Recent studies among financial advisors have shown that “help with building my business” is the No. 1 area in which advisors are seeking assistance. Increasing competition, compliance, complexity and a more discerning consumer all dictate a much more business-like approach to managing an advisory practice.

For these reasons alone, Breakthrough Business Develop-ment, by Duncan MacPherson and David Miller, is worth a read. In addition, the book prescribes a disciplined, step-by-step, week-by-week program for executing its recommendations, which, in my experience, significantly enhances the likelihood of implementing them.

By their own admission, Mac-Pherson and Miller love acronyms, so the book is full of them. “STAR” represents the overall 90-day process for elevating your business. In Part 1 of the book, “S” represents “strategic analysis”: determining the gap between where your business is today and where you think you’d like it to be at some point down the road. In Part 2, “T” is for “targets and goals”: setting specific, measurable objectives. In Part 3, “A” outlines the “activities” or tactics you will use to meet your objectives. Finally, in Part 4, “R” is the “reality check”: evaluating progress against the plan.

The “strategic analysis” process, oddly, begins with a look at marketing. While that seems somewhat out of sequence to me, I did like the “loyalty ladder” concept of moving from “suspect” to “prospect” to “customer” to “client” to “advocate.” It nicely illustrates the important notion of deepening and strengthening relationships over time through increased client intimacy.

From a focus on marketing, the book jumps to organizational structure and procedure manuals in the next couple of chapters. To assist in implementation, you are invited (as you are many times throughout the book) to visit the authors’ Web site to download a planning tool or template.

A marketing concept -— the ideal client profile — is reintroduced in the “target” section, with commentary on “rightsizing” your practice to concentrate on your most valuable prospects, or MVPs. We are provided with a brief script for “respectful disassociation” with clients who do not meet your ideal client profile. We are then taken into the realm of the sales process through a “know your client” exercise wrapped up in another acronym, FORM (family, occupation, recreation, message).

The “activities” section includes chapters on creating a client-centred code of conduct and service-level agreements, to establish standards of performance in these important areas. A large portion of this section is devoted to the referral process and offers good advice on branding, positioning, the use of meeting agendas, disclosure, working on a reciprocal basis with other professionals and expressing gratitude — all designed to build on the earlier notion of creating raving advocates for you and your business.

This portion of the book also rebounds into the marketing arena, with a chapter devoted to target marketing through more acronym-based processes, such as AICA (attention, interest, confidence, action) and DRIP (discipline, reform, inform, persist).

The final chapter, the “reality check,” brings us to the end of the STAR action plan. It (again) is built on an acronym, this time conveniently around the book’s title: BREAKTHROUGH. In the interest of space, I won’t elaborate on each letter — suffice it to say that I believe this chapter is intended to motivate us to hold ourselves accountable for the success of our newly defined strategy.

Just as the authors rely on acronyms to organize their recommendations, they also espouse a number of universal “laws of business” that state the obvious. Examples include: the law of optimization (there is always room for improvement); the reality principle (don’t trust your own judgement solely; follow a formal process of evaluation); and the law of attraction (it’s better to attract clients than to chase them).

Overall, my feeling is that Breakthrough Business Devel-opment doesn’t fully deserve the claim in its title. I didn’t see anything that could be described as profound or groundbreaking. It appears to be a “brain dump” by the authors and rather self-promotional. That’s not all bad. They have extensive experience in working with advisors, and there are enough good ideas in the book to warrant spending time looking through them to consider how they might apply to your business.

The content is not very deep and is somewhat disjointed, but those shortcomings are offset by the 15 or so templates and tools that are available on the authors’ Web site. IE