Delegating Functions, Not Just Tasks

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

As a finan­cial advi­sor, your abil­ity to grow is largely depen­dent on the amount of time you’re able to spend devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships. The key is to del­e­gate most of the tasks related to an advi­sory prac­tice to oth­ers, so that you are able to devote your time to attract­ing and retain­ing clients.

There are three man­age­ment strate­gies when del­e­gat­ing tasks that allow you max­i­mum your time with clients and poten­tial clients:

1. Opti­miza­tion ver­sus maximization
2. Del­e­gate Functions
3. Assign Tasks by address­ing Con­text, Pur­pose, Quan­tity, Qual­ity, Time and Resources (CP – QQT/R)

In this arti­cle, we will look at the sec­ond of these strate­gies, Del­e­gate Func­tions, in more detail.

When try­ing to man­age their work­load, many finan­cial advi­sors del­e­gate tasks directly to employ­ees or sub-advisors. For exam­ple they may del­e­gate the writ­ing of let­ters or fil­ing to an admin­is­tra­tive assis­tant, or send junior advi­sors out on indi­vid­ual calls. Every day, they will assign dif­fer­ent tasks to their employees.

If you del­e­gate tasks, you will still find your­self fol­low­ing up on the progress of the task—and it will still require you to take time away from your own core respon­si­bil­i­ties. Instead, as a busi­ness grows, finan­cial advi­sors must learn to del­e­gate functions.

A func­tion within a busi­ness is a group of tasks. Some peo­ple think of it as a bucket con­tain­ing com­mon tasks. In many com­pa­nies a func­tion is typ­i­cally thought of as a depart­ment, for exam­ple, mar­ket­ing, account­ing, IT, or sales.

As your busi­ness grows and you hire more staff, it will be pos­si­ble iden­tify the func­tions within your busi­ness and make peo­ple respon­si­ble for those functions.

Instead of assign­ing tasks to some­one who does your mar­ket­ing, you may find it more effi­cient to assign the mar­ket­ing func­tion to them. The func­tion may con­sist of 4 to 8 key respon­si­bil­i­ties such as:

• Cre­at­ing and imple­ment­ing 6–8 robust mar­ket­ing strategies
• Keep­ing the bud­get below 10% of revenue
• Man­ag­ing the Pipeline and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with clients and your network
• Devel­op­ing strate­gic part­ner relationships

The more func­tions that are assigned the clearer everyone’s role will be, the more effi­ciently they will be able work, and the more own­er­ship they will take for get­ting things done. It will also free you up to con­cen­trate on the most impor­tant aspects of your own role.

As the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try places more and more respon­si­bil­ity on the advi­sor, suc­cess depends increas­ingly on the advisor’s abil­ity to build a business.

Del­e­gat­ing func­tions enables you to focus on what you do best and most enjoy. You will reap greater rewards and expe­ri­ence more satisfaction.

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: Administrative Assistant, Amount Of Time, Budget, Common Tasks, Commu, Core Responsibilities, Delegate Functions, Delegate Tasks, Financial Advisors, Junior Advisors, Management Strategies, Marketing Function, Marketing Strategies, Norm Trainor, Optimization, Pipeline, Quality Time, Relationships
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Three Strategies to Maximize Client Relationships

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

As a finan­cial advi­sor, your abil­ity to grow is largely depen­dent on the amount of time you’re able to spend devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships. The key is to del­e­gate most of the tasks related to an advi­sory prac­tice to oth­ers, so that you are able to devote your time to attract­ing and retain­ing clients.

There are three man­age­ment strate­gies when del­e­gat­ing tasks that allow you max­i­mum your time with clients and poten­tial clients:

1. Opti­miza­tion ver­sus maximization
2. Del­e­gate functions
3. Assign tasks by address­ing Con­text, Pur­pose, Quan­tity, Qual­ity, Time and Resources (CP-QQT/R)

In this arti­cle, we will look at the first of these strate­gies in more detail.

1) Opti­miza­tion vs. Maximization

When deal­ing with your clients, you may get bogged down in try­ing to ser­vice all of them equally. With this approach, a max­i­miza­tion strat­egy, you’ll run out of time and energy fast.

