When you take care of others as part of your job, you frequently hear about ongoing suffering, which can take its toll in the form of burnout and secondary traumatic stress. For advisors, burnout may result from your external environment, including a fast-paced schedule, long hours, and not enough time in the day to spend with every client. This burnout may then lead to secondary traumatic stress, which is internal and occurs when you reach the point where you just can’t take it anymore. Sound familiar? If so, you may be suffering from compassion fatigue.

Suppose Jeremy Grantham is (finally) right again, and the market is indeed set for a recession, a downturn, a bear market—your choice what you want to call it. We know this would happen eventually—we’ve enjoyed the longest bull market in history (more than 10 years)—but it had to end at some point.

Stop focusing on customer service. No, that’s not a typo. The reason I say this is because amazing customer service doesn’t necessarily help your bottom line. This is not to say you shouldn’t provide great service, but rather that it has become more of a commodity and is no longer a competitive differentiator. An amazing customer experience . . . well, that’s a whole other story.

Industry press is buzzing with articles about the value of partnerships in providing for succession, scale, specialization, brand strength, growth capacity, and so on. As a result, we are seeing increasing interest among advisors in creating or deepening a partnership. If you are one of those individuals, it is critically important that you understand the range of partnership options available—and, more important, why you want to partner with someone—before traveling down that path.

Leadership. Training and development. Pay and benefits. Corporate communications. Overall engagement. What do these five areas have in common? They make up a big part of creating a best place to work, at least according to InvestmentNews.

To compile its second annual Best Places to Work for Financial Advisers list, InvestmentNews surveyed advisors’ employees on a series of 78 statements, grouped into the five categories noted above. On average, those ranked “the best” scored 13 percent higher on these statements than other respondents.