Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 142: 2 Ways to Waste Less Time Every Single Week for You and Your Team

Transcript

142: 2 Ways to Waste Less Time Every Single Week for You and Your Team · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Did you know that the average person in your office, including you, is wasting over 3.2 hours of time every single week just looking for documents?
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: That's over three and a half weeks in a year if you are working just 45 out of 52 weeks.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: So when I heard this statistic, I knew I had to share some strategies around this.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: And, of course, talking about efficiencies and productivity in your financial advisory business is my jam.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: I am obsessed with helping people achieve their goals with less stress, less overwhelm, and I hate wasting time on dumb stuff like looking for documents.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: In this week's episode, I am sharing with you a keynote talk that I did with Penn Mutual last week, where I shared two ways that most advisory offices can save themselves tons and tons of wasted time.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: This keynote was for the office support team.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: You know the unsunkey rows of this business, the people that you, the advisor, could not do your job without.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: I used to always joke that my director of operations was required to give me a five year notice if she was going to quit, because it would literally destroy me, even with all those systems and processes in place.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: She was amazing.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: I encourage you to listen to this talk and share it with your support team, have them listen to this podcast.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Your job as a leader is to encourage the personal and professional development of everyone in your office, and I thought it was so cool that Penn did such an amazing event purely for the development of their office support.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: So let's go ahead and dive into this episode.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: And look, I know you're here because you know it's possible to have energy left over for your family and still have your dream business the business that you are running instead of it running you Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: And if you're new to the Efficient Advisor, welcome.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: I'm so, so glad you're here.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: I'm Libby Graywee.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: I started from scratch, built and sold by age 37, a 100% referral-only planning practice that I grew to seven figures as a solo advisor with an amazing team, all while working just three days a week and taking off 14 weeks a year.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: I am here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to help you take just immediate action on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: We are about to transform your practice.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So, even if you've got Advisor ADD, it's possible and we're gonna take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Well, if I told you that you could significantly improve the culture in your workplace, you could get way more done with pretty much the same amount of time and a whole lot more ease, and, at the same time, dramatically reduce the amount of overwhelm that you're experiencing, and that the financial professional that you're working for could literally triple their hourly rate, become a 100% referral-only advisor and, at the same time, reduce the amount of stress and overwhelm that they're experiencing and reduce the number of hours that they're putting in on nights and weekends.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Would you think I was crazy?
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Well, there was a time when I thought that would be crazy and that those things could not exist, but what I've learned over the last nearly two decades in this business is that it's not only possible, but it's totally attainable for any advisory team in any geographic location, serving any demographic of client, in any tenure of the business, with any type of niche or specialty or none, and that anybody can literally do it at any time, any place and at any stage.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: So let me take you back to 2008 so I can explain.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: So 2008 was a very, very scary year for me and has nothing to do with the stock market collapsing, although that did add a little bit of extra stress.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: The scary part of 2008 for me was that I found out I was pregnant.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: This was great news, because my husband and I had really wanted a baby.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: But this is scary news because for the previous four years I had been working around the clock like a crazy person building my advisory business, and it was nights, it was weekends.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Whenever a client wanted to meet, I was there.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: I was your girl and that might sound familiar for some of the advisors that you're working for or working with and I just remember thinking, gosh, I cannot have a baby and work like this.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: This is completely insane.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: This is not the kind of mom that I wanna be.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: I wanna be that mom that can fully show up and be fully present at everything.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: I don't wanna be tethered to my phone at night and I don't wanna be tethered to my phone during soccer games on the weekends.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: And I just remember being exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: And I knew I wanted to make the same amount of money.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Right, I knew I wanted to run the same level of practice.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: I didn't wanna scale back, but at the same time I knew I literally had to cut the number of hours that I was working in half and I realized I had built this big financial planning practice but I didn't really have a business.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: I had a Libby and I had a support person, but my business was running me instead of us as a team running the business.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: So, fast forward a couple of years, I had literally, since that first pregnancy, tripled the amount of money that I was making per hour.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: My team and I became a 100% referral-only planning practice because of the client experience that we were able to deliver consistently and we became a seven-figure firm working with a really small team with me as a solo advisor and then just two and a half support people.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: And the crazy part was is that I was working just 25 hours a week and my nights and weekends were then spent with my friends and my family and I had time to actually do things for myself, which made me a calmer person in general and a better mom and a better wife and a better friend and a better sister and a better daughter, but also inside of the office as a better colleague and has a better boss and a better leader.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: And the crazy part wasn't that I was really just working 25 hours a week.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: It was that we were actually turning down clients that were coming to us that weren't ideal clients, and if you had told 2004 Libby that started her business hey, at some point you are gonna be turning away people that have a heartbeat and a checkbook I would have thought you were completely crazy and you might be able to relate.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: The advisor that you're working with might be experiencing some of those same things.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: But if you're wondering what changed how did I go from working like a crazy person and completely overwhelmed, and overwhelming my staff, to operating on just three days a week in a super efficient manner?
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: I'd really boil it down to three things, and some of those we're gonna be able to get into today.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: It was really three key changes.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: It was building a simple client service model and a simple client experience, backed by systems and processes that allowed us to become 100% referral only because we were able to deliver a client experience consistently doing the same thing every time wash, rinse, repeat.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: It was building a simple team with the right people in the right roles, with the right culture and the right leadership to allow them to flourish both personally and professionally, and it was creating and implementing these time saving techniques that we're gonna talk about today and that we talk about at the Efficient Advisor, which is my podcast, essentially reducing the complexity within my business and helping it to become efficient, effective but, most importantly, enjoyable.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And we know that when the advisor is happy, everybody's a whole lot happier.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Am I right?
