Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 154: Part Two---Your Ultimate Guide to Resources from my Website and Beyond

Transcript

154: Part Two---Your Ultimate Guide to Resources from my Website and Beyond · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: We are deep into the season of giving y'all and I have got a great episode for you today.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: It is truly a gift, a gift of giving you back some of your time, because we have consolidated a bunch of tools into a toolkit for you.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: And you know I say all the time on this podcast that running a financial advisory practice is so hard.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Right, you have to actually run the business side of things and stay up to date on all of your technical knowledge and, you know, educate yourself on behavioral finance and interpersonal communication skills and leadership and literally like all the things.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: It's really, really difficult.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: So having tools in your toolkit is not just your ticket to keeping up, right, like.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: I can't tell you how many advisors I talk to every week that are like I just want to get caught up.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: We don't want to just get caught up, we just want to get caught up and then actually get to a place where we are working ahead right.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Thriving in this fast paced environment wearing all of these hats is is crazy.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: So I have put together a list of resources for you that will help you do all the things better, faster, smarter, cheaper or easier.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: So a big piece of my dream for the efficient advisor, kind of what I envisioned for.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: It is to be a hub of vetted resources for you, a place where advisors can come and say, okay, I need a tool or a resource that is industry specific, that's you know, tried and tested, well respected and can help advance you in whatever it is that you're trying to do in your business.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: So and I you know how I feel about sharing the thing there is nothing I couldn't stand more than I would go to these amazing conferences or meetings or events and I'd hear these speakers who would give, honest to God, life altering advice.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: And I'd go back to my office and I'd sit down and stare at this blank piece of paper and just be like, okay, but like how?
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: So you know, I'm a huge fan of just sharing the thing, and the website is full of free and some paid resources that I have created myself and that I have found, and I'm going to share with you just more about what's out there and where to find them.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: And there's so many that I had to break this down into a couple of episodes.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: So the first episode on resources was episode number 137 that aired back on September 12.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: So go ahead, take a listen to that episode if you haven't already.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, we're going to dive into this episode today and explore some more free and paid resources that exist for you out at the Efficient Advisor.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: All right, so let's dive in.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get into this.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: As I mentioned in the intro, my goal is really to just consolidate vetted resources for you.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: I've mentioned in a few episodes that everything you need exists in the world out there on the internet.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: It's just a matter of finding it.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: So if you have got a Google search bar, you have literally got everything you need to run a successful financial advisory practice.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: But let's be honest, nobody got unlimited time to be searching around for all the things.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: So I have pulled together a bunch of resources to make your life easier, and there's basically three resource hubs for you that exist within the efficient visor ecosphere.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Right, we've got our resources library, which is always evolving and ever growing, and as I come across really cool things that I think will help you move the needle in your business, I am linking them there.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: We've also got the video and template library, so those of you that have been around for a while here know that the efficient advisor used to be a video show back in like I don't know, 2016.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: And every episode that we did well, not every episode, but almost every episode had some sort of free download or template that went along with it, whether it was something from my own practice or something that was shared by a guest on the video show.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: So you can go out to the video and template library and there's a whole slew of videos with and I'm going to give you some very specific examples here in a minute but there's some videos with very awesome downloadable workbooks, pdfs, templates, et cetera.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: The third place that you can find some resources is the efficient advisor community out on Facebook.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: So we've got, as of the recording of this episode, about 1,900 and some odd advisors in the efficient advisor community and it's just a really cool place where advisors are just awesome.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: You can ask questions, people will share their opinions and feedback on software tech stacks, working with certain custodians.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: I mean really anything and everything email marketing services.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: It's been really cool to watch people post a question and just get 20, 30 different comments or feedback from different advisors from all walks of life.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: Right, we've got everything from financial coaches, who are doing just fee based work, to full service, comprehensive financial planners to boutique, to RIA, to broker dealer to hybrid.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a really wide variety of individuals.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: We have advisors, we have ops people, and we do screen before you can get into the community to make sure that you are indeed industry specific.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: I am keeping this community really tight only to people who are actually in it all day, every day, doing the work right.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: The last thing you need is to be marketed to or to have people spam you somewhere else in your life like just hard no.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: And then I'm going to share with you in just a minute another resource that exists on my website that you may or may not know about.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's just dive in.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: So the resources library, as I mentioned, you know, this is an area where I am collecting just really cool ideas and resources for you, things that I am vetting.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: So I mentioned in the resources one episode that I was currently vetting some additional resources.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: I'm excited because I have added quite a few things out there for you guys, but a couple of things that I wanted to just highlight.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: To give you an example of, there is the 37 point tax checklist from retirement tax services.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: So, if you remember episode number 40, and I had Steven on one other time when his book came out too, but episode number 40 was called something like okay, so you've collected your client's tax returns, now what?
