The CPA's Guide to a Successful Financial Planning Practice: Selling Financial Investments and Marketing Advisory Services [Hardcover]

Jim H. Ainsworth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0471076872 | ISBN-13: 978-0471076872 | Edition: 1

A blueprint for success in the 1990s… Proven techniques for marketing and selling your financial planning services… CPAs are discovering that to remain viable in the automated, hypercompetitive 1990s, they must break out of their "comfort zone" and take the big leap into financial planning services. This book is designed to get you quickly and confidently on-line with all the skills and expertise you need to make financial planning an important revenue generator in your practice. Accountant and certified financial planner Jim Ainsworth zeroes in on a controversial topic of major importance to the future of your business—should accounting professionals sell investment products? His answer is a resounding "Yes!" and he arms you with the proven techniques he used to grow his business from a small town "tax-return factory" to a multimillion dollar financial services firm in just five years. With the help of real-life examples, sample correspondence, checklists, and other tools you can use in your own practice, Jim shows you how to:

• Become licensed to offer financial products and other nontraditional financial planning services
• Market yourself as a full-service financial planning specialist
• Structure fees and payment options to overcome client fee resistance
• Find your niche and develop the practice specialties that work best for you and your clients
• "Sell" your clients on the investments that will best help them meet their long-range financial goals
• Organize engagements, gather client data and customize client analyses, develop recommendations, prepare client reports and presentations, and much more

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Adopts the position that licensed accounting professionals should sell financial investments in spite of the professional guidelines issued by the AICPA and College of Financial Planners. Provides a blueprint for making financial planning consulting services a noncyclical revenue generator for CPAs. Contains pertinent advice on becoming licensed to sell financial investment products, marketing yourself as a full-service financial planning specialist and offering clients payment choices that will overcome their fee resistance. Rates the pros and cons of a range of investment options. Includes strategies for increasing overall firm revenue by offering financial planning services.

From the Inside Flap

Jim Ainsworth looked at the tax return handed to him by one of his clients and knew that his business was in trouble. The return had been prepared by the client’s daughter, a high school junior, using commercial software purchased for under seventy dollars—and it was perfect! How could a CPA continue to charge a professional fee for a service that could now be performed by a teenager? This was just one in a series of events that led Jim to commit his business to a course of action he had been experimenting with for some time—selling financial investments and marketing advisory services. This book is both the story of Jim’s successes and failures along the road to becoming a top-rated marketer of financial planning services and an inspirational and practical guide for other CPAs who, like Jim, know that the CPA who only does tax returns may soon be as quaint a figure as the blacksmith and the iceman. In this book you will find everything you need to actively market yourself as a full-service financial planning consultant and turn this side of your business into a noncyclical revenue generator. Jim Ainsworth defies the positions taken by the AICPA and the College of Financial Planners that accounting professionals should not become licensed to sell investments. He provides both a strong argument and practical advice on how and why CPAs should recommend or "sell" financial investments. He demonstrates that CPAs can provide these services to their clients at lower cost than other sources, and he rates the pros and cons of a range of investment options. And he introduces you to TOPS—Trust, Opportunity, Pain, and Solution—the low-pressure sales method that enabled him to triple his productivity in just one year without jeopardizing his relationship with his clients. Jim would be the first to tell you that it won’t be easy. You’ll have to work hard, think hard, discipline yourself, and focus all your efforts on the ultimate goal. But the payoff is both enriching and personally rewarding—the ability to make money while helping other people make money as well. The elements of success are at your fingertips and, in the words of Jim Ainsworth, "If you apply them, make a commitment, and [are] persistent, you will succeed."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 6, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471076872
• ISBN-13: 978-0471076872
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,712,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In 1998, Jim sold all his business interests and made a journey across Texas by covered wagon and horseback to retrace an ancestral journey. He chronicled the trip in a memoir, Biscuits Across the Brazos. He traveled the team roping circuit as an amateur and worked roundups on big ranches. In the Rivers Flow, his first novel, was published in 2003. Rivers Crossing followed in 2005. Rivers Ebb, the third novel in his Follow the Rivers trilogy, was a Writers League of Texas contest finalist as a manuscript. It also was selected as a finalist for the national Violet Crown award for best mainstream novel of 2008, and a finalist in the mainstream/literary fiction category for Writers Digest international book contest. The novel was featured in the magazine in Spring 2008.

Home Light Burning, his fourth novel, has just been released by Sunstone Press. Sunstone is also reissuing all of Jim's prior novels and the memoir, Biscuits Across the Brazos.

Jim earned a BBA with academic distinction from ETSU in 1965. He returned to Commerce in 1973 as a Certified Public Accountant and launched a public accounting practice and a retail western wear store. Jim became Managing Partner of Ainsworth & Lambert, CPA's in 1977.

In 1986, he sensed a paradigm shift in the financial world and became one of the first CPA's in America to become a NASD Series 7 Registered Representative. Jim qualified as a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) in 1988 and later formed Ainsworth Money Management, Inc.. His innovative leadership in adding financial planning to CPA firms led to a position as Vice-President of a national financial services firm with training responsibilities for thousands of financial professionals throughout America.

In 1992, become a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) and a NASD Series 24 Licensed Securities Principal and was admitted to the Registry of Financial Planning Practitioners. John Wiley and Sons of New York published two of Jim's books that year--The CPA's Guide to a Successful Financial Planning Practice, and The CPA's Practice Guide. He co-founded and served as President of 1st Global Partners, Inc. and First Global Capital Corp. Jim's professional leadership was recognized in Forbes and Dow Jones Investment Advisor magazines.

A nationally recognized authority on converting CPA firms into full financial service firms, Jim made over three hundred presentations in the next five years, trained hundreds of financial advisors, and wrote articles for Accounting Today, Financial Planning News, and Dow Jones Investment Advisor. He was twice named to Accounting Today's list of the most influential accountants in America. In 1997, John Wiley and Sons published his fourth book, How to Become a Successful Financial Consultant.

Jim was named a Distinguished Alumnus at Texas A&M-Commerce in 2009.