Two Ways To Regain The Inspiration To Work With Your Clients
April 16, 2012 by Simon · Leave a Comment
There are two ways of regaining your inspiration for your business and one of them is to visit with your best 15 to 20 clients and ask those 2 questions, what do they like best about working with you and what have they received that they didn’t expect. While you’re asking those 2 questions, document what they say and by documenting the answers you’re going to integrate the answers along with the beliefs, feelings and values into your cellular being so to speak so you’re going to own that experience.
Another way that you can do this sit down and think of the best 5 to 10 client relationships that you have had over the years. Write down the client’s name, that’s client’s challenges, the solution and the difference that you made. Write down the values that you experienced through this process. Also write down how you felt.
What’s Your Ugly?
April 9, 2012 by Simon · Leave a Comment
Thrilled to be Speaking at Equitable Life’s Leadership Conference April 19-22, 2012
How do you get out from underneath all the day-to-day operations to focus on your business?
You have a profitable practice and you love what you do but there are some aspects of running your business on a day-to-day basis that can have a tendency to make your business look and feel ugly and these include:
- Day in and day out service requirements for some clients that were purchased in a new book
- Getting bogged down underneath the regulatory regimes so you can’t seem to meet the needs of your clients
- Staying on top of the sending in apps and admin
- Concerned about building a mammoth infrastructure and not being able to operate without one at the same time
- Trying to build and run a business when there are weeks when you see 20 clients
- Keeping in touch with all of your clients on a regular basis
- Finding the time to recruit new qualified agents
- Attracting the professional help to market your business speciality
- Creating a marketing funnel that differentiates you in the market place to bring in “qualified” leads
- Staying committed to your clients and the vision and mission of your company on a long-term basis
Join Simon Reilly of Leading Advisor Inc. in this value packed presentation.
Simon will focus on how advisors get “out from underneath” all the day-to-day activities and “the ugly” that perhaps prevents you from growing your business and focus on what you really need to be doing in your business. Advisors will walk away with tangible items that they are going to implement to build their practice/management.
Do You Believe You Can Get Your Needs Met From Social Media?
March 20, 2012 by Simon · Leave a Comment
A colleague passed on these two graphics to me last week which demonstrate the assumption that one can get their unmet needs met from social media.
Advertisers do this all the time conveying messages that their product or service will meet the unmet needs of the unconscious masses.
I don’t believe that one can meet their unmet needs from or through business, career, clients, family, friends, money or possessions or social media … unmet needs must be met from within. When I talk about unmet needs I am talking about the unmet needs of; approval, recognition, safety and worthiness. To read more on this check out What Are The Practice Management Issues That Many Advisors Are Facing? Or check out Curing The Unmet Needs Disease.
If unmet needs are not met consciously from within, then one could easily be experiencing OCSMD – Obsessive Compulsive Social Media Disorder.
Source: http://johnantonios.com/
What Are The Practice Management Issues That Many Advisors Are Facing?
March 19, 2012 by Simon · Leave a Comment
No business plan, no goals, in overwhelm and not asking for referrals just to name a few.
Business Plan and Goals – The unmet need of safety generates the negative beliefs of “I don’t have enough time” and “I don’t have enough money” which fuel the negative emotions of anxiety and fear … hence, the advisor is addicted to survival. It is impossible to build a strong set of values, vision, business plan and goals with this happening. A learned advisor said “most financial advisors are addicted to selling and they will not take the time to build a vision, business plan and goals.”
In Overwhelm – The unmet need of control generates the negative beliefs of “I am out of control” and “no one can do it as good as me” which contributes to the negative emotion of fear. The Law Of Attraction is absolute and with the unmet need of control fueling the negative beliefs and negative emotions, the financial advisor unwittingly will not delegate and if they do, no one will ever be able to do the job as good as them. The unmet needs become their jailor.
Asking For Referrals – Ninety percent of advisors agree that asking for referrals is the number one way to build their business and only fifteen percent actually ask for referrals on a consistent basis. The challenge is the unmet need of approval which generates negative beliefs like “what if they say no” which fuel negative emotions like uncertainty and worry.
