5 Ways to Work Toward Future Goals While Achieving Current Ones

While running a financial advisory business can be incredibly rewarding, there are some very challenging aspects. At ClientWise, we dedicate significant time and attention to addressing these challenges with our advisor clients. One of the most significant challenges is working both on and in your business simultaneously. This requires careful planning and the ability to see how your current goals align with your future goals. We’ve witnessed our clients achieve incredible success in this area through the following tactics:

Understanding your vision: This isn’t about imagining where you want to end up. It’s about knowing, concretely, how you will get there and why. That takes a lot of planning up front, even after you have a clear vision of where you want to go. If you plan to involve a team, it also means getting them up to speed on your vision, and making sure their reasons for staying committed to that vision are just as strong as yours.

 Setting clear goals: The goals for your business need to be clearly defined according to what you want to achieve, both now and in the future. How do your current capabilities align with what you need to achieve in the future? How can you create shorter-term goals around those to work towards in the meantime? Be sure to discuss and visualize these goals with your team, as this will give you something tangible to work toward, and allow you to create a common vision amongst your team members.

 Hiring the right team: You should be hiring simultaneously for both your present goals and your future goals. It’s important to know the direction of your business when you build a team so that you aren’t eventually hiring a new team of professionals to do what those you originally hired could not. The best employees will get you from point A to point B, and will be there to share in the end result. Also, be up front about your desire to carry your team members through to new or “future” roles, so that they are aware of the opportunity for growth when they are hired.

 Planning, Planning, Planning: This one is simple enough, but you’ll never achieve the goals you want for your business if you don’t work them into what you’re doing currently. Understand how your day-to-day goals align with your future business goals so that you can clearly picture how these smaller tasks factor into the larger picture of what you are trying to achieve.

 Executing more than you plan: Sometimes the greatest roadblock to achievement is planning to such an extent that it prevents you from executing on your business. Of course, not executing also prevents you from failing in that execution, and failing in itself involves many lessons in learning what not to do. Don’t avoid execution for fear of failure, because failure is an important step along the path to success.

 Powerful coaching questions from this article:

1. Are you able to track how every action and process in your current business is connected to your future goals?
2. Do you have the right team in place to manage both your current and future goals?
3. If you aren’t fully executing on your business plan, what is it that might be standing in the way of you taking action and how can you address it?