Bill Bachrach: Measuring Success by Feelings or Results? Have you noticed that some of the things that are good for you aren't necessarily pleasant? Not everyone loves to exercise. Many people would prefer to not eat well. (It might surprise you to discover my 3 favorite food groups are In-N-Out burgers, pizza, and Taco Bell.) I don't have personal experience raising children, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it would be easier to be your kids' buddy than to be a good parent. Some of things you have to do in order to earn the living you want may not be pleasant either. It might be one of the most challenging things for humans to deal with and, certainly, one of the comments that I hear on a regular basis from the advisors we train and coach. "I'm failing in ___________ area because it's just not comfortable or not something I enjoy." What do you say to a client when something their goals require is unpleasant or uncomfortable? "I just don't find writing those insurance premium checks much fun." "Do we really have to save that much every month? It would be more fun to spend it all now." Can you just skip these things and get the same results? What do you say to a child about eating their vegetables or doing their homework when they don't feel like it? Can you just skip vegetables and homework and have your life turn out just fine? What do you say to a friend or family member about exercising, eating well, and generally taking good care of their health? What if it's just not fun or comfortable or enjoyable or pleasant? You've heard the saying you are only as strong as your weakest link. That's definitely true for running a business. You are the CEO of your Financial Planning business and not everything that makes your business successful will be pleasant. In Dr. Scott Peck's landmark book, The Road Less Traveled, he begins the first chapter with this, "Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters." Read that paragraph as many times as you need to until you really get it. Where do most businesses break down? That's right, client acquisition. Why? Lack of a good system? Inconsistent execution? Weak people skills? All three? What is the best method for acquiring new Ideal Clients? According to those people you would like to acquire, it's by referral. Yet most advisors manage to get through their entire careers knowing this to be true, but never approaching mastery of this basic skill. Why? Back to square one: it's not comfortable or enjoyable. Vegetables? Exercise? Homework? Insurance premiums? Saving? Bummer. Life is difficult. And once you accept that... Asking for referrals, making follow-up calls, conducting phone conversations, and scheduling appointments may be difficult for you. Once you accept this truth it no longer matters. It becomes something you just do. And if you're not willing to do what is difficult in your life then how do you earn the right to advise others to do what's difficult in their lives? Let your integrity be your inspiration for doing the things in your life that you find difficult so you earn the right to give advice to others to do the things they need to do that might be difficult for them. This is what it means to be a Trusted Advisor. "Too many people see change as what other people need to do" – David Zach "Daddy or Mommy, if you don't ask for referrals and make your calls, do I have to eat my vegetables and do my homework?" Seems silly from this point of view, doesn't it? The bottom line is that you have to let go of the fantasy that every element of running your business is going to be enjoyable. If comfort is your goal then success in business is not in your future. There is no silver bullet. Some aspects of being a business owner just suck. Deal with it. Some things are just not fun and the time and effort spent worrying about is unproductive. Put on your big boy or big girl pants and get on with the work your goals require to achieve them. Getting results is fun. It's become a popular idea in recent years that you should focus on your strengths and delegate your weaknesses. And this is a great idea, where it's possible. And what's possible is defined by your goals, not by your likes and dislikes. When building your Ideal Client Community you simply can't delegate the relationship-building and relationship-management part. Asking for referrals and following-up with the people to whom you are referred is your job. If you were single and a friend referred you to someone for a date, you wouldn't have your secretary call to make the date, would you? If you would, this could explain why you're single. There are certain calls YOU have to make. Following up on referrals is one of them. Over 21 years of coaching and training Financial Advisors, there is another interesting dynamic I witness. I call it the consensus-versus-wisdom phenomenon. This is well-illustrated by the group of fat people who get together and decide that exercise is bullshit and agree that a trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet is a better use of time. While they all may agree, creating consensus. Their choice clearly isn't wise, presuming being healthy matters to them. Obviously silly when I put it that way, but what about when a group of financial advisors have a "meeting of the minds" and decide the method must be flawed because they aren't doing the work required to be successful? Don't blame the method for poor execution. The bottom line is that the most client-centered, cost-effective, time-efficient, and results-producing way to build an Ideal Client Community is by referral. No matter how uncomfortable you find it to be or how many other advisors you can find who are equally inept at building their business by referral, the fact remains: the most client-centered, cost-effective, time-efficient, and results-producing way to build an Ideal Client Community is by referral. My advice: suck it up, make a REAL commitment to build your Ideal Client Community by referral only, get good at it, and keep doing it until you're done. The positive feelings from the results will far outweigh any unpleasantness along the path. It’s a great time to be a Financial Advisor! Keep moving forward, Bill Bachrach Founder & Chairman ________________________________________ Contact