New Books by HB Publishing Clients Help You Flex Entrepreneurial Muscles

What could a surfer from the Midwest, a snowboarder from California and a field hockey coach from India possibly have in common? Answer: They’re entrepreneurial financial advisors who love working with fellow entrepreneurs.

They’re also book authors who recently collaborated with HB Publishing & Marketing Company to unlock more than 100 combined years of wisdom about successfully planning your business exit, avoiding international tax traps and seeing around the corners to make your firm and your own career more successful. If you like concise real-world client examples rather than textbook theory, you won’t be disappointed with the three new releases below:

International Tax & Compliance Handbook (with special emphasis on India-US)
Author: Cecil Nazareth, CPA, CA, MBA, a former professional field hockey player from India and a partner of Norwalk, CT-based Nazareth CPAs. Nazareth said a lack of knowledge about international transaction rules and reporting requirements leads to very poor decisions that can trigger significant financial penalties, even jail time. ”Too often even very smart individuals and very savvy companies don’t know what they don’t know,” observed Nazareth. “That’s what inevitably gets them into hot water as FBAR, the Panama Paper and the Paradise Papers have taught us.”

Liquidity & You: A Personal Guide for Tech and Business Entrepreneurs Approaching an Exit
Author: Anthony Glomski, founder of Los Angeles-based AG Asset Advisory. The Midwestern-born world traveler, now an avid surfer and Porsche club member, said successful entrepreneurs work tremendously hard to build their companies, but too often overlook the importance of having a transition plan for Act 2 of their post-liquidity lives (emotional risk). They also tend to have a significant overconcentration of personal wealth tied up in their businesses (financial risk). “Change is constant. Challenges are inevitable. The only way to survive is to create a solid support team around you and never give up,” noted Brian Vickers, a NASCAR driver who wrote the forward to Glomski’s book.

The Benefits of Becoming a CPA-Preneur: Break the mold; never be the most boring person in the room
Author: Blake Christian, CPA/MBT a partner of HCVT, one of the nation’s fastest-growing CPA firms. Christian grew up surfing the waves of Long Beach, CA and now surfs the snow in Park City, UT when not in the office. Christian stressed the importance of learning how to get outside your comfort zone to become proactive rather than reactive. If nothing else, that means bringing solutions to clients (or your bosses) before they ask for them. “The days of being a financial historian and looking through the rear-view mirror are over,” observed Christian. “Being proactive is so much easier than undoing client’s bad decisions after the fact.”

Like Christian, Glomski finds many parallels between surfing, the business world and life. 

“Sometimes when surfing, you get pulled underwater by a big wave. The instinct is to fight the force of the wave, but what you really want to do is surrender to the power of the wave,” explained Glomski. “If you do, you will eventually float back to the surface. You’re at the mercy of the ocean, just like you’re at the mercy of the market. You can’t fight the market, but if you stay within your plan and don’t panic when things get rough, in the end, you’ll likely come out on top.”

Conclusion

All three authors are very candid about the influence that their parents and families had on their careers. “My parents sacrificed a lot to give me and my siblings a great education and left us with these words of wisdom,” related Nazareth:

• “Always give more than you get.”
• “Challenge yourself and hold yourself accountable.”
• “Inspire, motivate and bring out the best in yourself and others.”

Great words of advice to keep in mind during the Holidays and beyond.

TAGS: Cecil Nazareth, Brian Vickers, Blake Christian, Anthony Glomski, Business Exit, FBAR, Entrepreneurial CPA

Must-See New Movie for Financial Advisors

I’ll admit it. I hate shopping. I hate the stress, crowds, overspending, forced smiles, drunken caroling and crappy weather that comes with the Holidays. But I do enjoy one tradition this time of year--advance screenings of major motion pictures that come straight to our doorstep courtesy of my wife’s membership in the Directors Guild of America.

It’s been mostly duds this season, but last night we took a chance on Molly’s Game and it will be worth standing in line for this one when it opens Christmas day. Many of you are skiers, poker players and closet math nerds, so add this flick to your must-see list. You might also recommend it to your risk-seeking clients.

The film is based on the true story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), a highly attractive and intelligent washed-up Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker game in the 2000s. She had a great decade-long run before getting beat up by the mob, addicted to drugs and ultimately taken down by gun-toting FBI agents.

Starting out just to pay the rent, Molly was soon making seven figures hosting private poker games that catered to Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknownst to her, the Russian mob. Great story, but the best part is that she ran her “game” as a legal, tax-paying corporate entity, complete with legitimate books, tax returns, a “no raking” policy and 1099s forms sent to her “staff.”

Not to be spoiler, but Aaron Sorkin’s film not only touches on risk management and securities law, but on most of the advanced planning principles you preach to clients including wealth enhancement, tax mitigation, wealth protection, wealth transfer, legacy planning and business succession.

Many of the financial issues in Molly’s Game are as realistic as the ski scenes, poker hands and bluffing strategies. Molly also takes down her abusive boss and dozens of extremely rich and powerful men in the process as she goes from a middle class upbringing, to poverty, to riches to rags again, as so many American entrepreneurs do.

If you or your significant other are Kevin Costner fans, you’ll enjoy seeing him excel in a NON-nice guy role for a change. He plays Molly’s demanding, often estranged father who gave her drive, smarts and ambition, plus enough emotional baggage to fill at least two luxury hotel luggage carts.

Conclusion

I don’t know if STX Entertainment had this much foresight, but Molly’s Game ties in seamlessly to the perfect storm of complex tax issues, Winter Olympics promos and powerful men being taking down daily in the headlines. It’s not exactly Bing Crosby, but it’s a timely encapsulation of the times we live in—and poignant exploration of how each of us comes to terms with fear, greed and our relationship with money.


