The Project Management Approach to Building a Better Financial Advisory Business

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

In busi­ness and in life, you are con­stantly man­ag­ing projects.  You could break your projects into three categories:

• Per­sonal Projects
• Fam­ily Projects
• Busi­ness Projects

To achieve hap­pi­ness, you must have a good bal­ance between these three projects.  A cou­ple of my friends wrote a great book, Jug­gling Ele­phants, which describes this process really well.

By tak­ing a project man­age­ment approach to each of these cat­e­gories, we can get more done in less time and achieve the cor­rect balance.

As a finan­cial advi­sor, you jug­gle way too many tasks.  One big com­plaint that I have been hear­ing lately is “If I took inven­tory of all of the tasks that I need to com­plete, I would be totally over­whelmed and would not get any of them done.”

Just do the math.  Let’s say you have 100 clients who meet your ideal client pro­file and you are deliv­er­ing a com­pre­hen­sive wealth man­age­ment expe­ri­ence.  To prop­erly exe­cute the strat­egy, you need to review, find solu­tions, imple­ment and monitor:

• Invest­ment
• Retire­ment
• Estate Plan­ning
• Insur­ance or Risk Management
• Tax
• Children’s Edu­ca­tion
• Busi­ness Succession

Some are more com­plex than the oth­ers, but it is safe to say that you are jug­gling a pretty big num­ber of tasks for each client.  Mul­ti­ply by 100!

Your abil­ity to man­age these tasks will deter­mine your level of client sat­is­fac­tion and even­tu­ally your client reten­tion and growth rates for your business.

Advi­sors have tra­di­tion­ally tried to use CRMs to man­age these tasks.  Unfor­tu­nately, it is like try­ing to use a your put­ter for driving.

Here is a step-by-step approach to tak­ing a project man­age­ment approach for man­ag­ing your clients‘ wealth man­age­ment projects:

1. Stop try­ing to do wealth and finan­cial plan­ning in inten­sive multi-hour meet­ings.  It wears both you and your clients out, your clients become over­whelmed and it does not gen­er­ally lead to com­plete imple­men­ta­tion of all aspects of the finan­cial plan.
2. Break you wealth man­age­ment pro­gram into the cat­e­gories above and either adapt your plan­ning soft­ware or develop a dis­cov­ery process for each category.
3. Set up a sched­ule of meet­ings over a 12 to 24 month period for each client with a goal of hav­ing every aspect of the finan­cial or wealth plan fully imple­mented and monitored.
4. Set up a series of Mile­stones to be com­pleted.  A typ­i­cal Mile­stone is com­ple­tion of dis­cov­ery, selec­tion and imple­men­ta­tion of solu­tions or strate­gies and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the best way to mon­i­tor the solu­tions and strategies.
5. In each meet­ing, iden­tify tasks that need to be com­pleted and link them to the Mile­stones.  Assign tasks to an indi­vid­ual – you, a team mem­ber, another pro­fes­sional advi­sor (accoun­tant, estate spe­cial­ist, etc.) or a client and set a due date.  Assign­ing tasks in an orga­nized way will increase client engage­ment and improve satisfaction.
6. Stress to your team mem­bers the impor­tance of com­plet­ing tasks on time and report­ing com­ple­tion sta­tus.  Have daily meet­ings to dis­cuss the project lists and any prob­lems to help team mem­bers to com­plete tasks on time and to everybody’s satisfaction.

By tak­ing a project man­age­ment approach, you will def­i­nitely iden­tify more work for you and your team but you will be able to achieve more in a frac­tion of the time.  Imag­ine that all you need to do each day is to come in to the office, ful­fill your client con­tact and task oblig­a­tions and go home.

We have devel­oped a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion – Client Roadmap to help you man­age this process.  Visit www​.clien​troadmap​.com and watch our 2-minute video on how to how to more effec­tively col­lab­o­rate with your clients.

Get more done, bet­ter sat­isfy your clients and get back on a pos­i­tive growth track.

Bob Simp­son is Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants.  Bob can be reached on his direct line at 905−502−0100, toll free at 866−646−6002 or by e-mail at bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

About Bob Simpson

Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sult­ing has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

Bob Simp­son, pres­i­dent and founder of Syn­chronic­ity has been involved, directly or indi­rectly in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try since 1981. He has been a very suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sor with Nes­bitt Thom­son Inc., a major Cana­dian finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Between 1981 and 1989, he built a busi­ness with more than $120 mil­lion in assets under man­age­ment, was branch man­ager and SVP National Sales for Mid­land Wal­wyn and has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

You can fol­low Bob Simp­son via:

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Tags: Advisory Business, Business Advisors, Business Projects, Business Succession, Children S Education, Client Profile, Client Retention, Client Satisfaction, Correct Balance, Education Business, Family Projects, Investment Retirement, Management Experience, Management Projects, Managing Projects, Personal Projects, Project Management Approach, Retirement Estate, Risk Management, Step Approach, Wealth Management
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