Staff Reviews & Setting Goals at the Beginning of the New Year

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law In successfully running a law practice for over 40 years, I have found that it’s vitally important to periodically meet with each of my staff members (even ones that may be part-time or independent contractors) to review their job performance and set clear and defined goals.  Once you do these reviews on a regular basis, you will be amazed how much more motivated and productive your staff will be! I do these reviews semi-annually, at the beginning of January…

6 Ways You’re Holding Yourself (and Your Firm) Back Without Even Knowing It!

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach If your practice isn’t where you want it to be and you feel “stuck”, do you know why?  There may be plenty of reasons why.  However, more often than not, there are a lot of things that you, the estate planning attorney, are doing (or not doing) that are the reasons why you can’t seem to move forward. Having worked with estate planning attorney, Philip Kavesh, for over 18 years, both in his law practice and with our attorney customers of The Ultimate Estate Planner, I’ve seen a commonality in most attorneys and what’s…

Are Your Employees Quiet Quitting?

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about the concept of “quiet quitting”.  You may have seen conversations on LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok or even some articles online or on news outlets.  Many employers are experiencing this concept and there has been a lot of debate about exactly who is to blame and what, if anything, can be done about it. What is Quiet Quitting? So, what is it exactly? “Quiet quitting” is a term to describe employees who are not outright quitting their jobs, but who may be essentially “quitting” in other ways. …

The Importance of Taking Time Off and Getting a Break from Work

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach The concept of taking time off of work or stepping away from work seems like an obvious one, but for those that are super-dedicated to their job, this can actually be a difficult task to do sometimes. It took me some time, but it was something that I had to learn over a number of years of going full-steam, with very little to no breaks. I can recall when I was first hired by Phil back in 2004, I was an eager, freshly graduated college student. There were a lot of details to my…

Strength in Numbers

By Bert A. Cooper, CES Can a solo Financial Advisor effectively offer all the expertise their clients deserve? While we’d all like to think we’re exceptional at what we do, the real answer is no. The most successful Advisors are those with a team behind them. I saw a growing need among clients for comprehensive wealth management and my vision was to build a cohesive team that consisted of specialists who offered these services exceptionally well.   In order to make this vision a reality I had to make a series of important strategic decisions. I knew from the start I…

5 Reasons Why You Should Have an Office Manager

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach If you are an estate planning attorney, CPA, financial advisor, or life insurance agent and you’re running your own practice, then you already know how precious your time is and, hopefully, how valuable that time is to your practice and its overall success. It is important that you see yourself as the “talent” and that you maximize the use of your time for tasks that only you can do. You need someone else to be the “producer-director”, handling other necessary details. All too often, we see estate planners that are spending far too much…

Top 6 Strategies for Managing Interruptions in the Workplace

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach According to a study, the average time spent per day by employees being interrupted and trying to refocus is 2.1 hours. Interruptions at the workplace is estimated to cost businesses in the U.S. over half a trillion dollars each year! While interruptions at the workplace are inevitable, it doesn’t mean that they cannot be minimized or reduced. Below are what I consider to be the top ten strategies for managing (and reducing) the amount of interruptions at the workplace. Strategy #1: Evaluate (and change) your physical workspace. One of the biggest eye-openers for me…

Top 9 Mistakes Attorneys Make Bonusing Support Staff

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach The concept of financial bonuses is not unknown to most people.  It is highly used in a lot of sales and marketing industries.  Even in the legal world, many lawyers have, at some time or another when working for a firm, received some kind of bonus. However, the concept of bonusing non-attorneys is relatively new, particularly for the estate planning lawyer world.  Attorney and Ultimate Estate Planner President, Philip Kavesh, did not consider or implement the idea of a formal staff bonus system until about 12 years ago.  He, as well as the attorneys…

Are You a Helicopter Boss? How Micromanaging is Killing Your Practice

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach You may have heard of the term “helicopter parent”.  It’s a term used to describe that parenting style where they “hover overhead”, like helicopters, over everything that their child is doing, overseeing and trying to control and supervise all aspects of their lives. This type of style can also be found in the workplace. A helicopter boss, whether it’s the attorney business owner or perhaps an office manager or other person in some type of supervisory role over others, is someone whose management style is similar to this parenting style.  It’s someone who is…

Having Disconnects and Conflicts in the Office Right Now?

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach With everything going on in the world right now, it is safe to say that most people are under much more stress than usual.  From dealing with concerns around the pandemic and working in a post-pandemic world, managing the constantly barrage of headlines, politics and war, to feeling a whole spectrum of emotions about all the change and heaviness that has happened in past couple of years.  Business owners and employees with young children are having to juggle their own set of challenges trying to navigate care and schooling for their children, while we…