Mentoring

Building your business

Building a business is a bit like working a jigsaw puzzle. Before you spread out all the pieces, you need to look at the big picture on the box. Then you separate the edge pieces – build the structure first – and categorize all the other pieces by shape, size and colour. After considerable trial […]

By Kanupriya Vashisht |February 1, 2010

12 min read

Planning and Advice

Is it better to recruit or retain?

Moderated by: Kanupriya Vashisht Participants Jim Morrison, VP and Regional Director, RBC Dominion Securities Tina Tehranchian, , MA, CFP, CLU, CHFC, Branch Manager, Financial Advisor, Assante Capital Management Ltd. Tina Tehranchian: A lot of it depends on the position you’re hiring for. Generally, if there’s a way to train an existing employee, it acts as […]

By Kanupriya Vashisht |January 1, 2010

5 min read

Planning and Advice

Training programs help rookies

Consider this: of the 17,500 CFPs in Canada, 44% are over age 50 and will be retiring in the next 10-15 years. However, only 10% of CFP professionals are under the age of 35. That means there are awesome opportunities for younger advisors to succeed older planners as they exit their businesses. The opportunities are […]

By Staff |January 1, 2010

7 min read

Planning and Advice

4 tips for new advisors

Recruiters always paint a rosy picture about being an advisor: One firm was famous for telling people they could make $600,000 a year by working a four-day week. Let’s get realistic. The money and career satisfaction that comes from being an advisor can be great, but roughly two of three rookies won’t survive in this […]

By Mark Noble |January 1, 2010

10 min read

Great teams need great players

In our coaching work, we always do an assessment of the roles that each team member plays within a financial advisory firm. After looking at the strengths and weaknesses of a team member, we are able to evaluate how well suited that individual is for their respective role. To illustrate this more clearly, let’s use […]

3 min read

Younger advisors will trade income prospects for stability

Whether you’re growing a financial planning practice, a branch office you own, a corporate- owned branch or a financial planning firm, the ability to recruit high-quality associates is a key component of success. A model of recruiting and business building that’s not frequently discussed is the salaried run financial planning practice. With the average age […]

6 min read

Attract the best to build your team

Chances are, the next time you’re looking for a talented team member for your practice, you won’t rent out an auditorium, take your seat in the judge’s chair and wince your way through dozens of bad acts in the hope of finding one exceptional star. But even if your interview process doesn’t make for ratings-grabbing […]

9 min read

Recharging the generator: What can you do to motivate your staff?

Successful advisors are invariably self-motivated. But when we look to motivate our staff, we tend to forget that motivation comes from within. Our instinct is to apply what Frederick Herzberg called KITA: a kick-in-the-a– approach. Over 30 years ago, in a classic Harvard Business Review article, he also told us KITA doesn’t really work. “If […]

3 min read

Do and coach: Advisors must learn to lead not from the top but from beside

(June 2003) The position of player-coach is an exalted one in sports. Bill Russell, Pete Rose, Lou Boudreau and Doug Harvey are some of the big names from the past who at one point simultaneously played for and coached their teams. Lenny Wilkins, familiar to us from his years behind the Toronto Raptors bench, started […]

3 min read

Step right up: A guide to seamless transitions on your team

One of the greatest challenges we face as advisors is building larger teams to service the needs of our clients. Our employees gain a tremendous amount of knowledge as they mature in their current positions. So how do we facilitate passing on this “brain trust” to a new hire or replacement? This task can be […]

3 min read