Book Excerpt

Concept:

Writing out your goals is one thing. Establishing a system and framework for accomplishing your goals is crucial to your success. Working on your business on a regular basis will create results that are dramatically better than working in your business. I guarantee that working harder in this business will not make you more successful. Working on your business and regularly developing ideas for success will. Why do the greatest athletes such as Tiger Woods keep practicing on a regular basis? Each day they are trying to get a little better. They are working on their game, not playing the game.

Objective:

As financial advisors we plan our clients' long-term financial futures every day. So why do we neglect to do it for ourselves and for our businesses? I have asked several financial advisors what "long-term" means. They usually answer that they develop five-, ten-, or fifteen-year plans for clients. Then I ask, "How long is your business plan?" If it is not ten years, maybe you don't plan on being in the business that long. I dare you to look at your financial plan and share it with your peers. Then look at your long-term business plan. If you have one, congratulations! You're in the top 20% of financial advisors in the world. If you're like most financial advisors, however, you wrote it a few years ago and never updated it. As advisors, we develop long-term financial plans, yet the average business plan for financial advisors is one to three years. Develop your plans as one-year (must-do), three-year (achievable), five-year (goal-oriented), and ten-year (long-term vision).

To sell you on the benefits of the business plan, I would show you that projections into the future based on what you know today would be of huge benefit to your success. The challenge is to think how you can grow and do things differently to achieve higher goals. Start by thinking what your ideal business plan would look like, if you could design amazing financial targets and goals, then think of a business or advisor that you would like to emulate. Think of the possibilities. The only limit is how much you can imagine. Challenge yourself to become the most successful financial advisor you know, not because of the money you will earn but because of the person and advisor you will become.

Strategy:

Start today to develop one-year (short-term), three-year, five-year, and ten-year (long-term) written business plans for success. Most advisors love to feel they are independent and work for themselves, yet they lack the discipline to run a successful business. If you work for a firm, structured goals and targets are set for you and followed up on a regular basis. As an independent financial advisor, I know that it is one thing to write a business plan, but to be disciplined and accountable for it is another. Make yourself accountable to someone and share your business plan. This may be a spouse, an associate financial advisor, a wholesaler, or someone in your peer group (discussed in a later chapter). A business plan has the benefit of creating a blueprint for even greater success.

Grant's Tip:

Review each section of your plan every month and set goals for certain dates in each category.

When you review each month, make sure you revisit and check off completed goals. Have a place to keep ideas to review and develop. For example, I keep a folder with business planning ideas that I pick up. Each month when I review, I also review these ideas so that I might implement them into my business (with a time frame for completion). If I see a new software program, I keep the idea for review at the time I planned to spend working on my business, not in my business.

Review the ideas with your peer group or people who help you be accountable in the business. Have you ever spoken with someone who said they are busy because it's month-end? Why don't you have a month-end where you review production, business planning ideas, your business and marketing plans and goals? Do you think this exercise each month will bring greater results?

One idea to use when you are developing your plan is to find a boardroom-type space where you can take each section of your business plan and freely write out the benefits. Do this exercise with someone else (or your peer group) to make yourself accountable and to give you feedback on your process. Remember, success leaves clues. Ask other successful advisors for their business plans and invite them to a strategy session. Surround yourself with literature on building business plans. Our web site has hundreds of successful sites devoted to developing business plans and marketing plans. Hundreds of books are written on this topic. Ask the wholesalers or marketing representatives with whom you work, or even your company, for help on this area.

At the end of this strategy is a sample confidential business plan. If you want to see what other companies do with business plans, check out corporate annual reports. Usually a company's vision and plan are there. Questions I receive from audiences are, "What is included in a business plan?" or "How much time does it take to prepare a business plan?" The answers are simple and straightforward. An effective business plan holds the fundamental information to manage your business as it will look five years from now. Then start working backwards. What will you need to have in place when the business is successful? What business is successful now and how is its business plan laid out?

The easiest way to build a business plan is to start by writing down your goals. Take a blank pad of paper and start writing. Combine business goals, family goals, spiritual goals, lifetime goals, travel goals, etc. Write them all down, then break them down into time segments-per year, per month, per week, and per day. For example, if your goal is to have 30 new clients this year with average investable assets of $300,000 for a total of $9 million new assets, how much per month and per week do you need to achieve the goal? Do this with all of your goals.

More importantly, activity drives production. What activities do you need to do to arrive at those numbers? Some experts suggest you make your numbers based on three assumptions-best-case scenario, likely numbers, and worst-case scenario. After you have completed your business plan, the key area should be a one-page summary of key objectives and key actions you need to take to follow up and complete your plans. One tip I will give you is to review your results for the past week every Monday morning, rewrite your one-page summary of goals and plans, and plan your week. One definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. Each month and year, what are your targets for improvement? Would you invest in a business that targets growth of 5% per year? Not likely; you want businesses that target plus-10% to plus-20% growth per year. What is your target for growth per year?

A final note: Work on your vision. Here is a story from Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth Revisited (HarperBusiness; 1995), that tells you why we ask ourselves these questions. Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was asked to what he attributed IBM's phenomenal success. He is said to have answered:

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision - was in place.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

Jay's Comments:

The first insight is that guerrillas plan backwards, beginning with the attainment of their loftiest goals in the future, then working back to the present. If you can allow yourself to visualize success, the path to it will be easier to find. Most companies see the beginning of the path in front of them, but don't see where it leads in the distance. Their short-sightedness gets them in trouble when change or unforeseen circumstances occur.

The hardest job in the planning of marketing is seeing the target. You must remove the shackles of insecurity and fear in order to travel to your final destination. So you've got to think as though you've been attaining your goals all along as you plan for your distant future. You must see your company at its finest in 20 years in order for it to operate at its peak in ten years. By knowing what must be accomplished for such optimum performance, you can see where you must be in five years. That helps you concentrate upon what must be done by the end of one year. And that points the way to what you've got to do tomorrow, to do today, to do now.

When the golf ball is in the middle of the fairway and the green 200 yards away, the great golfers don't aim for the green. They aim for the cup. How do you come up with a successful business plan? As Grant suggests, you evolve it over time. Revise and revise it until it is a powerful plan packed with enthusiasm and excitement about the future. You put it to work and then you stay with it no matter what (in most cases). You watch it slowly take effect, rise and falter take a bit more effect, hold on even more, stumble, then fi nally grab on and soar, taking you with it. Your plan is working. Your bank account is growing. And it all happens because you were committed to your business plan.