Blog Articles – Sales
Are you finding it hard to finish work?
Many financial advisers that I speak to these days continue to enjoy the benefits of remote working - not feeling they have to be in the office every singe day. They love saving the commuting time and the flexibility offered in working from home. However working from home comes [...]
Set great Performance Goals for 2025
Goal setting plays a key role in getting your whole team pulling in the same direction. We’re going to dig a bit into this area and set out a few thoughts on how to develop really effective goals to help to drive your business forwards. Align the Goals It [...]
AIDA – understand your client’s buying cycle
First of all, this is not a review of AIDA, the opera by Verdi! Instead it’s a few thoughts on how an often-used marketing acronym that is usually used in relation to advertising to describe a buying cycle, can be applied to the services offered by a financial planner. [...]
Where you can add value in estate planning
Estate planning has become a routine and valued part of the advice offered by financial planners today. As you work with clients particularly on their post-retirement financial planning needs, the questions and attention inevitably turn to what happens with the balance of wealth at death. Of course the strategies [...]
Your role as a financial therapist
I really think the importance of the role that financial planners play in the lives of your clients cannot be highlighted enough… To think of your role solely in terms of products, investments and even financial plans simply doesn’t do it justice. Each of these are important, but in [...]
How come you’re not selling more protection?
This is a question I’ve found myself asking of several firms that I worked with this year. Their businesses are growing revenue strongly, their proposition is very client focused and they are seeking to add value at every turn… but there seems to be surprisingly little focus on protection. [...]
Have you segmented your existing clients in a structured way?
As an important element of the research completed for Brokers Ireland on “The Evolution of the Broker Market 2030”, we identified 12 areas to be considered by Financial Brokers to help prepare your business for the changing market environment. We now consider the next action identified, which sets out [...]
What’s your advice business worth (to someone else)?
This is the first in a two part-series of articles that examines the sale of financial advice firms. In this initial article, we consider the various valuation methods that can be used to place a value on your business. Next month we’ll take a look at some of the [...]
What’s the right charging structure for you?
Trail commission. Is it the silver bullet that enables Financial Brokers to be paid for the value they add, to build value in their businesses and eventually sell the business at a healthy multiple? Or is it a somewhat opaque way for advisers to be paid, sometimes with very [...]
What’s the right niche for your business?
As someone who runs a niche business myself, concentrating solely on the financial advice sector, I'm a real believer in the potential to run a niche financial advice business. I'm also aware of lots of financial advice businesses that are pursuing niche strategies. I've written before about how niche [...]
Different people deserve different things
How many clients have you? 200, 500 or 2,000? Often as your client base grows, it results in your number of staff growing. But the chances are that even with your increased staff numbers, you are unable (and unwilling) to provide a top-drawer service to every one of these [...]
Cough, cough – I need to talk to you about our fees…
One of the areas of greatest challenge for financial planners in Ireland today is increasing the level of your fees / trail commission from the levels that you are currently charging. But time marches along, and often when you actually turn to really examining the issue, many advisers find [...]