What Most Financial Advisors Get Wrong About Work-Life Balance

[00:00:00] Nick: Your goal might be to meet with seven of those a week, but you might be only doing five. And maybe the systems you've got in place is not robust quite enough to get you there. And also there might be, there's gonna be stuff going on in other parts of your life to getting pulled around to, because you've got demands As, as a parent, you've got demands as a spouse, you've got demands as other parts of your businesses in your life.

[00:00:18] Nick: And it's okay. Right? And, and sometimes you just need to reset, is clear that it's important to make sure that we have a plan. and on a baseline level, obviously it makes sense, right? If life won't go to plan, if you haven't got one. What are the parameters, what that looks like? What's the nuance of goal setting overall and what's difference between a plan and goal setting?

[00:00:37] Nick: And a lot of this is semantics. We've gotta be clear what it means to you in any given sense. And ultimately, I believe we need to have a vision for where we're going. What's the bigger thing that we're going for right now? And define timeline around that. And then on a, on a practical year on year focus, we should have a plan, a business plan for that year.

[00:00:52] Nick: And then we should be to break that down into quarters and see where our focus is for that quarter and break that down into months and do the same thing, and then weeks into the same thing and days into the same thing. And before you know it, you're actually doing the thing in front of you. It's the smallest task you can possibly do at the moment that's actually gonna lead you to the bigger outcomes you wanna get to down the line as well.

[00:01:10] Nick: I'm also a big believer in sprints because business is complex. There's lots of layers that you need to set up to keep the standards going, to create the stability. You've talked about systems a lot to put that together. So sprintin a quarter or a month is really, really cool. I'm gonna focus on this set of clients.

[00:01:28] Nick: 'cause I believe that there's a big opportunity with this set of 60 or a hundred clients right now that I wanna serve them with. And so I'm gonna set up with my team and I'm gonna set up with people that are supporting me to say, this is the sheet that we're working off, or this is the system that we're working off.

[00:01:42] Nick: My goal is to meet with all of these people in the next three months. Okay? If I do that, then that means I've gotta have seven meetings a week with these people and then set out and go do it now. We know that anything that worth doing takes a while. It's gonna take a while to get there. Uh, because that sustained success takes a while to create that sustainability and track, create that consistency to get the result.

[00:02:05] Nick: Anything that we can get immediately is probably not worth the value that we really wanna, we wanna wanna get out of something or we can put into something. Um, but so it's easy to get also out of whack along the way. 'cause you might be, uh, averaging those seven meetings, but maybe those seven meetings are five of the people that you want and two of the people you don't want.

[00:02:24] Nick: And I had this week and a couple of different times 'cause I, I'm definitely advocate a sprint with my clients. I should be really think about in your business, like what's your focus right now? What's the immediate thing that you're focusing on? It could be doing another part of your business.

[00:02:37] Nick: It could be bringing in someone in your team. It could be. Buying a book, having an acquisition and onboarding that and seeing what that might look like. But it also might just be that one set of clients I wanna focus on right now. where do I wanna put my focus? When you do that, you get a laser effect, like you get all the heat in one place, which allows you to really warm something up to get it really hot, and therefore to add a lot of value into it.

[00:02:57] Nick: But it's easy to get distracted along the way, so Your goal might be to meet with seven of those a week, but you might be only doing five. And maybe the systems you've got in place is not robust quite enough to get you there. And also there might be, there's gonna be stuff going on in other parts of your life to getting pulled around to, because you've got demands As, as a parent, you've got demands as a spouse, you've got demands as other parts of your businesses in your life.

[00:03:18] Nick: And it's okay. Right? And, and sometimes you just need to reset, right? And that's the, that's the power of checking in, right? So if you've got a sprint over a month or a quarter, you wanna make sure that you're checking in a lot. Because if you start. That sprint, January the first, and you say, okay, we're doing this until the end of Q1, and you check in the last day of March, the chances of you getting your result very, very small.

[00:03:40] Nick: Is it to do with commitment? No. Is it to do with humanity? Yes. Your commitment level might be up here when you first start, and you might think it's also up here as you're going through and at the end other things come in and pull us away. And so the further we are up in our focus, in our business growth, in our journey, uh, the more ruthless we have to be in distractions.

[00:04:02] Nick: And so while thinking about you wanna add to your business in terms of growth, in terms of client load. Actually, you need to dis uh, remove things. You need to subtract things to prevent yourself from being distracted along the way. And so it's hard sometimes to get that right in your mind because, it seems like it doesn't quite fit.

[00:04:19] Nick: It seems like it's the opposite approach, but as I've heard from this week, it's like, oh, I was talking about these other set of clients, which I kind of think it's worth spending time with. I think I can have value to 'em right now, but, they're not the set clients that I said I would reach out to because they had this opportunity that was most important.

[00:04:35] Nick: And it just distracts from what's most important.

[00:04:37] Nick: So the point is get really clear about what your focus is, understand where your sprint is in any different different area, but know that you are gonna get distracted along the way. Don't trust your equipment. Don't trust your your memory. Don't trust the fact that you think you've got it. Make sure you've got the system set up for your team and that accountability to deliver on the things that you said is most important.

[00:04:56] Nick: You give the value to your clients that you wanna give business.