Power in Practice: Wrapping Up

The business vision in your plan provides three things, the program teaches: focus, focus, focus. The “production enhancement” focus requires participants to achieve at least 20 points of revenue-generating activity either daily (for smaller, earlier-career advisors) or weekly (for more established advisors.) The five activities that yield the best chances of increasing production are introductions, referrals, networking, small social events for clients, and building strategic alliances with associated professionals. While some advisors are better at some of these activities than others, setting numeric goals for these activities helps build a focus on revenue-generating activity.

The tools in the program include Excel worksheets that participants use to track their progress on the 20-point system and on the five other main goals of the program: leadership, human resources management, operations management, marketing management and risk management. Progress on achieving the calendarized goals on the worksheets can and should be shared with other advisors in your firm, but accountability on the goals is ensured by the other members of each participant’s peer group.

Peer Pressure and Encouragement

Spreadsheets. Conference calls. One-on-one coaching sessions. Writing business and marketing and HR plans. Setting increased production goals. Writing succession plans and continuity agreements. Conducting technology audits. Tracking revenue and expenses. Creating an annual budget and forecast. Defining the ideal client. Tiering your services to A, B and C clients. Building sustainable, repeatable processes. Benchmarking your business financials yearly.

The above are all addressed in the Power in Practice program and participants are encouraged to complete all those tasks in a systematic, calendarized way. Those discrete activities are also part of an overall plan, with the goal to build a business by documenting core processes and monitoring progress. As one participant said to the group, the program “brings flow charts into our procedures, using staff input,” which “gets us to see our business as a series of processes.”

If Commonwealth reps are selected for the program, they pony up $4,000 to participate (though they get the lion’s share of those dollars back if they complete the program), so they have skin in the game from the beginning. Since a core basis for the program is to learn from and to teach your peers, the participants are separated into two different groups based on their production levels. At the end of the fourth and final workshop of the year, the entire year’s learnings are reviewed, including a “final exam.” However, that exam is an “open book” test that each peer group fills out together, again reinforcing the program’s ethos.

What makes the program successful to this observer, and which could be copied by other organizations, is the power of peers, in Joni Youngwirth’s words. The 40-odd participants in the final workshop run firms of different sizes. Some are more successful than other participants. They have different client niches, and work in cities and rural areas. What they have in common is an openness to learning from other advisors and a feeling of accountability to their peers.

Here’s an example. The 40 participants didn’t sit in a lecture hall for the workshop. Instead, we sat at round tables in groups of six to eight, mixed up in terms of age, gender, firm size and experience. During one session that focused on how to deal with unexpected change, I presented my table with a personnel “situation” that happened to be challenging at the time. These five business owners probed me for additional details for 30 minutes or so, and each then suggested courses of action to deal with this unexpected issue. I got some very good advice from these experienced people, and they had just met me.

The other participants had been working in their peer mentor groups for a year. They knew the ins and outs of each other’s businesses. They had learned about each other’s successes and failures. They had forged strong relationships with each other. In their phone calls and in-person meetings, they had traveled along similar roads, completed the same assignments, had brainstormed within their peer groups. They felt a sense of accountability to each other. They hadn’t just vented about their problems, or sat in a classroom to be lectured at by a practice management consultant—not that there’s anything wrong with consultants. Most of the successful advisors I know have business coaches and personal coaches. They join local or even national study groups. From those successful advisors, I’ve heard how valuable those coaches and peer study groups can be.

The Power in Practice participants had much in common, not least of which that they are independent contractor reps, a notoriously independent-minded group, all of whom do business through Commonwealth Financial. The program, since it is sponsored by and run by Commonwealth, no doubt helps build the firm’s culture and makes it more likely that those participant reps will retain their affiliation with the firm. After all, when it comes to succession planning, I would think these participants would look favorably on making a deal with one of their fellow participants. They would also know that their fellow participants are serious enough about building their businesses to implement business plans and to document their core processes.

Learning from your peers is one thing; learning how to build a business and act like a CEO is another. The independent advice business remains a fairly lonely profession. Many solo practitioners are happy with their lifestyle practices: It meets their needs now and they can serve their clients now. But if you want to build a business that grows in value and meets the ongoing needs of your clients, a program like Power in Practice would be a very good start.