6 Tips for Handling Difficult Clients

Download Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant Difficult clients are inevitable no matter what business you are in and no matter how great your customer service is.  With the estate and financial planning business, clients can be very emotional.  Clients may be stressed about the kinds of decisions they are required to make while getting their affairs in order, especially if they may be grieving the loss of a loved one. They are investing time, money and their personal feelings into the entire process, so it is no wonder that you will experience a wide range of emotions.  Anything…

Look Inside Your Practice for the Answers, Not Outside

Download Printable Article By: David Giuliano, Business Coach Whether you’re a new solo practitioner or have many years running a practice under your belt, often the biggest problems you face in the workplace reflect some confusion or lack of clarity you carry inside of yourself. You may have some clear goals:  Make more money.  Find ways to grow the practice.  Work less (or more!).  Have more satisfaction and peace of mind.  The problem is, you’re having trouble achieving them, but don’t know why.  You know something’s wrong:  wrong staff, wrong marketing, wrong economy, etc.  But the real reason may not…

Eliminate Most of Your Interruptions with One Simple Technique (the U & I Rule)!

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law If there’s one thing that I have learned to master over the years, it’s to control the number of interruptions when I am in the office – – not just others interrupting me, but my interruptions of others. The main reason why interruptions happen is because there are no rules or protocols for how people will interact. The result is not only a loss of productivity, but the loss of money.  If you just look up the statistics online…

The #1 Step Towards a Happier, Healthier YOU!

Download Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant The office is busy.  Life is busy.  Things get crazy and hectic.  Some days and weeks are worse than others.  You have probably felt at one point or another that there was far too much to do and not enough time to do it.  This can create a great deal of stress and anxiety on anyone, regardless of whether you’re an estate planning professional (such as an estate planning attorney, CPA, financial advisor, life insurance or trust officer) or you’re a part of the ever-important team of support staff. Despite this, it…

Did Law School Fail You?

Download Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant Graduating law school is quite an accomplishment for anyone. But, with the growing popularity of becoming a lawyer, there’s an over-saturation of graduates and simply not enough lawyering jobs to employ those coming out of law school. Burdened by thousands of dollars of school loan debt and a desire to put to use the countless hours of hard work they put into it, many lawyers have been (or will be) forced to start up their own practice, whether they wanted to or not. And this is where most people are going to…

The Top 8 Staff Training Tips for Estate Planning Law Firms – PART 2

Download the Full Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant In continuation of the December 2015 issue… Law Firm Staff Training Tip #5: Have the Staff Member Create a Detailed Procedures Manual. Another important part of the staff member training is to have the staff member that is being trained be the one to create a detailed procedures manual out of the training that he or she received. Not only will it be helpful to have them write out the procedures manual in a detailed and very thorough format that would allow him or her to pick up the manual…

The Top 8 Staff Training Tips for Estate Planning Law Firms – PART 1

Download Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant Having worked with so many estate planning attorneys and support staff members, time and time again, I have seen that one of the major breakdowns in firm systems comes with the lack of proper job training. Things start to slip through the cracks and while one or two details won’t make or break the success of your firm, the compound effect of multiple staff members not trained right and doing their job duties as originally intended will become one of the biggest challenges for any brilliant estate planning attorney trying to manage…

One of the Most Important Documents that Most Estate Planners Don’t Have

Download Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant If you’re an estate planning attorney with your own law practice, there’s a good chance that you don’t have one of the most important manuals in your practice: an Employee Handbook. In fact, this may also be the case for other estate planning professionals as well, such as CPAs, financial advisors, or life insurance agents. The fact is, if you have your own business and you have employees working for you, an employee handbook is a must-have necessity as part of your business for all of the reasons laid out below. What…

Open Another Office!

Download Printable Article By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law You may be thinking I’m nuts. It may have taken you years of your blood, sweat, tears, time and money to get your current office up and running smoothly and profitably (or you’re still in the process of getting that done). So why would you want to open another office? There are lots of good reasons. Here are a few: Gain access to a larger audience of potential clients (particularly if your current market has a…

7 Tips For Being the “Boss” of Your Boss

Download Printable Article By Kristina Schneider, Executive Assistant An executive assistant is probably one of the most important support staff members that any busy professional could possibly have, regardless of his or her profession. One of the things that we hear all the time from our boss, Phil Kavesh, is that his executive assistant is actually his boss. Of course, this doesn’t give us, as executive assistants, the same kind of “power” that a normal boss might have over an employee. What being the boss of your boss means is that you are supporting your boss and directing his or…