The #1 way to start getting referrals? STOP ASKING In all his years of helping financial professionals build and grow their businesses, Stephen Wershing has learned that the number one way to make sure you don't get a referral is by asking for it. Why? Because studies prove that clients refer you not to benefit you but to benefit themselves. So you have to approach the challenge from a completely new angle. Stop Asking for Referrals helps you do exactly that. Inside, Wershing provides the tools you need to get more referrals than ever by designing your practice in a way that gets clients to mention you to friends when the opportunity arises. He calls it "the new referral conversation," and it works. Define your target market with accuracy and precision Communicate your value clearly and effectively Create your company's unique "brand" Harness the natural, normal social interactions of your clients to serve your marketing efforts You'll also learn how to use client feedback to benefit your business, create your service package, and bring in new business. "The way you have been told to attract referrals is based on an assumption that's wrong," Wershing writes. "And it is undermining your business and your relationships." You will come away with a deep understanding of why and where referrals actually come from, how to tailor your own practice to get people talking about you, and ways to develop a communication plan to project your reputation. So stop asking for referrals--and start attracting more new clients than you ever thought possible. Praise for Stop Asking for Referrals "Steve Wershing helps you unlock the untapped referral potential you have in your business today with an approach that is as comfortable as it is effective." -- JULIE LITTLECHILD, founder and president of Advisor Impact "The most comprehensive, practical, and engaging guide I know of for strengthening existing client connections and cultivating new ones in a way that is experience-based, respectful, and long-lasting." -- OLIVIA MELLAN, psychotherapist, money coach, author of The Client Connection, and columnist for Investment Advisor "Reading this book will revolutionize how you think about growing your business." -- MICHAEL E. KITCES, MSFS, MTAX, CFP, partner, Pinnacle Advisory Group, and blogger, Nerd's Eye View "This book will help you overcome . . . discomfort and show you how to engage your clients so that they will proudly help you build your business. Kudos for this powerful, one-stop marketing resource!" -- SHERYL GARRETT, CFP, AIF, award-winning author, advisor, and founder of the Garrett Planning Network "Stop Asking for Referrals is on my Top Ten list of books that I believe offer the most meaningful strategies for advisors. . . . Steve's ideas for referral marketing are brilliant and just plain common sense. Advisors will embrace his book as the new referral bible. -- SYDNEY LEBLANC, founding editor of Registered Rep magazine; partner of LeBlanc and Company "Embrace Steve's advice if you'd like to see your practice growth become effortless, boundless, and fun!" -- MARIE SWIFT, CEO, Impact Communications, columnist for Financial Planning magazine, and author of Become a Media Magnet

Vital guidance to ensuring the future of your firm G2: Building the Next Generation provides financial advisory firms with a clear roadmap to management succession. Based on the author's 17 years of experience with over 1,000 firms, this book provides a systematic process to help you identify, develop, and install the new leadership that will guide your firm's future. Extensive statistical research backs proven strategies for structuring management and succession, overcoming obstacles, selling equity, and more, while expert guidance walks you through the process and warn you of potential pitfalls along the way. A generation of entrepreneurs used their talent and ambition to build an industry; to ensure that their success lives on, those leaders now face the formidable challenge of succession. With the future of your firm at stake, how do you recruit, train, mentor, and develop the next generation of professionals, owners, and leaders? This book shows you how to find the people you need, and develop them into the leadership your firm deserves. Identify and develop future leaders from the pool of existing and upcoming talent Structure management and management succession to ensure successful transition Begin selling equity to your firm's next generation of leaders Learn smart strategies for dealing with setbacks along the way The next generation of leaders will shape the future of your firm, but collectively, they will define the future of the entire advisory industry. Firms who succeed in developing their best talent will continue to thrive—those who fail will be left with a great car, but no driver. Getting this right may be one of the most critical points of your career, and it isn't something that should be left to chance or "gut feeling". G2: Building the Next Generation gives you a solid, grounded, systematic approach for ensuring your firm's long-lived success.

Stop Asking for Referrals helps financial services professionals ensure that clients mention them to their friends when the opportunity arises. It guides advisors through the process of designing a communication strategy to promote referrals, teaches them how to have the new referral conversation with clients, and shows how to utilize the changes to promote referrals from other professionals and centers of influence.

Abraham--trusted advisor to America's top corporations--has written his first major book for anyone seeking fresh ideas on supercharging personal or business success.

If you want your business to grow, you need to be able to rely on your ability to hire talent reliably and consistently. No talent pipeline? No growth, and no business. But your recruiting team is drowning (I asked them). They need help. Now, if you ask recruiters, they will ask for headcount. Or more technology. But more bodies and more tools won't solve the issue (though it will eat up your budget). What you need a is a better strategy. And that strategy is called employer branding.Employer branding is about understanding, distilling and communicating what your company is all about in order to attract all the talent you need. That will differentiate your company as a place where people will want to work, rather than a place they land because they didn't know better.If you've heard about employer branding in business magazines, it might seem like something only "big companies" can do. Something that requires a dedicated team, expensive platforms, or a bunch of consultants. That isn't true. If you understand where your brand comes from, and how to apply it, any company (especially yours) can hire better with it.And this book will teach you how to do all of that, and then some.In this book, you'll learn what employer branding really is, how to make a compelling argument internally to leadership that creates commitment, how to work with other teams and be creative in finding solutions. As a special bonus, we are including a handbook on how to work with recruiting teams. This hands-on workbook is chock full of examples, checklists, step-by-step instructions and even emails you can copy and paste to make things happen immediately.

A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in “an age of ecocide” Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist—an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on “sustainability” rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth’s thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls “dark ecology,” which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed “Uncivilization” manifesto, asks hard questions about how we’ve lived and how we should live.

In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.