Do You Have the Elements of a High-Performing Business?

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

by Norm Trainor, The Covenant Group

March 7, 2013

When sur­vey­ing your busi­ness, do you assess the indi­vid­ual com­po­nents of oper­a­tions, mar­ket­ing, sales and client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment? Or do you sim­ply look at it as a whole?To get a clear sense of which aspects of your com­pany are per­form­ing well and which ones need to be closely mon­i­tored and improved, it is bet­ter to inspect the five ele­ments that cre­ate a high-performing busi­ness. As I explain in The Entre­pre­neur­ial Jour­ney, these are your vision, strat­egy, struc­ture, sys­tems and skills (the peo­ple who make the busi­ness run). It is vital that you under­stand the inter­de­pen­dent rela­tion­ship of these five ele­ments and that you give them all the atten­tion they deserve.With­out vision, there can be no direction

Lay­ing out your vision for the busi­ness will give the com­pany a focus but will also give you a greater pur­pose to work every day than merely mak­ing money. Greed is not a healthy or sus­tain­able moti­va­tor. When you have estab­lished the pic­ture of what you want to achieve through the orga­ni­za­tion, you will be able to make all future deci­sions in con­text of that vision. Each time you face a major choice, you will weigh it in terms of how it advances or detracts from your men­tal pic­ture of the business.The vision will serve as a foun­da­tion on which you build strat­egy. What will you have to do to achieve what you want the busi­ness to become? What resources and skills do you have on hand in order to exe­cute the plan? The answers to these ques­tions will help you cre­ate a busi­ness plan​.As you grad­u­ally exe­cute each point in your strat­egy, you will see your com­pany begin to grow. Expand­ing from a busi­ness of one to an orga­ni­za­tion of many dif­fer­ent employ­ees and mov­ing parts will require you to cre­ate a struc­ture and a hier­ar­chy. Define every role within the com­pany and map out how each person’s respon­si­bil­i­ties relates to those of other team members.With the increased num­ber of peo­ple and processes, it will be nec­es­sary to adopt sys­tems that sup­port the var­i­ous func­tions in the com­pany. Even­tu­ally, you will have a set of poli­cies and tasks related to hir­ing, train­ing, client ser­vice, infor­ma­tion man­age­ment, billing and much more.The final ele­ment, skills, will develop and become stronger as you hire more peo­ple and begin to nar­row your practice’s areas of spe­cial­iza­tion. Rec­og­niz­ing the intri­cate rela­tion­ship between all five of these com­po­nents will help your busi­ness grow and enjoy long-term suc​cess​.As founder, pres­i­dent and CEO of The Covenant Group, Norm Trainor is often seen as the face of the com­pany and its lead­ing finan­cial advi­sor train­ing pro­grams. He has penned sev­eral best-selling books, arti­cles and other works with entre­pre­neurs and finan­cial advi­sors to show them how they can become more valu­able to their clients, boost pro­duc­tiv­ity and, ulti­mately, achieve the suc­cess they desire.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Year-end Checklist for Improved Performance in 2013

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Consulting

Now that we have hit the half way point of Novem­ber, it is a great time to start think­ing about how to improve per­for­mance in 2013 and make it a year to get on a path to achiev­ing your per­sonal and busi­ness goals.

The end of a year or the begin­ning of a new year are times for reflec­tion and plan­ning and often­times result in New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions.  It is the time of the year that peo­ple join gyms or weigh loss pro­grams to get into shape and hire coaches to improve per­sonal and busi­ness performance.

It is a very impor­tant time for your busi­ness as your clients are in the state of mind to engage in review­ing progress and plan­ning for the New Year.  The next cou­ple of months is a great time to do tax plan­ning and present an oppor­tu­nity to expand your busi­ness net­work by meet­ing with your clients’ accountants.

Over the next cou­ple of months, the theme of my blogs will focus on steps you need to take to pre­pare your­self and your busi­ness for improved per­for­mance in 2013.

Plan­ning should be a sim­ple three step process, in which you answer these three questions:

1. Where are you now?
2. Where do you plan to be in the future?
3. How do you plan to get there?

If you always know the answer to these ques­tions, you will be able to live your life with very lit­tle stress and make good decisions.

Year-end or Begin­ning of New Year Plan­ning For Clients

Think about this when you work with clients.  To help your clients to iden­tify where they are now, you can pro­duce a sim­ple net worth state­ment and what we call an Estate Net Worth State­ment.  A Net Worth State­ment iden­ti­fies what you are worth today and an Estate Net Worth State­ment iden­ti­fies what you are worth today should you die.  Great way to demon­strate that some clients need addi­tional life insurance.

If you make the cre­ation of a Net Worth State­ment an annual event, it can be rel­a­tively sim­ple.  I have heard from many advi­sors that col­lect­ing the nec­es­sary data is like pulling teeth and this makes pro­duc­tion of a Net Worth State­ment too dif­fi­cult.  Where there is a will there is a way.

