DO MORE for fewer clients: Advice for professional retail Financial Advisors

I’m going to share with you the best piece ofadvice I ever received from one of my business coaches,

and it was years ago, but it still stands today.

My name is Mark a little I want to focus on an

area of financial advisory work

that really needs to be addressed.

It affects time management, and it affects

everything related to client service, including client

referral rate. What is that? Well, if you’re

busy, like I’ve always been serving my clients,

and you’re sitting there and your intuition is telling you, I wish

I could do more for my best clients.

My instinct is telling me I need to, and I can be

doing more for them. But the problem is, I am just so

busy putting out fires and delivering service to all

my clients, I can’t seem to make it work.

Well, let me share my situation. Now, this flashes

back years ago, but I’m going to wrap it all up with the piece of

advice that fixed everything for me. I had

1242 mostly

non ideal clients. Now I’ll leave for

another video how I acquired all those clients, because I’m an introvert and

I have call reluctance. Look,

I am not going to be the poster child for sales tactics.

I had to find another way to acquire clients. But at

the end of the day, I ended up with a lot of clients,

mainly because I was never trained in the industry, how to

stratify clients, if you want to call it that.

No notion of ideal client profile was ever trained to

me in my early years, in my 20s as a financial advisor.

So what happened over the years? People came

to me with financial issues,

or I encountered them in other ways. And,

look, if all they needed to do was set up a $2,000

little retirement account or something like that,

I was trained never ever turn money

away. Okay, so that was my mistake.

I came up out of the investment channel, and I

was trained never to turn away money. So what happens?

Blink, flash forward a dozen years.

You become effective at client acquisition. Even though I’m

an introvert and I ended up with 1242

clients, I was miserable. I was literally thinking

about leaving the industry.

It all goes to what I got into the business for to begin

with, and only you can answer that for yourself. But for me,

yes. I wanted to do well financially, no question. I also

had a talent for the investment markets. I didn’t realize

that really didn’t matter. All they wanted me to do was acquire clients.

So what did I end up doing? I would

just acquire clients. I would set up any account for

any amount. And then what happened? I ended up with so many clients,

I couldn’t even meet with them annually. If you have 1242

clients, you can’t have an annual review with them.

So I got into the business to make a difference in

my clients lives. I wanted to help clients

make better financial decisions. I wasn’t doing that either.

I woke up one day with all these clients and I thought,

I’m miserable. I’m working 80, 90 hours a week. I’m just

doing client service morning, noon and night. I’ve got

to get out of this basically hamster wheel.

And it’s at that moment that I had this

epiphany from my business coach.

Now, there’s more to this story, but about six

months earlier, I had come across

a training coach named Bill Bacrack.

And Bill Bacrac really appealed to me because

what he was talking about was establishing an

initial client meeting that was so valuable and

so compelling and so deep of an experience

for them, not for me, but for the client,

that it established the relationship at a much

deeper level. But what do you do if you now

have a skill to establish a relationship at

a deeper level, but you have too many clients to actually implement it? Or put

another way, I couldn’t do that with every client,

1242 clients, nor would I want to. What does

a client with just 2000, $3,000 care

about having a deeper relationship?

So I set about to sit down with

every one of my clients and to communicate to

them, know, I have been doing business the

old way, but now the new way. And what’s the new way?

Well, this is where Bill Baccrack created the epiphany.

He was listening to my story and he thought I was doing great

from a revenue standpoint. I was certainly acquiring clients.

I was certainly generating revenue. As a matter of

fact, I was his poster child. I was generating more revenue

and more clients than anybody else had in his program up

to that point. I think the record still stands, frankly.

What was the advice that he gave me that changed everything? It was

a simple sentence. It was just me stewing over what he

said for about a month. He said,

mark, it just seems to me you need to do a whole lot

more, but for a whole lot fewer clients.

So what did I do? I stood over

that for a month and I thought, well, he’s right, of course,

but what do you do about it? Well, I made a list of all my

clients and I figured I tried to establish kind

of the 80 20 of my business. It’s just a

theory. So supposedly 20% of your clients generate

80% of your revenue. Actually,

after I did the math, and I recommend that you sit down and go through

this exercise, I had 17 clients out

of 1242 that generated

most of my revenue. So it’s not 80,

20 for me. It was like, what, 95 five or

something like that. But the point is, I realized I was starting over.

If I was going to take Bill’s advice, I was starting over.

But that’s exactly what I did. I put together a

set of services for those 17 clients,

and then they were so thrilled with the

service that they started referring me to all their

friends and everyone they knew, everyone that they loved,

anyone that they cared about. They pointed in my direction

for financial services. So I started adding ideal clients

quickly. And as I added new clients,

then I could start politely disengaging from the 1225

smaller, non ideal clients. So I just want you to

think about that. I want you to stew on this. How can you do

a whole lot more for a whole lot fewer clients

to create a stunning service model that will make

you the only game in town. So I’m going to put a link below to

my free course on how to become the only game in town.

It’s ten game changing strategies that you can implement that’ll

get you on the road to what we’re talking about. Take care. See you

next time.