“Coach’s Forum” is a place in which you can ask your questions, tell your stories or give your opinions on any aspect of practice management. For each column, George selects the most interesting and relevant comments from readers and offers his advice. Our objective is to build a community of people with a common interest in making their financial advisory practices as effective as possible.

Advisor says: i have been in the industry for only a little over a year, after an attempt at another small business I started and ran for three years that, unfortunately, didn’t work out. Looking back, I can see where I made poor decisions that probably led to my failure, but I am actually OK with that. It was a great learning experience and I know that many successful entrepreneurs failed more than once before they got it right.

But here’s what scares me. I had a good knowledge of the industry of my previous business. I was formally educated in the field and even worked part-time while at college for a firm that was successful in the same business. Now, here I am, starting over in an industry in which I have little formal training and only limited knowledge of what it takes to be a successful advisor.

I am definitely attracted by everything this new career has to offer. I am worried, however, about the business side of things. In your experience, what separates the most successful advisors from the rest of the pack? Do they think differently or simply work smarter and harder?

Coach says: Wow! you must have been peeking at my calendar! In the past six months, I have spoken at half a dozen conferences in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Mexico – and guess what the topic was? “Ten things top-performing advisors do – that others don’t.” The quest for insight into what makes some advisors excel when others fail is global.

Everyone is searching for that “silver bullet” to propel them to the top of their game. But, of course, there is no single approach, activity or attitude guaranteed to work for everyone all the time. And, while I selected 10 best practices as differentiators for my presentation, there are many things that successful advisors do to put themselves at the forefront of the industry.

Here’s the good news: even the highest-performing advisors rarely do everything perfectly, yet they do enough of the things that are important to achieve levels to which others can only aspire. They have also come to understand that perfection is an elusive goal and it’s better to be “approximately right” than “precisely wrong.”

Another optimistic comment: although you missed with your previous business attempt, I bet you also did a number of things right. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have lasted even three years and be willing to take up the entrepreneurial challenge again in your new profession. So, while you’ve had limited formal training on how to build a successful practice, you have had a great informal education in the “School of Hard Knocks.”

Top performers have learned to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, then work to capitalize on the first and eliminate the second. You can do that, too, starting today.

Because you asked specifically for some ideas, I have listed five of the 10 things from my presentation that I have found to be common among top-performing advisors. I’ll follow up with the other five in next month’s column.

The central theme running through all these best practices is managing your practice like a business. That’s experience you already have, so you probably don’t need to learn all 10 things to do: perhaps just two, or three, or four. So, here are the first five things that top-performing advisors do:

1. Have a clear vision for your practice

Top advisors have a written statement regarding who they are and what they are trying to accomplish. Vision is the starting point for everything and, in my experience, most advisors have a pretty good idea of what they want their business to look like at some point down the road. The challenge is in putting those thoughts into a written statement you can use to guide yourself and your team.

Only by leaders clearly articulating what they aspire to achieve can they make the right decisions to drive their business forward. A strong vision statement includes answers to the following questions:

– How big do I want to become?

– What community profile will I enjoy?

– What type of clients will I have?

– What products and services will I offer those clients?

– What will it feel like to be a client? Or a team member?

– What role do I want to play personally?

When I ask top-performing advisors about the vision they have for their business, they get a faraway look in their eyes and, often, a big smile on their faces. The concept excites, motivates and drives them!

2. Create a plan to realize your vision

Top-performing advisors have a written description of how they intend to accomplish their vision. It works like this: vision drives strategy, which determines tactics. Then, the process all gets wrapped up in a document that so many advisors dread: a business plan. That’s where you describe your high-level view of what you are going to do. With that strategy in hand, you then can turn to tactics, which are described in a specific set of plans:

– Your marketing plan details the specific promotional activities and brand messaging you will use to attract prospective clients who meet your “preferred client” profile.

– Your sales plan lists the steps you will take through the introduction, engagement, discovery, analysis and presentation stages of your process to convert prospective clients into actual clients.

– Your service plan outlines the service levels you will provide and a description of how they will be delivered.

– Your operations plan explains how your business will be structured, managed and financed.

A top performer’s business plan can be two pages or 50 pages. As long as your plan adequately describes how you intend to meet your objectives and gives you day-to-day direction, size doesn’t matter.

3. Understand your business’s metrics

Top performers know the relationship between resources allocation and results. Knowing the numbers enables you to control the momentum of your business. For example, if you know that, on average, each new account generates $5,000 in revenue in the first year and you want to increase your revenue from new clients by $50,000, you’ll have to add 10 new client accounts each year. Then, you can apply the promotional activities in your marketing plan that are most likely to lead you to 10 new clients – for example, through referrals, seminars, etc.

Top-performing advisors have a very good idea of how efficient their business is in terms of measures such as revenue per client and revenue per team member. Elite advisors also know how effective they are in terms of metrics such as client acquisition costs and conversion rates.

4. Know your target market

Top performers have a well-defined preferred client profile. Understanding what your target market needs, how these clients like to be treated and how best to engage with them equips you to attract the right potential clients by offering solutions and service that are relevant and personalized.

Top performers know that having deep knowledge about the people with whom they want to do business allows them to become known as experts in certain fields – which leads to more referrals and less reliance on external marketing.

5. Have a compelling value proposition

Top-performing advisors stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Unfortunately, consumers have difficulty in differentiating among advisors. To consumers, all advisors offer pretty much the same products at the same price, follow similar processes and, essentially, make the same promises.

Top performers, by defining and communicating their unique value proposition clearly, give people a reason to do business with them over others, which enables top advisors to build their business faster and with less effort.

This is the first part in a two-part series on the best practices of top-performing advisors. Part 2 will run next month.

George Hartman is managing partner with Elite Advisors Canada Inc. in Toronto. Send questions and comments regarding this column to ghartman@eliteadvisors.ca. His practice-management videos can be seen on www.investmentexecutive.com.

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