“Values are like turtles, they only come out when it is safe.” Unmet needs will dominate one’s values, vision, business plan, goals and ability to grow until the unmet need is met from within.
Hurry Up & Be Very, Very Afraid … Get It Over With!
October 24, 2011 by Simon · Leave a Comment
In dark days, people seek glimmers of hope.
When it comes to the commitment, courage and conviction to dedicate you to making long lasting and sustainable change, hope is useless.
Hope is an avoidance strategy, a distraction, a medication preventing you from dealing with the real issues and what you really need to do.
The definition of hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. In the same vein: “faith without action is dead” – James 2:17
Pardon me for focusing on the negative in this oh so positive thinking instant gratification world.
But I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy isn’t going to cut it if your business is running you because you don’t have a vision or plan, you are buried by piles of paper, your mood is up and down with your ever changing cash flow, your marketing plan is non-existent, you are selling the flavour of the month products just to make a sale which is not meeting the needs of your clients because you have not done a needs analysis for your clients which is certain to have compliance regulators knocking on your door and your time management system is Swiss cheese because your clients think you are running a financial advisor drive through expecting 24/7 service.
I am writing this to bring the issues to the surface to wake you up and talk about the consequences of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results and hoping that things are going to get better.
The less afraid you are, the more likely you are to do just enough to temporarily stave off a catastrophe that lets the underlying problems get worse.
What makes things even worse; “The law of attraction is absolute; whatever you defend against you make real as thoughts are real forces”. In other words, you can continue to make the following worse by pushing them out of your mind, by not dealing with them, you give them more negative energy and hence the laws of attraction keep on attracting more of the evidence that kills your inspiration;
- your business is running you because you don’t have a vision or plan
- you are buried by piles of paper
- your mood is up and down with your ever changing cash flow
- your marketing plan is non-existent
- you are selling the flavour of the month products just to make a sale which is not meeting the needs of your clients because you have not done a needs analysis for your clients which is certain to have compliance regulators knocking on your door
- your time management system is Swiss cheese because your clients think you are running a financial advisor drive through expecting 24/7 service
Learn to make fear your friend by understanding your fear.
When there is no understanding there is fear.
When there is fear there can be no understanding.
When there is no understanding there is judgement.
When there is judgement there can be no understanding.
When there is judgement there is fear.
When there is fear, no understanding and judgement there can be no commitment, courage and conviction to dedicate you to taking action to make long lasting and sustainable change.
This article was inspired by; Be Afraid – The Economist, Oct 1 – 7, 2011
Doing Less & Quitting To Be More Successful
September 6, 2011 by Simon · Leave a Comment
It’s the day after Labour Day, the first day of the financial advisor’s and investment advisor’s year as it all starts here after the lazy days of summer.
We’ve had a very busy summer with clients and business development and we are standing on a strong foundation as evidenced by our budget cash flow document and sales report which are significantly ahead of last year.
We are as successful as we can get and we cannot do any more and have to find ways to do less to be more successful.
These are the thoughts that are behind the above comment “find ways to do less to be more successful” and the title of this Doing Less & Quitting To Be More Successful blog.
We saw fellow 2011 Senior Market Advisor Expo Speaker Larry Winget’s presentation in Las Vegas on Wednesday, August 24th. Larry’s presentation was about how the attitude of Entitlement was taking over Empowerment and that people have lost the values of excellence and hard work. People need to get used to less in order to be more successful.
This reminded me of Stephen Pressfield’s thoughts about Success from The War Of Art. Avoid resistance at all cost. Resistance is an all-encompassing term for what Freud called Death Wish. Resistance cannot be reasoned with. It understands one thing. Power. Resistance takes on the form of drugs, shopping, TV, gossip, alcohol, drugs, and the consumption of all products containing alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, fat, salt and sugar. The greatest danger is Resistance knows when the finish line is in site and it will throw out one final assault.
These also tie in with Seth Godin’s thoughts on Strategic Quitting from his book called The Dip. The gist of The Dip is about “getting” that quitting is a winning strategy. In essence, know when to quit or take a mini retirement to re-evaluate and outsource, outsource and outsource.
