Between Now and Success

Gail Graham is one of those rare people who have worked in the top echelon of two major companies--Fidelity Investments and United Capital--and helped shaped their strategies that led to massive growth and industry accolades. Today, Gail is the founder of Graham Strategy, and works with companies to figure out where the gaps are between their strategy and how they're running their company. On toda...

The science of wealth is in Sarah Fallaw's DNA. Her father, the late Dr. Thomas Stanley, literally wrote THE book on how and why affluent people accumulate wealth, "The Millionaire Next Door" (1996). Today, Sarah is using her doctorate in applied psychology to create analytics and metrics that carry on Dr. Stanley's study of wealth-building habits at the company she founded, DataPoints. The propri...

The resurgence of analog products in our digital advisor world has profound implications for both consumers and businesses, which author David Sax details in his new book, "The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter." As financial advisors get caught up in trying to "digital advisor everything," it's important to remember that there are many times when human to human contact is the bes...

If you're still stuffing mailers, making cold calls, and tweeting the occasional Warren Buffet interview to a handful of followers, it's time to upgrade your marketing strategy and let data driven content drive some foot traffic through your front door. On today's show, Justin Wisz, the co-founder and CEO of Vestorly, talks about how automated content and advanced AI can provide "delightful digita...

What if you had more than 20 years of financial services experience, then decided to start over and build a new RIA from scratch? Do you think you could take those decades of experience and build a new RIA in tune with the times? That's exactly what Stephanie Sammons is doing with her new RIA, SammonsWealth. Talk about a multi-hyphenate: Stephanie Sammons is the Founder and CEO of SammonsWealth, a...

Michael Nathanson is the chairman, CEO, and president of the Colony Group, a multi-billion dollar wealth management company with offices across the United States. But Michael thinks his most important title is one that isn't listed on his business card: CIO. "I sometimes joke that I'm CIO of this organization -- the Chief Inspiration Officer," says Michael. "I consider that to be one of my top fun...

There's never been a more exciting time to be a financial advisor, or a more challenging one. The Baby Boomer generation is keeping advisors busy as they age into retirement. A new generation of internet-savvy millennials is beginning to consider their investment opportunities. Competition is everywhere. Technology is both disrupting the RIA landscape, and giving advisors new opportunities to reto...

As the co-founder of multi-billion dollar RIA Beacon Pointe in Newport Beach, CA, Matt Cooper has a unique, in the trenches view of trends that are sweeping the financial advisory industry, on both the client and advisor side. In addition to his original, $7-billion-plus RIA, Matt founded a sister company, Beacon Point Wealth Advisors, which partners with smaller RIAs around the country so they ca...

Erin Botsford is one of the top financial advisors in the country. She is the founder and CEO of the Botsford Financial Group, which has nearly $1 billion in assets under management. She has appeared on Barron's list of the Top 100 Women Financial Advisors and Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors multiple times. And she's also an author who just released her second book, "Seven Figure Firm." But...

Once upon a time, financial planners met with clients annually, showed them a printout of how all their investments were performing, shook hands, and moved on to the next annual appointment with the next client. Smart advisors know those days are over. Many investors are already monitoring their portfolio online, often for free. Fees are compressing across the financial advisory industry. A younge...

Whatever you think about Donald Trump, it's hard to deny his masterful use of persuasion and branding techniques to win over a specific segment of the electorate that propelled him to the White House. Here are six key strategies Donald Trump used in his campaign and how you can adapt them to your business.

Imagine walking into a doctor's office with a bad cough and walking out on crutches, still coughing. That's how Brent Brodeski saw the client experience of financial advisory in 1992 when he co-founded Savant Capital Management in Rockford, IL. "It was kind of like going to the general practitioner, you get a checkup, and he wrote prescriptions and sent people on their way," said Brent. "And peopl...

Nobody can accurately and consistently predict the future but by observing and curating ideas, you can uncover accelerating trends, see things other people miss, and position your business to profit from these upcoming opportunities. In 1982, John Naisbitt wrote a book called Megatrends . It became a huge bestseller and he made the term "high tech high touch" a household phrase that we still use t...

Could 3 words be the difference between success and failure for you over the next 12 months? The recent presidential election proved once again that words are powerful. The words that we use, the language that we use has the ability to move people to take action. For several years now, I've taken this idea of "words are powerful' and completed an exercise that I want to share with you. The exercis...

If you don't plan your personal life with the same rigor and discipline you do your professional life, your personal life will suffer, says Ed Rapp. As a Group President and former CFO for Caterpillar, Inc. during the financial crisis, Ed was a high-level, globe-trotting senior executive who never forgot the importance of keeping family front and center. Ed and I go back more than 30 years when we...

I just finished my second year of podcasting and the numbers are in. Here are my 10 most popular podcasts for 2016 based on downloads along with a key idea shared on each episode. Grab some coffee and a notepad. It'll spark some ideas.

Your business is under assault from Robo Advisors, technology disruption, Vanguard and Schwab's low-cost call-center programs, the DOL rule, flat markets, and clients who are scrutinizing fees more closely than ever before. Ask yourself… How will you continue to add value in an industry that faces competitive threats and shrinking margins? How will you ensure clients don't fire you if the financia...

"If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to get comfortable with the notion of failing. Once you get completely comfortable with the idea that you're going to fail, what ends up happening is you build this resistance up and you start to think more clearly," says Anthony Scaramucci. Today's guest, Anthony Scaramucci, is the founder and managing partner of the $12.5 billion alternative investmen...

Shockingly, you might be able to generate more alpha for your clients by helping manage their career than you can from investing or financial planning. Today's guest, Michael Haubrich, CFP®, created the concept of "career asset management" as a way to help add additional value to his clients using an asset that is typically neglected by financial advisors. The idea is by helping clients manage the...

How would you answer these three questions about exploring advice? What is the definition of good advice? What is the definition of a quality financial plan? What does it mean to be a fiduciary? Kevin Knull, the president of PIEtech SM , Inc., (parent company of MoneyGuidePro financial planning software) asked those three questions to an audience of financial and wealth management leaders and basi...

Should RIAs offer an automated investing Robo-Advisor service? What are the pros and cons? How should you price the service? Will it cannibalize your existing clients? In today's show, Tina Powell and I discuss how she launched automated investing Robo-Advisor SheCapital and why they kept it separately branded from the large RIA that she was affiliated with. We also discuss the difficulties in gai...

It appears clients care much less about their advisor's digital technology than advisors do. The financial services industry spends a lot of time talking about technology and there are thousands of companies around the world and tens of billions of dollars being invested in financial technology or FinTech companies to enhance the digital offering. Yet, when you ask clients of financial advisors ho...

I believe financial advisors can add the most value to their clients in the areas of financial and life planning, and not as much in the investment management area. I also understand that you can't forget about the investment side. In today's conversation, we discuss how to improve your investment performance by overcoming some of the behavioral investing mistakes that are so easy for all of us to...

The second of two special episodes. What does the future of FinTech look like? It was on display recently in Park City, UT at the  3rd Annual Fuse Event sponsored by Orion Advisor. Fuse is a three-day coding event that brings together dozens of programmers from FinTech companies around the world who band as a community and solve advisor problems. It's part hackathon, part relationship-building all...

This is the first of two episodes. What does the future of FinTech look like? It was on display recently in Park City, UT at the 3 rd Annual Fuse Event sponsored by Orion Advisor. Fuse is a three-day coding event that brings together dozens of programmers from FinTech companies around the world who band as a community and solve advisor problems. It's part hackathon, part relationship-building all...