Fast-Track Your Success

1. Focus on Fewer, Wealthier, Clients. Quite simply, the most successful advisors have fewer, wealthier clients. The sooner you really “get” this and start running your businesses accordingly, the sooner greater financial and lifestyle success will come your way. (Note that with fewer clients, you will inherently be pulled in fewer directions, leaving your attention and schedule less fragmented.) This may mean turning down clients who are too small, pruning your book, and finding other ways to cultivate a smaller base of truly affluent clients.

2. Specialize in a Niche. You can’t be all things to all people. In every area of endeavor, from law to medicine to business, specialists do better than generalists. If you specialize in an affluent niche, you’ll be able to better serve those in the niche, which will rapidly enable you to work with — you guessed it — fewer but wealthier clients. A great way to nail down a niche is to conduct center-of-influence interviews with the niche’s movers and shakers. These will help you quickly determine the needs of those in the prospective niche and the best way to meet those needs.

3. Market Effectively: Far too many advisors fail to market effectively. On the one hand, they don’t do the two things that work best: implement a formal referral program for existing clients, and develop strategic relationships with accountants and attorneys (especially trust and estate attorneys). Note that occasionally receiving a referral from a client is not the same thing as regularly asking for referrals as part of your standard operating procedure. And occasionally having lunch with an attorney or accountant is not the same thing as creating a formal strategic relationship that benefits everyone involved. On the other hand, mass marketing is almost always wasted time (and money). Yes, it’s easy to buy a big list and send out a compliance-watered-down marketing piece, but the ROI on this rarely makes sense.

4. Regularly Ask for Additional Assets. Just as a formal referral program works wonders, regularly asking your existing client for additional assets is an easy and effective “must do.”

5. Increase Time Spent on Client-Facing Activities. Our research consistently shows that advisors who spend the most time on client-facing activities have the greatest incomes. It follows, then, that outsourcing all but your core client-facing functions makes sense, beginning with money management and IT functions.

Being Successful on PurposMost extraordinarily successful advisors are extraordinarily proactive about their careers. They understand that businesses do not flourish by themselves, but that a business plan, a marketing plan and an ongoing focus on profitability are necessities. They also understand the importance of leveraging known drivers of success, such as the five key strategies listed above. And they not only orient themselves toward working with fewer but wealthier clients, they make certain that they offer these affluent clients the services they are looking for in the ways they are looking for them.

Ultimately, the only truly finite resource in this business is your time. So make sure your time to succeed doesn’t run out while you keep doing things the same old way. Instead, go ahead and take the necessary leap of faith. If you take the right leap, the net (profit) will appear.

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Patricia J. Abram is a senior managing partner with CEG Worldwide in Florida; see www.cegwordwide.com.