Growing your business......

Everybody wants to get ahead.  So they become experts by cramming more and more knowledge between their ears.  They learn the latest catch phrases in order to be “moving forward”.  They dress for success and learn how to make friends and influence people.  They work on an ever expanding network of important persons.  They think,  “If I can only work harder, faster and better I will have better success.” 

Now certainly all of those things are part of being successful.  However, many miss the most important factor in growing their business...themselves.  If people do not like you they will not do business with you.  Everything flows out of the relationship.  Are you becoming the person others want to have a relationship with?

John Wooden, former UCLA basketball coach said; “Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read.”

How will you have changed over the next 5 years?  Will the change be positive and help grow your business because you have become better?  It doesn’t happen by chance.  It takes work.

Check out this book and in terms of growing your business think of growing yourself.

 

The Acorn Principle - Know Yourself Grow Yourself - Jim Cathcart

Sales.....Sales.....Sales!!!!

In the current economy, sales are suffering. Many salespeople feel that they’re in a scramble, trying to find a way to sell to people who seem hesitant to invest in anything, who are struggling to figure out what they can afford and justify. People are coming to the sales process with fear and wariness. 

Reversing the downward spiral is possible if companies change their conversations with customers and thus change their relationships with them. Often it is not the company's product or service that distinguishes it in the marketplace, but how a company interacts with its customers. As a salesperson, you have the power to turn the sales conversation around from trying to sell a product to delivering the solution critical to coming through tough times strong and healthy. 

In “The Three Laws of Performance” we walk you through the exact steps on how to “rewrite the future” – which in this case, can mean going from no sales to breakthrough sales. Fundamental to that breakthrough, is knowing that people’s actions are correlated to the way a situation “occurs” for them, not necessarily the way that it is. While there are facts involved in any circumstance, the way the circumstance occurs includes our interpretations of the fact, our hopes, fears, and past experience of these kinds of facts, and the future we imagine will come out of these facts. 

We cannot change the facts; but we do have a choice and a say in how situations occur to us through interaction with others about finding empowering ways to view our current circumstances. Often this kind of authentic communication also requires saying what we normally are not saying. Let’s start with the customer. When you walk into a company to make a sales call you can see, instantly, how the company occurs to its employees, and how the staff occur to each other. Like little cartoon bubbles floating over their heads, you can read what people are not saying but are communicating. It seems to spring from the essence of who people are, and comes through in every encounter. Just to make it through the day, we often turn our antennae off. But to do so robs you of valuable insight into your customer.

Key to elevating your performance – in this case, achieving sales goals – is addressing what people are communicating but not saying. Perhaps the issue isn’t the purchase, but how they can justify it to others. Or it might be cash flow – and a simple modification of the terms might make all the difference. By standing in the other person’s world – understanding how their world occurs to them – you have access to be effective in dealing with customer needs at an entirely new level.

Now let’s move to you, the sales professional. The key to making the sales process work is to transform how the process of selling occurs to you. Just as the customer has a cartoon bubble over his or her head, so do you. What does yours say? If it says, “I can’t sell,” you won’t. If it says, “they’ll defer the decision,” they probably will.

Recognizing the bubbles over your head is the first step in rewriting them. Even in a down market, sales people whose bubbles say “what I’m selling will turn things around for the customer” will do better. The key is to transform the unspoken but communicated way the world occurs – what the bubbles over our heads say. You can elevate your performance by elevating the conversations you are having – with yourself, your company, and with your customer.

Carbon = Cash!!!

By BJORN LOMBORG

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Now is the time!!!

I was listening to Squawk Box yesterday morning and they had an executive of Coca Cola on for the morning.  One of the subjects was how important is it to continue to advertise in a recession.  The advertising budget of every company is and has been under scrutiny as companies seek to cut cost and keep their heads above water,

 

Coke has been around for about 120 years.  This company knows something about recessions and advertising.  They have survived and expanded their company into over 200 countries world wide.  He made the statement that they believe, and analysis backs it up, that now is the time you expand your market share.  The best time to capture more of the market

 

When your competitors are backing off and everyone can use the economy as the excuse for not pushing forward now is the time for you to push ahead.   If you can expand your base now it will pay significant dividends in the future.  There is a vast group of people looking for answers and someone they can trust.  Make the effort now to connect with them and you will find your market share growing at a much greater rate as things begin to turn around.

