What Facebook can Teach Financial Advisors

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

We all know the Face­book story ….

From a Har­vard dorm room in 2004, in eight years Face­book has changed how much of the world com­mu­ni­cates. In the process, it has cre­ated sub­stan­tial wealth for its founders and early investors. While not yet pub­lic, pur­chases on pri­vate mar­ket­places put its value at $100 billion.

As CEO, Mark Zucker­berg obvi­ously did many things right. But there is one par­tic­u­lar aspect of his approach that was crit­i­cal to Facebook’s suc­cess; and that advi­sors can learn from.

Bet­ter done than perfect:

On the walls at Facebook’s offices are painted four words:

“Bet­ter done than perfect”

As I think about some of my con­ver­sa­tions with advi­sors, I’m struck by how often those words would help advi­sors break the log­jam of per­fec­tion­ism that pre­vents them from get­ting things done in their practice.

Some com­mon examples:

• The advi­sor who spends dozens of hours fine tun­ing his finan­cial plan­ning process to get it exactly right before using it with his clients to the point that it never actu­ally gets in front of clients
• The advi­sor who goes through draft after draft of his or her newslet­ter per­fect­ing the words; but is only able to sum­mon up the energy to do this once a year
• The advi­sor who invests immense amounts of time research­ing the best way to approach accoun­tants read­ing arti­cles, lis­ten­ing to pre­sen­ta­tions by con­sul­tants and talk­ing to other advi­sors, but runs out of steam when it comes to mak­ing the plan happen

We’ve all been guilty of per­fec­tion­ism spend­ing an inor­di­nate amount of time try­ing to get things exactly 100% right, when 90%, 80% or even 70% would be suf­fi­cient to get the job done.

Bear in mind this isn’t always the case. If I’m hav­ing heart surgery, the stakes are high enough that I want my sur­geon to obsess about get­ting things 100% right. But when it comes to get­ting out a quar­terly newslet­ter and many of the other things advi­sors do in their day, not so much.

Imple­ment­ing the hacker way:

Ear­lier this year, fil­ings to reg­u­la­tors included a let­ter from Zucker­berg to poten­tial investors, in which he described Facebook’s core val­ues. One of those val­ues is some­thing called “the hacker way.”

While hack­ing has come to have neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions involv­ing tak­ing down com­puter sys­tems, Zucker­berg describes hack­ing as a mind­set of exper­i­men­ta­tion. Doing things quickly and inex­pen­sively as a vehi­cle to test the bound­aries of what can be done, and then striv­ing to con­stantly improve and per­fect ini­tia­tives once in the field. In fact, some of Facebook’s most impor­tant fea­tures have emerged from that mind­set of experimentation.

July 1 is two months away; not only does it rep­re­sent the begin­ning of sum­mer, it also marks the mid– point of the year, so you’ve got 60 days before 2012 is half way over.

If you haven’t achieved all of your goals for 2012 (and who among us has?), con­sider apply­ing Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of “Bet­ter done than per­fect” in your busi­ness. Pick one ini­tia­tive that you’ve run into road­blocks on because you haven’t had the time to exe­cute it to a suf­fi­ciently high stan­dard. Then think about whether tak­ing a “just do it” approach might break the log­jam and begin the process of iter­a­tion and improve­ment to get that ini­tia­tive off the draw­ing boards; and into the mar­ket­place and help move your busi­ness forward.

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Tags: Accountants, Amount Of Time, Bear In Mind, Ceo Mark, Dorm Room, Facebook, Financial Advisors, Financial Planning, Founders, Heart Surgery, Immense Amounts, Logjam, Many Things, Mark Zuckerberg, Perfectionism, Private Marketplaces, Public Purchases, Quarterly Newsletter, Reading Articles, Substantial Wealth
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