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: And I work with a lot of advisors and their teams that are running around like chickens with their heads cut off right.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: We want to create a work environment where everybody feels well, you can be super busy.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: We don't want it to feel incredibly hectic.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: And look, because I am a financial advisor and because I ran a practice, I'm allowed to say this.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: But all advisors are crazy.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: Like we're all completely nuts and it's just figuring out which kind of crazy your advisor is in the developing systems and processes to maximize the good crazy and to downplay the bad crazy.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: And I'm cracking up because we're getting a lot of like thumbs up and hearts and the reactions on this virtual webinar.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, advisors are crazy and it's okay to say that and, by the way, we know it too.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: So self-awareness is a huge thing.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: But recently I was working with an advisory team and we did a retreat where I went out to their office and led a full day, kind of you know, get our stuff together retreat where we made decisions, we established their processes and we identified where we were going to start the work first.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: And as I talked through their business, we talked as a team, we talked with individual staff members, I talked with the advisors themselves and what I realized is most offices look like that you know imagery of a duck right From the outside, looking in.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: We're gliding across the water, all smooth and pretty and peaceful, and underneath it's just a big giant mess right With legs kicking and paddling, with water churning, and it's kind of crazy under the surface.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: So if that is you and your team, you are not alone.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: But what that led to was the support team feeling every day like they walked in the door and they weren't exactly sure what they were going to be walking into.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: They didn't know what was fully expected of them.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: They had no way of gauging as a support staff if they were doing an okay job, a great job or an exceptional job, other than the add a girl that came every now and then right.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: There was no way of really determining objectives for their role.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: And it was just a never ending to-do list that when three things came off, seven things were being added right.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: This led to very low employee satisfaction.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: While everybody loved the advisor that they were working for, loved the other people in the office, loved the clients, loved the work that they were doing, what they laughed was a sense of calm and a sense of control, right, and everyone, like I said, was running around like their hair was on fire and like a chicken, with their head cut off and starting in a direction on a particular task, only to be yanked from that task and redirected to something else that was considered more urgent, and not ever really the previous task being even followed up on to determine was that actually something that was effective or no, or helpful, and does my work here even matter?
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: And the crazy part was is when we shared these findings with the advisory team, the actual advisors, the financial professionals, were shocked.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: They had no idea that this is how their office was feeling.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: We heard things like oh, but Betty has been with me for 11 years.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: She knows my particular brand of crazy and she's she knows how to work with me.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Or you know, gosh, why didn't, why didn't anyone tell me that and they were floored to hear that their office actually felt the same way that they did Overwhelmed, overworked, lacking direction and like a little crazy, like the business was running them.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: And I haven't come across an office yet where the advisor has zero overwhelm and is just super chill and the team is going bananas, right.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: I've never seen a practice where the staff is chill and everything is calm and it's just the advisor going bananas, right.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: The advisor is never, ever the only person feeling stressed or pinched for time, never, never, ever.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: And I tell this to advisors all the time whatever you're experiencing and whatever you're putting out, it's contagious.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: If you run around overwhelmed, overworking, working on nights and weekends, your team is going to be overwhelmed, overworked and working on weekends.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: If you are frantically running around and doing tasks and frantically throwing tasks at your team, everyone is going to feel frantic.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: You don't have, you know, if you don't have your calendar organized from a time management perspective, how can you expect your team to have their calendars organized from a time management perspective too?
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: And don't get me wrong, most financial professionals, they want to be organized and calm.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: I literally sold a million dollar practice to pursue coaching advisors full time, because the need of feeling calm and organized is so huge in this industry.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: And the deal is this if we don't get this stuff under control, everyone will be cranky and burnout, including you, the support team, the wind beneath our wings, the people we actually need, and there's nothing that will burn out an advisor faster than losing a really good teammate, and there's nothing worse for you to leave an advisory office to go work for another financial advisor, learn the new job, learn the new ropes, only to go through this cycle again.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: So in my, in my intro, I mentioned that systems and processes saved me.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: They were what really genuinely allowed me to run my business instead of it running me, and I know your advisor wants that for you and for themselves.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: And so I'm going to encourage you today, the team, to take a lot of ownership because, frankly, we, the advisor, we need you.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: We need you to own these things.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: We need you to take extreme ownership of some of the systems and processes in our office.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: And, frankly, I always joke that my, my right hand gal.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: I worked for her.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: She did not work for me and she was so indispensable to me in my business that I paid her really well and I gave her really great benefits, and if she asked me for anything, it was hers, because I was so dependent on what she brought to the team and you guys have so, so much to offer and you are right there in the trenches and you see all of the things that need fixing in the business that often we, the advisors, don't even see.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: So, like I mentioned before, when we were in and talking to this team, the advisors were like what do you mean?
