Investment-adviser

This book is well worth the time to read it. It covers Granville's life in an engaging and sometimes humourous and racy style. It covers his progressive development and practical application of his theories and system. Am well pleased.

Great book, great advice. I highly recomend it!

As a new financial advisor, I was looking for a step-by-step book to get me going in this business. This book's two halves showed me what is involved in both the "Getting" and the "Keeping" business of managing people's expectations. The third section is on running a business.

In the "Getting" clients sections, the chapters are short but packed with useful information. They contain many sample letters, conversations, and approaches, both positive and negative - based on the 10 years of experiences of Dan's company "Marketing Solutions". He works with Financial Advisors to improve their business, so it stands to reason he knows from experience what works and what doesn't. I like this as "Why reinvent the wheel" - just follow what works...

In the "Keeping" clients section, the chapters are even shorter, 3 - 5 pages each. The message here is to continue to provide value to your existing clients so they don't leave. Again, there are many sample letters and options showing what works well and what works even better.

In summary, the central message and lesson to "getting" and "keeping", is that a successful Financial Advisor business is built on the trusting relationship you can develop with people, which they say will lead to more sales/commissions than the agressive Salesman out to pitch the latest product. This means your efforts often have little short term benefit (income!) but it will pay off down the road as your practice grows. Advisors short on time and cash will probably cringe at the costs this book suggests are necessary, initially and ongoing basis. I felt the upper limit on the number of clients/income is the hours you must invest nurturing the relationship. Can you imagine keeping up to date by personally phoning, mailing and meeting with 300 friends? 1000 friends?

I personally believe consumers these days see through the free seminars, lunches, golf games, newsletters etc that a new advisor bombards them with, as nothing more than an elaborate, lengthy sales pitch. The book carefully treads the line here, helping you NOT to appear to be selling when mailing letters for seminars, surveys, articles of interest.

The last section "Implementing" is very concise, telling you how to build and run an efficient business office, with the usual planning and control techniques : time management, business planning, goals etc. My book contained a CD-ROM disk with PDF files of all the recommended letters, surveys etc - a nice to have value to the book.

The book is masterfully crafted and edited. I would recommend it to other new advisors looking for a good, solid outline of what is required in this business. Since I am a new advisor, I don't know yet what is missing or could be improved.
DaveZ

Dan Richard helps you understand the evolving consumer, describing ways to attract new clients and how you can develop a trusting relationship. The book also talks about maximizing client referrals, doing bussiness with people you know and running effective seminars

I read this book from cover to cover and dog eared nearly every page. Dan Richards thoroughly covers topics such as: target marketing, prospecting, putting the customer first, getting referrals, conducting evaluations of your service, networking, managing a large client base and even firing difficult clients; and of course, everything in between. There are so many magnificent and expertly covered ideas in this book, you might feel overwhelmed with excitement and anxiety after finishing the book. Never fear, Richards touches on how you can implement many of the ideas in his book one or a few at a time without going overboard.

I will advise that this book is geared more towards the advisor with a year or more in the business (e.g. it does not cover cold calling), however, novices will pick up many ideas that will be useful in dealing with clients from the outset and in growing a practice effortlessly.

As an aside but also important, the central tenet of this book is similar to the ideas covered in Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Both are highly recommended.

After all the rave reviews, I thought this would be a great book on practice management. What I got was a book by Deena Katz on Deena Katz. For example, in discussing contact management systems, she glosses over Act! and Goldmine; barely mentions Text Library System and ProTracker, but spends considerable time talking about paying $50,000 to have a consultant design a system. If you currently have a fee only practice that is grossing in the high 6-figures and want to develop it into a multi-million $ firm, like Deena Katz, then I suggest you read this book.

Deena Katz's book should be read by anyone even considering a career in independent financial planning, and asset management. Financial planners and money managers obtain technical competence through education and professional designation programs such as the CFP, and CFA. This book assumes that you already know your craft. It deals with the important business of establishing, enhancing and staying in business.

Katz is true to her title. She thoroughly addresses all aspects of managing a financial practice... including designing the business, adding a partner, staff structure, hardware, software, positioning, public relations, hiring, firing and refusing clients, as well as, retaining desirable clients. This book has been written for the financial professional who has control of the financial practice management.

I have been a practicing financial advisor for over 15 years. I wish Katz's book had been available sooner.

This book makes a difference! It's obvious that "Practice Management for Financial Advisers, Planners, and Wealth Managers" is the practical advantage of skills that lead to success! It is brillant, easy-to-follow step-by-step methods and style to acquire the skills needed for winning at the rules and making them work for you!

This book offers a good selection of questions and answers focused on financial issues that people face. I like the format, it is easy to read and to find questions that I am interested in understanding. In addition to questions for financial advisors, it includes questions to ask when purchasing a house, selling a house, and purchasing insurance. It covers a lot of different financial topics, more that I thought it would based on the title. I would recommend this book as a good general reference book to have on your home bookshelf.

This book throws out just about all the knowledge that has been accumulated by the professional and academic investment community over the past five decades. The result is an amateurish book. The author Christopher Carosa explicitly rejects assets allocation and states that under no circumstance should an investor buy long-term bonds. With regard to risk management, which he makes light of as one of his Seven Deadly Sins, he states that one should "never consider risk tolerance ahead of the actual lifetime goals and associated investment goals." In his opinion, portfolios should either be short-term (invested in shorter-term bonds) or long-term (invested in all stock). He rehashes his idea repeatedly that an investor should hire a local Registered Investment Adviser or a local mutual fund, both of which his firm Carosa, Stanton & DePaolo Asset Management offers in the western New York area. He tells readers to avoid the workaholic investment adviser and not to work with a firm that uses an investment committee approach. He is very opinionated, repeats himself and does not offer much of substance to a trustee looking to gain an overview of responsibilities and investment guidance.

Depending upon your needs, I'd recommend instead Robert Fry's Nonprofit Investment Policies, Andrew Tobias's The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, or John Train's Investing and Managing Trusts Under the New Prudent Investor Rule.