The bottom line is....YOU!

Is superior performance critical to your success?  Most people would think yes...of course it is.  Everyone used to market the great return on investment their firms were producing...until it all tanked.  Now they hope they can say;  “Well, we did not lose as much as the other guy.”

The reality is that there is something much more important that superior performance.  In 1995 Goldman Sachs report The Coming Evolution of the Money Management Industry, the firm explained that the most important aspect of money management is not skillfully managing money.  They said it is;  “...gathering and retaining assets.”

When asked what is the most important criteria for choosing an investment firm clients consistently listed return on investment below trust and “other relationship issues.”  In another survey  clients rated track record ninth out of seventeen attributes, rating it below “a sincere desire for a long term relationship...”

“Prospects do not buy how good you are at what you do.  They buy how good you are at who you are.”  They demand someone they can trust and that flows only out of a relationship you have put time into building.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.......

WASHINGTON -- The pace of U.S. job losses tapered off a bit last month, suggesting that while the economy remains mired in a prolonged recession, it may be finally starting to find its footing.

Still, even though the decline was the smallest in six months, a good deal of the improvement came from temporary government hiring in advance of next year's Census.

And another half-million-plus drop in employment and further increase in the unemployment rate to a 25-year high remains a sober reminder that any road to recovery will be bumpy.

MORE

• Real Time Econ: How Long Until Jobs Gain?
• Real Time Econ: Broader Jobless Rate Up
• Management: Retaining Employees Before an Upturn Starts
• Laid Off and Looking: What Matters More -- Luck or Smarts?

Separately, U.S. wholesale inventories fell for a seventh straight month in March as sales returned to negative territory after posting a small gain in February, a government report released Friday showed.

Nonfarm payrolls fell 539,000 in April, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday, slightly better than Wall Street expectations for a 610,000 decline, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey. March was revised to show a steeper payroll drop of 699,000.

The data suggest that while labor markets are healing, "the improvement may be more gradual than hoped," said Zach Pandl, economist at Nomura.

The economy has shed 5.7 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007, with almost 2.7 million of those losses occurring in the last four months alone.

"Widespread job losses continued throughout the private sector," said Keith Hall, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private-sector employment fell by 611,000 last month, down a bit from the 700,000 average of the past four months, Hall said.

The unemployment rate, which is calculated using a survey of households as opposed to companies, increased 0.4 percentage point to 8.9%, the highest level since September 1983. Employment in the household survey rose 120,000 last month, the first increase in one year. That was offset by a 563,000 increase in unemployment.

Many economists expect unemployment to eventually top 10%. Not only does the economy have to stop losing jobs before the jobless rate stabilizes, it actually has to add payrolls at a modest rate just to keep up with new entrants into the labor force.

In testimony to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said, "currently we don't think it's going to get to 10%" though even something in the 9% range is still "way too high."

By broader measures, unemployment -- or at least underemployment -- is already well into double digits. When marginally attached and involuntary part-time workers are included, the rate of unemployed or underemployed workers hit 15.8% last month, up from 15.6% in March and 6.6 percentage points higher than it was one year ago.

Average hourly earnings advanced just $0.01 to $18.51. That was up just 3.2% from one year ago, a sign that inflation isn't a threat.

Should the modest improvement in labor-market conditions continue, as weekly jobless claims figures suggest, then the pace of economy contraction will probably ease somewhat this quarter. After declining over 6%, at annual rates, in each of the last two quarters, gross domestic product is expected to contract at a much slower rate this quarter, setting the stage for a return to growth later this year.

But so far, most of the so-called "green shoots" of recovery that economists and policymakers have latched onto are sentiment-based indicators such as consumer confidence and purchasing manager surveys.

The mix of grim automobile sales for April and ongoing steep job cuts suggest that consumers still face considerable headwinds.

According to Friday's report, hiring last month in goods-producing industries fell by 270,000. Within this group, manufacturing firms cut 149,000 jobs, bringing the total since the recession began to 1.6 million.

Construction employment was down 110,000 last month.

Service-sector employment fell 269,000. Business and professional services companies shed 122,000 jobs, the sixth-straight six-figure loss, and financial-sector payrolls were down another 40,000.

