So, you have a business model fit for a post-retail distribution review (RDR) world and you have adopted proper financial planning as a core service. You should be seeing some great results in terms of how your financial planning proposition generates more money for your business and lights up your clients. You may even find that the work you are doing is lighting you up, too.
Things are going well and naturally you will want to grow the business. That was, and still is, one of the biggest challenges for me.
What exactly are we seeking to grow by the way: assets under management, turnover, client numbers, adviser numbers, profits, the number of days we get to spend with our families? I threw that last one in there just to see if you were paying attention.
Pain is beauty
Core to the answer is what is driving you and what you are motivated by. I have found the balance of life requires sacrifices on one side in order to get what we want on the other. We cannot succeed without pain. This is an inescapable fact, so maybe ask yourself what kind of pain you would like in your life.
My colleague has a client who has grown his business by shrinking his client base from hundreds to 42. His revenue is up, his profits are incredible and his quality of life is through the roof.
Are you prepared to admit that, like me, you are a little bit envious when you read that? He has sacrificed more clients for better clients: people who really value what his business does. He has sacrificed saying yes to everybody, for time with his family. He has sacrificed time and money on developing his business and made himself feel uncomfortable in the process.
I recently spoke to a small traditional advisory firm that has six advisers and 12,000 clients, accumulated through a series of 16 acquisitions over a period of years. It has ‘grown’ and no doubt spent a lot of time, energy and money in the process. But there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that six advisers can service 12,000 clients. Assuming no holidays or time off, that is 230 clients a week, for six advisers, who no doubt have families. They have sacrificed their time, quality of conversations, probably quality of advice and their enjoyment in the pursuit of growth. We see this all the time.
Bigging it up
Big does not necessarily mean better, and if my experience is anything to go by, it often means the complete reverse, which is why many of us leave the corporate world in the first place looking for ‘small’.
The financial services industry is full of big egos and we often hear that ‘if you are not growing, you are going backwards’. It is partly why we measure the success of firms by their assets under management, or how many brokers or clients they have, or how they have increased their percentage of market share.
