The solution is simple: Hire and manage people correctly. Recognize that if all you’re doing is hiring people solely for your own benefit, and not for theirs as well, you’re not going to succeed at hiring the people who can best help you. After all, a lot of people are willing to take jobs merely to get the paycheck, but those people really don’t care about the job, and that’s reflected in their attitude and performance. This kind of person does the bare minimum, isn’t concerned about your clients or your firm’s mission and, no surprise, tends not to be very good at his or her job.

You get this kind of person when you focus merely on what’s in it for you. If you try to pay the least, you’ll get the lowest quality staff. If you don’t take the time to train, mentor and motivate, you’ll get poor productivity and high turnover. That doesn’t work over the long term.

You need star employees. Here’s how we do it:

1. We start by looking for complementary talent. We want people who are not only great in their fields, but who have expertise and abilities we currently lack. That’s why we hire people in HR, IT, compliance, portfolio management, operations, facilities management, event planning, marketing, public relations and all things digital. I’ve seen some other advisors hire redundantly—finding employees similar to those they already have. (They hire more advisors, for example, when what they really need is an office manager.)

2. We write compelling ads and place them where the talent we’re seeking will see them—in print and online industry journals (in the candidate’s industry, not ours), as well as on general job placement sites on the web.

3. Employees who refer candidates to us get a bonus if we hire their referral. There’s no better way to get great employees than by asking your great employees to find them for you. We invite employees to invite family members to apply for jobs, and we have lots of employees who have a spouse, parent, child, sibling or in-law working in the firm as well. Considering that our firm was founded by a husband-wife team (Jean and me), we’ve always regarded this as quite natural.

4. We carefully research compensation to make sure we’re offering salaries and benefits that will attract and retain top talent. In addition to all the expected benefits, a 401(k) with a matching provision, generous time off and the like, we go much further. Our employees enjoy a four-week paid sabbatical every six years; a Rolex on their 10th anniversary; birthdays off; stress-down days; and lots of food, ice cream days, waffle breakfasts and more, and we look for any excuse to have a celebration. These events usually involve giving away gift cards, shirts, mugs, umbrellas and whatnot, and for our biggest (celebrating our 25th anniversary) we took every employee and their families to Walt Disney World for four days.

5. Every candidate being considered goes through a rigorous interview process, involving meetings with as many as a dozen members of the staff. It can take weeks to go from the initial phone call to an offer.