The Art and Science of Building a Profitable Practice

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

By Norm Trainor, The Covenant Group

Rick was over­whelmed. He felt as if the whole weight of his prac­tice was on his shoul­ders. Deal­ing with com­pli­ance issues, staffing, client ser­vice and case prepa­ra­tion was wear­ing him down. His rev­enue was down year-over-year, and he wanted to get back on a growth tra­jec­tory. He just wasn’t sure what to do.

The chal­lenge in coach­ing Rick was that he had built a very suc­cess­ful prac­tice through hard work and tal­ent. His nat­ural ten­dency in grow­ing his busi­ness was to play to his strengths. He was a nat­ural sales­man who under­stood the “art of the deal”. Put him in front of a prospect and it was game over. The prob­lem was that he didn’t have enough qual­i­fied prospects. When I asked Rick how many prospects he had in the pipeline, he sheep­ishly answered “about 10 to 15″. When I asked him when he expected to close them, he said it would hap­pen in the next 6 to 12 weeks.

Those responses are fairly typ­i­cal. Most advi­sors have 5 to 40 prospects in their pipeline and expect to close them in the next three months. The num­ber of prospects and the time­frame for clos­ing the sales are symp­toms of a pat­tern in Rick’s busi­ness that lim­ited his suc­cess. Like a gifted ath­lete who gets by on nat­ural abil­ity, Rick was able to per­form at a fairly high level. He had mas­tered the art of sell­ing and deal­ing with peo­ple, but the lack of a more sci­en­tific approach to his busi­ness left him feel­ing over­whelmed and out of con­trol. Noth­ing about his prac­tice seemed as sim­ple or pre­dictable as it once did. He was los­ing his zest and pas­sion for the business.

In con­trast, top per­form­ing advi­sors take what can best be described as a sci­en­tific approach to build­ing their prac­tice. This approach puts sys­tems in place to man­age each aspect of the busi­ness. Rather than rely­ing on gut feel and nat­ural tal­ent, they plan their work and use ana­lyt­i­cal tools and processes to orga­nize each aspect of their work and that of their staff and asso­ciates to enhance effec­tive­ness and pro­duc­tiv­ity. The very best advi­sors com­bine art and sci­ence. They lever­age their tal­ent as rain­mak­ers and sales­peo­ple with clients and prospects and com­bine their unique abil­ity with a sci­en­tific approach to orga­niz­ing and run­ning a business.

In coach­ing Rick, the first step was to get him to slow down and think about his busi­ness and where he was going. Like many suc­cess­ful advi­sors, he con­fused activ­ity with progress. By always being busy, he kept his anx­i­ety at bay. Unfor­tu­nately, he some­times seemed like a car with the engine redlin­ing and the trans­mis­sion in neu­tral. All that energy wasn’t get­ting him where he wanted to be. It took patience and per­se­ver­ance to put together his busi­ness plan. This became his flight plan and his busi­ness took off. The flight plan clar­i­fied his vision for the busi­ness and crys­tal­lized who he wanted as clients and how he wanted to serve them. He broad­ened his prod­uct mix and began to work with clients and prospects that fit his ideal client profile.

Uti­liz­ing processes and sys­tems enhanced his mar­ket­ing, sales and ser­vice effec­tive­ness and led to dra­matic increases in rev­enue. Imple­ment­ing a per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tem increased the pro­duc­tiv­ity of his staff and their level of sat­is­fac­tion. He learned to enjoy man­ag­ing staff and asso­ciate advi­sors. Apply­ing the sci­ence of prac­tice devel­op­ment mag­ni­fied his unique abil­ity as a rain­maker and sales­per­son. His busi­ness dou­bled over the first twelve months and con­tin­ues to grow at a sig­nif­i­cant and pre­dictable rate. The best part is that he is pas­sion­ate about what he does and loves his job.

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: Analytical Tools, Art And Science, Case Preparation, Compliance Issues, Control, Covenant Group, Dealing With People, Game, Gifted Athlete, Growth Trajectory, Natural Ability, Natural Tendency, Norm Trainor, Passion, Pipeline, Profitable Practice, Prospects, Shoulders, Three Months, Timeframe, Zest
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Three keys to peak achievement

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

It’s com­mon to see peo­ple we work with achieve suc­cess way beyond ours – often with­out any appar­ent rea­son. The log­i­cal response is to won­der what they have that we don’t?.

This was the topic of the recent book Tal­ent is Over­rated, by For­tune edi­tor Geoff Colvin – with some impor­tant mes­sages for any­one look­ing to ramp up performance.

Here are three lessons that every advi­sor can apply:

These were taken from a review of this book by U.S. con­sul­tant Matt Ander­son that appeared on the U.S.  advi­sor web­site Horsesmouth.

Focus on delib­er­ate practice

Colvin looked at top per­form­ers in a vari­ety of fields – includ­ing busi­ness, sales, sports and entertainment.

