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Author: rafferty

Waiter, There’s a Fly in My Soup! Looking for Nice People

00:00 01 January in Articles Written by Jon Henschen by rafferty

by Jonathan Henschen, CFS and featured in Broker-Dealer Journal January, 2007: A functional back-office that delivers good service to advisors must be nurtured by management. No matter how much they produce, advisors who are rude and condescending to support staff should be weeded out before setting a dangerously negative tone. Recently, I started a weekly 30-minute radio show through ProducersWeb.com interviewing broker/dealers. It wasn’t long before I discovered a reoccurring pattern among my guests. When asked what kinds of advisors they target, instead of “Advisory focus,” “Big producers” or “Financial planning Approach,” as I was expecting, their first reply is usually: “We want them to be nice!” But that focus made perfect sense the more I thought about it, since the alternative to “nice” can have dire effects on a firm’s back office, and...

Top 5 reasons advisors stay at BDs. Creating “Hooks” to improve retention

00:00 01 January in Articles Written by Jon Henschen by rafferty

by Jonathan Henschen, CFS and featured in Broker Dealer Journal January, 2007: Last year I wrote an article detailing the, “Top 5 Reasons Advisors Leave a Broker/Dealer.”  The more I researched the topic, the clearer the differences between advisors who move on and those who stay became. For advisors to consider changing broker/dealers, the pain threshold must be sufficiently high to motivate them to make that drastic move. Nonetheless, though many advisors have mixed emotions about their broker/dealers, usually ranging from disappointment to apathy, most stay on.  Why is that? I look at the reasons reps stay with broker/dealers in fishing terms (can’t help myself; I live in Minnesota!).  That is, I see these reasons as “hooks” holding advisors to their firms.  The more hooks a firm has in its reps, the less...

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Indie Firms Sweeten Deals For Recruits

00:00 01 January in In the News by rafferty

by Bruce Kelly and featured in Investment News January, 2007: New York - Faced with intense competition for financial advisers and growing transition costs, an increasing number of independent-contractor broker-dealers over the past year have boosted the amount of money they give to representatives and advisers to switch firms. The broker-dealers that recently have increased the transition or bonus money include top firms such as LPL Financial Services of Boston and San Diego, Commonwealth Financial Network of Waltham, Mass., and Cambridge Investment Research Inc. of Fairfield, Iowa, according to executives and recruiters. In the past, those firms and others gave recruits transition packages of 2% to 3% of their prior 12 months’ production. Those packages, which have various structures, are now as high as 8% to 10%, executives said. Meanwhile, more independent registered reps are...