Spend 75% or more of your time doing things that have a direct positive result in your success, namely, staying in constant touch with their clients and exceeding their expectations. These builds trust.
Create a rigorous client acquisition and retention plan. Spend as much time keeping your current clients satisfied acquiring new clients.
Only take clients that meet all your parameters.
Create a sophisticated but simple asset management philosophy that takes very little time once implemented. It should include asset protection as well as growth. Identify where the best advice comes from and rely on it. Create a passion for personal development.
Set a New Year’s Resolution to greatly enhance your communication skills.
Do something wonderful for someone every day.
Partner up with a few of the best wholesalers in your territory. They know what all the top advisors are doing correctly and can help you design great events for prospects and clients.
Write a letter to all of your top clients and tell them how much you treasure their relationships.
Identify the top twenty prospects in your community and develop a plan to reach out to them.
Read Richard Capalbo’s “The Ultimate Customers Service Model and put it into practice
Create value.
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Define your annual goal and then break it up into a weekly goal both in terms of appointments and sales
Retain your top 60 reps. Send them a handwritten letter telling them how important their business is to you and how you are willing to help them in any way to continue to earn their business
Bring on 25 new reps each from the 3 most substantial firms in your territory
Double the amount of time you spend with your top 60
Identify 20 new reps that can do $1 million in sales and overwhelm them. These are producers that you already have but a currently doing less than $500,000.00
Focus on 50 additional new prospects
Create 4 events on practice management, one each quarter, where you ask your top producers to bring a colleague to the event
Team up with your mutual fund counterparts to help producers create a portfolio protection plan for 2024
Help the financial advisors with their top New Years Resolutions for 2024
Become Relevant and Add Value. Let your clients know that you are the best wholesaler in their area to partner up with and why!
I was very fortunate as I was a beneficiary of many outstanding mentors. Great mentors focus on helping to shape other people’s character, values, self-awareness, and skills sets related to their lives and their professions.
First, I was blessed with great parents. My father was my first mentor and among the many things he taught me was to take a purposeful view on ethics. I remember him saying to me that in this world there are paths that you can take which are obviously good and there are paths that are obviously bad but the problem always comes with the things that lie in the grey area. When something is in a grey area folks most often will interpret it in a way that they see as beneficial to them. This is usually a biased viewpoint. The key to following an ethical life is when you are faced with something grey, you seek someone else’s opinion for confirmation rather than proceeding on your own. As a marketing director and later as a CEO, I was often saved from doing something unethical by following this “get someone else’s opinion rule.”
When I began my career on Wall Street, I met another mentor by the name of Bill Hirt. Bill was an EVP at Dean Witter but later went on to become the Chairman of Capital Research. He convinced me that the key to any financial advisors’ success was assets under management (AUM), and not activity. This became an imprimatur emblazoned on my soul and led me to constantly look for ways and methods to increase AUM. This may seem obvious to many now, but it wasn’t in 1970. I had about a twenty-five-year lead on the rest of the Street thanks to Bill Hirt. Understanding this was one of the keys to my successful career on Wall Street.
My next mentor was Theodore (Ted) Levitt. He taught me that the purpose of a business was to create and keep a customer. He also taught me the way to do that was by providing customers with products that fulfilled their needs. He convinced me that too often salespeople sold the products they had rather than the products their clients needed causing an immediate disconnect in client trust. As a marketing director this thought really came in handy and helped me define the difference between Sales and Marketing.
In the mid 1970’s I had to good fortune to be exposed to Peter Drucker.
The many lessons I learned from Peter, are far too numerous to go into in this piece but perhaps the most enlightening one was his insistence on getting rid of things. He famously reminded me that “if you don’t excrete you die.” He said the human body as a matter of fact, excretes waste to make room for more nourishment. Similarly, it is necessary to get rid of things such as bad ideas, bad relationships, and a whole host of other things, in order to grow.
Peter’s concept of getting rid of bad ideas was further embellished by another one of my mentors, Hyrum Smith. Hyrum developed a reality model that demonstrated how bad ideas are generated in the first place and how to get rid of them. He taught me that I should constantly be asking myself, “ What do I believe in that is wrong?” This is an exercise that helped me get rid of a lot of garbage over the years and avoid a plethora of mistakes.
Two of my fondest mentors were DeWitt Jones and Tom Morris. DeWitt taught me that there is more than one right answer. As a result of constantly looking for more than one right answer it unlocked a fountain of knowledge I would have never dreamed of and let me to some very creative solutions to problems. Tom Morris, who is a modern-day philosopher, gave me the secret to life.
He taught me how to create “a robust capacity to enjoy the process.” Not only did I benefit from this, but I have shared this concept over the years with thousands of people many of whom still thank me.
Along the way there were others such a Larry Biederman who taught me how to delegate, Tubby Burnham, who taught me to always have all the voted in my hand before going before the executive committee to get approval, and finally, Jeremy Siegal who taught me that stocks always return to the mean. One of the most important lessons for successful investing.
So,I really believe that my personal and business life were both shaped in a very positive way by mentors. If you have not been as fortunate as I have in being exposed to many great mentors, than I suggest you reach out to me and I can help you get the benefit of mine.
, 2023
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