Jason Bernic

Ask almost any financial planning business what its growth plans are and wealthier clients will feature somewhere in the answer. Ask who is responsible for that happening and the answer is nearly always the advisors, which is where the trouble starts. Growth in this industry is usually counted rather than examined. More clients, more advisors, more assets under management. A business serving a thousand clients, versus a business serving two hundred clients, can turn the same annual income,...

There is a particular way the financial planning industry talks about its own difficulties, and it involves taking them one at a time. Consolidation occupies one conversation. Technology occupies another. Transformation occupies a third, generally shorter and more uncomfortable than either. Each is treated as a discrete problem with its own timeline, its own commentary and its own set of responses. Read together, they describe something considerably more coherent: a single situation arriving...

There is a conversation that happens in almost every financial planning business at some point, usually during a strategy session or a team meeting, and it goes something like this: how do we get more referrals out of our review meetings? It is a reasonable question, and there is nothing wrong with wanting referrals. The problem is that it is the wrong starting point, and businesses that begin there tend to design their review process around what they need from the client rather than what the...