Retail trade cut 46,700 jobs, while leisure and hospitality businesses shed 44,000 as households cut back on nonessential spending. Temporary employment, a leading indicator of future job prospects, fell by more than 62,000 a slight improvement from the previous month's fall.

As has been the case throughout much of the recession, the sole bright spot among private sector industries was health care, which added almost 17,000 new jobs.

The government added 72,000, "mainly due to hiring of temporary workers in preparation for Census 2010," Hall said.

The average workweek was unchanged at 33.2 hours. A separate index of aggregate weekly hours fell 0.6 percentage point to 100.3.

Wholesale Inventories Decline

Wholesale inventories fell 1.6% in March to a seasonally adjusted $411.7 billion, after falling a revised 1.7% during February, the Commerce Department's report said.

The Department in a report released last month had estimated February inventories fell 1.5%. The February drop in inventories is the largest on record.

The March drop in inventories is more than the 1.2% decline analysts had expected and indicates wholesalers are drawing down inventories as shipments to retailers remain weak.

Sales of U.S. wholesalers dropped 2.4% in March to a seasonally adjusted $310.9 billion after a downwardly revised 0.2% increase in February, the data showed. Originally, February sales were estimated to have gained 0.6%.

The inventory-to-sales ratio, a measure of the number of months it would take a business to deplete its current inventory, increased slightly to 1.32 from 1.31 in February. The March 2009 figure is above the March 2008 ratio of 1.12.

On a year-over-year basis, sales were down 18.1% in March, while inventories were down 3.5%.

Wholesalers' inventories of durable goods -- a category that includes cars, appliances and furniture -- fell 2.4% in March, after falling a revised 2.6% in February.

Sales of durable good fell 3.3% in March, on the heels of a revised 1.7% increase in February.

Auto stocks fell 5.0%, while auto sales declined 0.6%. That compares with a 7.9% drop in auto stocks in February amid a downwardly revised 3.5% increase in sales.

Lumber sales in March fell 3.1%, while furniture sales fell 2.5%.

Non-durable goods inventories fell 0.3% in March, following a 0.2% drop the month before. March non-durable goods sales fell 1.6%, after dropping a revised 0.9% in February.

Petroleum stocks rose 7.9% amid a 5.1% decrease in sales. Farm product inventories rose 4.7%, while sales fell 3.9%.

—Meena Thiruvengadam contributed to this article.

"Storm Shelter" - Art Cashin.

Art Cashin: If Jobs Drop, Hide in Your 'Storm Shelter'

Published: Wednesday, 6 May 2009 | 12:07 PM ET

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Stocks opened higher Wednesday and the S&P 500 (as of this writing) is positive again for 2009. Will it hold?

Arthur Cashin, UBS Financial Services director of floor operations, offered his insights to CNBC.

News that April layoffs were less painful than predicted, combined with "the ADP number — that cheered people up," said Cashin.

He also cited "the Bank of America [BAC  12.12    1.28 (+11.81%)   ] situation," in which the financial giant's $34 billion capital gap turned out to be much smaller than many analysts had feared.

• BofA Shares Rise as Stress Test Fears Abate
• Barclays: Expect ‘Surprising Rebound’ in Late '09

But Cashin isn't so sure the storm has passed:

"You can't forget that we lost about 2 million jobs so far this year and about 3 million last year. You have to wonder if the patient gives enough blood up — even though he's stopped hemorrhaging — that he goes into shock."

"I don't know if it's time to open the bubbly just yet."

• Read The CNBC Stock Blog
• Trader Talk with Bob Pisani
• Art Cashin on the Markets: CNBC Videos

And if Friday's jobs number turns out to be worse than the ADP figure indicates?

"Then it's time to grab Toto, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and go to your storm shelter," Cashin warned.

He has one piece of advice: "You want to pay attention to the bond market." He said bonds "are much less cheery than the stock market" — and the bond market has "been right the last 16 months."

Great Follow Up = Priceless!

Tomorrow is Tax Day...April 15th. The IRS has done what it always does in March in order to help people pay the amount of taxes they owe and not try to take deductions they do not deserve.  They call it the Recency Effect.

The Recency Effect is publishing in newspapers across the country and other forms of media the stories of tax evasion prosecution.  In fact one year the Chicago Tribune labeled the article the “Annual Tax Warning...” The effect is that people read the article and are more honest in doing their taxes.

