What to Do When Everything is Urgent & Important?

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Too often for most people, there’s far too much to do and not enough time to do it.  This requires a balancing act of figuring out how to prioritize your work. For most people, the work that gets set aside are the non-important, but also sadly, the non-urgent and important items.  The things that you know you need to get to, but that don’t have a looming deadline to be met.  Those tasks will constantly be backburnered into an oblivion, perhaps for eternity. We implement what is known as the “Urgent & Important” (or…

8 Steps to Hiring a Great Executive Assistant

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach An executive assistant is an often overlooked position for many estate planning professionals. I know this because I often interact with a lot of attorneys, financial advisors, and CPAs directly on matters that I also know would be best handled by an executive assistant. Not having an executive assistant means that you, the executive, are often stuck with a lot of daily administrative tasks in the office. And that’s fine if that’s something that you enjoy doing and it works for you. But, for most estate planning professionals, that’s a huge misappropriation of the…

Should You Have a Full-Time Marketing Person on Your Staff?

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law We often espouse the importance of building your firm infrastructure with competent staff, adding first an executive assistant and/or paralegal, then an associate attorney, and then more staff. Having effective staff is the primary way to leverage your own time and output and increase your profit margin. But most attorneys overlook one particular key staff person when building their practice – – a dedicated full-time person to handle their marketing. Everything from making and confirming appointments to managing the…

The Art of Confirming an Appointment

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Knowing the steps of how to properly confirm an appointment – – any kind of appointment, including a phone appointment, client meeting, lunch meeting, etc. – – is extremely valuable to any office looking to continue to operate efficiently and effectively. However, I have found that a lot of people don’t do this (or don’t do it properly) and this can result in a lot of disruption in the office. Whether or not you are the one responsible for confirming appointments, if you know that your office could benefit from a makeover in your…

Are You Fitting Jobs to People?

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Hiring, training, and managing employees have certainly not been easy things to learn when it comes to owning my own law practice.  I say it time and time again, but these are the things that we never learned in law school, but yet seemingly take up a great deal of time (and expense) if not done well. One common mistake that I am guilty of making in the past, but that I’ve seen come up quite a bit lately…

The Top 35 Overlooked Best Practices for Executive Assistants

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach and Kirsten Allen, Executive Assistant Working for our boss, estate planning attorney Philip Kavesh, we combined have over 28 years of executive assistant experience.  Throughout this time, we have been able to gain numerous best practices and good habits for providing administrative support to a busy executive.  Also through our time in interfacing with many busy attorneys, we have interacted and even worked side-by-side with our fair share of assistants that either lacked the skills, experience, knowledge, training, or personality to be able to properly support their bosses. So we have seen what works…

Effectively Managing Your Boss’ Busy Calendar

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Whether your boss is an estate planning attorney, CPA, financial advisor or life insurance agent, chances are, he or she has an overwhelmingly busy calendar.  From client meetings, phone calls, seminar presentations, conferences and CE programs to numerous projects to be completed, goals to be reached, and endless obligations to be met. How do you organize, prioritize and manage it all while getting everything scheduled and done? Ask for Assistance with Prioritizing First, ask for assistance in prioritizing your tasks (and your boss’ tasks).  Thankfully, most executives acknowledge that their assistants are juggling several…

Is Your Office a Safe Place for People to Work?

By David Giuliano, Business Coach For over 40 years I have worked in the business world and I’ve learned many lessons. One of the most important aspects of business success is a work environment where people feel safe, can communicate honestly, and grow as a whole.  Having an unsafe environment causes the most damage to the owner of the business.  This might seem like a no-brainer, but the truth is in this day and age, it’s extremely hard to maintain a healthy work environment, but very necessary to do so. My work has shown me that if we can address…

Reduce Your Number of No-Shows and Cancellations with a Proper Confirmation Process

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Having worked with numerous estate planning professionals over the years, one of the issues that a lot of people have struggled with are appointment and seminar no-shows and cancellations.  One of my first questions is always, “What does your confirmation process look like?” For some, they don’t have any process in place at all.  For others, they have a mixture of an e-mail that is sent or a phone call the day before.  While something is better than nothing, there is always room for improvement to help reduce the number of no-shows and cancellations….

Ten Tips for Boosting Office Morale

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach With all that’s going on right now in the world, office morale may be down.  A lot of change has impacted people over the past few years.  Perhaps you have different staff now, but the effects of the pandemic, the politics, the news stories, and the fears of the economy have left a lot of people feeling burnt out and empty. Even if you have tried your best to keep these things from impacting the overall environment in your office, morale in your office may be taking a hit. Boosting office morale is not…