What you can do today to make your business more efficient?
As a financial advisor you have likely discovered by now that your job entails far more than ‘doing’ your business (cutting hair, consulting or selling stuff). Running a business also entails anything from making strategic financial decisions to being the janitor. All of these additional responsibilities can cut into your revenue generating time. One of the gravest mistakes a financial advisor makes is to spend all their time selling or servicing. This may sound confusing at first, but let me elaborate.
You may have found that when it is time to hire new employees, you spend a lot of time training them on certain procedures. Let’s say that you hire a new assistant. You teach that assistant to do everything soup to nuts from how to answer the phone to how to balance your books. All this training takes a lot of time and leads to many questions along the way.
I like to tell my clients to only do things once. Instead of recreating these procedures every time someone new is hired, write out the very processes you are training them to do. I know it seems daunting. This is why it never gets done. However, creating systems for your business is one of the smartest things you can do. The benefits far exceed the time it takes to create them.
- It will make hiring and training smoother and easier.
- It will create a level of predicable service for your clients and customers – something that is more valuable to them than you know and will keep them coming back for more.
- It will save you time and money. By taking the time you would ordinarily take to recreate a process multiple times and instead using it to do revenue generating activities for the business.
- It reduces costly mistakes made by employees.
- It increases efficiency. Once you have a written process you can objectively begin to measure it. Once you can measure something, you can evaluate and enhance it to save even more time and money.
You may be one to dive head first into something and will begin to systemize everything – kudos to you for your gumption. Most of us will find it easier to swallow if we take it one process at a time. Start with the area of the business that most frustrates you; the area that you find most mistakes are made or the area that you feel is most inefficient. Buy a large 3-ring binder and many tab inserts and use this as your operations manual. You can even ask your employees to document the procedures they are currently using. Delegation is a good thing!
If you would like to learn more about running your business based on systems, a great read is Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. We have a direct link on our website: www.GettingResultsCoaching.comunder ‘Recommended Reading’.
If you are in need of a coach to help hold you accountable to creating these processes, complete our complimentary Personal Assessment here.