There are a cou­ple of ways of doing this:

You can build a spread­sheet that can be pre­sented to your clients in either elec­tronic or paper for­mat.  Make sure that you pop­u­late the work­sheet with all infor­ma­tion relat­ing to accounts that they hold with you. (Note:  Many clients are not com­fort­able com­plet­ing spreadsheets)

You can use a pro­gram like Pre­ciseFP.  It is designed to col­lect data and inte­grates with a grow­ing list of CRMs and finan­cial plan­ning soft­ware pro­grams.  Note:  Pre­cise FP’s is US-based so the cal­cu­la­tions may not be appro­pri­ate for Cana­dian advisors.

• A pro­gram that I really like is Fluid Sur­veys.  Below is a video that dis­cusses how to inte­grate Fluid Sur­veys with Sales­force.  I know a num­ber of firms have adopted Sales­force recently and this might give you some ideas on how to make Sales­force a more pow­er­ful tool for your busi­ness.  If you do not use Sales­force, it is still worth watch­ing this 20-minute video to see how to col­lect data to gen­er­ate a Net Worth State­ment.  (Yeah, I know it is too long to watch)

Note:  We are in no way asso­ci­ated with either firm men­tioned above.  Just shar­ing pro­grams that we like.

Year-end or Begin­ning of New Year Plan­ning For Your Business

For your busi­ness, it is also a good time to reflect on the year just passed.  If you have a plan for 2012, you have a base­line (like the net worth state­ment) and the review is more pow­er­ful.  In your annual review, you should look at the fol­low­ing to iden­tify strengths and weak­nesses of your business.

• Cal­cu­late your growth rate for 2012.  You may be sat­is­fied with know­ing your growth rate, but I would go deeper.  I would like to the num­bers inside your growth rate.  Here is a good breakdown:
• Your growth rate for 2012
• Updated AUM com­pound growth rates for 3-years, 5-years and 10-years if you have kept this data
• Num­ber of new clients, aver­age AUM per client and total assets attracted in 2012
• Num­ber of clients, aver­age AUM per client and total assets of clients who left your prac­tice and the rea­son they moved
• The source of all new clients, includ­ing such cat­e­gories as client refer­rals, pro­fes­sional refer­rals, per­sonal refer­rals and other busi­ness devel­op­ment pro­grams you con­ducted in 2012
• Per­for­mance sta­tis­tics of your model port­fo­lios in 2012 and how this affected your longer-term per­for­mance numbers

I know that I am get­ting a bit geeky on you and that most of you have not kept these num­bers.  If that is the case, jot down your num­bers for the end of 2012 so you have a base­line on which to judge your per­for­mance in 2013.

If you don’t keep sta­tis­tics like this for your busi­ness, it is dif­fi­cult to make good deci­sions for your busi­ness.  How do you know what is work­ing and what is not working?

These sta­tis­tics will help you assess such things as:

Your 1-year, 3-year, 5-year and 10-year growth rates tell you how your busi­ness is grow­ing.  Your growth rate will help you to project where your busi­ness will be in 3 to 5 years.  A $50 mil­lion AUM book will grow to to $57,881,250 in 3-years at 5% com­pounded, to $66,550,000 at 10% and $86,440,000 at 20%.

The num­ber and qual­ity of refer­rals that you gen­er­ated in 2012 helps you deter­mine how your clients judge the qual­ity of your client rela­tion­ship, finan­cial plan­ning and invest­ment pro­grams.  You can bury your head in the sand and believe that these sys­tems are work­ing great but if you are not gen­er­at­ing client refer­rals, they are not work­ing effectively.

Num­ber and qual­ity of client refer­rals also tell you how much time and finan­cial resources you need to spend on busi­ness devel­op­ment activ­i­ties.  If your goal is to attract 10 new clients who meet your ideal client pro­file (let’s use $500,000 in investable assets for this exam­ple) in an aver­age year and you get 5 through client refer­rals, then you have to build a busi­ness devel­op­ment plan to attract an addi­tional five ideal clients.  Refer­rals are the cheap­est way to attract new clients.

Invest­ment per­for­mance is impor­tant in attract­ing and retain­ing new clients.  Year-end is a great time to review the stocks, bonds, ETFs and mutual funds that you hold.  You should also con­duct a com­plete analy­sis of your model port­fo­lios, invest­ment processes and invest­ment man­agers.  See my arti­cle on Invest­ment Focus Days.

I will go deeper on these con­cepts in future arti­cles in this series.

If you have any ques­tions, please feel free to con­tact me directly.

Bob Simp­son

Tele­phon:  905–502-0100

E-mail:  bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca

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Practice Essentials: Investment Management Focus Days

Monday, July 30th, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chroncity Per­for­mance Consulting

One of the goals that you should pur­sue is to opti­mize the time you spend in client-facing activ­i­ties.  We define client-facing activ­i­ties as time spent man­ag­ing exist­ing (ideal) client rela­tion­ships or in busi­ness devel­op­ment activ­i­ties to attract new (ideal) clients to your business.

Some indus­try stud­ies report that advi­sors who spend in excess of 60% of their time in client-facing activ­i­ties earn three to five times the income of those who do not.  This study also reported that only about 9% of advi­sors spend in excess of 60% of their time in client-facing activity.

If you study the industry’s most suc­cess­ful advi­sors, you will find they have good processes and teams to allow them to focus on man­ag­ing their client rela­tion­ships and build­ing their per­sonal, busi­ness and client networks.

