Proven Strategies to Make Change Happen

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Last week I hosted a round table lunch for a group of advisors.

A focus of the con­ver­sa­tion was hav­ing started the year full of enthu­si­asm and ambi­tious objec­tives, a week later many already felt bogged down and had run out of steam.

The dif­fi­culty is that even start­ing with good inten­tions , we quickly get caught up in day to day demands on our time. Steven Covey wrote about this in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple, when he talked about get­ting so con­sumed in things that are urgent in the short term  that we fail to invest the time to deal with the things that are impor­tant in the long term.

Bal­anc­ing timeframes

It’s a ques­tion of bal­ance – we all need to do the  things that are press­ing in the short term because that’s what keeps us in business.

If we don’t put resources against the things that are crit­i­cal in the mid and long term, how­ever, we risk being stuck where we are and never really get­ting our busi­ness to a sub­stan­tially higher level.

The good news is that there there some proven tac­tics that you can put in place to achieve the kind of break­through many advi­sors are look­ing for.

I con­ducted a series of work­shops last year that had the best response of any­thing I’ve done in 20 years work­ing with advi­sors. In large mea­sure this was because of the sin­gle minded focus on imple­men­ta­tion – the work­shops weren’t about shar­ing new ideas, they were about mak­ing these ideas happen.

In talk­ing to advi­sors who attended last year’s work­shops, there were seven com­mon strate­gies that advi­sors used to achieve sub­stan­tial changes in their business.

Step one: Focus on a man­age­able num­ber of high impact activities

A key rea­son for fail­ing to exe­cute is that we try to do too much. The rea­son that advi­sors walk away from work­shops excited and with good inten­tions and then fail to imple­ment is almost never because they don’t have enough ideas – it’s almost always because there are too many.

The first step is to select a small num­ber of key ini­tia­tives to really con­cen­trate on in 2010. These ini­tia­tives fall into three cat­e­gories – deal­ing more effec­tively with exist­ing clients, attract­ing new clients and improv­ing prac­tice efficiency.

Advi­sors need to start by pick­ing one or at the very most two ini­tia­tives in each of these three areas as the key pri­or­i­ties for the bal­ance of the year.

Some can­di­dates:

Exist­ing clients:

• Increase num­ber of meetings
• Intro­duce struc­tured tele­phone meetings
• Begin using an agenda for every meeting
• Invite clients to small sand­wich lun­cheons to dis­cuss the mar­ket outlook
• Each month email clients a rel­e­vant arti­cle or video

Attract­ing new clients:

• Get to know accoun­tants of best clients.
• Increase the num­ber of prospec­tive clients you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with
• Use client activ­ity such as round­table lun­cheons and emails to talk about peo­ple clients know    who might find these of value
• Seek out speak­ing opportunities
• Build pro­file among a key tar­get group

Prac­tice efficiency:

• Upgrade your team
• Improve the skill set that you or your assis­tant bring when it comes to using your computer
• Estab­lish reg­u­lar monthly plan­ning sessions
• Sit down for weekly meet­ings to lay out the next five days
• Intro­duce a reg­u­lar sched­ule that your repeat each week

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Tags: Ambitious Objectives, Breakthrough, Business Step, Good Intentions, High Impact, Impact Activities, Implementation, Invest, Lunch, Manageable Number, Minded Focus, Reason, Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Steam, Steven Covey, Substantial Changes
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The Key Numbers that Drive Your Business

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

A cou­ple of weeks back, I wrote about how mak­ing short term progress a pri­or­ity can fuel long term growth.

In response, I heard from a finan­cial advi­sor who starts each week by focus­ing on two spe­cific mea­sures and have seen sub­stan­tial gains in his busi­ness as a result.

“Over­whelmed by putting out fires”

This advi­sor began by describ­ing his con­clu­sions from a review of his busi­ness at the end of 2010.

“Going into 2010, I set two key goals. First, I set out to broaden and deepen my rela­tion­ships with my most impor­tant clients. And sec­ond, I wanted to sig­nif­i­cantly expand the num­ber of prospects that I was com­mu­ni­cat­ing with.

As I went through the year-end analy­sis of my busi­ness, I real­ized that I’d made lim­ited progress on the first goal and almost none on the sec­ond. When I thought about why that was, the dif­fi­culty wasn’t lack of desire or good inten­tions, it’s just that I found myself so over­whelmed by putting out fires and the sheer num­ber of things I had on the go, I wasn’t able to put con­certed effort against those two objectives.”

“What’s urgent vs. what’s impor­tant?”

