Do you ever feel like there just aren't enough hours in the day to devour all the incredible business books out there? You (like me and many out there) constantly seek out ways to improve your craft, whether it's mastering the art of articulating your value, staying ahead of the curve in business best practices, or honing your self-improvement skills.
As a financial advisor, you know firsthand how crucial ongoing development is to serving your clients at the highest level.
Are you wondering what other financial advisors read? What are the best books for financial advisors?
Well today, we're diving into a treasure trove of knowledge curated for financial advisors like yourself. Consider this your personal reading list; a selection guaranteed to equip you with the tools and strategies to take your business to the next level. From industry classics to hidden gems, we've got you covered.
This list caters to financial advisors at all stages of their careers. Whether you're a seasoned pro seeking to elevate your client service or a new advisor eager to build a thriving practice, there's something here for everyone.
Our list of the 10 Best Reads
- The Advisor Playbook
- The Millionaire Next Door
- Questions Great Financial Advisors Ask"
- Investment Biker
- Storyselling For Financial Advisors
- The Psychology Of Money
- The Blue Square Method
- "Ask: How To Relate To Anyone"
- Succession Planning for Financial Advisors
- The 4 C's Formula
(P.S. - We've strategically placed some url links throughout. So, if you discover a new favorite you can invest in a copy right away).
Book #1: The Advisor Playbook - Regain liberation and order in your personal and professional life
Authors: Duncan MacPherson, Chris Jeppesen
Description: Practice management is often misunderstood. The Advisor Playbook will take the mystery away.
Practice management is confused with marketing, or is limited to strategizing about branding, or simply equated to old-school salesmanship.
Practice management is how you build an organized toolbox of all your processes - branding, marketing, service activities, core functions - and constantly tune and keep that toolbox efficient and effortless. It's a network of interrelated skills, processes and strategies that build value in a business while making it manageable, scalable and ensuring the owner runs the business and not the other way around.
Duncan MacPherson and Pareto Systems have been in the forefront of practice management in the realm of the professional advisor for a quarter-century. Chris Jeppesen of First Trust brings his own decades of professional knowledge to the table. The processes in The Advisor Playbook have grown over those years, through constant refinement and improvement. They'll help you to perform that same refinement and improvement on your business, and regain liberation and order in your personal and professional life.
As you progress through the book, you'll realize that each process is implemented in synergy with every other. Referrals are influenced by your service which is influenced by your process, which is influenced by your philosophy, which is influenced by your ideal client definition, life and business goals. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and everything is, in the end, focused on a single unwavering goal: To build real, advocate relationships with your ideal clients that will generate both growth through referrals and the capacity for that growth.
How you are perceived is key in every step of that circle, and readers who take on board what the Playbook outlines will come away with an understanding of how they are perceived, how to cast themselves as a consultant with a process rather than a salesperson with a quota, and will set a constantly rising bar for their own success.
You'll be amazed at how common-sense most of the processes and strategies seem, and probably horrified at how often you've wandered from the path or failed to implement them due to a lack of clarity or simple distraction.
The Playbook will guide you to an actionable plan and process that makes going to work a positive experience, and a positive investment.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Advisor-Playbook-Liberation-Personal-Professional/dp/0968440185
Book #2: The Millionaire Next Door
Author: Thomas J. Stanley
Description: Dr. Stanley wrote The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind. These books spent more than 170 weeks combined on the New York Times' Best Sellers list. His Millionaire Women Next Door was selected as a finalist for the business book of the year by the Independent Publishers Association and was on several business best sellers lists. Dr. Stanley's first three books, Marketing to the Affluent, Selling to the Affluent, and Networking with the Affluent and Their Advisors, were all designated as outstanding business books.
In total, more than three million copies of Dr. Stanley's books have been sold worldwide.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Americas/dp/1589795474
Book #3: Questions Great Financial Advisors Ask
Authors: Alan Parisse, David Richman
Description: A financial advisor recounts an interview with a recently retired physician who planned an enjoyable--and costly--retirement. The doctor wanted his entire portfolio in bonds, which was far too conservative to maintain the lifestyle he and his wife had planned. In the advisor's words: "This fellow was a bit of a know-it-all, and I wasn't getting through. Finally I asked him, 'Doctor, how will it feel for you when you have to go back to work?' That got his attention, and I was able to lay out a strategy that would allow him to retire and stay retired."
In Questions Great Financial Advisors Ask...and Investors Need to Know , coauthors Alan Parisse and David Richman have compiled the questions great advisors ask that lead to the probing and personal conversations necessary to diagnose and understand clients'--and potential clients'--deep-seated feelings about money. That's how great advisors help clients wring the emotion out of investing and set them on the rational road to achieving their financial goals. Throughout this book are questions, suggestions, and stories from some of the world's top financial advisors, including a chapter of "great questions to ask" organized by topic.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Questions-Great-Financial-Advisors-Investors/dp/1419526804
Book #4: Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers
Author: Jim Rogers
Description: Legendary investor Jim Rogers gives us his view of the world on a twenty-two-month, fifty-two-country motorcycle odyssey in his bestselling business/adventure book, Investment Biker, which has already sold more than 200,000 copies.