One of my fond mem­o­ries of being an advi­sor was when I was out of my office and was stopped by three advi­sors in the branch who wanted to talk.  My assis­tant Sheri got up from her desk, approached the group, grabbed me by my sleeve and pulled me back to my office.  I asked her what that was about and she told me “I get a per­cent­age of your rev­enue.  When you are talk­ing with other advi­sors, you are not talk­ing with clients and you are not mak­ing any money.  Get back to work!”

Invest­ment man­age­ment is one of the core sta­bi­liz­ers of your busi­ness, you need to man­age the process so you make good deci­sions and rec­om­men­da­tions.  At the same time you need to be effi­cient so that you do not take away time from client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment and busi­ness development.

Here is a process that I think you should con­sider:  Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Days.

I have writ­ten in pre­vi­ous arti­cles about the inabil­ity of humans to multi-task.  The brain is sim­ply not wired to do more than one thing at a time.  So, by allo­cat­ing time specif­i­cally for invest­ment research and report­ing, you will get more done in less time.

Even more impor­tantly, the process of devel­op­ing port­fo­lios and client reports will help you orga­nize your thoughts and help you pro­duce bet­ter client results.

If you are a reg­u­lar reader, you may have seen my arti­cle enti­tled “A Sim­ple Method to Improve Your Clients’ Invest­ment Per­for­mance”.  In this arti­cle, I dis­cussed a process called Purpose-Based Asset Man­age­ment.  You can read the arti­cle for a full expla­na­tion, but the con­cept is help­ing clients to iden­tify a series of “buck­ets” rep­re­sent­ing future uses of money, iden­ti­fy­ing how much money will be required in each “bucket” and esti­mat­ing a time­frame for each “bucket”.  Then port­fo­lios, invest­ment pol­icy and report­ing processes will be devel­oped for short, medium and long-term port­fo­lios, cor­re­spond­ing to the “buckets”.

On your first Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Day, you should develop a series of port­fo­lios for a vari­ety of time­frames and risk tol­er­ances.  You may want to develop port­fo­lios for tax­able and non-taxable accounts.  Your goal should be to develop port­fo­lios that are appro­pri­ate for 80% of the cases that you encounter.

You will be pre­sented from time-to-time with cases for which there is not a fit within your port­fo­lios.  In these cases, you should review each new port­fo­lio to assess whether it should become one of your model portfolios.

Once your port­fo­lios have been devel­oped, you should back test them to judge volatil­ity and per­for­mance against bench­marks.  Then, you should pack­age the port­fo­lios so they are in a client-ready for­mat.  I would sug­gest that you cre­ate elec­tronic (pdf) ver­sions so you can e-mail them.

The next step is to write a quar­terly invest­ment report in which you dis­cuss such things as:

• Per­for­mance for the past quarter
• Out­look for the next year

Keep it sim­ple.  I have been involved in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try for over thirty years and still don’t under­stand some of the reports that are sent out to clients.  Write your own.  It helps you to orga­nize your thoughts.  You may strug­gle with the first cou­ple but once you get in a groove, it gets a lot easier.

To com­plete all this work ini­tially, you will prob­a­bly need more than one day, but it will take much less time to update your port­fo­lios that to build them the first time.

On the other hand, this process will save you hours of time.  Rather than devel­op­ing port­fo­lios from scratch, you can sim­ply pull your port­fo­lio reports from a shelf (or print them from your com­puter).  You may even cre­ate a pre­sen­ta­tion binder (hard copy or elec­tronic) to dis­cuss with clients.  Clients love being given choices, espe­cially when they are easy to understand.

Make sure to stay focused – your ulti­mate goal is to spend a sin­gle day per quar­ter on invest­ment port­fo­lio and report­ing so you can spend more than 60% of your time in client-facing activ­i­ties.  Pre-book these days a year in advance.  Arrange with whole­salers or other indi­vid­u­als with whom you would like to col­lab­o­rate to meet on your Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Days.

I real­ize that if you man­age your own port­fo­lios that it is vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to do all the nec­es­sary work in one day per quar­ter.  It is dif­fi­cult to man­age invest­ments rather than work­ing with invest­ment man­agers and break through the 60% client-facing thresh­old.  Model port­fo­lios will def­i­nitely help your cause.

We are prepar­ing to launch a new ser­vice to help you man­age your invest­ment processes.  Should you decide to imple­ment a pro­gram, like the one above, we will help you nav­i­gate through set-up and your invest­ment processes and port­fo­lios.  Then, we can, at your option, meet with you on your quar­terly Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Days to dis­cuss your port­fo­lios and reporting.

You can par­tic­i­pate in our new pro­gram, Invest­ment Processes and Port­fo­lios, based on your needs, pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties.  A vari­ety of options are avail­able from pay-by-the-minute to pre-booked ses­sions of as lit­tle as 15-minutes.

We hold you account­able, chal­lenge you on your port­fo­lios and strate­gies and proof your report­ing.  You iden­tify your needs and we help you.

