When you take you car in for a check-up, the common practice today is to hook it up to a computer to look for problems.  By identifying problems early, you can make minor repairs to correct the situation before they become serious and expensive to fix.   This is the first in a series of [...]

When I was writing Key Focus Areas for Building a Great Business, I discovered something really important about financial advisors: As a rule, advisors are not great at business development because they have not completely bought into the value proposition for their businesses. One of the reasons that I love writing these blogs is because [...]

I was contacted recently by a reader of my articles.  He explained that he found the whole process of coaching, consulting and practice management to be too intangible.   He did say, however, that by reading my articles, he could see that I focus on the Core Stabilizers of a successful business – the 20% [...]

Do you have a business plan?  If you are like most advisors the answer is “No”.  The problem with most business plans is that they don’t really help you to improve performance.   The problem is not the plan but the process that most people follow when developing their plans.  Planning should not be a once [...]

As I read articles written by other consultants and coaches for the financial advisor community, it is interesting to see how many of us have very different approaches and concepts.  Many of our concepts are based on our past experiences. My concepts are based on a very unique background.  I built a $120 million business [...]

This article is a fourth in a series about building a great business.  The first three articles discussed setting goals and objectively analyzing the current state of your business: Building a Great Business – Where are You Now? These steps are designed to help you gain clarity about your business – where you are now [...]

We have begun a new series of articles over the past month.  The focus of these articles is to help advisors to achieve Sustainable Growth Milestones.  We use milestones to help advisors to set and realize their goals.  They can help you focus your attention on constant improvement of your practice rather than getting involved [...]

By Bob Simpson Last week, I posted an article “Building a $100 Million Business – Setting Goals”.  Many of the concepts discussed in this article apply to businesses at any stage of development but the strategies and tactics to achieve the goals are quite different for a business that has achieved $100 million in assets [...]

The process of setting both personal and business goals is an important step in building a successful business.  If you do some research about the best ways to set goals, you will come across the SMART acronym.  SMART goals are: S – Specific M – Measurable A – Attainable R- Relevant T – Time Bound [...]

Here’s a mindset shift to help you accelerate the growth of your business.  I call this approach the “Ten Door Approach”. This mindset helped me to build a $120 million book in a little over 8 years, when the average advisor managed $3 to $5 million. When I met a new prospective client, I had [...]