/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
The simple answer is easy: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, personal financial advisors, on average, made $121,770 in 2018. Translated into an hourly figure, the typical financial advisor made $58.54 per hour, assuming a 40-hour work week.
That’s a mean average, though, which is skewed significantly higher by a few highly successful advisors at the top of the profession. The median average is much lower: $88,890 per year in 2018, or – again assuming a 40-hour work week — $42.73 per hour. “Median” means half the advisors surveyed earned more than that figure, in that year, and half of them made less.
The lowest 10% nationwide made $41,590, or $19.99 per hour – assuming a 40-hour work week. The top quartile of the profession earned $157,710.
But few of them became that successful by working a mere 40-hour work week in their early years!
Here are a few factors to consider to maximize your earning potential.
Read more
How Financial Advisors Can Use AI to Free Up Time for More Client-Facing Activities
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
Despite the shortfalls of artificial intelligence (AI) in the financial advisory business in that it cannot replace advisors as relationship builders, there are several ways advisors can embrace AI to achieve higher efficiency and have more time for the human element of the business.
We know that AI is rapidly transforming industries, and the financial services sector is no exception. Financial advisors are often overwhelmed by managing multiple tasks at once, especially when much of their time is consumed by administrative and back-office duties. And, with the increasing complexity of financial markets and compliance requirements, advisors must spend more time on data entry, paperwork, and compliance at the expense of more client-facing activities.
Read more
Future-Proofing Your Financial Advisory Career: The Power of Soft Skills in an AI World
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
Financial advisors are bracing for the “next big thing” as artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly prominent role. The rise of AI-powered tools and robo-advisors is automating many of the routine, data-driven aspects of financial planning, creating more efficient and accurate solutions.
Robo-advisors, for example, offer algorithm-based portfolio management services that can reduce the need for human intervention in certain advisory functions. AI tools can sift through massive datasets, analyze market trends, and generate investment strategies, all at a fraction of the cost and time it would take a human advisor.
However, as AI takes over the technical aspects of financial advising, the human touch remains irreplaceable.
Read more
How to Attract Emerging Affluent Gen Z and Young Millennials in their 20s
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Financial advisors with any ambitions of growing their practices in the next couple of decades can’t ignore the emergence of Gen Z as an economic force. Though the estimated $143 billion in assets held by Gen Z is dwarfed by the trillions held by millennials, Gen Z workers are expected to outearn millennials as soon as 2030. They will be more educated and more ambitious than their generational predecessors, and they will be starving for financial advice.
The challenge for financial advisors is that while even today, the members of Gen Z are looking for financial advice, most prefer to find it through social media, the internet, and their parents or friends, according to the FINRA Investor Education Foundation.
The good news for advisors is that the same study found that 71% of Gen Z investors are receptive to working with financial professionals, counting them among the most trustworthy sources of financial information, second only to their parents.
The critical issue for any financial advisor hoping to attract young clients is whether they are perceived as someone who can be trusted to serve them in the manner they expect.
Read more
3 Strategies Advisors Are Using to Break Through Stagnation to Get to the Next Level
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
“I feel my team and I have reached a stage of stagnation. How can we build on what we have and continue to grow the business?”
That sentiment is becoming a common theme among many of the advisors who enroll in our workshops and training programs. I can also attest that it is pervasive throughout industry, which means it happens to most every advisor or advisor team. Regardless of what stage you’re in, you can do all the right things to move through that stage and then realize that what got you to that point isn’t enough to get you to the next level. So, you stagnate. And you know that in this business, if you’re not deliberately moving forward, you’re actually falling behind.
Read more
Why Financial Advisors Must Embrace Technology Now
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
In the third of our series of Critical Issues Facing Financial Advisors Right Now, we turn to the challenge facing advisors in adopting the technologies that will drive business growth for the foreseeable future. Financial advisors have seen the future, and it is now. Those who learn to embrace it will have a distinct advantage over those who continue to run from it.
We can complain all we want about the rise of robo-advisors but, the fact is, they only control a minute portion of the trillions of dollars held by wealth managers, advisors, and asset managers. Still, robo-advisors are on the cutting edge of technological innovations, and venture capital is flooding the financial technology sector with billions of dollars.
Our industry has reached a critical juncture where advisors must now choose to embrace technological change to get ahead of their competition and provide the level of service their clients have come to expect or risk obsolescence.
Read more
How Advisors Can Inoculate Themselves from Fee Compression
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
In our last post, we highlighted four critical issues financial advisors face in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, impacting the way they approach their businesses and the way clients are responding. In the next month or so, we will take a deeper dive into these issues, the challenges they present, and how advisors can meet them head-on for a greater chance at success.
At the top of the list—an issue familiar to all and well-covered here in past blog posts—is fee compression.
Read more
How Much Do Financial Advisors Make?
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
The simple answer is easy: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, personal financial advisors, on average, made $121,770 in 2018. Translated into an hourly figure, the typical financial advisor made $58.54 per hour, assuming a 40-hour work week.
That’s a mean average, though, which is skewed significantly higher by a few highly successful advisors at the top of the profession. The median average is much lower: $88,890 per year in 2018, or – again assuming a 40-hour work week — $42.73 per hour. “Median” means half the advisors surveyed earned more than that figure, in that year, and half of them made less.
The lowest 10% nationwide made $41,590, or $19.99 per hour – assuming a 40-hour work week. The top quartile of the profession earned $157,710.
But few of them became that successful by working a mere 40-hour work week in their early years!
Here are a few factors to consider to maximize your earning potential.
Read more
4 Steps to Avoid the Commoditization Trap (And Justify Your Fees)
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Water is water, right? Everybody selling water is in the business of selling H2O. If anything was a hopeless case for commoditization and price collapse, it should be bottled water. Most cities in America can now deliver very clean, safe water right to the tap – at 0.0025 per gallon.
But bottled water companies like Waikea, Fiji, Aquafina and Desani have been tremendously successful in branding their products, affiliating themselves with target markets, associating themselves with positive lifestyles, creating a positive customer experience, and getting a premium price. Customers pay between 400 and 4,400 times more for bottled water than they do for tap water, and the premium water market continues to grow.
Financial advisors face a similar dynamic.
Read more
Why You Need to Differentiate Yourself
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
It used to be, in the not so distant past, that using words like “client-focused”, “trusted”, “comprehensive”, and “knowledgeable” was enough for financial advisors to separate themselves from the pack. But today these are just the table stakes clients expect their advisors to bring to the table. After all, how many clients do you know who don’t expect their advisor to be knowledgeable, trusted, and client-focused?
In fact, in a highly muddled and fiercely competitive advisory landscape, there is very little to differentiate most advisors from each other, which causes them to disappear among the multitude of “average” advisors. Needless to say, clients today aren’t looking for average when it comes to financial advice.
A case in point is the massive amount of attention the eighty million baby boomers are receiving from the financial services industry – and rightly so because trillions of dollars of assets are at stake.
Read more
5 Reasons Why You Need to Connect with Clients on an Emotional Level
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
As an advisor you’re no doubt good with numbers; you’re an objective thinker. But to succeed in this business you also need to be able to create meaningful relationships with your clients. You need to have not only a high IQ but a high level of EQ (Emotional Intelligence).
According to a study by Harvard Business Review emotionally connected clients are more than twice as valuable to your business as ‘highly satisfied clients’.
Here are 5 reasons why rather than focusing on their financial plans you should get to know your clients on a personal level.
Read more