Before you invest another dollar anywhere in the world (including the United States), read this book by the man Time magazine calls "the Indiana Jones of finance."
Jim Rogers became a Wall Street legend when he co-founded the Quantum Fund. Investment Biker is the fascinating story of Rogers's global motorcycle journey/investing trip, with hardheaded advice on the current state and future direction of international economies that will guide and inspire investors interested in foreign markets.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Investment-Biker-Around-World-Rogers/dp/0812968719
Book #5: Storyselling for Financial Advisors: How Top Producers Sell
Authors: Scott West, Mitch Anthony
Description: Learn what makes a client trust you to be their financial advisor. Put the power of storytelling into selling financial products. The authors explain the process of making these intuitive connections, then translate their findings into understandable and practical strategies that any financial professional can use. They present actual stories, including many by Warren Buffet, one of the greatest "storysellers" of all time.
These actual stories can help financial pros tap into the "gut reaction" of different types of clients. the book also includes special topics on communicating to women, the 50+ market, and the affluent.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Storyselling-Financial-Advisors-Producers-Sell/dp/0793136644
Book #6: The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Author: Morgan Housel
Description: Doing well with money isn't necessarily about what you know. It's about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.
Money"investing, personal finance, and business decisions"is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.
In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the different ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life's most important topics.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness/dp/0857197681
Book #7: The Blue Square Method
Author: Duncan MacPherson, Chris Jeppesen
Description: The Mindset and Best-Practices of Top Fee-For-Service Professionals
The Blue Square Method is a philosophy and process for the enlightened fee-for-service professional who is striving to grow on their own terms and become the best version of themselves. Panoramic success requires continual refinement and optimization both personally and professionally. This actionable playbook is designed to put you on a predictable trajectory and ensure you never plateau.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Square-Method-Fee-Service/dp/0968440193
Book #8: "Ask: How to Relate to Anyone"
Author: Daniel R Solin
Description: Do you want a tried and tested way to engage anyone? Do you want to learn how to turn an argument into an opportunity? Do you want more meaningful relationships with your colleagues, your clients, your spouse, your children, and your friends?
In his meticulously researched book, based on fascinating and compelling studies in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, New York Times bestselling author Dan Solin shows you exactly how to make deeper connections with everyone. Dan has shared this transformative research with thousands of people across North America, Europe and Australia, helping them change their relationships for the better.
The lessons in Ask are easy to understand and put into practice. Dan's investing books changed the way people around the globe invested. Ask will change the way people around the globe connect.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Ask-Relate-Anyone-Daniel-Solin/dp/0974876321
Book #9: Succession Planning For Financial Advisors
Author: David Grau
Description: This book is going to challenge you and everything you think you know about succession planning.
For independent advisors, succession planning is quickly becoming the cornerstone to a strategic growth strategy designed to perpetuate their business and their income streams beyond their own lifetime, while providing a multi-generational service platform that attracts and rewards younger advisors. This makes succession planning one of the most, if not the most, important practice management tools in this industry today.
As an independent financial advisor, now is the time to address the question of what will happen to your practice and your clients after you "exit the building." In most cases, the answers are right in front of you. Thankfully, Succession Planning for Financial Advisors: Building an Enduring Business has arrived to transform today's practices into businesses designed to endure and prosper and serve generations of clients.
95% of independent financial service professionals are one owner practices. To the positive, these practices are among the most valuable professional service models in America. But almost all advisors are assembling their practices using the wrong tools - tools borrowed from historically successful, but vastly different models including wirehouses, broker-dealers, and even OSJ's and branch managers. Revenue sharing, commission splitting and other eat-what-you-kill compensation methods dominate the independent sector and virtually ensure that today's independent practices, if left unchanged, will not survive the end of their founder's career. It is time to change course and this book provides the map and the details to help you do just that.
For independent practice owners and staff members, advisors who want to transition to independence, as well as accountants, attorneys, coaches and others involved in the financial services space, there are invaluable lessons to be learned from Succession Planning for Financial Advisors.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Succession-Planning-Financial-Advisors-Website/dp/1118866479
Book #10: The 4 C's Formula: Your building blocks of growth
Author: Dan Sullivan
Description: Have you ever wondered why some people are super-achievers and seem to go from success to success while others never seem to get out of the starting blocks?
In my 40 years of coaching high-achieving entrepreneurs, I've noticed that they all go through a process to help them break through to the next level of success. I call this process The 4 C's Formula.
The 4 C's Formula is a universal process that can be used by anyone who wants to achieve greater success in any part of their life.
Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Cs-Formula-commitment-capability-confidence-ebook/dp/B094QF2VBQ
Final thoughts on these reads
The greatest financial advisors are lifelong learners who consistently seek knowledge and refine their skillset. While our list highlights 10 exceptional reads, feel free to tell us about your favorite book.
Contributed by: Ryan Weeks, Financial Advisor Coach
Related: The Language of Referrals - NEW PODCAST Ep 57
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