To dis­cuss how this pro­gram can help you build or man­age your invest­ment man­age­ment pro­gram,  please con­tact Bob Simp­son at 905−502−0100 or bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

Bob Simp­son

Direct Line:  905−502−0100

Toll Free:      866−646−6002

E-mail:  bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca

Text Mes­sage:  905−502−0100

Web­site:  www​.syn​chronic​ity​.ca

Join our Dis­cus­sion Group on LinkedIn:  www​.linkedin​.com/​g​r​o​u​p​s​/​A​d​v​i​s​o​r​-​C​o​l​l​a​b​o​r​a​t​i​o​n​-​4​2​4​8​7​2​5​/​a​b​out

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Building a $100 Million Business – Step 1

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Consulting

The process of set­ting both per­sonal and busi­ness goals is an impor­tant step in build­ing a suc­cess­ful busi­ness.  If you do some research about the best ways to set goals, you will come across the SMART acronym.  SMART goals are:

S – Spe­cific
M – Mea­sur­able
A – Attain­able
R– Rel­e­vant
T – Time Bound

Goals give you clar­ity and help you to make bet­ter decisions.

We call our process for set­ting goals the “Sus­tain­able Growth Curve”.  The “Sus­tain­able Growth Curve” is a series of three-year bench­marks that lead to a longer-term goal.

In this arti­cle, we will look at the devel­op­ment of a “Sus­tain­able Growth Curve” for an advi­sor with a long-term goal of build­ing a $100 mil­lion AUM busi­ness.  In a future arti­cle, we will apply the same con­cept to a busi­ness that has achieved $100 mil­lion in AUM and is look­ing to grow the busi­ness to $250 million.

One impor­tant fac­tor in achiev­ing sus­tain­able growth in your busi­ness is your abil­ity to keep your busi­ness SIMPLE.  Com­plex­ity slows growth and increases the demands on the resources of your busi­ness – time and money.

There are two mod­els that you can use to build a $100 mil­lion busi­ness:  the Solo Model or the Ensem­ble Model.  In a Solo Model, you have a sin­gle pro­fes­sional with a sup­port team; and in the Ensem­ble Model, you have mul­ti­ple pro­fes­sion­als.  A sin­gle pro­fes­sional can build $100 mil­lion prac­tice but busi­nesses with more than $100 mil­lion will require addi­tional pro­fes­sion­als to allow growth to con­tinue.  I will dis­cuss the Ensem­ble Model in more detail when I dis­cuss the process of grow­ing a $250 mil­lion business.

In this exam­ple, we will look at a typ­i­cal advi­sor who has achieved $31.25 mil­lion of AUM and has a longer-term goal of build­ing a $100 mil­lion busi­ness.  I like to set aggres­sive tar­gets and build plans to achieve them.  So let’s set a goal to grow at a sus­tain­able com­pound annual growth rate of 24%.  At this growth rate, you will dou­ble your AUM every three years.

So in this exam­ple, we have a longer-term goal of $100 mil­lion in six years with a bench­mark of $50 mil­lion in three-years.

Next, we need to develop much more spe­cific goals for our $50 mil­lion bench­mark, as this will become our focus for the next three years or until our goal is achieved, whichever comes first. We like to start by exam­in­ing the results of a client seg­men­ta­tion analy­sis and the devel­op­ment of an ideal client pro­file.  By seg­ment­ing your clients into two cat­e­gories:  Ideal Clients and Less Than Ideal Clients, you have a great start­ing point.

If you focus exclu­sively on Ideal Clients, you will be much more effi­cient and will reach your next bench­mark much quicker.  Less than ideal clients will slow your growth.  They are like junk food – you know it keeps you from main­tain­ing a healthy weight but you eat it any­way and live with the consequences.

Let’s look at the busi­ness dis­cussed above: $31.25 mil­lion in AUM and 215 fam­ily rela­tion­ships.  When we com­pleted a seg­men­ta­tion analy­sis, we found that there were 75 (35%) fam­ily rela­tion­ships aver­ag­ing $333,333 to make up $25 mil­lion and 140 fam­ily rela­tion­ships aver­ag­ing less than $45,000 for the other $6,125,000.

Note of Inter­est:  When we started doing seg­men­ta­tion 14 years ago, we found that the Pareto Prin­ci­ple (20% of clients held 80% of AUM) was the norm.  Today, we find that it is closer to 35% of clients hold 80% of AUM.

Note of Inter­est 2:  Some stud­ies show that 20 – 35% of clients gen­er­ate 100% of prof­its.  This is due pri­mar­ily to resources added to prac­tices to ser­vice small clients.

I like to say that your ideal clients are the peo­ple who will help you achieve your busi­ness goals and that your less than ideal clients will act as an anchor to slow your growth.

I don’t like to spend a lot of time on client seg­men­ta­tion, as it is an old story.  On the other hand, I did seg­men­ta­tion when I was an advi­sor and dou­bled my busi­ness in twelve months so I am a big believer.

So, our start­ing point in this exam­ple is 75 ideal clients aver­ag­ing $333,333.  To grow to your next bench­mark of $50 mil­lion, this advi­sor chose to add 25 new clients (net) that meet your ideal client pro­file and bring his aver­age AUM up to $500,000.

There are two parts to achiev­ing this:  (1) attract 25 new clients and (2) expand busi­ness with exist­ing clients.  Some of this growth may come from upgrad­ing less than ideal client sta­tus to ideal client status.

Note:  The major dri­ver of both the inter­nal growth (grow­ing exist­ing client assets) and attract­ing new clients (through client refer­rals) is deliv­er­ing con­sis­tently supe­rior client experiences.