To grow your busi­ness it’s impor­tant to imple­ment an opti­miza­tion strat­egy. Although client ser­vice is cru­cial to the suc­cess of your busi­ness, you need to opti­mize your ser­vice plan, that is, pro­vide the most value you can to your high­est value clients, and spend less effort on the others.

Why it is Impor­tant to Opti­mize, not Maximize

One of the advi­sors whom I coach had been in the busi­ness for ten years and has built a thriv­ing prac­tice. Like many advi­sors, Jeff started out mar­ket­ing him­self to peo­ple he already knew who were within five years of either side of his age—his nat­ural market.

Jeff did such a great job serv­ing those ini­tial clients that many of them referred him to the friends or busi­ness asso­ciates they thought would ben­e­fit from his ser­vices. When I met Jeff, he was firmly estab­lished in the busi­ness mak­ing over $200,000.00 a year. Unfor­tu­nately, Jeff had a seri­ous problem.

In our first meet­ing, he looked har­ried. As he rushed in he was flip­ping his cell phone closed and try­ing to straighten his wind-blown hair with his other hand. He was sorry he was a few min­utes late, but he was just run off his feet try­ing to get from one client to the next. In fact, that’s why he had made time to see me. He had heard from a friend about the work I do and real­ized he could use my help.

In our first coach­ing ses­sion, Jeff painted a pic­ture of his life for me. He worked five and a half days a week, and, some days it seemed to Jeff that he lived in his office. He made hur­ried phone calls, dic­tated let­ters to his assis­tant, and even wolfed down his lunch as he dealt with one ser­vice issue or call after another. His days were packed solid with client calls and ser­vice meet­ings, and it was dif­fi­cult for him to spend more than 10 or 12 hours a week on sales to exist­ing clients or meet­ings with prospec­tive clients. His busi­ness was not grow­ing and he was going crazy.

I sug­gested to Jeff that he relax and take time to work ON his busi­ness. He needed to take a step back, exam­ine why his busi­ness had become so labour inten­sive, and start think­ing about how to cor­rect the prob­lem before he burned out and started los­ing clients.

I then asked him to walk me through his cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. He told me he had 300 clients, mostly mid­dle income fam­i­lies, and a hand­ful of very high-net-worth clients that he acquired by tar­get­ing the med­ical mar­ket. Those car­di­ol­o­gists, oncol­o­gists and plas­tic sur­geons brought in more than 40% of his annual rev­enue even though they were less than 10% of his client base. He wished he had a few more of these clients.

Unfor­tu­nately, mar­ket­ing was the last thing he had much time for recently. He was far too busy try­ing to serve all of his clients to pay much atten­tion to fill­ing his pipeline. Plus, he was sure that, even if he did acquire new clients, he wouldn’t be able to offer them the level of ser­vice he wanted.

I sus­pected we were reach­ing the crux of Jeff’s prob­lem. I asked him to describe for me how much con­tact he had with his clients, and what he did for them. Jeff told me he wanted to impress each of his clients, not just with his abil­ity to solve their prob­lems, but also with his eager­ness to help. As a result, each client received let­ters and calls on a monthly basis. He met with each of them at least annu­ally, and, in some cases, quar­terly. And, he had a per­sonal rule that he would respond to any and all client inquiries within three hours dur­ing the busi­ness day. He had even begun a per­son­al­ized quar­terly newslet­ter for his clients.

Jeff believed this level of ser­vice set him apart from other advi­sors. All of his clients deserved the same red car­pet treatment—not just the doc­tors who pro­vided the major­ity of his rev­enue. Unfor­tu­nately, the ser­vice was killing him.

Obvi­ously, Jeff had reached his ceil­ing of com­plex­ity. The sad truth I had to explain to him was that the busi­ness model he was fol­low­ing, although gen­er­at­ing rev­enue, was not a good long-term strat­egy. By offer­ing iden­ti­cal lev­els of ser­vice to all his clients, regard­less of their value to him, he had been unin­ten­tion­ally fol­low­ing the same strat­egy as a not-for-profit business.