Anne Bachrach at the Financial Services Speakers Network at anne@fsspeakers.net to schedule Bill Bachrach for your next meeting or conference. Anne Bachrach: 5 Tips to Kick Your "Time-Wasters" Habits It seems like the world is running at such an accelerated speed that we barely have any time to catch our breath. We start the day running out the door at full tilt; only keep going until we crash into bed from exhaustion. Then we get up and do it all over again day after day. The weekends don't seem to offer much relief either, because we have soccer practice, ballet recitals and business social events. While most of us would consider ourselves effective time managers, few of us actually are. We're constantly on the go and can accomplish a lot in one day, so we must be effective time managers, right? Wrong. In the ever increasing rat race that we run to turn business profits so we can pay ourselves, all the while making time for our family; we find ourselves suffering from sheer exhaustion trying to create more hours in the day so we can get everything done we need to do. At some point, you have to concentrate on only what's important to your success and sanity. It's a process that all successful business owners and professionals find themselves having to learn, in order to focus their energy on the most important things. All the miscellaneous stuff that consumes your time with little or no return eventually must be eliminated from your schedule. The bottom line is that anyone who runs their own business has to practice excellent time management, effective delegation and learning to say the word, "No." It's just not possible to maintain the simple life while achieving a high level of success. And with today's technology, it's harder to hide when you need a break. Your email inbox is dinging, your cell phone is ringing and your spouse is trying to call you on the car phone because your cell line is busy. It is at this point that you have to filter the input so you can begin to regain control over your life. As good as you think you may be with your time management; there are always "time-wasters" that can be eliminated from your daily life. Let's review some practical tips: Time-Wasters Tip #1 Regarding your work email - how much time do you spend typing and replying to emails each day? More than an hour? Two? Four or more? Now, ask yourself how much of your time is spent on essential emails? Think about how many emails you receive that do not require your response and think about the percentage of non-essential emails you could eliminate from your inbox each day. It is estimated that only 10% to 20% of emails that most people get at work each day require their attention and are essential to their job. Even if you estimate that 50% of the emails you receive are considered essential that stills leaves 50% that are time-wasters. If you are spending the majority of your time on non-essential email, do whatever you can do to either delegate or eliminate needless email. The goal is to spend as close to 100% of your time devoted to essential email only. This goes for personal email as well. If you are spending valuable time scanning chain, spam and video of the week emails - it's time to re-prioritize. Your time would be better spent in the gym - working - or with your family. It's OK to ask your friends to remove you from their bulk email list, and a courteous request will go a long way. Time-Wasters Tip #2 Another popular time-waster is watching TV. This is one of the hardest habits to break - but there is simply much more effective ways to spend your time. Unless you're on vacation, turn the TV off. Besides, removing the exposure to devastating and negative news will greatly benefit your outlook on life and help you sleep better at night. Don't believe me? Try it for a week and see if you notice improved sleep and reduced nightmares. Think about things that you would prefer to do during the time that you would normally spend watching TV. Maybe it's playing a board game with your family, sharing the hot tub with your spouse, reading a 'fun' book, getting a massage, or doing yoga. Make a list of the things you would like to do if you had some of that TV time back and arrange them in order of importance. The ones that make you feel the best should go at the top of the list and should be the first thing you do when you create the time. Time-Wasters Tip #3 Reduce time-wasters by creating a To-Do List for the following day the night before. Writing a To-Do List before you go to sleep every night will help your mind run through the day and organize it. While you're sleeping, your brain is organizing how to create successful outcomes for the next day's tasks. If you give it a task, it will figure out a way to complete it successfully - and be more focused on success supporting actions instead of time-wasters. Prioritize everything on the list so if you don't have time for everything, you at least get the most important items done (I didn't say the easiest to do). Time-Wasters Tip #4 If you have an assistant, evaluate if there are additional tasks you can delegate to them. Have your assistant look through your email, screen phone calls or walk-ins, schedule all appointments, or research something you need more information about. When working with my clients, I'm amazed and how each one of them doesn't utilize their assistants or team to the fullest extent - whatever you can delegate to free up some time - do it. Find an assistant, if you don't already have one! Hire an experienced virtual assistant to help you part-time or full-time. There are many good people out there if you can live with them not being physically located in your office. Again, the goal is to minimize and reduce the time-wasters that are demanding your attention, but not delivering big payoffs. Time-Wasters Tip #5 Last, but not least you have to learn to say "No." You cannot always take care of everyone else and if you spend more than half your day on the phone, you've got to figure out a way to scale back. Sure, many of us go to the store, make dinner, drive and dress our kids while we're talking on our cell phone, but spending more than 4 hours a day on the phone is taking away from other valuable opportunities. The goal is to slow down and be focused on