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: The team is overwhelmed and running around like crazy people.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: They don't even know.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: So we need you to bring some calm to the chaos.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: I'm giving you guys permission to change your title formally to coordinator of chaos.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: That is now your new title and if you really take that in and own that and help us coordinate some of the chaos, the fingers and the things that that reaches out into are going to benefit you and your advisor in so many ways and you will truly become an indispensable part of the team.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Now, of course, I don't have time to get into everything today and that makes my heart so, so sad.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: I would love to have hosted like a full day workshop, right, I'm giving you 5 million strategies and all of the things that we talk about over at the efficient advisor.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: But here we are and we are going to make as much impact in one hour as we possibly can.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: So a lot of people listen to the podcast and we're going to talk about one and a half time speed or one and a quarter speed, right, so they could listen and they hear me usually talking really, really fast, like I've had a lot of coffee.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: So I'm just going to talk today on one and a quarter speed so that we can, like you know, just be really efficient and get through this.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: And I do know that we have time at the end for some Q&A, so please feel free to drop those questions in the chat box and we will take care of all of that at the end.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: So in every financial advisory practice there are seven main processes and you don't have to write this down.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: There are podcasts Glor on this that go into all the juicy details.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: But there's seven key processes that every practice pretty much has.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Marketing and prospecting is number one.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: Financial planning start to finish process is number two.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Onboarding is number three.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Ongoing client service model number four their client experience process.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Number five a referral process.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Number six, an investment management, if there's assets to be managed.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: As number seven, and, like I said, don't get caught up in writing them all down.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: You can find all that information, all the goodies and stuff are on my website Everywhere.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: You can get access it for free.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: But what matters today is that you have these processes in your office, whether you're being intentional about them or not.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Is the other question right?
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Every process, every advisory practice goes through these processes, whether they're written down or they just live inside of our heads.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: That's again, another story.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: So the first step in streamlining any process and by establishing these processes and streamlining them and documenting them, this is the first step in dramatically reducing overwhelm and saving you like so much frustration and time.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: So the first step to streamlining any process is to get it not only documented but to get it organized.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: So, for today's purposes, there's really two main ways that we're going to do this.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: We're going to identify the process and then we're going to create standard operating procedures or SOPs, and then we are organizing the stuff, and you know what I mean by this stuff.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: So that's the checklist, that's the PDFs, that's the templates, that's all of the things that allow us to do something more quickly, or the actual items associated with it, the collateral, the list of things that we're going to put inside of a folder for a first meeting, all that kind of stuff.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: That's the stuff.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: So we're going to say your financial advisor we're going to let's talk about the financial planning process and we're going to say the financial professional you're working with is bringing a new prospect into the process and we're going to follow that process and I'm going to explain what I mean.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: So it's hard to talk about systems and processes and make it sexy and make it interesting.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: So I promise we are going to do our best.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: But we want to start capturing literally each and every step that happens, from the first time that prospect calls in, all the way through the time that they say yes and we onboard them as a client.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: So we're talking from the minute an advisor connects with somebody and they say, yeah, sure, I'd like to meet, all the way through taking applications and moving money.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: So your standard operating procedure should include a couple of things, and these are the four that I think are the most important what, who, when and how.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: So let's start at the beginning the what is.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: What is the thing Like what is it that needs to be done?
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: So that could be something like put the client into the CRM.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: No-transcript.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: The who is whose responsibility on the team is it to do that part of the process?
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Is it the advisor?
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Is it the front office person?
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Is it the para-planer?
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Is it the back office staff person?
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Who on your team?
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: And if you're like, hey, I don't have that many people on our team, it's like literally just me and my advisor.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Don't worry, I got you.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Your name might just be listed more frequently, but whose responsibility is it to do it?
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Then the third is when?
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: When does this happen?
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Is it before the meeting?
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Is it during the meeting?
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Is it after the meeting?
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: Is it in between the meetings?
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: And then how?
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: What is the how?
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: How are we actually doing it?
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Is there a template for that email?
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Is there software that we're going to be utilizing to book the appointment?
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Is there a checklist that I need to be going through?
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: So who, so what, who when and how?
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: So let's start at the beginning.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: A client calls in and says, hey, I met Libby at an event and I'd love to set up an appointment.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: The process that you're going to want to document it might look something like this Okay, the first step is input the clients into our CRMs.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: That might be Salesforce or Redtail.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Whose responsibility is it to do it?
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: It's Sally's job.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: When does that happen?
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Immediately, soon, as she gets off the call.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: And then what is the the how, and that might be hey, there is a checklist that we use Up.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Here's all of the information that we want to capture from that client so that we have all of the data that we need to input that into the CRM.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: So that might be that first step.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: So the how might be the checklist and maybe a standard operating procedure on how do we actually do that.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Like, here's a video or a step-by-step document that shows how do we enter client information into Salesforce.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: The second step might be in putting the client meeting into the calendar.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: The who might be again Sally, immediately, and how.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: Well, there might be a standard operating procedure.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: And, hey, here's how we enter client meetings into calendar.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Here's the way we title it.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Here's where who's we're inviting and who we're not inviting.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Here's how we link it to zoom.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Here's how we don't link it to zoom.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Whatever process it is that you follow, here's how the third step might be.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: The meeting confirmation email goes out.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Sally does it again.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: It happens immediately and there is an email template that we use.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: That's the how.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: There's an email template that we use that's pre-written and ready to go.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: You just fill in the details and shoot that off.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Then there might be a reminder email before the appointment.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: That might be done by Calendly.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Sally doesn't have to do it because it's already in the calendaring software.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: It might happen three days prior to the meeting or whenever you have that scheduled, and there's going to be an email template that somebody has created and then loaded into Calendly.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: All the things right.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: There's more steps.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: You might have to put together a client folder before the meeting, and that's Sally's job, and it happens, you know, within three days of the meeting and there's a checklist for all the items that you put in the folder.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: If they're doing live meetings, maybe there's a meeting agenda being created, maybe that's the advisor's job and it's their job to get that done three days before the meeting and they have a template or a checklist that they're using, and so on and so on and so on and so on.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: So the idea is that if you got hit by a bus or you were to move up in the organ chart as your advisory practice grows, that somebody else could literally step in and follow this step by step, by step.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: Or you get like some of you might freak out, you get pregnant and you have to leave.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Some of you are like, no, never again.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Or some of you might be like, oh, yes, please, that's what I'm been praying for.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: But you step out of the office.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: Whether it's for a family emergency or for a longer term thing like a, like a FMLA or a maternity leave, right, you might need to step out of the office and we want someone to be able to follow, step by step and knowing where the things are.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: So the standard operating procedure is the how, and you'll hear that a couple of times in here.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: You know the how to enter the stuff in Redtail, the how to put stuff in Salesforce, how to enter stuff into the calendar software.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Then the second piece is the.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: Is the what right?
