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This is The Perfect RIA, in case you didn’t know. Bringing you all the strategies to help your business grow. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Sit back and listen in while you feel the beat. Another myth bites the dust…

Matthew Jarvis:   Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Perfect RIA Podcast. I’m your co-host Matthew Jarvis. And with me, the man, the myth, the legend recently returned from Moosetopia, Micah Shilanski. Micah, how are you buddy?

Micah Shilanski:  I am excellent. Jarvis. How are you doing?

Matthew Jarvis:   I’m good. I’m good. You know, I did an episode or two without you, and it just wasn’t quite as fun. Hopefully we didn’t lose too many listeners during that interim while you were gone.

Micah Shilanski:  Well, I’ll take that as a big compliment. I have a lot of fun doing this. It is great to get back into the groove. You get that nice little, as you said, Moosetopia break, it was successful. We got a couple of moose that means we can eat for this year because shopping at Fred Meyer is clearly too painful. We got our freezer full, which is wonderful, and I’m excited to get back at it. And we have some fun things to talk about.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Because speaking of getting back at it, you and I have recently completed a series of one-on-one calls with our Invictus members. So these are our members of the Perfect RIA Nation that are the most committed to transforming their practice, doubling their success. We’ve had a series of one-on-one calls. And what we want to do in this episode is relate to you, our listeners, our Nation at large, some of the things that we ran into and the reason we want to relay these is not just for fun because we enjoy it, but so that you can look and say, “Wait a second. I’m telling myself that same story,” and how do we fix it.

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, I just want to change the name of Invictus. It stands for in victory together, because we are committed with these members to really helping double their success. But really the commitment they’re making is a commitment to being uncomfortable on these calls, which is just excellent in going through it, but having you open up your practice, open up everything that’s going on and having someone else come in and say, “Great, you’re doing 99 things phenomenal. We’re going to pick on that one thing that you don’t want to talk about, that you’re trying to avoid, and that’s the one we’re going to press on because you need to focus on it.” So kudos to them for standing up. And I know when the shoes on the other foot I’m squirming just like they are in the chair, but it is such a great way to grow.

And that’s really what we want to talk about today. So we’ll often, we get these great ideas and we’re like, “Oh, well I’ll just do it later. I’ll just do it next year.” Really, that’s a sign that you’re not comfortable in that area. And you need to press a little bit more on that one. You really need to work through that, because there’s probably a lot of growth opportunity there.

Matthew Jarvis:   By the way, if you’re ever in a Mastermind with Micah and you can get them to squirm, it is a site to see I’ve only experienced it just once or twice. And I wrote about it in my Joe know that night I got Michael to squirm, but-

Micah Shilanski:  Dear journal.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, your spot on, a quick disclaimer on this, we have changed some of the details to protect the guilty or the innocent. And we sort of combined some details to make the points a little bit more clear. So if you hear your example used and it doesn’t sound quite like it went down, it’s a fish story, we got to make it sound the way it needs to sound.

Micah Shilanski:  Well also when you hear this example and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’re talking about my practice.” Yeah, that’s you and about 50 other of us.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s right.

Micah Shilanski:  These are not unique to us. And that’s the reason we’re going to bring it up. These are things that we have really found across the board, and Jarvis, that’s the reason we created this thing called a Mountain Map. Now we have a webinar coming out in just a couple of days, which is to the Nation for everyone. What we’re going to focus on, what we call our Mountain Map. How do you double your success? And we have broken it down to four key areas. And it’s amazing as we start working through this, how those four key areas are really encapsulate your practice and what you need to do to transform.

