specialize Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Factors Financial Advisors Should Consider When Choosing a Fee Structure for Their Practice

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Among the more critical decisions a financial advisor must make is determining their fee structure—what to charge clients and how to charge them. After all, the fee structure sets the tone for how clients perceive the value they receive from your services.

If clients feel that the fees are too high relative to the value provided, it can lead to dissatisfaction and attrition. Conversely, if they perceive your fees as fair, it can foster trust and long-term loyalty. However, if they are too fair, it could threaten your business’s bottom line and sustainability.

Choosing the proper fee structure is a delicate balancing act for advisors. It requires consideration of client expectations, business sustainability, and your own financial goals. Your fee structure should align with your business model and client base, leading to stronger client relationships and business success while fulfilling one’s fiduciary obligations to clients.

Here are the pivotal factors to consider when determining how to structure your fees:

Why Financial Advisors Quit

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

It’s estimated that nine advisors out of ten don’t last three years in the industry. That seems high for a career that offers so much promise and potential. Most people come into the business checking all the appropriate boxes for having what it takes. Still, when you consider the gap between reality and expectations of fledgling financial advisors, it begins to make sense why most choose to leave the business.

To put it bluntly, not everyone is cut out for a career as a financial advisor, even for those who do check all the boxes. However, with a better understanding of why many financial advisors quit the business, you can beat the odds by avoiding that fate.

The reasons why financial advisors quit are varied, but here are some of the most common.

How to Write a Highly Effective LinkedIn Summary – Examples for Financial Advisors Included

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

It’s well established that LinkedIn is a vital platform for financial advisors to showcase their expertise and connect with potential clients. Advisors who use LinkedIn agree that the social media platform plays a key role in building connections and expanding their opportunities for finding potential prospects.

We’ve discussed LinkedIn’s important role in generating leads and how to use it effectively for prospecting. We also covered the five grave LinkedIn mistakes advisors make, including giving short shrift to their LinkedIn Summary. In fact, a poorly crafted LinkedIn Summary can render your profile unreadable, causing anyone looking for a financial advisor to move on to the next profile.

Niche Marketing: Narrowing Your Focus to Attract More Quality Prospects

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

In recent years, the commoditization of investment advice has forced an increasing number of financial advisors into offering more comprehensive financial planning as a way to add more value to the client relationship. As a result, the financial planning space is becoming much more crowded, making it difficult for financial advisors to stand out.

That is why many practice management consultants recommend that financial advisors establish a niche to more quickly build their businesses, focusing on a more targeted market they can dominate rather than a broader market they can vanish in. The key to differentiation in a crowded field is to become more focused and specialized to become recognized as the best-of-breed for a specific type of clientele that can be served profitably and effectively.

Successfully crafting a niche is not without its challenges, and most advisors avoid attempting it for fear of narrowing their field of prospects. However, any advisor who has found success in a niche will tell you that, while you may narrow your field of prospects, you increase the likelihood that a higher percentage of prospects in the niche will choose to do business with you.

3 Ways to Boost the Promotional Power of a Marketing Resume

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

A marketing resume can be a very potent tool because it can be used in unlimited number circumstances—at networking events, canvassing businesses, social events, speaking events, or anywhere you would normally hand out business cards. But you must be thoughtful about who exactly should receive your marketing resume. If your value proposition is too broad (trying to be everything to everybody) it may not resonate with anyone because it doesn’t differentiate you.

Here are three tips on how to get the most promotional power out of your marketing resume.

Want to Get Out of a Rut? Focus on Becoming Exceptional

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

We can all remember when we first became financial advisors, feeling like we could conquer the world. With our entire careers in front of us, we were excited, motivated, and ready to commit everything we had to become successful. The great thing about starting out as an advisor was that there was never a dull moment. Everything was new, and we thrived on the daily challenges of learning how to build a successful practice.

Flash forward a few years, and time seems to slow down. The hours don’t fly by as they once did, and the pace of change has slowed to a crawl. That’s when you know you’re in a rut, which can be agonizing for someone who once braved the many obstacles that lay in front of all new financial advisors. For financial advisors, being in a rut can seem like dying a slow death.

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.

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.

How to Choose Your Specialty as a Financial Advisor

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

The financial services market is becoming more complex and more complex every day. Everybody needs a focus. And those with focused practices are better able to serve their clients. None of us can be all things to all people so it’s important to specialize in the kind of advice you give.

But do you know how to choose your specialty as a Financial Advisor?

There are two key considerations – both equally important: Your market, and your passions.

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.

1 2