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Is it the checklist that you're using, the template that you're using, etc.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: So we need to be creating this step by step guides for the how, and then we need to establish a system for the what, and this is really important.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: And if you're, if you're multitasking.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Come back to me because this is really really important information here.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: There is a huge cost to not having this stuff Uber organized and this is where you can tell your advisor hey, you can pay me some overtime to get this, to get this mess in order, but the costs are really this it's spending so much time finding what you want when you need it.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: I would love for anyone to give me a thumbs up who has been frustrated by spending time looking for a document.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: It costs you decision-making.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Every time you think about hey, look at all those thumbs up every time you think about how you have to name a file and you to go like, look at another file and go, okay, how do we name it for that client?
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: And then how do I?
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: You know, where do I need to put that?
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: Anytime you have to name a file or think about where to put something or what folder does that go in, there's a cost of time, energy and just decision fatigue with decision-making.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: The third cost is losing documents.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but I have had to recreate many a document in my day and my team has had to recreate many a document in their day because we couldn't.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: We just frankly couldn't find what we were looking for.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: The fourth cost is having to duplicate any documents or duplicate things that we already had, which lead to inefficiencies.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: So how many of you have ever been like well, wait a minute, there's two onboarding folders.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Or wait, oh no, there's two folders for this, like what is in which?
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: Which one's the most recent, which one has the most updated versions of stuff?
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: And the fifth cost is that it's really, really hard to train people when your filing system or your organizational systems are MS.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: How do you show someone like, hey, here's where you go for that piece of information, if you yourself can't find it?
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: So there was a study done by 50 where they showed 58% of office professionals said a top three issue in their office is finding a file or a document when they need it, and more than 81% of office professionals said they cannot find a document under pressure when a client calls in or their boss rolls in and says hey, I need you to pull the so-and-so.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: So we tend to.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: We spend a ton of time looking for stuff.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Media Valley did a research project that said employees spend 8% of their day looking for things, and so in an eight hour day, that's 38 minutes a day just spent looking for files and documents In a week.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: If you work 40 weeks a year, that is 3.2 hours, and if you work 45 weeks a year, that's a hundred and forty four hours.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: So basically, a little over 3.6 weeks a year of your working time are just spent looking for stuff, and nobody wants that.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: I would rather spend those 3.6 weeks in Hawaii.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: To be totally honest with you, and this report also indicated that most small businesses recreate anywhere from 10 to 15% of their assets every single year, so you know what I'm talking about.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: When that prospect books an appointment and you type that email to them from scratch, you're recreating the document every single time instead of having an email template.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: So the search for a file should not take more than just a few seconds.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: So you need your.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: So one of the first things that I would encourage everybody to do is to get their digital filing system super organized.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: This will be one of the things that will save you so much time and will save your advisor so much time.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: So each, each category, I like to organize mine, and when I coach advisors, I coach them through having each step of their process as a main folder in different departments like marketing or human resources.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: So having these, sub, these head folders and within each sub folder, having a few folders, sops, so all the hows.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: This might be zoom videos where your screen recording here's how you enter the client's information into redtail, and or maybe it's that step-by-step document of you go here and then you put this here and then you put that here.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: The second sub folder is the templates, checklists, etc.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: So that's the what.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: And then number three is the archive, where any old documents or versions you don't know what to do with, or things that you're not quite sure where they fit, they go in that archive folder.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: So we've got the how, we've got the what.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: So if the standard operating procedure is, hey, you put together a folder for your advisor before this meeting, the what is going to be, the checklist of what goes in there, and then all the PDFs.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Anything that you need to print or have organized is all right there in that folder.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: That is going to be one of the best ways to do that and I have examples of what that could look like out on my website.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: So, again, you don't have to, like you know, figure it all out.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: So establish your folder system, one process at a time, and group them together so you know and can teach someone else the what and the how for each piece.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: You know, and we want it to be intuitive.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: So you do you.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: You don't have to follow the way that I've said this, but imagine it looking, you know, like an organized where everything is kind of the same and we never, ever want a miscellaneous folder, ever, because that's where everything gets dropped and nothing gets found.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: So we want to have all of the items grouped together for what we're doing before or during, after, in between.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: Every step of that meeting I like to organize by each step of the process, or by the processes themselves or by the departments within the business, so you'll never have to recreate anything which is 10 to 15 percent of stuff each year.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: We'll save 3.6 weeks of our year just looking for stuff, and there will bea lot less stress and overwhelm when we can find the documents that we need quickly.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: And so if you're ever like, hey, well, what do we put together when, a when our advisor is doing a day together, what, what do I need to get for them?