Matthew Jarvis:   Boy, we can do a whole episode on why it’s so critical to aim for double. Sometimes we get hung up in this, I want to make incremental improvements. And, you don’t, you just try a little bit harder to make incremental. If you’re going to double in any of these areas, which are effectiveness, value to clients, prospecting, and profitability. If you’re going to double in any one of those areas, let alone all four of those areas, you’re going to have to dramatically shift how you’re doing business. This isn’t, “I’ll give one more hour at work,” that will not lead to double. This isn’t “I’ll wait until time becomes available and then I’ll double.” I mean you have to change everything you’re doing to double.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s the fun part about this. Because if we said, great, I want a 15% growth. Well quite frankly, the market will give you that, depending on what’s going to happen or not happen. But again that doubling, that’s uncomfortable, walking through great, having an honest conversation, what are our numbers now? And what does it look like if I double? And if I had to do that next 12 to 36 months, what do I have to do today to change that number?

Matthew Jarvis:   Love it. Well, let’s hit our first example. We’ll call this advisor, Dave. Dave has a phenomenal practice growing very rapidly in the four areas of success he’s hitting all four really hard. As we were looking at profitability, we discovered that of all his clients, four of them, just four, four of his largest were still on commission accounts instead of being on a wrap fee. Now again, Micah and I, we’re completely indifferent on how you charge your clients as long as you’re delivering massive value. But for this advisor, Dave, he was passionate and in his heart of hearts, he believe that clients were better served if they were paying a wrap fee instead of an old commission account. Dave, why haven’t you changed these for? “Well, these are friends of mine and I’ve mentioned it to them and they like the old fashioned way. They’ve been with me a long time.” Reason, reason, reason, reason, reason, reason I can’t do it. Micah, have you ever heard this one before?

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely. Whether it’s, I can’t increase their fee, I can’t charge them a fee, I can’t transfer over all of their accounts into one, we don’t do all of their planning. Insert whatever reason here, it’s the same excuse that’s there. And we run into the same issue. I have clients that are friends that I’ve had to really draw that line that was actually there. It actually, Jarvis, that happened to me on this last week, one of my friends called my cell phone, was his wife, and it was weird she never calls my cell phone, but they are clients. Well they’re good friends. We hang out three or four times a year. I traveled down to see them. I was like, “Oh crap, what went wrong?” Well, she had a question on an IRA. I was like, “Thank you for calling me. Let me give you my office phone number.” I need to draw a line between, this is where our friendship is and this is the professional nature.

And this is the same thing we need to do in this case. Where is that line between your friendship and being professional, sometimes in a friendship, you’re going to allow them to do things that maybe aren’t in their best interest, your friends you’re going to do things not detrimental, but we’re going to allow them a little bit more room. Versus when we put on that professional hat, we got to be very clear in saying “No, no, no, this is in your best interest. And if you’re not interested in doing what’s best for you, I am not going to be part of this decision making.”

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. And that’s what a 100% what we talked about Dave. We said, “Dave, you need to outline, write out, physically, write out because you’re thinking change. Why it’s in these client’s best interests to make a change. Articulate that to them.” I always like to use the CD player analogy. Mr and Mrs. Client, do you remember when you bought your first CD player? I do. Wasn’t it wonderful? It was. Yep. When was the last time you used the CD player? It’s been years. Perfect. This account you have or this plan or this fee schedule or whatever, when we started it, it was the best thing available, today there’s something better and you need to make this change.

And Dave then committed if they don’t make this change by a certain date that he is going to have to graduate them. Because if a client is not following your advice and fee schedule is advice. If they’re not following advice, you cannot have them as a client. You’re doing them a tremendous disservice. And you’re potentially jeopardizing your firm when that complaint comes along. Because if they’re not following your advice in one area, there’s a lot of areas they’re not following your advice.

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis that’s exactly the point I was going to bring up next. What’s next in that relationship? The minute that they say no, and now this isn’t like an AB decision, of saying, “Well, I want to do a hundred thousand dollars remodel in my house.” Great. We could do a home equity line of credit. You could pull out a hundred grand. It’s really 50, 50. You might want to do the home equity line of credit because a client says, “You know what? I don’t really care. I’d rather pay the taxes and have the money.” That’s not a deal breaker kind of thing. When it comes up with these deal breakers, and fee schedule is a deal breaker, one of them and you allow them not to do that.

