IDEAL Plans Ideal Advisors

Towards the end of every year advisors are bombarded with messages from coaching firms about making some key changes that will help you finish the year strong or build a foundation for next year.  Those messages are sound but are easy to ignore since most advisors feel they are already doing what they are supposed to be doing.     

So the best message isn't about making a few tweaks to your business but asking the right question:

Are you the advisor you need to be?  

In this podcast episode, we will address why the events of 2020 have created an opportunity for you to evolve into the advisor your clients need you to be in 2021 and beyond.  

There has never been a year quite like 2020.  All the turmoil has reinforced an old rule of thumb that the more crazy things are, the more likely clients want advice from financial advisors.  

Now consider all the changes that are coming in 2021.  Some will affect everyone but some will have an outsized impact on certain people.  It is this difference that creates your opportunity.  Are you prepared?  If you aren't sure, listen to this episode.  We'll discuss how to take an objective view of your business to see if you are positioned to deliver the advice your clients need so much.  

We are an aging industry.  Studies show the average age of a financial advisor is 50 years old, with some 45% over the age of 55.  In fact, close to 40% of advisors are likely to retire in the next ten years.  So there is an existential threat to our industry and there could be a very real personal threat to your ability to attract a viable successor.   

This episode is focused on how you can attract and support new advisors to your practice.  

There are numerous benefits to you for adding someone, not the least of which is a successor.  Many advisors are simply looking to improve their own business or they may be looking to create a larger organization (the OSJ model).

Some benefits to adding new advisors are enhanced scale, depth, revenue, competitiveness, or even access to new markets.  

By listening to this podcast you will learn the steps to determine which kind of advisor to attract, what you should expect from them, what they should expect from you, and how to make the final hiring decision so you can have a more profitable and survivable business. 

An ideal advisory practice is one where you serve the clients you want, the way you want, while living the lifestyle you desire. Sounds good right?  But how do you do it?  

There are lots of possible solutions, many of which sounds too good to be true.  

"Join our coaching program and you will be an elite advisor!" 

Or

"Sign up with us and all your dreams can come true!"

You don't need sales pitches.  You need an honest approach.  This episode will explore how you can take an honest, no-nonsense approach to uncovering exactly what you need to achieve YOUR vision of an ideal advisory practice.  

Advisors are always wondering how best to speak with a prospective client.  They often meet or know plenty of possible ideal prospects, but they don't know how to strike up a conversation that will generate an appointment.  They don't want to sound too salesy or blunt but they know they can't convert a prospect to a client without getting that first "yes".  

The answer is to master your conversational marketing.

Conversational marketing has two meanings in today's world.  One is the technology application of a chat box on a website.  The other is the actual words that come out of your mouth.  This podcast is focused on how the words you say will empower your prospective clients to say yes to meeting with you.  So we will explore how to create a conversation that will lead to that appointment.  

You will learn how to lay the foundation of your CTA (Call to Action) by clearly articulating whom you serve, what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.  You'll also learn how to create an emotionally powerful personal story that will help your prospects understand why they should work with you.

Clients are the most valuable asset of any business.  Many of the best run companies work tirelessly to improve their client experience since that is one of the best ways to compete in the marketplace.  Potential investment clients have plenty of options.  For the vast majority of clients, they can pretty much get whatever they need from just about anybody in the industry.  So why should they pick you?  

When everybody is selling the same things, you have to do something special to stand out. 
On top of that, we face fee compression and an ever evolving threat from robo-advisors.  So what are you doing to ensure your clients are loyal advocates while encouraging new clients to engage?  

In this episode we'll explore how you can co-create your client experience with the people who matter most - your clients.  We will discuss how you can identify some of the key themes that will drive new levels of loyalty and advocacy.  Ultimately, you can learn from your clients exactly how to deliver what they truly want from you.  

Partnerships can drive financial practices to new heights of success. They can also be very stressful and damaging to the participants if there isn’t a high degree of compatibility and alignment.  There are many reasons you should have a partnership such as scalability, enhanced business value, and leveraging of different resources and skill sets.  No matter the motivation for having the partnership there are many factors that go into forming, maintaining, and optimizing it.  

In this podcast we'll explore how to optimize your partnership so that you can effectively execute your shared business vision. You will do this by identifying and then solving the key issues that can damage a partnership - communication, personality, and motivation.

In honor of Labor Day, this episode will address how to create an optimal balance between your work and your life.  Many advisors struggle creating real balance between their work and their life.  Reasons vary but the big one is simply not accomplishing what they want in their business.  This can lead to regret or a sense of guilt.  Many will then compensate for their work by taking away time from their personal life.  The best way to stop feeling guilty about not getting enough done at work is obvious - create an ideal work week!  

This episode will discuss how you can create that perfect, ideal week where you accomplish everything you set out to do.  Then we'll talk about how you can reallocate time and energy in the other parts of your life that are so important - family, health, friends, community, personal growth, and any passions and interests you may have. After all, you don't live to work, you work to live.  

We take great pleasure in announcing that all of our tools and coaching resources are fully integrated into our state of the art learning management system and available online through our website!

The IDEAL Plan Builder © is an interactive and instructive program that creates personalized IDEAL Plans for financial advisors to achieve their vision of an ideal advisory practice.  An ideal advisory practice is one where you can serve the kinds of clients you want, the way you want, while living the lifestyle you desire.

The Builder takes advisors through the IDEAL Plan Process ©:

Identify where you are now and where you want to go
Determine your business model and possible adjustments
Evaluate your skills in Critical Business Elements
Assess optimal strategies based on your skills and priorities
Leverage resources in sequence to achieve goals 

You will receive your unique plan immediately.  Then you can choose to implement the plan on your own or with our help though our online only courses or our immersion coaching engagement.  

Clients have needs and aspirations they can't put a price tag on. 

Client's attitudes towards their own longevity, health care, elder care, career, charity, community, spirituality, and legacy all lack a dollar value.  These areas, and possible many more, are all very important yet cannot be solved purely through a quantitative or numbers-based approach.    

This mismatch creates an opportunity for a wealth manager to use a qualitative approach. 

To solve non-numeric issues you need to ask the right questions and coordinate different disciplines of knowledge.  However, you may not have all the required knowledge to solve every need.  So assemble and coordinate a team of experts in the different complementary services your clients require.  

By listening to this episode, you will learn how to identify those life issues, how you can work with other experts, and why your clients will appreciate you going above and beyond the empirical to help them.  Not only does this approach work to help your clients, it helps you development more revenue while enhancing your position in the marketplace.  Coordinating complementary services is not something the "robo-advisors" are going to duplicate anytime soon.  

Today's wealth management has evolved far past its origins in financial planning.  Clients have more than one advisor in their life because they have more than just investment needs.  Regardless of their overall net worth, many clients have a CPA, have used an attorney at some point, they may have a relationship with an insurance agent, and they could have other people giving them advice in other areas that are not traditionally financial.  The problem is they could be missing out on advice because they lack a central knowledgeable figure who coordinates everything.  

Here is the opportunity for today's wealth manager.  Imagine if you could be the person at the center of every element of your client's financial life.  You can and should be asking your clients and prospective clients about everything that is important to them and then probe to uncover what other issues may affect their overall health and wealth.  They could have a very strong need for guidance on health and wellness, elder care, longevity, career or business, sense of charity, and other things that matter.  You may not consider all those topics to be purely financial - that is OK.  But they are important to your client and that should make them important to you.  

So in this episode, we'll explore how you can discover these issues and how you can be that central figure in your clients' lives.  And here is the kicker.  This kind of wealth management service can help anybody - not just the super-rich.