Now the same is true in sales and taking care of your clients.  They are being pitched on a regular basis by your competitors.  Their pitches are well conceived and powerful.  So if you come along sounding predictable and only somewhat enthusiastic guess who now has their attention?

Your follow up is priceless...it is crucial.  Your follow up presentation needs to be as well thought through as anything you do and tailored to their needs and wants.  You know them and have been working with them, which is your advantage.  So in your regular follow up...make it personal...make it appealing and do it with energy.

“Take advantage of the Recency Effect.  Follow up brilliantly.”

Indifference.....

Indifference - Your First Competitor

Everybody is on overload...we are all too busy.  That is where most successful people end up.  Too much left to do at the end of the day.  Dozens of things on the To Do list crying out for attention.  Then you come along and want their attention so you can make a sale.  If you do not give them a powerful reason to listen they will not hear you.

“Your greatest competition is not your competition.  It is INDIFFERENCE.”

Many sales people, when talking to the prospect,  will talk about their company and their product.  They are trying to sell the value of their product, their company and themselves.  Instead the focus needs to be on the prospect and what you can do for the prospect.  Then you will be speaking the prospect’s language and not your own.

Prospects are thinking about themselves and what they need and sometimes we are thinking about ourselves and what we need...and the two do not connect.

If you don’t make your client and their needs your focus your message will become lost in their indifference.  Making them the focus will help you speak their language and they will hear you over the cries of others wanting their attention.

UBS going "upmarket". - Good move.

This week, Stifel Nicolaus announced it was buying 55 UBS wealth management branches spread across 24 states, which include $15 billion in assets under management, 320 reps and over $100 million in revenue. The St. Louis regional b/d will make an upfront cash payment of $27 million for the branches, which are said to consist of mostly lower level producers. UBS says the deal allows it to divest itself of producers that don’t fit into its high-net-worth strategy, and sell them to a firm that’s willing to take them on.

While it’s not the first time a firm has sold some of its branches to another b/d, Alois Pirker, senior analyst at the Aite Group, says the UBS/Stifel deal might spark a series of similar deals. “Ultimately there is over capacity at many firms right now. At Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney there must be people stepping on each other’s toes. There is plenty of opportunity to sell branches,” he says. In fact, D.A. Davidson says it bought two Smith Barney branches located in Washington and Oregon, which included 8 brokers, last November. Kerr says Smith Barney approached his firm about a possible sale. When asked about the deal, however, a Smith Barney spokesperson declined to comment. For more on this story, check out Registered Rep.’s Wealth Management e-newsletter.

In the headlines.....day after day after day after day.

Washington Has Always Demonized Wall Street

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By ZACHARY KARABELL

'Wall Street, as we knew it, is dead. The system that allowed the U.S. economy to be a dynamic innovator has been fundamentally broken and the implications of these structural changes have yet to be fully felt."

It's now commonly accepted that the economic meltdown has forever changed the nature of the financial industry. But the words above weren't written in the past weeks. They were penned by financial analyst Richard Wayman in 2003, after investigations by then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer led to a structural shift in the relationship between research and investment banking following the stock-market collapse of 2001-02.

Martin Kozlowski

Among the many remarkable aspects of our present crisis is the speed with which we have collectively forgotten past crises, even ones that happened recently. The current meltdown is substantial, dramatic, and systemically dangerous -- but it is hardly the first to merit that description. And each crisis, without fail, results in unequivocal pronouncements that such excesses will never again be allowed.

When President Barack Obama lambastes Wall Street bonuses as "shameful," he is keeping up with the American tradition of vilifying Wall Street. Almost since the founding of the country, the U.S. has oscillated between admiration and condemnation of money men. When the first Bank of the United States was established in Philadelphia in 1791, it was amid fears that it would allow merchants and speculators to subvert the new republic for their own gain. Decades later, Andrew Jackson's presidency was bolstered by his staunch opposition to the Second Bank of the United States. He positioned himself as the defender of the common man against supporters of the bank who used their money to obtain influence.

From the 19th century to the present day, denunciation of financiers has gone hand in hand with each recession, speculative bust and depression. Each time the economy falls, the chattering classes announce that the old ways have brought the country to the brink of ruin and that the riches of society will no longer remain in the hands of the greedy few.