What’s the next thing that you’re squishing on? What’s the next thing they’re not going to follow your advice on? Don’t need life insurance to take care of your spouse. Don’t need long term care. Going to turn on social security at 62. Really doesn’t matter if I leave a survivor benefit. That’s not a far line to go from. Once they know that they can push back and you are not that passionate, you’re not that committed to what you’re going to recommend.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. So I would say intermittent action step here. Before we get to the end of the episode is pull a list of all your clients, highlight any that are not following your advice to the letter, not on these issues that Micah mentioned that are not relevant, but on any material thing. If they’re not following your advice to the letter, you need to give them a opportunity to get back on the straight and narrow or just explain to them, “Hey, we’re not a good fit. We need to find an advisor whose advice you trust and can follow.”

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, what a different intermediate really be first, what is material advice versus what is a choice. Again, home refinance. If it doesn’t matter, if they take a hundred grand out, really it’s a choice. It’s six, one half designated what they want to do this case versus what’s a material fact that you know what, if you break this, we’re done. So what are those 10 commandments? What are those material things that says, no, these are the rules we’re going to live by.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, a couple that come off the top of my mind would be, Micah, you mentioned these, fee schedules, estate planning, risk protection, providing tax returns. These are all things, that just off top of my head, these are non-negotiable. Certainly anything unethical. Those are all non-negotiables

Micah Shilanski:  Transparency. That’s a huge one for me as well. I got to see everything or nothing. If you’re hiding stuff from me, you don’t want to share everything. Nah, sorry. I’m I’m not going to be able to help you.

Matthew Jarvis:   Perfect. Perfect. All right, Micah. Now you talked to a few others. Let’s talk to another example.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. So another one I heard multiple times, we’ll call this advisor Bob. When I was working with Bob, it was a question about the fee schedule and the value that they deliver. And when I started looking through things, now, first when I start talking to advisors, you can definitely tell when they have head trash around their fee schedule, because they’ll start off with “Micah, I don’t charge nearly as much as you do.” All right. That’s not the question. The question is what value are you delivering to clients? And are you being paid in proportion for that value? This is the better question that’s going to be there. So often when I’m talking with these advisors, they have this hesitation, and some of them are charging sub 1% and they’re doing two meetings a year, they’re doing four value ads, so they got six value ads going to clients, including meetings.

They’re doing a lot of proactive planning and they’re charging less than the average advisor that’s there. So we got to say, “okay, head trash wise, what do you think is going on?” So there’s a lot of head trash around fee schedule. And then the question is, okay, once they see the value that they’re delivering, yes, they agree they should be charging more. The question Jar is “How do I do it?” And a lot of times I’ll hear the responses, “Micah, that’s a great idea. Once I do X, then I’ll move to do this.”

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. And an advisor, I was just talking to, one of our Invictus members said, “Wait, once I make my broker dealer change, then I’ll raise my fees.” I heard another advisor, “Once I send out a couple of new value ads, then I’ll raise my fees.” Mm-mm (negative). No, in fact I talked about this at length at my kids’ podcast. Are you delivering more value than you delivered at the beginning? I would certainly hope the answer is yes. So therefore are your fees higher than they were before? Anytime you tell yourself, “I will do this when,” is really code for I’m just not ever going to do it.

Micah Shilanski:  No Jarvis I want to give out a couple of my exceptions, that I would say are totally fine for this. Number one, if you just brought on a new client, I would not change their fee within 12 months. For me, this is an integrity thing. Exactly. This is the deal that I made for the next 12 months. This isn’t the deal for the next 12 years. This is the deal for the next 12 months. And then we can renegotiate this. I know there was a head trash that came up with one guy. He says, “Hey, I just brought on a bunch of these clients.” I said, “No, absolutely leave those at those current fee schedule, I 100% agree. In a year now we can have this fee increased conversation.” So that would be absolutely acceptable.

