What do you do when one of your best clients is spending their way into oblivion?

Time management is a fallacy – you can’t manage time; everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day. You can manage your choices – by focusing on personal management you will start to see a positive shift when you try one or more of these things.

We are finding it harder and harder to attract good talent. We are in a large metropolitan area and the economy is strong so candidates are waiting it out when it comes to job offers.

The last couple of weeks I was reminded that often times, words do matter and we have to consider how what we say is interpreted and relayed to others.

I need to motivate my team to take more action. I often tell them to bring me solutions, not just problems. But all I hear are complaints about what we need to do differently.

There are things coming at me from all corners – my own clients, my boss’ needs and other projects he wants me to be involved with in our firm – and he is asking me to obtain a certification, which I haven’t even been able to investigate yet.

What do the best leaders do to gain the trust and respect of their followers? They master these seven key skills.

My advisors need to do a better job of presenting their ideas to clients.

The founders of our firm don’t get along. They are accusing each other of stealing from the firm, abusing the clients and taking advantage of the employees.

A number of our clients are watching the markets and becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ups and downs. We have many retirees and soon-to-retire clients and 2008 is still fresh in their minds. They fear another disastrous downswing in their portfolios.

We are grooming three young people to be successors to our founder. What should we expect of them?

I know you’ve written a few times on difficult clients, but I hope you will indulge one more inquiry. What if the difficulty stems from possible dementia?

Our partners take marketing very seriously. They are focused on growing and want to create a sustainable business. We’re all very involved. The problem is, it is too much.

Do you have any tips on the best way to coach and mentor someone who is the heir apparent in my firm? I have a young man who is sharp, highly credentialed and very good with clients. The problem is he rubs people in the firm the wrong way.

I want to hire someone with a few years of experience because I don’t have the time or inclination to train a new graduate. I’ve been posting ads to LinkedIn and networking through friends, family and even clients but cannot find a single candidate.

Unfortunately the old-fashioned networking that worked for you no longer succeeds. Consider these four tips to make networking work for your team.

Our sales manager is starting to implement more stringent requirements around how many calls we have to make each day and how many meetings we have to have in order to plan a trip. He wants to weave results into our bonus program.

This week I learned a valuable lesson on delegation and communicating in a polarized political environment, and on being respectful of how people might interpret something.

My partner and I are at a crossroads in our advisory firm. For years we have been in sync about our values and culture, how we should grow and even the people we have hired to join our team. In the last few months, though, he has become aligned with some radical political philosophies.

Here are some tips on the best ways to network, engage people and get results. LinkedIn can be a great tool to research, see what others are doing, learn new information and meet people. But it is becoming abused as a way to find prospects and pitch to them.

Here are some reminders to add to your list of New Year’s resolutions. These are compiled from the thousands of inquiries I get via this column and in my consulting work every week of the year.

At this time of year, I’m often asked for ideas to help cope with family-related issues. As a gift to our readers, I’ll pass on my best ideas for you to share with your clients as needed.

Clients focus on their portfolio performance numbers – not just against goals, but against the benchmark. Could we do a better job of explaining why the benchmark isn’t apples-to-apples?

The focus of the sexual harassment issue is on women being victimized by men. I, however, have been victimized by women in business as well as personally.

Is it prudent for me to reach out to the women in my firm and ask whether I have done anything that made them uncomfortable?

To make a hire, or ensure someone you have is operating at full capacity, here are my “Seven Tips to Hiring Success.”

I lack motivation to work with my staff and mentor or coach. Is this what happens to every advisor who has been doing this for a while?

I want to outline a process I created many years ago that I teach to managers, leaders of firms and staff members so they can learn to solve their own problems.

Are family businesses doomed to fail? It’s killing the great advisory firm we have all inherited.

Can I run my sole-practitioner firm for the next 15 years until I retire? I write because my wife keeps bugging me to “hire someone to help” and I am dragging my feet to do this. She thinks it will free me up, but I believe it will tie me down in ways I don’t desire.

Here are Bev’s five best tips for improving your relational skills with your clients.

These crucial keys will make your presentation concise and powerful.

We made a mistake and put someone in a role that was over their head.

I recognize that as a leader it’s up to me to instill good communication practices across my team. But I have a couple of people who are gossips.

After working with clients for over 20 years, I believe I have insights and information I could share more broadly and am considering writing a book.

Getting hiring right is crucial to both the candidate and your firm’s success – but how can you get it right?

I’ve worked hard to build a very successful advisory firm over the last 20 years. But recently I am distracted and unable to focus on the core issues with my business.

How do I get through to clients who spend too much money?

I work for a very large firm that is undergoing significant cost-cutting measures. This is corporate-speak for lots of my colleagues being laid off. I’m worried and depressed much of the time thinking about the potential of losing my job.

We have been hearing grumblings that some of our longer term people believe they are being overlooked. As far as career pathing there aren’t many other places they can go.

Now that the market is up significantly, our clients are asking why they aren’t seeing these gains in their portfolios. We do take the time to educate and we show them a blended benchmark so they aren’t measuring us against the S & P. What else could we be doing to give them comfort that we are acting on their behalf by not chasing returns?

How do we get our team to embrace our new CRM system and understand the value to our advisory firm?

Things have been very difficult at our advisory firm since one of the partners announced his intention to retire. I’ve read a great deal about succession planning and I can honestly say, we don’t have one.

I work in a large financial organization and my team is trying to make a significant business decision. It’s a collaborative culture, which we tout as being very positive. However, when decisions need to be made, we often get stuck because everyone has to have a voice and be heard.

Over 90 advisors responded to a survey I conducted earlier this year with Advisor Perspectives. Here are the important insights into which activities help find new business for RIAs and IBDs.

One of the women in my office is a tattle-tale and a gossip. It’s become so bad that everyone is afraid if they don’t listen or don’t engage with her, they will become one of her targets. She picks on the most benign things; it could be someone’s dress, how they talk or how slow they approach a task.

We are rolling out a new investment approach. Our advisors have agreed to outsource investing and we are migrating our accounts. It’s been a very, very long decision-making process to determine how best to shift investment management and communicate internally. Now, the hard part comes – communicating this change to our clients.

I work for a large organization that has very poor leadership. We lack direction, communication and motivation from the very top down to the level of my manager.

What’s your thought on hiring a business-development officer?

Some of our team members are lazy. They will say they are busy doing client work or following investments but then they are gone at 3 p.m. on a Friday.