Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 149: Ideas to Implement - Five Strategies I Used to Work 25 Hours a Week

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149: Ideas to Implement - Five Strategies I Used to Work 25 Hours a Week · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, before I dive into this week's episode, I have two exciting things that I want to share with you quick.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: So the first is last week we did an episode on family tree templates and I had so many people email me and send me messages saying, hey, can I just get yours, please, please, please.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: And normally it's something I reserve.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I have, you know, oodles and oodles and oodles of templates, and usually it's something I reserve for clients that are in our group coaching program or are working with us one-on-one.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: But I had such an outpouring of people asking for this because I know it's one of those things that it's not like, it's hard but it's time consuming to create and develop, and so I found the perfect solution.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: We decided to do a fundraiser and you can actually purchase the family tree template for a donation of $15 or more to St Jude.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: So I have the link in the show notes for you to go ahead and grab that.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: It'll save you, you know, at least $15 worth of your time looking for a template, creating a template, having somebody on your team create a template, trying to explain to them what it is that you're looking for.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: I'm just gonna give you the one that I used in my own business and it goes along with the episode where I explained kind of how we implemented it, where we stored it, what we wrote on it, all of the details.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: So you can check that out in last week's episode or you can check the show notes before.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: I've linked that podcast for you and the link to take you out to theefficientadvisorcom where you can purchase the template for the $15 or more donation and all 100% of the proceeds will go to St Jude's Medical Research Center.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite charities that we've supported for years and years and years.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: So I felt like it was a win.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: It was fair for the clients that have paid to work with me and get templates, it's fair to you guys because it saves you a ton of time and it helps the children.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: So that my friends is what we call a win, win, win, and who doesn't love it when everybody wins?
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Oh, and speaking of winning, the second thing that I wanted to announce a couple of weeks ago we sent out an email announcing my friends over at the Perfect RIA have created a one-page financial plan masterclass and the link was I don't know.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Their website was jacked up.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: The link was broken.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: So I am excited to announce that the brilliant tech folks over at the Perfect RIA have cracked the case and they have figured out the link, and their masterclass is now live and working.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: And so, as you know, my mantra is to keep it simple, and giving clients a detailed, complex financial plan can be really overwhelming, and advisors are often met with glazed eyes, kind of losing clients' interest before they really even get into the meat of it.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: And I get asked all of the time about one-page financial plans and how to really help boil down clients' needs and desires into a simple, concise way.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Not to mention, a one-page plan is so easy to template and really, really easy to execute and you know how I feel about efficiency, but one-page financial plan.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: So in my own practice, we did something similar.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: We called it our financial planning synopsis.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: So we still gave them the big, you know obnoxious financial plan, but we boiled it down to this synopsis and that is the thing that most of our clients really resonated with, and I loved it because somebody else on my team could create it on my behalf.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: So I'm super excited to just let you know that my friend, matt Jarvis, and my other friend, micah Stolansky, over at the Perfect RIA, have created a one-page financial plan class just for advisors.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: So your clients, you know it'll save you a ton of time from analyzing complicated financial jargon.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Your clients will gain a better understanding of their financial situation, they will engage in their financial decisions at a higher level and, honestly, the leave meetings feeling less stressed and more at ease.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Because it is it's simple, it's easy to digest but, most importantly, selfishly for me, I think it's really cool because for you guys, it's easy to execute, it's easy to template, it's easy to train and it's super efficient.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: So I have got the link for you in the show notes for that as well, and an email went out on November 3rd with the link as well.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: So check your inbox, check your spam, wherever my crazy emails end up, and you can find the link to the masterclass on crafting the perfect one-page financial plan.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: But now that we've got that housekeeping out of the way, as you know, every week I try to create a follow-up episode that is short, sweet and all about the action steps from this week's longer podcast.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: So my objective is really just to distill the episode down into a couple of bullet points so it goes hand in hand with the Tuesday episode that's longer and a lot more in depth and gives you a lot of the how, why, all the things behind whatever it is that we're talking about.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: And then these ideas to implement are really just about the action steps.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: So the couple of bullet points that you could take action on immediately to make a big impact in your business.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: I am your host of the Efficient Advisor, libby Graywee Welcome if you are new.