the highest pay-off activities that will produce the results you desire in the timeframe you want – personally and professionally. The goal is not to figure out how to move faster. It’s impossible to create more hours in the day and it’s simply not healthy to run at full tilt constantly. Learn how to eliminate the time-wasters in your life to improve your quality of life and success. OLIVER CROMWELL, British politician and soldier (1599 - 1658) said: He who stops being better stops being good. For additional assistance on How to Eliminate Time Wasters and Stop Settling for the No Longer Acceptables, consider obtaining the 30 minute tele-seminar at Accountability Coaching Resources. ________________________________________ Anne Bachrach is the author of the book, Excuses Don't Count; Results Rule!. She has 23 years of experience training and coaching. Anne works to help financial professionals improve their productivity, profitability, and quality of life. Through her proven systems, she inspires her clients 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) Mark Little: How Often Should You Meet With Ideal Clients? One of the great things about having a small community of clients, all of whom are paying your annual recurring minimum, is the time it creates for you to really stay on-top of their financial issues and meet with them as often as needed. What I am noticing with the advisors utilizing The Trusted Advisor Toolkit™ Web Site is how few advisors have an organized annual client meeting cycle. Let's consider how having a standardized recurring and regular client meeting cycle is the best way to delegate the work of your practice to your team, freeing you up to spend at least two-thirds of your time interacting even more effectively with your ideal clients and, of course, acquiring new ones. After I closed my practice to new clients and settled upon an ideal client community of 91, it seemed to me as though there were always five, or so, clients going through some special situation requiring more analysis by our team or needing a "specially called" meeting. You know, those rare occasions where an ideal client's company has made them an "early buy-out" offer, or they have an opportunity to purchase a business, or one of a clients' biggest, and most complicated, goal dates is imminent. These situations can be time-consuming for our team and I realized early-on, that to “create" the time necessary to deal with these few clients with pressing needs, we had to develop a well-ordered and methodical sequence of meetings with those remaining clients who had nothing "pressing" going on in their lives. Before establishing an annual meeting cycle, I did quarterly meetings for years with my "top" clients, without having any good reason other than "urban legend" had it that most "top producers" did it that way with their best clients. Once I developed fully comprehensive financial services through the Ten Client Deliverables™, I resolved to put more thought into the ideal number of client meetings per year. I had two primary objectives in developing this more orderly annual client meeting cycle. First, I wanted to determine the fewest number of annual meetings to accomplish The Ten Client Deliverables™ and second, I wanted a standardized process for all ideal clients, so I could delegate most of the meeting preparation to my growing Deliverables Team (progress reports, updates, The Implementation Plan™, etc). Having a standardized meeting cycle saves time. Rick Zurbriggen, a financial advisor from Sanibel, Florida has this to say, "I have just changed all of my ideal clients to The Three Meeting Process™ going forward, which is going to save me 67 meetings per year from what I was doing before and I definitely feel I am offering them much more service." With 91 ideal clients two things occurred to me. First, I came to believe that it was in the best interest of my clients to have the least number of meetings required to get everything done. Mainly, fewer meetings gave clients more time to focus on those things that mattered more than money to them, which is my job. The second thing that occurred to me was that less meetings also were less taxing on my Deliverables Team, which freed them up to deal with clients going through more intense special planning situations; so it was smarter. We invested a year at our firm researching the question. At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, four meetings was too many (we didn't need that many meetings to get the information we needed from our clients), and two meetings per year was not enough. Three meetings was "just right." With that established I created The Three Meeting Process™, which we teach Trusted Advisors and fully support to this day with all the meeting plans, client agendas, preparation materials, document checklists, progress reports, and all client "homework assignments" available to the advisors we teach. If you are wondering what I told clients who had become accustomed to 4-meetings per year, I introduced them to the "New World" in this way, "Mrs. Client, with our fully comprehensive financial services, it's important that you commit to three meetings per year so we can get the information we need from you, that only you can provide. So three meetings is what we need in order to ensure your plan is on-track and your "financial house" is in order. As a member of our Ideal Client Community, If you would like to meet more times per year, no problem. Feel free to let me know and we'll put a meeting on the calendar right away." Nobody called to schedule additional meetings. So, consider that an organized annual meeting cycle like this is the best way to delegate preparation work to your team because the annual meeting process is delightfully standardized and nobody on your team needs to read your mind or take up your time determining what to prepare for your client progress meetings. ________________________________________ To learn more about how to implement The Three Meeting Process™, you can sign up for "The Kate Wilson Case-Study" at no charge at The Trusted Advisor Toolkit. Mark McKenna Little is a speaker, author and Trusted Advisor who began implementing Values-Based Financial Planning® in 1999. Contact Anne Bachrach at the Financial