The 3-Step Loop to Scale: Clarity → Strategy → Accountability

Nick [00:00:00] And maybe you're good at putting the strategy in place or not, but oftentimes it’ll fall down either way because we’re not clear. People know strategy, people know the importance of accountability. People often have strategy, but often don’t have accountability. And in my experience, 90% of people just aren’t clear about what it is that they want, and first of all, where actually they are.

Nick [00:00:00] Nick Davies here with the 7 Figure Advisor. The basics are not for beginners. Oftentimes we start out with the fundamentals, right? And that’s what gets us going. We forget those as we get further along, and we’re looking for how do we grow, because we’re going to hit plateaus along the way.

Nick [00:00:00] But coming back to the basics—getting zoomed out, getting clear—really is the fundamentals of success. And something framework-wise we can always come back to is thinking through what success is to be as a seven-figure advisor and beyond. And it really starts quite simply with what clarity is.

Nick [00:01:00] And the framework overall is clarity, strategy, accountability, which can continue to go round and round. Now, like most people know—as most advisors know—that you’ve got to have a strategy. If you haven’t got a strategy, you haven’t got a plan, and life doesn’t go to plan if you haven’t got one. And also, most people know that accountability is important, right?

Nick [00:01:00] Because it’s not about what you know. I just had an advisor tell me yesterday, who’s long time in the business, and said, “When I started out, I wanted to have a career, I wanted to help people, I wanted to make money and support my family.” And along the way, they’ve realized there are so many things they could do—so many things they’ve learned along the way—that they just never had done them.

Nick [00:01:00] It’s not about learning more stuff; it’s often just about applying the things that you already know. And so that’s what people understand—the power of accountability that aren’t necessarily doing it, and the power of strategy.

Nick [00:01:00] Now, what often happens is that you put the strategy in place, and maybe you do or don’t have accountability.

Nick [00:02:00] But oftentimes it’ll fall down either way because we’re not clear. People know strategy, people know the importance of accountability. People often have strategy, but often don’t have accountability. And in my experience, 90% of people just aren’t clear about what it is that they want, and first of all, where actually they are.

Nick [00:02:00] This is what I see all the time for advisors. So this is just fundamental strategy—something you can always remind yourself of at any given point when you’re feeling that you’re stuck somewhere, or you’re up against a wall. You just haven’t got that level of clarity that you need to make the right decision.

Nick [00:02:00] And sometimes it’s not obvious that it’s not clear, which is an odd thing. But think about it: it’s kind of like the comfort zone, right? The scary thing about the comfort zone is that oftentimes you don’t know that you’re in it. And by the time you do realize—like, “Ugh, I’ve been sitting on the couch for an hour and a half, and I’m so comfortable, I just don’t want to move.”

Nick [00:02:00] And once you’re in it like that, you just don’t really care as much, right? That part moves away from you a little bit. And so, kind of like that, clarity can appear that you’re clear and you don’t know that you aren’t sometimes.

Nick [00:03:00] But I think about the old standard-definition TVs. You could watch sport on those TVs back in the day like no big deal—growing up watching football. Then someone showed me an HDTV for the first time, and when you see that, you’re like, “Wow, that’s incredible.” And it looks super clear: “I’m clear. I’ve got clarity.”

Nick [00:03:00] And it’s not even—that’s not my biggest distinction. My biggest distinction is when you go back to look at the standard-definition TV, it’s almost unwatchable. You’re like, “Well, I could do that before, and that was completely normal.” But now I’ve seen what real clarity can be, it gives you that contrast.

Nick [00:03:00] And so that is always the place to start. So by thinking about where you are in your business, you might want to use some of these guiding questions to think through: “Do I have the clarity that I want?” Rather than, “I’m stuck. I want to go straight to the strategy. I want to grow,” or, “I’ve got too much stuff going on.”

Nick [00:04:00] “I want to move myself from that successful advisor to being the business leader that I really want to be, and understanding my team, and understanding creating leverage.” But first of all, we’ve got to start with: where are you? What are you trying to build?

Nick [00:04:00] Do you want a lifestyle-style practice, so actually you just want efficiencies with the clients that you’re working with? You have an organized system, you’ve got enough clients, but you just want to get deeper with them. You want the system so you’re not doing all the things that you’re doing—the service work, the following up, the reactive work.

Nick [00:04:00] Or do you really want to think about having more advisors in your team? Do you want to scale that way? You’re going to have a lot more volume of clients, and you want to be able to get focused through that level of having the team.

Nick [00:04:00] Or do you want to think about enterprise-wise, where you’ve got a hybrid structure of: okay, there’s a volume of clients I’ve got there—maybe even a fee-based component. We’re building massive AUM, and then there’s a level where me and some higher-level advisors are working with some different tier clients as well.

Nick [00:05:00] And whatever your version of this—and obviously there’s loads of nuance in between that as well—what are you trying to get to? So: volume, depth, hybrid. What then might that look like for you?

Nick [00:05:00] And how do you define success? And what period of time are you looking over for that as well?

