Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it. —H. James Harrington
This chapter details a quantitative approach for the advisor with the belief that the right actions lead to the right results. Also discussed is how to estimate your workload.
The Daily Game Plan, which consists of metrics against which to measure your daily or weekly actions and results, takes a quantitative approach. It is our preference to take this pragmatic approach. There are four elements that we suggest and discuss in this chapter:
• Specific Client Contact Plan
• Model Week Plan
• Metrics Scorecard
• Six Most Important Things
Another approach advisors can take is a qualitative approach. This approach is much more of a mental approach, including components like:
• Morning Power Questions
• Inspirational Visions and CDs
• Attitude, Mindset, and Motivation
The subject of Morning Power Questions is not our forte, but in researching the subject we came upon an article that said:
Tony Robbins uses his physiology to create powerful results. He’s trained himself to use his emotions as a source of power in everything he does. You can do the same. By asking yourself the right questions, you can change your focus. And by focusing on “feeling our feelings,” you can teach yourself to summon your most powerful emotions to support you from the start of the day and throughout your day (you’ll be able to “remember the feeling.”) This is a simple way to practice emotional mastery while you practice your attitude of gratitude. In the book, Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny, Tony Robbins shares power questions you can use in the morning to start your day off strong with more passion, power, and purpose.1
We will leave Tony Robbins’s thoughts at that, though we have no issue or concern about using a qualitative approach, either alone or in concert with a quantitative approach.
On another site, Jesse Lyn Stoner offers three questions “to start and end your day” that are very interesting and useful. She suggests:
Start your day with focus and energy by taking a few moments to answer these questions.
1. What will give me joy today?
2. What am I excited about accomplishing today?
3. Who needs my help today?”2
To end your day, she says:
Your day will take on greater meaning and will end on a better note if you take a few moments to answer these questions before you go to sleep.
2. Who do I love?
These questions tie well into the quantitative approach. “Try these questions, see how they work, and find the questions that work best for you,” she says. “Consider open-ended questions, rather than questions that have only one right answer or that can be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The most powerful questions are those that expand your thinking.” (If you are interested in more of what Stoner says, you can review her website at http://seapointcenter.com/.)
You can also research “Morning Ritual.” A colleague, Joe Lukacs, is an expert in the qualitative approach, having a long history with it and a background with Tony Robbins. You can find Joe at www.practicepower.net.
William Penn said, “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” How do we spend our limited time wisely?
Too many of us do not plan how to use our time well in advance of the spending of it. This can result in a feeling of uncertainty about your productivity. Too many people seem to walk out of their offices at night, looking back at their day and wondering “what happened.” A way to avoid that is to have an action plan and stick to it throughout the day. In fact, successful advisors start each day with an excellent daily game plan and a set of daily outcomes. We need to come to the office every day with clarity about what we want to accomplish. We can if we have a Daily-Weekly Game Plan as a cornerstone of our success and our Model Week.
We know we are responsible for and accountable for our results, but at times we don’t take a good look at the actions we need to take to get the results we want. The road to results runs through the actions we take. However, FAs are so tied up in the day’s calendar, between planned and unplanned events and issues that arise throughout the day, that they often don’t focus on specific targets to measure actions against, and they rarely have an accountability plan in terms of metrics or individuals with whom they share these metrics and are held accountable. We therefore need to discuss accountability action metrics as well as measuring results. This will enable us to determine if we are taking the correct actions or need to make course corrections over time.
Your metrics plan should reflect your written business plan and contact plans as well as your personal development plan. It should be consistent in terms of approach and needs to be executed daily in a consistent manner. It is understood that it may have to be somewhat flexible to take advantage of opportunities. A successful Daily-Weekly Game Plan needs specifics to make it work for you. The plan should address:
• How many client reviews need to be done and where?
• How many phone calls do I need to make, by type?
• How many marketing contacts do I need to make?
• How many prospect appointments do I need to set?
• What has to be done to be a level 10 tomorrow? (Use a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being top.)
Client contact is based on your segmentation and a workload planner, as discussed in Chapter 4 (see Figure 4-3, “Meeting and call volumes for our hypothetical book of business”). That table can be used to calculate workload.