• 5:15
  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.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: And I am here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to take everything that I've learned from the couple of decades of being in this industry to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and really creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: What I've learned in the last nearly two decades is what actually matters and what really moves the needle forward in your business and how can you actually build out systems and processes and automate and delegate and delete things that don't matter and streamline everything else so that you can build a practice that helps you serve your family, your friends, yourself, the lifestyle that you are looking for, so that business that you are running, instead of it running you.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: All right, so let's dive into this week's action items.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: So this week's episode was really all about kind of just updating the podcast.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: It's been a while since I talked about kind of my story and what the origin behind my desire to work so much more efficiently like where it really came from and what strategies I used to go from working that 70, 80 hours a week down to this 24, 25 hour a week work week and since the podcast has just kind of gone crazy and we have thousands of new listeners every week which awesome.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: I can't thank you guys enough for being here.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: I just thought it'd be kind of important to share some of the key things.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Obviously, it was years and years of accumulation of lots of small things that made a difference, but really kind of five of the things that really really helped, or five strategies that really helped me dramatically reduce the amount of time that I was working, while increasing my happiness and increasing my sanity.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, so the first one was having a model week and there's an episode, number 12, all about designing your perfect schedule.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: But this is one of the things that brought me so much structure to an otherwise non-structured practice.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: And when I first started my business, I remember thinking like, oh, I'm an entrepreneur, I mean, I was fresh out of college, I was 22, and I remember thinking like, oh, the beautiful part about this business is I can work whenever I want.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: If I wanna work at midnight, I can work at midnight.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: If I wanna work Saturday at 2 pm, I can work.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Saturday at 2 pm, I can sleep till nine.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: Do you guys remember the days that you could sleep till like 10 am?
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Do you remember that?
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Those were amazing, weren't they?
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: My body would never in 5,000 years, let me sleep till 10 am now, but man, I do remember those were the days.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Anyway, post-children moving on, I just remember being like, oh, this is so great because I don't want structure, I don't want to have all of this schedule.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: I really wanted a lot of freedom and flexibility and while I still really desire that, I'm an Enneagram 7.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: I love variety, I love having that freedom.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: When I started structuring my practice and having these God-awful things like tea meetings and huddles and specified days that I'm doing different things right, like meeting days, prep days, buffer days All of that stuff actually gave me so much freedom.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: I would have never been able to work a 25-hour work week with a seven-figure practice if I had not figured out my model week.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: So go back to that episode.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: It's a whole stinking hour on how to craft a model week and what to consider and what to look at and all the things.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: So, in lieu of going into all of that detail, check out episode number 12.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: It's one of my favorites.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: I honestly should probably rerun it at some point or maybe do an update to it and remember, as you're building it build the week that you want to have, or the model month, or model year or model quarter or whatever it is that you're building.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Build the one that you want, not the one that you currently have.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, all right.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Number two creating a niche, an ideal client avatar.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: There's a whole episode on how to craft a marketing message and it's all about building out this ideal client avatar or ICA, and I would suggest you go back and listen to that.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: That's episode number 10,.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Right, we're going way back in the vault to some of the original episodes here, but having a niche allows you to do so many different things.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: One when you specialize, you can charge more for that specialty.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Specialists are sought out, not general practitioners, and so the more nuanced the planning that you're doing, the more you can speak directly into the hearts of your ideal client.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: And it doesn't have to be and I want you to kind of change your mindset around what a niche is.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: It doesn't necessarily have to be a certain employer or a certain age group or a certain occupation.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: There are qualitative attributes to an ideal client avatar that I want you to consider too.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: So you might work with a particular personality type or people that have similar fears or past experiences with financial advisors or similar objectives.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: I was working with a advisor client of mine on his ICA, and he was like there's just no qualitative I mean no quantitative qualities to these clients, like they're all over the board.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: They have different occupations, some are married, some are single, some are old, some are young, some are introverts, some are extroverts Like there are no labels that I can put on these people.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: And so we started asking a lot of qualitative questions and we kind of got down to that.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: His clients were millionaires next door.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: They were all a wide variety Some were farmers, some were physicians, some were business owners, some were employees, but they all were living way below their means.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: They were all extremely generous with their money.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: They were all doing very well from a savings perspective.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: They all had at least a million dollars or more, but the key being that you'd never know it looking at them, that they didn't project as people who've got lots of resources, and there's a particular mindset to this millionaire next door.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So we started rebuilding and crafting his message around that.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: But when you do serve a niche, it allows you to streamline what you are doing from a process perspective, or when you have a niche product or you kind of productize your service offering.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: So what type of planning that is that you do?
