BFC Thought Leadership Blog
What Advisor Recruiting Still Gets Wrong About Growth
Paige Christofferson | Chief Business Development Officer
The people who run financial services firms are typically very smart. They understand markets, economics and the mechanics of building large, profitable businesses.
Still, their recruiting approach sometimes overlooks the bigger picture.
Why Responsive Home Office Support Matters More Than Ever
Paige Christofferson | Chief Business Development Officer
When financial advisors need help, they shouldn't have to navigate layers of bureaucracy or wait days for answers.
Whether it's a compliance question, a technology issue or guidance on implementing artificial intelligence, advisors need direct access to experienced professionals who can solve problems quickly so they can stay focused on serving their clients.
That's the philosophy at Berthel Fisher.
Advisor Technology Should Give Time Back, Not Create Another System to Manage
Paige Christofferson | Chief Business Development Officer
Advisors have no shortage of technology available to them. What they often lack is time.
There is some irony in that. Technology is supposed to save time, yet it can have the opposite effect when systems do not work well together or require advisors to spend hours learning, maintaining and navigating them.
Why Autonomy Is a Retention Strategy
Paige Christofferson | Chief Business Development Officer
The recent consolidation wave in wealth management, among other things, has produced higher firm valuations, sharper competition and greater scale. It has also produced more sameness.
Indeed, as firms have gotten larger, many of them have standardized processes, centralized decisions and created tighter rules around how advisors serve clients.
Service Model Refresh: The Three-Tier Client Calendar That Does Not Burn You Out
Paige Christofferson | Chief Business Development Officer
Clients Hire Perspective, Not Portals
AI and workflow automation have compressed tasks that once took hours into minutes. Advisors can draft notes faster, follow up more consistently and access information that used to sit across multiple systems.
Firms Are Getting Bigger But Growth Still Depends on Advisors Being Treated Like Advisors
Send Recaps Your Clients Will Actually Read and Use
During most client meetings, you discuss real decisions and tradeoffs, like cash flow, taxes and timing. After the call, clients is focused on what changed, what needs to happen next and who is responsible.
How to Demonstrate Your Worth in a World Obsessed with “Value”
No matter how a client defines success, they will judge your worth by how well you deliver value that meets their expectations. The challenge is that value itself has become a shifting concept.
The Three Conversations Every Advisor Should Be Having in the First Quarter
Most advisors start the year focused on goals, revenue targets, asset flows, and marketing plans. Those inputs matter, but they may not be the only things that shape what your firm becomes over the next 12 months.
Act Like a Doctor: A Model for Serving Clients
We all talk about financial health, but few advisors actually behave like physicians. The best doctors don’t wait for patients to show symptoms – they diagnose, monitor and prevent.
The most effective advisors do exactly the same thing.
Building a Brand That Lasts: Service and Authenticity First, Community as the Pillars
When financial advisors talk about brand building, the conversation often jumps to tactics, whether social media posts, sponsorships or newsletter drip campaigns. Those can help, but they’re not the foundation.
The core of any brand, whatever the industry, is easy to articulate but hard to pull off: great service and authenticity.
Here’s How Independent FPs Can Prevent Burnout
Independent financial professionals wear more hats than almost anyone. They are portfolio managers, client relationship specialists, business developers, compliance officers, marketers – and, on top of it all, small business owners.
That range of roles often comes with a level of freedom and flexibility that advisors in large Wall Street-backed institutions often don’t enjoy. But it also comes with a hidden cost: the constant risk of burnout.
How to Deliver White-Glove Service Without Burning Out or Hiring Up
Amid elevated client expectations for personalized service, innovative solutions and holistic planning, the impetus to “work smarter, not harder” is greater than ever. For independent financial professionals – who are business owners as well as advisors – the stresses are compounded.
Private Equity In Wealth Management: Short-Term Investors Complicating Long-Running Industry Challenges
Take private equity's increasingly tight hold over vast swaths of the wealth management industry. Given the general business model—taking a stake in a firm and moving on within three to 10 years—few industry participants are more closely associated with the concept of self-interest than PE investors.
Size Does Matter—But Not In The Way You Think
There’s a scene in “The Pink Panther Strikes Back” where Inspector Clouseau enters a hotel and sees a small dog. He asks the clerk, “Does your dog bite?” Told no, Clouseau pats the dog’s head—and the dog immediately bites him.
How Senior Advisors Can Be a Part of the Solution to the Industry’s Succession and Next-Gen Problems
Ask Your New Firm These Questions Before Making The Switch
There are many reasons why advisors dissatisfied with their current firm don’t move to a new one, but trying to avoid a painful transition process is likely near the top. This is especially true for advisors running smaller firms who cannot afford much, if any, client attrition.
Saving the Advice Industry from its Demographic Problem
The wealth management industry has a well-documented demographic problem.
While there are any number of statistics that bear this out – including women only making up about 30% of today’s financial advisor class – perhaps the most damning one is that 75% of all CFP®s are men. With clients increasingly opting for advice and planning-based solutions, and given how many assets women in the U.S. will soon control, we can no longer tolerate this sort of imbalance.
How financial advisors and retail investors engage with alternative investments
Berthel Fisher knows alternative investments. For decades, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based diversified financial services firm has deployed a vetting process on these complex investments before including them on its product platform. That’s not changing. What is changing? The growing appetite for alternatives from an emerging investor class: the retail market.
Berthel Fisher’s Paige Swartzendruber: Artificial Intelligence and Wealth Management
Paige Swartzendruber has literally grown up in the wealth management space and continues her father’s legacy, working alongside him as both a financial advisor at Family First Financial Strategies and an executive at Berthel Fisher Companies, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based diversified financial services firm.