The Perfect RIA

To start this episode, Micah Shilanski provides a very valuable comparison between the mentalities of a shopkeeper and a CEO. He starts this way to illustrate the often erroneous assumption that many business owners make about the amount of time they should devote per day to their practice. Workdays start to become these open-to-close events that are very quantity-over-quality phenomenons. Instead, there is an incessant need to optimize days like a visionary or CEO would; doing things efficiently will ultimately transcend the quantity of hours spent. Micah also points out that having a shopkeeper mentality doesn't make much sense because most financial advisors or business owners aren't paid by the hour, but instead by result. Sure, if it takes you twelve hours on a given day to see the best results for your client, that might be true, but consistently overworking and creating busywork are bad habits to cultivate.

Matthew Jarvis then rides the momentum of this concept and admits an area in his own daily practice that isn't very productive. He stresses that reading the Wall Street Journal makes him feel like he is busy, but the pressure to always feel busy is detrimental to the overall value of his practice. For the next hour, instead of spending time on bringing actual monetary value to his firm, he spends an hour reading opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal. By his own admission, the time is perhaps wasted. To keep the ball rolling, Micah states that there should be an alarm system of sorts in place: a self-administered system of checks and balances that one can use to test if the time being spent is worth a thousand dollars an hour (or five hundred); and through that metric, personal accountability is possible and the value of your firm will only increase. And to keep themselves accountable to what they preach, both Micah and Matt use "forcing mechanisms"--a concept they have underlined in previous episodes as an accountability system and value-building mechanism that one forces oneself to stick to. The forcing mechanism that Matt uses is he looks at a picture of his wife and kids on his desk and asks himself if he could look his family in the eye and say something along the lines of: "Hey, I'm sorry I worked late tonight, but I really had to get the Wall Street Journal read." These type of mechanisms really provide a positive framework for how valuable your workday can and should be.

Lastly, during the talk, Matthew accentuates four key things that advisors should do to save themselves from cultivating a shopkeeper mentality: (1) Eliminate pop-ups, alerts, distractions like email or anything that constantly pulls you away from the task you are focusing on.(2) Don't waste time on guilty pleasures: things like social media or games that you find yourself gravitating towards at all times of the day. (3) Implement a backup plan just in case clients cancel or time is freed up in another way; this way time is always spent productively and with purpose, instead of aimlessly. (4) Lastly, train your employees and clients that you are not available at all times of the day, but only in designated slots. And a bonus thing to consider is to have a clean desk policy to minimize all paperwork that accumulates and to clear your headspace.

Key links

• Episode 2 (featuring Gina Cotner) of The Perfect RIA
• Gina Cotner's website for virtual assistants: Athena Executive Services
• The financial advising program that Matt was enrolled in: Academy of Preferred Advisors
• The two books referenced in this episode: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell & The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
• Matthew Jarvis's prospecting process

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If you are currently successful, so-so, struggling, in a down quarter, thinking about quitting or unsure of where to turn regarding your practice, Matthew Jarvis has some valuable advice to give. In this episode, he explains to fellow advisor Adam Hersh that there are a few important concepts necessary for elevating your practice to its optimal level. This is done by centering your focus on time blocking, prospecting, defining a clear client-service model, and staffing.

Because of his six years spent with Tom Gau and Ken Unger's coaching program, The Academy of Preferred Financial Advisors (APFA), Matthew learned a lot and transposed those ideas to fit his own practice. He explains that the concepts he learned while in that program helped him work with retirees, gave him ideas for how to naturally increase his network, which in turn led to robust opportunities for prospecting new clients. Also, Matthew gives Adam some good advice on prospecting potential clients and expanding his network when he suggests that he teach free college classes at the community college. The reason for this being that those who attend a three hour lecture (one with an overabundance of information) are bound to come up and ask questions after the lecture--which is a perfect icebreaker for generating a new client. Matthew also explains the importance of being a young financial advisor and being able to assure clients that you are there for the long haul, that you won't be retiring before them. He also talks a little about delegation, and how Adam should hire a virtual assistant to do some of the non-value tasks (like paperwork) that he spends so much time on. Referring back to the second episode of The Perfect RIA, he recommends Gina Cotner's platform: Athena Executive Services as an invaluable resource for this.

Finishing up his talk, he has five key takeaways that one can utilize for generating a more valuable practice: These are as follows:

1. Ideally, designate a day of the week which is proactively spent on just working on your business. For example, you could make this a Monday, where the phones are off the hook, and you are proactively working to generate more value for your practice.
2. Pick five non-value tasks to delegate or eliminate.
3. Read Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point
4. Read or reread Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Workweek
5. Remind yourself that doing is the key to all success, and just knowing is not enough.

Key Links

• Math Diagram

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As the title states, this episode is all about determining a fee schedule for clients—that is, what a fair rate to charge clients for services rendered should be. Instead of making it complicated, both Matt and Micah stress over and over again that simplicity is key when it comes to your fee.

Also, just as important as simplicity, is the cost-value structure that you set up. This isn't as complicated as it seems. What is meant by cost-value structure is determined by what your goals are. If you have ambitions to keep growing your firm's revenue or assets, then keeping your prices high enough to meet that goal means that your cost-value structure has been correctly formulated.

Lastly, Matt and Micah talk about raising rates and how much the process varies over time. But one should never negotiate prices. Staying fixed, usually only rising and never falling in price, conveys that you will only keep growing. Not having a business plan and negotiating too much means that people will not take you as seriously. And that hurts your reputation and potential revenue. Do not let this happen.

Key Links

• Book Referenced by Matt and Micah: Selling the Invisible

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"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it."

This quote from Warren Buffet frames the whole episode. And by using this as a tool for showing just how important reputation can be, hosts Matthew Jarvis and Micah Shilanski chronicle the instances in their lives where reputation has generated large ripples in one way or another.

Be it, a firm tarnishes their own reputation because of charging money for "services rendered," even though the "services" they rendered were certainly of a negative quality. Or, a treasurer for a church suffers the embarrassment of a check bouncing because of a mistake from Matt's firm. Whatever the circumstances, both Micah and Matt cut through the noise and simplify everything with four words: "Take the high road."

And it is through these four words that almost everything is made simple. By taking accountability and offering to pay penalties, or giving a client their money back because they were unsatisfied with the services provided, you keep your reputation intact. And because word of mouth travels fast, you may lose some money in the short term, but the positive reputation you gain is much more valuable.

Key Links

• John Barron's LinkedIn profile

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In this episode, John Barron shares the importance of replacing old systems with new ones. Most business owners take a plateau personally or as a sign of having mismanaged their business, but Barron says this is not true. The culprit is often that there are systems in place that are not consistent—somewhere along the way, X stopped being X and became Y instead, even though what was really needed all along was Z. Or as Barron says, "a Toyota factory can't produce a giraffe."

Perspectives are just as important as systems because if you are an entrepreneur who has been "down in the weeds," and you are suffering from tunnel vision because of it, often you need an outside agent to provide a more balanced viewpoint; a coach can help one obtain this crucial vantage point.

Procrastination can also be just as powerful a tool as well. As Matthew, the host of the podcast shares in this episode, he works more efficiently when a deadline looms near. Putting things off to the last minute actually helps him get work done at a faster rate.