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…

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…

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…

How Do You Properly Compensate (and Incentivize) Associate Attorneys?

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law One of the biggest mistakes I see attorneys that own their own practices make is failing to properly incentivize associate attorneys.  The primary way I have done this successfully for many years is through monthly bonuses.  Whereas attorney bonuses are usually purely discretionary and undefined in advance as to their amount and frequency, the bonus system that I have developed is based on a clearly defined formula.  By utilizing monthly bonuses, you will not only make your associate attorneys…

Failure: The Great Teacher

By David Giuliano, Business Coach I think we can all agree that failure is not a beloved or relished part of life. It gets a bad rap but truthfully there’s no better teacher. It’s been said you don’t know where you’re vulnerable until you fail. Very true. When making any major change, failure happens all the time. I have to address this issue because so many of my clients – a majority of who are lawyers and other business professionals – have very little tolerance for mistakes or failure. They punish themselves, twist others into knots, judge too harshly and…

What to Do When an Associate Attorney Leaves Your Firm

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law If you run your own law practice and have ever had to hire an associate attorney, one of the biggest concerns and risks you take is that one day that associate attorney may decide to leave your firm. Unfortunately, this is a business where a trained employee can easily set up his or her own shop and there is little you can do to restrict it from happening. It can be one of the most disruptive and chaotic things…