Only 27% of female professionals have a financial plan

Uncertainty among Mass Affluent Spells Opportunity for Advisors


For purposes of this survey, the Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based consulting company, defines mass affluent as U.S. households with between $100,000 and $1 million in assets

Only 27% of female professionals—such as doctors, lawyers and accountants—have a financial plan either developed on their own or with help from an advisor. At the same time, only 44% of male business owners have a financial plan.

    The majority of people in these categories who do not have financial plans “would seem to me to be the ‘low hanging fruit’ who can use the assistance of advisors,” says Wynn.

    Two-thirds of the mass affluent are 55 or older and are nearing retirement or are already retired. However, only 9% of the wealth of those still working is derived from investment income, and for those retired only 29% of wealth is from investments.

    “Another opportunity for advisors will be to help (this group) set up or redefine a retirement income stream,” the report concludes.

Forget the elevator pitch

Now it's a "Twitpitch", your company's story in 140 characters, about 20 words, the maximum length of a message on Twitter.

Businessweek gives us The Escalator Pitch.

Their example is Google.  When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first approached investors, they

had no track record or experience running companies. But Brin and Page had passion for digital information and a concise vision: Google would provide "access to the world's information in one click" (eight words). The investor said when his team heard this, they understood the vision immediately and were eager to hear more."

Quickbase for Kayak

How Paul English, CEO of travel website Kayak.com uses a do-it-yourself database to keep millions of users happy, without employing a single customer-service rep.

The company spends a total of $10,000 a year on QuickBase licenses and related hardware. English says he would have to spend $300,000 a year in salaries and benefits for an estimated 12 extra staffers he would need to run traditional customer-service software. He also saves on other software: Kayak uses QuickBase to manage projects, vendors, and some accounts.

"Small businesses would be foolish to not at least test this kind of solution," says Yankee Group analyst Joshua Holbrook. "You're at a competitive disadvantage if you don't."

PR Secrets for Startups

From Techcrunch comes guest author Brian Solis with his PR Secrets for Startups