When you plan for exiting your advisory practice, start by asking three questions.

If you're an owner of an advisory practice, your firm is likely the most valuable asset you own. As such, growing and protecting and eventually monetizing the value of your advisory practice, is enormously consequential to achieving your financial independence.

To Belichick, the invisible aspects of team building and winning are as much as – or perhaps more important than – the visible aspects like talent, speed, and strength.

I will clarify four oft-used terms by defining them and providing examples: core purpose, mission, vision and values.

If you’ve spent any time recruiting, you are painfully aware how hard it is to find good people. It’s even harder to keep them, particularly younger people. But those Millennials are not as unmotivated and unambitious as many claim.

Looking back 10 years, why were so many capable and otherwise successful executives and other experts unable to see the overwhelming impact the iPhone would have? What are the lessons for advisors?

My recent trip to an online job search site, Glassdoor.com, validated my conviction about how critically important a strong, “emotionally intelligent” leader is to a healthy organization.

This is how obsessive adherence to process unfolds into irrelevance.

How a product or service is packaged and presented has a huge impact on the way its value is perceived. The sleek design of the iPhone, the Apple logo and the box it comes in all “scream” quality and hipness. And Starbucks made a name for itself with the “Starbucks Experience.” That lesson applies to advisors, who must scrutinize the elements of their personal interactions with clients to the same degree as they do their investment and planning processes.

Quick! What are your firm’s core values? What about core purpose? Mission? How about your ideal client profile?

Providing a path for career growth is essential to every business. Two recent conversations with young, talented professionals illustrated the price an advisory practice will suffer if it lacks a career track for growth.

Running a strategically disciplined advisory business – or any business for that matter – is like writing a strong story with a tight plotline.

What does the CEO of an advisory firm do? Would you know what to do if you were to step into a true leadership role?

A cohesive leadership team is the foundation of a healthy and productive business.

There are more “silo practices” than we realize – those with two or more advisors, each with his or her own book of business. In the eyes of a buyer, there are business risks that chip away at these firms’ values. To mitigate against these risks, there are at least five things these firms can do.

If you are one of these founder-owners who genuinely wants to grow and to transform your practice to an enduring business with an impressive enterprise value, the reason your firm has plateaued is you, the founder-owner.

If you ask financial advisors – as I have – what’s truly important to them, their personal goals and dreams, and what makes them genuinely happy, they get uncomfortable.

Here is how a 40-something became a second-generation owner-executive of a $3+ billion firm. The two founders of the firm have retired.