In true entrepreneurial fashion, most successful financial advisers excel at the technical side of their business: financial planning, investment management, insurance and other established areas of professional training, experience and expertise. Nevertheless, there is still an area where excellence has yet to take hold in the financial profession: running a business.

GBOs and GFAs

In my experience, there are two kinds of professionals in the planning world: people who are great business owners (GBOs) and those who are great financial advisers (GFAs). If you're like most advisers, you fit the latter description much more than the former. You find that business issues dominate your life, and you often wonder why this "business stuff" is so hard.

When I attend conferences and give presentations, the discussions among GFAs often cover the same basic topics. These include the challenges of managing growth; existing in the operational equivalent of Groundhog Day, where there seems to be no progress and the same challenges come up again and again with no resolution; frustration with financial results (quite common among advisers with the highest incomes); lack of time; countless daily snafus; and reactive (rather than proactive) client service.

Add in poor scalability, staffing nightmares and a desire for a better quality of life. Top it all off with a burning desire to "get it right" in spite of the obstacles because you can clearly see the potential if only you could just get to the "next level."

All these problems get in the way of the goal of every GFA, which is to achieve your potential. In most cases, your greatest obstacle is how you think about and act in your business. You are the CEO of your firm, theoretically and literally. Whether you are a solo practitioner or a partner in a large firm, you control your behavior. Even when firms have a designated CEO, creating the management structure doesn't necessarily change the mindset required to make that structure effective.

The natural human tendency is to focus on that at which we excel, and for most of you that means being a financial adviser. More often than not the net result is an imbalance in the natural equilibrium required for success. For example, I am currently working with an adviser who is truly an effective planner. His technical knowledge, care and concern for his clients and staff are extremely high, and his income and profit margin are healthy. But like many advisers, he didn't realize that his business skills were not nearly as developed as his advisory skills.

When we looked at his business practices, we found that he didn't conduct performance reviews because he felt that if people were doing great work, they would know it, and if they weren't, he didn't want to have to discuss it with them. As a result, he had one staff member in a position for two years who was performing unsatisfactorily and creating morale problems, and another younger adviser in the firm who was doing a great job, but who after five years left the firm, taking the succession plan with him.

In my experience, good business skills are part natural talent, part experience and part hard work. Most advisers aren't aware of these underlying problems, and they lack the time, inclination and resources to attack the formidable task of operating a real business. So it's no surprise that your intentions to run a better business are outweighing your execution.

What can you do about it?

The most important point I can make is that you can bring about meaningful change in your business, and I've found that the following model can help advisers adjust their perspective and develop core business abilities:

Vision. You must be able to see the potential in order to achieve it. Clearly defining your ideal situation is the first step toward running a great business. This is as true for strategic issues (e.g., double assets in the next three years) as it is for tactical ones (e.g., have profitable client relationships). I find that once I explain this to advisers, their eyes light up, they realize they knew most of this all along and they're excited by the opportunity to bring about change.

Thinking. You must be willing to change the way you think about, and act in, your business. Einstein said, "No problem can be solved with the same consciousness that created it." No mystery here-if you start to think like a business owner, with time and discipline, you will begin to act like a business owner.