Nick [00:05:00] Utilize time. Utilize time as a tool. That comes directly from the Science of Scaling book by Verne Harnish. Great book. Think about the way that you can move that in and out, and then say, “Okay, well, over this amount of time, this is what success looks like for me, and where am I getting to,” right?

Nick [00:05:00] And so you might want to play around with understanding clearly where you are—what actually is real for you—and what do you want over that time? And getting clear about what that picture looks like now—that is much harder than sometimes it sounds. And what could that picture be like in the future? Where am I overall?

Nick [00:06:00] And once we define, okay, like, I want to build simplicity in my practice. I had this quote the other day which I thought was great from a client of mine. Thank you, Rob: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Nick [00:06:00] And so maybe your practice is: okay, I’ve got a book of business, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades. It feels really good. I’m just doing too much stuff myself still. So I want to get really clear about redoing my book. I want to be really clear about handing off some clients. I want to be really clear about my operational process.

Nick [00:06:00] And so when you think about your strategy, then it might be: okay, if I want—I don’t want to add any clients, but I do want to add the clients I want to add, right? So maybe my favorable introduction focus is how I add value to my current clients.

Nick [00:06:00] But if I do want to just go deeper with where I am as well: okay, maybe I want to think about raising my fees. What is it that I’ve done that’s different over the last five, ten years that I haven’t reflected in my business and how I work with my clients? How can this be upside for all of them? The fact that I’m raising my fees—how can that be more value opportunity for them? How can I bring more people in the team to support them overall as well?

Nick [00:06:00] Or maybe it’s about understanding the right people in your team and increasing the capacity by delegating ownership, not tasks.

Nick [00:07:00] And so creating the strategy based on where the clarity is in the first place. And then when it comes to the strategy, we’ve got the specificity as to stuff we can actually work on.

Nick [00:07:00] Because the clarity is going to give you the bigger picture—the result you want to get to—which is really cool. And the strategy works inside of that, plus the actual action plan: how do we get from A to B, or A to Z?

Nick [00:07:00] And then once we’ve created that, you’ve got to have the accountability. We all know accountability is powerful. And again, it’s not about what you know or how you know how to do it; it’s having something or someone or a team or a system outside of you to make sure that follows through.

Nick [00:07:00] Because isn’t it a weird quirk of psychology that we have to convince ourselves to do the things that we already said we want to do? And that is what accountability provides from an external point of view. Because you’re not always going to show up for yourself in that same way.

Nick [00:07:00] And even if you can—if you’re consistent with that—it’s going to take capacity away from what you could do, your highest and best use, to deliver that for yourself.

Nick [00:08:00] What are we measuring each and every week, right? Are we really clear around how many reach outs we’re doing as a team, or how many new leads are coming in through from our marketing efforts?

Nick [00:08:00] What’s a good meeting cadence for me? In the totality of our firm, how many meetings a week do we want to have, right?

Nick [00:08:00] And you could think about this as: this is what I want to get to, so I’m measuring towards that. Or it could just be: I’m just trying to figure out where my baseline is, right? And I feel like I have 10 to 12 meetings a week, but is that really right?

Nick [00:08:00] I had a client tell me just that: 10 to 12 meetings, I think is what I’m doing. I think I could do 18 to 20. And so we said, okay, well, actually, probably that’s 10. Let’s call it 10 average for the year. Let’s make the focus 15. And essentially, add 50% of meetings. And there’s a massive growth strategy just from doing that itself.

Nick [00:08:00] But either way, just getting clear and understanding what your numbers are at. If I’m doing reach outs, I’m doing meetings—how many meetings lead to pieces of business? What’s my average case size? How does that split across the different ways I’m serving my clients?

Nick [00:09:00] Where’s my focus in terms of revenue numbers and adding to my AUM overall? Not just what is my AUM number overall, because that fluctuates with markets. That’s not a number we want to measure on a weekly basis. What we want to measure on a weekly basis is what’s going into it—the net new stuff in there as well.

Nick [00:09:00] And understand everyone’s capacity on the team and get clarity about what actually is real on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis.

Nick [00:09:00] And then overall, it’s about creating ownership in the team as well.

Nick [00:09:00] And so if this is just you, okay, you need to understand: I’m going to likely be the biggest bottleneck. In fact, you’re always going to be, as the owner, the biggest bottleneck in the firm, because it’s your skill set and your capacity and your mindset that is going to prevent the next level of growth.

Nick [00:10:00] And so think about in the team: how can you not just move tasks, but how can you move ownership to other people in the team to understand consistently, systematically building a cadence to have not just the clarity, strategy, and accountability work for you as a thinking framework, but work for you as a practical framework for execution—creating the business and the life you, your family, and your clients all deserve as it comes to being a seven-figure advisor and far beyond.

Nick [00:10:00] Let’s not sacrifice our family. Let’s not sacrifice our health. In fact, let’s use all that stuff to create the best possible outcomes we can for everyone that we touch in our lives.