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…
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…