Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 177: Ideas to Implement - Five Good Ideas You Can Implement Today

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177: Ideas to Implement - Five Good Ideas You Can Implement Today · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome back, advisors.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: I'm always so glad that you are here joining me.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Every week, I want to create a follow-up episode that is short, sweet and all about the tactical actionable items from this week's longer podcast.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: So every week, my objective is to just distill the episode down into those couple of bullet points that you can act on immediately to make a big impact in your business.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: We just want to do the dang thing.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Strategizing shiny objects all super interesting, but without implementation, none of it matters.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: So I am your host of the Efficient Advisor, libby Greilwe, and thanks for joining me.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: I have built a 100% referral only planning practice that I grew to seven figures as a solo advisor, all while working just three days a week and taking off 14 weeks a year to lean into being a mom, a wife, a friend, a sister, a daughter and, frankly, just a travel obsessed human who enjoyed taking extended vacations and time away from the business.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: We are about to transform your practice, so move over exhaustion and get out of the way.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Advisor ADD.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: It is time to take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: And in order to do that right, this week's episode was really just a little list of good ideas, and I joked in the intro of the longer podcast that you know, all the time when I'm coaching, whether it's in our group program or one-on-one, or whether I'm out speaking at conferences doing keynotes, I'll have people like tell me this little nugget that they heard and they'll go oh my gosh, that's just such a good idea and it seems so simple.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: It seems so easy, it seems super doable and they're not like long enough things to make their own episode.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: But I've just been kind of writing stuff down here recently and we're going to do a couple of these where it's just a bunch of random good ideas that are not just mine, but ideas that I have collected from working with, you know, over a thousand advisors in this coaching business since 2014.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: So you know, I talked to lots of people, gather lots of fun, little interesting, cool things that people are up to, and really I just, you know, I hear all the time, oh, that's a good idea.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, that seems so easy and I wanted to just give you a whole bunch of those ideas for you to see what might work or make sense for your business.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: So in thinking about this ideas to implement episode to go along with the longer podcast, I'm like okay if it's only five ideas.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: I gave a lot more detail, of course, about each idea inside of the longer podcast, but really it comes down to this there's there's five ideas here.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: There is this concept of using language that is really intentional with our clients and moving away from the word review, so things like annual review, quarterly review, investment review and moving more towards language like strategy, things that are forward thinking, proactive, so review kind of having this reatric, reactive or retroactive feel to it or sort of like hey, let's just talk about what happened to us over the last year versus this idea of strategy session is, you know, let's obviously we want to talk about what happened in the last 12 months, sure, but what are we going to strategically do about the next 12,?
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Right, we want to kind of shift from this old school idea of things are just happening to us and shifting into this new school of while things are happening to us, we also have some ability to take actions and to do things strategically to improve your financial plan client.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Another little kind of shift or idea is we talk a lot about model weeks and time management, and something that comes up for a lot of advisors is well okay and really just in our group coaching program we were talking about this idea of Surge meetings or cluster meetings, and you know there's a whole bunch of different styles of you know ways that you can do a lot of client meetings and we were talking about, well, what happens when you're booking months in advance and your calendar is totally full and you have a client that has an emergency or a big need, or, you know, something happens right somebody dies, somebody Files for divorce, somebody has a baby, somebody gets married, somebody has a benefits package change or they're offered a Retirement package that they want your help deciding on whether that they should take.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: What do we do With those people?
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Or people at call and say left my job, I need to roll over my 401k and I have you know X number of days to get that done?
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: How do we Add them into the schedule without it becoming this big disruptive thing?
