Be armed and ready to make appointments with all of your existing architectural clients with these two ideas. Andrew Torelli discusses how to expand your target markets by leveraging your existing market relationships in today’s BeAdvised.

The Obama administration on Monday released broad new operating rules for state-run health insurance exchanges, which form a key part of the 2010 federal health care reform law that will face landmark Supreme Court hearings in just two weeks.

House Republican leaders are looking for a way to reshape the debate over the administration's new rule on birth control insurance coverage before moving ahead with a bid to nullify the requirement.

What is your firm doing to proactively cultivate centers of influence and gain new business in the process? Florida broker Beverly Beattie shares one easy to follow idea you can incorporate into your firm’s business development strategy today.

Here's a recent roundup of industry accomplishments. Check to see if a colleague is mentioned this week.

Fortune Magazine’s list of the 50 Most Admired Companies only includes one insurer, Berkshire Hathaway, at No. 7. However, the news outlet ranked insurers separately in their own categories: “Property and Casualty,” “Life and Health” and “Health Care: Insurance and Managed Care.”

The odds of being single at some point during retirement are high and present unique challenges for both “ever single” retirees who never married and for those who become “suddenly single” in retirement due to divorce or death of a spouse. In fact, 43% of Americans age 65 and older are single due to divorce, having never married, or the death of a partner.

A change in ranks within the C-suite can often make or break business and personal relationships. In today's BeAdvised, a second-generation executive at an Atlanta brokerage shares first-hand tips to help any company build the next generation of leaders.

Many small business owners are unprepared for retirement, with a third of the women and a quarter of the men in a new survey having no estimate of how much they will need when they retire.

Almost half of men and 46% of women who purchased individual critical illness insurance policies in 2011 were younger than age 45, according to a recent survey.

Every election year brings a certain degree of uncertainty to the financial markets, making life a bit more complicated for financial advisers and clients trying to anticipate how whatever happens in November will impact publicly traded companies, the tax code, Social Security and the full gamut of investment products going forward.

Workplace retirement plan investors who use target-date funds feel more secure about reaching their goals and managing their portfolios than those who did not, a recent study from ING finds.

Here's a recent roundup of industry accomplishments. Check to see if a colleague is mentioned this week.

In a difficult economy, you have to be even more adept at creating value for your clients and their employee population. You need to go beyond being perceived as the point of access to benefits product information and services, and transcend your client's expectations. But that's no small task. How can you do that in these economic conditions when most are being forced to do more with less? Well, the best way we know is to create a multi-year benefits strategic plan. And now is the perfect time of year to initiate such discussions with your existing clients and prospects as well. It is a powerful planning process that will enable you to guide your client's benefits planning for the future.

Voluntary benefits have been a growing trend for almost 15 years. Recent surveys show employee-paid benefits are on the minds of brokers, employers and the workforce alike. According to a 2011 study by LIMRA, 30% of U.S. employers are considering adding a voluntary benefit to replace employer-paid and contributory benefits within the next two years - affecting between 19 million and 45 million employees. These numbers aren't surprising. Even with slight improvement in the U.S. unemployment rate, employers have responded to the poor economy and rising health care costs by making the tough decision to shift the costs of certain benefits to their employees.

Are you still using just a hammer in your benefits practice? Too many benefit brokers have been showing up at the jobsite equipped only with the hammer of health insurance, limiting their ability both to add new revenue and to be consultative and solve other HR problems.

In the two years since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's passage the health care industry has seen a flurry of activity. And much of this activity has been around technology innovation related to health insurance exchanges, but there are other technologies in the works as well. Here is a retrospective on the last two years of technology innovation, which also serves as a good indicator of where technology will likely be going in HIT as it may relate to PPACA.

Let's look at the use of power for selling and properly managing a sales staff. We are definitely talking about transformational leadership with these two applications.Leadership is the use of power and influence to direct the actions of followers toward others to goal achievement. I define power as the ability to influence the behavior of others and resist unwanted influence in return. The existence of either or both does not, however, mean that you will be able influence anyone. That is where the strength of the leader comes in.

Over the last two months I have discussed the use of video and article marketing in growing your business. This month, I am going to focus on public speaking, which is a great complement to the work that you have done during the past two months.

While some people justifiably claim that the defined contribution/401(k) market is mature, there's a school of thought that believes the market is about to go through radical changes. Primarily, a broad-based realization that DC plans will become the main retirement vehicle for the post-baby boom generation, causing greater scrutiny, focus and hopefully innovation for all involved.