He found super achiev­ers are not dif­fer­en­ti­ated by nat­ural abil­ity, work ethic, expe­ri­ence or intel­lect. A cer­tain amount of each of these is nec­es­sary to excel of course, but in and of them­selves they don’t lead to peak achievement.

Among the com­mon traits of supe­rior per­form­ers that Colvin did find was that they pur­sue delib­er­ate prac­tice in areas that address key skills, often tak­ing them around nat­ural limitations.

An exam­ple is foot­ball hall of famer Jerry Rice, who played with the San Fran­cisco 49ers. He holds all the major records for receivers and played 20 sea­sons until he was 42 in a posi­tion where the aver­age player does not make it to 30.

Yet he was not con­sid­ered fast by pro­fes­sional standards.

His suc­cess came because he worked harder in prac­tice and in the off-season than any­one else –  and also because he designed his prac­tice to work on his spe­cific needs .

His train­ing focused on four things to com­pen­sate for his aver­age speed:

run­ning pre­cise pat­terns (strength training)

explo­sive accel­er­a­tion (uphill wind sprints)

sta­mina late in games (endurance training)

and chang­ing direc­tions sud­denly with­out sig­nal­ing his intent (trail running).

The same prin­ci­ple applies to finan­cial advisors.

The first cru­cial ques­tion to think through is sim­ple: What is the sin­gle most impor­tant improve­ment needed for you to achieve bet­ter results?

Do you need to prac­tice how you run ini­tial appoint­ments so they lead to fur­ther meet­ings or how you make prospect­ing calls? Should you focus on get­ting bet­ter results from ask­ing for refer­rals, your net­work­ing activ­i­ties or cof­fee with poten­tial cen­ters of influ­ence? Or is moti­vat­ing your team or time man­age­ment the area that you need to work on?

Once you iden­tify the activ­ity, you need to put in place a prac­tice plan. One solu­tion might be to find some­one you know who’s really good at the area you’ve iden­ti­fied and find a way to learn from them.

And then com­mit to spend­ing at least five and prefer­ably ten hours a week on it in a sys­tem­atic, dis­ci­plined fash­ion.  It might be improv­ing your invest­ment or insur­ance knowl­edge. It might be upgrad­ing your com­puter skills or pub­lic speak­ing skills. It might be build­ing pro­file by tak­ing on a lead­er­ship role in a local charity.

What­ever the one area you pick, you need to make an unshake­able com­mit­ment to work­ing on it.

Oper­ate in the Learn­ing Zone.

Even if you work hard, you won’t make real progress if you just do things that are safe and easy.

Uni­ver­sity of Michigan’s Noel Tichy is best known for his many years of work with Gen­eral Elec­tric. He has iden­ti­fied three areas that we all oper­ate in: the com­fort zone , the learn­ing zone and, beyond that, the panic zone.

In terms of mov­ing for­ward, the com­fort zone is not help­ful and the panic zone is unpro­duc­tive. To be on top of your game, you must push your­self to  be in your learn­ing zone as much as possible.

And as you gain pro­fi­ciency, you need to con­tin­u­ously push your­self. This is no dif­fer­ent than a weight train­ing pro­gram – as you gain strength, you have to keep adding weight in order to keep improving.

To do this, most of us need sup­port and feed­back. As Colvin puts it: “No one becomes extra­or­di­nary on his own.”

Espe­cially at crit­i­cal times in your devel­op­ment, Colvin rec­om­mends an out­side eye to see the things you can­not not see about your­self. This can be a col­league, your branch man­ager, some­one at your head office, a close friend or a pro­fes­sional coach that you hire.

In Colvin’s words:  “Becom­ing sig­nif­i­cantly good at almost any­thing is extremely dif­fi­cult with­out the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going”. That’s the rea­son why the best golfers and ten­nis play­ers still work with coaches.

Finally, mind­set is key

Another key to top per­form­ers is that they are never sat­is­fied, always ask­ing them­selves how they can do bet­ter – in fact, typ­i­cally they’re their own tough­est critics.

Two other key traits when it comes to the mind­set of super achievers:

First, they avoid a vic­tim men­tal­ity and take respon­si­bil­ity when things fall off the rail.

And sec­ond, they are always push­ing them­selves and striv­ing to get bet­ter – good is never good enough.

My thanks to Matt Ander­son for per­mis­sion to extract key points from his arti­cle. To sub­scribe to his free refer­ral newslet­ter, go to www​.there​fer​ralau​thor​ity​.com.

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Tags: Apparent Reason, Average Speed, Changing Directions, Deliberate Practice, Endurance Training, Explosive Acceleration, Football Hall, Hall Of Famer, Impr, Jerry Rice, Key Skills, Logical Response, Matt Anderson, Natural Ability, Peak Achievement, Precise Patterns, San Francisco 49ers, Three Keys, Wind Sprints, Work Ethic
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