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: And it's an episode all about okay, how do we actually improve our tax return acumen, how do we improve the tax lives as our clients?
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: And what Steven has done is he's created a 37 point tax checklist of things that you can go through every year with your clients and then as a bonus, I threw in, if you purchase, steven's is available for purchase for $37.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: I threw in, if you purchase his, that I'm going to give you the one that I used in my practice, which is a 15 point tax checklist and it's got some different ideas on there than Steven's.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: So, between the two, lots of information.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: So really, the idea here, or kind of what the process would be that I would implement to go along with something like this, is as we collect our tax, our tax returns, from our clients, we have a tendency to make it overly complicated in the beginning, right?
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: So I coach lots of advisors and we talk about, like, okay, I want to do more with tax returns and they want to do the very first round of tax analysis.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Right, we want to do this big, huge like take the tax return, enter it into something like holistic plan, run all of these tax considerations and scenarios and what about this and what about that, and do something really amazing over the top for our clients, and you totally can, should absolutely do something along those lines.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: I'd also like to propose a much simpler solution that is a really helpful tool for you as an advisor and also a helpful whole exercise for your clients, without it being crazy, crazy complicated.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: So something that you can do is take these two tax checklists and create your own variation of it that you're going to actually show to your clients.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: So you're going to take their tax return and, yes, you can enter it into holistic plan and you can't enter it into some tax software and do all of these cool things.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Or you could literally just show your clients like hey, here is our brand's 25 point tax checklist that we roll through every year for our clients.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And so, like this idea of a behind the scenes checklist that you've heard me talk about before, we really want to take these behind the scenes checklists and bring them out into the open and bring them out into the light so that our clients know what is the stuff that we're doing for them.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: So here's what happens and I know this happened to me too, especially early on in my career.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: I'd get these tax returns from clients who were W2 clients and I'm going, okay, like what can I really?
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: They're not business owners, they're not doing anything wild and crazy.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: How can I actually add value to them?
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: And, man, they've been listening to the things that we've been doing.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: We're maxing out the 401ks, we're doing the backdoor Roth, we're funding their HSAs and their FSAs and we're doing like all of the things like funding the Ohio 529 and getting the state tax deduction and using that to pay for their parochial schooling.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, we were literally doing everything.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: So how can I add value to clients?
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: And something that we found so this is where my 15 point tax checklist came through was hey, clients, we're going to run your tax return through our checklist and we're going to show you this checklist.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: So, even if we're not coming up with all of these new, crazy, wild, fun, exciting ideas for you to save you oodles and oodles of money on your tax return.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: And the goal is, hopefully, you know we can do that.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: But even if we can't come up with lots of different things.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: Our clients like to know what it is that they're paying us to do and what is actually happening between meetings.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: So in bringing that into the light and saying like, hey, here's the stuff that we think about all the time for you, here's the stuff that we're doing between meetings, here's the tax checklist that we're utilizing and we're running your tax return through, you know, just so, Steven in the episode referred to it as the dishwasher rule.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Right Like, you don't get credit for doing the dishes unless your spouse sees you doing the dishes or they see the evidence of it there.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Right, like the clean dishes sitting on the counter on the towel finishing their drying process.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Right Like, we want to get credit for the work that we're doing.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: So even if you don't come up with all of these wild and crazy tax ideas or that first year that you're trying to do this for your clients, you know you can select a small percentage of them.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: You could select a certain segment and you could just do a behind the scenes tax checklist for them and show them these are the things that you're running it through and then hopefully you know, as you go through this tax checklist, you're finding errors or you're finding mistakes or you're finding areas of opportunity for your clients to save even a little bit, right.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: And so having a tax checklist and I would suggest you know, white labeling it right, like making it your own, branding it, taking what Steven gives you, taking the free one that I'm gonna give you, you know, when you purchase his and make it your own and show your clients and actually make it a checklist and go through the boxes and say like, hey, we checked these ones off, like as we went through before you came in today, here's your completed tax checklist.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: We went through all of these things.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Here's the three ideas that we have for you from that.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: So that's how I would take the resource from retirement tax services and make it an actual kind of like process.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Here's how you put a process around that.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: Am I making sense?
