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Bill Bachrach: To Niche or Not to Niche? | |
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 During your career you have probably heard a lot about
niche marketing and wondered whether or not you should niche and, if so, what
your niche should be. I think you should niche, but probably not the way you usually think of it or how it's typically taught to financial advisors. Traditional niches are occupational or demographic. Occupational niches are criteria like dentists, highly compensated executives, or business owners. Demographic niches are criteria like people between the ages of 50 and 70 with $500,000 of investable assets. Instead I suggest that your "niche" is your Ideal Client Profile. Let's first discuss what an Ideal Client Profile is. Your Ideal Client Profile consists of two parts: Personality and Economic Viability. In other words, you want to work with people you like who have the ability to pay you enough money to make it worth your while to have them as clients. For example, consider this as an Ideal Client Profile: People who are serious about achieving their goals, want comprehensive financial services, have a delegator personality, and are willing and able to pay $ __________/ year to have a Trusted Advisor help them make smart choices about their money. For clarity, a delegator personality is someone who truly values the advice of a professional and consistently acts on that advice. You determine the amount of annual recurring revenue each client must pay you, based on your financial needs, overhead, and how many hours of time it takes you to serve each client. Imagine having an entire client community made up exclusively of people who meet your Ideal Client Profile? How would that impact your financial health? How would that insulate you from the adverse affects of market downturns and other events outside of your control? What would your quality of life be like? How do you build a business of only Ideal Clients? Step 1: Identify your current Ideal Clients. Don’t be discouraged if it’s not a large number. You can build an entire Ideal Client Community in just a few years beginning with only a handful of Ideal Clients. How do you know who your Ideal Clients are? Look at the names in your appointment calendar. The names that make you smile are probably people you like who have the ability to pay you enough money to make it worth your while to have them as clients. And the people who make you frown are likely those who you either dislike or who consume too much time to be profitable – or both. Once you are clear who is an Ideal Client and who is not, make a short list of the Ideal Client attributes. This is your Ideal Client Profile. Step 2: Replicate your Ideal Clients by referral. Your Ideal Clients know others who are just like them. And if these people are serious about achieving their goals, want comprehensive financial services, have a delegator personality, and are willing / able to pay you $ ___________/ year for you to be their Trusted Advisor to help them make smart choices about their money… do you really care about their occupation or their age? One of the most important skills you will ever develop is the ability to articulately ask for referrals, get introduced well to the people to whom you are referred, and effectively follow-up to schedule appointments. This is a skill anyone can develop with the right process, training, coaching, and practice. For more guidance in creating your Ideal Client Profile go to http://www.accountabilitycoach.com/bw/icp/icp1.php. If you are unclear about how our turn-key business model can help you build your Ideal Client Community in 4 years or less by referral only, thus helping you have your Ideal Life, maybe it's time to speak with one of our Accountability Coaches. There is no charge for an initial consultation. We wish you continued success in building your Ideal Client Community. Keep moving forward,  Bill Bachrach, CSP, CPAE (Speaker Hall of Fame) Chairman & CEO; Bachrach & Associates, Inc. Author: Values-Based Financial Planning & High Trust Leadership ________________________________________ Contact Anne Bachrach at the Financial Services Speakers Network at anne@fsspeakers.net to schedule Bill Bachrach to speak at your next meeting or conference.  Don't miss Bill's keynote speech at the Financial
Advisor Symposium November 11th in Orlando, Florida. click here to register. Monday, November 9, 2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. How to Build and Maintain Client Trust Through All Economic Cycles click here Click here to register for our December 1st Webinar to learn strategies, tactics, and planning ideas to make 2010 your best year ever. |
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Anne Bachrach: Three Tips to Eliminating the "No Longer Acceptables" | |
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Again, these are just examples. Your list can consist of any
aspect you find yourself consistently complaining about or cause you pain or
hurt. When you have your completed list, take a few moments to think about what
you've written. What you wrote down should be from the heart and of raw emotion
- because those are the best motivators. How would you feel if you had
everything you wrote on the list? Visualize your list as if you have already
achieved them. Imagine how good it feels to be in your new apartment, have that
better paying job, or end a destructive relationship that causes you pain. Anne M. Bachrach is the author of the book, Excuses Don't Count; Results Rule!. She has 23 years of experience training and coaching. Anne helps financial professionals keep and get more clients while maintaining balance in their life. Through her proven systems, she inspires Advisors to stay focused and take action on the highest payoff activities that lead to their ultimate professional and personal success. Take advantage of the many complimentary resources on her website (www.AccountabilityCoach.com) and subscribe to her blog (!Anne's Blog!). ________________________________________________________________________ |
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Mark Little: 8 Steps to Creating a Succesful Comprehensive Financial Services Business | |
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 1. Your Commitment: Make up your mind and fully commit.
