Your investment performance reports are failing you
Sending inadequate performance reports to your firm’s clients can hurt your client retention, says Philip Lawton in Middle Office: Managing Financial Institutions in Turbulent Times. Too many numbers is a common flaw. Clients also need narrative explanations, says Lawton. In my experience, some people can quickly grasp the significance of a chart or table. Most people […]
POLL: What are your blog’s goals?
Why do you blog? I’d like to get a better sense of why my readers blog and the obstacles they face. That’s the focus of this month’s two-question survey. Talking with students in my blogging class for financial advisors, I often hear that they’d like to attract more clients. In fact, some of them take […]
Why I’m lucky clients didn’t flock to me
I reluctantly launched my career as a freelancer after getting laid off from a wonderful investment communications job at an investment management firm. After I decided to freelance, my phone didn’t ring with eager prospects. On the other hand, as an introvert, I didn’t do much to market myself. Cold calls? Heaven forbid. Blessing in disguise […]
“Turn signals” and good writing
“Use ‘turn signals’ to guide your reader from sentence to sentence,” suggests Kenneth W. Davis in The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Business Writing and Communication (p. 24). I like Davis’ analogy, but I think it’s even more important to apply it at a higher level than sentences. Every time your article, blog post, or other written […]
Blog post vs. white paper: How do you decide?
An Iranian watercolor struck me as a way to show the difference between a blog post topic and a white paper topic. “A School Scene,” which you see in the photo above, is beautiful. But it has too much going on to be a blog post. Blog posts should focus tightly on one topic. Like […]