This advisor’s dif­fi­culty is a uni­ver­sal one.

In “Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple”, Stephen Covey describes the prob­lem we all face of assign­ing enough energy and resources to the impor­tant things that will drive our future suc­cess. Quite sim­ply, we’re all inun­dated with press­ing demands on our time that need to be dealt with right now; these are crit­i­cal but not nec­es­sar­ily impor­tant. And if we’re not care­ful, those things that are crit­i­cal in the short term can crowd out the impor­tant activ­i­ties that are essen­tial to achiev­ing long term success.

This advi­sor had another prob­lem beyond this, however.

“I had set out really ambi­tious plans for 2010, with a bunch of dif­fer­ent things that I wanted to move for­ward on, includ­ing broad­en­ing my knowl­edge on insur­ance, upgrad­ing my team, devel­op­ing closer rela­tion­ships with the accoun­tants for my key clients and rais­ing my pro­file among a key tar­get group that I see as hav­ing real promise.

As I looked back on the year I real­ized that I’d spread myself too thin. I’d set out to do too much, and as a result hadn’t been able to put enough real focus and effort against any of my goals.”

“A pre­scrip­tion for progress”

As he put together his 2011 busi­ness plan, this advi­sor resolved to learn from his fail­ure the pre­vi­ous year.

Step one was to select two and only two key objec­tives on which to focus. As part of that, he sat down with his asso­ciate and assis­tant and dis­cussed how they were going to achieve these goals. Next, he set quar­terly objec­tives for each of these goals, against which he can track progress. At the start of each quar­ter he fur­ther sets activ­ity goals by week.

All of this is on a spread­sheet that he and his team review each Mon­day morn­ing. For each of his goals, there are four columns that they focus on.

The first col­umn is an overview of tar­get activ­ity that was set out at begin­ning of year, with a run­ning tally year to date tally show­ing where they should be. Col­umn two shows where they actu­ally are. The other two columns focus on the cur­rent quar­ter; col­umn three lays out their goals for the cur­rent quar­ter, bro­ken out by week, and col­umn four shows actual progress for each week.

Using this spread­sheet as a guide they dis­cuss what they did last week against each of those two pri­or­ity activ­i­ties, and the num­bers that resulted from that activ­ity. They then agree to the activ­ity that will take place in the week ahead with those two goals in mind.

None of this is in any way rev­o­lu­tion­ary. But by main­tain­ing steady and con­sis­tent focus on weekly progress, this advi­sor was able to achieve his goals on two impor­tant long term ini­tia­tives in 2011; and is on track again in 2012.

Given that this has worked so well for this advi­sor, con­sider whether a sim­i­lar approach might help you move your busi­ness for­ward as well. In the mean­time, here’s a link to the arti­cle describ­ing the research on how focus on short term focus can advance your business.

http://​www​.cli​entin​sights​.ca/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​a​-​b​r​e​a​k​t​h​r​o​u​g​h​-​s​t​r​a​t​e​g​y​-​t​o​-​a​c​h​i​e​v​e​-​a​m​b​i​t​i​o​u​s​-​g​o​als

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Tags: Accountants, Ambitious Plans, Concerted Effort, Conclusions, Different Things, Good Intentions, Important Things, Key Goals, Lack Of Desire, Measures, Priority, Prospects, Putting Out Fires, Relationships, Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Sheer Number, Stephen Covey, Substantial Gains, Term Success, Year End
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Seven Steps to Making 2012 a Breakthrough Year for Your Business

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

Last week I hosted a round table lunch for a group of advisors.

A focus of the con­ver­sa­tion was hav­ing started the year full of enthu­si­asm and ambi­tious objec­tives, two weeks later many already felt bogged down and had run out of steam.

The dif­fi­culty is that evening start with good inten­tions, we quickly get caught up in day to day demands on our time. Steven Covey wrote about this in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple, when he talked about get­ting so con­sumer in things that are urgent in the short term that we fail to invest the time to deal with the things that are impor­tant in the long term.

Bal­anc­ing timeframes

It’s a ques­tion of bal­ance – we all need to do the things that are press­ing in the short term because that’s what keeps us in business.

If we don’t put resources against the things that are crit­i­cal in the mid and long term, how­ever, we risk being stuck where we are and never really get­ting our busi­ness to a sub­stan­tially higher level.

The good news is that there some proven tac­tics that you can put in place to achieve the kind of break­through many advi­sors are look­ing for.

