By Mindy Diamond – We hear it from advisors all the time: “Sure, things are far from perfect, but we’re keeping our heads down and waiting it out to see what happens next.” And it’s a perfectly fine response, provided that while you have your head down, your eyes and ears are open and you stay aware of what’s going on around you.
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By Louis Diamond – The conversations around movement to the independent space often center around the “big picture”: The opportunity for an advisor to get out from under the auspices of a larger firm to build an enterprise and legacy based on his own vision and terms.
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By Mindy Diamond – “While the wirehouses have solved for succession planning by offering advisors exit strategies allowing them to monetize their life’s work, most smaller firms have yet to put something formal in place.” — An astute observation recently posted by our own Deborah Aronson on LinkedIn.
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By Howard Diamond and Mindy Diamond – It’s the time of year when we gather the team at Diamond Consultants to revisit the prior year—and few can argue that 2017 was an interesting one to review to say the least. Working together, we examine deals both large and small, dissect the headlines and hearsay, and study the players.
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By Mindy Diamond – So what will become of the restrictions and added bureaucracy that firms enacted as a result of the DoL Rule? Will firms wave a magic wand to reverse their decisions and make the added restrictions disappear? Or will another Fiduciary standard be the new norm?
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By Mindy Diamond – While there is no shortage of hungry and capable acquirers for well run, compliant and growing independent businesses, sometimes the best acquirer can be a big firm with deep pockets, robust resources and platform, cutting edge technology, turnkey access to specialists, senior leadership, and virtually anything the business may need to support it.
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By Cathy Nichols – Almost every week seems to bring some stunning change in the financial services industry. Advisors are inundated with both newsworthy headlines as well as rumors from within their own firms: Possible comp changes (even whispers of going salary-bonus at UBS), recruiting retrenchment, and new models being born and poaching top talent from the competition. All this leaves many advisors feeling unsettled and unsure about their futures. While that’s an understandable reaction, more prescient advisors realize that they are actually getting a gift: The gift of time, a running head start, if you will.
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By Mindy Diamond – I write a lot about changes in the landscape—whether it’s information about a new business model, relevant trends that we’re seeing, or discussing any of the headline-gripping announcements from firms that can ultimately impact the business lives of advisors. What strikes me about the past 12 months is the frequency and speed of transformation that we’re seeing. Even more striking is the evolution of the advisor population at large: Their courage and determination to live their business lives as they see fit, regardless of the obstacles they may encounter.
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By Barbara Herman – The strength of even the most successful partnerships may be tested when advisors consider changing firms. They may be in total agreement that their current firm no longer serves them and that it’s time to seriously consider leaving, yet they may have differing views on what will better serve them. And it’s at that point that so many get stuck, reaching an impasse that can lead to a loss of momentum in both the business as well as the exploration process.
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By Mindy Diamond – Like most of us, advisors consider change for a multitude of reasons, yet we find that most of these can be placed into one of two categories: Push or Pull. The “push” category is built of those things that cause frustration and make us feel out of control. e “pulls”, on the other hand, are those things we want or desire.
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