Little recalled now is "The Long Depression" of the 1870s that began with the Panic of 1873. The Panic was triggered by the collapse of the Jay Cooke and Company Bank, which came on the heels of Jay Gould's infamous attempt to corner the national gold market in 1869 and the speculative boom in railroad building. During the 1870s, as much as 50% of the U.S. labor force was out of work at one time or another, making it by far the worst economic collapse in the country's history. In the agrarian heartland of the country, early stirrings of populism led to attacks on eastern barons for robbing Americans of their birthright.

From then on, busts followed almost like clockwork every 20 years, with the panics of 1873 and 1877 followed by the panic of 1893 and then the "Bankers' Panic" of 1907, when J.P. Morgan orchestrated the recapitalization of the financial system from his mansion in Manhattan. It was the TARP, the "bad bank," and the stimulus of its day, and it earned Morgan the gratitude of a nation and the applause of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Having lionized Morgan, a few years later the country turned on him and his ilk with a vengeance. In 1913, a populist congressman from Louisiana, Arsène Pujo, launched an investigation of the so-called "Money Trust" that he claimed was exerting undue and deleterious influence on the body politic. Exhibit No. 1 was none other than one-time savior Morgan, who was interrogated by the committee as if he had committed a heinous crime. One member of the committee said Morgan represented "a moneyed oligarchy more despotic and dangerous to industrial freedom than anything civilization has ever known." Strict regulations followed -- as they always have on the heels of such crises.

Yet 20 years later, the market imploded with the crash of 1929. The ranks of the unemployed swelled to at least 25%, and the country was plunged into the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously indicted the "money changers" in his 1933 inaugural address, but he was even more caustic in private, vowing to end forever "speculation with other people's money." The raft of modern regulatory institutions, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was one result. Wall Street was tamed and quiet for a while.

Later on, the "Go-Go" years of Wall Street in the late 1960s quickly gave way to the bust of the so-called "Nifty-Fifty," the 50 largest blue-chip companies. Then came inflation, severe unemployment, and the stock market collapse of 1973-74. Between 1964 and 1982, the major stock indices went nowhere fast -- the Dow began that period at about 800 and ended at the same. Wall Street in those years was more of a cottage industry, one that few suspected would again return to its prominent and controversial position at the apex of American society.

The booming 1980s -- mergers and acquisitions and arbitrage -- were capped by the highly publicized trials of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, who were pursued by the Eliot Spitzer of his day, Rudy Giuliani. Combined with the market crash of 1987, the subsequent Savings and Loan debacle (which had little to do with Wall Street per se, but was wrapped up with the same crowd in public imagining), and the recession of 1991-92, Wall Street was once again pronounced immoral and in need of tight reins. Yet within a few years, the Nasdaq was soaring, animal spirits were in control, and the Internet bubble was in full bloom.

Wall Street's obituary has been written many times. Yet what is striking today is that cycles that used to take a few decades now take a few years. And our cultural amnesia has gotten worse. The rapid sequence of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, the recession of 2001, and the 2002 collapse of Enron combined with major fines levied against investment banks, all became a distant echo in a surprisingly short amount of time. At the rate we've been going, we're due for a new boom with obscene profits for the financial industry -- albeit with different names and different companies -- before Mr. Obama runs for re-election.

The fact that we have been in similar places in the past doesn't make the specific problems we face any less pressing. New regulations may prevent an exact recurrence of yesterday's crises, but our relentless capacity for reinvention means that we will produce innovations that will in turn create new problems.

Recognizing that our present is not quite so breathlessly unprecedented doesn't make the challenges less critical, but it could lead to a more level approach. That can begin with steady leadership from President Obama. Wall Street has been humbled and will change, but capital will continue to flow. That much, at least, is certain.

Mr. Karabell is president of River Twice Research. His new book, "In the Red: How China and America Became One Superpower Economy," will be published by Simon & Schuster in October.

The Power of a Story....

The Power of Story

In case you have not noticed our culture is engrossed with stories.  People Magazine, USA Today, the first words you hear on any TV news show...everyone in communications know that if you want to grab peoples attention use a story.  It is not a new marketing technique.  It has been in use since Euripides and the Greeks used it almost 2500 years ago.  Even before that in every culture in the history of the world people sat around and shared stories.

