"Prices and your fees are the value you assign to the services you are providing," he said. "Prices and fees are your communication of the quality of your services. The higher the price, the higher the perceived value."
He also stressed the importance of branding, noting that Yahoo!, despite the fact its Internet search engine could be viewed as inferior to others in the market, attained an international following through a concerted branding effort.
"Brands have a placebo effect," he said.
Among the other facets of a successful business, he said, are fast and friendly service. A friendly greeting to prospective clients, he said, could make all the difference in the world. "No other single act creates more customer satisfaction than in the first two or three seconds," he told FPA members.
On the investment front, attendees heard a range of scholarly-and sometimes conflicting-advice when it comes to the role of equities in client portfolios.
Zvi Bodie, professor of finance and economics at the Boston University School of Management and author of Worry-Free Investing, bluntly told advisors that they are over-emphasizing equities for their risk-averse clients.
Too many advisors, he says, subscribe to the belief that equities become less risky as clients time horizons lengthen. This, he maintains, is a mistake. While the chances of a shortfall do decline as time goes on, he says many people ignore the fact that the potential severity of a shortfall rises.
"Stocks are not safe in the long run. Beware using probability of a shortfall as a measure of risk," he said.
His main points were that stocks are not safe no matter how long an investor's time horizon, and that presenting clients with a small number of easily understood investment choices is better than overwhelming them with a large number of choices.
Bodie, in fact, told planners that most people "don't get it" when it comes to diversification, and they more easily understand hedging strategies and insured investments.