The Project Management Approach to Building a Better Financial Advisory Business

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

In busi­ness and in life, you are con­stantly man­ag­ing projects.  You could break your projects into three categories:

• Per­sonal Projects
• Fam­ily Projects
• Busi­ness Projects

To achieve hap­pi­ness, you must have a good bal­ance between these three projects.  A cou­ple of my friends wrote a great book, Jug­gling Ele­phants, which describes this process really well.

By tak­ing a project man­age­ment approach to each of these cat­e­gories, we can get more done in less time and achieve the cor­rect balance.

As a finan­cial advi­sor, you jug­gle way too many tasks.  One big com­plaint that I have been hear­ing lately is “If I took inven­tory of all of the tasks that I need to com­plete, I would be totally over­whelmed and would not get any of them done.”

Just do the math.  Let’s say you have 100 clients who meet your ideal client pro­file and you are deliv­er­ing a com­pre­hen­sive wealth man­age­ment expe­ri­ence.  To prop­erly exe­cute the strat­egy, you need to review, find solu­tions, imple­ment and monitor:

• Invest­ment
• Retire­ment
• Estate Plan­ning
• Insur­ance or Risk Management
• Tax
• Children’s Edu­ca­tion
• Busi­ness Succession

Some are more com­plex than the oth­ers, but it is safe to say that you are jug­gling a pretty big num­ber of tasks for each client.  Mul­ti­ply by 100!

Your abil­ity to man­age these tasks will deter­mine your level of client sat­is­fac­tion and even­tu­ally your client reten­tion and growth rates for your business.

Advi­sors have tra­di­tion­ally tried to use CRMs to man­age these tasks.  Unfor­tu­nately, it is like try­ing to use a your put­ter for driving.

Here is a step-by-step approach to tak­ing a project man­age­ment approach for man­ag­ing your clients‘ wealth man­age­ment projects:

1. Stop try­ing to do wealth and finan­cial plan­ning in inten­sive multi-hour meet­ings.  It wears both you and your clients out, your clients become over­whelmed and it does not gen­er­ally lead to com­plete imple­men­ta­tion of all aspects of the finan­cial plan.
2. Break you wealth man­age­ment pro­gram into the cat­e­gories above and either adapt your plan­ning soft­ware or develop a dis­cov­ery process for each category.
3. Set up a sched­ule of meet­ings over a 12 to 24 month period for each client with a goal of hav­ing every aspect of the finan­cial or wealth plan fully imple­mented and monitored.
4. Set up a series of Mile­stones to be com­pleted.  A typ­i­cal Mile­stone is com­ple­tion of dis­cov­ery, selec­tion and imple­men­ta­tion of solu­tions or strate­gies and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the best way to mon­i­tor the solu­tions and strategies.
5. In each meet­ing, iden­tify tasks that need to be com­pleted and link them to the Mile­stones.  Assign tasks to an indi­vid­ual – you, a team mem­ber, another pro­fes­sional advi­sor (accoun­tant, estate spe­cial­ist, etc.) or a client and set a due date.  Assign­ing tasks in an orga­nized way will increase client engage­ment and improve satisfaction.
6. Stress to your team mem­bers the impor­tance of com­plet­ing tasks on time and report­ing com­ple­tion sta­tus.  Have daily meet­ings to dis­cuss the project lists and any prob­lems to help team mem­bers to com­plete tasks on time and to everybody’s satisfaction.

By tak­ing a project man­age­ment approach, you will def­i­nitely iden­tify more work for you and your team but you will be able to achieve more in a frac­tion of the time.  Imag­ine that all you need to do each day is to come in to the office, ful­fill your client con­tact and task oblig­a­tions and go home.

We have devel­oped a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion – Client Roadmap to help you man­age this process.  Visit www​.clien​troadmap​.com and watch our 2-minute video on how to how to more effec­tively col­lab­o­rate with your clients.

Get more done, bet­ter sat­isfy your clients and get back on a pos­i­tive growth track.

