Why Independent Advisors Struggle To Grow Their Business, And How To Fix It

Have you ever wanted to grow your independent financial practice but are struggling to keep up with the daily grind??

Have you ever wondered how these bigger RIAs and IARs are producing a significant amount of new business year over year and still take vacations as they please??

If so, you aren’t alone.

The most five common problems I see advisors having are:

• I’m not getting enough leads
• I’m working too many hours and am getting burned out
• My staff consistently make stupid errors
• My sub-advisors are not closing enough business
• I’m tired of doing seminars

Sound like you?

The problem with wanting to grow your practice into a high-producing practice is that what you do at the beginning of your career and at the beginning of your independent practice is completely different from what you will be doing when you run a high-producing practice. If you want to run a business, then you can’t keep seeing your clients like you used to see them. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You cannot do everything. At some point, you will hit your ceiling.?

Makes sense, right?

Let me elaborate. When you first started your career, you probably started on the insurance side selling annuities or life insurance or you started on the securities side and sold mutual funds or another particular type of investment. At some point, you may have realized that you’re pretty good at sales, that the compensation may be better if you went out on your own, and that you would rather work for yourself than continue working for your boss who’s always hounding you on sales quotas and goals.

So, one day, you leave and start your own practice. After a year or two, you find yourself with one or two staff members. Now, you’ve got payroll, HR to worry about, training, managing, marketing, compliance, and so on. The list just got significantly bigger, and you’re taking it all on. It’s a lot of hats to wear.?

At this point, you’re always working and may be starting to resent your business. This is when you become an employee to your creation. The business owns you and your time. It’s up to you to keep going. Oh, and by the way, not only are your clients depending on you to properly manage their funds, but you have your staff’s livelihood to think about. You can’t just let them go. That would be a failure, right??

This is the common progression that is the result of the “hustle” becoming a business that is not built to scale.?

Luckily, through great mentors, and my own experiences (I’ll share my story at the end of this article), I’ve discovered how to avoid this common disaster…

To grow your practice into a high-producing practice without working yourself to death,? you need to:

• Quantify your business down to a single number to focus on (IE number of first appointments per month)
• Implement systems that can scale so you don’t bottleneck your growth (See Harvard Business Review’s article “Who’s got the monkey”)
• Create a unique, marketable asset that separates you from all the other advisors around
• Optimize that asset so that it consistently generates qualified leads for as little cost as possible
• Grow from the foundation that has been set.?

You cannot rise higher than your foundation allows. So, build a foundation that can scale.?

For example, do you know how much it costs to get a first appointment to show up? Do you know the stick rate at which the scheduled first appointments actually show up? How many first appointments are qualified? These are just a few metrics that must be understood in order to track your business and see where the problems exist.

In addition, imagine if you had 22 staff and you just hired 3 more, making your business a total of 25 employees. Does that make you nervous? Do you know how they would be trained? Would they all report to you? If this thought makes you nervous, there’s a good chance your current systems would implode at a certain point.?

Let’s talk about the importance of being authentic. Most all advisors have access to the same funds, the same annuities, the same life insurance, and so on. Most advisors have a process that goes 1) Discover 2) Plan 3) Implement. Most advisors can help you with anything you need. If this is all true, and it is, then why would someone work with you over the next advisor? When you allow yourself to stand out and be authentic, you increase your probability of getting more leads. You must lead with someone new or different.?

Once you have something new and different, it must be delivered to the masses in a cost-friendly way. For example, if your lead cost, sales closing percentage, and all other metrics averaged out to cost $5,000 to get a new client and your average commission is $5,000 per client, then you are running a lean business. Instead of trying every new vendor to get you qualified leads that don’t know you from Adam, spend your time optimizing your marketing assets so you can get your own leads as cheap as possible. The difference between a business and a sales team is a business provides itself its own leads while a sales team buys leads from vendors.?

Once you have your practice quantified, with scalable systems in place, and a unique marketing asset that has been optimized for efficient lead generation, all you have left is to grow as much as you want.?

Now obviously, that’s easier said than done, right?

You can’t normally just grow to a high-producing asset without a significant amount of trial and error, growing pains, and so on.

That’s why I developed the 100 Million Lifestyle Practice Protocol.

If you’d like, let’s hop on a quick phone call together to see if growing your practice is right for you.

Just book a time to chat that works for you.

During that call, we’ll look at how your business could exponentially grow while you work less. We’ll also discuss what your best next steps would be if you decide to pursue this protocol.

Spots are limited, and there’s zero obligation to work with me, but if we do end up being a fit, I’ll invite you join my private client group and get you started on your 100 Million Lifestyle Practice journey.?

Look forward to speaking with you!

By the way, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t some theoretical protocol. Most coaches and coaching programs in the financial space never actually did what they coach on. I’m different…?

When I got into the business, I was fortunate to see how an independent practice should be run. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but the owners were able to take vacations when they wanted. Their staff (including me) knew what to do and how to run the business when they were gone. When it came down to it, they worked on only the aspects of the business they wanted to work on and left the rest to us (and we were OK with it).

Then, in 2016, it was my turn. I had the opportunity to help co-found a new RIA. We put our systems in place, built out the marketing plan, and got to work. We did everything that I mentioned above. In our first full calendar year, we closed more than 50 million of total new business. In our second year, we brought in around 100 million of total new business.?

Everything I teach is based on principles. The framework works. The only question remains, do you want to grow your practice? For some, the answer is no (and that’s OK). For others, it’s an emphatic yes, but they just don’t know-how. We are your solution.?

Looking forward to speaking with you.

Mike Decker