Another one that also came up with some guy just changed from a BD to his own RIA and just had everybody repaper. I was like, “Great. We’re going to schedule this for next year. You don’t got to run and do this right now. Let’s get this scheduled,” because his clients just went through a change. Other than those two reasons. Absolutely not. Now is the time. Now is the time you need to be leading forward with these things.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. The only exception I would give you other than the ones Micah I mentioned is if you want to do it in tears, if you just can’t get your head trash around doing it top to bottom, then great start with the bottom half of your clients and do as far as revenues and raise those fees, so they’re more proportionate with your other clients. I’m okay with that, though if you’re going to do one at a time, don’t do that. Say like “I’m going to do a third. I’m going to do half now and I’ll do the rest later.” That’s fine. But you’ve got to have dates. Micah can do your point, I’m going to do this portion on this date and I’m doing the next portion on this date. Otherwise we’ll be having the same discussion years from now. Well, excuse me, you’ll be having that discussion. We don’t have discussions with people that don’t take action.

Micah Shilanski:  Jarvis, that’s such a good one. I mean, fees are such a big aspect of there. And our goal here is not for you to charge the most fee ever. This is the question about what are your goals to deliver the value you want to deliver? Awesome. Let’s figure that out. Now, if you are able to attend our webinar coming out in a couple of days, you need to jump on that. Sorry to put a plug in there, but we’re going to be going through our Mountain Map process, which is our step by step process of determining what that fee needs to be with the value that you deliver because that’s a very key thing. And then we’re going to talk about how we articulate this to clients, which is a huge value.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. I love it. Okay, Micah, so we’ve talked about fees quite a bit. What are some of the other areas? Some advisors listening, saying, “Oh, my fees are good. I’m charging top level fees.” We’ve worked with several of those “Hey, I’m charging the maximum that whatever organization will allow me, I’m already there.” Okay. So what are some of the other areas that we’re seeing coming up?

Micah Shilanski:  All right. So a big area, and this is going to show up in a couple of different places, but is time. Time is the big area. “Micah I am spending so much time in the office. You know, I’m working 40, 50 hours a week.” Maybe they’re still working 40 hours a week, but they really want to work 20 because they want to spend more time with their kids. They want to spend more time with their family. They’ve already been at this business for 20 years. They want to start reaping some time rewards. Now Jarvis, where I see this creeps into a couple of different areas. This is one that you could look at, says, “You know what? My fee schedule’s fine. I’m doing great. My 10 40. I’m bringing in plenty of revenue.” This isn’t a profitability problem. This is I have 700 clients. I have 300 clients and I need to cut those clients in half.

Now there’s a couple of things with this. Number one, yeah, you probably have too many households that you can really service at a high level. So agreed. We need to make a change in that. But if all of a sudden we said, “Hey, go cut your clients in half, go from 700 to 350 or go from 300 clients to 150.” What are your economics going to do? And this is where people can start to freak out right now. Pareto’s law is going to come in, that bottom half of clients is only generating 20% of your revenue, but 20% is still 20%. I would notice 20% missing from my paycheck. So how do you replace this? And this is where your fee schedule really comes in play. Sometimes we need to do a fee increase in order to let go of those clients.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, another place I’ve seen this is advisors, like you’ve mentioned, they’re taking home five, six, 700,000, a million dollars a year in income. But like you said, they’re still working all these hours and they want to go to the next level, but they can’t break through. A lot of that is because they’re working too much as odd as that sounds, they’re working too much and their brain just doesn’t have the capacity. So that’s where we go through and say, “You’ve got to be taking Fridays off. You’ve got to be doing surge meetings.” This counts for all year around. Micah, I’d be curious on your calls. I have advisors every time I be with them, “Tell me again about your surge schedule.” Well, we have three to four weeks in the spring. We have three to four weeks in the fall and we have two days, one, two, two days each month for mini surge. “Yeah. Yeah. Well what about the other days?” That’s it. That’s it.