In the example used earlier, the FA needed to have three face-to-face meetings a week, four telephone portfolio review meetings a week, and 12 check-in calls a week to satisfy the contact plan. These numbers become part of the “metrics scorecard,” where you post your actions in order to bring you the results you want. Right actions deliver right results.
Figure 8-1 shows two parts of an Excel spreadsheet that address the areas that should make up your metrics scorecard.
On page 1 of the spreadsheet we suggest you quickly record your Daily rating (AM/PM) about how you subjectively feel about the quality of that portion of your week. You are likely to believe you had a better portion of the day if you did some business, so we suggest you rate the period “Exceptional (5)” if you closed some business or “Poor (1)” if you felt that part of your day was unproductive in terms of how you felt you used those four hours. This is a 30-second analysis that is essentially a gut reaction. What you will be looking for are patterns so you can think about why any particular day or part of a day is either positive or negative. Short notes will help. After a few weeks to a couple of months perhaps you can find a pattern that can be changed if it is negatively affecting you and your performance.
Figure 8-1 | Weekly metrics scorecard.
The rest of the metrics scorecard, the Action metrics, asks you to record the planned actions for the week and how well you executed against those planned actions: Did you conduct the meetings and make the calls? Did you seek introductions and receive any? In the Notes column, you can list the last name of the client you met with, called, and/or sought and received introductions from. In your CRM system, you should be recording notes on every contact. Your focus and work plan should reflect your goals and the nature of your business and experience.
On page 2 of the spreadsheet we emphasize prospects and Centers of Influence. If you are not prospecting for client acquisition, it will show up here, and you have an opportunity to take action. In any one week, your prospecting and COI activity might be light, but if you are not doing prospecting or COI activity over any period of time, these records will tell you that quickly.
As with client calls and meetings, in the Notes column, you can list the last name of the prospects and COIs you met with or called. In your CRM system, you should also be recording notes on every contact with a focus on A and B tier clients.
You can also record your Results metrics, which should be reported on your firm’s system. If you choose to, your assistant can post the weekly scorecard to an ongoing tally by week to give you a view of what your numbers are year to date and for the year.
Finally, at the end of the week answer two questions:
• What are you most proud of this week?
• What could have gone better this week?
Over time, answers to these questions will help you. At a high level, an experienced advisor’s time distribution might look something like this:
• Client and prospect contact and preparation for contact (~40 percent to 50 percent)
• Client acquisition efforts (~20 percent to 25 percent)
• Other (~25 to 35 percent)
• Practice administration (~10 percent)
• New client services (~5 percent)
• Portfolio management and administration (~10 percent to 20 percent)
• COI contact and preparation for contact (~2 percent to 3 percent)
If needed, to determine the amount of time you actually spend on each major task, you can keep a daily time log. This is something advisors do not like to do and that’s understandable. However, if you are serious about getting your practice under control, it’s an activity worth considering. You can do it yourself or hire someone to watch you and constantly ask, “What are you doing now?” The log is best kept for a month, especially if your activities vary during the month. Month end and month beginnings are often different from the weeks in between. If that is not true with your practice, two or three weeks may be long enough to use a time log. You need to record activities in half-hour time increments to tell you what you really do, and you must be rigorous and record enough detail. See Figure 8-2.
The last tool we want to mention is the Six Most Important Things worksheet, because the day is won or lost in the first hour of the day!
The intent here is to make it a habit to do the most productive thing you can at every given moment. To do this, we suggest that at the end of each day, you write down the six most important things you have to do the next day, in order of priority, and then follow that list in order. We also suggest noting what else you work on, including nonwork-related items. See Figure 8-3.
Figure 8-2 | Daily time log worksheet.
Figure 8-3 | Six Most Important Things worksheet.
• Develop a quantitative metrics plan.
• Quality actions lead to quality results.
• While you need to hit your numbers, it’s the actions you take that will drive the numbers.
• An action is seeking an introduction.
• Results are receiving introductions, securing a meeting with a prospect, and converting the prospect to a client.
• This book is about how to create actions and convert actions to results.
