Recognizing best practices

InvestmentNews to highlight financial advisory firms that stand apart from their peers (in a good way).

Everyone likes — and deserves — a little recognition for the things they do well, especially for the things they do very well. But highlighting top performers serves an even higher purpose. It inspires, or maybe pushes, guilts and goads, the rest of us to think out of the box, and work harder and smarter.

Let’s face it, one of the main advantages of working out in a gym is the energy you get from exercising around other people. You can improve your workout routine by watching what others do, and you can tap into that friendly competitive vibe that you just don’t get from running on a treadmill in your basement.

With that in mind, InvestmentNews will be highlighting financial advisory firms that stand apart from their peers (in a good way) through innovation in practice management and technology. By revealing the “secret sauce” of these top-performing firms, we hope you will be inspired — or pushed, guilted and goaded, if that’s what it takes — to up your game and concoct your own recipe for success.

In a bimonthly feature entitled Best Practices, we will profile the strategies of a top-performing advisory firm. While high achievers often do many things well, we will home in on just one or two aspects to which the firm’s top executives attribute their firm’s success.

In some cases, such as this week’s profiled company, Joseph Barry Co. LLC, which uses color-coded flags to improve customer service, those practices may not seem exceptionally innovative. But it is a practice that is exceptionally executed — and good execution, as we all know, is often the difference between success and failure.

Tapping research

So how exactly do we find our top performers? That’s easy. We simply turned to our proprietary research. The next year’s Best Practice profiles come from firms that participated in — and scored high on — the 2013 InvestmentNews/Moss Adams Adviser Compensation and Staffing Study or the 2013 InvestmentNews Adviser Technology Study, or both. Composite scores for all firms rated, among other factors, growth, profitability and productivity levels.

In addition to written profiles, InvestmentNews.com will feature short videos about all of our top-performing firms. To view those videos, click here.

Think your firm deserves to be recognized for innovation in practice management and technology? We’d love to hear about it.

But first, you must participate in one of our research surveys and, if you score well against your peers, yours just might be one of the firms profiled.

To participate in a survey, click here.