Your assignment for today: Give your client list a good look and ask yourself, "Should I really be working with everyone on this list?" If you're honest with yourself, you'll have to admit that probably at least a few clients - perhaps many - simply aren't right for you and your practice.

These clients will probably stand out. They're the ones who monopolize your time but generate scant profits for your business. They don't take your advice, but drag down your team's energy and productivity. Deep down, you know that you don't enjoy working with them.

Now is the time to release these people. It's better for them and for you. Here's the best way to get the job done.

GET MORE FROM LESS

The idea of shedding clients and the revenue they bring may sound reckless, especially in an uncertain economic environment. But working with non-ideal clients is holding you back from reaching your full potential.

Releasing clients who are not ideal for your business is one of the most important tactics we teach at CEG Worldwide, and it's a key step in taking an advisory practice to a higher level of success. There are several reasons for this.

When you stop working with less-than-ideal clients, you free up a tremendous amount of productive time for you and your team. Think about the one-offs you deal with or the extremely demanding clients who consume chunks of your day. If you take that time back, you can focus on serving ideal clients and finding new ones. In addition, avoiding unworthy clients can renew your energy and excitement for your job.

Remind yourself that less is more. If you boil down your business to only those clients who match your services and expertise, you can build an amazing practice with a relatively small client base. Indeed, when we segmented 2,094 surveyed advisors by incomes and the size of their client bases, we discovered the top earning advisors (average income: $416,000) served less than 150 clients.

FOUR WAYS TO LET GO

How do you discontinue working with clients who aren't a good match for the type of business you want to build? There are four main techniques advisors tend to use, but not all of them make sense. Let's take a look at each approach:

1. "Quiet file" the inappropriate clients. This is the passive-aggressive method, and nearly everyone uses it to some extent. You know this technique: You stop doing any proactive work with clients you don't want to deal with, and you hope that they will no longer contact you (but that you'll keep them and the recurring revenue, of course).

This technique probably isn't working as well as you'd hoped. In fact, you are doing a disservice to these clients and opening the door for them to tell their friends and associates about your less-than-world-class service.

Until you admit there's a problem and do something about it, these clients will keep asking for your time and attention (or more likely your team's attention). Yet they won't provide you with enough business to compensate for all that expended energy.

2. Hire a new advisor to work with unsuitable clients. I see many planners take this step because they believe this approach gets the inappropriate clients out of the way. But, like the first option, it doesn't solve the main problem. Think about it: You hire a junior advisor, pay him or her a salary and spend time training and supervising that person. There's more time and money spent. And for what? Someone whose job is to spend time on clients who aren't very profitable or appropriate for your business. Not a brilliant business model, is it?

3. Transfer the clients to another advisor in your office. This option can work well in certain cases. Let's say you are an employee of a firm. It can make sense to transfer these clients to another advisor within the company. Compensation for this transfer is sometimes arranged by making a revenue-sharing agreement with another advisor.

One advisor in our coaching program employed by a regional brokerage firm chose to start working only with larger accounts he could serve profitably, while transferring smaller clients to other advisors. He transferred 56 of his roughly 140 clients to another advisor, but for two years kept nearly all the revenue those clients generated - giving him a two-year window to make the transition without hurting his fees. The move boosted his fee-only business to $45,000 a month from $33,000 a month immediately and gave him more time to focus on attracting affluent clients going forward.