What advisor couldn't build a respectable practice just serving the needs of doctors, lawyers and MBAs? Six- (and even seven-) figure incomes, smart, well connected and, most importantly, too busy to handle their own investments. Research suggests...

Advisors trolling for small business clients are discovering what mate-seeking singles have known for years: cyberspace is the place. The old methods of small business prospecting, such as hanging around the Chambers of Commerce and Kiwanis clubs...

The industry's focus on high-net-worth clients has been a boon to many advisors, but the high energy focus required to succeed in the high-net-worth game is not always easy to sustain. An advisor I know named Marsha admitted: Sometimes I wonder if...

Dreams are an important part of any successful advisory business. Indeed, they represent perhaps the purest form of aspiration. But there's a reason that is a derisive term in the business world: Many people are unwilling to pay the price for...

The term 12-step process is all but synonymous with substance-abuse recovery, but it's also easily applied to other undesirable behavior: poor salesmanship. Our interviews with successful high-net-worth advisors has helped us to create a process...

Advisors of a certain age might remember an old Heineken beer ad campaign based around this phrase: Just being the best is enough. The idea, of course, being that the beer was so good it sold itself. A surprising number of advisors subscribe to a...

The corporate way of communicating has been so bad for so long, many of us have stopped caring altogether. It's a natural reaction: If something is annoying and unavoidable, ignore it. Trouble is that, in the brokerage industry, corporate are...

When registered reps set about advising clients on where to put their money, they usually focus on risk tolerance. A conservative-minded client, for instance, might get a portfolio heavily laden with fixed-income products; a more aggressive client...

The good news for high-net-worth hunters: A large subset of affluent clients self-directed investors tend to be nonplussed by their current advisory relationship. The bad news: Inertia has a strong pull on this group. According to a recent report...

Small-business owners are typically a self-reliant lot, and this fact cuts two ways for financial advisors who would serve them. On the positive side, the advisor who gains access to a small-business owner has reached the decision maker, the...