It is now the end of July, and I find this window of time is very dangerous for advisors.
Let me explain why.
Many times what we’ll do is get into the summer doldrums or adult days of summer. You get into this July or August window, and there’s a real push to tell yourself I’m going to just hang out the next few weeks and then I’ll hit it hard after Labor Day.The reality is if you want to have a dynamite September, October, November, December you need to create momentum today. If you downshift for the next four or five weeks it will take you 30 to 60 days after Labor Day to
create momentum in business.If we played that out your momentum will not get kicked up into the end of October. Then we’re right into the holidays.
A strategy that I use with all my clients is to have them reach a goal where they make August their second-highest contact month of the year. The first highest contact month needs to be January. This is where you’re reaching out to both clients and prospects through text, email, calls or any method you can.
You just check in with them to see how their summers going with the goal in most cases is to get a meeting with them and get that penciled into your calendar. If you wait until after Labor Day, to try and start scheduling meetings then you’re already three – four weeks out and you need to get work done. There’s financial plans, projects, analysis, application, and underwriting.Now you’re really pushing it and you’re giving away six to eight prime weeks of production. I want you to have vacation time, I want you to build families, and I want you to go fishing, boating, golfing, or anything else you would like to be doing.
Over the next couple of weeks, I want you to go ahead and reach out to everyone. This will make you a lot of money. You’ll be grateful come December that you listen to this advice. That’s the first thing you need to do.
Second thing is pay attention to your habits and rituals. This will always matter. If you’ve committed to coming into the office to get work done make sure you hit it hard. Don’t just come in do a little project and hang out. You need to decide to go to the office and be a rockstar. What I mean by that is you commit to what you say you’re going to do. You do your daily game plan, you do your morning rituals, you set up meetings, and do introduction conversations.If you’re not willing to do that, don’t come in and make excuses. Maintain your standards. If you say you’re going to come in at your normal early time, do your morning ritual, and leave at one o’clock to go play nine holes, be with the family, or go to the pool that’s okay. Just maintain your standards.
Your bank account is about two things, your mindset and your standards. If you have low standards for yourself, your team, or your clients it will reflect in your bank account. Don’t sit there and say you’re going to come in and play office. If you lead a team, and they see you playing office, you basically give them permission to do the same thing.
Leadershipin our space is by example, not by proxy. You need to make a decision.Currently, I have clients on an Alaskan Cruise and in a Safari in South Africa. They’re doing all kinds of great stuff. I encourage it. I’m all about the bucket list of my clients.
In order to play you need to honor your business and honor your standards. It’s easy to get seduced into average. It’s easy to come in with the best intentions. Then next thing you know, the TV’s on, the internet calls your name, your emails dinging, or you’re on your mobile device. Your phone will either make you a lot of money or cost you a lot of money.
What box do you want to check on this? Listen to books on tape, motivational and inspirational items that’s going to feed your mind and get your mindset right. Don’t feed into things that are going to become a distraction. Be aware of where you’re being seduced at.
In the summer you also need to execute a mid year review process. You want to go ahead and basically benchmark where you’re currently at vs. your plan for 2019. What must you do different or better? If you’re saying you don’t need to do anything different, that you can be the same person, that you don’t need to change your behavior, and that you don’t need to change your standards that’s how you’re going to operate. This is why you’re stuck in stagnant.Here’s what I want you to think about.
What are you willing to commit to making the next six weeks work? That commitments going to be I’m going to reach out to everybody and I am going to set the stage this month. Not when fall happens. I’m not going to sabotage my success by getting distracted.Next, if I’m going to go play, I will have the rule and the rule is going to be when I’m in my office, I AM IN MY OFFICE. If that means I want to get out at noon, or I’m going to take Mondays and Fridays off and just work Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays then maintain those standards. If you’re going to take a long weekend and go to the lake house or shore I’m cool with that. Why? Because Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we’ll rock it out. At a high level Monday and Friday, we go and play. That’s our summer game. You have to have a set of rules around this.
A lot of advisors have this haphazard and have no calendar discipline or no daily game plan discipline. The reason is most people get distracted. I want you to think about this for yourself for a second. Now, this may be a little epiphany, what attracted you to this business? What attracted you to this profession?
Maybe you wanted freedom, flexibility, to make a lot of money and help people. Those are going to be somewhere in your top 10. The problem though, is that you take freedom and you apply it in a negative way. Freedom does not mean we don’t have benchmarks. In fact, I can make an argument to you that the more discipline and the higher your standards are the more freedom you will have. Why? Because your business grows economically.
You hire the right people and you lead them properly.And if you have the right people in the right seats, guess what? You don’t have to be the storekeeper. You don’t have to be the shopkeeper. You go somewhere else. You pay your people well, to go sit in and answer the phones while you go off on vacation with your family.I’ve got several clients that are thinking about sabbaticals. For instance, one of my clients says they want to take at least four weeks off. They want to pick their family and go on vacation for four weeks, while their team runs their business. They want to be available for only 911s if necessary.
But by and large, they are unplugging. They will not be monitoring their email and they will have their phone forwarding. They asked me if it was possible and I said everything’s possible. We need to test it, try it and plan it to see what works.
Fast forward now five years later, it’s a reality. Five or six of my clients have now done this. They will take sabbaticals in the summer to be with their families and go on vacations. They’re able to leave their office for a long period of time and yet they run multimillion-dollar businesses.Why? Because they understand to get their freedom they need to plan for it. It doesn’t happen by accident. You cannot be loosey goosey around your scheduling and your standards.I hope this makes sense for you.
Get your calls done, get your faults figured out, and let’s make it happen. If you want to put a sabbatical in your world in the future for 2020, let’s get it done. Remember, as a financial advisor, all things are possible. I’ve got clients doing all things. So come to me with a question. I’m happy to answer them for you.
The last thing come play my coaching game with me for the next 30 days at MagellanNetwork.net Come experience what we do and see if it makes sense for you. I’m not the right coach for everyone. I always openly admit that, but you just might be surprised what happens in that 30 days for you.Related:
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