As I explained, he had been fol­low­ing a max­i­miza­tion strat­egy, instead of an opti­miza­tion strat­egy. Jeff did not under­stand what you have to do to run a prof­itable busi­ness. And the results, as he was find­ing out, could be disastrous.

Jeff was a lit­tle shocked by what I told him. He’d never imag­ined he might be run­ning a char­ity. But, as I explained, max­i­miza­tion is a not-for-profit strat­egy. In this strat­egy your aim is to max­i­mize the ben­e­fit for all recip­i­ents. This was exactly what he was doing.  For instance, if some­one ran a char­ity devoted to end­ing world hunger, they would not be try­ing to end hunger in one per­son or one fam­ily, but for every­one, everywhere—just as Jeff tried to serve all his clients equally.

Opti­miza­tion, on the other hand, means using the resources at your dis­posal to their great­est advan­tage or profit. For instance, in busi­ness, opti­miza­tion often requires that you seg­ment your clien­tele. Instead of pro­vid­ing a uni­formly high level of ser­vice to all clients, and run­ning the risk of burn­ing your­self out, you strive to pro­vide excel­lent ser­vice to your high­est value clients and ser­vice con­sis­tent with the eco­nomic value of lower value clients. In order to reclaim his life, and then grow his busi­ness prof­itably, Jeff needed to com­pletely re-tool his approach.

Over the next year, Jeff went through our Busi­ness Builder pro­gram. Although the course cov­ered all areas of his busi­ness, he faced two spe­cific chal­lenges: seg­ment­ing his client base and devel­op­ing a ser­vice plan. Once he had solved those prob­lems he could mar­ket him­self more aggres­sively and in a more tar­geted fash­ion to the med­ical market.

To start, Jeff iden­ti­fied his Ideal Client Pro­file and the 20 cur­rent clients or cen­tres of influ­ence most impor­tant to him. He ana­lyzed his net­work and tar­get markets.

Then he divided his clients into seg­ments based on their value to his busi­ness. He cre­ated a ser­vice plan based on the opti­miza­tion strat­egy he was now employ­ing. He would offer his pre­mium level of ser­vice only to his Top 20 and A clients. The other seg­ments received fewer let­ters, calls and meet­ings accord­ing to their value.

Over a period of months Jeff learned to del­e­gate ser­vice requests to his assis­tant in order to focus his efforts on the peo­ple most valu­able to his busi­ness. He had to stop try­ing to serve every­one, and focus on serv­ing his most prof­itable rela­tion­ships. Only then could he free up time, energy and cre­ativ­ity to attract more high-value clients in the med­ical market.

One year later, Jeff and I met to review his progress. In the pre­vi­ous six months his non-recurring rev­enue increased 80% over the same period the year before. Doc­tors now made up 30% of his clients and that num­ber is steadily ris­ing. He pro­jected that, in the next year, he would more than dou­ble his income. The best news for Jeff was that he no longer runs ragged—he’d stopped work­ing week­ends and nights, and was regain­ing his peace of mind.

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: Amount Of Time, Business Associates, Business Service, Cell Phone, Client Relationships, Coach, Delegate Functions, Few Minutes, First Meeting, Friends, Job, Management Strategies, Marketing, Norm Trainor, Optimization Service, Optimization Strategy, People, Quality Time, Success, Value Clients
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How to Delegate Tasks

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

As a finan­cial advi­sor, your abil­ity to grow is largely depen­dent on the amount of time you are able to spend devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships. The key is to del­e­gate most of the tasks related to an advi­sory prac­tice to oth­ers, so that you are able to devote your time to attract­ing and retain­ing clients.

There are three man­age­ment strate­gies when del­e­gat­ing tasks that allow you max­i­mum your time with clients and poten­tial clients:

1.         Opti­miza­tion ver­sus maximization

2.         Del­e­gate Functions

3.         Assign Tasks by address­ing Con­text, Pur­pose, Quan­tity, Qual­ity, Time and Resources (CP — QQT & R)

In this arti­cle, we will look at the third of these strate­gies: Assign Tasks by address­ing Con­text, Pur­pose, Quan­tity, Qual­ity time and Resources {CP – QQT & R}l.

