The Objective Review and the 20 year Customer

I often get questions about what sort of Customer should we do an Objective Review for. During a conversation with Karen this morning I came on the answer to that question. The type of Client we want to do an Objective Review for is a Client we want to do significant work for [...]

The Wealth Management Series

I have started to write a year long series on wealth management for our Stage 2 Planning newsletter. If you’re interested in receiving this series, you can sign up at our newsletter page on our site.
Or, if just want to read them as they go up, we will be posting them within a week [...]

Why Client triage makes you money

I recently had a call from one of our Midas Manager affiliates with Stage 2. He first spoke with Karen Lynch about his needs and what he would like to get from the Stage 2 Affiliate Program. Part of the conversation with Karen was around a case he was working on. [...]

Children in the workplace

When I was in high school and for much of college I worked for my father during the summers.  I learned about our family business and had an opportunity to do almost every job there was in the company.   After graduating from college I came back to the family business and understood how it worked, [...]

Congruence in the sales process

I’ve been thinking about what Clients want recently.  I know that they want to have advisors present ideas that are good for the Client whether they are good for the advisor or not.  Business owners want unique ideas that are designed for them.  They want advisors who put the Client before themselves.
I also know that [...]

Valuations and wealth management firms

I’ve recently been doing some work on determining financial value for financial planning/investment management firms.  These are the firms who develop significant cash flow based on a percentage of assets under management.
One of the firms we are working with is being courted by a consolidator who is rolling up investment management firms.  They are paying [...]

Data Mining

Karen and I spent a couple of hours with one of our web providers yesterday working on our Stage 2 Planning Partners web site. The conversation morphed into one on gathering useable information about the people who visit our site and those who listen to our webinars.
The new version of his software allows us to [...]

Hiring the right person

I find that hiring the right person for a job is one of the most challenging activities we face. This is especially true with smaller organizations where we can’t afford to have people in our companies who don’t pull their own weight. It’s also true in the larger ones, but you can afford [...]

Creating capacity

I recently gave a talk about improving return on investment in the vending business.  As usual my conversation ended up focusing on being strategic in your business.
One of the things I often talk about at these presentations is making yourself operationally irrelevant in your business.  While making this particular talk I realized that making yourself [...]

Changing the Objective Review

I have been thinking about our standard planning process lately and believe that it needs to have some adjustment made to it. I’ve noticed that our Clients are really interested in having someone help with the coordination of their financial life. This means working in an interdisciplinary manner on the total wealth the [...]