The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It is an enduring classic and should be a must-read for financial advisors. The book reveals the blind spots most small business owners (and financial advisors) share—they’re great technicians. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult for technicians to transform those talents into the entrepreneurial or management skills needed in running a business. The book’s author, Michael Gerber, believes it’s difficult to make that shift in mindset, from technician to entrepreneur, but it can be achieved through the power of processes.
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Gerber states that you should look at every area of your business as a process and then develop a specific system for each of those processes. He says the key is developing processes so streamlined and efficient that anyone can run them. Once you have those systems in place, you’re no longer worrying about developing something new in your business, allowing you the time and energy to focus on your clients and prospects.
5 processes for financial advisors
Following these principles, at Beacon, we recommend that you consider five key process areas to help streamline your business:
1. Business development process. This process is broken into two parts. First, how do I get people interested in my business and having a conversation with me? You develop this process through newsletters, seminars, social media and similar marketing efforts. Second, is the process you have during each client meeting. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel each time; you want an efficient system that allows you to go from point A to point B in every single meeting with every single client.
2. Client onboarding process. Once you have a client onboard, you want to have an efficient process to get the client integrated into the system. One example is connecting with your client through LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to communicate with them and comment on their various life events. For example, through your processes, you can develop tagging systems and could send all your clients that were World Cup fans an update and comment on the event.
3. Ongoing client process. This is how you communicate with your clients throughout the year. Are you speaking with them on the phone quarterly? Are you meeting with them face-to-face on an annual basis? However you decide, you will want to create this as a process across your clients.
4. Investment management process. An area to significantly improve scalability for advisors is to develop a process for delegating non-revenue producing responsibilities to a third party so you can focus on capturing new assets—one of the most potentially game-changing responsibilities being investment management. (For more on why outsourcing investment management is a $1 million question, check out our past newsletter on this topic.)
5. People process. This process deals with how you hire, manage and fire people. How do you onboard them? How do you pay them? As with the other topic areas, you want a system in place that takes the guessing out of running your business.
To learn more about how you can develop and implement these goals and more for your business, contact your wholesaler today!
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