On any given day, as a finan­cial advi­sor, you can per­form tasks that are worth $20–30/hour, up to $500–1,000/hour. The key to effec­tive­ness is to focus on your high­est value tasks. Del­e­gat­ing lower value tasks cre­ates oper­a­tional lever­age when the finan­cial advi­sor is freed up to focus on client build­ing tasks that enhance con­tri­bu­tion to rev­enue and the value of the business.

When del­e­gat­ing, it is impor­tant that you assign tasks with clear duties and objec­tives, and tasks that your peo­ple are capa­ble of com­plet­ing. For instance, ask­ing your admin­is­tra­tive assis­tant to close a big sale is prob­a­bly not going to get you the results you are look­ing for.

Effec­tive del­e­ga­tion involves a six step process:

Con­text

By def­i­n­i­tion, con­text addresses how every­thing ties together. When you assign a task, you start by describ­ing how it relates to other tasks and fits into your over­all objectives

Pur­pose

You describe why this task is impor­tant and what you want to accomplish.

Quan­tity

The focus of quan­tity is how much, of what and by when.

How many clients are you assign­ing to that per­son? Be clear about your expec­ta­tions as to who and what you are del­e­gat­ing. Remem­ber to con­sider if the per­son has the orga­ni­za­tional capa­bil­i­ties to han­dle the task.

How large an account is it? Review what you want done and how you want it done. Deter­mine if per­son has the exper­tise to pro­vide the level of ser­vice required.

How many dol­lars? Be sure that the per­son to whom you are del­e­gat­ing under­stands what kind of finan­cial impact this will have on your busi­ness. Con­sider if the per­son is com­fort­able deal­ing with large sums.

Qual­ity

While quan­ti­ta­tive stan­dards are objec­tive, qual­i­ta­tive mea­sures are more subjective.

Qual­ity stan­dards—Review and make sure the per­son under­stands what needs to be done and to what stan­dards. Every­one has their own inter­pre­ta­tion of a “good” or “thor­ough” job. Make sure you com­mu­ni­cate what exactly it is that you expect.

Com­pa­ra­bles—To avoid con­fu­sion or mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion, it is a good idea to give the per­son exam­ples of other work that reflects your expec­ta­tions.  This will act as a guide­line for any new work being done.

Out­comes—Make sure the per­son knows what your expec­ta­tions are. That way, they will have a greater chance of car­ry­ing out the task suc­cess­fully if they know what the desired end result is.

Time

The time you intend it to be done by—If you want a task com­pleted on time, set time­lines! Make sure your per­son knows how long they have to fin­ish the task so they can orga­nize their own time accordingly.

Mon­i­tor­ing time—If you want to peri­od­i­cally check in on the progress of the task, set it out in a time sched­ule. If you want cer­tain mile­stones achieved by cer­tain interim dead­lines, com­mu­ni­cate the time expectation.

Resources

When del­e­gat­ing tasks, make sure you setup peo­ple for suc­cess, not fail­ure, by mak­ing sure they have the resources to com­plete the task:

Bud­get—Do they have enough money to cover any costs that may crop up?

Time—Have you set rea­son­able dead­lines for the com­ple­tion of the task, espe­cially in con­sid­er­a­tion of their other responsibilities?

Equip­ment—Do they have access to the right tech­nol­ogy or office equipment?

The help of oth­ers—Do they have access to other per­son­nel that they can go to for opin­ions or to ask questions?

Sum­mary

Effec­tive del­e­ga­tion of tasks enables your peo­ple to demon­strate their com­pe­tence and work inde­pen­dently. In turn, it allows you to focus on your high­est value tasks.

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: Addresses, Administrative Assistant, Amount Of Time, Amp, Delegate Functions, Effective Delegation, Focus, Leverage, Management Strategies, Norm Trainor, Optimization, People, Quality Time, Relationships, Six Step, Ties
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