What do the most successful advisors do that you may not be doing? Three of them shared practice management secrets at a 401(k) Summit workshop Sept. 13.
Your Personal Brand
If you engage with 401(k) plans on YouTube or Twitter, chances are you know Jeanne Fisher, Managing Director at Strategic Retirement Partners. Fisher has built a popular and successful personal brand, #401klady. What did she learn in the process of building her brand?
“Here’s the thing: everybody in this room has a brand,” Fisher said. “Your brand is just your reputation. It’s your decision whether or not you want to leverage that brand. Think about someone who has referred business to you. How do they describe you? Do they say, ‘Well, he’s a little dry, but he’s brilliant.’ Or ‘He’s kind of a goofy guy—he’s going to wear a bowtie—but he really provides great service.’ That’s your brand.
“So when people see “401k Lady,” they think that’s the brand. But it’s not. The brand is authentic… relatable… simplifying things.” Don’t feel like you have to start with a hashtag and then build a brand, Fisher advised. Rather, she said, “Build your own reputation and key on those things you’re known for that are your natural strength, and carry that brand in the way you walk, the way you talk to people—from co-workers, to family, to prospects.”
Delegate!
“This is the most important thing you can take away from this conference, right here,” began Joe DeNoyior, President, Retirement and Private Wealth at HUB International. “If you really want to spend time doing what you’re best at and what you really love to do, you have to get rid of things you’re not good at. You’ll just keep them on your list forever, and it will weigh you down.”
DeNoyior shared a simple exercise: Every 60 days, take one week and do an inventory, using a simple Excel spreadsheet showing 15-minute increments for each day in that week. Then keep track of everything you do during the day. “Don’t lie to yourself; if you’re wasting time, you’re wasting time,” he said. “Then at the end of the week, spend some ‘think time.’ Go over everything, and start circling in red what you should eliminate. Circle in green what you love to do. That’s pretty simple, right? Then, over the next 60 days, eliminate three things that you circled in red, and increase three things that you circled in green.”
The exercise can also be used in a broader context, DeNoyior advised. “This is for people on your team too. If you’re trying to figure out whether you need to hire a new person, wouldn’t it be great if your entire team did this exercise? Then you take all the things that were circled in red. That’s the next person you need to add to your team. You’ve literally just created a job description.”
The exercise has other important benefits, DeNoyior said. “Number 1, it’s eye-opening beyond belief,” he said. “Number 2, it allows you to start feeling really good about what you’re good at, and then focus on those things. And when that happens, I believe that your business will go to the next level.”
Job Costing
What does it cost to advise on a plan? At startup Finspire LLC, CEO and Cofounder Chuck Williams resolved to answer that question to serve a number of purposes. Even though it’s a common practice, surveys over the years have shown that, like Williams himself, many advisors have never done it. “But starting up a new company, we felt that we had to do that, initially for financial reasons,” Williams explains. Since it’s daunting to do that for an entire book of business, they started by doing it for just one client for one quarter. “Pick a relatively easy client that you offer your core services to,” Williams advised—October 1 would be a good time to do this, he noted. Then document everything that happens through the end of the quarter.
“So we did that initially for financial reasons—what does it cost? Then we expanded that to the rest of our clients, and we realized that we had some service inconsistencies that we didn’t know were there. Why weren’t we doing “X” for this client? That was incredibly helpful for us: Why is that? How do we get this to be consistent?”
It also made the firm more valuable to their clients, Williams added. “When we bring on a new client, we say, ‘This is what we’re going to do for you;’ then we do it for them; then we tell them what we did for them.” The information also goes into their annual service review and is thoroughly documented into the firm’s CRM system.
In addition to clarifying the financials and boosting the firm’s value proposition, Williams says, job costing led to other benefits, like consistent workflows. “It changed how we do services, making sure we’re being consistent, adding some things in. Sometimes we were way over-servicing. It just gave us a much more consistent financials and services across our book of business.”
