Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 222: Ideas to Implement -Growing a National Niche Empire - Advisor Success Story

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222: Ideas to Implement -Growing a National Niche Empire - Advisor Success Story · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey gang, welcome back.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: I'm so glad you're here.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Every week, I want to create a follow-up episode that is short, sweet and all about the actionable steps from this week's longer podcast.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: So my goal every week is to distill the episode down into just a couple of bullet points that I want you to act on immediately to make a big impact in your business.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: I want you to take what you've learned and actually finish it.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I want you to do the thing.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: I am your host of the efficient advisor Libby Grywe and I built a 100% referral only planning practice from scratch that I grew to seven figures as a solo advisor, all while working just three days a week and taking off 14 weeks a year so that I could be a super present mom, wife, friend, sister, daughter and, frankly, a travel obsessed human.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: And I'm here just to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and creating less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: We are about to transform your practice, so move over exhaustion and get out of the way.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Advisor ADD.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: It is time to take that one right next step to build a business and a life that you love, and so I loved this week's episode with my client, nick Doherty.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: And I loved this week's episode because Nick is just on fire for what he is doing.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: It's incredible and it's been so fun to watch his journey and to see him really grow into that CEO role and thinking strategically about his business.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: It's a hard transition to make.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Most advisors are just trying to move from working reactively to proactively, and then you have to move from working proactively to strategically, and then you have to move from working proactively to strategically, and it takes intention and concerted effort to do this.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: It's not easy and I know most listeners are not trying to grow a national brand like Nick is, although quite a few of you are, and it's super cool.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: But regardless of where you at, here are some amazing takeaways from Nick's story.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: So, number one hire a coach.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: And I don't say this because I am a coach, but anyone who wants to be good at anything needs a coach.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: I see the role of a coach serving a few different needs.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Right One, it helps you zoom out.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you are just too close to it.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: So, as a coach, I have a coach and my coach tells me things that I tell my advisor clients all the time, and I need it and even though I know the strategies and same thing like a lot of the time, you know what to do, right.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you just need someone who's not in the thick of it to zoom out and kind of look at something from a 10,000 foot level or slightly different angle than you can see it from, because sometimes you're just too close to it, to a roadmap.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: All the info can be out there, right.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: If you have a Google search bar, you've got an endless source of information to help you do whatever it is that you want to do.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: However, sometimes you have to find it all and piece it together and put it in the right order, and sometimes it's just nice to have someone lay out the roadmap for your success.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: The third thing I see about a coach for Nick and the different coaches that he's hired that kind of came out was accountability, just having someone that you're answering to and I say this all the time.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: I have a gorgeous, gorgeous gym in the basement of my home, has all the accoutrements, right, but yet I still pay a personal trainer and go to the gym with her multiple times a week because I have that accountability.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: I know I'm going to show up.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: I'm knowing I'm going to push myself harder.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: She has a roadmap laid out for me of what we're going to be doing and how we're going to be training Right.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: And then four, she has some knowledge that I just flat out don't have, right, uh, so hiring a coach gives you that knowledge that you just don't possess yet.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: For example, deirdre, the speaking coach that we talked about in this episode.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: You know where you can learn a lot about public speaking.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Right, you could learn how to build the perfect talk and the perfect, you know, webinar presentation for your clients.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: If you have the time to read the books, watch the YouTube videos, um, you know, practice all the things.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: You can just fast track it, right.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Just have your speaking coach watch me, fix me, help me make it better now, and I you know I've used Deirdre for a long.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Just have your speaking coach, watch me, fix me, help me make it better now.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: And I, you know I've used Deirdre for a long time as my speaking coach because she helps me fast track.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: What would?
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: What would take me hours and hours of research and not even really sure, right, cause there's so much conflicting information out there and ain't nobody got time for that.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: So I put my money where my mouth is.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Like I said, I have coaches to help me do all of the things that I want to be excellent at, and there's no shame in having a coach, right, and sometimes I think there's a stigma around having a coach or someone like Nick having multiple, multiple coaches.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: But if you think about Olympic athletes right, we just got done with the Olympics here If you think about Olympic athletes, these people are literally the best in the world at what they do, and all of them, except maybe the Australian break dancer, uh.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: So there might be a few exceptions to this, but all of them have a coach, someone who is looking at them from a 10,000 foot level, zooming out, giving them a roadmap, holding them accountable and giving them knowledge that they flat out just don't have Right.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: So that was my first takeaway that I think Nick shared.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: That was really impactful for me.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Listening was get a coach for things you want to be exceptional at, okay.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Number two was hiring strategically.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: We talked a little bit about hiring a role versus hiring a person, and you hear me say that all the time on this, just stepping back, and what we tend to do as advisors is we hire a person who we're like oh yay, they're really great, they know how to use a computer and maybe have some experience with Salesforce.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: And we hire a person and then we start to wrap the role around them and their skill sets, like, oh, what are they good at?