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, good.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: The next resource that I wanna share with you in the Resources Library is a one-page financial plan masterclass.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: So this is hosted and offered by Matthew Jarvis, who has also been on the show, and my friend, micah Shalansky.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Together over at the Perfect RIA, they have taken all of the knowledge that exists in the industry, and you know how I feel about taking complicated processes and boiling them down into something that's super easy to execute and easy to template, and a one-page financial plan is exactly that.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: So in our practice we used to call them a one-page financial plan synopsis or a one-page synopsis, but basically the idea is how do we keep it super simple, how do we take all of this complex information for our clients and how do we get it onto a one-page document?
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: So there is an episode that aired last week with my friend, brian Jansen, about moving from free planning to fee-based planning and some of that transition.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Another thing we talk about in our group coaching program a lot, or in my one-on-one coaching, is having what are your offers?
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Like having no more than three offers, and often I'll find financial advisors have a hey, we're gonna do a big, hairy, deep, complex financial plan for you for a fee and here's what it costs, and maybe they have another solution or another offering that is something really simple, like a one-page financial plan that they execute for free in order to kind of just show or demonstrate value in a client relationship early on, before they're asking for assets or before they're asking for a deeper level planning, and this would be an amazing resource for really anyone who is trying to help their clients by saving them a ton of time and what I would call analysis paralysis, right, or decision fatigue, reading through these big, giant, hairy financial plans.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: It can help take complicated financial planning jargon and make it super simple for them.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: It will also help your clients just gain a better understanding of their financial situation.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: They can engage in their financials at a little bit higher of a level when they have a easy to read, easy to understand document.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: They're not feeling stressed or like they're stuck in all of the weeds.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: And I love it from the advisory standpoint because a one-page financial plan is super easy to execute.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: You create a template, you follow the process.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: You can take all of this information and make it super easy.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: So what we're trying to do right in any time we're doing financial planning for our clients is we're trying to reduce the friction.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: So in our systems to scale group coaching program, we're right now we are deep in it, right, we're talking about how do we reduce friction, how do we make every single teeny, tiny thing that we're doing for our clients, whether it's sending them a welcome email or having them get us documents.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: How do we make this as simple as humanly possible?
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: How do we reduce the friction?
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: How do we make it so that there are very little barriers in the way of them moving their needle forward, moving their process forward, moving all of the things forward?
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: So by having a really tight one-page financial planning process you are able to move clients forward through the discovery, into your analysis, into your recommendations, into that step of becoming clients pretty quickly.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: So to learn more about the one-page financial planning masterclass, you can check out the resources tab.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Of course I'm gonna also link all of that stuff below in the show notes to this episode.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, so we're sticking with the resources library here for just a second, a couple other things that are out there just to give you an idea.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: I mean in the previous episode, episode 137, resources number one, I shared.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: There is the legacy letter, which is like the world's greatest value add for clients and I cannot tell you.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: I mean I know I mentioned this in the last one, but even since that episode aired I've had so many advisors tell me like, oh my gosh, we did the legacy letter challenge with our clients and it was an unbelievable client experience, just super epic experience for our clients, super connecting.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: We got a boatload of referrals all the things that I love to hear.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: I also talked in the last episode about Claire Myers consulting, who is a industry specific headhunter, and, oh my gosh, I've had people tell me, even since that episode aired, that they hired her and she's placed some like amazing qualified people inside of their practice.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: So make sure you check those things out too.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: But something else that's in there is I went ahead and loaded, since we're getting into the holiday season.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Every tax season I share a CPA referral basket gift COI nurture, whatever you wanna call it kind of a thing.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: But basically the idea is that as we're in the midst of tax season, it's nice to send like a care package to our CPAs.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: But as we're getting into the holiday season here, knowing that this is airing the week of Thanksgiving, I was thinking about this from the lens of holiday packages.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: So I went ahead and linked the CPA referral basket I don't know what you wanna call it, what do I just call it like a care package.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: So we've got really cute ideas in there.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: You know, obviously we want chocolates and coffee, but we have some really fun mugs that we found online that say things like you want to deduct what?