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Forget Open Rates; Focus on CTOR

Everyone’s focused on metrics this time of year. Budget battles for 2018 are in full swing as bean-counters and jealous colleagues scrutinize how your precious marketing dollars are spent (or wasted) online. Social media gets all the headlines today, but good old email marketing is still very effective for financial professionals—if done well.

Katrina Manning, author of the Email on Acid blog recently shared seven reasons that Email Marketing Still Works. “Many business professionals are checking their email at work regularly, not going onto all the social media sites,” explained Manning. “Reach out to them directly where they prefer communication for their business transactions and informational needs. Heck, 40 percent of Americans read emails while in bed. That means you already have their attention in their inbox, so use it!”

McMetrics

Sure, it’s important to track opens, clicks, unsubscribes and forward, etc., but you can artificially inflate your open rates with provocative email openers such as: “Salary Survey,” or “New Sex Position” or “Celebrity Slips” or “Top-10 Overrated Colleges” or “Do this now to get a raise!”

That’s just Kardashian-esque click bait.

If there’s no meat on the bones when people take time out of their busy day to open it, then you’ll be punished in several ways: low click rates and possibly and unsubscribe.

That’s why open rates are essentially a McMetric—easy to measure, but low on substance, as my colleague Rick Telberg and I addressed in a podcast. There’s another more meaningful metric, the Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR), that I’ll explain in a minute.

First of all, open rates are deceptive. An open is recorded when images are downloaded, even if the recipient didn’t click or take action. Or, the recipient may have the “auto preview” feature turned on (which automatically registers an open). Recipients may have inadvertently clicked on your email when they really wanted to open the one just above or below it in their inbox….i.e. they bailed just a split second after reading yours.

CTOR levels the playing field

What you really want to know how many of the people who opened your email actually clicked on at least one of your content element?  CTOR measures the relevancy and context of an email by taking the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens, and then multiplying by 100 to show it as a percentage.

Example

Email A: Let’s say you sent a mailing to 1,027 clients, past clients and prospects. Of those 1,027, let’s say 27 bounced or were out of office replies, giving you 1,000 sent. Of those 1,000 delivered, let’s say 260 opened your email, i.e. 26% open rate. Not bad, but suppose only 10 of those 260 people actually clicked on something giving you a 4% click-through rate.  Therefore, your click-to-open rate (CTOR) would be 15.4% (i.e. 4% ÷ 26%).

Email B: Let’s say the following week you send a new email to the same list of 1,027 and the same 27 bounced or were out of office, giving you 1,000 successfully sent (same as last week). Of those 1,000 delivered, let’s say only 190 opened your email, i.e. 19% open rate—7 percentage points worse than last week. But of those 190, a 20 individuals clicked on something giving you a click-through rate of 10.5%. Therefore, your click-to-open rate (CTOR) would be 55.2% (i.e. 10.5% ÷ 19%)…..significantly higher engagement than last week’s mailing despite a lower open rate.

Even though Email A had a much higher open rate than email B, which do you think had a higher engagement rate and was ultimately more successful?

	Sent	Bounced	Deliv.	Unique Opened	Unique Clicked	CLICK to OPEN Rate
Email A	1,027	27	1,000	260 (26%)	10 (4%)	15.4%
Email B	1,027	27	1,000	190 (19%)	20 (10.5%	55.2%

Source: HB Publishing & Marketing Company, LLC 2017


Improving click-through

The best way to improve your CTOR is to improve the nominator; your click through rate. Here are some time-tested techniques. No magic, here. Just basic blocking and tackling.

1. Relevant content. The easiest step is to make sure you have content that’s entirely relevant to your audience. Don’t try to send a one-size-fits all email to your entire list. Take the time to segment your list and send highly relevant campaigns to each.

2. Don’t be a click baiter. There’s nothing more annoying to a busy reader than opening an eBlast or enewsletter and finding nothing inside that relates to the provocative subject line. Again, you’ll be ignored and possibly unsubscribed to.

3. Design issues. When reviewing the content and creative of the campaign, you might see that an email with a poor performing click-to-open rate did not include enough links, or possibly the clickable areas were unclear to the subscribers, causing the low level of engagement.

4. Too many “asks.” Another mistake we see in this era of “do more with less” is asking the recipient to do too many things in a single email (i.e. sign up for a webinar, check out a video and register for a conference).

QUICK TIP: It’s great to have multiple links to helpful content and resources, but NEVER include more than one call-to-action (CTA) within each email.

Benchmarks

So, what’s a good CTOR? According to digital market consultant, Cara Olson, it depends on many variables including industry, type of email, segmentation, number of links in an email, etc. She said, a good CTOR can vary from 20% to 30%. But, rather than benchmarking against your peers, benchmark against yourself. Establish the CTOR for your own newsletters, triggered campaigns, promotional campaigns, transactional emails, for each email in a series, and then compare your improvement (or lack thereof) over time. Measure often, tweak, and re-assess.

Drilling down into industry specific email benchmarks, MailChimp says the CTOR for the Business & Finance category is 13% (21.0% open / 2.7% click through). GetResponse says CTOR for the Financial Services category is about 24% (i.e. 22.0% open/ 5.3% click through).

Conclusion

Business email is something that your client chooses to open and read; they are not being forced to do so. You work hard to build client and prospect relationships. Respect their privacy and how busy their schedules are. If you do, and consistently offer valuable content and insights, readers will refer you without hesitation to like-minded peers.

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