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Most of you probably have a checklist, or the checklist lives up here.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: So what's next next step or even a step better is have the checklist and all of the documents right there together so you can visually see them and make sure that you've got the most recent versions of everything.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, so this whole standard operating procedure vault is out of scope for today.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: We can't get super into it because I have some other stuff I really, really want to talk about.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: But when your advisor listens to the efficient advisor podcast and comes to you with all of these fun and fabulous ideas to infuse in the process, to enhance that client experience, I don't want it to be a stressor for you, right?
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: We don't want it to be like, oh well, that's one more thing I have to remember to do every time.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: The goal is we don't want it to be something to remember, we want it to be on that standard operating procedure and you have the item or whatever it is that you're doing, right there ready to go.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: So I'll give you kind of a fun one.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: So we want to think about every process.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: There's three pieces to every process.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: There is the actual paperwork, the nuts and bolts.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: There is an expectation setting part of the process.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: So whether that's the advisor setting expectations with their team or the team setting expectations with the client.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: And Then there's the human to human element, where we're wanting to do and this is where most advisors tell me like I wish I had more time to like do those little extras that make our clients feel loved and make them feel special.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: And so a great example of that is in our office.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: When we would onboard a client, we would find out their wedding anniversary.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: And something really cool that you can do for all of your best clients is, six months prior to their wedding anniversary, book a reservation for them, get on open table it doesn't call the, call the restaurant, it takes but a minute and go ahead and book a reservation at their favorite fancy restaurant.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: And if you don't have a client in tell sheet again, that's like a whole nother thing.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: But starting to capture that information from from your clients what's their favorite fancy restaurant in town Go ahead and book them a reservation for around their wedding anniversary.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Then, three months out right, this is part of a client experience process Three months out, we have a template email that we send them saying hey, we know your anniversary is coming up.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like us, we totally blow it and we forget to book anything for our wedding anniversary until it's too late and all the good reservations are gone.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: So we took it upon ourselves to go ahead and just book a reservation for you.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: Here's the date, here's the time.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: Feel free to cancel it, no pressure.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: We just know we wanted to celebrate you guys and we think Another year of marriage is something definitely worthy to be celebrated for, and we wanted you to know that we were thinking of you.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: It's so simple, but one of those things that an advisor will come and say, hey, I want to do this.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: And it's like, oh my gosh, how do we do that?
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: And we can set up workflows and standard operating procedures that when we onboard a client that, hey, this is their anniversary date and a task will be created six months prior to that for us to make that reservation, and we just follow the process.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: And then, three months out, another task shows up.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: And here's the email template that we use, so it's not a recreate from scratch.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Every single time you can deliver what feels like a really unique and customized experience to your client, but coming from a place of systems and processes, and it allows you to do it consistently.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: So, again, I'm going to encourage you guys to take ownership in your role, do the thing right, listen to the podcast.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: I'm going to give a shameless plug, but mine is all about systems and processes.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Another one that's pretty process oriented, that I would recommend is the perfect ria.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: You know, we want you to become an indispensable part of our practice.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: You are so much more Then support or an assistant you we literally work for you and one done correctly.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, you guys are so important and you can ask for more money and you can ask for more paid vacation and you can do literally everything.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: I used to tease my director of operations that she had to give me a five-year notice Because I was so dependent on her and all of the things that she did, because she brought so much to the table.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: So read, read books about business, read books about client experience.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: Join newsletters.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: Join the efficient advisor community on facebook.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: It's only operations people for advisory businesses and advisors share.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: There's template sharing.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: Ask people what you're doing.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Join masterminds that you guys connect through with this group.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: We're once a month.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: You guys are sharing best practices and how you guys are managing your crazy advisors and their office is more efficiently.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: The more you bring to the table, the more oh my gosh the more value and the more dependent on you we've become, which is a really good bargaining chip for you.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: So I want to transition to the second thing that I really, really want to talk about today, and this is one of the things when we instituted model weeks inside of our business.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: This is when my life changed.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: We used to host live workshops when I was still running my practice, where advisors from all over the country would come in for two days and my team and I we would train them on all of our systems and processes.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: And I remember kind of trying to figure out what the content for those Events should be.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: And we were like, okay, if we had you know, if I had a month with every advisor, what would we teach them?
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: And okay, if we only had a week with these advisors, what would we teach them?
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, if we only had two days, if we only had one day.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: And I remember, with someone on my team asking me if you only had one hour, what would be the thing that you would teach an advisor?
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: And this is exactly it a model week.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: It's also sometimes referred to as an ideal week, but this is where the pre-work that I asked you guys to do Surrounding.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: How are you spending your time?
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: What?
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: What does your fast-paced environment look like?
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: What tasks are you being drawn into?
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: What interruptions are occurring?
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: Where are you Checking email?
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: When are you answering questions for your advisor?
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: When are you talking to clients on the phone and really then having a way to better manage our time, our energy and then, most importantly, our headspace?