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Or I'm sorry for what I said during tax season.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: So, as we think about, you know, surprising and delighting our clients, we also wanna be thinking about surprising and delighting our COIs during this season as well, and I know a lot of you give gifts to clients during the holiday season, so be thinking about your COIs.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Something new that we've included out there and I'm sure I'll send an email about this in the next couple of weeks as well is we went ahead and did the same thing and put together an attorney care package that has some really cute stuff in it as well.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: So one of the things that I thought that kinda made me chuckle was there's a mug in there that says Tears of Opposing Council, and I don't know why, but that made me giggle out loud when I saw that, and there are just a whole bunch of fun ideas on there.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: We had a good time putting it together.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: So there's like fuzzy socks for attorneys that have some funny sayings on the bottom.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: And then my favorite was this drinkware and honestly, this would make an amazing gift to your advisor friends, and it's little wine glasses that just say because clients, I mean.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Honestly, that's really applicable to To financial advisors as well.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: But make sure you get on and check out that resource.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: You can click the link on the resources page and it takes you to a listing where it just has all of the cute little gift ideas that we've pulled together on your behalf.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Again, trying to make life simple, and we've got an episode coming up with Carter Wilcoxon, who he shares a little bit about how he really built his IMO business helping advisors connect.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Well.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: It started with his original connection within a state attorney and how he used that relationship to just blow up his referral base.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: And I've got an episode coming up where he talks a little bit about that and how he helps.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Now it helps advisors do the same thing and gives them a repeatable process, blah, blah, blah.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: All of the good things.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: And so be thinking, if you don't already think about attorneys and CPAs and other people in those adjacent businesses, if we don't already think about them as clients from a client experience, so think of like having a COI experience as part of your processes.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Right, we wanna love on those who could potentially send us referrals and we wanna stay top of mind and these are some really great ways to do that.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: And, speaking of Carter Wilcoxon, he has a couple resources that I'm going to get out on the resources page, but they will not be out there by the time this episode airs.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: But stay tuned for his episode and I'll be linking the items that he is referring to on that resources page as well.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: So it just takes some time.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Like he totally surprised me when we did the recording, I didn't even know he had these things and I just have to vet them and make sure that they're really really good quality and kind of go through them and learn about them and experiencing them myself before I recommend them to you guys.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: But stay tuned, like I said, this page is a living, breathing resources tab that will be constantly updated.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, so moving on, I want to jump to the Facebook community.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: I mentioned it earlier in the episode that there's 1900 advisors, yada, yada.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: It's a really great place, all of the things.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: There are also resources available to you inside of the Facebook group as sort of a cool so glad you're here, one of those resources that you can just download again totally free.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: This is something that I use in my practice.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: I did a whole episode on our Lost Cause Letter.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: I will link that for you in the show notes as well.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: But the Lost Cause Letter is this special letter that we created in our practice that we found like, hey, when we're following up with clients I just did a whole episode on follow up, when we were following up with our clients we're like how do we get these people to move off the mark without sounding desperate, without sounding needy, without sounding like we had tons and tons of time and maintaining, kind of, our status as the sought after expert?
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: And we created this letter that went out to our clients in the actual physical snail mail and when our clients received it, or when our prospects received it, I should say it was one of those things that really automatically triggered them to just Make a move right.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Like the ball is now in your court.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: We're done following up with you.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: We are no longer going to pursue you.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: We are at a point where it is kind of on you now to seek out the relationship with us.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: And I just shared this letter with a client of mine, jd White, and he told me I could share this.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: So it's all good, I'm never gonna share anything without permission, but JD implemented the last cause letter in his follow-up process, right?
