teeth cleaning.  While there I witnessed some amazing selling….not by the Dentist, not by the hygienist, but by the woman who took my x-rays.
You wouldn’t think that the person taking x-rays should be selling, but she was.  And, she was very, very effective.  The sale method [...]

Run your business like a business

I was sitting in a meeting this morning with a group of successful financial advisors.  I was struck by how few of these advisors ran their businesses like businesses.  Most of them had very nice practices, but they had not put the basics in place for running their business as a business.
The advisors didn’t have [...]

The value of collaboration

For the past week I and my partners in Stage 2 have been having a conversation about the value of making a business purchase pre-tax or after tax.  We all agreed that there was some value in having it be a pre-tax transaction, but we were at odds about how much the actual value of [...]

Email versus snail mail

We are doing a Customer appreciation dinner next week and sent out invitations via regular mail (snail mail) to the dinner. As of today, we had one person who had responded to the regular mailing we had done.
I had a brainstorm, why don’t I send out a similar invitation using our email system. [...]

Motivations of the business owner

I got involved in a conversation about Enron the other day. This conversation went down the path that they usually do when this topic comes up. The topic is all people who run business are bad and only want to take advantage of the little people.
Here in Vermont we have organizations like [...]

Competitive Salaries?

Every once in a while I run across a truly useful internet site. Today was one of those times.
Most of us in business have wondered how much we should pay a new person who joins our company. This is especially true when that person is for a job we’ve never had in the [...]

Let’s get predictable in our service

I was having an interesting conversation with one of my partners in the Stage 2 Business Solution today. The conversation came down to systemizing a business and how much more effective and profitable a business becomes once you systemize it. This is what we talk about when we are working with a [...]