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: You can streamline that.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: There's an amazing book by John Warlow called Built to Sell.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: I recommend it all the time because it's A.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: It's the easiest book to read.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: If you've never read a business book or you're one of those people who's like Olivia, I don't like to read, it's written like a novel.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: You can read it in like two hours.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: It is Fantastic and I've never had anybody I've recommended to come back to me and say, uh, terrible book, not worth my time.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: In fact, for most people, the way that this book is written.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: It's so powerful from a productizing, a service standpoint.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: You will absolutely benefit from it in some way, shape or form, so I will link that in the show notes for you as well.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: But by having a niche, it allows you to streamline your prep.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: It allows you to streamline your delivery.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: It allows you to streamline your followup.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: It allows your staff and your team to have a more narrowed approach to what they need to know and know.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: It's easier to do a few things really really well than to do a 5,000 things really really well, and so having a niche can be important.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: It makes you more referable, all of the things that we talked about in the longer episode.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Having a team was critical for me.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: So having a model week that worked, finding the one that actually really allowed me to maximize every minute of my day that I was working, to be really productive, to give me the structure that I needed by niching down and really figuring out who it was that I wanted to work with and how to streamline that process, and then having a team to help me buy back my time, and that looked like a team both in the office and outside of the office.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: So that could include outside of the office.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: That includes someone mowing your lawn for you.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: That could include hiring cleaning people.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: That could include having a nanny come in and watch your children.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: That could include having a laundry service.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: There's a million different ways that you can buy back your time.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: And in the office you know there's that old adage that if you want to go fast, go alone.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: If you want to go far, go together.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: You need a team.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: But don't get me wrong, you need the right team.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Like that's the thing.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: You need the right team for your business, get the right people and the right roles with the right culture.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: And in the episode I go into a little bit some sort of examples of how you know, there was this kind of old adage of hierarchy of who you hire first and who you hire second in your business and what that looks like and how.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: That didn't work for me.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: And then how to actually assess what it is that your business needs, because what your small boutique RIA firm needs might be different than somebody's multi-advisor broker dealer practice.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: So, just like a diet and fitness, not everybody is built the same and needs the same things.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Same thing with your business.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Not every business is built the same.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Not everybody offers the same products and services.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: So making sure that you are doing org chart exercises, role exercises, scalability for each piece of your planning process exercises and really determining who the right next hire for your businesses.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: But making sure, before you jump into hiring, that you have scaled yourself and that you have scaled your existing team as much as humanly possible.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: And doing that through model week and building out time management processes and streamlining as much as you can.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Which kind of leads me into the next one, which is streamline, streamline, streamline, streamline.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: And the fifth one, which is finding that pressure point and then fixing it.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: And in the episode I kind of gave some examples of how you find the pressure point what's causing you pain, what's taking too long, what do you feel like should be faster, how do you want to show up and what's getting in the way of that.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: And then using that as your guide or as your North Star to figure out well, what in my life, what in my business, needs to be streamlined, how can I do it better, faster, smarter, cheaper or easier?
