TRANSCRIPTION

Hi guys, in this short video, we're going to talk about how you don't have to run your financial advisory practice the way other people expect you to. I'm going to give you six steps that you should be doing right now in order to be playing your own. Okay. I've been involved in scanning and running three or four different businesses throughout my career over the last 20 plus years. And one of the best pieces of advice that I ever received early in my career was play your own game. But I think in the early stage, I didn't really understand what that actually meant. And I see it all the time with financial advisors as well. I see them running their practice because of other people's expectations, whether that be family or whether that be the industry or their peers, they're doing things because they feel they should. They're taking on clients that they probably shouldn't take on. They're trying to produce certain amount of content in a certain way, or have a certain type of logo or branding or whatever it happens to be, to try to conform to what's happening in the industry. And honestly, it's, it's kind of crazy. So if you can kind of take one thing to heart, it's play your own game. Be your own man or woman run your own business your way because it's your personality and it will be a reflection of you. But today I want to give you six tips to really help you with this number one, communicate clearly what you actually stand for. So your messaging on your website, on your LinkedIn profile and any content that you put at it needs to be consistent. What I see so often with financial advisors, their website says one thing and their content says another and their LinkedIn profile says a third thing that just leads to confusion. You want to have a consistent and clear message. So your audience can actually pick up at that and understand what you are actually about. Number two, communicate clearly who you can help. This is something we talk about a lot, most financial advisors, their marketing plan. And this is probably 95% of advisors. Their marketing plan is if you have a pulse and some form of financial need, I will help you. There's no power in that. And there's no leverage in that. What works a lot better is to call out specifically who your audience is, and even the location you'd like your audience to be in. So if you're in the U S you might specifically be looking to speak to doctors and consultants based in Florida. So if that's the case, you need to specifically call that out. So it makes it very clear to that niche that you deal with them. And you specialize in Dealing with their needs. Number three, communicate clearly who you cannot help. And again, this is something I see advisors be very, very fearful of. They're always worried about excluding people and therefore that they may lose some business because of it. The reality is actually the opposite. You do want to exclude people. So previous, I mentioned, call out your audience and when you call them out, anybody who sees that you're dealing with that particular audience will gravitate towards you and they'll push away people who don't fall into that audience. That's a good thing. That's what gives you leverage. That's what gives you positioning. We always say that we want you to be the big fish in the small pond, and that's how you go about doing that. Number four, have a better onboarding process. And another way of standing out from the crowd, remember there's thousands and thousands of other advisors out there, but how do you start? It just have a better onboarding process. There's so many fantastic FinTech tools that you can use these days to sharpen up your onboarding, to make it a little bit more seamless, to make it easier for the client. These days, doll should be digital signatures. It all should be online that they shouldn't have to touch or sign any paper. It shouldn't take 10 different meetings to onboard a particular client. So look for the friction points. How can you raise your game? I mean, is there any piece of technology that can help you do that? Most of them are very inexpensive. A number of five have a better client experience. This kind of goes hand in hand with the onboarding. When you're onboarding is fairly seamless, the actual experience of them being a client a year to year needs to be very good as well. And again, that the CRM systems and the different FinTech, uh, software that you can get to help with this these days are so, so good. And they're so easy to use. You don't need to be in any way intimidated by the technology. And again, what it does is it improves the experience for the client and applying who's having a great experience is going to refer more business to you. And there's also going to be retained longer within the business. That's going to bring down the attrition rate of your, your clients and therefore of your overall book. Number six, your compliance department does not run your business. I see many advisors who are very fearful of their compliance department. Now I'm not saying you don't have to be compliant as a regulated business. Of course you do, but you don't need to be checking with your compliance department every time you look to go and do something at the end of the day, you run your business. Okay? So whether it's profitable or very successful is really going to be down to you, not the compliance department, they're still going to be the compliance department. So take that back that control and start to really grow and develop your business with a nod to the compliance department. Yes, but not being controlled and fear you're full of them. Lastly, don't be worried about it. What people are going to think, what you will generally find is most people, whether they're family or friends or colleagues or anyone else tend to be more worried about this six inches in front of their face than they are about you and wash your doing. If you're fearful, for example, about putting out some content, some articles, or maybe even shooting some video, don't worry about it too much in the early stages of funding, not a lot of people will read your article, right? A lot of people will actually watch your video. So as somebody, once famous, he said, feel the fear and do it anyway. Just get started. Do your first 1, 2, 3, 4 articles or videos, or even podcasts, if you want to as well and start to create some momentum. Yeah, worry less about what everybody else thinks and worry more about adding value to your prospects and to your clients. If you can focus on that, it will really help your message to resonate more. And if your message resonates, that's, what's going to grow your business. You said at the beginning, play your own game. You don't have to run your advisory practice the way other people expect you to. Paul is my name. If you want to learn a little bit more about us, you can check out advisor accelerator.com. I hope those tips were really helpful for you today.