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: So in our one-on-one coaching or in our group coaching, we talk about having a.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: We have to have two processes when we're going through our financial planning process with our clients right, we have a process for if we get ghosted, like a client saying yes to us but then we don't hear from them.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: And then we have to have a follow-up process for clients who are like, oh, I'm gonna think about it or oh, sure, we'll get back to you.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: And so JD implemented the last cause letter in his follow-up process and he shared with me.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: He's like it was crazy.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: The first time I sent one out, we got pretty much an instantaneous response and the client moved forward with something.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: So that letter is available out to you in the Facebook community.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: But you're gonna wanna make sure you go ahead and listen to the podcast episode that goes along with it so that you have some context around kind of where, when and how it's best to use it.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: And that episode is episode number 94, my simple trick to get prospects to finally book an appointment.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: So make sure you check that out as well.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: And again, I'll link all of it, okay, and earlier in the episode I mentioned that I'm gonna share with you, kind of something I didn't talk about last time.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: That's another resource that's available to you guys, and out on the Efficient Advisor on our website, which is theefficientadvisorcom, you'll find a link called Favorite Things.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, and I'm just sharing with you that I started this back in 2014 on old website platforms, so when you look at it, you're gonna be like, wow, this is really archaic looking.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: So I'm just, you know, I'm just throwing it out there.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: It doesn't need to be updated.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, am I a big proponent of just like, get the thing out there.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: Minimum viable product.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: Also, yes, you can always come back and make it fancy later, but even though it's not crazy fancy and it's on the to-do list for 2024, what you'll find out?
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: There are a couple of different things, so one I included.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: I get asked constantly for a list of my favorite books, like what are some of your favorite books that have helped you in your business?
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: And I've got a just.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: There's probably 20 or 30 books out on the website and, of course, there's like 5 million more that I've read since then that I'd love to add.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: I also have some office supplies-y kind of stuff out there that I loved.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: So things like oh my gosh, these candles we used to use in our office.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: We would actually burn them in our office and they smelled amazing.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: It's by Seta France.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: There is this one scent.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: It is the only scent you're allowed to get and they come in these cute little pagoda packages.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: So we would burn this candle and I can't tell you how many clients we have walking and be like, oh, it smells like a spa in here.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: That's such a lovely, because there's certain scents that you can burn in an office that it can be, you know, really overwhelming to certain people, like I personally can't do vanilla, like if you have, if I walk in your house at Christmas time and you have a Christmas cookie scented candle, I'm gonna want to vomit in my mouth.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: I just can't do that scent.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: And there's other people who are super sensitive to things like lavender or cinnamon.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: This is one of those candles that we found that every client loved and, again in the spirit of the holidays coming up, you might want to check this link out but we loved this candle and the packaging was adorable.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, when we had a client that would comment on the candle or comment on about how great our office smelled.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: We would document that on our client Intel process sheet.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: If you don't have a client Intel process, you need one.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: But we would document all those weird little things, so any preferences that our clients had, and then, when they would send us a referral, we'd check our client Intel sheet so that we could customize the gift to them and if they're one of the people that had mentioned the candle in our office, that would make a really great referral gift for them.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: So we would then use that.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: And of course, they'd always get in like, oh my gosh, you remember that I loved it.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: And we'd be like of course we did, and I have that linked.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: I also have the planner that I use personally linked in there.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Just little stuff like the headset.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I need to update the social media.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: Like the light still is a great light.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: I've got birthday postcards, the mic kit You're gonna need mics have changed a little bit, I'm gonna update that.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: And then I've just got some other things that I love.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: So like just other random products out there Again, is it great?
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: No, it's not great.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: It's not great, but it's out there and it's available to you guys.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: And there are some amazing books and other things linked and listed.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: So I'm a huge, huge fan of the best self journal for a daily planner.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Love it, still, use it.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: I'm actually staring at it right now and I cannot wait to finish recording this episode and cross it off on my to-do list inside of my best self journal planner today.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: So that's a resource that's available to you guys out there as well.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: So I feel a little bit like Oprah having a my favorite things section, but I'm committed to updating this in 2024.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: And you know what?