Bob Simp­son is Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants.  Bob can be reached on his direct line at 905−502−0100, toll free at 866−646−6002 or by e-mail at bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

About Bob Simpson

Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sult­ing has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

Bob Simp­son, pres­i­dent and founder of Syn­chronic­ity has been involved, directly or indi­rectly in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try since 1981. He has been a very suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sor with Nes­bitt Thom­son Inc., a major Cana­dian finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Between 1981 and 1989, he built a busi­ness with more than $120 mil­lion in assets under man­age­ment, was branch man­ager and SVP National Sales for Mid­land Wal­wyn and has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

You can fol­low Bob Simp­son via:

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Tags: Advisory Business, Business Advisors, Business Projects, Business Succession, Children S Education, Client Profile, Client Retention, Client Satisfaction, Correct Balance, Education Business, Family Projects, Investment Retirement, Management Experience, Management Projects, Managing Projects, Personal Projects, Project Management Approach, Retirement Estate, Risk Management, Step Approach, Wealth Management
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The last resort for achieving motivation

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Over the past six months, I’ve spent lots of time talk­ing to advi­sors, both indi­vid­u­ally and in groups.

A key con­clu­sion:  Never have so many advi­sors strug­gled to main­tain even the most basic level of activ­ity and show up in the morn­ing with a mod­icum of enthusiasm.

Yes, some advi­sors are step­ping up to the chal­lenge and ramp­ing up activ­ity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exist­ing and prospec­tive clients — but they’re the minor­ity. More typ­i­cal are those advi­sors who strug­gle to do much more than show up at the office.  And even when in the office, some advi­sors con­fess there are days when they fight to make more than four or five calls.

As a result, in some cases, a dif­fer­ent approach is required to stay motivated.

If you find your­self among those fight­ing to stay moti­vated, you might want to con­sider a recent New York Times arti­cle on a three step approach to com­pet­i­tive diet­ing that is pay­ing results, par­tic­u­larly among guys. While this arti­cle focuses on diet­ing, the prin­ci­pals can be applied more broadly to any dif­fi­cult task.

Step One:

In the intial stage of this com­pe­ti­tion, you and one or more col­leagues each set weekly goals. For exam­ple, it could be to have three face to face client meet­ings and six phone for­mal appoint­ments to review port­fo­lios with clients each week. And you might toss at least one face to face or phone con­ver­sa­tion with a prospect into the mix for good measure.

Step Two:

Next you agree on how long the com­pe­ti­tion will last — a rea­son­able length might be any­where from six to twelve weeks — and set a time for a “weekly weigh-in”, where each week’s results are reported and recorded.

One group of Toronto invest­ment bankers who embarked on a 13 week weight loss com­pe­ti­tion last fall raised the ante by hav­ing the weekly tally posted on their firm’s intranet. (To make things fair, suc­cess was mea­sured by the per­cent of weight lost rather than absolute pounds.)

Step Three:

In the final step, you agree to the stakes.

There are lots of dif­fer­ent ways to reward the win­ners and pun­ish the losers in this kind of com­pe­ti­tion.  Each par­tic­i­pant could put $100 into a pot, with any­one fail­ing to meet their objec­tives over the com­pe­ti­tion for­feit­ing their con­tri­bu­tion; the pro­ceeds could either be shared by those achiev­ing their goal or fund a party at the end for every­one who participated.

You could have a win­ner take all struc­ture, where who­ever has the most meet­ings and makes the most calls walks away with the pro­ceeds. Alter­na­tively, you could set a weekly penalty of $20 for any­one who falls short of their goals, so that even if some­one falls behind after a cou­ple of weeks, they have an incen­tive to keep trying.