This advi­sor set a goal of attract­ing half his tar­get of 25 new clients over three years through client refer­rals and half through busi­ness devel­op­ment strate­gies and tactics.

Your Sus­tain­able Growth Curve is sim­ply the num­ber of ideal clients and aver­age AUM per client today, plus a series of three-year tar­gets through to your ulti­mate goal.  The fol­low­ing table is an exam­ple, based on a 24% growth rate:

It is SIMPLE, passes the SMART test and keeps you focused.

Once you have set your Sus­tain­able Growth Curve goals, you set your sights on reach­ing your first mile­stone.  You will need to estab­lish a plan to man­age client rela­tion­ships that will gen­er­ate high lev­els of client sat­is­fac­tion, and a busi­ness devel­op­ment plan to build your client, per­sonal and busi­ness net­works.  These plans should only include activ­i­ties to attract the num­ber and qual­ity of clients in your Sus­tain­able Growth Curve.  The more dis­ci­plined you are in being true to your client accep­tance guide­lines, the sooner you will arrive at your milestone.

Most advi­sors do not have busi­ness plans because they are too much trou­ble to develop and they just col­lect dust sit­ting on your desks.  This approach is very sim­ple and allows you the flex­i­bil­ity to inno­vate your client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment and busi­ness devel­op­ment strate­gies and tac­tics as you strive to achieve your goals.

Under this approach, you set your goals for num­ber of ideal clients and aver­age AUM per ideal client, develop and imple­ment your tac­tics and strate­gies and then get to work.  When you hit your bench­mark, whether it be in one, two or three years, you sim­ply refo­cus on your next bench­mark, develop new strate­gies and tac­tics and get back to work.

To visu­al­ize how this approach will work, imag­ine your busi­ness if you only worked with your ideal clients.  Think of all the time (your most valu­able resource) you would free up.  Maybe you can reduce your expenses because you have hired peo­ple to deal with 215 fam­i­lies.  Now you only have 75.

Real­lo­cate some of your time from ser­vic­ing less than ideal clients to improv­ing the client expe­ri­ence of your ideal clients, some to busines devel­op­ment and some to spend­ing more time with your fam­ily or pur­su­ing your per­sonal goals.

This one sim­ple step can be the key that unlocks your growth potential.

I enjoy hear­ing from peo­ple who read my arti­cles by phone, e-mail or text mes­sage.  I respond to all inquiries the same day.  If you have a prob­lem and would like to dis­cuss it with some­body, I would wel­come your call.  I enjoy help­ing peo­ple solve prob­lems and build more suc­cess­ful businesses.

Bob Simp­son

Direct Line:  905−502−0100

Toll Free:      866−646−6002

E-mail:  bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca

Text Mes­sage:  905−502−0100

Web­site:  www​.syn​chronic​ity​.ca

Join our Dis­cus­sion Group on LinkedIn:  www​.linkedin​.com/​g​r​o​u​p​s​/​A​d​v​i​s​o​r​-​C​o​l​l​a​b​o​r​a​t​i​o​n​-​4​2​4​8​7​2​5​/​a​b​out

Bio:  www​.syn​chronic​ity​.ca/​a​b​out

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Tags: 100 Million, Acronym, Aum, Benchmarks, Bob Simpson, Business Goals, Business Step, Business Time, Clarity, Complexity, Compound Annual Growth Rate, Decisions, Growth Curve, Long Term Goal, Setting Goals, Smart Goals, Step 1, Successful Business, Sustainable Growth, Synchronicity, Targets, Time And Money
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Getting Prospects to Make Faster Decisions

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

One of the biggest frus­tra­tions for advi­sors is the amount of dither­ing that prospects do — some­times it feels like it takes for­ever for peo­ple to make a decision.

Or you’ll have a really good meet­ing with a prospect, you agree to send them some infor­ma­tion as a follow-up and then prospects won’t return your calls.

There are a num­ber of rea­sons for this. Peo­ple are busy. Often they’re gen­uinely unsure whether life with you is going to be bet­ter than where they are now. Iner­tia is a pow­er­ful force — for some investors, it’s just eas­ier to stay where they are.

And often the harder that you try to accel­er­ate the process, the more prospec­tive clients get their backs up.

As a result, you need to have three strate­gies in place

1.     Min­i­mize pressure:

The chal­lenge when talk­ing to a prospec­tive client is to com­mu­ni­cate that you’d like to work with them but that you don’t need to work with them — you need to allow the con­ver­sa­tion to evolve at a com­fort­able pace. The moment you con­vey anx­i­ety or even a trace amount of des­per­a­tion for the busi­ness, your chances go way down.

One way to do that is to have lots of prospects in the hop­per. If you have five prospects, inevitably you’ll feel pres­sure when talk­ing to one of those five.

If you have fifty five prospects, much less so.

2.     Cre­ate momentum

Recently I fea­tured an arti­cle by a US advi­sor coach out­lin­ing a four meet­ing process to con­vert prospects to clients.

