As a fiduciary to your clients’ and their personal wealth, the last thing you want to do is reveal when (not if) you’ve made a mistake. News flash: Your clients already know that you are human. And humans make mistakes. Of course we want to avoid errors to begin with, but when they happen despite our best intentions, don’t compound them by going passive in communicating them. By “passive,” I’m referring to sentence structure:

“Mistakes were made.”

In case your high school English teacher failed to drill it into you, this is a passively constructed sentence. Instead of the subject performing the verb, the verb is performed on the subject. Why does that matter? With no “I,” “he/she” or “they” in sight, there’s no telling who owns the problem, intends to fix it, is sorry it happened and will ensure that it never happens again. The buck has NOT stopped here; it’s still roaming around planning its next attack. Continue reading “Some Active Advice About Passive Mistakes” →

To heck with a day. What a difference a vowel can make. For example, are you an investment advisor or investment adviser? What about your firm? How do you spell it there?

Dictionaries are not very enlightening. Merriam-Webster as well as Dictionary.com unhelpfully suggest: ad•vis•er also ad•vi•sor. The Associated Press Stylebook hints at a solution by resolutely stating: “Adviser | Not advisor.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t really account for the fact that “Registered Investment Adviser” seems just plain wrong. Continue reading “Are You an Investment Advisor or an Investment Adviser?” →

How are your corporate communications like a courtship? For both, it’s crucial to proceed in the proper order, at the proper time. Otherwise, like proposing marriage to your blind date, what could be a smooth move could flop fast.

Project Planning: As Easy as One, Three, Two

As advisors plan for their communications, here are questions I sometimes field on initial queries:

1. How do we get more traffic on our website?
2. How can you help with our blog/social media/white paper/book?
3. How much will it cost?

These are great questions … in time. But before you can properly address “How?” make sure you’ve nailed “What?” Continue reading “Courting Your Corporate Communications” →

When sharing important but complicated financial concepts such as investment strategy, fiduciary duty and compensation structure, how do you decide what to leave in and what to omit as “TMI,” or knowledge overkill, harmful to your cause?

Learning vs. Sharing Knowledge

Step one is to recognize the difference between the wisdom you’ve acquired, versus how much of that wisdom to pass on to others in the form of effective advice.

Continue reading “Cutting Caveats from Your Corporate Communications” →

This month’s blog post is inspired by a recent e-mail from one of my advisor friends: “Hi, communications expert.” (He was off to a great start!) “Can I get your thoughts on whether it would be better to use ‘I’ or ‘we’ in the [project]? As a sole proprietor, I struggle with this periodically; perhaps you do, too.  Sometimes I come down on one side, sometimes on the other.”

 What’s in a Name?

Even before Abbott and Costello pitched their familiar “Who’s on First, What’s on Second” routine, naming conventions on who we are as authors have amused and confused us in our personal and professional communications. And by the way, it’s not just a conundrum for sole proprietors. Larger firms face similar challenges. Large or small, you’re still a gathering of individual characters with individual viewpoints to air and share. Continue reading “Who’s on First, and Are We on Second? Using First-Person Pronouns Like a Pro” →