About Crossroads Professional Consulting
Crossroads Professional Consulting is a consulting company that specializes in the financial services industry. With over 40 years of experience, Paul Blease founded the company to guide multimillion-dollar financial advisory teams, especially at pivotal moments in their journey. As financial advisory practices evolve from relatively simple sole practitioner business models to sophisticated and complex mega teams, the journey faces many crossroads where the right decisions can lead to the next level of performance, while the wrong ones undermine your control of the enterprise and dramatically hinder your performance. Recognizing how crucial these inflection points can be to you, your team, and your clientele, we have named our enterprise, “Crossroads Professional Consulting”. We are dedicated to helping you navigate these crossroads throughout the evolution of your practice.
Beyond our technical expertise, there’s a deeper layer to our consulting practice. You might have noticed the crossroads imagery comes in the form of a cross. This symbolism is not just metaphorical but the embodiment of our ethos. Drawing from the profound journey of Christ, the crossroads represents those forks in the road where your choices, sacrifices, and faith are tested.
For well over 40 years our approach blends a unique cocktail of profound industry experience, a holistic approach that considers both the enterprise and the practitioners within it, and a spiritual foundation that fully integrates who you are, what you do, and why you do it. This harmonized approach ensures that our council can not only help you with your temporal performance but can also help you integrate a profound purpose in everything you do.
Who We Serve
1. Elite Advisory Teams
My north star has and always will be to help top financial advisors with the challenges and complexities that come with running large enterprises. I believe that our profession when done well, can have extraordinary societal impact and great nobility. However great success brings its own burdens:
- Being responsible for the financial health and stability of multiple generations of clients
- Architecting a structurally sound, systemically driven and technologically refined practice
- Leading and managing a sophisticated group of skilled professionals
… all while navigating unpredictable and often volatile markets. Very few professions are as demanding, nor as potentially rewarding as ours.
2. Branch/Complex Managers
Field leaders have many of the same challenges that face elite advisory teams ie. managing and leading their own teams, with the added responsibility of creating a culture of cohesion and performance within the greater enterprise for which they are responsible. Whether branch/complex managers, regional or divisional directors the culture you establish, the strategic and tactical insights you provide and the personal and professional council you give, can and will have a profound impact on the performance of those to whom you are responsible. Leveraging the core structural components that we use when consulting with our Elite Team clients, we can help you create a structurally sound, systemically driven enterprise, while enhancing your ability to lead those for whom you are responsible.
3. Field Trainers
Field trainers are expected to bring valuable insights and solutions to practitioners that run the gamut from the greenest rookie to the most sophisticated mega team leader. The depth and breadth of knowledge, skills and insights necessary to address these wide-ranging challenges can be truly daunting. Our highly systematized approach, vast array of tools, templates, and white papers can help field trainers dramatically expand their skills, capabilities, and insights. We will help you be able to walk into any office and simply ask, “where does it hurt”, and no matter what the response, provide critical insights and solutions to take that practitioner to the next level of performance
4. Wholesalers
The day of the wholesaler as product sales person died years ago, and in too many cases we simply failed to pronounce last rites. Competition and technology have turned investment products into pure commodities (and AI will radically accelerate this trend). The greatest challenge facing financial advisors is not “running money” but “running businesses”, which have become increasingly complex over the past 25 years. If you can help them create a sound business structure, incorporate coherent and elegant systems, while managing and leading a diverse group of high performance team members, they will beat a path to your door. Walking into an advisor’s office with a research report, mountain chart and marketing brochure may occasionally work with rookie advisors just learning about the industry. But for elite advisors today, it’s all about consulting; walking into their offices without an agenda and simply asking, “where does it hurt”and being equipped, no matter what the answer, to offer important insights and potential solutions. This approach and capability will be the key to remaining relevant both now and into the future.
About The Founder
With over 40 years in the financial services industry, Paul has helmed a successful advisory practice, managed a large complex of offices for Merrill Lynch, created the first Internal training, development, and coaching department exclusively focused on ultra-high-net-worth financial advisory teams for Smith Barney, and finally taking that experience and expertise to build out a high net worth coaching capability with Oppenheimer funds/Invesco helping their hundred person distribution team evolve from sales professionals two business consultants. This multidisciplinary background has given Paul the experience and insights necessary to help practitioners and senior executives working for a Wirehouse, an Independent Firm, an RIA or a large mutual fund company.