Whether your process when meet­ing with prospects is two, three or four meet­ings, you need to try to close each meet­ing by set­ting up the next one, ide­ally in the next cou­ple of weeks. You need to try to build an appro­pri­ate level of momen­tum into prospect meet­ings, with­out cre­at­ing pressure

So if a prospect asks you to send infor­ma­tion, if it’s a sig­nif­i­cant prospect, I’d try to set up a time to briefly review that mate­r­ial face to face. The prob­lem is that mail­ing or email­ing infor­ma­tion after a meet­ing typ­i­cally doesn’t add to momen­tum, in fact it often reduces it.

Instead of email­ing infor­ma­tion, I ‘d say some­thing like: “I’ve found that the best way to cover this kind of mate­r­ial is in per­son. I won­der if we could set up 20 to 30 min­utes the week after next to review this. We could do it at my office or if more con­ve­nient I’ve got a meet­ing in this area a week from Fri­day morning.”

3.     Com­mu­ni­cate scarcity

Let’s sup­pose that you’ve met with a prospect, had a good meet­ing and then they don’t respond to your voice mails and emails.

At that point, you could call the prospect and leave a voice mail along these lines:

Hi Jim, it’s Dan Richards. Sorry we haven’t been able to connect.

I have capac­ity for six new clients in the next quar­ter. After our last meet­ing I thought we’d work well together and you might be some­one I could help.

It sounds like you’re busy right now … I’ll touch base in about three months. Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to talk in the meantime.

This says you’re busy too. It lets the prospect know that you’re inter­ested but not des­per­ate. And whether or not the prospect calls you back, you’ve set the stage for your next con­tact in 90 days.

We have to accept that prospects will make deci­sions in their own time­frame, not ours … but that doesn’t mean we can’t do things to help the process along.  The next time you’re talk­ing to a prospect, con­sider try­ing to min­i­mize pres­sure, develop momen­tum or com­mu­ni­cate scarcity — and see if that helps move the prospect to a faster decision.

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Tags: Anxiety, Coach, Decisions, Desperation, Face To Face, Frustrations, Hopper, Inertia, Investors, Momentum, Pace, People, Prospective Client, Prospective Clients, Prospects
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Dan Ariely: Are we really in control of our decisions?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Behav­ioral econ­o­mist Dan Ariely, the author of Pre­dictably Irra­tional, uses clas­sic visual illu­sions and his own coun­ter­in­tu­itive (and some­times shock­ing) research find­ings to show how we’re not as ratio­nal as we think when we make decisions.

Click plaly to watch:

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Tags: Control, Counterintuitive, Decisions, Economist, Research Findings, Visual Illusions
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Making Yourself Referable

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

The fol­low­ing is based on one of Norm Trainor’s clients, Tom Perrone.

How do you feel when you meet some­one who just nat­u­rally makes you feel at ease? There are peo­ple who seem to have the gift of engen­der­ing trust. Tom Per­rone is one of those peo­ple. One of the things I have learned in work­ing with Tom is that his abil­ity to make peo­ple feel com­fort­able is based upon two things: 1. Effort, and 2. Skills. Tom really makes an effort to ensure that the peo­ple he meets feel at ease and safe. Over the years, he has honed skills that he applies in a seem­ingly effort­less way in his inter­ac­tions with others.

Tom focuses on the Seniors Mar­ket. One of his core val­ues is that seniors feel safe. It is impor­tant to him that his clients feel safe finan­cially and emo­tion­ally. The core of his Value Propo­si­tion is that his clients make the right deci­sions long term. Tom has been known to say “I would like a nickel for every dol­lar of com­mis­sion I gave up to do the right thing.” Tom takes the Long View. It starts when he meets a prospec­tive client for the first time. He focuses on get­ting to know them through ask­ing feel­ing ques­tions. Tom under­stands that peo­ple treat facts as fac­tors, but make deci­sions based upon feel­ings. All deci­sions are val­ues based.

The ini­tial meet­ing is a Dis­cov­ery i.e. an in-depth explo­ration of what is impor­tant to the client(s). He fol­lows up each of these meet­ings with a hand­writ­ten Thank You card in which he reit­er­ates what they want in life. Later, many clients tell Tom that this per­sonal touch affirmed their deci­sion to become a client. Tom includes per­sonal notes at each stage of the client inter­ac­tion e.g. before send­ing the Engage­ment Agree­ment, he sends a per­sonal card. If a client or fam­ily mem­ber gets sick, Tom will send a per­sonal note. He believes in small acts of kind­ness. Clients who have been sick will receive tick­ets to go to the movies and have a night out. As a result, his clients feel very well treated.

After each meet­ing, Tom asks his clients to com­plete a brief Sur­vey. In the Sur­vey, he high­lights that his busi­ness is refer­ral based. A sheet is included where they can add the names of peo­ple whom Tom would ben­e­fit from meet­ing. In some instances, clients will include eight to ten names. Tom assures his clients that the peo­ple whom they refer will always be in con­trol of whether or not they talk to him. Then, a let­ter with an arti­cle of inter­est goes out to each refer­ral. His sec­re­tary includes a flyer that says if they do not want to receive this infor­ma­tion, they will not be sent any­thing fur­ther. Every­thing that goes out includes a ref­er­ence to the per­son who rec­om­mended them. Each refer­ral receives 8–10 high qual­ity let­ters or emails a year. Four of them are unique newslet­ters that include recipes, sto­ries about clients and arti­cles of inter­est to seniors. The intent is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the newslet­ter from the typ­i­cal finan­cial piece that advi­sors send out.

