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Practice Management > Building Your Business

How to take your business to the next level

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Are you seeking to grow your business to massive amounts of gross revenue? Would you like to see your business booming? Wouldn’t it be nice to have prospective clients beating a path to your door?

You are about to read how super-advisor Ron Carson broke through multiple barriers to build his multimillion-dollar advisory practice and generate more than $15 million of gross revenue.

Through this chronological story line, you may be able to glean some insight into how your practice can grow and flourish. During a presentation he gave in April in Arizona, Ron expressed how his 30-year career grew exponentially when he focused on various disciplines that helped him explode his business in an s-curve pattern.

You are somewhere with your business right now. Where you are is where you are. But where do you want to be? If you want to get from here to there, you need to implement some basic fundamentals to help you grow.

Ron Carson went from $140,000 in revenue in 1989 to $1 million in 1991, and he credits system integration as the key to his growth. By systematizing everything in his practice, he had every one of his team members document everything they did. He did the same, and then they created a systems manual. This manual became the operations guide to help them develop intentional competency. By knowing what they were doing as individuals, they developed a clearer vision of what they were doing as a team. The teamwork improved, and the business grew 10-fold in two years.

Some of the things they documented included establishing account minimums for new business of at least $250,000 and setting up communications standards with clients to chart how each client would receive 100 touches per year. Clients would receive a weekly market commentary, a monthly newsletter, quarterly calls and at least an annual review.

In addition to this, Ron began to systematize his sales presentations. When he followed a pattern of how he presented his recommendations and action plan, he could improve that presentation with each presentation. Finally, he developed what he called love-affair marketing. Ron put one person in charge of being in touch with current and prospective clients in a personal and relational way. This relationship marketing specialist would create random acts of kindness for clients in need or celebrating exciting times in their lives, such as wedding anniversaries or the birth of a grandchild.

When he catapulted his practice from $1 million to $2.4 million in four years (from 1992 to 1996), he credited his success to hiring A-plus staff and paying them on a performance basis. In addition to paying his team members a salary, he created a team bonus that rewarded them for accomplishing personal and team goals. One example of a team bonus is to pay a 20 percent bonus on base pay, split into four personal goals and one corporate goal. Each of these five goals is worth 20 percent of the overall 20 percent performance-based bonus. When team members write their goals down every quarter and track them for success, every team member gets more focused and stays on track together.

See also: Hire winners, not whiners

From 1997 to 2000, Ron’s business grew from $2.4 million to $4.8 million in revenue. He credits “passion prospecting” as the secret to this s-curve explosion. Next month, we will follow his pathway from $5 million to $15 million in revenue. If you want to learn from Carson Wealth Management’s success principals, you may revisit this column next month. For additional information, read Ron’s book “Tested in the Trenches” or look into his coaching program at www.joinpeak.com.

For more from Brent Welch, see:

S-curve explosions

5 ways to charge fees

The 4 percent myth


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