Distraction-Proof® Advisor Ideas

Last week we spoke about loneliness and your clients, this week we’re talking about loneliness and you, the advisor.

Thanks for your feedback regarding last week’s post about how your clients can sometimes feel lonely. And, yes, you’re right: as advisors, we can also feel isolated ourselves.

We’re typically Type A personalities. We’re leading small groups of people. We’re charging ahead with our business, with our plans, and yet many times we have no one we can bounce our ideas off of just to make sure we’re tracking in the right direction and just to be able to have feedback provided to us.

We can often like Tom Hanks’ character in the movie Castaway, where we’re feeling like there is no one to talk with apart from Wilson (the volleyball), an object that’s going to provide no sort of feedback to you whatsoever. It can be incredibly lonely.

I know from coaching, sometimes I have clients who refer to me as a chaplain, or as their priest, because the times that we share one-on-one are a safe place they can talk about their aspirations just as much as they talk about fears and concerns that they have regarding their business.

1. If you are feeling isolated and alone, recognize you are not alone. Many advisors feel exactly the same way that you do.
2. Don’t stay there. Get into a small group of advisors and talk to each other. You can do this by connecting with your broker-dealer or your custodian and ask them to give you five or six names of advisors who have similar businesses to what you have, not necessarily in your own backyard from a territory perspective, but across the country, and set up a time to establish a study group where you might meet once a month on a conference call with each other.
3. If you don’t want to meet in a group and you want more one-on-one concentration and one-on-one dialog, shoot me an email and I’ll connect with you. We can talk about your aspirations for your business.

   If you’re frustrated that you had great ideas for this year in 2018, but didn’t really get through many of them and didn’t really build any momentum that you wanted, these are the kinds of things I talk with advisors about.

   I’ve got a bit of space left for coaching clients beginning in January next year, so send me an email through and we can talk about the planning we can do for your business. Where do you want to be four years out from now? Where do you want to be with your business, where do you want to be with your health, with your family, relationally with people? Then we bring that back to where do we want to be in December 2019, twelve months from now. Winding that back to what do we now need the next 90 days to look like? How do we go and get new centers of influence? What do those emails look like we send to them? I have templates to talk through with you about those ideas. How do we stratify our book into As, Bs, and C clients? How do we set up a client segmentation grouping?

   All of these little ideas will have you really honing your skills and really building on what you already know as an advisor but maximizing your potential. We do that together, one-on-one. So send me an email and I’ll connect with you and we’ll figure out how to make 2019 a fantastic year for you.

Don’t do it alone. Get into either a small study-group or shoot me an email, we’ll set a time, and we’ll help build your business one-on-one. Don’t go through 2019 thinking this (Wilson, the volleyball) is the only guy you can talk to.

(To Wilson) How does that sound? Pretty good? (Wilson nods.) Great.

I look forward to bringing you another Distraction-Proof Advisor Idea next week.