Do financial advisors tend to be more successful because they attend national conferences-or are successful advisors the only ones who can afford to take the time away from the office?

This question has intrigued me for years. I attend 12 to 15 meetings annually in various locations around the country, sometimes speaking, but mostly taking notes, talking with attendees and, after talking with them, taking more notes.

The advisors at these meetings always point me toward interesting trends and new ideas in the profession, and I'm learning not to beat myself up too badly for not knowing about them beforehand. Most of what I learn-much of the 16 pages I publish every month, the e-columns I send out and the columns I write in this magazine-is inspired by these interactions.

HIERARCHY OF SUCCESS

Conferences have their own hierarchy, appealing to advisors at various levels of awareness and success. The people you see at, say, the NAPFA national conference, the FPA Retreat or the Pershing Insite Financial Solutions conference will generally be more successful and on top of professional issues than the average person you see at industry groups' local chapter meetings. And, as the pattern goes, the people you see at local chapter meetings always seem to be light years ahead of the professionals who never take any time to gather with their peers. So what gives?

The ambitious advisors-those who want to make their practices truly topnotch-invest in themselves. Every year, at every meeting, I run into at least one or two people who really can't afford to be there-but they came anyway. Attendance, for them, represents an enormous leap of faith. The stories vary: an advisor may just have started a practice, or may have been trying to break out of the struggling-idealist syndrome for years. Another may have left the brokerage world without a parachute, or is a promising staff person who paid his own way since his firm declined to cover the costs.

Naturally this person and I would talk about what I had learned over the years about getting ahead. After having a few conversations with knowledgeable advisors (whose names you might recognize), he would then go home and completely revitalize his professional life. He would be back the next year, and the next, and by his third national conference or so, he'd be serving on the local chapter board. Over the hump professionally-and from a new position of prosperity-he would begin to proffer advice to younger conference attendees, while still receiving counsel from older ones.

CHOOSING THE FAST TRACK

If you talk to some of the early NAPFA members or the early Retreat attendees, they'll tell you similar stories; it was a leap of faith to buy that plane ticket and block out four days away from the office to be there. But the connections they made and the advice they received really started them on a fast track to success.

And that, I think, is the important point: There seems to be a fast track and a slow track in our profession. Both may get you where you want to go, and there are certainly successful advisors who don't attend national meetings on a regular basis. But advisors who take a deep breath and jump into the deep end of the conference scene seem to come home with an unfair advantage-a wind at their back, an extra booster in the rocket.

For those of you who don't think you can afford to go to this year's NAPFA Practice Management & Investments conference in September (keynote speaker: Nobel laureate Bill Sharpe, plus a panel discussion on how to grow to $1 billion under management) or the FPA NorCal Conference in San Francisco (keynotes: Andrew Ross Sorkin and Dan Ariely, plus business coach Tracy Beckes), I offer the best advice that I have received over the years on how to get back more money than you spend on these meetings.

GET THE BALL ROLLING

Step One: Before you get on the plane, sit down and think about the two or three things you really need help with. What is it about your practice that you're avoiding dealing with? Upgrading your technology? Creating detailed job descriptions? Hiring that first staff person? Chances are, you have a blind spot. We all do.

The good news, though, is that the people you talk to at these industry conferences will not have that same blind spot. They will have their own, sure, but they will also have sailed past your biggest challenge and can share key insights with you that will seem obvious in retrospect.