The 60-Day AUM Sprint: The Simple Math Most Advisors Skip

Nick [00:00:00] Now, if success is going from one to 10, and 10 is you see the outcome, this is why falling in love with the process is such an important part to enjoy what that looks like. The goal is not to be able to skip from one to 10 just to get the result, but the goal is to understand the one through 10 process in which each of those numbers, what they do, and the value of them individually in order to get through them as efficiently as possible.

Intro [00:00:00] Welcome to the Seven Figure Advisor Podcast,

Speaker 3 [00:00:00] 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 [00:00:00] Here's your host, Nick Davies.

Nick [00:01:00] As advisors, you love numbers, right? You do the precision and you get it just right for your clients. You spend time going over the plan, you know exactly how it's laid out, what they want. Is there any part of you thinking, "Man, I'm not quite doing that for myself in my own business the way I do it for my clients."

Nick [00:01:00] It's pretty common. It's okay. Oftentimes you might be thinking as well that, "Well, I know that stuff. I should be really precise in terms of how I'm tracking my production numbers, how I'm tracking my AUM income numbers." And sometimes the danger of knowing something is that you tend to know it and therefore don't get the push psychologically, or the pain, to go ahead and make sure that you're actually doing it.

Nick [00:02:00] So let's break down and make it clear. And even if you've got a version of this already, that's okay. It's worth looking at and going, "Okay, is it right?" Like anything, we want to continually make better. We want to focus on continuous improvement. And even if things are great, even if things are exactly where you want them to be, if you don't continue to push forward and try and make them better, they're not going to stay the same. They're certainly not going to get better. They're only going to get worse.

Nick [00:02:00] And so we want to make sure we're super clear on the things that we're tracking and measuring inside of our businesses that are the most important part. And this is basic stuff, right? And, as I often will say, the basics aren't for beginners. This is about trading up on the basics, right? If you're a championship fighter and you win the championship, you come back, you're like, "Yeah, I've got a week off," and you come back to the gym. First thing you do, you just throw in a jab, right? Or you're doing some fundamental training, you jump rope, something like that, because it always is about coming back to the fundamentals.

Nick [00:03:00] Now, if success is going from one to 10, and 10 is you see the outcome, this is why falling in love with the process is such an important part to enjoy what that looks like. The goal is not to be able to skip from one to 10 just to get the result, but the goal is to understand the one through 10 process in which each of those numbers, what they do, and the value of them individually in order to get through them as efficiently as possible.

Nick [00:03:00] So whether you're in the first five years, whether you're 20 years in or more, it's coming back to the basics and saying, "Okay, right now, how am I doing number one versus how I was doing it before? Does the number one I'm focused on now fit with where it should be in my business right now, or am I doing it to a lesser version of it?"

Nick [00:03:00] So practically speaking, what could that look like in terms of me structuring my goals? Right. So let's think about your AUM collection, right? If you're in a business of building recurring revenue and you want to add value to your clients by making sure that you look after their money for the future, you want to be really clear about breaking it down in the most simple way as possible.

Nick [00:04:00] Now there's many ways of doing this, but this is a simple way of getting clear about what it is. The point is: what are you doing? Are you clear about what you're doing, and do you know if it's working or not? Are you tracking and measuring it? Of course, we're always going back to the format here of clarity, strategy, accountability.

Nick [00:04:00] And so for the sake of this, really simple is that let's just say you've got a 60-day sprint. I love sprints. Sprints are really cool because it allows you to compress time and get a lot of results in a small amount of time, for you to get a lot of information, also to know how to do it better next time.

Nick [00:04:00] Now, sprints by their very nature cannot be continuous. And so you have to put it in a time-bound bucket to focus on a particular area in order that you can get that result, understand what it is, and then play the game again. And so sprints are really powerful to compress that. I mean, think of it this way around, right?

Nick [00:05:00] If you were learning to play tennis and, like me and my wife did a couple years ago, we started to play tennis and we were playing every week, and it was fun. We enjoyed it, but we weren't really getting any better because playing once a week, it was fun, but week one to week two, we got better, but after that it started to really fall off.

Nick [00:05:00] But if we had some coaching, some training, and we were intense on that, and let's say for a week we did two hours of training in a day—two hours of training to play tennis a day—10 hours in a week versus one hour over 10 weeks, what do you think will be the biggest results you would get? It's certainly much quicker.