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I'm just gonna lean into the openness.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, I get people constantly asking me like, oh, would you use for this, or do you have any recommendations for that, or what kind of cards should I send, or whatever.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: And I have just oodles and oodles.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: I have a Google doc in my second brain just loaded with ideas.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: So we're gonna try to bring that to life for you in 2024 and have some other resources to like client gift ideas and other things that we have found and have been really, really well received.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: So that again, the idea is how can we do some of that legwork and make it super simple for you and make it easy for you to find and implement Because, y'all, I am on a mission to elevate this industry.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: All ships rise together and you know I've probably talked about this before, but when I started the Efficient Advisor back in 2014, one of the reasons was that we just saw a really high attrition of really great advisors who had young families like me, and I saw all of these women and men who were just phenomenal advisors just burning out and it was really a platform for me to take all of the things that I had learned and how did I whittle, you know, a seven figure firm down to three days a week and how did we implement?
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: And I just really wanted to share that.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: I didn't want to see these other advisors who are making huge differences in their clients' lives.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: You know the kind that weren't salesy, that weren't shady, that had their best clients, you know interest at heart, and I saw them burning out and leaving the industry and it just made me so sad because, honestly, I love this career.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: I think financial services is just such an amazing career and such an amazing business opportunity for so many people and I hate to see advisors who, with just a few tweaks or just a few ideas or just being able to fast-track some stuff for them to keep them not only in the business but to keep them thriving and to keep them in a place of you know, where they weren't living in overwhelm, where they could get their arms around their business.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: You know, and be able to be mom, to be dad, to be brother, sister, daughter, friend you know all of the things and live these full lives while still running really successful practices and not having their practice running them, but literally them running their businesses in a way that produced a phenomenal lifestyle for them and their families.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: So that's where just kind of the origin story, if you will, of the Efficient Advisor came from and you can kind of see as you go out on the website you'll see newer stuff, older stuff.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: I mean I've got lots to do and lots to update.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: So I'm right there with you and it's actually kind of cool.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: We're in the midst of, you know, our Systems to Scale Group Coaching Program that launched in August and getting ready to launch another cohort come January.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: If you are interested in just getting more information, get on the wait list.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: You can go out to theefficientadvisorcom.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: I'll also link it in the show notes but right on the opening page of theefficientadvisorcom.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: Up at the top, you'll see a banner about the January 2024 group starting and that's gonna launch on.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: We're gonna start our first day of coaching.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: We're gonna start on January 9th and you'll get to know all the other advisors in your cohort.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: I'm really excited for this next round.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: I've continued, I kept telling myself, I'm memorializing and I continue to make updates to it, so it's getting better and better, which is really fun.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: But I digress.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: My point in sharing that is that as we're going through this round of group coaching the group program that started in August I'm redoing all of the things right alongside these advisors.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: So redoing my ideal client avatar, redoing my branding pillars, redoing some of my processes, and it's been really fun and I like to share that.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: Hey, check out my website.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: I have pages that are crazy outdated and crazy old, even the my Story page of our website.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: I mean that copy on there and the image are from 2014.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: And I share that to say we're all kinda doing this, so just keep moving forward, do what you can, keep that giant brain depth of future projects that you can update, and know that, even if it looks a little dumpy.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: So when you go out to the my Favorite Things page.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: You might open it and be like ee, but you know what, if someone gains something from reading one of the books that I've recommended out there, then Mission Accomplished, right.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: It doesn't always have to be perfect.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: You can do this business a little messy and make it fancy later and come back and improve things later, or not right, sometimes?
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Just getting the information out to your clients whether your video has the greatest lighting or the best audio or whatever really, I mean, does it make a difference?
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, of course it does.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: Professionalism always counts, but at the end of the day, if you're letting that hold you back from actually producing the thing or sending out that thing to your clients, it's gonna make a difference.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Because you know and don't worry I mean you've probably noticed this I went for a while without a copywriter in this business or someone proofreading all of my emails.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: And were there typos?
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Absolutely there were.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Did the grammar police email me back and let me know these things?
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: Of course they did.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Am I a little embarrassed?
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: I mean kind of like, honestly, not really, because I got the thing out.
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: And again, if it moved somebody forward in their business in some way, shape or form.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: I am a happy camper, even if I sometimes look like a bonehead and have errors in there.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, I'm gonna just hop off that soapbox Moving on, okay.
