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When you run your own business one of the key differentiators in your long-term success will be how you use your time.
Here are some scary home truths about time:
- We all get exactly the same allocation. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, educated, uneducated, or in which country you live.
- Dominika at RIE Solutions repeatedly explains to my Uncover Your Business Potential groups that if you could save 2 minutes on a simple task that you repeat 10 times per day, you will save almost 10 full working days per year.
In reality, I see advisers and business owners wasting a couple of hours per day.
What does that add up to in a year? About 11 weeks.
What could you do in 11 weeks every year that were totally free and clear?
Multiply that 11 weeks a year by a decade or a 30-year working career and it can really make a difference because we know the effect is compound, not linear.
Success happens in the decisions we make minute by minute.
5 Time Killers You Should Look At
Here are five ways I see advisers wasting large chunks of time whilst telling themselves they’re busy and ‘giving-it-some’.
1. Having a first meeting with clients that you should have screened-out on a call
The voice in your head tells you, “But I might earn £1,000 or £2,000 and I’m not busy right now.”
If you’re not busy and have no leads, is it the right decision to take this job?
No.
By taking this job you’re telling yourself this is better than not generating any revenue. And now at least you’re busy.
However, let’s explore what happens if you say ‘no’ to this work.
Now, you’ve got a week to sit there at your desk, feeling very uncomfortable, working out how to generate more on-target leads. If you sat there for a week doing that, do you think you might be able to come up with some great ideas on how to generate those leads and make your business more successful? You betcha!
Solving the real issue is likely to be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds to you over the coming years. Yet we settle for £1,000 or £2,000 in the hand now and never solve the real issue.
2. Doing reviews for clients that you should have elegantly disengaged from
What’s the cost of this to you and your business?
I hear advisers telling me that they’ve got a client that pays £1,000 pa and so this is a profitable job. “Why would I let go of a profitable job?” they exclaim.
Firstly, I question the maths. You can barely hold the client’s details on file for £1,000 per year.
Secondly, let’s look at what’s involved:
- The real cost is to your team and it can be morale-sapping. Low-level review work shouldn’t be done at all and your team knows this. There are better quality clients in your client base who need that time, OR you could be finding more of the high-value clients that are fun (and truly profitable) for you and your staff to serve.
- Retaining these clients is just increasing your staff headcount and your business overhead.
- And then there’s the opportunity cost of not being able to take new high-value clients. If you and the team are nearing capacity you either say ‘no’ to new leads or take too long to respond when the enquiry comes in (missing some in the process). Or you accept the new leads and put you and the team under even more pressure.
And none of these are making you more successful.
Don’t compare your bottom-end clients to some dodgy profitability calculation. Compare them to your ideal on-target clients. Then all of a sudden there’s no comparison. Let these clients go and replace them with higher-value clients.
Look at how each client brings value to your business in terms of revenue, business longevity, job satisfaction and team morale.
3. Hiring a marketing consultant when fixing other issues would yield better results (for now).
Nearly every business owner or adviser I speak to believes that if they could just find more leads everything would be rosy. So they go and invest a lot of time and money in marketing, believing it to be the answer to generating more leads.
Yet that’s not how the market-leading financial planning firms generate lead flow.
Getting the basics right in your business is what leads to an uptick in lead flow.
- Right proposition
- Right pricing
- Good selling skills
- Great team
- Great processes
I know it’s not sexy, but it’s true.
4. Handling your own email
Don’t manage your own email. Get a PA or trusted staff member to be the point of contact for your email.
Most emails you receive can be triaged and handled by that person. They’ll deal with simple requests themselves and forward admin or paraplanning issues straight to an administrator or paraplanner and then update you on what’s happened.
A small percentage of emails will need a reply from you. So have a call or a meeting with your PA and they can reply for you. Where it genuinely needs a personal response, they can escalate it to you.
Where you do need to respond, send video replies to clients, not written email replies. In a 2 or 3 minute video response you can cover a ton of ground and it feels much more personal and engaging. There are plenty of free tools you can use for this, like Loom, Cloud App, or Bonjoro.
Sorting this one will save you hours and hours of your time and improve your customer service.
5. Not scaling your team fast enough
Everyone is focused on minimising their costs. It sounds smart and makes good business sense right?
But what if you were focused instead on maximising your productivity and output?
With that mindset, you’d be looking to hire more support staff to allow yourself and any other advisers to generate more revenue.
I realise there needs to be the right balance financially, but most business owners wait far too long to add to their support team.
Stop doing £35 per hour work yourself. Bring in the right staff at the right level to do that for you. Set yourself free to focus on the high-value jobs like rain-making and seeing clients.
But, I hear you ask, what about AI, couldn’t I use that to service my lower value clients?
Maybe, in years to come, but we are far from there as yet.
And in the meantime what is the opportunity cost of all the higher value clients you have lost along the way.
What’s the time (saved)?
If you addressed these 5 things, how much time might you free up in your day or your week? How might you use that time to increase the success of your business?
Look at it this way: There’s no time to waste.
“To do things no one else is doing, you have to not do things everyone else is doing.”
Craig Groeschel
“To do things no one else is doing, you have to not do things everyone else is doing.” ~ Craig Groeschel