Read Transcript
Happy Wednesday, folks. We are here again in quarantine another week, and I'm going to be speaking today specifically to advisors and teams who feel like they're ready to get back into strategic work on the business mode, let's go forward, versus tactical, let's just try to stay afloat during this time. We've received so many questions and comments this week from advisors who really feel like they want to set the stage for the second half of the year and be clear about what they're focusing on, but feel sort of paralyzed by all of the overlapping priorities and the challenge with balancing what's happening right now and the reality that we still have a business and team to run conceivably for the next 25 years for some of my Gen X advisors.
And so I want to give you a framework through which you can think about the latter half of this year and how to really prioritize what you should be focused on and what you should actually be focused on if you put your CEO and business manager hat on. What I want you to listen for as I talk through some of this is not necessarily even the solutions or ideas I'm providing you, but the questions that I'm asking. Ultimately, I know if we're succeeding as coaches and consultants, if we're giving advisors the ability and the framework and the questions to help them help themselves solve these challenges when they're not watching our Wednesday Wisdom videos.
Okay, so three sort of overarching strategic things you should be focused on. Obviously the first thing, it goes without saying, it's growth and organic client acquisition. And that may seem like an obvious one, but the question that I want you to ask yourselves, leaders, is, "How can we institutionalize client acquisition for our practice?" In other words, if I was to take you leadership, or you rainmakers out of the equation, but we would assume that the practice is still generating business, how exactly is that happening? Now, you may answer that question with, "Well, we just need to figure out how to bring on clients, forget institutionalizing it." And so the question you should be asking yourselves then, is, "What is our greatest revenue-generating opportunity currently?" The followup to that is, "What do we want our greatest revenue-generating opportunity to be in the future practice?"
And so here's the connection I want you to make. If you are a multi-leader team, in other words, there are multiple revenue generators, maybe you've brought on junior advisors, you're building out a multi-gen practice, the obvious opportunity for you is to really use what you've built, that platform, to attract other advisors and other books of business. And so in this case, it's actually not an organic growth opportunity, it's an inorganic growth opportunity. And so if you're an advisor who's in that model, what you should be thinking about is, "We can institutionalize client acquisition by shifting our marketing and our content and our messaging to attract other advisors and especially retiring advisors to our firm, and position us as the forever home for clients of retiring advisors and the forever home of advisors who want to build a fabulous practice but don't want to do it on their own."
And so if you are in that structure, that is your biggest revenue-generating opportunity right now. And so all of your efforts through the end of the year should be putting out content and information and value add specifically to those two groups, so the advisors who want to build but don't want to build alone and retiring advisors who don't have a solid succession plan in place. And so I'm talking about weekly Zooms conference calls, one-pager value-add sheets that are constantly providing value to these two groups, but are also positioning you as the go-to platform. This is especially important if you're within a BD, the go-to platform and firm for both of those advisors. And so your priorities for the rest of the year related to growth should be around that and getting really specific and clear about what the value-add offering is. What's the benefit to an advisor looking to join you folks and what is the actual offer? And then, what is the benefit to a retiring advisor working with you guys for the last five to seven years of the life cycle for him or her?
Now, if you are a solo advisor or an advisor who runs a boutique practice and maybe there's only one or two of you generating revenue, same questions. How can we institutionalize client acquisition? And we start to answer that question by asking, "What is the greatest revenue-generating opportunity we have?" Now, that may be one of many things. It may be referrals and introductions from our current client base, it may be business from our actual clients that we haven't totally capitalized off of, or it may be we have a person on our team who's just such an incredible rainmaker and everything they touch turns to gold and they just have the ability to make things happen when they're in front of people.
If that's the opportunity, if you have somebody with that X factor and a really dynamic rainmaker, some of you listening may fit that profile, then the greatest opportunity is to create capacity and give you a channel directly to prospects and clients, to be able to talk to them and woo them with your incredible relationship management skills. So all of your efforts through the end of the year should be focused on giving that rainmaker more time back in the week, and then figuring out what channel you're going to use to get that person in front of people. So perhaps that person is facilitating a weekly Relax at Home with XYZ financial series, where you bring on all different sorts of value-add speakers, a guided meditation session, a yoga specialist, a cooking class, and your main advisor is facilitating those sessions with your clients.
Maybe it's that middle one I talked about before, opportunities within your book of business that you haven't capitalized off of. So the rest of the year, all of your focus should be on, especially my BD advisors who have really big books of business, it should be on re-going through your entire client list, even if it takes you seven months, and especially those B, C, and D clients that maybe you don't spend a lot of time with, going through the entire client base and qualifying people as either someone who can potentially move up in segment, so there's additional opportunities here, we haven't capitalized off of it, we're bringing them now back into our review meeting rotation. Or you've qualified them as not a good fit for you anymore, or you've qualified them as ultimately a dead file who needs to go back to the service center at your home office. But maybe that's your biggest opportunity.
Or maybe you're in that first camp, where your biggest opportunity is referrals and introductions. And so for the rest of the year, you are focused on a couple things. Number one, establishing a relationship with some of your best clients, and by best clients, I don't mean biggest revenue generators. I'm defining best here as they are natural networkers, they have the ability to connect you, they get excited every time you share something you're working on or position a client event, or introduce a new team member. We all have people like this in our network. The rest of the year should be focused on isolating that group of people and engaging them in an ongoing dialogue about what you're building, how you're building it, what changes you're making.
And so perhaps this is about creating a pseudo client advisory board, where we simply get this group of really good clients together and say, "You guys are so valuable to us, and we've done a lot of intentional thinking about how to come out of this stronger, more valuable, and more impactful to you and the community more than ever. And so we want your feedback and we're going to ask for you to perhaps spend one hour with us once a month for the next four months to really help us shape what our message is going to be moving forward." This is no different, by the way, than what any other firm does in any other industry when they want to think about really building deeper relationships with clients that ultimately are going to lead to referrals. They pull those people into their planning, and they pull those people deeper into their network.
And so those would be my suggestions for your first initiative around growth and client acquisition through year-end, and really institutionalizing it and focusing on your greatest opportunities. If you want to hear my ideas on the next two priorities, infrastructure being one of them, and then brand and messaging being the third, tune in the next two weeks and you get to hear them. All right, folks. I hope that was helpful. Have a good week. Talk to you same place, same time. Bye.