When we are selling a product we can use adjectives or story.  Adjectives do not engage the listener, stories do.  Adjectives place a spotlight on a product but they are so overused in our communications they have become almost meaningless.  Stories have the power to immediately make a connection with the listener and engage their minds and emotions.

“Like clever journalists and great lawyers, marketers who tell true stories make their presentations more interesting, more personal, more credible and more felt - and more persuasive.”

Changing Affluent Expectations....

Phoenix: Following a presentation I delivered on "affluent expectations in tough times," Mike said, "My clients are continually calling—it's as if they expect me to know when the markets are going to stabilize ... it's gotten to the point that I'm convinced my clients have unrealistic expectations."

Obviously it is impossible for me to determine whether or not Mike's clients have unrealistic expectations from our brief conversation. But what is quite clear—and our research continues to reinforce this point—is that most affluent clients have unrealistic expectations of their financial advisors. Why? Because not long ago the markets appeared strong, clients were making money, and both clients and advisors were getting greedy. So why bring up something that might interfere with landing a new client? Bearing this is mind, many advisors opted for the path of least resistance and avoided establishing realistic expectations at the beginning of the professional relationship. And it is virtually implausible to manage expectations that have never been clearly established.

Couple this with the fact that most advisors still have too many clients, don't have a clearly defined service model and service tends to be reactive rather than proactive. If, like Mike, you are getting too many incoming calls from your clients during these challenging times, it is a warning signal that your service model needs either a tune-up or a major overhaul.

The fact is that being on the receiving end of poor service is what's causing the greatest amount of dissatisfaction amongst affluent clients. In tough times, shoddy service leads clients to believe you are an unprofessional and shoddy advisor.

The level of affluent dissatisfaction has prompted many media outlets to publish questions that investors should ask their current or prospective advisors. Take a deep breath as you read through these questions and PLEASE take this as a signal of what, in some shape or form, clients will expect from the affluent client-advisor relationship. The following is a partial list of questions that affluent consumers are being prompted to ask by the media and consumer groups. If your clients and prospects are not yet asking these questions, it is likely they have been exposed to them, which means they probably will be in the future.

34 Questions:

• What services do you provide?

• How do you provide these services?

• How do you get paid relative to each of these services?

• How long have you been in the business?

• How long have you been with your current firm?

• How many firms have you worked with?

• Why did you change firms?

• Did you get paid to change firms?

• Did you get paid to stay at your current firm?

• What is your educational background?

• What licenses and certifications do you have?

• Have you ever been disciplined by the NASD or other regulatory agencies?

• Can I have a copy of your NASD form?

• Do you prepare comprehensive financial plans?

• How long does it take to complete a comprehensive financial plan?

• What do you charge for this comprehensive financial plan?

• How many clients do you have?

• How much money do you manage?

• What type of clients do you have?

• How often will you contact me and how?

• How will you determine my risk tolerance?

• What type of due-diligence do you conduct to ensure my money is "Madoff proof"?

• How is my money going to be protected?

• How often will you meet with me to review my portfolio?

• Will you be handling my account personally ?

• Will you be executing my financial plan personally?

• Will you keep me informed with every investment decision you make on my behalf?

• Will you be organizing, coordinating, and keeping all financial documents up-to-date?

• How many full-time associates do you have assisting in providing the services you described?

• How long have these associates been working with you?

• What is the role of each of your associates?

• Can you outline your service model?

• What are your office hours?

• Do you have names of clients, CPAs, and attorneys you have worked with who I can call?

Granted, few clients and prospects are currently asking all of these questions. But as I mentioned earlier, you can expect them in the future. Which is why you—and every member of your team— should be able to answer these questions with ease and confidence. TARP money, the Madoff scandal and the general economic meltdown have created a media field day. As these entertainers disguised as journalists continue to report scandalous behavior and fuel the fires of fear, affluent expectations are being framed accordingly. 

The emphasis is now on the advisor—not the firm. The trust factor with national firms is at an all-time low, and now clients are focused on the professionalism of the individual advisor. Our research on both the affluent and the rainmakers continues to tell us that there is tremendous opportunity for advisors who are able to stay ahead of these challenging times. That said, it is important to realize that affluent expectations regarding financial professionals will never be the same. 

Raise your game. Be able to handle serious due-diligence and background checks. You will not only survive this financial tsunami, your future will be bright.