Road To Independence

Since we’re in a business which is in a constant state of flux, it pays to keep up with other advisors in your area. Let’s say you have a prospective client who is working with an advisor across town. You have a few meetings with the prospect but they decide to maintain their current advisory relationship. What if one day the other advisor retires or changes firms? What would you do? Depending on what I know about the other advisor, I might reach out again to see if the client is moving with them. This is precisely what happened recently. A financial planning client I’d been working with over the past few years had his assets with another firm. His advisor left and now the client is transferring his account to me. The moral of the story is that it’s a good idea to keep up with this type of information. In this business, timing is a critical part of client acquisition.

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This past week was spent on a number of various tasks and initiatives. One of those tasks concerns my Web site. A lot of time and energy has gone into its development and there is still more to come. Basically, there are three components to the site: the front end, the back end, and the CMS integration.
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It seems as though there’s a lot of interest in custodians, so I thought I’d write a little more about my decision to join Trade PMR. First, I’d like to say that my former custodian, Fidelity, is a fine company. I have nothing bad to say about Fidelity. Even though I was leaving, its service never faltered. Whenever I’ve spoken to them on the phone, they are extremely courteous and helpful. Again, my decision to change was solely due to their corporate decision to raise their minimum AUM requirement. In general, they did this because they determined that advisors under this level of assets were unprofitable. To further explain, it was many of these advisors who called in by phone instead of utilizing Fidelity’s technology to get service. The result was that it took more man hours which increased expenses. In any event, that’s water under the bridge now. Let’s move on to TradePMR, my new custodian.

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