I con­ducted a series of work­shops last year that had the best response of any­thing I’ve done in 20 years work­ing with advi­sors. In large mea­sure this was because of the sin­gle minded focus on imple­men­ta­tion – the work­shop wasn’t about shar­ing new ideas, it was about mak­ing these ideas happen.

In talk­ing to advi­sors who attended last year’s work­shops, I have iden­ti­fied seven strate­gies that advi­sors used to achieve sub­stan­tial changes in their business.

Step one: Focus on a man­age­able num­ber of high impact activities

A key rea­son for fail­ing to exe­cute is that we try to do too much. The rea­son that advi­sors walk away from work­shops excited and with good inten­tions and then fail to imple­ment is almost never because they don’t have enough ideas – it’s almost always because there are too many.

The first step is to select a small num­ber of key ini­tia­tives to really con­cen­trate on in 2012. These ini­tia­tives fall into three cat­e­gories – deal­ing more effec­tively with exist­ing clients, attract­ing new clients and improv­ing prac­tice efficiency.

Advi­sors need to start by pick­ing one or at the very most two ini­tia­tives in each of these three areas as the key pri­or­i­ties for the bal­ance of the year.

Some can­di­dates:

Exist­ing clients:

Increase num­ber of meet­ings
Intro­duce struc­tured tele­phone meet­ings
Begin using an agenda for every meet­ing
Invite clients to small sand­wich lun­cheons to dis­cuss the mar­ket out­look
Each month email clients a rel­e­vant arti­cle or video

Attract­ing new clients:

Get to know accoun­tants of best clients.
Increase the num­ber of prospec­tive clients you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with
Use client activ­ity such as round­table lun­cheons and emails to talk about peo­ple clients know who might find these of value
Seek out speak­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties
Build pro­file among a key tar­get group

Prac­tice efficiency:

Upgrade your team
Improve the skill set that you or your assis­tant bring when it comes to using your com­puter
Estab­lish reg­u­lar monthly plan­ning ses­sions
Sit down for weekly meet­ings to lay out the next five days
Intro­duce a reg­u­lar sched­ule that you repeat each week

Once you’ve picked your pri­or­i­ties, write them down and beside each one write down your level of com­mit­ment and enthu­si­asm for it, from 1 to 10, with 1 being low and 10 being high. Than elim­i­nate any­thing that’s not a 10 from the list – if you aren’t fully com­mit­ted going in, your chances of suc­cess approach zero.

Step two: Incor­po­rate new activ­i­ties into your workflow

It’s unlikely you’ll suc­ceed in try­ing to three or four sig­nif­i­cant new things at the same time – and try­ing to do so is a pre­scrip­tion for frus­tra­tion and failure.

One sim­ple step is to lay out a plan where you select one or two key new ini­tia­tives per quarter.

The goal is not to get these com­pleted but rather to get momen­tum behind them and build them into your routine.

So the sec­ond step is to lay out a grid and iden­tify one or two key ini­tia­tives for each the [remain­ing] quarter[s] of 2012.

Step three: Build into your rou­tine and make them a habit

The only way to effec­tively intro­duce new activ­i­ties into busi­ness is to make them a habit – in this respect, changes to your busi­ness are no dif­fer­ent than lifestyle changes such as diet or exercise.

One way to do this is to del­e­gate aspects of new ini­tia­tives to other mem­bers of your team wher­ever you can. Once you’ve iden­ti­fied, your key ini­tia­tives, look for things you can get help on.

Another strat­egy that’s paid div­i­dends for advi­sors is to block out time in your sched­ule for new ini­tia­tives. There’s noth­ing new about this – time block­ing is as old as the hills.

But some­times the best ideas are the old ones. Some exam­ples of advi­sors who’re used time block­ing to intro­duce new initiatives:

One advi­sor booked off three after­noons a week for struc­tured tele­phone reviews with key clients, iden­ti­fied who he wanted to talk to – and then gave his assis­tant respon­si­bil­ity for sched­ul­ing these in.

Another advi­sor booked off lunch on every Fri­day to meet with the accoun­tant of a key client – and also blocked off time each week to make the calls to set these lunches up, open­ing up each call with the words: “We have a client in com­mon — Joe Smith has told me great things about you. He’s also given me writ­ten autho­riza­tion to dis­cuss his finan­cial sit­u­a­tion – I’m call­ing to see if we can sched­ule a lunch to sit down and talk. ”

A third advi­sor had sev­eral clients who owned fran­chises of fast food restau­rants. He booked off every Thurs­day morn­ing to build vis­i­bil­ity and pro­file among other restau­rant fran­chisees in his community

Step four: Estab­lish short term goals.