Committing to deliver fully comprehensive financial services through a
Best-in-Class Deliverables Team of Subject Matter Experts will take effort on
your part. Installing a turn-key practice management operating system which your
support team can understand and support will require your dedication and focus
with a portion of your time every week. On a scale of one to ten write down your
level of commitment to installing fully comprehensive financial services through
a team of experts you will acquire. Describe your level of commitment in
writing. Express what would have to happen to make your commitment a "ten," and
then write a narrative of how you will get from your current level of commitment
to the necessary "level ten" commitment. Then, share your written commitment
with everyone close to you and your business. The more people who know and
understand your commitments, the more sustainable your commitment is likely to
be. 2. Vision of your Ideal Life: Create an inspiring vision to sustain you. Your Success Road Map® is the foundation of this vision. Consider contemplating your values and goals and writing a narrative (in present tense) describing your ideal life once you've accomplished your goals and are experiencing your values. Then consider sharing that narrative with those closest to you. Earl Nightingale’s strangest secret is, "You become what you think about most of the time." 3. Are you able & willing?: Understanding that all significant commitments you make in your life will likely require some personal sacrifices along the way, many of these sacrifices may come in the form of uncomfortable behavior required of you. So, gauge your willingness to sacrifice and perform necessary activities which are uncomfortable. For some of you it is uncomfortable to pick up the phone and call Best-in-Class professionals you've never met to schedule meetings to discuss joining your Deliverables Team. Regardless of what is uncomfortable behavior to you, be prepared and forewarned that your success will require you to do the work required to actualize your vision of your ideal life. 4. We all have good intentions: Create a plan for excuses. Once you have established the activities which are clearly required for you to succeed and achieve your ideal life, then establish a plan designed to "kick in" whenever you are ever tempted to avoid these essential activities. When the excuses begin to mount, establish strategies to get you refocused and back on-track. 5. Mentors: Surround yourself with success. Find folks who have already accomplished much of what you are pursing. Immerse yourself in their thinking. Commit to doing what they did. Pledge not to "over think," resist or overcomplicate what they recommend. Furthermore, pledge to politely disengage from those around you who have not accomplished what you seek, but who seem bent on advising you against implementing what others have actually achieved. 6. Establish a detailed plan with specific goals and milestones. As fully comprehensive financial advisors, we are committed to ensuring that every Ideal Client has a comprehensive written lifetime financial plan along with milestones to measure success. Good: Commit to ensuring that you have such a plan for yourself no later than 90 days from today. Best: Hire a Best-in-Class Trusted Advisor (and pay their fee) to get this done for you. 7. Consistency is the key: Commitment to consistent personal habits & disciplines. As tiresome as it may seem, a commitment to simple personal disciplines will serve you well with your most significant commitments and goals. Daily routines such as planning your day in advance, establishing two or three critical outcomes for each day, and then making a covenant with yourself not to leave the office until they are completed, will accelerate the actualization of your ideal life. 8. Personal responsibility: Seek encouragement and accountability for yourself. It may be easy for you to simply "do the work required" but it's undoubtedly easier not to. It is one thing for your initial commitment to be strong, but how you behave at that inevitable point when you just don't feel like (and refuse) making the effort necessary matters quite a bit. Will the tyranny of office distractions prevail and steal your future ideal life from you? Even with a plan in-place designed to get you refocused and reenergized, nothing will ever replace the personal accountability, provided by an individual worthy of your trust, who truly understands and cares about your success, reminding you of your commitments to yourself and revisiting your faithfulness to your goals whenever you fail to "make the effort." My experience is that a skilled, experienced, paid coach is the best option here. Someone who "has your back" and vows to help you shore-up your deficiencies. A coach who is competent, objective and is trained not to allow excuses slip by without serious discussion. ___________________________________________________________ __________ To learn more about how to delegate the coordination of your client deliverables to your Deliverables Team, you can sign up for "The Kate Wilson Case-Study" at no charge at http://trustedadvisortoolkit.com/. Mark McKenna Little is a speaker, author and Trusted Advisor who began implementing Values-Based Financial Planning® in 1999. |
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Tom Voccola: The Five Keys to Building and Growing a Sustainable Company | |
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 There are, in my experience at least, five keys to building
a growing and sustainable company. These five begin with, and depend upon, first
understanding the dynamics between the two words I just used, growing and