Tom believes that if you pro­vide peo­ple with good infor­ma­tion and stay in touch over a three to four year period, peo­ple will expe­ri­ence a Trig­ger Event that will lead them to call and book an appoint­ment. Recently, a prospect whom Tom had in his sys­tem for over three years, sold his busi­ness and called Tom for help in man­ag­ing the new wealth. Through ran­dom acts of kind­ness and thought­ful ges­tures, prospec­tive clients get a feel for Tom as a warm and car­ing human being. Recently, Tom sent a get well card to a prospect recov­er­ing from back surgery. The cou­ple called and soon after, became clients.

Each quar­ter, Tom will iden­tify 50 clients and send them a sur­vey. The incen­tive to com­plete the sur­vey is par­tic­i­pa­tion in a draw. The prize could be a $100 gift cer­tifi­cate for din­ner at a restau­rant of their choice, tick­ets to the the­atre or a sport­ing event, etc. Typ­i­cally, he gets a 50% response rate. Just last week, he received 18 refer­rals from a recent client sur­vey. Over the last year, Tom spent more time focused on clients. He hand­picks two or three clients a week to take for lunch or din­ner. Each client is given a sur­vey to com­plete. Tom has learned that it is less stress­ful for every­body if his prospects do not feel as if they are being solicited.

Tom’s goal is to add 150–200 intro­duc­tions per year to his DRIP sys­tem. At any point in time, he will have 250–300 prospects receiv­ing infor­ma­tion. The impor­tant thing to note is that Tom has a sys­tem that con­sis­tently gen­er­ates 15–20 new clients per year. He calls this con­cept “Friends help­ing Friends”.

Norm Trainor is the founder of The Covenant Group, a com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in prac­tice devel­op­ment for advi­sors. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, visit his Web site at www​.covenant​group​.com.

Fol­low The Covenant Group at:

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Tags: Acts Of Kindness, Client Interaction, Core Values, Decisions, Depth Exploration, Discovery, Do The Right Thing, Family Member, Feelings, Nickel, Norm Trainor, Perrone, Personal Card, Personal Note, Personal Notes, Personal Touch, Prospective Client, Seniors, Small Acts Of Kindness, Value Proposition
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Structuring Your Day For Maximum Productivity

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Two things go into mak­ing our days pro­duc­tive — the first is what we do and the sec­ond is how we do it.

In recent con­ver­sa­tions with advi­sors, a num­ber have begun using a sim­ple idea to dra­mat­i­cally increase the return they get on their day, by ensur­ing that they’re focus­ing on high return activities.The first thing to mak­ing your time in the office pro­duc­tive is being inten­tional, step­ping back at the start of the week and ask­ing what is the high­est and best use of this week as a whole and each day within this week.

I’ve worked with some advi­sors recently who have begun spend­ing 15 or 20 inutes plan­ning the week ahead, iden­ti­fy­ing the biggest pri­or­i­ties. Some do this end of the day Fri­day, oth­ers on Sat­ur­day or Sunday.

Just by doing that, advi­sors tell me that they find their week has greater focus.

The other key to pro­duc­tiv­ity is build­ing con­sis­tent rou­tines into your sched­ule, using the tried and true approach of time blocking.

Rou­tine sim­pli­fies our lives — with­out rou­tine, we’d all have to make so many indi­vid­ual deci­sions we’d spend most of our time decid­ing what to do rather than doing it.

Some of the most suc­cess­ful advi­sors I know have very con­sis­tent rou­tines. Each day looks pretty much the same — as long as the rou­tine is one that sup­ports the right activ­ity, it can boost our pro­duc­tiv­ity dramatically.

For many advi­sors, the best way to estab­lish rou­tine in your day is via time block­ing, estab­lish­ing time in your cal­en­dar for key activities.

Sup­pose you say that you want to meet with your assis­tant Scott on Mon­day morn­ing to lay out the week ahead. You can say to your­self — I need to talk to Scott when we both get in. Or you can say to Scott — “let’s book a 15 appoint­ment for 8:30 every Mon­day morn­ing and build it into our routines.”

Or per­haps you decide you need to spend at least three hours a week talk­ing to prospects. To make that hap­pen, you can try to find time dur­ing the week as it is avail­able — or you can  book off an appoint­ment at 10 on Mon­day, Wednes­day and Fri­day, focused on pick­ing up the phone and call­ing prospects.

Here’s another exam­ple. One of the advi­sors who par­tic­i­pated in the video inter­view series avail­able on this web­site decided to ramp up the num­ber of client phone reviews.

So he did a cou­ple of things. First, he booked off every after­noon from 2 to 4 for tele­phone reviews.

And then he sat down with his assis­tant and said: “I’ve set aside 10 time slots each week for phone meet­ings, one at 2 and one at 3 each after­noon. “Your job is to fill those slots. Let’s talk about who you should approach about those meet­ings. And let’s talk about what needs to go out to clients in advance of those, an agenda, a pdf of their state­ment, any­thing else I want to refer to on the call.”

As a result of build­ing a key activ­ity into his rou­tine, he dra­mat­i­cally ramped up the num­ber of phone meet­ings with clients.

