By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach 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 Kinds of…
Top 10 Year-End Practice-Building & Marketing Ideas of 2024
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach As we head into the final quarter of 2024, you may be wondering where all the time went and what can you do in these final two months to really help your practice end the year with a BANG! I’ve put together what I consider to be the Top 10 Year-End Practice-Building and Marketing Ideas for 2024 so that you can end this year on a productive, positive note and head into 2025 with some momentum! IDEA #1: Clean up your database. Now is a great time to take a look at your database…
The Top 6 Reasons You Should Be Giving Seminars
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law For estate planning attorneys, all of the technical and legal education in the world is great, but if you are not able to bring in prospective clients to plan for, there is no way for you to be able to successfully run your own estate planning practice. If you regularly receive referrals from other sources, such as financial advisors, CPAs, life insurance agents or other attorneys, that’s great. However, what happens if those referrals stop? How consistent and predictable…
Top 6 Mistakes Estate Planning Attorneys Make with Prospective New Clients
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach As an attorney, your time is important and there are a lot of people out there who want free legal advice. It is a common practice for many estate planning attorneys to offer a free consultation to prospective clients, so those who are insisting on charging a fee for initial consultations are creating a barrier to entry and eliminating potential new clients who otherwise seek attorneys not charging for their initial meeting. Over the years, I have heard a number of common mistakes made by estate planning attorneys with respect to how they handle…
Training Associate Attorneys & Staff
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Over the past couple of months, we covered the importance of properly hiring and incentivizing your associate attorneys and support staff in order to build and maintain a successful estate planning practice. Now, we will address training. As I’ve stressed in all other aspects of your practice, you must have processes, procedures, forms and systems for everything that happens in your law firm on a daily basis. This includes your marketing, client meetings, work production and work review, as…
Multiple Financial Advisor Referral Relationships May Be a Big MISTAKE!
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Does that sound crazy to you? Probably! But, hear me out. (By the way, if you’re a financial advisor, what I’ll say applies equally to you having too many estate planning attorney relationships.) Over the years, I have consistently heard fellow estate planning attorneys tell me all of the reasons why the dedicated, single-financial advisor referral relationship (or a relationship with only one company or group of advisors) that I use in my practice doesn’t work or why it…
What to Do When Your Employees Ask for a Raise?
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach If you’ve ever had an employee approach you randomly and request an increase in their salary, it may be challenging to know how best to respond. While you may be happy with their work, you may be strapped from being able to financially accommodate such a raise. It creates all sorts of fears and concerns around this person walking away if you don’t oblige. Below are some practical tips to help you manage (and avoid) this happening. TIP #1: Create a Process for How and When You Review Compensation. First and foremost, by creating…
Squash the Drama: 5 Steps to Properly Handling Interoffice Conflicts
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach It’s a fact in just about every single office, conflict is going to happen. There are times when the workplace is going to be stressful. There are going to be different people with different personalities and with different things going on in both their personal and professional lives. Regardless of what industry you’re in, but especially in an estate, tax or financial planning practice, what is inevitable is that, at some point or another, there will be conflict. Knowing and implementing the steps to properly handle this conflict, while they may seem obvious and…
Tips to Maintaining a Positive Online Reputation
By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach With the growing use of the internet, clients, prospective clients and professional referral sources will look you up online and learn about you before they decide to do business with you. So, you have to maintain a quality online presence, more than merely having a good website. You also must maintain a positive online reputation! First, let’s start with some basic questions: Have you ever Googled yourself or your firm before? Do you know that Yelp, Google, and Facebook create profiles for your business (even if you didn’t initiate one) and customers can leave…
Blow Up Your Annual Client Maintenance Program!
By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law In this article, I addressed the marketplace issues confronting estate planning attorneys, in particular commoditization of our “products” and increasing low price competition. One of the ways that I discussed to combat these issues is to emphasize how your “product” is better than your competitors’. Another way to differentiate yourself is to emphasize your “service after the sale.” When someone purchases a car, he or she wants to know what kind of service or maintenance program is available and what…