Services Speakers Network at anne@fsspeakers.net to schedule Mark Little for your next meeting or conference. Tom Voccola:Who You Really Are, & Why You've Been So Hard to Find Part 2 of a continuing series on CEOing and the Values Based Financial Advisor. In just about every leadership or management book, course or seminar you've ever taken, somewhere within the first few chapters of the book or hours in the seminar, you will see or hear the familiar phrase: "know thyself!" And then the book, course or seminar will quickly move on to management tips and techniques on how to manipulate and control things. Now don't get me wrong, knowing how to manipulate and control the right things is of immense importance, but attempting to manipulate and control the people who are controlling the right things is a monumental waste of your time and energy. There is a more powerful way. And it begins with you. If you're reading this you probably think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Maybe not. Being an entrepreneur is a role you play, no different than being a friend, a parent or an financial planner. That you are playing one role in particular has more to do with your ability to play the role, which has to do with certain aspects of your personality, which we will talk about in another post. Who you really are is what bring to the roles you play in your life. You are a complex being, yet, if you stand back far enough, you are still very predictable. I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. The truth is you just don't know what you don't know. And why would you when your entire life you have been told to be like someone else – and so has (almost) everyone else. As you succeed in building a successful business, your first task will be to lead and manage people – staff and clients – who are trying to be somebody else! No wonder leading people has been describes as herding cats! The fact is you and just about everyone you know has been brought up in a culture that says for you to be valuable - for you to be happy, rich, thin you name it – you have to be like someone else. Think about it. Every book you’ve ever read (except mine of course) has told you that to be successful in life you need to be like someone else. Still don't believe me: think In Search of Excellence, think Good to Great, think The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Each ends up with a list of things that you absolutely must do to be like the people or the organizations featured in the stories. The fact is while you may be able to do or be like some of these people or companies for a time, it's not sustainable. It will just totally exhaust you. To give you a concrete example: You will never, ever, no matter how hard you try, be Bill Gates. There is only one Bill Gates. And again, this is also good news, because no matter how much money and power Bill Gates amasses, he will never, ever be able to BE YOU! So what I am saying is this: If you want to be powerful in your life, you must first understand and master yourself. Yet the majority of people define who they are by the roles they play and that has been the natural order of things for millions of years. Who you really are, is what you bring to life simply by being in it! You may have been hard to find because you've been hiding behind the mask of other people's expectations. To be one of the top 100 financial services firms, you're going to have to come out from behind that mask and be authentically you. Let me say more about this last point. Who you really are is what you bring to the roles you are playing in life. Who you are is what you bring to being a parent during those moments when you find yourself being a great parent. Who you are is what you bring to being a financial planner when you find yourself being a great financial planner. Who you are is what you bring to being a friend when you find yourself being a great friend. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? It's easy to be you. It's very natural. It’s only hard when you try to be someone else! It's only hard when you constantly struggle to live into the expectations of others. Yet we spend our lives doing this. What I am saying here is be your SELF and help others do the same. There will be less stress, less struggle and less violence in your life. Now before you think that's selfish, nothing could be further from the truth. Who you really are is a contribution – a magnificent contribution! You have always known it – why do you think you want to help people manage their money? We are about to find that part of you that has been lost for a long time. There may have been times in your life, if you were very lucky, when you felt like time stood still, when what you were doing was effortless, and you actually felt joy. You may have been sailing a boat, looking into someone's eyes, or being on a team or project. This may have been with the family, at work or in the military. Can you find a moment or time in your life when you were actually joyous? If you can I want to tell you something that no one else will tell you: This is how you were meant to live. You were, during those moments of joy, being authentically YOU! And when you are being authentically YOU, you light up the room. People find you irresistible! They want more of you and your ideas and your friendship. Wouldn't you want to tap into more of that? The reason you have been so hard to find is that you have been buried in all the reaction of life and have not had access to the creation in life. Now pay attention here, because this is all about to change for you. I am going to help you see the invisible forces that have, for your entire life, been running you and everyone you know. Now I want you to get this, because if you get this then you will know what all Powerful Leaders know - if you truly understand yourself, you will profoundly understand humanity – because we are all run by the exact same forces. Next month: Our Reactive Identity. Copyright 2009 Thomas A. Voccola All rights reserved ________________________________________ Entrepreneur, speaker, author and CEO Coach, 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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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.