According to Me

Let's pop ahead a decade. In Feb 2000, I published "The 747 Principle: Launching Your Prospecting Campaign." In it I talked about how we all know someone who seems to open new accounts effortlessly. Then I made a comparison between a prospecting program and a big airplane such as a 747. Both prospecting campaigns and airplanes need a lot of energy to launch successfully. Once that's accomplished, momentum makes it easier to continue.

This is why some advisors almost effortlessly make money, open accounts and enjoy life. Their business is off the ground. When I tell you: on some days, do a lot, do a lot. If you don't, you will just taxi around on the runway for a while and then the tower will radio: "Get that thing off the runway. I have a heavy taking off."

Building a Team

In all modesty, I was the first to identify the need for a team, back in 1985. A very important addition to team building came in 1991. At that point I explained to readers that I once had "believed everything I had been told about partnerships: They're less stable than marriages; 90 percent of them break up; and since 1 + 1 = 2, why bother?"

I then discussed how our computer-based marketing system got some complaints from partners because a single-user version did not address their specific needs. So we went to work to design a partnership version and, in the process, worked quite closely with partnerships. Lo and behold, we discovered that partnerships can be an Immensely Viable Organizational Structure.

As I put it in 1991: "Granted, we certainly have witnessed some spectacular and bitter breakups. But overall, a well-structured partnership has at least the survival potential of a marriage — and is possibly more likely to make it."

Of course, now partnerships are quite the thing. As the vast number of baby boomer FAs lumber toward a transition out of the industry, what I characterized in 1991 as the "senior-junior partnership" is the preferred way to make that transition.

2010 and Beyond

Sometimes you get it right only to be undone by technology, changing market conditions, or changing FA needs and wants. Or all of the above.

In "I Love to Prospect" I wrote that information overload was driving a trend to separate money-managing and money-raising. That was true then. It is not true now. I no longer believe you cannot do both. Instead, I believe you must take back responsibility for client assets, manage them and continue raising money.

So what changed? Technology.

In 1990, if you wanted to actively manage client funds, you needed hours and hours to prepare your point-and-figure charts. Today, with tools such as the Dorsey Wright database, thousands of charts are ready with your morning cup of coffee. I discussed this in my June 2010 column "Get New Clothes."

Here's my call: In the coming years, survivors will take back management of their assets. They will abandon Modern Portfolio Theory and "buy and hold." Those who make it to the end of the rainbow will have investment strategies in place to take protective action to preserve client assets in the face of adverse "weather reports."

Bill Good is chairman of Bill Good Marketing. His Gorilla CRM System helps advisors double their production or work half as much, and his seminar program, "No More Pies!" helps advisors manage ETF portfolios by using technical analysis.