Financial Advisors: How Changing Your Mindset Changes Your Business

Are you in the 38% of financial advisors who consider themselves business owners over advisors, or do you fall in the larger category of the 62% of financial advisors who consider themselves advisors first and business owners second?

In the early part of your career, you probably very successfully ran your business as a solopreneur. You likely even attributed that success to the fact that clients knew that they were in your care exclusively. While this was probably true at the time, it is a model that is only sustainable for so long if you intend to grow your business to the point of generating billions in revenue.

In the early part of your career, you probably very successfully ran your business as a solopreneur. You likely even attributed that success to the fact that clients knew that they were in your care exclusively. While this was probably true at the time, it is a model that is only sustainable for so long if you intend to grow your business to the point of generating billions in revenue.

This three part blog will go over some of the tips covered in our Building The Billion Dollar Business Workshop™, which will help you think and act like a business owner so that you can live up to your true potential.

Transition from a Lone Ranger to a Leader:  You have created a vision for your business and as a result have experienced great success. If you’re like many advisors, it’s a difficult task to take the leap of faith to pass the responsibility of working toward this vision onto others. However, if you are plateauing in terms of your success, or limited in the clients that you can serve at the level you want, it’s time to take the leap and move from Lone Ranger to Leader. Letting go of your solopreneur mentality can be challenging, but we will walk through some assessments and strategies that will break it down into manageable action steps.

Surrender independence for interdependence:  At a certain point, if you really want to grow, you have to pass the responsibility of success onto your other team members, and eventually your successors. Doing so requires surrendering your independence for interdependence. In other words, create a team that relies on the input, opinion, and action of all its members (not just the leader) to run successfully. This will give you a truly engaged team, dedicated to the success of the business and the overall fulfillment of your vision.

Increase the face of your firm: Who do clients associate with your business and their financial success? If they picture you and only you, you aren’t doing justice to the rest of your team members, who, in an ideal situation, should be carrying equal responsibility for the well-being of your clients. As a leader, consider how you can consistently bring the other advisors into client meetings so that your clients become familiar and associate the other team members with their success. This will alleviate your responsibility as well, and increase the amount of time you have to spend working on your business rather than in it.

Create Consistent Client Experience: As you grow it is likely that you will acquire more clients through referrals and word of mouth. In these situations it is extremely important that you give your clients a consistent experience—not only from visit to visit, but also from client to client. Your clients’ experiences should be a direct reflection of that which is described to them by the people referring them, as it is this experience that motivated the referral in the first place. The continuity of this experience for each individual client will continually reinforce your care and attention to them over time, and lead to more referrals from those initial referrals down the line.

Routine, Not Impersonality: A consistent client experience, or any process you put in place for your business, should not equate to impersonality. You want to make the elements of running your business as predictable as possible (both for your own sake and for the sake of your clients) without losing the personal touch they’ve come to expect from working with you.  Closely involving your team in working with clients from the beginning will help achieve this. Similarly, involving your team members in the various parts of the business, from operations to acquisition, and allowing them to create processes around these, is a great way to bring their personality and engagement into the various folds of your business, which will keep it from seeming rote or impersonal.

Stay tuned for more tips on thinking like a Business Owner and building a billion dollar business in Part II of this blog!

Coaching Questions from This Blog:

1. Have you truly shifted your role to that of a leader in building your team, or are you still seeing things from the perspective of a solopreneur?

2. What are your clients’ experiences in working with your firm? Do they have a sense of consistency and continuity? Are they comfortable working with various team members?

3. Have you created a streamlined process at only the expense of personalized, individual attention?