When you think about it, you can approach your week two ways. You can have desired activ­ity drive the struc­ture of your week. You can say each Mon­day What do I want to do this week and then fit it into your calendar.

Or you can have the struc­ture of your week drive your activ­ity. You can carve out the same hours each week to meet with staff and for phone meet­ings, client meet­ings and to con­tact prospects.

By putting these hours into your cal­en­dar and incor­po­rat­ing them into your rou­tine, you dra­mat­i­cally increase the chances of mak­ing high return activ­i­ties hap­pen. That doesn’t mean you can’t devi­ate from your sched­ule if some­thing more impor­tant comes up, but for most of us hav­ing a con­sis­tent rou­tine for at least part of our week will make us much more productive.

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit http://​www​.get​keep​clients​.com.

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Tags: 20 Inutes, 20 minutes, Appointment, Calendar, Conversations, Decisions, Least Three Hours, Maximum Productivity, Monday Morning, Priorities, Prospects
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The Four Fundamentals of an Effective Mission Statement

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

The fol­low­ing is based on one of Norm Trainor’s clients, Joel Goodhart.

In a recent arti­cle, I described how Joel Good­hart devel­oped the Mis­sion State­ment for his finan­cial advi­sory firm, BIRE Financial.

A Mis­sion State­ment describes why you are in busi­ness and is designed pri­mar­ily for your clients. Ide­ally, the Mis­sion State­ment has mean­ing for every stake­holder in your busi­ness i.e. share­hold­ers, employ­ees, asso­ciates, sup­pli­ers, clients, fam­ily mem­bers, etc. The Mis­sion State­ment describes for them the pur­pose of the busi­ness and why it makes a dif­fer­ence for them.

When I first began work­ing with Joel in Sep­tem­ber 2006, he was a part­ner in a Philadelphia-based finan­cial advi­sory firm. Like many suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sors, Joel strug­gled with how to respond when some­one asked him, “What do you do?” If he answered “I am a finan­cial advi­sor,” he put him­self in a large cat­e­gory of advi­sors and the per­son ask­ing the ques­tion would think “I have one of those.”

There are four fun­da­men­tals in devel­op­ing your Mis­sion Statement.

1. Start with the ben­e­fit to the client.
2. Define your­self.
3. Dif­fer­en­ti­ate yourself.
4. Keep it simple.

When I asked Joel what made BIRE Finan­cial dif­fer­ent from other finan­cial advi­sory firms, he explained that the three part­ners col­lec­tively have over 90 years of expe­ri­ence in help­ing clients make informed deci­sions about their finances. I then told Joel, “That is your Mis­sion State­ment. Your Mis­sion is that you help your clients achieve finan­cial secu­rity through informed deci­sion mak­ing.” An effec­tive Mis­sion State­ment piques the inter­est of your ideal client. Joel real­ized that his ideal clients were look­ing for a finan­cial advi­sor who would take the time to under­stand them and then, inform and edu­cate them about the finan­cial prod­ucts and services.

Now, when Joel meets some­one who asks him what he does, he is given a golden oppor­tu­nity to describe what makes BIRE Finan­cial unique: “We help our clients achieve finan­cial secu­rity through informed deci­sion making.”

Let’s review the four fun­da­men­tals in prepar­ing your Mis­sion Statement.

1. Start with the ben­e­fit to the client – Joel’s Mis­sion State­ment high­lights the ben­e­fit to the clients of BIRE Finan­cial, “We help our clients achieve finan­cial secu­rity through informed deci­sion mak­ing.”
2. Define your­self – Joel and his part­ners are edu­ca­tors. They view their role as pro­vid­ing their clients with the infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge they require in order to make informed deci­sions.
3. Dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­self – The part­ners of BIRE Finan­cial take the time to under­stand each client’s sit­u­a­tion and objec­tives. Rather than sim­ply pro­vid­ing solu­tions, they engage in a dia­logue to ensure the client fully under­stands what is required to achieve their objec­tives and the options avail­able to them.
4. Keep it sim­ple – In com­mu­ni­ca­tion, as in archi­tec­ture, less is more. There is a won­der­ful sim­plic­ity in com­bin­ing finan­cial secu­rity and informed deci­sion making.

Appeal­ing to the other person’s aspirations

A good Mis­sion State­ment should leave the other per­son hun­gry to know more about what you do. When they respond “Tell me more about that,” they are giv­ing you per­mis­sion to begin devel­op­ing a rela­tion­ship with them. Most peo­ple have an aspi­ra­tion to be finan­cially secure. When you appeal to their aspi­ra­tions, you unlock pow­er­ful emo­tions that can take your rela­tion­ship with them to a much deeper level.

Norm Trainor is the founder of The Covenant Group, a com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in prac­tice devel­op­ment for advi­sors. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, visit his Web site at www​.covenant​group​.com.

Fol­low The Covenant Group at:

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Tags: Benefit, Cli, Decisions, Family Members, Financial Advisors, Financial Advisory Firm, Financial Advisory Firms, Financial Security, Financial Statement, Golden Opportunity, Goodhart, Ideal, Mission Statement, Norm Trainor, Philadelphia, Recent Article, Shareholders, Stakeholder
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