And by the way, I run the Perfect IRA with Micah on those other days as well. And take a lot of time out for my family. There’s this myth that if I spend more time in the office, I will get it results that does have a place where the margin of diminishing returns is astronomical after about four days a week on average, in my experience, for successful advisors.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. I think you can peek that out a little bit more personally because I do five days a week during surge. So everyone is going to be a little bit different. I’ve seen guys that do three days a week or two days a week during surge because what are they solving for? And this is the big part about your surge schedule. It’s not about mirroring Jarvis or myself or Ben or anybody else. It’s really about saying “Great. What are you solving for?” And being intentional about surge, being hyper focused in that period in time to deliver massive value to your clients, and then be able to rest and relax, rejuvenate. So you can come back and do it again. And Jarvis I would say that really comes into what we call the effectiveness on that Mountain Map. And this is another area with time that I think, again, I said, this is going to creep up multiple places.

This comes up in delegation as well. How often do we, and I’m raising my hand right now, by the way, because I’m a 100% guilty of this. How often do we think? “Well, I’m just going to do it because clearly the best person and it could do this, and if I delegate it’s going to get screwed up. It’s going to take longer to do so. I need to do that.” But the problem is, and Jarvis correct me if I’m wrong, if you have heard different things on your calls, but if you start doing that for one thing, you’re going to do it for two things, then three things, and 50 things and a hundred things. And all of a sudden there goes surge meetings. All of a sudden you’re going to spend your entire time in the office.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yep. Micah, the other place I see this with delegation. Same theme is I ask advisors, all right, tell me about your weekly meetings with your team. Tell me about your interaction with your teams. Well then we kind of push and it’s this constant flow back and forth, which feels on the surface like “This is great. We’ve got the synergy and information flowing back and forth. Yeah. Every time somebody has a question, they’ve just ask me,” wrong. Those interruptions are destructive to you and your team. And so I and Micah, took a couple advisors through my weekly check-in with my team members where all non-urgent action items get put there so that we can in one block, we do the same thing with Perfect RIA, in one block run through the whole thing instead of pinging each other back and forth.

Because as we’ve talked about before, every time you’re interrupted by anyone, client, prospect, team member, email alert, popup, all of those things cost you hours of productivity, hours of productivity. And if you’re constantly being interrupted, which would be, if you’re getting more than four or five interruptions a day, your whole day is in a sub productive state.

Micah Shilanski:  So this is the whole thing we’re doubling again is going to be so important. If you said you wanted a 10% increase in your effectiveness, you could maybe do one little thing, but how do you measure it? If we said, “Great, you need to double your effectiveness, and let’s put your effectiveness in an hourly rate component. This is great. How many hours are you working divided how much money did you make?” That’s it. What’s the hours divided by your gross income. That’s how we’re going to calculate your hourly rate. That’s it. And then we look at, it says great. If you had to double that, well there’s two ways that you could double that pretty quick. Number one, you could charge twice as much, boom, work the same amount of hours. Or you could cut your work time in half.

Now we have a measurement tool with your gross hourly rate. So you say, “Hey, how are we measuring your effectiveness in the office?” And this is a huge key point that we can look with the advisor said, “Great, which lever do we need to pull? Do we need to pull the time lever? Do we need to pull the fee lever? Do we need to pull both of those levers to double your effectiveness?”

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. And some people might write this off as hyperbole, but Parkinson’s law, which says an activity will take as much time as is allocated to it, is as true and as powerful as gravity itself. So when you just say, “I’m going to just work until the work is done.” The work will never be done. If you say “The work has got to be done in four hours,” by golly, it’s going to get done in four hours or pretty darn close to that. You’ve got to use, will is timeless, you’ve got to hack Parkinson’s law and use it in your favor, right now you are letting the law dominate you. Dominate that law and say, “Great. I’m not going to work six days a week. I’m going to work four days a week and I’m going to get actually more work done,” because you’re going to get in a productive mindset.

