The complete conversation, in order. 1,609 words.
[00:00:00] Nick: Being available for your clients 24/7 is not good service. Think about this. Your Going through your week and you wanna, you know, add value to your clients, you wanna also pick up your kids, right? I mean, you're telling your clients, "Hey, let me know if you need anything. I'm here for you." And, and whilst that in theory sounds good, you are not respecting your time, you're not packaging your time, you're not protecting your time.
[00:00:26] Nick: And if you're not doing that, no one else will as well. I really like get reminded that the more that we can protect our time, the more we honor our time, the more clients will appreciate and value it as well. If you think about it, a client calls and says, "Hey, I wanna speak to... I wanna speak to you. I need s- I need to speak to this, the guy."
[00:00:44] Nick: And your assistant picks up or someone on your team picks up or they email, uh, and they say, "I need to speak to, I need to speak to John. I need to speak to the head guy," or, "I need to speak to the person that's in charge. I need to speak to the person that I have the relationship with." Really what they want is just their, their problem solved.
[00:00:58] Nick: They don't necessarily need to speak to you. And so if you think about being available all the time is not necessarily what they value. Because if they hear, "Oh, absolutely, you can speak to, uh, your advisor, your, the, the planner, absolutely. And the next time that she's available is, like, two weeks on Tuesday."
[00:01:17] Nick: Right? It, it's, it's a case of, "Okay, well, we'll help you right now, but if, if you wanna speak to the person, it's gonna take that long to do." Because think about it, when it comes to planning, it's not an emergency. That's really your key skill, uh, as the head person is to be, is to be the planet. Do the planning and do the long-term impact to, to your clients.
[00:01:37] Nick: Uh, but that's not likely that that's gonna be an emergency, not gonna be urgent in that fact. And so really think about it from that, that perspective. The more systems you can put on that front end, the more that they're gonna respect it. And that way that they're gonna really know that if they're gonna come to you and you, and they te- you're gonna get less inquiries for, for your time because your team's gonna deal with these situations in the first place.
[00:01:57] Nick: And when it does come to you, they'll be really thinking about that you're gonna be the person that actually needs to, to be there in that, in that instance for your client. And the client's gonna perceive even more value from you as well because if that person's got a system set up in the front end, it's like, "Oh, they must really know what they're doing.
[00:02:13] Nick: They're taking care of my money. I don't need to speak to them as well." Really helps on the front end when you're building that relationship. When I think about we wanna be really on purpose about building your, your week because as you got to be an established advisor, as you got to be successful, you brought on assets, you started to see that recurring income come.
[00:02:29] Nick: You know, it now is real, and you can trust yourself. Be like, "Oh, wow, look, I can do this. I am adding tons of value, and I, I can live on this." Right? "More than that, I'm starting to thrive with my family." But you still might be feeling a little like what you did before is run fast to make this work, and you're still kind of running after it, and it's taking on this snowball effect where it's really hard to do so.
[00:02:49] Nick: And so you gotta think about, okay, reset, zoom back out, and start to design the week that you want in order to fit inside it. It's not gonna work the other way around. It's not gonna be, once it gets to, I will do this. You have to start in the place that you're at Uh, and then reset in order to move it to where you want to get to.
[00:03:11] Nick: Now, of course, in this scenario, uh, you can't just like click your fingers and it'll all be fixed, right? You're still gonna have some things from before that will move into that new s- new situation. As you change the standards you go-- as you go through, uh, there'll be some clients that perhaps won't fit into that, and we'll have to think about that as well.
[00:03:29] Nick: But first things first, it's gotta be what are you creating going forward? How can you have yourself a no distraction week? And it starts by thinking about, well, what actually is a good week? And so just this week, working with one of my clients, we talked about like, how many meetings in a week is a good set of meetings for you?
[00:03:47] Nick: What do you want to look like? He said, "Well, I, I, I'm, I don't wanna work Fridays." Okay, good. And I should say, by the way, out of all the clients I've worked with, every time someone stop-- says, "I've stopped working Fridays," what always happens is that their business always leaps when they do that. Because you kind of create a forcing function for things that, uh, must be true to, to complete during the time that's available, rather than just expand the time.
[00:04:10] Nick: As Parkinson's law says, uh, things expand, uh, with the time you fill it. Uh, things expand to fill the time that you provide for it, rather. And- We've got to be really on purpose about what that is. So let's just say Fridays I'm not working. Mondays is mostly my CEO time or mostly my team time. Maybe I want to have one meeting on Monday, and maybe I want to have three meetings Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
[00:04:35] Nick: And so you can total that up, it's 10 meetings a week, right? And if you've got 10 meetings a week, it's like, oh, well, if I'm doing 10 meetings a week, that allows me time to think about CEO time, think about my team time, think about working on business and, and through that CEO time and add value to my most set of clients.
[00:04:51] Nick: If I've only got 10 meetings a week, I'll make damn sure that those meetings are the right meetings as well. And so by giving yourself that premise, it's creating a forcing function to where you want to go to, really allows you to back into what's really important as well. So practically, tactically, there's loads of ways to do this.
[00:05:06] Nick: Okay, what is an ideal week? Write that down. Put your meetings in there. Set out your week and like actually time block that, put that in the calendar. Because it's amazing to me how many high-level planners still aren't protecting their time and are clear about, okay, look, here's a couple of rules. If it's not in the calendar, it doesn't exist.
[00:05:24] Nick: If it's not written down, it doesn't exist. How can you possibly, uh, run a highly effective company, uh, if you're, you're working by what you might remember or might not remember? And you might say, "I've got a great memory." Good for you. Make sure that we use that good memory for things that are creative on the upside.
[00:05:43] Nick: Use that CPU power, not just for remembering I've got to reach back out to that client, or I've got to tell my teams reach back out to that client. I would recommend that we just expect that we're gonna forget everything. It leaves you that creative space to go to the next level in your business and think about some of the stuff that you've been wanting to do for your clients for a while that you haven't got around to because you're too busy remembering doing the follow-ups.
[00:06:07] Nick: Make sure that that application gets processed, even though someone on your team is responsible for it as well. So really think about what is your ideal week? What must be true for you? Zoom back out. Don't be in the, "Oh, I can't do that right now." Let's zoom back out and create what that is, because if you wanna build and go through that next ceiling of where you are, you've got to put yourself into the shoes of where you wanna get to.
[00:06:28] Nick: What's the version of you that you wanna create in the next 12 months, at the end of the next 24 months, in the next 36 months? Not looking forward, but looking at that point backwards and saying, "Okay, at this point, this is gonna be true for me. This is what my life looks like. Okay, and how do I back into that?"
[00:06:44] Nick: And it starts from going from that perspective. Suspend your disbelief in the moment and go forward and create the life that you want through the business you deserve and the impact you're having to your clients without sacrificing time with your family and looking after yourself.
