(From the October 2022 Edition of eFORUM)
By Kelly Maxwell
It’s hard to believe that we’re already into the fall season, which means back to routines. Routines are important, especially for your advisory practice. They help busy professionals succeed by providing everyday structure to stay focused on impactful business activities. With focus, professionals can manage a healthy stress level, build their confidence, and find time to reset and relax.
Get Focused
When considering your routine and whether it’s the right one for you, it’s important to feel confident that you are spending most of your time focused on your unique skills. These are the things that only you can do. Let’s examine why our coaches suggest to their clients, “Do what you do best and delegate the rest.”
This mentality helps you grow your business:
- You will have more energy focusing on your unique skills.
- You will be more focused on serving clients.
- You will avoid doing things you don’t enjoy doing, they are time suckers.
- You can focus more on high revenue–generating activities.
Without a routine, it’s easy to get distracted by emails or non-revenue generating activities that can come up during the work day. You are also more likely to take on an activity that sucks up time that could likely be delegated to someone else. When you lose the focus, you will feel like you were working too much and spinning your wheels. One of our beliefs is that process sets you free and a routine is a process that will do exactly that.
In-Person or Virtual
You may also be wondering if you’ve got the right amount of virtual and/or in-person meetings per week. Should you be doing one more than the other? Virtual meetings are great. Sometimes they are preferred by both advisors and clients and require less of an effort for travel, preparation, etc.
On the other hand, many advisors crave the human interaction of an in-person meeting and value the benefits. For example, you may get into a deeper conversation with your clients in person, you may be able to read their body language better. And, you can strengthen the relationship in a way that can’t always be accomplished in a virtual meeting.
We have some clients who want to stay virtual because they feel like they have a more productive routine that way. Others want to go back to face-to-face, particularly those who have been running their practice that way their entire career.
There is no right or wrong and it really depends on what your clients want and what your client base looks like.
Virtual meetings are perfect if you have clients who live far from your office. In this case, you likely want to keep those meetings virtual while being mindful if and when you are both in the same region for the occasional in-person meet up.
If you find clients want a mixture of both, you can set up a routine where you have virtual meeting days and in-person meeting days. The key is to buffer some time between these meetings to write notes and delegate immediate tasks.
A practice many successful advisors adopt is to meet with the appropriate team member daily to summarize the important issues/opportunities and tasks that arose from meetings. This ensures that everyone is on the same page to support the client and the process most effectively.
Kelly Maxwell is a marketing coach with The Personal Coach. She can be reached at kelly@thepersonalcoach.ca.
