A Question from Hellyer

Happy Friday!

Hope you all had a FANTASTIC Annual Meeting and brought home a lot of ideas and energy to drive through the second half of the year!

After the CFC luncheon, I had a conversation with BJ, who shared an intriguing topic for our next Driving FPP message. He referred to Aaron Miller’s main stage message, specifically the moment Russo challenged Aaron early in his career, “Are you doing YOUR job, or are you doing THE job?” What a blessing it is to have someone in our lives who cares enough to challenge us like that when we need it!

BJ’s question was: How do we keep advisors focused on what they need to be doing every day to grow profitable practices, especially in the valuable 5-19 space?

There’s no simple answer, but I believe it requires a real strategy and investment in moving from driving critical CDO prescriptive learning and activity accountability to impactful CGO business coaching/consulting thinking and accountability.

At the risk of committing heresy… we need to help them move beyond Granum. Not to quit Granum, but to grow past the basics and delve deeper into the why behind the what. As advisors evolve, their job becomes more complex, and leaders need to challenge their thinking through this evolution. When I think of an advisor’s career curve, they generally move through these four stages:

1. New Advisor
2. Having a Practice
3. Building a Business
4. Building a Firm

During step 2, many advisors experience what we’ll analogize as their ‘teenage years’, rebelling against the methods that got them where they are and wanting to do things their way. Remember being a teenager or dealing with one? They want to be treated like adults but often lack the tools to really be adults. Our job is to guide them through this phase. With our kids, we eventually learned that challenging them with adult-level thinking, instead of relying on ‘because I said so’, reduced rebellion and increased critical thinking and growth… though not always in a straight line!

For these advisors, we need to guide them through, and coach them to, a more substantial business planning process than just setting annual production goals and breaking them down into Monthly/Weekly/Daily activity metrics. Goals and Metrics are critical, but they need more context beyond just ‘Granum’. As an example, a light bulb often goes off when I’m working with these advisors and we draw a Ben Franklin “T-Chart” on the whiteboard, listing duties on one side for Business Owner and on the other for Financial Planner.

Prospecting, activity metrics, hiring, managing people, expenses, benefits, managing cash flow, etc., are not unique to our business. These are fundamental to any business, whether selling wine, seed corn, shingles, cars, carpet, software, medical devices, or development services to NM MP’s... What’s unique is applying these fundamentals to the financial planning business they want to grow. This business isn’t hard, being a business owner in general is hard ~ but our business is worth it, and there is no better place to build it.

I’ve tried different business planning systems and even worked on building my own, but I haven’t found a better process than the VTO from the Traction process. Facilitating the creation of a 2-page VTO helps advisors vision beyond a vision board, document key target markets, develop their elevator pitch, and tie goals to long-term objectives. Most importantly, it helps them think through, develop, and execute on strategic Rocks that drive their growth as business owners. Integrating this into your process, when advisors are ready to move from ‘typical' client builders to a study group format (still with accountability!), will facilitate a mindset change towards growth. This is where your CGO can truly impact advisor growth in the 5-19 space.

For those unfamiliar with Traction, I’ve attached a copy of the VTO for reference.

Open The Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) (FPP Tools) · Word version

Reflection for you

• How has your annual/quarterly business planning process evolved for your leadership team over the years?
• What changes have you made to make your leadership team planning process to be more effective and drive better results for your business?
• When comparing your leadership team’s business planning process to the process you facilitate for advisors, what changes could you implement to impact their productivity and growth?

Happy to think through this if you’d find it helpful!

In closing, and on a different subject, I thought Jesse Itzler’s talk was definitely top 5 for any keynote we’ve had an annual. If your reps didn’t text Itzler's number at the end of his talk, attached is the video he sent back from the text. For me the value in the video was mindset more than technique - it’s not about doing exactly what Jesse did, but understanding the mentality behind WHY he thinks each step is important, and what can be learned from them. Listening to this would be a great assignment for advisors before their next study group/client builder and then facilitate a conversation about what they learned and how their learnings can be applied to their businesses!

Video: 15 Steps to Grow Your Business & Influence – Jesse Itzler (YouTube)

5 months left in 2024 - Let’s make them count!

Think Differently,

Steve