sustainable. For this conversation growing means constant change and sustainable means keeping the status quo. To your employees, one can seem to oppose the other. And they do. But when you (and they) come to understand the nature of things, you begin to understand that flow only occurs when there is a difference, either in altitude, voltage, tension or some other dynamic, that forces movement in one direction or another. In other words, flow always depends on some degree of imbalance. The trick is in understanding how to nurture and guide the flow. So here are my five keys to doing that. These are not meant to be the only keys, but they do -- and this is the most important thing to me -- work. 1. Know exactly what you want. 2. Develop and inspire a conscious team that appreciates what you want. 3. Install a 90 day project cycle to keep everyone focused and growing. 4. Encourage the dynamics of intention, creativity, innovation, and integrity. 5. Let go of wanting to know exactly how you will get there in advance. As you look at the above list there are quite a few concepts and ideas included in 5 simple keys: the dynamics of want, consciousness, understanding, appreciation, 90 day cycles, focusing, growing, encouraging, the dynamics of intention, creativity, innovation and integrity; and why letting go of the how gives you access to even more possibility. These five keys are designed to help you create an Extraordinary Organization for delivering financial services to your Ideal Clients. So, let's begin with the first key: 1. Knowing Exactly What You Want In my work with leaders and individuals I find that there are usually two things missing, the presence of which would allow them to clearly state what it is they want in their lives and businesses: Context and Direction of Focus. Here is the unconscious way according to the world: Context: Focus on what others want: Outside Focus Direction: Focus on what we do not want: Backward Direction You will often hear me say "Don’t believe a word I say!" because, in the end, the only thing I have to offer you is the benefit of my own personal experience. So what I am about to share with you is from my own personal experience. For me, it works. Perhaps it will for you as well. Here is the conscious way according to the Masters. Context: To thine own self be true: Inward Focus Focus: Focus on your hearts desire: Forward Direction. Notice the difference? Now, I am not saying to not pay attention to what others want, but rather, to do so in the context of who you really are and who you are here to be. That shift in consciousness may not change your field of business but, it will shift how you are doing it. I am also not saying that we don't have problems, recognizing what is not working is certainly important, however fixing them is not. Now why would I say such a thing? Because there is a Universal Law that says what ever you resist, persists. Have you ever noticed that our war on drugs, our war on teen pregnancy, our war on hunger, our war on obesity and now, our war on terror, never seem to get better? These things will always be with us until we change the context from fighting the symptoms (what we don't want) to addressing the cause (what we do want). In most companies, fixing things by adding just another patch, regulation or procedure for our people to follow is the norm. Eventually everything might work like a well oiled machine, but at what cost to creativity, innovation and growth? When I started my first few businesses I initially hired and expected people to do what I told them to do, and soon began to wonder why they didn't seem to think for themselves. Sound familiar? So, the first key to building a growing and sustainable company is for you to know exactly what you want. When you do, you will begin to naturally stop resisting what is necessary to achieve it. On November 9th, we'll be working with a group of Financial Advisors who will be addressing this first crucial question for themselves in San Diego at our Purpose & Passion Experience. Each participant will uncover their unique Purpose and Passion. Each will distinguish their learned behaviors from their true values and desires. And from that place, each will design their unique Game Worth Playing. Next month: The Second Key to Building a Growing and Sustainable Company Entrepreneur, speaker, author and CEO Guide, Tom Voccola is the CEO of CEO2, a Chief Executive Consulting Firm specializing in the rapid transformation of corporate and organizational cultures. Tom is the co-founder and past Chairman of the Los Angeles area CEO Round Table for the American Electronics Association, and the author of The Accidental CEO – A Leader’s Journey from Ego to Purpose. His life's work is to inspire a new generation of leaders who transcend ego and its fear based agenda. His work gives executives immediate and authentic access to new levels of power, influence and freedom within their organizations. |
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Rick Barrera: The Three Most Powerful Words in Your Business | |
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 I've discovered an astounding gap between what advisors
believe their brand is and what their real brand is. What advisors believe their
brand to be is their logo, or their tagline or their ideals or their
advertising. In fact, the most common reaction I get when I say that I have
written a book on branding goes something like this. "Branding is marketing,
marketing is advertising, advertising is TELEVISON advertising and I’m too small
to do any television advertising so branding doesn't apply to me." Then, they
find some way to politely disengage from the conversation having decided that I
