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143: Ideas to Implement - 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: Welcome back.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: I'm so, so glad you're here.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Every week.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: My objective is to create a short and sweet follow-up episode from the longer content earlier in the week and just really break it down into actionable steps.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: So this week I'm going to distill the episode down into just a few bullet points that I want to highlight and to have you take immediate action on to make a big impact in your business.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: I am your host of the Efficient Advisor, libby Grywee, and I built from scratch a 100% referral only planning practice that I grew to seven figures as a solo advisor, all while working just three days a week and taking off 14 weeks a year to lean into being a mom, a wife, a friend, a sister, a daughter and, frankly, a travel obsessed human.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same and to help you take immediate action on the most important strategies to scale, organize and create less stress and overwhelm in your business.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: So this week's episode was a keynote that I did for Penn Mutual.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Penn Mutual hosted an event for the administrative teams and operational teams of financial advisors, which I thought was a really cool concept and what a great thing for all of these five financial professionals to do was to give their admin staff a pay and space and time to pour into their own personal and professional development.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: And so, really, that's gonna be my first takeaway from this episode is to do that right.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Our job as CEO of our business is to pour into our own personal and professional development and, as a leader, to pour into the personal and professional development of our team.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: I hear advisors all the time like, oh, I wish I had a team or staff that was more motivated or, you know, wanted to take on more and doesn't want to just do the bare minimum.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Well, here you go.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: This is the type of opportunity we need to be providing.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Not everybody's wired that way, but we want to hire people who are wired that way and we want to give them that opportunity to take the reins, to take agency over some of our systems and processes, to give them the education and the freedom to take things away from us.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: And so I just I thought it was just a really great idea.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Some of the big ideas from this episode were just all really surrounding wasted time and how much time is wasted from not having some basic operational efficiencies in place.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: So the first half of the talk was really surrounding having a better digital filing system, and while that sounds so frigging boring and, let's be honest, it kind of is right who, I don't know who gets excited about digital filing systems, but this is something that I was so guilty of and even as I started the efficient advisor back in 2014,.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Compared to now, the inefficiencies were even though I was running a really efficient financial advisory business.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Having to do it again in a second business.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: It was hard.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, I had the, the knowledge and the know how and naming conventions and, but figuring out and actually then following through on a better organizational system was really challenging.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: And now that we've got it down pat again, it's like oh, thank, thank the Lord, it's so much easier to find stuff, but I can't tell you how many things I recreated in my financial advisory business, how many things I recreated in the efficient advisor until I got a better filing system in place for both businesses.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: So wasted time.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: In the episode I mentioned that the average employee wastes 3.2 hours a week just looking for documents.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: I mean that's completely insane to me and that it was listed as one of the number one or top three problems that office professionals have identified as issues in their business was I can't find what I'm looking for when I need it, especially under pressure when a client calls and they need to pull up a document.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: So we also have all of these standard operating procedures that we're trying to put in place and if you've been listening to the podcast, especially this summer, we did the systems to scale series where I walked you through some exercises to build out every level of your business and a bunch of processes associated with that.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: And one of the first questions that I get from advisors when we start creating templates and checklists and collateral and all of the things that you need standard operating procedures.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Where do I put these?
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: How do I make sure that I can find them?
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: How do I make sure my team can find them?
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: I don't want to just create stuff and then have it hide somewhere in Dropbox where we never actually utilize it.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: So this episode is the answer to all of those questions at a pretty high level.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: The second half of the episode is all about.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: So we're not going to get into the actual systems and processes, but really just kind of where and how to organize them in a way that allows you and your team to save just like 10s and 10s of time.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, the second half of the episode was all surrounding model weeks, and you guys have heard me mention it and talk about it.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: This, to me, is when I figured this out for me and then my team figured it out for themselves and then we figured out how to coordinate between the two.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: This was life saving.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: We were so inefficient Me personally and I've shared my story in episode number 12, designing your perfect schedule.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: I wasted so much time, so so much time, and when I was trying to whittle from working like 70 plus hours a week down to 24, having a model week was absolutely critical, and I shared in the talk that when we were doing live workshops for advisors, when I was running my business, we would do live workshops and advisors from all over would come in for a couple of days and my team and I would train them on our processes and we would talk as a team about like, okay, well, what are the things that we think are most impactful?
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: We only have two days.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: What can we show them?
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: And we kind of started off with like, okay, if we had a month with everybody?
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: What would we teach them?
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, if we had two weeks with everybody, what would we teach them?
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, if we only had one week, if we only had three days, if we only had one day, if I only had one hour, you know.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: And we kind of just started really whittling down like what are the most important systems and processes and productivity hacks and time saving techniques that we use?
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: And when it came down to it, to me this idea of a model week or sometimes it's called an ideal week was I mean, I hate to constantly be like I was a game changer, right, but it literally was a game changer for me and I would say it's the one thing.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: This structure gave me so much freedom and this structure gave my staff so much freedom and it allowed us to integrate and work together so much better and so much more effectively and so much more efficiently.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: And, of course, in this talk I couldn't get into the super minute details of what building a model week really looks like.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: So make sure you check out episode number 12, designing your perfect week, and there's all the tips, tricks, learnings that I had, mistakes that I made, things that I had to build time in for, but in this episode I talked specifically to the staff of advisory offices and in this talk I'm sharing with them.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: So it's different than the number 12 episode.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: It's things that they need to be doing and things that they can be asking of you as an advisor.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: So do share this episode with them.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: So there are some different time block techniques and time block needs that your team has versus you as an advisor.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Anyways, I hope you guys found this week's episode super helpful.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: I look forward to connecting with you over on LinkedIn and out in the efficient advisor community on Facebook.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week.