Annual, quar­terly and monthly goals are fine – but to really make change hap­pen you need weekly and daily goals.

The most suc­cess­ful advi­sors I know set time aside each week to iden­tify key pri­or­i­ties. As you plot out each week, iden­tify what you’re going to do to advance the one or two key ini­tia­tives you’ve picked for this quarter.

Step five: Learn from the week just passed

Years ago, I talked to a fab­u­lously suc­cess­ful advi­sor who attrib­uted much of his achieve­ment to a habit he’d begun early in his career.

Every Sun­day at 9 pm, he sat down for fif­teen min­utes with his cal­en­dar for the week that had just passed. He reviewed every day and asked him­self three key questions:

What worked well?
What didn’t work so well?
What am I going to do dif­fer­ently this week as a result?

With packed sched­ules, it’s easy to get so busy that we fail to take a bit of time to step back and really think about our busi­ness. As part of your weekly plan­ning ses­sion, con­sider set­ting aside ten min­utes to think hard about what you can learn from the week that just passed.

Step six: Estab­lish accountability

Few of us are some dis­ci­plined that we wouldn’t ben­e­fit from mak­ing our­selves account­able for doing the things that we set out to achieve.

You can achieve account­abil­ity within your team – as part of your weekly plan­ning ses­sion, take a bit of time to go through the key com­mit­ments that every­one agreed to for the week just passed.

Or you can estab­lish account­abil­ity with one or two other advi­sors in your office, agree­ing to meet for cof­fee on Fri­day morn­ing to review progress against the key goals that you all estab­lished the week before.

Step seven: Cel­e­brate successes

When try­ing to imple­ment change, it’s easy to get dis­cour­aged – we typ­i­cally have to invest lots of time and energy up front before we see results.

That’s why it’s impor­tant to acknowl­edge and cel­e­brate small suc­cesses. As part of your weekly plan­ning, write down one, two or three things that hap­pened last week to feel good about. They won’t nec­es­sar­ily be big things – but you need to build in recog­ni­tion and rein­force­ment where you’re see­ing even a bit of progress.

Start­ing out with ambi­tious goals for your busi­ness is a good thing – but as the old axiom goes, a vision with­out a plan to achieve it is just hallucination.

If you find your­self falling short of the ambi­tious goals you set from at the begin­ning of the year, con­sider using this seven step struc­ture to make 2012 the year that you look back on at the end of your career and say: “That was the year I really broke through in my business.”

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Tags: Ambitious Objectives, Breakthrough Year, Business Focus, Business Step, Business Week, Ffffff, Good Intentions, High Impact, Impact Activities, Implementation, Invest, Lunch, Manageable Number, Minded Focus, Reason, Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Seven Steps, Steam, Steven Covey, Substantial Changes, Target
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A simple strategy to make change happen

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

This week I began a series of half day work­shops address­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for advi­sors in the cur­rent investor mind​set​.In those work­shops, I tackle the num­ber one prob­lem for most advi­sors attend­ing train­ing ses­sions —  trans­lat­ing the ideas they get into action. I also out­line some sim­ple strate­gies to put new strate­gies in place — includ­ing the sin­gle most suc­cess­ful approach I’ve come across to make change happen.Note that there is sel­dom a prob­lem get­ting enough good ideas — rather the typ­i­cal issue relates to get­ting too many.  As a result, advi­sors walk away filled with good inten­tions — but do nothing.

So here’s an idea to imple­ment change in your practice.

Start by writ­ing down all the things you’d like to do this year to move your busi­ness for­ward — per­haps set some time aside to dis­cuss this with your team.

Hav­ing done that, pick the one idea that would have the biggest impact on your busi­ness — and set the rest aside.

In the next 90 days, resolve to focus in a sin­gle minded fash­ion on putting that change in place. Dis­cuss this change with your team, estab­lish weekly goals for what you’re going to do to move this for­ward, set aside time in your cal­en­dar every week to work on that change and mon­i­tor progress into your daily and weekly progress review.

Changes are that at the end of 90 days you will have built good momen­tum on putting that change in place. …. at which point you pick a sec­ond area to work on.

By focus­ing on one change to your busi­ness at a time and set­ting aside focused time to make that change hap­pen, you dra­mat­i­cally increase the odds of trans­lat­ing good inten­tions into reality.

And over time, you increase the chances of tap­ping the real poten­tial of your business.

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Tags: Calendar, Fashion, Focus, Good Intentions, Investor, Mindset, Momentum, Odds, Sessions, Typical Issue, Weekly Goals
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