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: So it's easy for you to have your day hijacked by other people's agendas and, honestly, sometimes that's part of what we do.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Right, you're going to get phone calls.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: It's a necessary evil, but if we can put some things into place to help us control that time, that energy and that headspace, ugh, things get so better.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: You know, the beautiful thing about financial planning is that there are no life threatening Emergencies and, thank god, we really want to deliver a High client experience.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, we do not need to respond to every single thing, like someone is going to die on the table if we don't get them their beneficiary form in the next 37 minutes.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: So when I instituted a model week for myself, everything changed.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: And then, when my team instituted model weeks for themselves.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: Holy smokes.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: That's when things just went Expedentially in the direction of calm and control.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: And not to say that our office was always like, oh yeah, we're just listening to bob marley and hanging out and everything's really chill in here.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Oh no, we definitely had moments of hysteria and moments of crazy, but we're looking for a way of operating that feels so efficient, where we can get stuff done in the amount of time that we're giving it, that my team could experience more consistency from me, that I could manage my energy better and then I could also really reduce distractions.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: So structure having a structured model week or it might be a model month for you gave me freedom and, as a enneagram seven or someone who just the thought of structure makes me go there, I can't tell you how much having structure Provided me and my team so much freedom freedom to take fridays off.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: Our entire office was closed on fridays, everyone on my team was a mom and it was the day to go to target, hit up Costco without the kids so that they could be fully present on the weekends.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: And by getting our stuff super organized and creating systems and processes and creating a week in which we could organize ourselves so that we could get everything done, allowed us that type of freedom.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: So if you're someone that's like uh, structure gives me like twitches, just hear me out, okay.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: So task switching the average task switch can take about 15 minutes and 15 seconds For you to get really back into something that you were concentrating on.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: So you can get way more done and way less time if you're not switching tasks constantly.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: So I had you help track your time to help you see or understand the natural rhythms of your work life.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: So, like I said in the pre-work, it's not that I'm going to look at it and I'm going to judge how you're spending your time.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: It's that natural rhythms will emerge.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: You might see that, hey, every day around 1.30, I start to lose energy and that's when I hop on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok and I get sucked in for 40 minutes.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: Or perhaps you might see, gosh, we get.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: So I'm dealing with so many client calls at the beginning of the week and, man, thursdays, practically no client calls at all, and everybody's rhythm is gonna look a little bit different.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Or maybe you look at the time tracker that you did and you're like, holy crap, I have no rhythm.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: That's okay.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: A lot of offices don't have a rhythm and it's going to be your role to help bring a rhythm to the practice.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: So I had to track your time so that you can start to see what are the different types of tasks, and I would encourage you to go back in with colored highlighters and start to highlight things that are kind of similar.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: So maybe you're using pink for answering client calls and having to actually chit, chat and respond and talk to clients via email or text, and then maybe you use green to highlight tasks that are related to interacting with your advisor.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Maybe blue is messing around with technology and maybe yellow is checking your friggin' email.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: So you can go through and kind of start to batch your tasks and see what rhythms naturally occur and how can I start to batch those tasks together.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: So we want to have routines kind of baked in and it's helpful if your advisor is doing this too.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: So, for example, you might have an advisor who holds meetings on Tuesdays, wednesdays and Thursdays and then Monday is prep and Friday is follow up and that would show up in that time tracking, kind of natural rhythm.
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: Or, like I said, maybe high volume of calls on Mondays but practically nothing on Thursdays.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: You might also notice that your natural energy levels vary throughout the day too.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: Are you a morning person or do you hit an afternoon lull?
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: Are you somebody like me who I could not hold client meetings before 10 am because it took 37 cups of coffee and a little warming up my brain before I could get going?
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: So for me, having a startup and a shutdown routine every day, knowing my natural energy and the natural energy patterns of the people around me, and then crafting a schedule around that was super helpful.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: And we don't have a time on time left, so I want to keep getting through some of my best tips and tricks for building out a model week.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: But there's an entire hour long episode on the Efficient Advisor.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: It's episode number 12, called Designing your Perfect Schedule All about all the different things to consider when building out your model week.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: But here are a few things that I would really really suggest and kind of best practices when it comes to sort of mapping out your week.
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: And when I say ideal week, what we're wanting to do is start blocking our time pre, kind of pre organizing it to the best of our abilities so that we know what we're doing when we're doing it.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: So if your office is getting a ton of calls on Monday, you're probably not gonna want to schedule a two hour working session where you're gonna try to work on a process or you're gonna try to build something in the business, you're not gonna want to put that on a Monday.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: You're probably gonna want to put that on Thursday when you see that, hey, typically client interaction is much, much lower, and so the goal is like so for me I'm not a morning person so for me to shove a bunch of breakfast meetings into my calendar, I'm gonna be exhausted and I'm not gonna do my best work.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: So for me, knowing I need to be doing meetings after 10 am.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: So taking all of those things into consideration and starting to block your time a little bit we hear some things that I would suggest Having a time block every morning and, at the end of the day, work day for your startup and your shutdown routines.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: So setting intentions for the day in the morning and saying these are the three things that I'm gonna try to get done today because, as you know, everything will go crazy and blow up and then, at the end of the next day, laying out your plan for the following day.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: So what will you do in these blocks of time?
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: So, for example, if you have time tomorrow for, let's say, you have a time block for marketing, you will wanna go in and write social media pre-schedule 12 posts.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: Like, get super specific so that tomorrow when you walk in the office you know from nine to 10, you are gonna be pre-scheduling 12 social media posts.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: Or you know that, hey, I have all of these questions for my advisor, but I have time on my schedule where she and I have a meeting and instead of me trying to email her all of these questions, I'm just gonna save them all and these are the 12 questions I'm gonna ask her during that window.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: So some of the best time block examples and some tips and tricks.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: So your inbox.