Micah Shilanski:  You know, Jarvis, one of the things that I always like to bring up when we’re speaking about this on a platform and people are like, “Yeah,” you get those people that says “Yeah, that it works in theory, but that’s not really how it works in reality.” Quick example, the last time you were supposed to get on an airplane, did you miss that airplane or did you get it on time? No. Most people got to the airplane on time, not a mechanical issue. You forgot to show up to the airport two hours in advance, you forgot to get on the airplane. When did that happen? Okay. Never. Now your luggage. Did you bring your luggage with you to the airport? Not did the airlines lose it? Did your luggage come to the airport? Yes. Did it have your clothes in it? Yes. Okay. Right there. We have it, right.

It had to get done in a limited time, by an external time factor. And you met the deadline, you packed your luggage, you had all this other stuff in your life going on, but you managed to get that done. Now apply that same concept to time in the office. How do we put up those same external factors that are in there that would force you to get things done in a limited period in time, that’s a little example of surge and you can apply it in so many different areas in your life.

Matthew Jarvis:   Well, Micah let’s take this one step further, because there’s definitely advisors listening to the Nation, which by the way, we’re getting tens of thousands of downloads a month on this podcast, which is a lot of fun, amazing impact. Some of you’re listening, you’re saying, “Yeah, I get it. I get it. I know I need to raise fees,” but you still have these shoulds, you have these maybes, you have these some days. Micah, what about those advisors, by the way, you and I have been those advisors, and to be totally honest, there are still areas that we’re not going to talk about the podcast right now, come to a mastermind, where we are in that area, Micah, you and I were just together for a mastermind and we had some heart to hearts. We’re like, “Hey, I’ve got some areas where I still need extreme accountability to take it to the next level.” What about those advisors? Where do they find that kind of support?

Micah Shilanski:  Number one, selfish plug. But this is the backstage pass, this is Invictus. This is the TPR. This is the reason we created the Perfect RIA, was for this type of community. So selfish plug. That’s going to be one. The second one I would go to, is you got to create a mastermind. There’s great things that we have already put out free and publicly on how to create a mastermind. This is a lot of work, but it is worth the effort that you put in. I’m saying this jokingly, because Jarvis puts in all the efforts for the masterminds and I show up, but it’s worth every hour he puts into it, I’m going to tell you.

Matthew Jarvis:   But in fact, we are going to have, not to get ahead of ourselves, later this year in December, we’re going to do an entire webinar for the Nation on masterminds, and back to Micah and our selfish plug. We’re only opening our cart for backstage pass to Invictus members, one last time for this year. And it is this week and next week. So I think I would just look, and I know this sounds like a selfish plug, so take it either way, either join Invictus for the backstage pass or find some other way, like tell yourself, like “If I’m not going to do that, if I’m not going to make that commitment, what is it going to take? What am I going to do that’s going to force me to double my success?” Or am I just going to get real with myself and say, “Well, I guess I’m just going to coast forever.”

This is as good as it gets. And I would say, not to be too harsh, I would say shame on you for that because you’re doing a disservice to your clients, yourself and your family. If you’re not continually growing, if you’re not continually adding value, I think you’re to disservice to the industry.

Micah Shilanski:  200%. And I want to focus on this. One of the things in the Mountain Map that we’re going to chat about in a couple days here is doubling your value to clients. Now, this isn’t doubling your fee to clients. This is doubling your value to clients. And how do you measure that? Jarvis, to your point, if you are not pushing yourselves, if you’re not joining masterminds, if you’re not pushing the needle, getting more education and you’re listening to the podcast, you made it 20 minutes in, you are doing this. So you got to take action on the stuff that you’re hearing. And so one part of that is “Great. How do you put a metric up to double the value you’re going to do to clients? How do you add these value ads?” Now again, we’re going to go through this in depth in our webinar. How do we structure? How do we look at, how are we proactive with that every year to make sure we’re delivering massive value?

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. I love it. Micah, anything else you want to highlight from the calls we’ve had this week, before we jump into action items?