can add no value to their lives. Let me reduce all of the complexity of branding in a single sentence. Your brand is your REPUTATION. That's it…nothing complex or incomprehensible. So, now that we have demystified branding, I have a simple question for you. What is your brand? This question usually stupefies my clients. As simple a question as it is, they really don't know what their reputation is. They can tell me what they would like it to be. They can tell me what they BELIEVE it to be. But they don’t really know what it is currently. How to determine your current brand The best way to determine your current brand is to have an independent third party (a market research firm , local college professor or your third cousin twice removed) call your clients and potential clients and ask a single question. It is important that you use an independent third party because your clients will NEVER tell you the whole truth, no matter how well intentioned they may be. The single question is this: "What three words would you use to describe (insert your name here)?" Whatever your clients and potential clients say is your true brand. Go deeper If you want to truly understand your brand, you can have your researcher ask an additional question. "What behaviors or incidents have led you to select those three words?" You may find that you actually have two brands. Your clients may describe you using one set of words, while your potential clients use a different set. If the answer turns out to be "Three words to describe whom?" you may find that you have no brand at all among potential clients. Now, the real work begins. There are two possible outcomes to this exercise: 1. You LOVE the words your clients used to describe you 2. You HATE the words your clients used to describe you and are about to get out your gun and the whiskey. If your brand falls into category one, congratulations! Your next step is to identify the words that were most often used and begin to align everything in your business to become even more like those words. I was recently working with a client whose research generated the word "impeccable." He was thrilled and we created a project to measure everything his company did and every customer contact against the word "impeccable." His team generated lists of customer TouchPoints that were less than impeccable and then proceeded to bring each one up to his new standard of impeccable. His company has grown steadily and he is now opening an office in Europe based on his success in the U.S. If your brand falls into the second category, put the whiskey down and identify the three words you would most want to be known for. Then, identify one single customer TouchPoint (your initial meeting, your annual client meeting, your statements, the way your telephone is answered, etc.) and change what you do and how you do it to align with your three aspirational brand words. Keep tweaking the experience until your clients start to tell you how great the experience is using your aspirational brand words. Then, pick another TouchPoint and do the same. By focusing on only one TouchPoint at a time you'll bring greater creativity and innovation to that single TouchPoint ensuring that it will just keep getting better until you get the desired result. When you have completed 3 TouchPoint transformations, your reputation in the marketplace will have begun to change and you'll be on your way to creating exactly the brand you want. Remember, your true brand is what your clients and potential clients say about you. When they are saying the right things, your business will grow faster than you could possibly imagine. _______________________________________________________________________ Rick Barrera is a nationally acclaimed marketing consultant and author, known throughout the Fortune 500 for his extraordinary speaking ability and his unique approach to brand building. His consulting focuses on helping companies design unique client experiences that drive high levels of referrals. Rick's research on the strategies used by breakthrough brands like Apple, American Girl, Starbucks, Chico's, Lexus, Tivo, and Google will change your thinking about marketing forever. His impressive client list includes Abbott Labs, AutoZone, Bayer, Caterpillar, IBM, Intel, Merrill Lynch and Verizon. His newest book, Overpromise and Overdeliver: How to Design and Deliver Extraordinary Customer Experiences is both a Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller. |
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Back to Index | |
Many of us say we're going to make changes to eliminate the
things we don't like about our life, but few us actually commit to improving the
quality of our life. We keep clients we don't like, remain in a relationship
that does not serve us, and blame our circumstances on the "hand" we've been
dealt in life. If you have ever felt like this - it's time to get a dose of
reality. Whether you're sick of your financial situation, your business the way
it currently is, your health, or destructive relationships, you have the power
to eliminate the "no longer acceptables" in your life and create the life you
want and deserve.  |
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| The Trusted
Financial Advisor (tm) ISSN 1543-432X A monthly publication dedicated to helping transform the financial services industry from salespeople to Trusted Advisors. Bachrach and Associates, Inc. baivbfp.com info@bachrachvbs.com 8380 Miramar Mall Suite 200 San Diego, CA 92121 800-347-3707 Printing Tip: For best results print this newsletter in landscape mode. (c) 2009 Bachrach & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. The following are registered and trademarked and intellectual property of Bachrach & Associates, Inc.: Financial Road Map®, Success Road Map®, Values-Based Selling®, Values-Based Selling® Academy, Values-Based Selling® Academy 2, Trusted Advisor Coach®, Values-Based Financial Planning™, Being Done™, Values-Based Financial Professional™, The Values Conversation™, High-Trust Leadership™ and The Quality of Life Enhancer™. All rights reserved. |