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: I would suggest not checking email all day long.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: And you might say, libby, oh my gosh.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: But what about our clients?
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: They might email us at 11.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: We always told our clients hey, if it's really important, call us.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, we check email twice a day and it was just an expectation that we set with our clients.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: Or we just go with the natural assumption that email is not necessarily designed to be an instantaneous form of communication.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: That's not the original intention of email.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: That's not even what an email is designed to do.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: Now that's texting, that's calling, and so for us we would set set times where, hey, this is the time of day that we're gonna check email, we're gonna process that email and we're gonna respond to that email, and then I'm gonna turn off all notifications, I'm not gonna respond to every ding and every beep and every boom and I'm not gonna check it again until 2 pm.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: That way, when I see the client email come in, it's not like, oh, task switch, oh, my gosh, I have to address this because they need this beneficiary form or someone's going to die on the table.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: So, setting blocks of time where you actually have time to go through your email, take care of the stuff that's in there, respond to clients accordingly or delegate the email to other people in the office or to your advisor, and I would suggest doing that once kind of mid-morning and then once kind of late afternoon.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: The reason I wouldn't do it first thing in the morning is because the minute you get into that inbox it's gonna hijack your day right.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: There's gonna be things on fire and you're gonna need to deal with them.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: So if you can get one or two important tasks done before you open your inbox, mwah, all right.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: Also, having time blocks for paperwork processing.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: So having a block of time where you can just do all of the forms that you need to do at the same time you get into the forms system.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Once you fill out all the stuff, you do it for another client.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: You do it for another client and setting expectations with clients instead of leaving things open-ended.
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: So instead of saying, oh, yeah, we'll get that beneficiary form out to you, it's oh, I have time on Thursday afternoons where I do all of those types of forms, so you can expect that form Thursday or Friday and setting expectation.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: No client is gonna be like, oh, I need to change my beneficiary today, like this is critically important and fine.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: If it's that important, okay, we'll figure it out.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: Client experience is a really good thing, but we also need to train our clients too that we are not on demand, that we have time set on Thursday, we do all of our paperwork then and we'll get those things processed Because you get into a mode right, this is paperwork block.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: We also and this one might initially kind of shock you if you're in an office is having a no phone answering time, where you have a block of time where you can have someone else cover the phone or just ask for a 45 minute or one hour block of time that you can be heads down on something and you can just return calls when it's over.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: So having a block of time then on the calendar for hey, this is now I'm gonna check the voicemail and respond to anything here, but this is great for what we call iron.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: But time where you just need to sit down in a chair, like your butt's made out of iron, and not move and actually focus and get a project done without the distraction of having to take a call and process it and deal with it and do the tasks that come from that.
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: Daily check-ins.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: I did mine over lunch with my director of operations.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: So having a time on your calendar where you get to check in with your advisors, so instead of you trying to email them questions all day, then respond when they have a hot second, you asking follow-up questions, just having a set time on the calendar every day that you can sit down with your advisor and say, blablabla, here's all my questions, you get all the answers, you ask all the follow-ups and then you can walk away from that.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: I like to do it while I was eating lunch, so it didn't add any time to my calendar.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: I was already eating and my team just got used to me talking with my mouth.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: Full Education time.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: Building some time into your calendar for you to further your education on a particular topic or a particular software or a particular piece of technology that you're using Process time, having time on your calendar to actually sit and build out a process.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: So if your team says, hey, we wanna build a start to finish onboarding process and you're gonna wanna take 45 minutes to an hour every week to focus on that until it's done, great, put time on your calendar to actually build a process.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Mastermind time.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Mention that, before having other peers in similar roles that you can share best practices with, share templates with.
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: It makes everything move faster.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: And again, the Efficient Advisor community is an awesome place.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: If you need a template for something, you post in there and say, hey, does anyone have a template for it?
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: Blah, blah, blah, you'll get like 40 templates.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: It's a pretty amazing place.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: Rapid fire power hour this was one of my favorite things, so this is something I liked to do when my energy was low at the end of the week.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: So I had an inbox called rapid fire power hour folder in my inbox and anytime it was a little task that would only take anywhere from like two to five minutes, I would drop it in there.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: Anything less than two minutes I'd take care of right there.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: But things like getting online and paying a bill, putting my hours in a payroll service or just that little stuff like I have to do a little bit of research to answer this client question, dropping it into a folder, having a set time at the end of the week when you're not gonna do deep work, when you're not gonna be creative For me it was the end of the week, for you it might be the beginning of the week and just you can go through and bang, bang, bang, bang and bang out a bunch of projects.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: I love rapid fire power hour Brain dump time.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: For me this was part of my startup and my shutdown.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: I had a professional brain dump on my desk and a personal brain dump.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: So anytime during the middle of the day when something would pop into my mind like you need to look into swim lessons for the kids, I would write it on my personal brain dump.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: Now I do it digitally, but having a place for you to just dump all that information so that your brain doesn't fixate on it and go okay, now I gotta get online and look up swim lessons or send myself an email, just dump it on that sheet and then, during your end of the day shutdown, you can then book time in for the following day.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, this is when I'm gonna work on the thing that just popped into my head.
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, what can you automate?
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: Spending time every week really getting to know the tech stack that you have and what it's capable of.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: So a lot of advisory teams spend all of this money on really cool technology and we're not even scratching the surface of what it's capable of.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: And so spending time with the tech people on the phone saying what cool features do you have?
