Your Role Players—How financial services teams can thrive with them.

July 23, 2011

On  great basketball teams it’s the stars who get the attention, seldom the role players.  Then why do the stars with great role players stay with their team, while stars without them want out?  Because role players make the stars and the whole team perform better. There are two kinds of role players common to [...]

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Shouldn’t exit advisors be following their own advice?

July 13, 2011

Nobody sees more directly the aspirations and concerns family business founders have for the future of their enterprises than the financial advisors who provide wealth preservation and business continuity planning.   Yet few of these advisors are prepared for their own future ownership transitions.  If both groups don’t act today, they are throwing away tomorrow’s opportunities. [...]

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What’s wrong with financial services firms’ brochures and websites?

June 29, 2011

We take this as a sign of Recovery—financial services firms like yours are contacting us about remodeling their brochures and websites. It is a smart move.   In a volatile financial landscape clients are looking for a higher standard from advisors.  That gap is your opportunity to rethink your firm’s story and create the new standard. [...]

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The Three Most Important Questions Driving Philanthropy Today

June 27, 2011

Question 1.  Let’s say you are in a parked car facing west on a straight road.  After driving awhile you realize you are a mile east of where you started.  What’s going on? Answer.  You must be going in reverse. From our outsider perspective, that answer accounts for many of the pressures nonprofits are experiencing [...]

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How to gain traction when your clients are on Pause? Think NON-linear! Adapt the Catalytic Planning Model!

June 9, 2011

Terry White. Is this the new reality for financial services producers?  What we have been hearing from our producer clients for over two years.  Crisis and recession sent business and affluent family clients everywhere into shells.  Short-term concerns and interim solutions overshadowed long term personal and corporate financial issues.  We expected that would change as [...]

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ROI–our un-conventional approach to planning conventions and conferences

June 1, 2011

First, a little moralizing… Remember at the depth of the global financial crisis when every executive retreat and sales incentive trip became a symbol of capitalist arrogance?  The media had a field day implying that, in the light of bankruptcies and foreclosures, management was laughing at the rest of us from hot tubs at ritzy [...]

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Gutenberg v Googleberg

May 22, 2011

Recently a client of ours was working on a new website by committee, and after a long conversation our job as facilitators was to summarize the conversation. “We have gone from Gutenberg to Googleberg,” we said. “Half the room represents the best of old school print, books and face-to-face relationships, and the other half represents the best of [...]

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Pains and Cures—IdeaTransfer’s practical manifesto on the life insurance industry future

May 22, 2011

IdeaTransfer was born in the late 70s when it began consulting with life insurance producers.  We landed in the middle of a life insurance marketing revolution.  Product manufacturing began to separate from product sales.  We became advisors to the premier producer groups and the BDs, IMOs, FMOs and other distribution structures that filled the gap. [...]

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Why most business founders should stop thinking about selling out

May 22, 2011

The numbers favor internal ownership transfer over outside buyers. There are six million employer firms in the private business sector.  Estimates say at least 50% of founders expect to sell their companies in the next ten years.  Who is going to buy all six million companies? But there are tens of millions of candidates for [...]

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How much Growth is strategically planned and how much is just brilliantly reactive?

May 22, 2011

According to Darwin, species do not survive because they are stronger or more intelligent.  They survive because the respond more effectively to change. Think back over the major change events in history of your firm. Name the episodes where you adapted most successfully, and deconstruct how and why you succeeded.  Was there a consistent process [...]

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