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: So the last resource I wanna share with you today, or I wanna highlight today, is there is a Sunsetted Podcast episode page where you can click.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: When you go out to theofficialadvisorcom, you can click podcast and on the podcast page you'll see maybe like the first 30 or 40 episodes that I did, and underneath every episode there is potentially, depending on the episode and what the topic was, there's a lot of different downloads and templates and resources.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: I highlighted a couple of those in episode number 137, the first resource episode.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: But something I wanted to highlight for you here was episode number 23.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: I shared my process that I created to delegate.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: So one of the things that was a challenge for me early on in my business was how do I build confidence in the competency of my team?
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: How do I actually measure progress?
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: How do I know when I can delegate more?
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: How do I know when it's okay for me and not that I'm a complete control freak, but I also recognize that at the end of the day, this was my business, it was my name on the door.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: I was the one responsible from a compliance perspective.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: Should something happen to this was my business.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: I had to take that extreme ownership over the practice.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: And how do I know how to delegate properly?
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: I was never, ever trained to do that.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: I started my business when I was 22 and fresh out of school and I wasn't a leader, although everyone's like, oh, natural born leader, blah, blah, blah.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, but it's also there's a lot of nuanced skills that come along with leadership.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: So even if you're a natural leader, there are still tools, skills, tricks of the trade that you're gonna have to learn in order to be not just a decent leader but a really effective and great leader, and one of those is learning how to delegate properly.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: So episode number 23 is all about the process that I created for myself for delegation and how to become a better delegator and how to really make sure I was moving my team through the five layers of delegation that exist.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: So I've got a free download for you that goes along with that episode.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: And that's just an example so you can kind of click around and peruse the different episodes.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: We're gonna get back to having a episode per page, so the podcast page only maybe has 30 or 40 episodes.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: Now there's probably 70 or 80, maybe more episodes that have a page, and usually you can find that in the episode show notes.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: You can click especially in iTunes, you can click episode webpage and it'll take you to that page.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: Those pages exist but they're not necessarily linked to that main podcast page.
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: Again, we're not talking about perfection here, right?
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: I sunsetted that.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: That was a boatload of work.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: But what you can do is go to theefficientadvisorcom backslash and just type in the episode number and any episode is gonna pop up for you.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: And so if you're listening and I get this all the time in the Facebook community if you're listening and I say, oh, I've got a download or I've got that for you in the show notes, you can go and just type in theefficientadvisorcom backslash, whatever episode number it is, and it'll take you to a page where you can do a template download.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, I've tried to link everything in the show notes for you guys.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: But if there's something that I missed or you just can't stink and find it, that's fine.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: Email me at efficientadvisor at gmailcom, and I am happy to locate that item and ship it on over to you, all right.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: So in order to keep this episode short, I am going to stop it there.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: But long story short, you've got the resources tab out there with some really cool vetted resources for you.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: You've got the podcast episodes that have their own downloadable templates.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: Especially in the beginning of the podcast series, there were tons and tons of templates.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: We've done a few this year as well, and there are more to come.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: So continue looking and listening for a bunch of free downloadable templates.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: In fact, I've got one coming up for you here next month.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: There's also the efficientadvisor community over on Facebook, where there's some free downloads inside of there, plus just a whole host of resources by having this group think you know brain trust of 1900 advisors out there.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: There's also the video resources library from when the podcast used to be a video show and lots and lots of free downloadable templates, workbooks et cetera there from both myself and my guests.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: And then, finally, you've got the Libby's favorite things page Again.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: Is it a little, you know, old school?
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: Sure, does it work?
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: Is there some interesting stuff out there?
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, why not Give it a try?
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: So I hope this was a helpful episode for you guys If you are indeed interested in the group coaching program and mastermind the systems to scale group coaching and mastermind program will launch again.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: We're gonna do a new cohort in this January and the sign up starts for that on November 30th.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: The cart will open.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: There are a limited number of spots and it is first come, first serve, so if you want to get information about that, the wait list will be the first ones notified of the cart being opened and the link for that.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: They'll get that a little earlier than everybody else.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: So go ahead and get on the wait list.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: I'll have the link for that in the show notes below and I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: And if you have any questions or if there's anything else I can do for you podcast episode ideas, all the things I'd love to hear them over the Efficient Advisor community on Facebook and I hang out on LinkedIn.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: Thank you guys so much and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: I'll see you guys next week.