Making Money in Financial Planning

By now I am sure you might have heard about the wildly successful inaugural financial planning conference held in July in Chicago by this publication under the Accountants Media Group umbrella.   Although the idea for the conference started back in March (a rather short period of time to get the word out), it was nevertheless a huge success and brought in attendees from all over the country wanting to know how to move upwards in the financial planning niche. Interestingly enough, two-thirds of the attendees were not already in financial planning but were looking for how to enter the field; only one-third were already in practice.   Four major companies saw the opportunity in such a topic to sponsor the conference: Five Star Financial Solutions, Rochdale Investment Management, Honkamp Krueger Financial Services, and Oppenheimer. The speakers came from the upper tiers of financial planning from Stuart Kessler and Rebecca Pomering as keynote speakers to Sidney Blum, Gale Crosley, Garrett D’Alessandro, Mitchell Freedman, Jim Files, Gene Garrelts, Keith Heichel, James Herrig, Peter Jaworski, Bernard Kiely, Michael Parness, Larry Swedroe, Enrique Vasquez, Troy Waugh, Clare Wherley, Stephen Wild, and Stuart Zimmerman.   The topics were wide-ranging from why financial planning makes sense to selecting the right business model to marketing and selling such services to success stories (including costly false starts and failures) to the importance of critical strategic partners to financial planning software to best practices. You can see where this was heading.   The results from the attendees, sponsors, and speakers were highly laudatory, so much so that we are now looking at a conference for next year that will go into this area even more deeply with some nuts and bolts tactics such as exactly how to go about getting licenses and stories from those who just started up a financial planning practices with their personal pros and cons.   If you wish to be on the mailing list for advanced information, by all means e-mail me.