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And starting with each pain point that you have and slowly going through each one and identifying a solution that allows you to be more efficient and more effective.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: And if you need help with this, that's what the systems to scale, group coaching and mastermind program is we are launching.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Our next group starts January 11th the second Thursday in January.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: No, january 9th the second Tuesday in January.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: So we've got a group launching in January 9th.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Consider joining and every week we will start breaking down your processes and I will walk you through all of the different systems to scale.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: You could check out more on the website.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: I didn't really plan on talking about it, so I don't really have any detailed information sitting in front of me.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: And that's just how I'm going to roll today, you guys.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: So, but we go through, we identify several pretty significant parts of your planning business and we start sketching out the process, start to finish, build the templates.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: I'll give you all the tools, templates, samples, examples, resources, and we will get you hyper organized over the next 10 months.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: So this group runs from January through end of October, early November.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: If you wanna join, check out theofficialadvisorcom backslash coaching or just click the coaching button and you can learn more there.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: But yeah, we're wanting to find these pressure points.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: We're wanting to find the things that are taking too long.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Is it that you're rewriting basically the same email over and over and over again and you just need to sit down and make a template, create the storage hierarchy where you're gonna save stuff so that you can find it, how to name it, and then you can teach somebody to use it, send it, et cetera.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: You find yourself doing the same process over and over, but slightly different every time.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: How do we sit down, actually establish what we want that process to look like?
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: So, whether that's your financial planning process or your onboarding process and all of those things that you've been capturing, are these ideas from listening to podcasts or out on LinkedIn or attending conferences and meetings, all of these ideas that you're like, ugh, it'd be so great to implement that.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: This is where you do that.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: We find those pressure points or those pain points, and sometimes the pain point is imposter syndrome.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Even I wish I should be doing this or I could be doing that, or so-and-so is doing this.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: I'd love to implement something like that.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: I just don't have the time.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: I just don't have the.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: So here's where we go through all of those pain points and we start to build out ways to streamline literally everything through automation, delegation, templating or straight up elimination, and really a big piece of what we need to be doing and I'm kind of getting off the heart of the ideas to implement episode here but is also identifying what are you currently doing that has zero value or zero impact and straight deleting it.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: And if it's not necessary and it's not moving the needle in your business, if it's not making a difference in your client's lives, if people aren't reporting back to you and saying, oh my gosh, this is amazing or this is exactly what I needed.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Perhaps it's not even necessary.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: So, doing some self-assessment of how you're spending your time, what is it that you are delivering to clients?
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Actually asking them like what's helpful, what's not helpful, what's impactful, what's not impactful, and using that data to continue to streamline.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm getting way too long.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: These episodes are supposed to be like 10 minutes or less, and this one I'm looking at my clock here and it's approaching 20 minutes.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: I'm so sorry you guys, but anyways, I hope you check out the Perfect RIA one page financial plan masterclass.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, if that's one of your pain points is writing recommendations or your planning process, this is just taking too friggin long.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Make sure you check out that masterclass.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: It's currently offered at, I believe, $479 through the link that I've got for you guys, so check that out Might be a great way for you to start identifying one of your pain points and working through that.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: I've also, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, got my family tree template linked for you.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: If you wanna make a donation to St Jude, I and the children would greatly appreciate it, and if there's anything else I can do for you guys, please don't hesitate to ask.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: You know I hang out over on LinkedIn and in the efficient advisor community over on Facebook, which is a free Facebook group for financial advisors, financial coaches and operations people within your practice that would benefit from having resources of other advisors and other ops, people that are willing to share templates and share software and what's working and what's not working.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: It's just a really cool place to hang out.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: So if there's anything I can do for you guys, please don't hesitate to ask, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week and I'll see you guys next time.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: I'll see you guys next time.