Paul Kingsman

After specifying exactly how many clients you’re going to pursue this year, ensure you have your internal systems in place.

By doing this you take care of two key things:

1) You maximize your return from what you currently have. While it sounds more fun to head out and find new clients, it always costs less time and money to ensure the ones you presently have stay with you. By reviewing your current client list, you’ll see people who you can contact to set up appointments or reviews. By doing this, you can build your servicing platform, routine and habits.

2) By doing that, you not only maximize what you presently have, but also begin creating a system where you’ll maximize your return when you bring in new clients.

By looking internally first, you essentially kill 2 birds with 1 hit.

Mine your current client list. While I’m not a huge fan of the A, B & C client label approach, you must know where the bulk of your income is derived from, people to pay attention to and ensure they remain clients, and people who possibly take a lot of your time and provide little return back to you.

By having a better handle on this, you’ll sum up conversations you’re about to begin having with prospects and potential clients quickly, knowing exactly how bringing them on will look relative to your overall business mix.

Happy Hunting.

-Paul

Remember our scenario:

Independent adviser on 85% payout.
Goal: Within 4 years, to annually generate before expenses, $340,000
Charging 1% on assets managed

You’ll need to generate $400,000 to your grid, the company will take 15%, leaving your 85% payout at $340,000.

If you’re looking to generate the above scenario, you need to be managing $40mm – it’s that simple.

Over 4 years, that means you’re hunting $10mm each year.

The next step is a combination of you deciding how many clients you’d like to work with and what their ideal asset level will be. This goes a little deeper than just doing numbers as it forces you to think about how you’ll structure your business and which type of client you’re looking for. For the purposes of this series, we’re assuming you want to be gathering assets by offering different planning and investment platforms for your clients. We’ll cover what those look like a little later in the series.

Once you’ve solved that issue, come back to the numbers.

Remember, you’re looking for $10mm in Year 1. $10mm at 1% is $100k – of which you’ll keep $85k. If your expenses are running at roughly 20%, you’ll keep $68,000 before taxes. Depending on your cost of living, etc, the first year might challenge you a little, but keep focused on what Year 2 and beyond will look like.

If you decide your sweet-spot are clients between $500k and $1mm – great. Now figure out what that looks like.

It might look like this:

3 $1mm clients ————— $3mm
4 $750k clients ————— $3mm
8 $500k clients ————— $4mm

That means you’re looking for 15 clients. That’s a little more than a new client each month and way less than 2 new people a month. Can you see and feel how achievable this is?

They’re out there needing to meet you. Who are those 15 people who will be blessed to work with you this year? If you get more than the 15 great people this year, and they’re the right people – fantastic. Obviously looking forward from here, you’ll build a practice of 60 or so ideal people. We’ll look at just what this might look like later on also.

By having a number of right people you’re pursuing rather than an asset level, you’ll become discerning as to who deserves to be working with you and who doesn’t.

By being specific about what you want to be generating in your practice, you can see clearly the number of clients you need and the respective number of assets each must have.

Next week, we’ll look at some different criteria for finding and selecting clients. Some people prefer a niche strategy, others prefer the AAA approach. We’ll look at each next week.

Happy Hunting.
-Paul