Best Practices for Year-End Planning

Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.

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Dear Bev,

Year-end planning. We need to do it but in past years it hasn’t gone well. Everyone is checked out between end-of-the-year exhaustion, holidays and preparing clients for important year-end decisions. Wait until January and then it is full steam ahead on re-energizing for the New Year. No one wants to plan at that point, they want to jump in.

Best practices?

N.U.

Dear N.U.,

If the planning process was more enjoyable and the results were better, do you think your team would be less “checked out”? I find many team members groan when they hear “offsite” or “planning” because they know it will be a lot of time, typically without much direction and often leading nowhere. I’m not suggesting this is your situation. I respect people are exhausted and burnt out at year-end. I’ve had two planning calls today where advisors admittedly called themselves “distracted,” and I appreciate this. It’s always a tough time of the year and a mad scramble but the last couple of years particularly have been very wearing on people.