Journal of Financial Planning: June 2019
Stephanie Bogan, founder of Educe Inc., is a thought leader, author, speaker, and coach to top advisory firms and CEOs in the advisory space. She is also the founder of the group coaching program, Limitless Adviser, and serves as a coach for the FPA Coaches Corner.
Do you ever feel that you are on a treadmill, working as hard as you can just to keep up? Perhaps you’re with a successful firm but struggle to break out to the next level or to gain back your time and freedom. Maybe you’re among a growing group of seasoned advisers not yet ready to retire but bored by the routine and wondering how to regain your enthusiasm or explore new adventures. Or perhaps you’re a newer adviser figuring out the best, fastest way to achieve greater success.
If any of these feel familiar, your vision may feel out of reach.
Neuroscience now shows us that success is 80 percent mindset and 20 percent methods. Thus, mastering your mindset is the single biggest step you can take to confidently create a bigger, better future for your business and life.
Having a strategic mindset means you have a vision for your business beyond this calendar year’s goals—you can envision what you want the business to be in your next stage of success. You set clear strategic priorities that drive broader goals that will create immediate business impact and progress toward those long-term goals.
Follow the six-step process presented here to bring a more strategic mindset to your strategic planning process. The key is to limit the time to 10 minutes per step, so as not to over-think things and to ensure you stay focused on those points that matter most. Answer the prompts quickly without allowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt to creep in, as those are the stealthy stumbling blocks you face on the road to greater success.
Step 1: What Do I Really Want My Business to Look Like?
In 10 minutes, write down a one- or two-sentence answer to this question. Be specific, but not overly detailed.
For example:
- Grow revenue by 50 percent over three years while increasing time off to three months per year.
- Serve only ideal clients at fees while increasing profitability to 35 percent over three years.
- Set the business up to run without me 50 percent of the time, successfully transitioning all but hand-selected clients to the team.
- Find and transition to a successor, successfully, within the next five years.
- Build my practice to $500,000 with only one staff member and summers off.
With this statement you now have a vision or inspiring goal to serve as your beacon as you move forward. This statement should be posted where you can see it frequently throughout the day, covered as the first item in your team meetings, and be the focal point of your quarterly business reviews.
Step 2: Create Your Business Blueprint
In this step, spend 10 minutes writing down your desired state for the key strategic decisions that define your firm, including:
- Who you will serve
- The services you will provide
- The fees you will charge
- The team/staffing model that will support you
- The financial results you will achieve
- The work that you will do/role you will play
- Your lifestyle goals
The above list offers you a succinct blueprint from which to construct your envisioned future. With this clarity, you can now turn your attention to how you will achieve that vision.
Step 3: Set Your Goals and Priorities
Now, review your vision statement and business blueprint criteria and close your eyes. For a few moments, visualize the business in this ideal state. Imagine how great it feels, see what it looks like, imagine how it works, and remind yourself this vision is simply waiting for you to make the shifts needed to make it a reality.
Now ask yourself the following question and write down the first three to five things that come to mind, without question or judgment: What things do I need to do, or solve for, to achieve my vision?
This list represents your already-on-tap ideas for achieving your goals. We have many of the answers we need swimming in our subconscious; we only need to give ourselves permission to let them out. You can evaluate and assess them later—the goal here is to get some action items onto your paper.
For example, if your goal is to grow revenue by 50 percent over three years while increasing time off to three months per year, your top five actions goals might look something like:
- Hire and train a top-notch paraplanner to leverage my time and focus me on revenue-producing activities.
- Re-arrange my calendar to block my time and organize client meetings into groups each quarter.
- Re-define my client service model to define services delivered to each client segment and create a systematized service model that allows us to efficiently deliver a personal experience.
- Work with and retain only profitable client relationships.
- Implement a fee increase with new clients and bring all clients to profitability within three years (via a fee increase, shift in service model, or transition to others).
In 10 minutes, you will have a clear view of your priorities and some substantive ideas for how to make it happen.
Step 4: Create a Priorities Playbook (aka Take Action)
Next, on a piece of paper, lay out the four quarters of the year for the number of years you’re working with. If you have a three-year vision, you have 12 quarters in your playbook.
Now, select the priority with the greatest potential for impact and assign it to the first quarter, or quarters, depending on the time needed. Ideally you will only assign one priority per quarter, as focusing your energy and attention is essential to successful implementation. Repeat this process until all the priorities are assigned to a quarter.
Under each priority, identify the first few actions you will take. You don’t need to do a detailed plan for each, just capture the first few steps so you can begin and create momentum. Using our example, you might put “Hire a top-notch paraplanner” in Q1, with three key sub-actions such as: (1) create job description; (2) find virtual planner resources; and (3) put together compensation package. Then, assign a due date to each action to create commitment.
What matters most here is that you take the first step to implementing it, as that means you’re focusing your energy in the direction of your goals. Maintaining that momentum is critical to your success.
Step 5: Measure and Manage Your Progress
Your next step is to measure and manage your progress. This can be efficiently and effectively done with a quarterly strategic business review, and a more tactical review monthly, to assess progress.
In addition to the progress reviews, I strongly suggest planners engage in performance benchmarking to provide clear and relevant insights into how their actions are aligned with their goals. This is a business process that involves measuring the firm across key benchmarks, such as revenue per employee, profit per client, productivity per staff person, and qualitative measures like days off or working remotely.
Step 6: Review and Reinforce
In just 50 minutes, you’ve established a vision, set strategic goals and established clear priorities, and established a process to help you manage to your objectives. But your work is not done; stopping here limits your ability to be successful. The next step is to carry your vision and priorities into your daily work.
Spend five minutes at the start of every day reviewing your vision and goals. A wealth of neuroscience shows this trains your brain to focus itself to work behind-the-scenes in powerful ways that contribute to your success. Reviewing daily subconsciously reinforces your vision and rewires your brain to accept this as the map (instead of the habitual daily routine you’ve been trapped in) and literally shifts your brain into support mode, reframing your reality in ways that align your thoughts, feelings, and actions with your vision.
Conclusion
The six-step process outlined here is a simple way to start creating the shifts that will lead you into a bigger, better future. There can, of course, be a great deal more to strategy and strategic planning than this one-hour exercise. However, practicing this exercise a few times will demonstrate the powerful impacts it can have.
As you shift into a strategic mindset, you raise your awareness, lift your head, and step off the treadmill that keeps you trapped in the status quo. Except this time, you’ll step off with a new sense of clarity and confidence—which is exactly what you need to create the bigger, better future you’ve just imagined.
This column was adapted from the author’s FPA Coaches Corner paper, “Strategic Planning for Success.” Read more from Bogan and the other FPA coaches at OneFPA.org/CoachesCorner.