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: And you know we talk about how advisors are amazing at adding stuff and terrible at subtracting stuff, where we continue to add to our schedule without necessarily taking time away from something else in order to accommodate the addition, and that's then right, what pours over into Overwhelmed working late, taking work home, you know, the nights, the weekends, this idea of constantly feeling like we're behind and need to get caught up, and this idea of adding VIP time slots into your model week is Something that I have seen.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: I personally didn't do this and I'm like, oh, what a great idea.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: I wish I would have done that, but my you know, bestie Jen has VIP time slots now in her calendar and it's made all the difference and I've had quite a few advisors that I've worked with over the years start implementing VIP time slots and it has just been a huge time saver because they've got it booked in.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: So it's not an addition and If those time slots are not filled, they can use that towards something else business development, getting caught up, doing the email, you know all those kinds of things.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: The way that we kind of did this in my business is I Would run 12 appointments a week and we had slots for 14 to give a little bit of flexibility for our clients.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: So ideally we would have 12 kind of of our regular clients or prospect meetings, and then we had these two like buffer ones that were built into the calendar but I really didn't want them.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Full 14 appointments was a lot for me, you know, considering that I worked through three days a week too right.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: So I have some advisors that can run, you know, at 25 appointments a week and, like you, live in their best lives, and I have some advisors that can run seven a week and that's kind of their personal max.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: So don't let my number influence your number by any stretch of the imagination.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: But we do want to be thoughtful about what percentage of our time is spent in front of clients, adding value to clients, seeing clients doing impactful work versus Officework, busy work, paperwork, things that we can hire out to better leverage our time.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: So this is something we're talking about in our group coaching program right now is Looking at KPIs and one of our KPIs being how much time are we spending in front of our clients.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: But anyways, sidetrack back on track here.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: So Building time into your calendar to accommodate oopsies, errors, you know IT's clients all the time that like okay, well, what happens when your kid throws up on the bus, and because this happened to me multiple times.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: We live in a really hilly area.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Our kids would get on the school bus super early.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: They were the first stop and they had a long our Jewish drive and it was very hilly and we had our one son threw up on the bus multiple times.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: And, of course, if your kid puked, the school calls and they're now not allowed to school.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Come back to school for 24 hours.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: So what happens if your kid pukes?
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: How do we build margin?
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: How do we build white space?
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: How do we build the oops your kid puked on the bus time into our calendars?
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: And VIP time slots make a ton of sense for those types of activities that are especially revenue generating or really really important for clients.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Building that in makes a ton of sense.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: Another quick idea that we talked about was this idea of smiley face, sad face, meh face and really working through your processes to make sure that every single interaction that your clients have with your business is a smiley face.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: And how do we move?
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: You know, often we just think things are very neutral.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: We have a lot of meh, just kind of that average face.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: We're talking about the smiley face where the mouth is just like a straight line across.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: So if your clients were to rate their interactions with your emails, with their, with your newsletter, with your social media, when they call into your office and talk to your team, when they receive a doc, you sign like, what is their experience and how do we move a meh to a happy face?
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, another thing that we talked about on this, on this episode, was really setting intentions and goals and, when you're building out an agenda for a meeting, really being intentional about what is the purpose of this, what is the impact of this to our clients.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: So I measure the impact of these meetings and each line item that I'm adding.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: What is my purpose in doing this?
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: What am I moving forward for this client?
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Am I filling, you know, blank time on the on the agenda?
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Am I just is this filler?
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Is this more for me in my ego?
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Is this more to try to add value?
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Is this trying to educate, like really getting into each bullet item and identifying what is the purpose of this thing, so that we don't get into this trap of our clients being like, oh, I could have looked that up online or gosh, we came all the way in or we spent an hour online with this person and we really didn't get a whole heck of a lot out of it.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: So, being really intentional and kind of going back and editing your agenda and really like assigning like what is the actual purpose.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: So you know, when you talk about, like copywriters or editors or people who are writing a book, you know you go back and ruthlessly edit words that don't matter, phrases that don't move the story along, things that don't contribute right.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: We're not just wanting to fill 100 pages for a book, we're wanting to make it one of those books that people put down and go oh my gosh, that was so helpful.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: So how do we set intention, how do we make sure, how do we edit every line of that agenda to make sure that it's moving the story forward, that it's moving your purpose forward, that it's moving your clients forward?
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: And the last one is I have to Google when I say this out loud but like, how do we celebrate as a team, supporting the team culture when we have crappy client experiences?
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: So we talked on the episode about how, like, if you fire a client or you ask a client to take their assets somewhere else.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: However you want to phrase that graduating, firing, ushering into a new experience, whatever you want to call it.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: We talked about throwing a pizza party or taking your team out for margaritas, because that kind of stuff can be heavy and hard and how do we wrapper it in a way that's like hey, I've got your backs.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: We're not going to allow clients to treat our team members like that.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: We're not going to keep people in the book that drag our culture down or that we don't look forward to working with.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: How do we keep a positive, exciting work environment that people want to show up to?
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And I think celebrating some of those things that are really tough in the business are a great way to kind of keep that culture up and alive.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: So try not to make this episode too, too long.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: I hope these are some good ideas that you guys will implement inside of your business and we'll probably have a few more of these episodes coming out here in the near future, because there's lots of just like little good ideas that I've continued to capture from people.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: So let me know if you like this type of episode.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: This is something new and a little different, so let me know if this is something that you enjoy and would like to see more of.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: Let me know over in the Efficient Advisor community over on Facebook or DM me over on LinkedIn.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much, and I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week.