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: What's new?
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: How can I use this CRM to automate task creation?
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: Is there anything that I'm doing manually that could be being done automatically?
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: And how can then you that streamline the processes so you don't have to spend time on that and you can redirect your energy towards something else?
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: Then getting your advisor to work off of a model week is a complete game changer and the two of you then kind of integrate or everybody on the team kind of integrates their model weeks.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: They work together.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: So quick example I had an advisor that I was working with and she was doing all of her client follow up on Friday mornings and she was like this is the greatest thing ever.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: I had 12 meetings a week and Friday I just sit in my pajamas at home and I get all my follow up done.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: And she didn't realize then that she was dumping all of these tasks and to do onto her team from a whole week's worth of meetings Friday afternoon.
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: So her team said, hey, we, like I'm having to work on Saturday mornings to get caught up, or this is really stressful.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: My brain is fried by the end of the week and now I have this inflow of tasks.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: So can we work together to create different times?
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: Can maybe you do half of these on Wednesday morning?
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: So I have two days to deal with at least half of it.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: And then I'm not overwhelmed over the weekend thinking about all the catch up that I need to do.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: And she didn't even realize that she was swapping her team.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: Another thing is if you're checking email at 9am and your advisor is checking it at 8am.
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: There might be things that they're sending you, or you might want to have things that you're sending.
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: So you just want to coordinate hey, when are we checking email, so that if I'm not emailing you questions until 9am and you're not checking your email again until 2pm and I have another email check at 1pm that I'm not, we're not missing each other.
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: You see what I'm saying.
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: So understanding the rhythms of your practice, how you're spending your time, building out blocks and allocating time appropriately, because the amount of time you give a task to be done is the amount of time that it will take.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: So if you're not giving yourself time blocks and you're not giving yourself deadlines, and you're not giving your advisor time blocks and deadlines of when they need to get stuff to you so that you can adequately do your job, everything gets a little crazy.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: So the more we can understand the rhythms of our practice and put into place some you know, some boundaries and things that can help us control them, that's when things go really well.
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: And remember to give yourself many iterations of a model week.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: You're not going to get it right the first time.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: You're going to give it an attempt and go whoa hey, I didn't even think about these five things that I need to do every single day and I didn't book in enough time for meeting prep.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: I gave too much time for X, y and Z or I don't want to do that kind of work at 2pm because I'm friggin exhausted at that point.
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: I need to find a different time.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: So it probably took me a good 35 different variations of my model week before I found the one that really really worked for my team and for I.
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: So I mentioned before that structure gives way to freedom, and this is so true for you and your advisor, and the more ideal is that you can bring to the table and the more structure you can bring to their practice.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: I promise you they crave that type of organization.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: They are just a tornado in their business, as they should be, and they just don't have time to do it.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: And again, this is how you can become an indispensable asset To the team that you are working for.
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: You can move up into business, you can ask for more pay, you can set expectations and you can develop yourself both personally and professionally.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: So I am excited.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: I hope less stress and less overwhelm For your advisor means less stress and overwhelm for you and vice versa.
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: So I thank you guys for your attention manners just so much more I wish I could share with you and I hope that you found this valuable and again, you can check out the website in the podcast to go way, way deeper on all of these topics.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: What was so cool about this talk was, at the very end, the questions that these admins and virtual assistants and directors of operations were asking and I didn't include those because I wanted to just be respectful of the privacy of the people who were saying their names and asking questions and such.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: But what was so cool and what really stuck out to me was how badly these support teams, your team, how badly they want to help you be successful and help the business run smoothly and bring some, you know, calm to the chaos.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: And I thought it was just such a really great reminder For advisors to be pouring into their team and giving their team agency and permission to wrangle some of these systems and processes.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: And I just want to remind you that if you've got office support that you want in the efficient advisor community on Facebook, they are welcome, as long as they identify what company they're with and who they're working for in the three questions.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: They are allowed in the group.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: So we do screen everybody just to make sure there aren't, you know, people wanting to spam and just be obnoxious.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: It you have to be an advisor or part of an advisory team, or wealth coachers.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: You know some professional in the industry.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: So I would love for you to invite your support team into the community and invite them to listen to this podcast, because it is pretty operations oriented, and have them take that ownership over that piece of the business and take it off of your plate, with your guidance, of course, and your you know tutelage and your overall vision for the business.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: But giving them some permission to wrangle some of the systems and processes, I think will be a huge, huge benefit.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Thank you guys so much for joining me once again today.
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: I hope you found this episode valuable.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: I look forward to connecting with you over on LinkedIn and, of course, in the efficient advisor community on Facebook.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: If there is anything else I can do for you guys, please don't hesitate to ask.
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: I love for people to continue dropping me episode ideas in the DMs on LinkedIn or in the Facebook community.
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: You guys are awesome.
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: I hope you have an amazing and productive rest of your week and I hope, hope, hope that you are making some adjustments and doing some things inside of your model week and then as a team for digital file organization, so that you can free up literally weeks and weeks of your time.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: I mean honestly when, when I saw that statistic about 3.6 weeks a year being wasted on just looking for documents, I literally and I said it in the talk I would rather be on the beach in Hawaii for those three weeks.
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: So there is a lot to be said for looking for those inefficiencies and putting in the time to get your office organized.
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: I'll talk to you guys soon.