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My day job is publishing Inside Information, a private subscription-based information service for financial advisers. This gives me a chance to pose questions to roughly 2,000 thoughtful professionals on all sorts of interesting subjects. Usually about 5% of my community will have worked through the question at hand in their practices (of course, it is always a different 5%), and will give me thoughts, ideas, comments and real-world information that I would never, ever have thought of on my own.
The point here is that I recognize that you, collectively, know a lot more than I ever will. The information in this column will come from where the real information lives: the planning community itself.
I've also learned, over the years, that the media's portrayal of the planning world is very different from the reality. Profiles in most magazines are about mature, highly successful practices. You will read interviews with advisers who have more clients than they need and more revenues than they can plausibly spend. Because these are the only kind of firms that are ever profiled, you might think that 90% or more of the professional population is successful and prosperous.
In fact, as nearly as I can tell, the practices that get written about and quoted represent, at most, 10% of the total. Despite what you see, hear and read, the great majority of even the best financial advisers are still working long hours to make ends meet, and at least half of you are what I call starving idealists: people who do great work every day for the people in their community, wondering when, if ever, they are going to enjoy for themselves a bit of the prosperity they bring to their clients.
If you are one of these people, then the most important thing I can tell you is that you're not alone, even though you might feel like you are. In fact, you are in the great majority, and I'm not sure that most writers are telling you the most important things that you need to hear.
SUCH AS...
Over the years, planners have shared wth me their ideas about the simplest, most effective ways to achieve excellence, prosperity and ever-improving service for their clients--goals which I think apply to every serious professional. Taken together, these bits of wisdom form what I now call the Magic Elixir--the special ingredients, which when stirred into the pot transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. The ingredients include:
MAKE ROOM FOR CHANGE
Create a place on your schedule, every week, to plan and execute improvements in your life and practice. Bill Ramsay, who practices in Raleigh, N.C., has an especially great system for making consistent progress. He devotes every Tuesday morning to a meeting with his staff, where everybody talks about what could be done better around the office.
Suggestions could be as simple as creating better worksheets to get more client information at the initial visit, or as complex as developing a list of all the skills and tasks that interns will need to be able to perform before they leave at the end of the summer, and a system for tracking which of them is proficient at each.
From this and prior meetings, they create an action list. Then everybody in the office is assigned a task to create a new system or procedure that will bring the company one step closer to accomplishing this change that will allow them to work smarter rather than harder. They spend the rest of the morning on those tasks, and then go back to their normal routine, with the understanding that whatever is not finished will be worked on the following week at the assigned time, and the week after that, until it's finished.
HIRE A COACH
I know, I know; you don't have the money right now, you're too busy, and anyway a coach would just tell you things you already know about yourself. My advice--which comes from virtually every successful adviser I've ever talked with--is do it anyway. The coach doesn't have to be somebody with a coaching degree (these things actually exist now) or a huge hourly cost; you can start down this road by making a pact with another planner whose judgment you respect, so that you can each set aside some coaching time for each other.
The benefit lies in accountability. You (get ready to hear a hard truth) are simply not selfish enough to put your own needs, interests and progress ahead of the hundreds of other peoples' agendas that flow across your desk each day. You never get around to you in all that busyness.
The coach performs the incalculably valuable service of finding out what you want to happen, holds those things in trust on your behalf and gives you back your own agenda with--if he or she is any good--more force than all those other people's agendas. He or she will hold you accountable for making progress, and without that accountability, without that focus, without knowing that if you don't make progress, somebody you respect is going to ask you why, you simply won't budge from where you are now.
ATTEND PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS
Get in the habit of going to local and national professional meetings. Don't just attend them; notice where you seem to be blocked in your personal and professional development, and go to the meeting with this problem as your topic of conversation in the hallways and at the lunch and dinner tables. Inevitably, other people around the table will have faced that same obstacle and will tell you how to overcome it. Suddenly you're able to step over what seemed like impenetrable barriers to growth and progress.
Glen Buco, who practices in McLean, Va., gave me one of the most valuable pieces of advice I ever received. He said that most advisers get very little out of conferences because they have no organized way to incorporate what they hear into their practices. They take copious notes, and the information goes into a file that is never looked at again.
Then he offered a better approach. On the plane back from the conference, go through your notes and identify one, two or three things that you want to make happen in your own practice. Make a note of what they are in a way that you can communicate clearly to your staff. This, of course, could be a small change like creating an annual client appreciation dinner or upgrading your Web site, or it could be a significant project like outsourcing all of your payroll administration and human resources work. Or, it might entail developing a philanthropic planning service for wealthier clients.
Then (and this is very important) do nothing about this for at least a week. The worst possible time to implement change is when you're trying to catch up on all the work that piled up while you were gone.
Finally, after you're able to breathe and the pile of work is down to the usual impossible demands, make time to sit down with the staff and go over one (and only one) of the changes you want to make. Brainstorm what has to happen in order for this improvement to become a reality. Chances are, the staff will be very valuable in providing the operational details that you might have missed.
Then assign out the tasks that are needed to make the change happen. Eventually, when the improvement is in place to your satisfaction, pull out the second change you wanted to make and call a new staff meeting.
BE PERSISTENT
Learn to become comfortable with change. Many advisers will try something, and if it doesn't work, go on to something else. The most successful advisers follow a different process. They will try something, and if it doesn't work, they'll tinker with it and try again. Chances are, it won't work the second time either, so they'll tinker with it some more, until finally--many tries and tinkers later--it accomplishes what they want. These are the advisers that the future belongs to, those who are constantly trying new things in an effort to improve.
There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that few advisers do any of these things, much less all of them. That's the case even though, as I'm sure you've noticed, they're all pretty simple.
The bad news is that, as simple as they are, these tasks are hard to focus on, with all the other distractions you face. The real value is not in knowing these tips, but in establishing ways to constantly remind yourself of them, because chances are high that you'll have all but forgotten the elixir, its magic and its simple ingredients as soon as you get buried in tomorrow's workload.
Of course, there's a lot more to tell you about what advisers are doing, about what works and doesn't work, about new ideas and innovations, about the future and how to prepare for it. We'll get into all that later. For now, I hope you saw something here which will be useful as you go forward; useful enough so that next month you'll give me and this column another chance to build on our relationship.
Bob Veres publishes Inside Information (www.bobveres.com), an information service designed to help advisers improve their practices and offer better, more powerful services to their clients.