Nick [00:05:00] If you did that 10 hours over one week and you did spaced repetition for one hour a week over the next eight weeks, you're going to get so much further along. And so think about this sprint as really getting really powerful and knowing what works and building new habits in your business as well.

Nick [00:05:00] So how do you do it? We go: are you clear about what are you trying to get to? What is that 60-day, let's say, or 30-day, 90-day, whatever it is—what is the actual outcome you want to get to? And what is the goal in total AUM, net new AUM coming in as well?

Nick [00:06:00] And of course, really important here not to measure your total AUM, because that way you're going to be looking at market fluctuations. So you want to just look at net new AUM. And you want to break that down to case size as well. And of course, this is going to be whatever is appropriate for clients, but the more you focus on, the more you're going to zoom in on those opportunities, right?

Nick [00:06:00] And so we want to get clear about the outcome you want to get to. What does that typically break down to in a case size for you? What's your close rate? And maybe even what's your show rate—who doesn't show up for your meetings? And then from that, you're going to understand: okay, what is my meeting rate total? And then across those weeks, what that actually needs to be if we're saying 60 days.

Nick [00:06:00] And so what we want to do then is break down to, in each given week: how many prospects do I need? How many calls do I need to call on to get the prospects? How many meetings do I actually need each week in order to fulfill that as well? And then actually how many meetings are held, and that leads to closed meetings, which leads to net new AUM coming in as well.

Nick [00:07:00] So in each and every given week, what you want to get to is to take all this work and do it upfront so you're not having to redo it every time. This is something I see all the time for advisors because most of you people are smart, and because you're smart, you're able to go through and do this work on a consistent basis and just redo it every time, essentially.

Nick [00:07:00] Do not do that. Don't use your capacity for smarts to do the work that you could do once and come back to. Use that to provide value to your clients, for goodness sake.

Nick [00:07:00] Okay. So example could be: how many first meetings do I need to get booked in a week, right? If I know that if I need to hold 10 meetings a week, let's say, maybe I need to book 12, because two may not show up, right? Got to give yourself some room there.

Nick [00:07:00] Or my conversion rate from that might be five, and whatever my average case size is, and then follow up same day. I need to make sure always that I am following up. What systems do I need to have in play as well to do that?

Nick [00:08:00] So each given day, every given week, you need to know: how many reach outs do I need to do? How many meetings do I need to book? And that's actually going to lead to those closed meetings and that new AUM coming in.

Nick [00:08:00] Key point here is thinking about who is doing this in my team. Now, likely you're watching this, listening to this, you've probably got a couple of people that are helping you and your team at least, but maybe you haven't as well. But you want to think about, okay, if it's not me, I'm not going to have the willpower to follow this through every day, so I need someone in my team to hold onto this to bring it to me rather than me having to go and get it.

Nick [00:08:00] And if you haven't got that someone in the team, you want to use maybe someone you work with, maybe a joint work partner, maybe your coach, maybe someone outside of that, so you have the accountability to follow through, create the system that works for you on a consistent basis, right? And you want to start to create that daily rhythm.

Nick [00:09:00] We've talked about rhythm before, lots and lots, so you know every given day I've got my time in the calendar to do my reach outs, or to make sure my team is doing these reach outs to get the calls booked. Because consistency in the calls booked is going to lead me consistent opportunities to add value to clients and prospects that's going to absolutely allow me to win my AUM sprint goal in the next 90 days or 60 days.

Nick [00:09:00] Super powerful to think about the precision here, and I bet you're going, "I know this," but are you actually doing it? And are you doing it to a level where you know it's working? Are you able to assess through the sprint period? Do you reset every quarter? Maybe so, but also how could it be even better?

Nick [00:09:00] How could you transfer it away from you? Are you concerned that it's always you having to go out there and go grab it? How might you transfer it to someone in your team—not the task, but the ownership of that—such that you can be free to add value to your most important clients, go out there to your centers of influence and drive value, drive production, drive impact to your clients, drive impact to your family, and create a better life for everyone.

Speaker 4 [00:09:00] Thanks for listening to today's episode. Hit the Follow button to be notified of new episodes and visit seven-figure-advisor.com for more resources and to connect directly with Nick. See you next time.