Micah Shilanski:  The biggest thing that I think I would say on these calls is what we’re focused on and what our problem is, generally, the solution is something else. It’s the forest through the trees. We get so close to something that we can’t figure it out. And I’ll take time as an easy example, I got to take more time out of the office, but I have to do everything. If I delegated it, it doesn’t get done. I can’t get rid of those clients because I need the revenue, but my revenue’s fine, so I don’t want to increase rates. All of these things are connected and nine times out of 10, the solution is staring you in the face. It’s just a little off to the right. You’re just not looking at it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Boy, Micah, I’ve got a really great example from an advisor I talked to this week, we call him Joe, he’s launching a podcast, which was part of his marketing audit that our team did, which was spectacular. So he says “Great Jarvis, I’ll start taking time out of the office once I have all of my content created for the podcast,” we’ve heard this one before. So I said, “Joe, well, that’s terrible news, but Joe, show me on your calendar where have you blocked out time for the podcast?” Another advisor, where have you blocked out time for prospecting? Another advisor, where have you blocked out time for training your team? If it doesn’t have a spot on your calendar, it’s not going to get done and more hours isn’t going to fix that. So Micah, I think to your point, you’re looking to say, “I don’t have enough time.” No, the issue is always, always, always, you’re just not allocating your time effectively. You need a forcing mechanism for that.

Micah Shilanski:  And I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying this, time, I love time because time is our great equalizer. All of us have 24 hours in the day. Not more, not less. Doesn’t matter who you are. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Matthew Jarvis, Joe advisor, we all have 24 hours in the day. The question is, how productive are you going to be with your 24? Now, pro tip on this one where I struggle as those same things, well, I’ll do this. I’ll get around to it, et cetera. So what I have to do, my own mental hack, if this works for you, I send it to Victoria, I send to my assistant, book this time I’m on my calendar to get done. And then she’s got to figure out where it’s going to fit in my calendar. But I am very good at getting my stuff done on the calendar. If it’s not on the calendar, may or may not get done. But if it’s on the calendar, I’m going to crush it.

So I always kick it to her because if I go to find it, I’ll make excuses as to why I can’t do it that week or why I shouldn’t do something, et cetera. I kick it to her. No, this has to get on the calendar there for where it’s going to get done. So what’s that hack that works for you and it’s not working harder.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Well I love that Micah, but we’ll do a whole ‘nother episode on this. I keep thinking people come to you and I, and they say “Why you guys are doing so much in your time,” and then you and I come to each other and we’re like, “We’re barely scratching the service. We’re barely scratching the service of what’s possible here.” Okay. Action items, this podcast and everything we do is about taking action. I’ll kick it off. Action item number one, anywhere where you have a should a someday, a maybe you need to get some support around that and some extreme accountability. These are signs, anytime, someday, a should, maybe, that’s a sign for you need someone to help you see the forest or the trees. You’re blind to it. You’re too deep in it.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely. I’m going to say the next thing is you need to make a commitment to doubling your success.

Matthew Jarvis:   Love it.

Micah Shilanski:  Now we could define that in four different areas, double your effectiveness, double your value to clients, double your profitability, double your prospecting. Those are the four areas that we’ve come up with. So out of those four areas, where are you going to double your success, and make that a commitment, and make this objective not subjective. I want quantifiable things that you can say, “This is how I’m going to measure it,” to make sure you’re improving.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. Next action item. Attend our webinar this Wednesday 9:00 AM Pacific. You can adjust that for whatever your time zone. Micah and I are going to go through each of those four quadrants. We’re going to line out the steps for doubling your success. If you haven’t registered already visit theperfectria.com, somewhere on the site there’s a button to sign up, or just send a quick email to lifestyle@theperfectria, and we’ll get you signed up for that Wednesday at 9:00 AM Pacific.

Micah Shilanski:  Awesome. Again, this podcast is all about taking action. Make that commitment this week to double your success. And until next time happy planning, happy planning.

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