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Practice Management > Building Your Business

3 Steps to Building Your 2023 Business Plan

By Michael Silver and Eric Sheikowitz

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What You Need to Know

  • Most top-performing advisors and teams commit to writing an annual business and marketing plan. Here's how to do it.

The most successful financial advisors revisit their business planning every year. Here are some questions to jump start the process.

Where are you now? Where do you want to be? How will you get there?

These are fundamental questions that financial advisors regularly ask their prospects and clients as a core part of the financial planning process.

How often do you ask yourselves the same questions? 

As the year quickly winds down, it’s a great time for advisors to answer these questions to develop a robust business and marketing plan for the year ahead. 

The high majority of top performing advisors and teams commit time each year to writing an annual business and marketing plan, while a very small percentage of lower producing advisors put pen to paper to do the same.

In our opinion, the correlation here is not a coincidence; those who have a detailed strategic plan tend to run practices that are both more organized and continue to grow. A good business and marketing plan covers three general areas: 

1. Where are you now?

Take a snapshop of your practice as it exists today.  Look at the metrics of your practice thus far for 2022 – how much in new assets acquired, revenue produced, new relationships established, the types of clients targeted and acquired, and the marketing approaches used to attract new business.

2. Where do you want to be?

Set detailed goals for the year ahead.  This may sound simple, but the key is to be specific and to challenge and stretch yourself while still being realistic. The more specific you can be for each of your goals, the more likely you are to achieve them.

Start with a high-level goal then drill down to define what strategies, tactics and action steps will lead you to achieve the goal(s).  Some areas of focus can include: crafting a robust marketing plan for clients, prospects and trusted advisors, defining your ideal client profile, planning intimate events, developing a new client onboarding process and examining the structure of your team.

3. How will you get there?

Make sure to execute on your plans in a tactical way. If you do a good job on the specifics of mapping out your goals, the execution becomes almost a paint-by-numbers exercise.

If one goal is to gain more clients by partnering with accountants and attorneys, then the execution involves asking clients and other business associates for the for the names and contact information of their trusted advisers.

The next step is to build a database of prospective partners and methodically meet and evaluate them for their partnership and referral potential. Lastly, choose a select group of like-minded professionals to partner and do joint marketing with.

Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. This is an old saying, and there are few places it rings truer than in the financial advisory industry.

The coming year is full of uncertainty, and even some of the best-laid plans are likely to need revisiting. But those advisors who have established a framework for creating goals and taking steps to actually achieving them have a huge head start on whatever the new year may throw at them.

Close out the year by crafting a robust business and marketing plan to help set your practice on the right path for success in the New Year!

Michael Silver and Eric Sheikowitz are speakers, coaches and consultants with Focus Partners, a practice management consultancy based in Paramus, New Jersey. 

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