Scaling Your Firm: Why Management is Holding You Back

Intro Welcome to the seven Figure Advisor Podcast,

Speaker 3 the show for financial advisors ready to scale their business to seven figures and beyond. Each week you'll get proven growth strategies, leadership insights, and best practices. From someone that's helped countless advisors break past the million dollar milestone.

Intro Here's your host, Nick Davies.

NIck Management is a low standard. As it comes to being a financial advisor or a financial planner, you start off thinking about me. how do I get good at what I do? How do I add value to my clients? How do I build a book of business? And then once that business is established, it's how do I continue to add value?

NIck How do I grow my book? How do I grow my passive income, my recurring revenue at and think about how do I serve my clients at the best level? And then you need a team to start to syndicate your leverage [00:01:00] out, right? Because obviously working more is not the answer. And especially if you think about the entirety of your life.

NIck maybe at, there's some point of your life where you get to run really fast, and that's great, and leverage that. I actually was working with a client yesterday talking about that same thing. and he was reflecting on, in his late 30s, that there was a point in his 20s up to his early thir- very early 30s that, he had tons of energy, and it was, it was-- He ran very fast and had less responsibility.

NIck And although he felt like he did a good job doing that and taking advantage of that, it's a reminder that we should be really aware of the season that we're in and to leverage the season that we're in And not trying to be somewhere else because awareness of it is really important.

NIck But as we grow our business and think about bringing people in, we think about them helping us deliver, them helping us, like, do some tasks to move that way. and how do we manage the people in a team? How do we manage our clients? But I would offer that management, essentially is a low standard, and it's not a bad place to start, but we wanna move through that as quick as we can because people don't wanna be managed.

NIck Bottom [00:02:00] line is it's people, and you can't manage people, really, not effectively long term. You can only manage processes, and that's okay because people wanna be led. And e- even if that's someone on your team that's-- that of course you're paying to deliver o- on tasks or deliver on, on, on being in the office, we wanna be careful how we set this up because it makes a huge difference.

NIck Rather than paying someone for their time just to be there, which is a traditional old school model, I would offer that we wanna think about not paying them for their time and them, then them managing that. We wanna be thinking about leading them by saying, "Okay, we want to have you come in and own a function.

NIck What function can-- is it that you can own?" And it doesn't really matter what it is that they're doing, it's just defining what it is overall. So you might say, "I have an assistant that comes in, and he or she... Goodness, the first thing that drives me crazy is that if I could have someone manage my calendar, like, meaning, meaning like someone could book calls on my calendar, follow up, make sure meetings are prepped, and make sure that clients are getting the follow-up, that would be a huge deal."

NIck and [00:03:00] then the next piece, of course, is like making sure that the business gets followed up on, applications get processed, service work is completed. But think of it from the mindset that's most important. This is your journey as the owner here. Again, we're talking about being an advisor that is an established advisor to a business owner.

NIck And the thing-- And the sooner you can think about like a business owner, the sooner you can get through the next level or part where you're trying to scale through wherever that might be. and so we should probably start by drawing a distinction, a definition as to what management versus leadership is.

NIck Management is checking in. management is making sure that tasks get done. Assigning tasks to make sure they get done. Leadership is about assigning ownership for delivery of overall results. And you can think about this just as a time-bound situation, right? And so, like, they're worth thinking about the hierarchy Of how it might look in any given business, right?

NIck And so if you can think about, okay, from the bottom up, individual tasks together complete a [00:04:00] particular process, right? So it might be, okay, I've got to fill out a new business application. a new business application might have... Okay, filling the application out itself, but you've got to think about, okay, well, I've got to request it.

NIck I've got to make sure it's... I get that up from the detail I need from a client. I've got to fill the actual thing out, and I've got to submit it, and I've got to follow through and make sure it gets processed. That whole thing might have 10, 20 different specific tasks in it if you put it down to a level which is a keystroke level, which might, a standard operating document might look like.

NIck And if you lay that together, the process of completing onboarding for a client is all together in that one process, right? So think about the chunks of that. And so as you're sharing and teaching someone that you're gonna look at it from those individual tasks, but you don't want to give it task by task.

NIck You want to think about, okay, overall, this person, you might hire them for a function of owning all new client business. New client business, new client onboarding. and the result might be that is to know how many clients were coming in and all client new [00:05:00] business gets pro-processed by a certain amount of time, and that will be a success for that role.

NIck So that's the top-down approach. The bottom-up approach is which... How we're gonna piece it together. So for that role to deliver that outcome, it might be... You might call that something like director of new business and whether that person is really established in a role or they're new to that role and they're really figuring out from that task level up, I would still call it that and think of it like that.

NIck At least as if that person is stepping into that role, this is what we're... This is what you're coming in to do and we'll learn as we go through. That way from the start that person's thinking, "Okay, cool. This is the function that I'm in. This is the role that I'm playing here and the role... Success in this role is this."

NIck Otherwise, what will happen is that every time they complete a task, no matter how good they are at completing tasks, they come back to you asking for more or the next steps, what it might, what might it be. I just had an example yesterday from an advisor where- His assistant office manager of 12 years or so came back to him to ask him this very specific question about something that a client submitted, whether it [00:06:00] required a tax form or not.

NIck And so the example was really perfect because it was a very small, relatively speaking, something that happened through the day, but really telling in terms of, like, how that person thought about what their role was. And so, like, it's worth having an escalation framework. So, ultimately, that thing should come back to the expert, the planner and the advisor in this case.

NIck But also, that person should have a Rolodex, as it were, like a framework to move through in order that they can figure out what it is before they come back to him as well. Another quick example, right? Super simple. A client of mine has a new assistant coming into his team that he's sharing.

NIck And the assistant that is partially retiring has a change to her email signature and her email out of office. And the email simply says to contact the lead advisor and then secondarily the new person in the team. And so that sets up that new-- that the lead advisor for getting more of these phone calls and emails rather than directly to the new person in the team.

NIck And so thinking about [00:07:00] it from the overall perspective about what, who's playing what roles allows us to much quicker move through to that leadership focus, where you can focus on the big picture and set the strategy because bottom line, as a business owner, the jobs that you can't share the ownership...

NIck and let me be clear, because we often talk about delegation, and whilst that is a useful framework to think through, delegation is much more often about task delegating. That's kind of tends how we think about it. You do this thing. I would share that we want to think about ownership transformation, ownership transferring, right?

NIck And so rather than saying, "Okay, you do this task," we're saying, "You, I want you-- I'm transferring the ownership of this thing to you." Because as the, that, the business owner and the lead advisor and the things that you, only that you can do are set the strategy for your business and show up for your most important clients.

NIck Everything else, at least to a high level, can be moved to someone else. and aspirationally, that's how we want to think about [00:08:00] it in order that you can become a better leader, to have the right people in your company, and that's how you create a culture that persists, and it creates that situation where people look in and go, "Wow, how do they do that?"

NIck That's exactly where it starts.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening to today's episode. Hit the Follow button to be notified of new episodes and visit seven dash figure advisor.com for more resources and to connect directly with Nick. See you next time.