It might sound odd but The One Page Business Plan also includes the notion of do less in order to be more successful.
The five components of The One Page Business Plan are Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies & Actions and they answer the following questions;
- Vision What are you building?
- Mission Why does this business exist?
- Objectives What result will we measure?
- Strategies How will we build this company?
- Action Plans What it the work to be done?
An Objective can be written by either Increasing or Decreasing an Objective using the following examples:
Increase ____ from ____ to ____ by ____.
Or
Decrease ____ from ____ to ____ by ____.
The complete example could look like;
- Increase 2010 income from $250,000 to $330,000 by December 31, 2011.
So having said all of this, I’ve started a list of things that I am going to Decrease and I’ll share them with you in my September E-Newsletter.
For now, I am going to share one;
- Decrease daily blogging from 5 per week to 1 – 5 per week by September 6th, 2011.
My reason for saying this is I started blogging back in February of 2005 and I committed to blogging on a daily basis because I believe there was nothing worse than arriving at someone’s blog page when it had not been updated in 6 months.
Now I believe that blogging is part of Marketing / Social Media and there is so much more to business so I am decreasing daily blogging and Doing Less & Quitting To Be More Successful and investing the time in other areas of the business.
“I try to use social media to share interesting things with people. It isn’t about what you post but what you listen to. You don’t want to be the source for everything, you want to be the pipe for everything.” Ashton Kutcher – Details Magazine September 2011
How Do You Emotionalize Your Business?
August 30, 2011 by Simon · Leave a Comment
( Laura and I are taking a break from August 31st and we will see you back here on September 6th … have a great Labour Day weekend! )
As a frequent customer of Starbucks I’ve been thinking of whether or not to buy Howard Shultz’s new book Onward for a while.
I made the purchase after watching a segment of an interview with Howard Shultz by Piers Morgan on CNN because of these compelling words from Howard.
“To build an enduring brand you have to emotionalize the relationship of your business with your customers and employees.”
Those words made the book sale and they reminded me of how we work with our clients to emotionalize their business by helping them discover their values, their positive beliefs and positive feelings all creating a strong foundation for their business to stand on.
Howard Shultz’s words reminded me of another compelling book that I read in 1996 by Tom Chappell of Tom’s Of Maine called The Soul Of A Business.
Free One Page Business Plan Webinars September 9 & 28th – Register Now!
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Announcing Leading Advisor’s One Page Business Plan(TM) Free Webinars and the One Page Business Plan(TM) Webinars!“If you don’t get the words right, you might build the wrong business and may never get the numbers right.”
The dates for the One Page Business Plan(TM) Free Webinars are:
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Who should attend?
- Do you have too many scattered ideas?
- Do you need to focus on a few?
- Do you need to jumpstart your business right now?
- Do you have no time or interest in writing a 50 page business plan?
- Do you need to determine if you’re focusing on the right things?
- Do you need an effective blueprint to keep yourself and team focused?
Then consider a fresh, simple approach to business planning that will enable you to focus on what is important…the One Page Business Plan(TM) – a powerful tool for building and managing a business. It’s short, it’s concise, and it delivers results quickly and effectively. There can be no question as to where your business is headed when it is in writing, especially when you have the key essentials about growing your business clearly specified on a single page.
Is this another ho-hum course on business planning like the ten others you have attended – no way! I know how to capture the essence of any business in just a few minutes using the innovative key word and short phrase techniques using the One Page Business Plan(TM).
To Register for the One Page Business Plan(TM) Free Webinars:
Call Laura at 250 248-6012 / 1 877 248-6012 or e-mail Laura at lreilly@leadingadvisor.com and you will receive your GoTo Meeting Webinar Link, Phone Number and Access Code.
- Friday, September 9th at 11:15am EDT
- Wednesday, September 28th at 12:30pm EDT
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Dates for 2012 TBA - stay tuned!
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Now Reading
Planned books:
- Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- The Book Of Air And Shadows: A Novel by Michael Gruber
Current books:
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The Brave: A Novel by Nicholas Evans
Recent books:
- The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
- The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Zafon
- The Outlander by Gil Adamson
- The Book Of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