Or you could go the anti-charity” route described in the New York Times arti­cle, where losers have to write a cheque to an orga­ni­za­tion com­pletely at odds with their val­ues. (Depend­ing on your polit­i­cal point of view, for exam­ple, the losers might have to write a cheque to the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party, the Lib­er­als, the NDP or the Bloc Que­be­cois — as I write this, I can imag­ine bemused party offi­cials from the Bloc won­der­ing what’s prompted a flood of new con­tri­bu­tions from Eng­lish Canada.)

As an aside, if you don’t entirely trust other advi­sors in your office when it comes to self report­ing meet­ings and activ­ity level, you could always keep score by com­mis­sion lev­els or new accounts opened.

Remem­ber, des­per­ate times call for des­per­ate mea­sures. If every­thing you’ve tried to stay moti­vated has failed, con­sider giv­ing old fash­ioned com­pet­i­tive spirit, greed and humil­i­a­tion a try.  See if you can enlist some of your col­leagues to join you  - to para­phrase Karl Marx, by unit­ing in a friendly com­pe­ti­tion, you have noth­ing to lose but your sense of drift and lack of direction.

For those who want to read more, the full arti­cle is below:
HEALTH / FITNESS & NUTRITION | Feb­ru­ary 05, 2009
Fit­ness:  Diet­ing? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is
By PAMELA WEILER GRAYSON
Inter­net sites that facil­i­tate diet bet­ting have seen an increase in use, and recent stud­ies have sup­ported the idea that such wagers work for many peo­ple who couldn’t seem to shed pounds any other way.

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Tags: Appointments, Client Meetings, Colleagues, Conclusion, Good Measure, Investment Bankers, Last Resort, Modicum, Motivation, New York Times, Phone Conversation, Portfolios, Principals, Prospective Clients, Six Months, Step Approach, Tally, Weekly Goals, Weight Loss, York Times Article
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Breaking through the procrastination logjam

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

A cou­ple of weeks back, I got a call from an advi­sor who found him­self way behind on con­tact­ing clients, felt over­whelmed at the prospect of tack­ling this and was par­a­lyzed by pro­cras­ti­na­tion as a result.

We all suf­fer from pro­cras­ti­na­tion — the only dif­fer­ence is the mag­ni­tude of the problem.

For advi­sors look­ing to over­come pro­cras­ti­na­tion, here’s the three-step solu­tion I sug­gested to this advi­sor.Step One:

At the end of each day, iden­tify two things you’ve been pro­cras­ti­nat­ing about.

Each should be some­thing that can be addressed in fif­teen min­utes or less — a prospect or client to call, email to write or admin prob­lem to resolve.

If the issue can’t be dealt with in fif­teen min­utes, then carve out a fif­teen minute slice to at least start.

Step Two:

Hav­ing iden­ti­fied the two issues, write them down on top of your to-do list, in your day-timer or on a piece of paper.

Then carve out 30 min­utes in your cal­en­dar on the first free spot the next morn­ing — ide­ally the very first thing in the morn­ing. If you don’t have thirty min­utes avail­able, then you’ll need to come in early to get some other things done to free up the time to address this.

Step Three

Resist the temp­ta­tion to avoid tack­ling the two issues. Resolve to deal with them — if you haven’t tack­led them by lunch time, then  put off going for lunch until you’ve addressed them.

I got a call early this week from this advi­sor thank­ing me for my sug­ges­tion. He’d put my idea into prac­tice — while he still had clients to call, using this approach he’d begun knock­ing over­due client calls off his to-do list (and in fact had increased the num­ber of these calls to four a day). As a result, he feels much bet­ter com­ing into the office and his over­all pro­duc­tiv­ity and enthu­si­asm level is a lot higher.

Lots of us are feel­ing over­whelmed these days. If you can relate to this, con­sider using the two item a day, three step approach that worked for this advisor.

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Tags: 30 Minutes, Address, Advertisement, Calendar Free, Day Timer, Fifteen Minutes, Logjam, Lunch Time, Magnitude, Next Morning, Piece Of Paper, Procrastination, Productivity, Step Approach, Step Solution, Suggestion, Target, Temptation
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