I love this time of year. As I am still eating some delicious Thanksgiving leftovers, I take full advantage of the holiday season (and some of the much needed down time) to reflect on the past year and begin preparing for the coming year.
As the old saying goes, to know where you are going, you must know where you have been.
I'd like to share with you a few of the year-end '"accounting" measures that I have become accustomed to doing to help gauge the success of my year as well as the overall health of my firm. To be fair, I take the final measurement of these numbers in early January, a logical time since all of the year-end numbers are in. But December is a great time to begin collecting these numbers if they are readily available so you may begin to digest them.
Alternatively, if you do not have the systems in place to accurately collect these numbers, this may be a great month to institute a system whereby you can readily obtain these ever-important measurements.
There are several quantitative barometers that I use to measure the success (or progress) I have made in a given year. These include the following:
1. The amount of new assets that I acquired over the year. This includes the gross dollar amount of new assets that I gained to manage and placed in any variety of vehicles, from fixed indexed annuities to fee-based managed accounts.
2. The total value of all of the assets that I manage, including, of course, the growth or appreciation realized over the year.