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Oh, they could take care of this.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Oh, here's one more thing I could delegate.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: But instead we want to step back and actually really genuinely think about what your business needs, and what your business needs is going to be very different from the person in the cubicle next to you, kind of a thing, right?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: So you really need to map out your processes and go through your processes, and this is something like we do in our group coaching program and it's one of my favorite weeks.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: It's very understated, like it's not this huge process, it's a very simple exercise, but we go through all of our processes that we've built and we really identify what lives in this upper right-hand quadrant of what is easy to teach and easy to template.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: And going through your processes and really determining like okay, if we look at everything on an X Y axis, like what is easy to teach and template and what are the things that our business does that we could delegate and give away and then use those things to build a role and then hire a person with the right skillset for that role.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: So as you fill up that upper right-hand quadrant, then you start moving to things that are a little bit harder to template but maybe easy to teach.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: And then you move into things that are a little bit harder to teach but pretty easy to template.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: And then you move into the things that are hard to teach and hard to template, right, but you want to build out the roles first that your business needs to succeed and then hire the right person for that role.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: And this is really critically important as your business gets bigger and you start to have multiple teammates.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Um, if you have one role that's kind of divided amongst multiple people, that's where things start to slip through the cracks and mistakes start to happen.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: So the other thing about hiring strategically and hiring a role versus hiring a person we want to be strategic in our hiring because we really want to set up our employees for success.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: No employee wants to walk into an office where literally everything is on fire.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Nobody knows what needs to be done.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: First, the processes change every time we're winging it right.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to work in that environment.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: We need to set up processes for them to follow.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: We need to have an onboarding process for our employees.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: They know what they need to learn first, then second, then third.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: We need to learn to delegate and then, like Nick was talking about, we need to learn first, then second, then third.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: We need to learn to delegate and then, like Nick was talking about, we need to lead right.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: And part of leading is helping them to learn to problem solve and to think critically about the issues.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, number three, the third takeaway niching down right.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: This episode is such Nick's practice is such an amazing example of picking a specialty and going all in and a niche.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Just kind of for the record, I think sometimes, like having a niche, people assume that it has to be a specific job or a specific career, like Nick works with frontline workers.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: Or sometimes we think it has to be a certain age group.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Or, you know, like hey, I work with people who are five to 10 years out from retirement or something very specific like that.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: A lot of people can get it twisted.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Your ideal client avatar could actually be an occupation, it could be an age group, it could also be a mindset.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It could be something like hey, I you know.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: So I did an episode with my advisor, client Trent, and his target market is DIY investors.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: He's shooting after a certain mindset of investors that he is hoping to then come alongside them and do their planning.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: It could be business owners in any type of industry.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: It could be a very industry specific, it could be a certain asset level or a certain income level, and it can be qualitative in addition to quantitative and it can be qualitative in addition to quantitative.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: I just did a whole episode on ICA and ideal client avatar and it has a download to help you identify who you like to work with, how you like to work with them, what you're good at, and it helps you develop an ICA so that you can really use that to be the foundation of your business and build your processes around that ideal client.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: And I know that sounds a little bit crazy, but kind of the same thing.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: We we want to build our processes to serve our niche, because when the the more you niche down, the more narrow your focus becomes, which means you can build a laser focused marketing message that speaks directly to those clients and even if you're not in a position where you're wanting to go super narrow, you know being able to at least understand what who your ideal client avatar is.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: What are their fears?
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: How do they make buying decisions?
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: What is their previous experience collectively been with previous advisors?
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: There's just a lot of information that you want to have about the ideal client avatar and I swear in our group coaching program, when we do the, when we do this at the very beginning, I always have so much like fear around, like, oh, no, we're starting off the program with this, but it's so foundational that we need to.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: And I feel like everyone's always going to hate this exercise because it's one of those things that we're all like, yeah, we need to do that and it lives on your to-do list for like three years and you're like, yeah, I kind of know roughly what I'm doing.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: But every time we go through this in the program, people are like, oh my gosh, that was so helpful.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that brought me so much clarity.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: And it's interesting because at the end of the 10 months of the program on, when I'm doing exit interviews, there are advisors all the time who are like.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: I am so glad we did that work at the beginning because it completely changed the way that I approached all of my planning processes.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: So I think that's really cool.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: So make sure you go back and check out that episode on Ideal Client Avatar and do the download and the thing that goes along the workbook that goes along with it.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: But I just think Nick's such a beautiful example of picking your niche and knowing your lane and literally going all in and then still being able to expand from there, right.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: So Nick was a cop and his lane was only cops, and now his company is expanding into firefighters and there's some additional expansion coming down the pipe, the pike that are like adjacent to cop, right.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: So just because you pick a ICA doesn't mean you can't work with adjacent markets, okay.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: So I just I just love it.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: It's, it's a great underdog story.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Nick is so charismatic and so passionate about what he's doing and he's so intentional and I think I hope that you got that from this episode.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: You know he's more than just a inspirational success story but really he's very methodical in his thinking and he's very vulnerable and shares, kind of what his strengths and weaknesses are and I just hope you really enjoyed this episode.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: And, again, if you know anyone who's an advisor that is either a firefighter or a cop, I know they should definitely at least check out Nick and see what he is doing, because some of the strategic relationships that he's building are just awesome.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: We're going to have to have him back on to talk about, um, how he is developing his market, which is so cool.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, thank you guys so much.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: I hope you have an amazing rest of your week and, as always, I'd love to invite you to join us out in the efficient advisor community over on Facebook.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: It's a group of over 2,200 advisors who are just super cool.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Um, you get, you do have to answer some questions to get into the group.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: We do make sure that you are an advisor or working in an advisory office in an operational capacity, and it is just a great place to ask questions, to bounce ideas off of, to share resources.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Would love to have you join us in there, and I also hang out on LinkedIn.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: So those are kind of the two main places that you can connect with me, and I would love, love, love for you to follow us over on LinkedIn and DM me.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: I'm always, always, looking for a podcast ideas.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: I'm always loving the questions and thoughts that you guys are sending me because it does get my creative juices flowing to help me think of more episodes or finding the right people to interview, to help point you guys in the right direction so you can take that one next step for your business.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: That'll help move the needle.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Thank you guys so much.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Have an amazing rest of your week.